Be Consistent

I can still remember Darryl’s conference room. It’s not your typical setup with walls and a desk. Darryl’s conference room was the bar. And when he invited you to a meeting it wasn’t, lets get a drink happy hour. I mean it started that way, but it always had a purpose.

It was a Thursday. I remember because that meant he had something he wanted to say. Friday beers were reserved for bullshitting, but a mid week beer was something different.

I never knew how to act with Darryl. He was more than twice may, been through Vietnam, and part of two mega hit startups in Tonka Toys and Watchguard. This was my first job let alone my first CEO role. But somehow Darryl was a believer in what we were building, despite our crappy office and modest success.

The first beer is the happy one, catching up and pretending that a sixty something year old and a 28 year old have anything in common. But by the second beer he lets you know what he’s thinking. Being a military guy he lives by the chain of command. He respects you but also lets you know when you aren’t cutting it.

At some point he looked at me and said…you need to be more consistent.

I started typing notes into my phone, waiting for him to add more. He didn’t.

I was relieved that’s all he had to say. But then I grew more concerned….what the hell was he talking about?

I actually didn’t know. And being the immature CEO that I was, I didn’t ask.

Fast forward a few years and during my time running Contour I never fully understood what he meant. I heard him but never got it.

It’s been ten years since we had that beer. I understand what he meant.

It’s taken a while. Perhaps it was becoming a husband or a father or a second time CEO. Or perhaps it’s just being the old guy in the room, but I can see in others what Darryl meant.

Being consistent is hard. It’s hard as a parent and it’s especially hard in running a company. Most of the time you have no idea what you’re doing, piecing it together a you go. You’re trying to sound purposeful, but on an undefined path it’s hard to be consistent.

Most entrepreneurs are creative in some way. To generate an idea takes some level in ingenuity. And so being consistent feels like it can be in direct conflict to the craziness people need to create because it’s boring.

Over the years I’ve found the opposite to be true. Discipline has resulted in more space for me to create while providing the consistency others around me expect.

If you are running a team everything you do gets replicated. So if you are random in your cadence, the team will be random. If you don’t document your work, they won’t either. The list goes on, but your approach on the details speakd more to your consistency then anything else you do.

Everyone has their own process for being consistent. Here is what works for me…

My Day

I try to start it the same time every day, before 6am. This isn’t a work thing, it’s a life thing. It takes a week but your body adjusts and appreciates the regularity. This has gotten harder with kids unpredictable nights, but it still works. By the time everyone starts their day I’ve already accomplished something.

I use Evernoteand start my day with a short list of what I need to work on next. I’ve tried blocking time as they show in 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People. It became too complicated so I went back to a simple list. It provides focus and relief when each item is completed.

I took email and slack off my phone. I’m on my laptop enough. I could never resist not clicking the icon and just checking what’s going on.

I use Calendly and block out the same 3 hours, three days a week, for any phone calls. This channels interruptions to the same window of time. I don’t schedule anything on Thursdays or Fridays, it’s my chance to think.

I make it home for dinner. It matters for my family and in return it matters for me. It’s hard to come home, cook dinner, and have energy but the habit has helped a lot.

I try not to open my laptop after 8pm when the kids go to bed. If I do I stay up and lose my morning rhythm. Waking up early has forced more discipline to when I go to bed.

My Process

I don’t have meetings. I have sessions. It’s a mindset for me that makes me think about how we make each workout better. Whether 1:1 or with a group we run a session together no different than if we held sports practice.

Agenda structures rarely change. We practice getting good at running the same types of sessions for several months before we evolve the structure. Growth in team size is what impacts these changes.

We start Moment with a 10am daily stand up. This was company wide up to 30 people, now it’s by team. It’s the same time every day regardless of your time zone. It’s our chance to connect with each other, even if for just a few minutes.

We have one leadership team session every Monday at 9am pst for 30-60 minutes. Each team replicates this structure with a weekly session of their own. The agendas doesn’t change much. We review our numbers, last week, this week, and schedule changes. What we do as a team, starts the company cadence for the week.

I hold 1:1 sessions with each member of my team. I try to never miss them as this is their time and my job is to be there for them. They set the agenda and I can add to it. I didn’t start this until about two years into the company when we built teams and leads.

We have a company session every other Tuesday for 1.5-2 hours. It started as planning our next two weeks and now it’s my chance to address the team and the team leads chance to engage the whole company. This isn’t a beers and BS session, it’s practice for playing at higher level.

