Hiring, firing, culture, and managing people when you’re still figuring it out yourself.
It took us five offsites to figure it out. Too much agenda. No strategy before. Momentum that evaporates the day you leave. This time we kept the team two extra days after the sessions ended. Just working together. It built culture and solved follow-through in one move.
I asked a hotel staff member for a larger bowl. He brought me one. The next morning it was already at my seat. Every morning after that, same thing. Nobody asked. He just remembered. That’s customer service. The small thing that costs nothing but signals everything.
We hired a team to manage routes, assign bonuses, and call couriers. It worked so well that leadership had no idea. We thought the system was running. It wasn’t. People were running it. By the time we realized, the manual process was baked into our DNA.
Growth is slow, so we chase the next opportunity. But growth is slow because we never commit long enough to see if the plan works. The distraction causes the problem that justifies more distraction. We have to protect the plan long enough to know if it actually works.
The most important thing that leads to startup success (even more-so than luck, timing, hard work and persistence) is solving a problem in a different way from competitors.
Startups are different beasts. If you’ve never been a part of one, it’s really hard to explain just how unique and challenging it is to be part of one during its early stages. I’ve seen so many people think they want to be involved in a startup only to have the reality punch them in the face when they get what they want.
Co-founders need to be aligned. Unified. Clear on objectives. To have a voice.
Lots has been written about the importance of company culture and how to encourage it to develop and flourish in the right way.
How much patience should you have with employees in an early stage startup?
This happens all too often in early stage companies.
There are 2 cardinal rules in life: There is no crying in baseball and there is no coaching in startups.
