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APB Padel Base GmbH
"At some point, you just lose the overview"
INDUSTRY
Sport & Event
EMPLOYEES
11 plus 40 independent coaches
PLATFORM
TIMELINE
Ongoing Partnership
Björn Nareyka, CEO of Padelbase in the interview on growth, WhatsApp chaos, and building a system that carries the company's knowledge.
Padelbase was founded in 2021. The first courts opened in 2022. Today the company runs 19 locations with nearly 50 courts across Austria, works with 40 freelance trainers, and has built an in-house team of 11. Padelbase invests in its own courts and operates a franchise model to stay at the front of the Austrian padel market.
What that growth means on the inside isn't visible on the website. You see it in the folders on OneDrive, in the WhatsApp groups, in the notes someone scrawled somewhere. Björn Nareyka knows this well. We spoke with him.
Essentially with Outlook, OneDrive, and a lot of WhatsApp groups. Everyone keeps track of things somehow, sometimes on a piece of paper. For every location there's information that needs coordinating: access codes, contacts, sponsors. It all got saved in Word and Excel files, somewhere on OneDrive. And then there are more locations, more employees, more trainers.
At some point you just lose track - me and my team both.
Growth. We went from two founders to a team with employees and trainers, and at the same time we were opening new locations. With a small team, you know everyone, you talk every day. It works from memory. Once the company gets bigger, the knowledge can't live in two or three people's heads anymore.
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It's also a risk question. If a key person is sick or leaves, the knowledge goes with them. What does a contract cover, when does it expire, who is the contact at location X? That needs to be stored somewhere, accessible, not dependent on the right person picking up the phone.
It gives us structure where there was chaos before. We manage events and bookings at our venues much more efficiently now: create them, publish them online, coordinate confirmations and cancellations. It was very manual before and took a lot of time. A lot of it runs automatically now.
For the locations, we have a central overview: access codes, contacts, sponsor details, contract information. Visible to everyone, at a glance. And internally there's a task and controlling system for the team. I can see who has what, what's open, what's been completed.
