Eva Wong, COO at Borrowell, talks to CBRE Forward about that it is about the Borrowell culture that drives success.
What was your first job, and what did you learn from it?
My first job I ever had was as a piano teacher. To start, I had a few 5 and 6-year-old students who came to my home. I definitely learned patience, and how to deal with short attention spans! My first full-time job was as a management consultant. It was great training – from analyzing big data sets and learning to draw out insights, to project management and managing people’s expectations, I learned a ton.
What is it about your culture that drives success?
We’ve been pretty deliberate about our culture and the values that drive our culture. The first value that we share with people is that we are high performing and humble. It’s really important to us that those two things go hand in hand. High performance is a pretty self-explanatory concept. A lot of startups and a lot of companies would say that high performance, producing great work and working at a very high level is extremely important. But we think that it’s really important to pair that with humility. Humility is a big part of why we are successful.
Humility allows you to understand that you can’t do it alone… you need other people. Sometimes the ideas that you come up with on your own may not be the best ones. Being humble allows us to collaborate with a team and to work cohesively. Bringing together a diverse group of people who have that high performance and humility is what makes us successful.
What was the company’s journey like to get where it is?
Every startup has the goal of wanting to go up and to the right. In reality that’s not what happens. There will always be bumps along the way and there are always times where we have to stop and take stock of where we are. We have to learn from mistakes. And so it’s not always easy.
When you get a group of people together who are really high performing, it is in our nature not to make mistakes, but we have come to recognize that mistakes are a part of learning. They drive us to become better. It has been incredible to get a product out there, to get customer feedback and to take that feedback and make a better product. We are excited about where that’s going to take us.
What’s next for Borrowell?
Borrowell’s mission is to help Canadians make great decisions about credit and we are excited to take a lot of the feedback that we’ve received this year and introduce what will be a much more robust and exciting product. By the beginning of next year, we will be rolling out a number of product improvements around credit education, credit information and providing people with a deeper understanding of their credit with the ability to make decisions about it.
Borrowell
Borrowell is a proudly Canadian company with a single goal in mind: to help people make great decisions about credit.
Over a million Canadians have joined Borrowell to help them make great decisions about credit and achieve their financial goals.