We have a board meeting every six weeks. I used to think this was dumb. I’ve come to realize that a leadership team needs it. It forces us to step back, analyze what’s working, and discuss that with the board. We don’t make presentation decks, just write a running google doc with our analysis and topics to discuss. We share that whole doc with the team after the meeting. They get the same information the board does, no secrets.

We run the team on trimesters, not quarters. Quarters happen too fast. By the time you plan one, it’s nearly over. With trimesters we can make bigger goals. Most important we can afford to take the whole team offsite for week to kick off a new trimester. These sessions have let us knock down nearly all the walls that live between us, while working to build, shape, and define our culture. We document every offsite so new teammates can understand our past.

I’ve sent 70 business updates over the first five years of Moment. They started every other week and over time they have moved out to 1x per month. They force me to step back and think about the business. They aren’t list of stuff we’re going to do. They include short paragraphs of analysis with snapshots of data that we are learning. Everyone receives this same update via email…all the employees, investors, and board members.

I write everything down and require our team to do the same. We start every kind of project with a brief. It makes us define the why, what, when, and how. We still struggle to read them in detail, but we’re getting better.

Every team has a data dashboard and nearly everyone on the team does a short weekly update that is shared company wide. We teach early on how to read and analyze data. It’s equivalent to learning proper technique for passing a ball.

My Weakness

Slack makes it too easy to read, follow, and comment on everything. I’m still working to improve at communicating less. In particular being better at grouping my thoughts into one post instead of a string of comments.

Being Inconsistent

Things I see people do when they are inconsistent.

They change their team session times. For whatever reason they aren’t able to hold the same session at the same time every week.

They use complicated charts because they think lines and bars are boring. If lines and bars are boring they assume people won’t read them.

They don’t document their work. Whether it’s the structure of a Trello card, a brief or a process they do it in their head and then have to explain it to everyone else. You should assume nearly everything you do needs to scale beyond you in the future and therefore however you run things today is how the next person will run it.

They add more than one piece at a time. Everything you add, whether a feature, an idea or a market takes practice to learn how to do it well. You want to build into complexity over time.

….All of this is easier to do when things are going well. When shit hits the fan is when your consistency really gets tested.

No Surprises – What This Really Means

In startup culture there is a classic metaphor, "no surprises." It’s often used in referring to how a CEO and Board are supposed to function.

"No surprises".

The first time you hear it you go, huh. The second time, you start to wonder. By the umpteenth time you finally get over the fear to just ask…WTF are they talking about with "no surprises"?

A startup, by its nature, is one giant science experiment. You start with a thesis and then you test the shit out of it, day after day, week after week, year after year. This process is constant and anything but predictable.

So if you have no idea what is going to work, how can you have no surprises?!

You can’t.

Instead consider everything will be a surprise. The question then how do you manage it?

The Background

I have three little kids. When they decide to throw peanut butter covered apple slices across the room…that is a surprise. Even if you carefully place them on their plate, put a 6 foot tarp around the table, and sit with them…they still decide to throw their apples across the room.

Why?

Because they are experimenting. They are trying to learn and test where the line is.

So as a parent what do you do? Before you make the food you communicate about what you’re going to do. Before you put it on the plate you let them know the expectations. And before they take it from you they look you in the eyes and agree to what you’ve told them.

You do the same thing with a Board. You tell them where the company is going, what you are testing next, and what is expected from those tests. What’s important is that you share the downsides of what you are testing and not just the upside. Otherwise all they hear is the upside so when your effort doesn’t work they will go…oh that’s a surprise.

This holds true whether you are super early testing basic assumptions or further along and testing annual plans.

Another Way To Think About It

I don’t like the term, no surprises. It’s reminds you of being told by your parents not to let them down. It’s kind of like no shit, why would I want to let myself down, let alone you?!

What they really mean by no surprises is they want predictability. Boards LOVE predictability. They may say they love supporting founders figure out their path, but deep down the want you to crush what ever plan you put down. Anything to the contrary is a "surprise" in their mind.

Another way to think about no surprises is be transparent. Tell us when shit breaks. And if you steer away from the plan we talked about last meeting please let us know.

Managing To No Surprises

Assuming this nomenclature isn’t going to changed anytime soon here are a few ways to manage that expectation.

