How we built Sandbox: 5 lessons for anyone

To date 100% of our business has come from referrals by our clients, and that for us is the most important metric of all.

Be true to your values and you can build great teams.

A dream, an idea and 8 years later here we are. Sandbox.

Finally! We held our first every Sandbox Hudde in August 2022, despite all the challenges that life could possibly throw at us this year! I cannot be prouder of my team than I am right now. We made it to 8 years. And no, we didn’t just make it, today we are the best in the business and have the results to prove it!

Today we compete with global powerhouse consulting firms delivering multi-million-dollar performance to our clients. Our services power culture, leadership & talent in over 80% of Sri Lankas top business, and we count numerous Fortune 500 brands and multi-nationals in our portfolio, that keeps growing by the week.

We made gamified experiences a household name in the region and inspired hundreds of thousands of individuals to dream big and be the best versions of themselves. Today we offer on campus curriculums and faculty to 2 of Sri Lankas leading and most prestigious universities and have become the first private company in Sri Lankan history to be given that honor.

What a journey. One that I am immensely proud of and humbled by. Sometimes, I pinch myself to remind me that this is a team of misfits that got together in 2014 to revolutionize a training industry that badly needed a facelift; and 8 years later we are here. We have arrived.

I thought I’d share a bit of how we got here, the story and the timing along with the values that made us, and of course not forgetting the hand of God in all this, for I am always a believer in powers greater than us that guide our journey and purpose through life.

Here are 5 valuable lessons I would like to share with you that helped us build this great company.

1.      Embrace the right bad experiences

The beginning for us, looking back, was just right and so wrong.  As is said so often hindsight is 20:20. We benefited from the right amount of rejection, hardship and heartbreak at the right time.  We benefited from the right amount of “massive ideas” and “massive failures” never letting our creativity get the better of us but just enough to keep us sharp. To keep us grounded. To keep us real.

After starting up the business in a room in my apartment and running experiences from the back of my pickup truck, celebrating 8 years with such an amazingly talented & dedicated team truly is the stuff of dreams. If one could imagine a stretch, I believe this would be it.

However, given all the nightmares and let downs, I must say it is a dream I never doubted for one second.

A few years into our journey my business partner at the time would throw in the towel as things got too tough, leaving me to carry the burden of financing as well as leading the company through its formative years. Looking back it was all in preparing us for a future much greater than any one of us had ever anticipated.

I still recall how potential clients we approached in those early days blew us off laughing at us asking “what on earth is an experience company?” “don’t you mean OBT?”. But with one gig we did in 2014, we silenced all of them and the rest is history. Being the new kids on the block everyone wanted to work with Sandbox, and then just in time came a few challenges that beamed us back to earth. A few botched ideas over the next few years taught us the great value of humility, project management and contingency planning. Lessons we have never forgotten and hope never to. But we will always be humbled by the timing and luck of the experiences that made us.

2.      Culture is what you make it. Invest in the right team. No compromises ever.

Our team has always been our core strength. I consider team selection my most important job as the CEO and founder. Each member of our team has a story. A unique track record of real world experience, real life hardship (no snowflakes) and real-performance and expertise in whatever discipline they practice. There are no experts on everything, just experts with specific skills and abilities, time tested with stories of failures as much as ones of success.

Our commitment in NOT hiring jerks has kept our team tight and together. We do not find value in great minds that are rude and incapable of basic human decency. So yes, our bar is very high but shouldn’t it be?

This level of high expectations has kept our culture alive with performance, trust and mutual respect. Each member is a complete character; you can bet your last dollar on their expertise to solve a problem and to stand by our values while doing it. It is this trust and reliability that we transfer to our clients. That’s the secret to our team if anyone wants it.

3.      Good things no cheap; have confidence in your value.

When we dropped our first product back in 2014, one thing was certain. We were never going to be cheap.

We believe in the age-old truth that cheap things are no good, and good things are not cheap. When a client came into a Sandbox experience we wanted it to be that larger than life moment that one will hold forever as a precious memory, so big and bold, that it will sit in your mind forever. We knew that such an experience could not be built on cheap. With experiences costing easily over Rs 1 million per day our products were premium by far in 2022 standards let alone in 2014. This wasn’t always good for business at the beginning. Believe me, there have been moments where I have felt the urge to reduce price and run volume, but I am glad we didn’t go down that rabbit hole of mediocrity.

As I always say to my clients, if you want something that can be googled and facilitated in-house you shouldn’t be paying Sandbox for it. You come to Sandbox when you want an experience like no other. You come to Sandbox when you are ready. This philosophy has gained us phenomenal clients that believe in quality and true experience value and we have become the better company for it. Our products have grown, our experiences become bigger and our quality has remained a chart topping best in the business for 8 years and counting.

4.      Be original; Create, never copy

Innovation is in our blood at Sandbox. Our first major diversification came just one year into our life in 2015 when we launched our first own brand Colombo Paintball League. We harnessed the event capability of military simulation paintball and formed and played the nations only professional sports league for paintballing. An evolution of our corporate learning experiences Rapid Response & Crimson Strike. To date we are the largest paintballing brand in the nation with an unmatched 100% safety record.

StreetFood Cook off our second major brand launched in 2015 really sealed our place in true Sri Lankan authenticity. To date it is the quintessential Colombo experience, which has travelled the country with us rediscovering Sri Lankan street food with the beauty of the outdoors.

In 2016 we introduced racing as a team experience for corporates, another first in the nation with our experience Rolling Thunder. The experience ranks among the few in the entire world providing everyday people a mock Formula1 and endurance racing challenge.

Getting into tech was something natural for us, given that all of us were millennials from the DOOM and Need4Speed generation. We adopted team analytics and reporting into our challenges as early as 2015. Over the years these vast quantities of data has allowed us to have our own line of people analytics solutions today, being used by leading corporate management teams for analyzing, assessing and diagnosing their companies future readiness.

The 2019 easter attacks and the tumble dryer of crisis that has followed Sri Lanka since has indeed been a blow to the experience line. 2019, in particular was a hard year, where we were forced to halt all operations in the experiences business due to the prevailing situation. However, our team was quick to pivot, channeling all our energy into our leadership and talent development streams.

Fast thinking and an ever ready attitude has now enabled Sandbox to command 6 lines of business, all actively generating profit.

5.      In the end it has always been about values

Our currency has always been trust. Trust built not only on the quality of our people and product, but also in the fierce loyalty we have to our values and integrity. Our candid and direct personality has always been the core language Sandbox has spoken, our tone of voice to the outside world. “We stand by our values and aren’t afraid to lose business over it”. I believe this has been why we have been protected by karmic forces, God or good luck, what ever you may call it. To date 100% of our business has come from referrals by our clients, and that for us is the most important metric of all.

Be true to your values and you can build great teams.