I’ve been struggling for a while about what to write for Tech IT Easy—things seemed to change from one day to the next and it made little sense to reflect, rather a speedy reaction felt more like the right thing to do. That hasn’t changed much, as I believe we’ve just reached a stage of development where speed outweighs thought, but my realisation of this warranted a blog post for future reference. I always imagine myself looking back at what I wrote a few months-years ago to see whether I learned a lesson that I could apply on the future.

Every startup starts great, I think. You (and your team, if applicable) feels a sense of elevation, of engaging onto a route that brings rewards, wealth, and joy to future customers (of course the entrepreneur is usually the 1st customer). This hazy phase is necessary to get the necessary adrenaline for the rest of the trajectory. It’s like a warming up, the important difference being that the more you structure your plans during that phase, the more strategically you can dedicate energy to different steps & actions.

Continuing with the analogy of a run, we have reached the marathon phase. We’re running on the limits of our “bodies,” which contain what energy we have pumped in before, what survival strategies we researched, and what supplies we managed to take with us. Both in a marathon and in a startup the vision of the destinations should be strong. It starts with much socialising with other runners, perhaps with some personal trainers during the preparation stage. But eventually, we realise two things: there are lonely routes to run during that marathon. And eventually, it’s a race too and only a selected few can win.

So what am I learning during this marathon?
I may have mentioned this before, but I envisioned my role in the company as different then it is now. I drafted a contract for myself with a set of deliverables that relate a vision outlined in our business plan. One deliverable is keeping that business-plan updated as I know that these plans hold little value as static documents. But essentially, it’s about getting our product to a certain stage and our company to a certain stage, and that’s how I phrased it in my business-plan.

As a CEO, an important part is learning to let go of the definition of a “job” (singular). A CEO must be a generalist and be able to do a number of “jobs” (plural). Not to a great depth, but enough to get each member of the team to do their job well. That means that, in my company, I have to understand how our products are built and help build them. I have to understand design and help my designers. I have to understand marketing and help my team there. In the end, there’s three things to realise about being a CEO: a good percentage of your time is spent on people management and you have to learn to delegate a lot of things. And last but not least: the final responsibility is always yours! You can fire an employee for doing a bad job, but you are always to blame for the outcome. So there’s no excuse, ever!

A runner’s most important asset is his brain. In regular intervals, he has to observe his body and his environment and make a decision about what the best actions are at that moment. Going downhill = move faster. A long road to the next water-source = conserve your supplies. A runner close to you = know his and your strengths and weaknesses and decide whether to run faster, slower, or at normal speed.

The startup’s most important asset is leadership, which fulfils the same role as the brain during a marathon: evaluate internal resources and the environment and decide what step is best to take when.

I hope to have a few more general blog posts on entrepreneurship left in me. But for now, the sun is shining and the future looks bright. But we also need to conserve our supplies to the next water source, and run at sufficient speed to meet both our milestones and reach the finish.

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

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The “Captain’s Chair” is what I call the chair of the entrepreneur which always has to be filled and which sits prominently in the middle of the office and all the business being conducted within. It comes out of the simple evolution from running a 1-man show, and then hiring on more people to do the work. It also has a lot to do with how sensitive the service is that is being released, and when customers expect services to be at the same level of professionalism that the initial founder has always displayed, it is understandably hard to let go.

It is also a trap that is being written about in plenty of business “self-help” books and is, in my opinion, best solved through designing processes to be as failure-free and as simple as possible. In other words, like the preparation of a McDonalds hamburger, which is a scientifically designed factory process.

One public example of the captain’s chair phenomenon is Micheal Arrington’s Techcrunch, which has, until recently, always been run out of his own apartment, and even today he is (I believe) the no. 1 editor and certainly the no. 1 PR guy. In no other media publication of that size (in terms of readership numbers, not company size) does the founder take such a prominent and involved position and, physically and mentally, I’m sure, it is taking its toll on Arrington. Similarly, I know several small companies, where this is a problem, with similar consequences on the founder.

This is not to say that doing the opposite is necessarily a good thing. As perhaps the case of Starbucks showed, which recently had to ask its original founder, Howard Schultz, to return to the captain’s chair, sometimes an organisation can forget the original values it was based on and do some silly things. In Schultz’s case, I have actually always blamed its problems on his book, which was essentially a franchise manual for anyone who wanted to set up a coffee-shop, and which might have also inspired McDonalds to basically become an affordable Starbucks alternative for the masses. A story for another day, but I think the current Starbucks model is doomed and Schultz will have to redesign the company’s business model from scratch.

There is certainly a careful balance that needs to be maintained when designing a company to both expand a business’s reach, without losing the heart of the business. Together with the simple process of “preparing a burger,” you need to instil the values that also lead to the “smile” that accompanies the sale of the burger and leads to a satisfied customer (and his return-visit).

Designing companies must thus, in my opinion, be a rich process, involving the founder(s)’s, the employees’, and customers’ input, finally leading from the single business to the chain of businesses serving all customers equally or superiorly well.

Vincent

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