1. Build Your Plan In Phases

Early on in a startup you have zero predictability and even less validation that your founding thesis is correct. Instead of building financial models, work on defining the major phases of the business and what you want to prove to yourself with each phase. If you are your harshest critic then meeting everyone else’s "no surprise" expectations will be easier. And if you need help in making these phases, they all include "not running out of cash."

2. Build Into Annual Plans

It takes years to build into business predictability. It took four years at Moment until we had an annual plan. Instead we moved from predicting a month to a trimester to a year. It allowed us to experiment and learn faster without having to guess at what would happen 12 months from now. Building into predictability trains your board on what types of surprises they can expect. Together you want to learn as the startup scales from smaller to larger bets.

3. Don’t Hype

Shit is going to go wrong. It always does. And if you are known for hyping, you immediately look out of control when you hit a rough patch. There are times that you want your team and board excited about the potential, but that potential doesn’t last long. Building a successful startup is at least a 10 year journey, which means you need to manage this consistently.

4. Don’t Get Emotional

Business is matter of fact, especially with a Board. If you take people’s money then you have a job to do…provide them with a return. If you don’t like this expectation then don’t take their money. Otherwise recognize that your job is to test and re-test until you find the successful path you promised. That path may be a different direction than what you pitched, but none the less it will be a path towards the return you promised.

5. Prioritize What’s Broken

Always start with the bad news. Hit it first thing in your emails, updates, Board prep materials, and meetings. Most importantly make it concise. The more words you use the more out of control you appear. Instead make the problem succinct, provide alternative directions, and your recommendation. And at the end you want to have a clear ask from your Board.

6. Escalate Major Changes

Put yourself in a Board member’s shoes…from the last meeting we talked about "blah." If in operating the company something changes that impacts your ability to deliver blah then you should escalate that. One path is an email that outlines what happened, why, and what you are going to do going forward. A more serious path is that same email with a phone call on the end of it.

Board’s have a fiduciary responsibility, which means they too can get sued if you screw up. So use your best judgement…if I was on the board would I want to know this new information? If yes then escalate.

Just remember you can only escalate so many times until it looks like you don’t know what you’re doing.

It’s OK To Obsess

In sports there are champions and non champions. In music there are hits and non hits. In sculpture there is “the david” and everything else. In startups there are winners and non winners.

It doesn’t mean that the non winners aren’t successful, nice, wonderful, endearing, deserving, hard working, empathetic, etc. They just aren’t champions.

When you walk into Camp Nou you can feel it. The old concrete, the steep rafters, and the bright lights. The anticipation of history, there are no empty seats when the game starts. There is no complacency in being late. There is no one lagging back from half time. Everyone understands the significance of the moment, the history that is about to unfold. And for the next two hours they celebrate it. They watch, applaud, awe, and even critique….but most important they appreciate it.

We have lost that spirit of appreciation towards company builders. The legend of Ben Franklin has been replaced with Jeff Bezos and his cruel culture. Ford and the marvel of making the Model T is now Elon and his exploding cars. The magic of Walt Disney has become Howard Shultz and his ‘racist’ coffee cups.

We are quick to judge and even faster to give up. We are afraid to try, try again, and keep trying until there is nothing left to give. We aren’t willing to put ourselves out there, to be utterly vulnerable to the world. Because in order to be successful you have to be willing to be judged, to be critiqued. And if you win…to be hated.

If pouring your soul into your work, isn’t your game that’s ok. If wanting to be the best isn’t your thing, it’s safer not to try. If being obsessed isn’t what fuels your existence, no one will judge you.

But to those of you that do, we should be giving you a standing ovation. We should be appreciating the detail and the commitment, the courage and the journey. We should first marvel, then critique.

If you know someone who has started a company don’t tell them to work less. Don’t confuse their desire to change the world with your own fears. It would be like telling Michelangelo to stop working on The David because he should have better balance.

Why Brand Wins

Google "brand and startup" and you get a lot of content. Talk brand with startups and you get a lot of glazed eyes. Most of the internet content comes in a list format and most of the startup talks are from creatives who eat, sleep, and breathe brand.

What a lot of people get wrong at a startup level is that brand isn’t about beautiful visual execution. It’s not about having a great logo, stunning imagery, or a well designed website. It’s not even about hiring a rad agency that “does that brand thing that we suck at.”

As a startup, brand is much deeper. Brand is about purpose.

