Six Tips For Keeping Your Momentum

Larry Chiang character compass the vector and direction of a business executive’s soul. He only wants guest posts by the best. Peek into some of the best business minds with him. This latest guest-post is from Brad Wisler from SproutBox.

The Book Cover art done by yours truly

Edited By Larry Chiang

By Brad Wisler

It’s an intense experience to create a business plan, build your initial product, and find a way to fund it. Managing a company once you gain traction is an entirely different set of challenges. Here are a some tips to remember as you make the transition from founder of a startup to CEO of a growing company.

Don’t stop pitching.
Travel. Meet people. Share your vision with anyone who will listen. Every successful entrepreneur will tell you stories of chance encounters that became turning points for their businesses. Just because you found your first round of funding doesn’t mean you can stop pitching. You probably haven’t met the partner, customer, adviser or employee that will be the catalyst for your success, and you’ll never meet that person from behind your desk. Telling your story also helps you refine your plans. It may be the 247th time you give your pitch that you finally hear how stupid some part of it sounds, or how profound another part is. Traveling also gives you a chance to escape the urgent and think about things that are important. This blog post would not exist if it weren’t for a long flight home from San Francisco.

Get a great secretary.
I don’t mean a receptionist. I mean a corporate secretary – someone with a knack for documentation and organization, someone who takes great notes, a great writer. This might be a young assistant or it might be a seasoned executive. It doesn’t matter who it is, but every organization needs at least one. Technology makes information easy to retrieve, but that doesn’t necessarily mean easy to find. Your policies, procedures, product info, training, and marketing materials must be easily understood by people you never meet. Yes, you can probably explain these things better in person, but if your company is growing, you won’t have time.

Don’t just treat your employees like owners, make them owners.
Not phantom stock, not bonuses, not profit sharing. Give them equity in the company. Let them know exactly what percentage (or fraction of a percentage) of the company they own. Let them know when they get diluted. This is the only way they will see the big picture. Remember, employees care about process more than value, but owners care about creating value first.

Get the generic version of everything except people.
Expensive furniture and equipment won’t make your people more productive if they are unskilled. Buying them fancy dinners and first class flights won’t motivate them if they’re bored and unchallenged. Truly productive and creative people enjoy doing more with less. Give them a comfortable chair and a flat surface with a computer that doesn’t crash, and watch the magic happen. If it doesn’t happen, replace them quickly. Never hire the slightly-less-impressive-but-quite-a-bit-cheaper candidate. If you can’t afford the candidate you want, wait. Hiring always seems urgent, but remember: when you need to hire someone real bad, you’ll probably make a real bad hire.

Let your personality show in your products and your workspace.
There are lots of ways to do this, but it starts with your product names and logos. Don’t let anyone talk you out of a name that is meaningful to you, as long as it’s telling your story. Stay away from acronyms and inside jokes, but don’t worry too much about ‘what the industry will accept’. Focus on being meaningful and memorable.  It’s not a bad thing if people are asking where the name came from, as long as they are spelling the domain correctly. Your workspace should do the same. If impressionist art doesn’t inspire you, don’t hang it on your walls. If you like action figures, keep a few on your desk (not in your desk, on display). There is nothing more exhausting and conflicting than hiding your true identity. Remember: Peter Parker and Clark Kent are broke, and Bruce Wayne is fictional. Besides, he inherited his money.

Share your vision for tomorrow, but sell what you have today.
This is similar to ‘under-promise and over-deliver’, but it goes further. You’ll need to convince people that your product – even in its incomplete state – is better than their current solution. Don’t integrate with their legacy system, replace it. Persuasion will usually cost less than integration, and it will always be faster. Selling features you don’t have gives your sales people control of your entire organization. That’s usually bad because sales is about instant gratification rather than long term value. You need to have a plan for attacking the market and stick to it. Overselling takes you off of this plan.

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Brad Wisler heads up Sprout Box in Bloomington, Indiana

I edited this in 10 minutes. If I missed something, email me… larry @larrychiang dot com and include your cell in the subject line.


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