Empowering tomorrow, today. A letter by Pierre Yamfam, Founder and CEO.
Pierre Yamfam ~ CEO & Founder of Finders Force.
To those who have had enough.
Not only do I feel your pain but I’ve made it my life’s purpose to do something about it.
If you manage a depot, warehouse, fleet or factory, at some point, you’ve been sick and tired of relying on money-hungry agencies who fling poorly behaved, barely qualified, untrained and disloyal agency workers at you. You have no control over the standard or quality that walks through your door and if you could wave a magic wand, you would have an entire team of in-house, trustworthy employees who actually give a damn about your brand and services to your clients.
If you’re an agency operative (aka shift-worker), at some point, you realised that in the agency game, who you know is more important than what you know. You may have received shifts in WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups, mass text messages, emails and the odd phone call at random hours of the day “Evening mate, Can you cover a shift tomorrow”, sound familiar? You believe that agencies taking large chunks of your already-taxed-wages, whilst you’re left with just enough to get by each month, is daylight robbery. And you believe that waiting a week or more for pay, disorganised work places, dirty vehicles and equipment, short-tempered managers, shocking industry standards and not knowing if you have work next week has to change.
And if you are an investor, at some point, you looked around at the opportunities in front of you and you wondered… Where the heck is the blue ocean in all of these highly competitive, red, bloody ocean markets. Every other pitch deck you look at is incohesive and incomplete, too lengthy or unclear, the vision sounds logical but not captivating and the team have the spirit but you’re not 100% sure if they’d travel to the ends of the earth to realise their goals.
If any part of what you just read has ever made your blood boil and you’re ready for true change, we have spent the better part of a year building that vehicle for change.
That vehicle is called Finders Force and its sole purpose is to: Empower Humanity’s Workforce.
As a side note, my name is Pierre, I live in Buckinghamshire, England; I have just turned 28 and I’m the the CEO and Founder of the national award-winning tech start-up, Finders Force. You can find out more about me over on my Team Bio (and connect with me on LinkedIn). However, if you have a few more moments, I’d like nothing more right now, than to spend the rest of our time together, giving you the opportunity to find out why I care so much about empowering you, what solutions we’re building to handle your current issues and how we aim to revolutionise the status quo by bringing about true change in your everyday life.
Sounds good? Great! Because I’ve been dying to find out if we share the same beliefs, but first, a little bit of context.
4 brothers, 3 lectures, 2 roads, 1 outcome.
Growing up, my dad had 3 lectures to choose from and drill into me and my 3 brothers every time we misbehaved or didn’t live up to the super high standards he set. He was an army chef, martial arts instructor and entrepreneur. It got to the point where all 4 of us could bet a million pounds, with 100% accuracy, on which speech he was going to deliver after one of us committed a felony of some degree.
1. Always have a reason and know why you do what you do…
2. Be the best at whatever you do…
3. And his favourite… Just because I did it, doesn’t mean you should do it, think for yourself and be better than I ever was.
At the time, my child-like, restless brain longed for the day when I wouldn’t have to sit for hours on end and listen to my dad drone on and on and on.
However, only in recent years have I truly understood and appreciated the deep importance and value of all 3 of those philosophies and how they have shaped both myself and Finders Force into what we are today.
There seems to be 2 roads people end up choosing between. As a result of the constant badgering from my dad, I have immense clarity on who I am, why I am here, what I do, how I do it and why I do it, with a high standard and a robust moral code, on the other hand, 98% of my childhood friends did not have a clue what their purpose is, lacked true self-confidence and clarity and aimlessly drift towards student debt, a mortgage, taxes, more debt and eventually… death with “unfulfilled” metaphorically tattooed across their tombstone.
All 4 of us brothers took on our upbringing in our own way; thankfully, how I interpreted my upbringing has led me to be highly inquisitive, forever asking "why?" I see things around me and instantly wonder, “how could that be better?”.
The trait that allows me to be most disruptive is feeling utterly comfortable with changing the way something has been done for decades because of the meaning behind my dad's 3rd philosophy, just because it was done this way, doesn't mean I have to do it that way, how can I do it better?
Mix all of that with my mum’s inhumane work ethic, compassion and loyalty to a cause and you’re only going to end up with 1 outcome. A disruptor with the will power to make things happen.