Figuring out how you are going to win the market is a much harder problem to solve than brand. Winning is binary, brand is not.

You don’t even have to make a pretty brand to win. Ugly brands win all the time, just ask Amazon. They could give two cents about visual identity. Instead they just crush the living s%&# out of everyone, in every market they touch.

I’ve lost to an ugly brand before. It made losing that much more excruciating. All I could do was shake my head and go WTF.

Whether you are creating an ugly brand or a beautiful one, here is what I’ve learned about startup brands the past 15 years.

Brand Forces You To Have A Clear Purpose

A brand should answer the question…"why do you exist?"

Regardless of B2B or B2C, being able to answer this question is both hard and important. Not because the exercise is difficult, but because you often make up words trying to craft the perfect sentence.

Usually the answer is simple. Everyone starts their company for a reason, that reason is your purpose. It’s probably around making something better, people happier, others more successful, etc. Whatever the reason, write it down.

That is the foundation of your brand.

Have A Character

Read this book, “The Hero And The Outlaw.” It will help you visualize the archetype that represents the person your brand will become.

Even if you just express brand through words, having a clear picture of the character helps to move brand past visual to something tangible. It’s easy to describe your friend and their attributes. Your brand should be equally as clear.

Learn To Tell Stories

Everyone wants to fall in love, especially with new young brands. They provide an un-biased opportunity to discover a company that shares their same beliefs. The reality is that people are buying into your beliefs as much as they are the product. Who you are, what you believe in, and why you made this product….is brand.

Learn how to share that message through stories. All kinds of stories from short ones to long ones to visual ones to words. Tap into emotion and purpose as much as you can. It’s the narrative that people want to connect with.

Your stories may suck at first and that’s ok. It takes a lot of practice to get good at telling stories.

If you are just competing on a check list of features it is a very long road to winning hearts. And even longer road to winning the market.

Consistency Wins

What ever your brand stands for, don’t stop repeating it. That goes for your name and it especially goes for your purpose. Once people create a perception of who you are and what you stand for, it’s very hard to change it.

To GoPro’s credit they were incredibly consistent with their brand. They didn’t change their name, we did three times. They didn’t change their message, we did that a lot. They didn’t compete on the features, that’s all we competed on. Instead they focused on the emotion of action video and told that story over and over again through video.

It is much harder to capture minds than it it so to capture hearts.

You Can’t Be Wrong

Here’s the thing…if you go all in, you can’t be wrong. If you are sharing your beliefs no one can say that you are wrong. They may choose not to believe what you believe, but they can’t argue that you are wrong.

On the other hand if you just sell features anyone can argue that something else is better. That your product doesn’t do X as well as company Y. Or that they prefer company Z because they do feature W better.

MLK often used the word, ‘believe’. It was a powerful statement that you couldn’t challenge.

Brand Alone Doesn’t Win

This isn’t discussed enough within the startup community, but winning is incredibly hard. Once a market develops there is one winner and a whole lot of losers. And unfortunately if you are a venture backed startup you have only one choice but to win. Coming in second doesn’t provide nearly the return that is required.

Having a purpose, sharing your beliefs, and telling your story over and over again is just one piece in figuring out a market winning strategy.

My Addiction

 

laptop

It’s just after 11pm on a Friday night. My mind is tired, to that point that I can feel it fighting to gain just a little bit more adrenalin. Because slowing down would cause me to collapse at my laptop.

I’ve been here before. Many times in fact. Especially during my first startup there was little that prevented me from being a train reck of a workaholic. The harder I pushed, the harder it was to stop. The more my body and mind yearned to be worked until exhaustion.

Fast forward eight years and I can feel it happening again. Like a drug addict that just needs one more hit, I push for one more ounce of thought to advance the business.

Except this time, sitting at my desk at 11pm, I have a lot more to lose. With two young kids and an amazing wife I can feel life slipping by as I spend just one more minute on my startup. Just one more glance at my phone. One more thought before bed.

The deeper I go the easier it is to justify this path. To say, oh just after this project it will slow down. Except it doesn’t. Not because it can’t, but because I’ve forgotten how to. What started as a side project has become a constant being. To the point that I’m sitting here at my laptop, long after my family has gone to bed, doing the work of three people.

I’ve written about this slippery slope before. In between companies and free from the burden of growth I wrote a guide about enjoying the ride. That was almost three years ago. Long enough that I have forgotten my own words.

