Tang Binsen "reorganized" the Yuanqi Forest

Produced | Tiger Sniff Commercial, Consumer and Mobile Group

The author | Miao Zhengqing

The title image | Visual China

At Yuanqi Forest's headquarters in Beijing's Huijia Building, a women's toilet converted from an idle storage room was finally put into use on the afternoon of April 15.

After experiencing a major enrollment expansion in 2021, the total number of employees in Yuanqi Forest has risen by about 4 times, and the new employees are mainly post-90s and post-95s: there are more male employees in the five factories of Yuanqi Forest, and more female employees in the headquarters.

"Limited pits" is one of the "sequelae" of the employee surge, and a Yuanqi Forest employee told Tiger Sniff that at the end of the third quarter of 2021, she had repeatedly "waited" for more than thirty-five minutes.

The challenge of the surge in employees is not only "toilets", but also "differences". In the 2021 Yuanqi Forest, you will hear two different names about founder Tang Binsen: Old Tang and Tang Zong. The old team members who came from the game circle and followed Tang Binsen for many years used to call him "Old Tang", and the old cannons in the beverage circle who joined the Yuanqi Forest in 2021 instinctively called him "Tang Zong".

Titles and toilets are regarded as the epitome of the "genetic collision" caused by the large-scale expansion of the Yuanqi Forest in the short term, but these are only the scabies diseases of the Yuanqi Forest rather than the diseases of the heart.

In the third quarter of 2021, Tang Binsen suddenly asked a middle-level manager who would join in 2021 about the progress of a certain project at a management meeting in which middle and senior executives participated. What made Tang Binsen unexpected was that the middle-level was stunned and asked Tang: "Is that project decided to be done?" (At another meeting a week ago, the project was officially approved, and Tang had appointed the middle level to promote it.)

Earlier, Tang Binsen was surprised to find that an event that he had paid a lot of attention to had not been solved after more than three months of "fermentation", and the reason was that many relevant departments mistakenly thought that "other departments would push forward".

"Execution efficiency and internal information flow become key issues." A Yuanqi Forest executive told Tiger Sniff.

Two details can be a footnote. As of June 2021, Yuanqi Forest has no systematic new employee training mechanism, and most of the new employees who have been employed for more than half a year are extremely unfamiliar with the company structure - they have limited knowledge of the specific positions of other executives and the roles of other departments except for Tang Binsen, who is the founder. As well, "internal rip-off incidents" are not uncommon, there have been two product groups for "who can get the promotion resources" dispute, various meetings have been held for more than three months and still have not been known...

In the stage of high-speed growth, the above hidden dangers were covered up by the "battle record", since its establishment in 2016, Yuanqi Forest has gradually broken the circle through tea burning and sparkling water, and gradually becomes the most valuable new beverage company. The instantaneous expansion of the organization and the slowdown in growth began to make the hidden dangers of the Yuanqi Forest appear: the official data of the Yuanqi Forest showed that the revenue in 2021 increased by 260% year-on-year, while the revenue growth rate in 2020 was 309% year-on-year. At the end of 2020, Tang Binsen had predicted that the revenue would reach 7.5 billion yuan in 2021, and the insider revealed that "although the final result exceeded 7 billion yuan, it did not reach the red line of 7.5 billion yuan".

Change begins from the top down.

According to people familiar with Tang Binsen, in June 2021, Tang began to discuss with his friends "various challenges that may be faced after the organization becomes larger", and deduced the "underlying logic of organizational structure and human motivation" with friends who have known each other for many years.

From the end of the third quarter of 2021, the expansion rate of Yuanqi Forest has slowed down rapidly. A person close to Tang Binsen said, "When the total staff broke through the 8,000 mark, Old Tang said to slow down, he felt that we needed to re-do the construction of basic parts. ”

Some highly symbolic signals have been interpreted as the 6-year-old company is trying to evolve into a "modern enterprise": in the second half of 2021, yuanqi forest executives have re-clarified the company's vision, mission, and reformulated the employee training system through several meetings, and they hired the first CHO in the company's history.

