Mulperi was born almost a year ago and has been growing slowly but steadily as time has gone by. As we have explained in our Mulperi Podcast episode, we have added to our team and clarified our purpose during this spring. This essay is a reflection of Mulperi’s growth up until this point and also a letter for the future from the project leader’s (me) perspective.

What we do is important

We have noticed that there is a lot of stigma when it comes to the themes of sustainability and responsibility. One reason could be that there is too little understandable information out there. We have moved from climate change to climate crisis, which explains why all environmental advocates are shouting loudly trying to get people’s attention. But it’s very hard to get people on board if they don’t understand what is happening and how it is affecting their lives. That’s why we know that what we do is important – and we also know that there are multiple business opportunities for us out there.

Our brand

We have intentionally kept the visual side of our brand fun, colorful, relaxed and personal. We want the visuals to reflect who we are and who we are not. We are not highly educated professors or experts, but we are constantly learning by reading and doing projects. We work consistently to better our working methods to fit our brand and we want that thrive that we have to show through to our customers, partners and stake holders as well. Our brand will be more in our focus in the next 6 months because we now have the opportunity to test our MVP and build our networks by working with our first customers. We want to build a strong brand on a strong foundation and that is exactly what we’ve been doing in the past year.

Coordination, consistency, leadership and our team

These three pillars are the most important to me as the project leader in Mulperi. Our team needs coordination, consistency in leadership and these three things show in different ways for everyone in the team. As the project leader, I want to maintain trust within the team: the team needs to trust each other at all times. And I want that the team trusts me to coordinate things and keep everyone up to date. I want to be consistent in my work because consistency in leadership creates trust (Alahuhta 2015). I know that our team consists of great leaders – we have all lead either a team or have otherwise been in a leadership position in our recent past. This is imporant to note, because we also need to learn how to be lead when we are not leading.

One concrete development we will have is improving our meetings. We have fun together but sadly not enough time to talk about life and other things not related to work. That’s why I will be implementing the “how are you?” moments in our meeting from now on. This idea came from Sanni as she has successfully lead the Marketing and Communications team in Proakatemia for the past semester.

We’ve also noticed that we actually complement each other quite well. Sometimes I feel like I am working with friends, but at the same time I feel like I am surrounded by professionals that are enthusiastic, motivated and overall cool people who I look up to. It has been amazing to slowly but steadily build the team rather than just picking someone to work with. And I think in the future if we decide to grow our team, we will have that same criteria for them as well. It won’t serve anyone to pick team members randomly. As Jim Collins has said, first who, then what – you need to get the right people on the bus!

Customers and competitors

We have succeeded in getting our first potential customers with the help of Kamil’s determined but open mindset. We all believe that people need to learn about sustainability and responsibility and what better way to get people learning than in schools. That’s why we want to work with schools and educational organizations as well as businesses and companies. For the next fall we will have a structure on how we will contact customers and maintain good customer relationships. Even though we wish to work with the same customers over and over again, our goal is to help our customers so that they can survive on their own. So whatever they will need help with in the future, we will try our hardest to provide, but not in an unsustainable way. In the future, our goal is to build a large network / ecosystem of organizations, companies and people who are willing to work for the same cause together. We realize that we have competitors in the market and that’s actually great. That increases our chances to work with other entrepreneurs and teampreneurs and make a bigger impact.

Conclusion

Even though I’ve planned these technical and structural things for us to make our work better, I will not forget about our dream team. In the future I want Mulperi to be a safe place where we can vulnerable to others, ourselves and our customers. We have already bumped heads because we are all opinionated people. But we always manage to get through them by understanding each other and the place we are coming from. We are all adults so to speak, meaning that we won’t get stuck by childish behavior, and that increases the amount of trust towards each other. I am only looking forward to what the future brings because I know we sure will work for it.

Source:

Alahuhta, M. 2015. Johtajuus – kirkas suunta ja ihmisten voima. Jyväskylä. Docendo Oy.

Jimcollins.com. First Who, Then What. Read on the 5th of May 2022. https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/first-who-then-what.html#:~:text=First%20Who%2C%20Then%20What%E2%80%94get,where%20to%20drive%20the%20bus.