The beginning
MAQE is closing its doors. Over nearly 13 years, we’ve experienced both exhilarating highs and challenging lows. We’ve nurtured talent, fostered a culture of Purpose, Growth, Humility, and Freedom, and delivered exceptional work for our clients.
MAQE was born from a desire to do better at building websites, applications and running a company. We thought that by treating people well a natural byproduct would be the production of amazing work. Personally, I had imagined creating MAQE to be the Asian counterpart of Accenture – a renowned company admired by many – I had ambitious goals!
I met Andreas in Sep 2009 in Thailand. There were no co-working spaces. At least, none that we knew of (Hubba later opened in 2012) at the time. I saw him post in LinkedIn in a group called BarCampBangkok. Andreas was looking a place to sit and work. I saw his job title as “Web Strategist”. Well that impressed on me as clearly he must be someone very interesting to get to know. So I immediately responded to his post.
Here’s our first interactions.
We met and talked for 2 hours outside a Starbucks in All Seasons Place, Wireless Road. It would be the start of a beautiful 13 year partnership rooted in trust, honesty, and a people-first approach. I was running another company at the time and figured I should have someone as talented as him sit in our office first so I might have an opportunity to learn from him or potentially hire him later. It turns out I managed to hire him short term to be a project manager for me. Eighteen months later we started a new company based on an early draft of a manifesto.
- 37 Signals is our idol
- We think, therefore we am
- We know our business
- We always look at the bigger picture
- We truly believe in giving value
- Honesty is the best policy
- We charge honestly and only for whats needed
- We love what we do
- We will challenge you
- We build what you need, not what you ask for
- We will always tell you what we think
- We are your friends
- We believe in giving back
I had a deep philosophical discussion with Andreas about honesty and we used the term “frank” to underpin the initial thinking. We also used it as a potential name of the company. He later drafted the following addendum to our manifesto:
Frank – We’re a lot of things. Frank is one of them.
Good-hearted and honest approach to application development.
What we do
- We build not what you want but what you need (research, empathy)
- We imbue our creations with agency (UX, copy)
- We create platforms (API, use)
How we do it
- We believe honesty is the best business policy (challenge)
- We’re process-oriented (no ambiguity)
- We think happy people do good work (cost-effective)
The last bullet stuck and ended up being one of our popular slogans “Happy People Do Good Work”.
Unfortunately, the 9 person team we had at the time shook their head at the name “Frank”, so we had to re-think the company name. Re-thinking a name that related to our business, the word “make”, seemed to make sense. We loved making things. We loved experimenting.
To our shock after being able to find a new name the domain name was already taken! “What about changing the letter ‘K’ to a ‘Q’?” Andreas suggested. Boom! Deal done and THB 90,000 poorer (to buy it from a domain squatter) maqe.com was now ours.
The early years and building culture
The first three years of operation was exciting. We were busy crafting working processes, learning how to run a company and we focused on putting people at the centre of our business. We learned very quickly that it was it was harder to work right than to work like our clients wanted to. We added our first QA person to our team and a project management. The recruitment process for our first PM laid the foundation for MAQEr’s to come. A piece of homework, a technical interview (PM’s were given a scenario to role play with a small team) and the pièce de résistance (a memorable accomplishment) – the team fit.
Culture was everything that united us.
MAQE was Andreas and me. But MAQE was everyone too.
Around the 5th year of our operation we noticed things were not aligning culturally. We had gone past our first 3-year plan and we needed to sit down and strategise to set a new company direction. With a massive company-wide workshop we defined our core values as Purpose, Humility, Growth and Freedom. We used these terms to explain to newcomers what we were like and wanted like-minded people to join us.
We wanted people with a sense of purpose (direction) to join our ranks to not aimlessly drift into work every day.
We wanted a humble group of people to work with. Andreas had always said that I represented the humility of MAQE, that I was approachable and open to conversation and always thought of others first.
Growth was all about Andreas. He was a natural academic, always learning and improving himself. He lived to learn.
Freedom was based on our want for everyone to have freedom to be responsible for their own work and to get things down how they wanted.
I believe these core beliefs grounded every MAQEr in the right way that, as I write this article, I am constantly reminded by recruiters, clients and fellow agency friends that the quality of our people is impressive. What a compliment indeed!