But the transition is no easy task.

Some employees who joined the Yuanqi Forest from the Internet factory told Tiger Sniff that it was "much easier" here, in his former company, the toilet door was not allowed to be unlocked and there was timekeeping monitoring; and in the Yuanqi Forest, it was even possible to hide in the toilet to "play the king". There are also people in the beverage circle who jumped to join Yuanqi Forest in 2021 and said bluntly that the "pride and recognition" of employees for Yuanqi Forest need to be strengthened, "In the beverage circle, people are accustomed to calling themselves XX people (brand name or brand abbreviation), but so far Yuanqi people are not a popular statement." ”

"Contributor" Tang Binsen

Tang Binsen is the "number one writer" within the Yuanqi Forest - in the "Internal Journal" called Yuanqi Weekly, Tang Binsen opens a column under the name of "Old Tang Recommended Book List", and he will recommend the books he is reading from time to time, accompanied by book reviews of hundreds of words or even more than a thousand words.

Yuanqi Weekly is a product launched in the third quarter of 2021: all Yuanqi Forest employees can "watch" every week through the Feishu employee terminal. According to informed sources, the books Tang Binsen has read in the past 6 months are mainly in the fields of "organizational strength" and "the underlying logic of human nature", and the two books that make people impressed are "Social Animals" and "Slow Thinking". Moreover, he still admires Huawei, and in the "Old Tang Recommended Book List", there was a time when Tang Binsen concentrated on sharing books related to Huawei.

Tang Binsen will pay attention to the "reading volume" at the bottom of each Yuanqi Weekly. People close to Tang told Tiger Sniff that Tang's expectations for Yuanqi Weekly were "tools for efficient flow of information within the company" and "means to break down the information barrier." In the Yuanqi Weekly, various departments will announce the latest progress, situation, and publicity, and Tang Binsen hopes to let 8,000 Yuanqi people know what they are paying attention to and thinking about through the "Old Tang Recommendation Book List".

Improving the efficiency of information flow is not easy. A person familiar with the matter showed Tiger Sniff the reading volume of Yuanqi Weekly: about 1500 people per issue, which means that nearly 80% of the employees in the entire Yuanqi Forest are not "deep fans" of the weekly.

Yuanqi Weekly is not Tang Binsen's only weapon to "break the internal information wall". Since the third quarter of 2021, Tang Binsen has begun to personally take the lead in building the "document specification" of Yuanqi Forest.

Previously, the documents of various departments and high-level levels within the Yuanqi Forest were "different in form", and the expansion of enrollment in 2021 further aggravated the "dispersion" of documents. You can see wahaha, unity, kuaishou, and douyin in the Yuanqi Forest. In view of this, Tang Binsen personally wrote the first Yuanqi document in the yuanqi forest in the whole group of yuanqi forest in the second half of 2021 and fixed the specifications in it.

In the matter of promoting the construction of documents, Tang Binsen has put a lot of thought into it. For example, the first standard document for each department was asked to "introduce the positioning, values, and philosophy of the department." At Tang Binsen's request, the department "boss" (that is, department Leader, yuanqi internally commonly known as the department boss) was asked to put this similar "department manual" document link under the Feishu avatar - which means that yuanqi forest 8000 employees can click on the "document manual" of any department boss at any time to understand the specific situation of the department.

The core reason why Tang Binsen "engages" documents with such fanfare is the efficiency of internal information flow.

A yuanqi forest product side person told Tiger Sniff a detail, in internal communication, there are new employees from Internet companies with "full of big factory vocabulary" copywriting to report ideas, the result is from the traditional beverage company employees "dazed". The large expansion of enrollment in a short period of time has further reduced the efficiency of communication: people from different "worlds" have the original "world" discourse system (even some jargon and black words), and the Yuanqi Forest, which combines a variety of "genes", urgently needs to find a "common language" to reduce communication costs.