These beliefs are the very threads which run through the origin story of how Finders Force was founded and forms the basis of our 6 core values. And when I look back and connect the dots, for me, there really was only ever going to be one outcome; and that outcome is starting to take shape in the form of Finders Force.
Where did Finders Force come from?
After a few months of working agency shifts in the Traffic Management industry, I began noticing a consistent pattern of raging pain points when it came to shift-work.
Mountains of emails, ongoing phone calls, wasted time, lack of trust, sub-par agency staff, no-shows, over-bookings, under-bookings and a lot of blame shifting.
I asked one simple, fundamental, seemingly recurring, life question: “Why?”
Why is hiring decent agency staff so stressful and costly?
From this single question, Finders Force was born. Amidst Covid-19, an unprecedented time of uncertainty, change and crisis, the Finders Force team came together and geared towards problem solving, innovation and evolution.
Our values guide everything we do.
If you share our 6 core values outlined below and subscribe to the Finders Force movement in your own way, be that following our socials or becoming a client, partner, shareholder or picking up shift-work on the app, you are a Finder.
A Finder is a rebel. Someone who challenges the way things are for a better world that could be. A Finder believes in empowering others; is done settling for sub-par standards and has joined the Finders Force movement to contribute to a changed world in their own way. A Finder stands for:
Family.
Finders believe in family. Grow together, win together, fight, cry and forgive together because nothing can tear us apart, unbreakable forever.
Innovate.
Finders innately drive to disrupt. Constantly questioning the status quo and always a curious mind seeking ways to bring value to others.
Never giving up.
Finders embody true tenacity. The unwavering discipline of a mad scientist persisting tenaciously, even in the face of adversity, relentlessly chasing your goals.
Differentiate.
Finders embrace their uniqueness. Courageously standing out from the crowd, and dismissing the brules whilst confidently celebrating your individuality.
Exceed.
Finders exceed expectations. An undying ownership of how you show up, you take pride in your achievements whilst accepting your flaws.
Reinvent.
Constantly kaizening and existentially flexing because we choose to play in the infinite game.
With these guiding principles, it’ll come as no surprise that we will always choose to act in accordance with these values over short-term profits and gains. Potential investors should seriously consider this fact before choosing to invest in us.
History has proved time and time again, as is the case with Costco almost doubling their return on capital compared to Walmart, the company that sticks to its core values which made them great in the first place will have greater shareholder value over other players who lose their way in the chase for short-term profits.
We choose to start with WHY.
What is your WHY? A question globally popularised by the inspirational, Fortune500 leadership consultant, New York Times bestseller and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Simon Sinek, of whom I look up to a great deal.
With the attributes of my upbringing, mentioned earlier, we found it quite straightforward to answer the WHY question. Our WHY is:
To empower humanity’s workforce with the ability to challenge the way things are, for a better world that can be.
We further condensed our WHY Statement down into our company tagline, which Salim Ismail and Peter Diamandis, from Exponential Organisations, would call an MTP or Massive Transformative Purpose:
Empowering Humanity’s Workforce.
As a team, we deeply believe that all greatness comes from the ability to challenge “what is” for a better world that “could be”. This philosophy runs in my blood and will run in the blood of every team member we bring on board, from new Directors right through to a junior coder.
We believe it’s the right way to conduct business and this belief was further affirmed when we discovered a study from Accenture found:
62% of global consumers want companies to take a stand for what they believe;
64% want companies to actively communicate their beliefs and
52% are actually more likely to select certain brands over others if the brand they have chosen stand for something more than just the products or services it sells.
This data solidified our stance that every decision we make and everything we do should be run through the same test: Does this next step get us closer to empowering humanity to challenge “what is” for what “could be”?
Finders Force just so happens to be the first medium, the first megaphone, the first infrastructure we will use to embark on realising our WHY.
Will it ever be fully realised? The very essence of our WHY is continuous improvement... Can you ever stop improving?
Adopting an infinite mindset. As a result our sole focus is on how we can equip humanity with what we need to make a better world in our own individual ways? Continually answering this question allows us to continually realise our WHY of creating a better world.
This commitment requires us to have an infinite mindset. In his book "Finite and Infinite Games," Dr. James Carse explores the profound distinction between two mindsets: the finite game and the infinite game. This concept was, again popularised by Simon Sinek, who expertly applied it to leadership and business strategy.
Finders Force embraces the 5 pillars of an infinite-minded approach to enable us to weather the imminent storms and create immense value for all our stakeholders.