As I sit here again, I realize that this is a choice. No one forced me to push myself to exhaustion. No one required that I say good night to my family. No one listed this as a requirement to being a founder. And yet I’m here…a few steps from sliding right back back down that hill.

Previous to being an entrepreneur the only thing that I was ever addicted to was soccer. I didn’t just play on the weekends, I was the kid with a bag of soccer balls in the back of his car practicing before and after school. I even convinced my principal to give me first period off in high school so I could train.

As a player, I didn’t make it to the world cup or even to the professionals. And yet I would take that same path every time.

Trying to be a great entrepreneur is something I think a lot about. No different than trying to be great athlete I’ve come to believe that success is built on hard work. A discipline and willingness that the average person is not willing to commit. And yet my personal desire to improve comes in conflict with the relationships that I love in my life.

It’s even come to the point that I’d rather work than socialize. Because socializing feels like I’m being inefficient in the very seconds I’m consumed in conversation. All I can hear is the introvert inside me screaming to get back to work. Back to my quest to move forward.

Unfortunately, the only thing that really stopped me down this path last time was being fired from my own company. It was so finite in conclusion that my stomach still turns from its abruptness. It not only forced me to get off the roller coaster, but to realize I had a problem.

I still have that same problem and I don’t have a solution. Just a realization that this time I have a lot more to lose.

 

Image Credit: dangquocbuu via Creative Commons

Confronting Fear

 

la-vie-photo-260

My wife’s grandfather recently passed away.

At 95 years old he lead an incredible life. One full of love, laughter, and success. And despite the 61 years that separate them, the two of them shared a special bond. As if father and daughter, their relationship was incredibly honest.

When she heard that the end was near she was given a choice. To confront it or to hide.

Confronting death is terrifying. I remember when my mom was dying, I hid more than I confronted. I worked more, pretending to myself as if my startup was more important than the reality of her battle.

My wife didn’t have this conflict. She packed our house and we moved in to her grandfather’s place. Even if he only had a few weeks left to live, being there was more important than not. Embracing his death, no matter how difficult it would be, was not a part of life she wanted to pass by.

Life and death is much more important than the gray we stress out about as entrepreneurs. The fears associated with growth, capital, customer acquisition, or even team building pale in comparison. But the approach to confront what terrifies us is the same, even in death.

There are a lot of times as an entrepreneur where we’re afraid. When your subconscious knows your plan is not working. Your growth is not fast enough, your money is dwindling, the product is not sticking, or the team is not believing. Although the data of your results is binary the depth behind that fear is not. It’s an emotion felt deep down that every entrepreneur understands.

The hardest part is to embrace this fear and confront it head on. To spend real time understanding what isn’t working. To have the confidence to talk about it in public. To be objective about your own business. It’s always easy to judge someone else’s startup problems, but incredibly difficult to be honest about your own.

Communicate regularly, objectively.
Learning ‘business speak’ takes practice, especially for product focused founders. Normally they gravitate to product speak with talk about the immediate tactics.

To combat this, I found it helps to read quarterly and annual letters from public CEO’s. It teaches you how to objectively talk about your own business, including how to measure success. Then communicate in this manner with your investors and employees every two weeks.

Sending a monthly business update is not the same thing. Often startup company updates are just a list of stuff they’re doing, heavily focused on the good. Instead analyze your own business every two weeks and send that analysis, no matter good or bad. Just like public company CEO’s are forced to do every quarter.

Forcing yourself to provide consistent analysis will enable you to be much more objective about your actual results. The Seahawks call this ‘tell the truth Mondays,’ and they follow this process ever week whether they win or lose.

Tackle the biggest problems first.
Dealing with shit all day sucks. Especially when working on problems you are worried about, which often come from money or the expectations associated with raising it. Even in your daily routine, eating your vegetables first is hard. It’s easy to gravitate to the areas of the business that you like, leaving yourself exposed.

This is easier said than done. Often problems are linked and so if you drop one plate the other spinning plate will fall. Regardless, prioritize the most important items first even if what you love gets put on the shelf for the time being.

Let the fear consume you.
Pushing away fear, especially the fear of failure only makes the stress worse. And just because you push it away doesn’t mean it actually goes away. Sure you can make yourself busy in order to forget why your subconscious aches, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

Instead try embracing that emotion. Whether through meditation or a different means, just let that fear consume you. Let it spread from your soul, to your heart, and to every part of your body. Feel its energy until the point you realize it’s just energy. At which point, use that energy to give you clarity of direction.

