Set the pace
A customer wanted us in six cities. So we opened six cities. Here’s what a year of bleeding taught us about the difference between following and pace-setting.Retry
Operations
Execution, processes, scaling, and the day-to-day grind. How to actually run the thing you started.
Making it manual
Senior team updates are important. Strike that. Senior team updates are VERY important. Something of this importance should not be left to automation.
Startups are hard to keep moving forward
Being a leader of a startup — especially in any operations role — is one of the hardest things to do properly in business.
The best laid plans
Startups, by their nature, are designed to be an uncontainable, uncontrollable and unstructured mess.
From anarchy to…less anarchy?
“Just f@cking do it.”
Embrace the silence
Great interviewers know that silence is a tool. They don’t feel the need to fill the space left by a question or an answer. They soak in it and keep their mouths shut.
The secret to scaling is stopping
Why myself and my co-founders of a delivery company spent months doing deliveries ourselves, and how that’s the opposite of what most scaling advice tells you.
Your Situation Room
After the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 — attributed to a lack of up-to-date information — President Kennedy ordered the creation of the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. Its sole purpose was to bring together the right people and information at the right time, mostly during a crisis, to make the most right decision available.
How startups can save $100,000
Early days in startup life feels like David Allen’s GTD on amphetamines.
The alignment meeting
Remember that old adage that to assume makes an ass out of you and me? That’s cute but in startups, assumptions derail initiatives and kill momentum. Nothing cute about that.
When do you add an operations lead
This is a question that not enough founders ask. The simple answer is right now.
Kill the (be)cause
Most of the challenges of building a business are a direct result of ignoring the “because”.
Distractions.
Running a start up is full-frontal. Things come at you from everywhere.
Manual Productivity
New productivity app? I’ve tried it.
The Urgent vs The Important
This is the biggest stumbling block for early stage companies
Mad startup operating skills
In startups, operating discipline is a muscle but versatility is a skill.
Focus.
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