We, the people who run operations for companies, are marathon pace bunnies without the ears.
Watch any marathon and you’ll see the ears among the throngs running. They balance the adrenalin of the first bunch of miles with the long run ahead. They don’t let anyone get too far out in front of their feet too early on and don’t let them get too far behind later on. Steady.
You put trust in them. They set the pace. You follow them to hit your goal.
I think of startups and high growth companies as running successive, back-to-back marathons…without stopping…ever. There are tremendous highs and lows along the way and, at each 20 mile marker, you question why you are putting yourself through it. Every time.
This is why setting the pace is so important. Most startups jump too fast out of the blocks or think of the finish line before putting in the work — wasting essential energy on non-essential things.
We learned this the hard way at Trexity. When we launched, a customer wanted us in six cities. So we opened six cities. They were our only customer in those cities.
For a year, we bled. Every delivery required our ops team to personally call a courier to get it picked up. We paid drivers way above market just to get anyone interested. Meanwhile, we were a broke pre-seed startup that couldn’t afford to invest in markets that weren’t earning. Our main city needed us. These six cities just needed to not exist.
It took us a year to admit it. Then we gave the customer 60 days notice, which meant we bled for another 60 days after we’d already made the decision to quit.
Two years later, we reopened two of those cities. This time with a plan. This time with funding. This time at the right pace.
We sprinted when we should have jogged. The customer wanted six cities, so we said yes. That’s not pace-setting — that’s following.
Pace bunnies lead and encourage everyone around them — often with a smile on their face — but don’t forget, they are running the same marathon as everyone else. It just doesn’t seem like they are and that’s the power of pace setting in action.