Watching my wife process what she just lost is incredibly hard. On the surface life without her grandfather is already surreal. But deep down there is a peace. Because every chance presented to her she embraced his life and ultimately his death.

I’m humbled to call her my wife. She has taught me more about life than I ever could have imagined.

Image Credit: Lili Vieira de Carvalho via Creative Commons 

Finding Your Recipe

cookies

 

I’m a big believer that a startup’s early existence is about discovering a repeatable recipe.

Once discovered you can then spend a lot of money to mass produce the recipe. But if undiscovered, you waste a lot of money and time on a business that doesn’t have a unique, marketing winning formula.

Like Mrs. Fields Cookies, recipe discovery takes a lot of experimentation, until you ultimately find a list of ingredients and cooking steps that consistently create mouth watering results. More comprehensive then just discovering a business model or reaching product market fit, a successful recipe requires the ability to repeat your results.

When we competed with GoPro it was clear throughout the battle that they discovered a repeatable recipe early in their existence. Sponsoring events that produced jaw dropping video, they aggressively pushed this content everywhere their product was available for sale. Borrowing Red Bull’s formula, the only difference was that GoPro sold you a camera instead of a can of sugar water. Fast forward a decade and they are still using the same recipe of content and commerce.

What made this battle even more difficult was that we didn’t develop a recipe of our own. Instead we kept tasting GoPro’s recipe and trying to figure out how not to copy it. It was a dizzying exercise that never resulted in our own, distinct formula.

GoPro’s ability to discover a repeatable recipe is consistent with most category winning companies.

Amazon has price, selection, and convenience. Uber has delivery convenience in style. Instagram created community that has transcended the virtual world.

Where a lot of startups get confused is that a winning recipe doesn’t have to be an amazing product because unfortunately the best product doesn’t always win. Instead the recipe has to be authentic to the DNA of the founding team, unique to the market they are competing within, and repeatable on a small scale.

Everyone’s path to discovering their recipe is different, but there are often a few traits that are consistent.

1) Authentic To The Founding DNA
The DNA of the founding team matters.

It would have been hard for a non baking loving person to start Mrs. Fields Cookies. They probably wouldn’t have perfected the flavor, started with a single local store, or gone to dozens of banks to get their initial funding. And they certainly wouldn’t of had the drive to spend the hours she spent nailing the smallest details on a path to building a $450M cookie empire.

Looking at the founding DNA of Instagram, community was anchored into their existence with the first hire they made; a community manager. GoPro’s DNA was marketing which tied directly to the founder and the first startup he created. Apple’s DNA was making beautiful products easy to use, which became core to Steve’s very existence.

Being honest about the super power of your founding team is the most important initial ingredient.

2) It Takes Time To Develop
A great recipe takes time and constant iterations in order to identify key ingredients and repeatable cooking steps.

Stephanie Amaruso’s story in building Nasty Gal is a great example. Starting with Ebay she constantly iterated on her listings through the clothes, descriptions, photos, shipping, customer service, etc until she discovered the recipe for Nasty Gal. Ultimately she discovered it wasn’t about the clothes, but instead about the style guide they inherently created that helped girls dress better. Once she understood her ingredients and how to profitably repeat her results she was able to raise a large amount of money to mass produce her ‘cookie recipe’.

If you contrast this to a conventional venture capital model it would say to find an investor that likes your same type of food, raise a bunch of money upfront and then spend that money to discover your recipe. Yes large capital may be required up front if the problem you are solving is incredibly technical. Otherwise adding money to mass produce a recipe that you haven’t yet discovered is a dangerous path to take.

3) Be Unique Within Your Market
Sometimes the best recipes are a mixture of influence from other markets. Similar to how great chef’s fuse the history of different cultures to influence their dishes.

GoPro stood out as a camera maker because their recipe looked nothing like a traditional camera maker. Combining the elements of beverage (on the ground events) with media (interesting content) with consumer electronics (channel) they created a result that no traditional camera maker could copy.

Elon Musk has done the same in competing with car companies. He’s brought the precision of aerospace together with the iterative nature of software with the personal touch found in apple retail. Constantly making their cars better through software he has made buying and owning a car human again.