But the efficiency of Yuanqi is not only "stuck" in the communication link. Some sales people revealed to Tiger Sniff that in the first half of 2020 to 2021, the execution efficiency of Yuanqi Forest "decreased" with the expansion of the organization. "Our sales department will regularly feedback the insight into market opportunities or key variables in the regional market to the headquarters, but the corresponding new products will take shape at the earliest 5 to 6 months, and the final large-scale distribution may be more than a year later."

The "amoeba model" of the Yuanqi Forest is also beginning to face challenges. Since the establishment of the company, Yuanqi Forest borrowed from the amoeba "theory", taking the product link as an example, each product group will recruit its own brand, sales, design, research and development, the advantage of this is that each product group of Yuanqi Forest is "complete", but the drawbacks also appear with the expansion of recruitment: many groups of "functional roles" are doing similar things, due to limited communication efficiency, these "functional roles" do not cooperate with each other, and the final result is that cross-departmental communication efficiency is not high.

A person who worked in Yuanqi Forest told a detail, when there were many products in the company that were promoted around the taste of white peach, and each product group was independent, and even when contacting and cooperating externally, "multiple groups would find the same goal and then compete with each other." ”

But adjusting existing product groups is no small matter: this is not only the structural basis for the operation of the "Yuanqi Forest World" since its inception, but also one of the "Yuanqi Forest Wars" that the new consumer circles are talking about, and there are too many "interests" entangled around these self-contained groups.

The external situation facing the Yuanqi Forest also made it need to evolve from a guerrilla force to a large army. A person familiar with the matter told Tiger Sniff that at present, Yuanqi Forest is facing the challenge of giants such as Coca-Cola, and this is a large army-level battle, "The past Amoeba model overemphasized flexible operations and small team independence, and this model is no longer applicable in the new situation of today's market competition." ”

The Yuanqi Forest has changed

Genki Forest began to reallocate internal resources.

Before the third quarter of 2021, the head of each product group has great authority: for the group, the person in charge can decide the salary and bonus distribution of each team member; outside the group, the person in charge can decide when the product applies to log on to the e-commerce platform and apply for promotion resources.

Due to the difference in each person's standards, with the expansion of the Yuanqi Forest, the existing model began to bring "contradictions and frictions". For example, two products in the same category will apply for resources at the same time, and the maturity of the two products is not the same from an external perspective, but both teams will strongly demand "their own first".

According to an insider who has worked in Yuanqi Forest, product leaders from different backgrounds often have "fierce collisions", "The 60-point and 100-point lines in everyone's mind are different, so there will be a quarrel at the meeting." The person revealed that the internal horse racing mechanism of Yuanqi Forest has magnified the "contradictions and frictions" caused by this "standard difference": the same category of products may have multiple product groups competing at the same time, and everyone hopes to win the opportunity internally.

Tang Binsen's solution is to reorganize the standards and reorganize the structure of the Yuanqi Forest. From the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2021, Yuanqi Forest began to "middle-stage", and positions such as e-commerce and offline channels began to be withdrawn from the group and included in the company's large structure. "For example, on the e-commerce side, in the past, each product group matched the relevant personnel, and even increased or decreased according to the needs of its own group, but under the new architecture, the e-commerce port was planned and operated by the company."

Yuanqi Forest began to form a clear "red line": at different stages, only products that met the red line standard could get a new round of opportunities. Different from the previous product team leader control rhythm, the new model Yuanqi Forest began to form a standardized review process: countless new products were initially screened through internal testing - the winners were arranged to log on to the e-commerce platform - in the case of not matching the promotion resources, they were screened again according to the sales volume of the e-commerce platform - the winner matched the promotion resources of the e-commerce platform, and after a period of screening again, the winner was allowed to log in to channels such as convenience bees - after re-screening, in a "small range" Those with better channel sales can be allowed to recommend to the whole country, and eventually get the company's maximum promotion resources.

