Five years after starting WORKBEE, I am still not sure whether I consider myself an entrepreneur. Maybe I am. Maybe I am simply a dedicated engineer who decided to return to Cyprus, sit on the other side of the table and try to deliver the kind of service I would genuinely be happy to receive as a client.

There was no grand vision of becoming an entrepreneur, no childhood dream of becoming a CEO, and no moment when I decided that I wanted to “build a business”. What I did have was something much simpler: a strong dislike of mediocrity.

Throughout my professional career, whether working in Cyprus or abroad, I always struggled with the idea of doing something simply because “this is good enough”, “this is how everyone does it”, or because nobody was likely to notice the difference. I wanted things done properly. Sometimes that is a good characteristic; sometimes it makes your life unnecessarily difficult because doing things the way they should be done is rarely the easiest way. But it is part of who I am.

So, when I eventually found myself building WORKBEE, the principles did not really change. Only the seat did.  

Same principles. Different seat.

As an employee, I always tried to approach a project as though the company I worked for belonged to me. Today, the company actually does. And that small difference changes everything.

When something goes well, the responsibility is yours. When something goes wrong, it is also yours. When a customer is unhappy, there is nobody further up the organisational chart to hide behind. When you make the wrong decision, you pay for it—in money, time, sleep, or usually some combination of the three. But you also gain something extremely valuable: the freedom to decide what “good” looks like.

I still remember the first residential PV system I cleaned myself. I was standing on that roof, looking across Limassol, and I remember thinking about how strangely different everything suddenly felt. Someone had trusted me. Someone had paid me to go up on that roof for a purpose. And there was nobody else defining the standard anymore.

I was.

How the job should be done, what was acceptable and what wasn’t, when I could say that the work was finished, and what level of service would make me satisfied enough to put my name behind it. My standards, my rules, my decisions—and my responsibility.

It was liberating and uncomfortable at exactly the same time, because there was no safety net underneath anymore. Maybe that roof was one of the first moments when WORKBEE became real to me. And the simple question I had in my mind back then still shapes much of what we do today: If I were the client, what would I expect to receive?

That is also why I never really cared about defining our work according to what competitors do. If somebody else does less, charges less or finishes faster, good for them. My concern is different. Is what we are doing technically correct? Is it necessary? Would I be satisfied if I were paying for it myself?

That approach has somehow taken us from that first roof into homes, factories and industrial sites across Cyprus, working with technologies and equipment I probably couldn’t have imagined being part of WORKBEE when we started. And we keep adding things, usually for the same simple reason: somewhere along the way we look at something and think, this can be done better.

None of it, however, feels like a straight line when I look backwards. It feels more like chaotic order.

Looking forward can actually feel quite peaceful. There is a direction, there are plans, and you convince yourself that you roughly know where you are going. Turn around and look backwards and sometimes it looks like a war zone: decisions, mistakes, opportunities, problems, long days, great days, terrible days, customers who trusted us before we had much evidence to justify that trust, investments that looked questionable at the time, ideas that worked and others that didn’t. And people who appeared at exactly the right moment.

Somehow all those pieces form a path. I still don’t know whether we are at the beginning of that path or somewhere along the way. I honestly don’t know. Perhaps that is part of it.

Why come home?

People sometimes expect a very clear answer about why, after years of living and working abroad, I decided to return to Cyprus. I don’t really have one.

If anything, I still consider myself a bit of a Viking soul—constantly on the move, always travelling and somehow never completely arriving. Perhaps years of working internationally leave that inside you. But however far you travel, there is usually one place that feels like home.

Nature is full of species that travel enormous distances and, at some point in their cycle, return to where they came from. Maybe we are not so different. We all carry memories of where we grew up: a home, places, people, summers, friendships, smells and little things that don’t seem important when you are young but somehow become part of you.

Everyone has an Ithaca. Cyprus is mine.

So, returning was not really a clever business decision. I didn’t come back because I had identified the perfect market opportunity. There was no spreadsheet telling me that Cyprus was the optimal place to start WORKBEE.

