Below you will find a real and un-touched internal letter we’ve sent to all Gizra employees.
From: Amitai Burstein <[email protected]>
To: All <[email protected]>
Subject: Efrat to be Director of Gizra Israel/ Europe
Amitai:
While the title tells the fact, it’s far from telling everything. This email is to give some context of this bold new move we’re heading to.
For many years Brice and I worked on building, fixing, and adapting the structure of Gizra. We have a strong dev team, experienced account managers, QA, and HR.
For a long time almost everything found it’s way to us, and our plates were always way too full.
If you have noticed in the past year – which has been a significant year in terms of understanding who we are, what we want, and how we want to get there – there was a lot more push back from our side. Dealing with so many things has kept us from important things like getting CircuitAuction into better shape, getting more sales for Gizra, etc.
While it’s almost never a good time for changes, as always we opted for the uncomfortable option – a change. However the way I see it, this change is mostly a mindset change. That is, we’re still here, we’re not going anywhere (in the end Gizra is what pays our salaries, it would be stupid not to give it all the attention it needs), but our focus will change. Brice is already almost fully committed to CircuitAuction, and I will stay more Gizra oriented, both on the sales frontier, and on making sure the high technical level remains.
I call it a mindset change, because it will most probably cause many of you to realize that there’s going to be less “somebody up there knows better than me”. From my perspective it’s a freeing feeling, as you realize you are able (or better said, forced) to find the solutions yourself.
Are you slightly panicking right now? Is your hand looking for that brown paper bag to breathe in? Here’s a good perspective to why you shouldn’t:
Remember the last time we had a change, that Where Gizra is Sailing email. That worked well in the end, didn’t it?
And the many changes before that? Remember you had that feeling as well? But It always worked out well. We’ve definitely took some wrong turns along the way, but this one doesn’t feel like one.
Gizra is here to stay. We’re just stretching ourselves further.
Efrat:
I had a moment a few weeks ago, when I attended a sales meeting with Amitai at the Osem (Nestle) headquarters in Israel. You know, the kind of headquarters where you should leave your ID at the reception desk, wear a tag, and then there are twenty rules you need to follow before you even set foot in the office on the 3rd floor.
Watching Amitai give his brilliant pitch, wearing his usual funky clothes and cracked(!) black nail polish, watching their managers faces filled with a mixture of “I’m not sure I should trust this” and “WOW!!” and “WOW” again - was an enlightening moment. I couldn’t help but (die laughing inside and) think that it’s in Gizra’s best interest that these kind of jaw-dropping sales meetings will take place as frequently as possible.
I’ve had - as many of you as well - similar moments with Brice, untangling what felt like a completely dead-end situation into a simple, solvable and in many times, very bold and courageous solution.
In moments like this it’s clear that Brice and Amitai, as the founders of Gizra, should have enough available time on their hands to invest in what will bring the most value to the company.
As Amitai mentioned above and as you all know, when the manager’s plate is too full, many things get pushed back. It seems that Gizra could benefit greatly from moving those managerial responsibilities to someone else who can dedicate the time to direct them.
Stepping into managing the Israel/ Europe activities is a big challenge for me, and a change for all of us.
While the scope of this new role is still evolving and is not yet completely defined, it will include managing all Israel/ Europe based clients and projects - in a similar way to what Brice and Amitai were doing.
You will continue to work directly with the Account managers, as usual, and the Account managers will be working with me.
I want to thank Brice and Amitai for this opportunity and for their trust, and I’m looking forward to working with all of you, and seeing this change evolve.