The "granularity" of Tang Binsen's change is extremely fine. According to a person familiar with the matter, Tang Binsen once questioned the "data authenticity" of the product's preliminary investigation, pointing out that "after a person spends 5 yuan to buy a drink, his attitude towards the investigation is different from that of the investigation when he did not spend money." And, when formulating the "standard red line" of Yuanqi Forest, Tang Binsen will point out that there is a flaw in the algorithm model of a certain data.

"He is a typical science and engineering mindset, he builds a house, he will start from what materials are used on each floor, there are multiple details on the bottom floor, the granularity is very fine." The above-mentioned person analyzed it.

The change in the internal resource allocation mode also means personnel changes: the various product groups of Yuanqi Forest have entered an adjustment period from the third quarter of 2021, and some members have been transferred to join most departments of the company, while some product team leaders who have failed in internal horse racing under the new standard have been adjusted to other groups or even to new groups to start from the role of executors.

This is a new mode of operation, although the product team still retains the freedom in the R & D innovation process, but the company can more directly coordinate the allocation of resources, personnel changes, and strengthen the daily "contact" with each team. A person, who did not want to be named, revealed that the potential benefit of this model is that the company can get a clearer picture of the real progress and situation of each group. "The core right to mobilize resources was relegated to the corporate level, and the company announced new standards, which meant that the group was placed within a more systematic framework."

With that comes a change in efficiency. In the past, the strong product group leader could rely on personal prestige to push the "subordinate" products to the e-commerce channel (the first stop of all Yuanqi forest products in the public world is e-commerce) In the case of non-uniform standards, too many products crowded to the e-commerce port, which not only means that the resources allocated to high-quality products are limited, but also means higher inventory pressure. "Those products that could not meet the standards of e-commerce may have sluggish sales, and it often takes three or five months to digest inventory and adjust products, and the internal slur will eventually reduce the overall efficiency."

According to people familiar with the matter, the combing of Yuanqi Forest around the structure and standards was basically completed in the first quarter of 2022. At present, for Tang Binsen and his Yuanqi Forest, how to digest the "new regulations" formulated in the past six months and transform them into "productivity" is a top priority in the first half of 2022.

People close to Tang Binsen told Tiger Sniff that under the new structure, Tang Binsen will put more experience in structural combing, standard formulation, company infrastructure construction and strategic planning, etc. As the volume of Yuanqi Forest becomes larger, Tang Binsen's energy is more limited. Starting in 2021, Tang Binsen gradually reduced his participation in sales meetings, but he will still participate in almost every product meeting. Earlier in 2021, a business school team visited Yuanqi Forest and wanted to discuss the "marketing strategy" with Tang, but Tang declined.

As energy became scarce, Tang Besen began to promote more young people. At present, in the Yuanqi Forest, the two co-founders Antlers and Uki are post-90s girls, and they mainly grasp the two major product lines of sparkling water and alien (electrolyte water). In the team of Antlers and Uki, the proportion of post-95 members is extremely high.

Born in 1982, Tang Binsen tried to understand the market through these young "confidants". A playable detail is that Tang Binsen once said internally that his favorite Yuanqi Forest product is "Qingpan" - a 0-add pure tea product, but whether it is an e-commerce platform or offline channels, the sales of Qingpan are very ordinary. "Tang Binsen is very clear that if he makes products according to his own taste, Yuanqi Forest may die, he needs to rely on young people, but he needs to think of a system architecture that can further improve efficiency and stimulate young people's creativity."

Quiet changes continue to appear in the Yuanqi Forest, such as the second half of 2021, the Yuanqi Forest has greatly cancelled advertising, and since the fourth quarter of 2021, the Yuanqi Forest has quietly opened the optimization of human efficiency. And these are also like the epitome of Yuanqi Forest in 2022, a Yuanqi Forest executive told Tiger Sniff: "When a company evolves from a product-driven company to a public company, it needs to have more capabilities." We're like changing tires at high speed, hoping to keep the speed, but more demanding stability. ”