I came home. The business came afterwards.

Jumping without the rope

There is a scene in The Dark Knight Rises that has always stayed with me. Bruce Wayne repeatedly tries to escape from the prison by making an almost impossible jump while secured by a rope. He fails. Eventually, he makes the jump without it.

That scene probably describes some moments of these five years better than any entrepreneurship book I have read.

As an engineer, I naturally want data. I want assumptions, calculations, contingencies and some reasonable understanding of what will happen before making a decision. Business doesn’t always give you that luxury. Sometimes you have enough information to believe something makes sense, but nowhere near enough to know it will work.

And then you jump.

You buy the equipment, hire someone, enter the partnership, say yes to a project—or sometimes, more importantly, say no. You invest money that would feel much safer sitting in the bank. You trust your judgement and accept that if you are wrong, there is no rope pulling you back to where you started.

Five years later, I don’t think that feeling disappears. Maybe you just become slightly more comfortable jumping.

The things that actually matter

There are infinite books, articles and podcasts about entrepreneurship. Growth, strategy, leadership, cash flow, failure, resilience, scaling, success—all important. But if somebody asked me today what comes first to mind when I think about these five years, my answer would be much less sophisticated.

Two things: clients and people.

The first is the happiness of a client receiving exactly what was promised, with no discount on quality. There is a particular satisfaction in finishing a difficult job, stepping backwards and knowing it was done properly. Not perfectly because somebody was watching, but properly because that is simply how it should be done.

Maybe that comes from engineering. Maybe it is just character. But I don’t think a client’s trust is something that should be “managed”. It should be earned, again and again.

The second thing is people. No company journey belongs only to its founder, despite the way these stories are usually told. My family, of course, is my Ithaca. It is the reference point that keeps everything else in perspective. But then there are the people who choose to walk beside you—the team members who show up day after day and somehow agree to join this recreational rollercoaster, trusting me in the driver’s seat.

That trust carries a responsibility I probably didn’t fully understand when I started. Because if WORKBEE succeeds, I don’t want only its owner to succeed. The people building it with me must succeed too. That is paramount.

And there is another reality behind that. Behind every person working next to you, there is a family you may rarely see. Someone is waiting for them at home. There are partners, children, parents, mortgages, plans, ambitions and lives connected to the person who comes to work with you every morning.

That changes the meaning of responsibility. Your decisions don’t stop with you anymore. Hiring someone is a responsibility. Growing is a responsibility. Taking risks is a responsibility. Even making a mistake feels different when the consequences can travel further than your own pocket.

For me, that is one of the most real challenges of building a company. You want to create something that rewards the people who trusted you enough to help build it. If WORKBEE grows, they should grow with it. If we succeed, we succeed together.

I feel that responsibility much more today than I did five years ago, and perhaps strangely, it motivates me more than the idea of personal success ever could. Still, despite all the responsibility, pressure and difficult days, I hope we keep having fun along the way. Otherwise, what is the point of this recreational rollercoaster?

Five years later

I don’t have a dramatic conclusion, and I definitely don’t have “five lessons from five years in business”. The journey isn’t finished, so pretending that I understand it would probably be dishonest.

What I know is that five years ago I made the first step. When I look at WORKBEE today, what we do now is only one part of the puzzle of everything that happened along the way. Some pieces make sense today that made absolutely no sense three years ago. Others are probably still somewhere on the table waiting for us to understand where they belong.

Maybe that is entrepreneurship: not having all the answers or really knowing where you are on the journey. Surrounding yourself with good people. Raising your standards when lowering them would be much easier. Taking responsibility when things don’t work. Making sure the people beside you grow when the company grows. Remembering where home is, however far you travel. Enjoying the moments when things actually work but also treasuring the moments when they don’t. Those probably teach you more. 

And every now and then, making the jump without the safety rope.

If that makes me an entrepreneur, then perhaps I am one after all.

But I still prefer engineer.

Author: Din Kumar