Working as a leader for a start-up is not for the weak. It requires a “rare unicorn” type of leader to see it through to stable profitability. The success of a business is how many unicorns you have on your team and how well they sparkle. What traits do I look for when seeking out the most sparkly unicorns of them all?
Hustling unicorns run long and fast, they work with a sense of urgency, and they do it with a smile. They have an extra comb in their pocket and come prepared with water and snacks for the ride. Unicorns are prepared, work hard and look GOOD doing it. 🙂 There is no complaining of long weeks or long hours….in fact, they enjoy the hustle.
Sparkle Indicator: Horses act “put out” by a workload. Unicorns will ask fo...
We are Founders for life — we just happen to build a few startup companies along the way.
At Startups.com, one of our most popular products is our "Founder Groups," where we pair 8-10 founders together to discuss the challenges of being a startup Founder. Invariably, startups succeed and fail, and the Founders find themselves asking us an existential question:
"Can I still be in a Founder Group now that I'm no longer a Founder?"
To which our answer is "Of course, because you can never stop being a Founder." We say that because we don't believe being a Founder is a job that we happen to have while running a startup. Being a Founder is who we are as creators. Our startups are a single moment of creation, but our role and existence as Founders...
How do we maintain focus and order when everything else is going to hell?
There are two skills we need as Founders trying to lead chaotic startups — the ability to solve problems and the ability to focus our attention. As it turns out, the ability to focus our attention tends to be the most important.
You see, chaos is pretty much standard fare at any startup. Yet, if we're not able to organize that chaos, no matter how capable we are, it will consume us. When everything is in chaos, we need to be the steady hand that guides us through the storm, even in cases where we're the only person in that storm!
Over time we start to realize that we can't "end chaos," but we can learn to control it in a way that allows us to systematically assess and...
Why are we still paying people in units of time?
It's been about 100 years since the Industrial Revolution and yet nearly everyone on the planet still gets paid like a dock worker, where units of time equal measurable production.
That made sense when nearly everyone had an output that could be tracked by time, but in our current economy, why do we still think every job should be performed for exactly 40 hours within a 9 to 5 schedule?
We're at a point where we can no longer justify a one size fits all type of output metric. It's time we burn down the old institution of work hours and build a new mechanism that actually applies to what employers are paying for, and what employees actually do.
As Founders what we care...
Most startups launch with $0 in funding, but no one ever really explains how the hell they do it. We keep saying, "They bootstrapped it," as if that explains anything other than "They didn't take on investors." What the heck does that even mean? What it is intended to mean is that we find creative ways to compensate people and buy things that don't involve using cash in the bank.
We can't possibly cover every use case of how startups find resources for $0, but let's take a look at the most popular categories that people run around looking for money for and see how we make it work.
Figuring out how to compensate people is where we're often stuck first. Most of us are familiar with paying folks with equity, but that's not th...
There's an inflection point in growing startups where our focus shifts from building products and helping customers to hiring staff and dealing with internal bullshit. That shift in focus is the death knell for growing startups as it slowly and completely takes our eye off the ball.
If we look at larger companies we can see this in full view. 90% of their focus (sometimes all of it) is spent internally with warring parties and fiefdoms more focused on their jobs and career paths than anything the company actually produces. (I've made the argument before that all the important stuff was probably done long before them anyway.)
Our job as Founders is to do everything in our power to prevent this loss of focus, and it absolutely starts with us.
Last year, when we launched our team building company HeyTaco!, my business partner Blake and I knew we wanted to build a customer first company. Both of us are inspired by the success stories of customer-centric companies like Costco, Zappos, and Trader Joe’s. We knew that putting customers first and a focus on customer experience would be the foundation of our business.
As the Chief Taco Officer at HeyTaco! (Yes, that’s my real title), I’m constantly obsessing over new ways to improve the customer experience.
Over the past year we’ve discovered five ways that help us create lasting relationships with our customers.
In the fast paced world we live in, customers expect quick responses. They don’t want to wait for answers....
Remote work. Work from home. Telecommuting and teleworking. Whatever you call it, distributed teams are becoming increasingly popular… and it’s here to stay.
A recent Gallup Poll noted that, in the U.S., telecommuting for work is up 37% in the last decade. 34% of business leaders surveyed at a recent Global Leadership Summit in London predicted more than half of their company’s global workforce would work remotely by 2020. Around the world, more and more companies are building distributed teams, just like we have at Mailbird.
When you look at the benefits of having a distributed team, it’s understandable why we chose to build our team this way. Happy people make great work and, generally speaking, those who work remotely are happier, more ...
For some reason, Founders are incredibly "shy" about giving themselves a raise.
It's odd really because we are responsible for looking out for the futures of so many other people, yet we often shortchange ourselves when it comes to our own needs. The reality is, our raises tend to come last, and in many cases, not at all.
So when is the appropriate time to pull ourselves aside and award that long-overdue raise?
For many of us, the default answer on when our salary goes up (or down) is based on our ongoing Net Income. If we make more money, we take some home. If we lose a bunch, well, those credit card balances and Home Equity lines just keep growing... and growing...
That said, basing all of our "salary...
Working with virtual assistants has become increasingly popular over the past several years, as small business owners, entrepreneurs, and busy people everywhere have acknowledged the need for additional help but wanted to avoid the cost and hassle of hiring in-house.
In his book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss outlines the benefits of passing off the repetitive tasks that you don’t have time for- or simply don’t enjoy to a virtual assistant.
But, there are several factors to consider in order to find the virtual assistant that’s best for you.
So, you know that you have too much on your plate and you need help. That’s great, but if you had an amazing assistant start today, what exactly would you delegate to th...