Aspiring Evil Genius @ Work

After spending months on end doing investor pitches, pitch workshops, multiple iterations of business plans and many, many oversimplifications of my life's ambition to please others (all while RUNNING a business!), I did not want to hear one more person giving tired '30,000 foot' advice. You may have even heard me say "The next person who says 'you just have to...' is gonna wake up naked and phoneless in the middle of the desert".

What I really needed to maintain my sanity and make measurable progress on the many goals I had ahead of me was specific advice on execution. Lots of people will tell you that they can talk or contribute 'strategically'. Most of their advice should be prefaced with the translation "I've never actually done this, and I'm not willing to make the effort myself, but here's the common advice that you get from everyone else".

I started looking for (and spending time almost exclusively with) people who could answer tactical questions, give practical advice and cite specific experiences, models and examples. Keep in mind that none of this fixed anything overnight, but none of the 'strategic' platitudes will do that either!

In November and December, Kickstand (a great organization for Startups that highlights Boise's communal willingness to help others succeed) put together a series of 5 sessions to provide some of the tactical advice we needed. You can see agendas for 4 of the 5 'Launchpad' sessions at http://kickstand.org/Event_Calendar.htm#12-2009. If you live in the area go to their monthly meetings - it's time well spent.

So here's a summary of the kinds of things you have to keep within your focus while you seek to build a startup, because without them you'll suddenly find that you don't have a company (italics mine, the rest is from Martin Zwilling):

• Create a vision and instill values. The vision may be yours alone, but the communication has to include your team, potential investors, and customers. For most people the communication is the hard part – written, verbal, over and over again.

  Even if your initial vision has to be 'tweaked' over and over, making it clear will help you identify the strengths and weakness. The payback for all the time spent is getting it right. We figured out how and where we were overshooting our customer needs this way. Now as we rewrite our business plan, our focus is on what we need to do for our success, not what investors want to hear. That means that the plan sounds much more relevant to the employees as well.



• Define a focused strategy. Limit the focus to a few critical areas that will yield the highest possible return. If your strategy has more than ten elements, it’s not focused. Not everything can be a priority. Do not spend any time on unimportant goals.

  For us, it was a matter of separating the many things we do and can do into 'parts of our vision' and 'stuff we do to pay the bills for the moment'. No one has a problem with that, and anything that isn't clearly on one list or the other should be killed off. Then we took the list, sorted by how much we could make in the next 12 months and that's the order of our priorities. Anything without a high probability of coming to fruition just shouldn't be on the list to begin with.



• Get stakeholder commitment. People who are not committed cannot be held accountable for delivering ambitious results. The guiding coalition must demonstrate 100 percent unity, or there will be a mutiny. The worst case is a silent mutiny.

  This was hard because we hadn't built a team of advisors and early customers. We didn't have sales staff on board and we looked like a risky bet to anyone considering selling for us on commission. We're finally getting this on track. Whether it's sales, finance, development or operations when you don't have someone with expertise in an area it's way too easy to think you can do that thing quickly from scratch. The person whose butt is on the line to deliver that thing will raise the red flag.



• Align the objectives of principals. I have seen startups implode when principals were pitted against each other on mutually exclusive objectives, like adding more technology versus keeping costs down. Quantify time and cost goals early, get agreement from all, and measure results regularly to verify alignment.

  OK, easy - if by easy you mean 'the sole stock holder can just work 70+ hours per week to run one business while starting another from scratch. Now we are building partnerships to tackle the unknowns and biggest challenges, and working to ensure that both our goals and theirs can be met at once. I still have a forceful charismatic personality, so I know I have to seek out others who can understand our vision and tell me when we're endangering it.



• Every process needs a system. Define and use well-thought-out systems, manual or automated, to ensure repeatable success of every key process. The most basic element of every startup system is a written, agreed, and measurable business plan.

  We knew from a technical perspective that we were going to need certain processes when we got up to speed, but when we examined where time was going on a daily basis, there was lots of room for improvement that freed up time to work on moving things forward - things like Quickbooks not being used efficiently and making multiple trips to the bank every week. At the same time, we avoided pouring a ton of time into an automated billing system for a service that doesn't have subscribers yet - we know (now) how to watch for the point at which the manual process is a liability and needs to be automated.



• Manage priorities. You must relentlessly communicate to all constituents the current priorities, and keep the total to a manageable number. One of the biggest mistakes I see in startups is a new and larger set of priorities every week, causing the team to lose momentum and lose commitment.

  Because not all of our staff works in the same place on the same days, we can't assume that they all know what's going on in the big picture. I took the same approach that I do to blogging and social media - first you put time in to put out information for others (because there is no doubt that it's needed), then you worry about people using it and tweaking your output to make it more valuable. We use Google Tasks with several lists. No, you can't share lists, but a common Google account and iGoogle config lets everyone see and edit the same lists. One master list shows the priorities for the current week, the rest provide more detail and road maps for future issues.



• Provide team support and training. People are your most valuable asset, so start with the right ones, and make sure they have the tools and training to deliver the results you are asking for. Don’t assume they know everything you know, or learn as fast as you do.

  This is tough with a small team and a shoestring budget. However, if they can see why you don't want to buy the expensive tool right now when they can get by with the cheap one until your next milestone, it's worth the time you spend on communicating vision, priorities and the state of the company. I still don't do enough, but we can get enthusiastic underpaid staff to work on unreasonable goals becasue they are excited about what we're doing. Any time they need input I can not only give them the information they need, I can also use that opportunity to keep them excited about what we're building.



• Measure, adapt and innovate. Things change in a startup, and things will go wrong. You won’t notice if you don’t measure. Measure four or five key drivers, not twenty or thirty things. Motivate everyone with an insatiable curiosity to make things one percent better every day (kaizen).

  We're blessed with employees that are more interested in improvement than status quo. Still, we have to know what the payoff is before we improve something in order to set priorities. If everyone knows you're a startup you don't have to worry that version 1.0 isn't perfect or that you're doing things differently today than you said you would 3 months ago. You do have to worry about missing a practical innovation that would have improved your offering or not being able to deliver at all. That makes it easier to decide what to measure.



• Reward and punish. What gets measured and rewarded gets done. Be exceedingly generous with praise, celebration, recognition, small rewards, and sometimes money. Set high standards for performance and use the three T’s (train, transfer, or terminate) to deal with people unable to effectively execute the plan.

  We lost some significant opportunities and spent too much money we didn't really have by not pulling the plug on some ideas, relationships and people soon enough. Now, every time I update the status of the issues and projects we're working on, I include the names the employees and partners working on that item. Everyone gets credit for what they do, and it helps to remind me that when failures are allowed to persist it prevents the people who are working hard from suceeding like they could have. They deserve better.
  

And then there is humility. We put it to work in two ways:

1. If you still consider yourself a startup, today is not the day to use an expensive tool instead of a cheap one. Don't kill productivity or employee moral with bad tools, but don't buy anything you can avoid buying.
2. When my default perspective on my days changed from 'What are we trying to accomplish?' to 'How am I spending my time and how long is it going to take to hit our goals?' it became clear that execution was everything. We've still got a lot of work to do - but we also have a product that we can sell (profitably) today. Without execution, we'd have nothing to measure but burn rate.

Many thanks for the bulletted list, which I paraphrased - it came from Martin Zwilling's Startup Professionals blog at http://ow.ly/QhGs. Follow Martin on Twitter @StartupPro.