1. Our Just Cause is a future projection of our WHY statement. A future description of what our WHY looks like, it fuels our purpose to empower and unite humanity's workforce.
2. We seek growth and improvement, not competition, and so we look to our Worthy Rivals to help us reach our goals.
3. Trusting Teams create a family environment built on trust, collaboration, and empowerment. Family is also the first of our 6 core values as a company.
4. Existential Flexibility keeps us agile and open to change, aligning every decision with our Just Cause and is the foundation of our company's 6th core value (Reinvent).
5. Guided by a Courageous Leadership team, we value visionary thinking, empathy, and resilience, allowing every team member to contribute and share in the rewards of innovation through the ownership effect.
From values to mindset to exponential impact.
With the right beliefs and values in place, supported by the right mindset, we have begun implementing the extremely powerful business model curated by the OpenExo team led by Salim Ismail and Peter Diamandis: The Exponential Organisation. This framework contains the same models adopted by unicorns across the globe. The likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, AirBnB, Uber, Github, Spotify and Coinbase, to name a few, all made it onto the Top 100 Exponential Organisations list. Companies on this list also experienced a staggering 46.6X average increase in valuation from 2014 to 2022.
The ExO model possess a set of attributes which enable implementing companies to excel in a rapidly changing world. These attributes can be categorised into two groups with the acronyms: IDEAS and SCALE, with an overarching attribute which we’ve mentioned before called the MTP.
Exponential Organisations ~ Exo Formula Structure.
Finders Force was designed with the concept of Exponential Organisations in mind. In fact, I was reading the first iteration of the Exponential Organisation book back in 2020 at the inception of Finders Force. As a result, it’s no surprise that more than 50% of the ExO attributes exist with FF’s make up, with the vision of successfully implementing all 11, at full speed, within the next 5 years.
Aim for perfection, achieve greatness.
The journey to get to this point of launching Finders Force has been anything but easy. In hindsight, I’ve made mistakes which, looking back now, makes my stomach turn. But that’s the beauty of entrepreneurship and that’s the beauty of life. There would be no success without failure and truly embracing the concept that I will fail way more times than I will succeed is one of the driving factors that will turn Finders Force into a century old lasting legacy rather than a timid trend.
Our team boasts over 15 years experience and deep understanding within the Traffic Management industry (the industry we'll enter first). Meaning we understood the majority of the pain points. I soon realised this was both a gift and a curse. Because of this understanding, we made the rookie error of spending way too long on developing loads of solutions within the App, rather than launching with an MVP (Minimal viable product) that has one or two solutions and then building the rest out as we progressed in the market. Eric Reis, the godfather of The Lean Startup Method and world-leading advocate of getting a minimal product to market as quickly as possible, will likely be spitting his morning coffee all over his suit round about now.
This is a mistake that, we can safely say, will never happen again.
As we look to bring out future versions of the app, we’ll prioritise features and release them in short sharp bursts of testing and constant iteration (aka the agile approach) rather than building a bunch of features and then pushing them out to the market all at once (aka the waterfall approach).
Lesson learnt.
As we finally enter the market as an award-winning start-up, we have a sense of urgency and clarity alongside an undying commitment to the Kaizen philosophy of continuous improvement, constant learning and growth efficiency. We’ll implement the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) method, alongside the more traditional KPI (Key Performance Indicators) method to continuously monitor and tweak our performance results and strategies.
In doing so, we will still get things wrong from time-to-time, no doubt, I will still make mistakes, however, in the same breath, I can assure you, that you can expect us to go from strength to strength on an upward trend towards local, national and eventually international value to everybody connected to our ecosystem.
That is a promise.
Empower your tomorrow, today.
If you manage a depot, warehouse, fleet or factory and you need an empowered workforce who takes pride in how they show up, it’s time for you to 10x your business performance with top-rated agency staff nationwide. I implore you to get started on your journey with Finders Force today and experience a revolution of industry standards like no other. Our dedicated success managers, 5-star agency-staff rating feature and GPS tracking systems are just a few of our revolutionary software features designed to enable and equip your depot with everything you need to get to the next level of execution. Please note, however, our values are truly at the heart of everything we do and so every potential client must pass our Pre-Screening Qualifier in order to have the chance of partnering with us.