Finding inspiration from industries outside your own is a powerful way to bring a new recipe to an existing market. Especially when most of the incumbent companies compete with the same recipes.

4) Getting The Economics Right
Along with developing the ingredients in your recipe, is figuring out the basic economics around how you deliver your recipe to customers.

Mrs. Fields opened her own store in 1977, a place most people would never start if they wanted to build a venture scale business. Warby Parker used a school bus and data to figure out which markets would best support future stores, while also realizing that ‘try before you buy’ was a key ingredient to success. Amazon figured out that free cash flow was all that mattered so they built their entire company strategy around maximizing this result.

Understanding success on a small scale is critical to winning on a large scale. It’s the only way you can turn one dozen cookies into two into four into a $450M empire.

Image Credit: Kimberley Vardeman via Creative Commos

Justifying Why You Can’t Delegate

I was reminded the other day of a struggle that all founders face…justifying why they can’t delegate.

For anyone that hasn’t been a founder this sounds like a trivial issue that just needs a little leadership training. It’s not. It’s actually a big issue that needs a lot of attention.

To the founder, a lack of delegation is the end result of a mental struggle that runs deep. On one hand they are afraid that if they delegate the team will fail, as if they are incapable of delivering more. On the other hand the founder is clearly drowning in responsibilities, frustrated that the team isn’t moving faster or working harder.

Trying to balance short term survival with long term success, the founder gets stuck in a terrible cycle of justifying ‘why now’ isn’t the time for the team to step up. Like the a vacation that never happens, they keep kicking the can down the road until ‘right now’ becomes the permanent state of the company.

This denial dramatically impacts the probability that their company will be successful. By carrying the workload, the founder neglects their most important priorities while building a culture that is not empowered or motivated to win.

I struggled with this a lot in building Contour. I didn’t understand why people went home at 5pm everyday. My solution to this problem was to pick up the pencil on their behalf to finish the work. This resulted in me getting too involved in almost every aspect of the business. Although it sounded good in my head, this leadership strategy wasn’t affective.

I ended up spending time on the wrong priorities, which ultimately built a business that was undercapitalized with a disjointed culture that didn’t know how to win.

It turns out that my lack of ability to enable was rooted in my own limitations as a leader. Now in building Moment I’ve tried to build a culture that is empowered, which alleviates the trust issues in delegating.

1. The Team Has To Decide It Wants To Win
There is a built in assumption by founders that everyone who joins the company shares their same passion for winning and therefore everyone is willing to work tirelessly to succeed.

This just isn’t true.

Winning is first a personal commitment and second a learned behavior. You can’t force this desire upon someone just like you can’t assume they want it. Everyone on the team actually has to make the personal decision that winning is what they want.

If they do, it fundamentally changes the relationship of the founder from a player to a coach. Now they can push the team to get better every day, providing constant feedback and clear expectations. Hearing a team make this commitment removes the self doubt the founder faces after 5pm when everyone has gone home.

2. Clearly Define The Destination And Who Is In Charge
Being clear about the company’s definition of success is important. But being crystal clear to the team about the next milestone is even more important. This clarity enables the team to work backwards in building a realistic plan.

Once the team knows where they are going, make sure they understand who is responsible for what. Every major, day to day responsibility should be covered by someone on the team other than the founder. Even if the team is small this transition is critical for creating an empowered culture.

Keep in mind, the team will fuck it up, but they will also get stronger through their own mistakes.

3. Don’t Underestimate People.
A lot of incredibly successful companies are started by founders that approach a problem without any preconceived notions. Their naivety is what gives them a competitive advantage over the incumbents. But at some point their own naivety gives way to knowledge and they forget their own previous ignorance. This translates into underestimating what their own, inexperienced team can deliver.

Constantly remind yourself that inexperience and ignorance are a strength for startups. That naivety is what enables fuels people to work harder, learn faster, and find new solutions to the problems you face. Give people more responsibility and then get out of the way.

4. Maintain The Right Priorities
Hardest of all, the founder should be focused everyday on ensuring that the company has enough capital, the right people, and the correct priorities. Doing this day in and day out is a lot harder than most founders realize mainly because it takes them away from what they naturally love to do…create new things.

It may feel like eating your vegetables first but if you approach every day in this order you will realize there isn’t enough time to also be in the weeds. Always take the hardest, most terrifying problems first.

*Image Credit: Washington State Department Of Transportation via Creative Commons

Solving The ‘CEO Said’ Syndrome

Being a CEO is different from being a founder.