Challenges
Andreas and I always pictured the perfect size for the company at 30 people. We felt that if we were larger than that, the chemistry, the camaraderie would be lost and we would end up like corporate company with internal in-fighting and company politics. No thank you. That said, we were doing great work and we were growing and winning work with decent regularity. Funny things happen when you grow in size. People love flexibility. They loved that we were flat.
But at 50 people, people complained that there was no defacto decision maker. Andreas was the Design Lead and I was the Technical Lead. Whenever, there was a decision to be made, staff would struggling to decide who they should ask. So we created a little hierarchy and decided that Andreas should be the CEO and I will take the COO role. Andreas had great vision – he had an academics mindset and was very well read. He read so much that all he would talk about is books and quote passages from them. Staff would later say that he was so smart that no one understood what he was talking about 🤣. I on the other hand, was more of a jack of all trades. I loved operational work and loved helping people. I was best suited to making sure the lights were on and the bills were paid. This partnership worked really well.
With size brought systems thinking. We loved structure. We loved order. It wasn’t meant to be a hindrance. I always hated corporate structure and excessive process.
I loved when Netflix released “The Netflix Culture Deck” – Patty McCord at the time was the Chief People Officer and helped contribute to the mindset and style of thinking that MAQE has partially adopted to this day. As Spiderman’s uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility”. Andreas and I took this to heart and brought this mindset to our MAQEr’s.
We gave all MAQEr’s the opportunity to decide how the company was run, to input into policies, to decide how things were run by creating guilds of knowledge and working groups called “Crew’s” to get things done. Once the objective was completed the Crew would be disbanded. We felt that we could not possibly decide everything in the company and wanted to empower our staff to make work better for themselves. By giving them ownership, things would get done better than if we ordered it top town.
The mindset of ownership and responsibility has always been a strong characteristic of a MAQEr to this day – so if you meet anyone that used to work at MAQE, please let me know what you think 😄
Money talks
In hindsight, my and Andreas’s greatest weakness was we were not very savvy business people. Business is still a business. You can’t have a business without clients. Clients have to be your priority – but of course, not at the expensive of your staff.
We didn’t hire our first business development person until 2017. It wasn’t easy. We didn’t really understand the value they brought or how it should work. Unfortunately, we learned too slow and had to cost-cut a few people during that time.
Letting people go is one of the hardest things you can do as a business owner. It is especially hard when you really care about people no matter what role or who they are. We see people, not resources. The act of cutting people or failing probation actually makes a person stronger. I would advocate that any budding junior manager have the opportunity to do this as it requires clarity of thought, skill is discussion, sensitivity and guts. Guts to look someone in the eye and tell them they are not good enough. It’s a rite of passage and helps you value the people you have. That said, it’s much worse when you don’t have enough money and have to cut people that do not deserve it.
We had good years at MAQE and we had bad years, revenue-wise. But mostly we were always struggling. We did not cut costs when we should have, we didn’t put enough effort into certain pitches that we should have and we became too comfortable pitching the exact scope of work requested of us. What this means is that we did not fight hard enough to survive. We got too comfortable in developing our learning culture, treating our people well and perfecting our processes that we did not focus on create value and change for our clients that we put in for ourselves. Andreas and me, were not savvy business people. We were just lucky business people.
The legacy
Despite our mistakes and struggles we created, what I still believe is, an amazing company culture that people thrived in, they grew (personally and professionally). Andreas and I helped create a place where people had freedom to work and to learn. They had a competitive salary and benefits. They had the freedom to contribute to how the company was run. They were exposed to great projects at scale that is noteworthy of an international standard and should be proud of every project delivered. They worked with people that were highly talented who had each other’s back. Almost the perfect place. We stuck the landing my friends (almost).
The staff kindly gave me and Andreas a notebook of personal thank you’s from the team that I’m hugely grateful for. There were some amazing personal notes that I will keep private. Perhaps it doesn’t make up for 13 years of blood, sweat and tears – but to see everyone grow from small roots to amazingly talent people is a great reward.
I leave MAQE with a legacy to be proud of. Close industry friends shared their shock and sadness at our closure. While it is indeed sad, I like to think that we made the world a little better by having over 200 MAQEr’s pass through our doors, allowing us to give them the chance to experience growth, opportunity and success. Now these hugely talented and wonderful people will spread MAQEness into the ether.
Once’s a MAQEr, always a MAQEr ❤️