If you’re an agency operative (aka shift-worker) and you need access to a more consistent supply of shifts from businesses who value you as a person and no longer just a number, it’s time for you to download the App and gain access to some of the highest paying shifts in the industry. Not only do we bring consistent, higher paid shifts, we give you a realistic, achievable opportunity to earn upwards of £2,000 a month without working a single day through our Wildfire Income program. And, arguably most importantly, we give you your own voice to rate companies on the platform so you are no longer mistreated and left powerless against it. You will be more valued than ever before, we have your back.
If you are an investor and you’re looking for a blue ocean opportunity to dip into, you’ve found it. As long as our values align, we want nothing more than to have you alongside us for this journey. We are young, hungry and, best of all, have an extremely high teachability index. Finders Force is already an unstoppable train, under the right guidance, we will have unlimited momentum in the right direction.
If you want to work at Finders Force as a team member, we couldn’t be more thrilled to meet you. At Finders Force, growth is everything, it will be a challenging environment and we will push you. We exceed our communities expectations at every turn and everyone is a driver. We don’t carry passengers but we will have your back under every possible circumstance. You’ll become family and with that comes protection but also immense responsibility. If you like a challenge and believe Finders Force is the right culture for you, reach out. Once you're in, our no.1 desire is for you to produce some of the best work of your life. Good luck.
And if you just happen to be passing by, enjoying this letter, picking up what I’m putting down… then hello! I hope this letter has somewhat inspired you to empower yourself and others around you. It’s an honour to share this time with you and always feel welcome to follow us across all socials to join in more of the conversation.
My commitment to you.
Finders Force will be a once-in-a-generation company and if you believe in similar beliefs to us, I openly welcome you to grab a seat and join us on this revolution. However, in doing so there are three things you must know about me.
Firstly, the overall vision of empowering humanity’s workforce is greater than any one of us individually. As a result, I’m making it public knowledge, as of now, that if, at any point, I feel I’m not the right person to lead the Finders Force vision or if during any periodic company-wide vote, my team believe the same, then I will willingly and necessarily take the appropriate steps to resigning as CEO to make room for a more effective leader to take my place.
Secondly, I am not your typical CEO and Finders Force is not your typical tech start-up. Both myself and this company have already and will continue to push the boundaries of known business processes, models and systems across a multitude of industries. In the face of adversity, I will march forward, at the front, tenaciously, and, in some cases, against the majority advice, I’ll make decisions with the team that seem absolutely absurd for the greater vision, over short-term gains.
Thirdly and I say this with complete respect for anyone who would call themselves our “competitors”:
I am not interested.
I’m not interested in competing with you. I’m not interested in competing with your profit margins, share prices or bottom line. I’m not interested in competing with your game plan, offices or strategies. Finders Force exists to empower humanity and we’re going to need all of the help we can get. If you do what we do, brilliant! Humanity will be empowered in a much quicker timeframe. If we can potentially do it together, even freaking better! Our resources together are most likely going to yield the results we want at break-neck speed.
The truth is, if another company came in tomorrow and achieved Finders Force’s vision at a click of a finger, I’d be the happiest man alive. I’d then wake up the next day and find another problem to solve. I’m here to solve as many problems as possible to the highest level before I leave this world, or at least set solutions in motion to the world’s biggest problems for successors to continue on. I’m determined to leave it in a better place than how I found it and that requires self-improvement, not petty competition to make more money than you at the end of the financial quarter.
I will continue to give my absolute all to Finders Force and the people we serve. That is guaranteed. That is my commitment to you.
And finally, I commit to the entire Finders Force team, doing the best I can to bring my brightest self to the table, showing up everyday, playing full out.
The truth is, I wouldn't be here without my close-knit founding team and surrounding partners. They not only keep my feet on the ground and head out of the clouds but they expertly plug the holes with the tools that I don't have and I do the same for them. They are my family and their skillsets, experience, wisdom and mindset make them an unbelievably prolific mix for this journey.
Together, as Finders, we'll be a genuine Force to be reckoned with. The Finders Force.
In our first year, we are super stoked to:
Officially launch Finders Force within the Traffic Management Industry;
Bring immense and immediate value change to clients, workers, investors and the communities we serve;
Continue building an insatiable team culture based on genuine connection and our 6 core values;
Fail, pivot, learn and grow with immense speed... on repeat;
And make a huge splash in the infinite game.
Empower all of humanity in my life-time? No chance.
Make a small dent in the universe? Every chance.
How exciting.
Pierre Yamfam