Not all CEOs are founders. But all founders have to learn how to become a CEO. You may learn it and decide you don’t like it. But none the less there is this progression in a startup lifecycle where it can no longer be run with a founder mentality.

One of the struggles you learn as a CEO is what I call the "CEO said" syndrome. As a founder it doesn’t make any sense. As a CEO it makes a lot of sense.

It goes like this…Someone comes up and asks if they can get your feedback on their work. You say yes and like any passionate human being you can’t help but immediately respond to what you see.

Without asking them what kind of feedback they need you start talking out loud…"Why is this like this?" "Why is this piece here or that piece there?" "Why aren’t we doing it like this or like that?"

Unintended, but a simple request for feedback becomes a mandate…oh the CEO (insert your name) didn’t like it and said we should do blah and blah. That isn’t actually what you said, but it’s too late now.

What you come to learn is that everything you say matters. If you like to make, this sucks. Your feedback as a maker gets weighted heavier in the creation process, which isn’t always good.

The Effect Of CEO Said

They won’t say this on the surface but your feedback has a ripple effect. The person who hears the feedback takes it to their team…"oh the CEO didn’t like that and thought we should…" This causes the rest of the team to now hesitate in their conviction.

Over time this practice compounds itself. It injects a small amount of doubt that weakens all future decisions that group of people will make. They will began to wonder…is the CEO just going to change my work in the end?"

It’s important to understand…

  • People weight what you say, no matter what it is.
  • People struggle to separate you the user from you the CEO.
  • The more feedback you provide the more often they come back. It creates a negative cycle where teams don’t learn to decide anything on their own.
  • They don’t always want your feedback. They are really just looking for approval that they are headed the right direction.
  • This is a really hard habit to break.

Tip 1 – Who Else Has Reviewed The Work?

If people are asking your opinion before interacting with their peers you have a problem. It means you are not building a team, instead you are building a dictatorship where approval from the boss is all that matters.

You want to correct this quickly otherwise they will not develop the peer network they need to go faster.

Tip 2 – Is It 30% or 90% Complete?

The type of feedback you give at 30% versus 90% is very different. But more importantly the reason you care about the answer to this question is because this provides direct feedback on how strong or weak your team process is.

If you see work that is 30% complete with foundational pieces that are in alignment with the company’s strategy then you are on the right track. If not, you need to re-address with the team how/why the foundation of the project is so off course.

If you see work that is 90% complete and tightly coupled to the company strategy then your team process is really working. If not, you have a deeper problem with your process, an immediate risk in derailing the project, and the opportunity to further weaken the future confidence of the team.

Tip 3 – Don’t Give Your Opinion.

When people ask for your feedback they aren’t really asking for your opinion. You may think this is the case, but they really aren’t.

This means the words "I think" should never leave your mouth as they get turned into, please do. Instead you want to talk through the problem with them to help them make a better decision.

You can do this by asking questions…"what problem are you trying to solve," "what decisions are you trying to resolve," or "what are you struggling with?" Or you can talk out loud to what you experience when looking at their work…"this confuses me," "I don’t understand this," or "I was surprised by this."

They key to this interaction is being able to create a dialogue without telling them how to solve the problem. As soon as you give a "suggestion" for how to solve the problem you have given your feedback.

It’s a very hard discipline to practice, but it’s a subtle difference to building a culture that learns how to make decisions.

Tip 4 – Use Briefs

What you care more about than the work they show you, is to understand how they got there. You want to understand what problem they are solving, how they measure success, and their approach to delivering on it.

A brief lets you understand that.

Page one of a brief is where you can provide the most value to ensure they are on track in solving a problem that stacks up to our goals. The actual execution is secondary to solving the right problem.

Tip 5 – Consistency Matters More

It’s hard to let the detail go. Sometimes they really matter, but what matters more is ensuring that your team is consistent. This consistency can show up in message or in their approach. Regardless what you are looking for in their work is that consistency. It’s a simple place to go when they ask for your opinion.

I learned this lesson when getting punched in the face by GoPro. To their credit they were incredibly consistent. The proved that consistency mattered then nailing the last 20% of the details.

Tip 6 – Explain Your Hats

It helps to say what hat you are wearing when you talk to your team. Sometimes your feedback is from the CEO and sometimes it’s from an every day customer. It’s important to clarify this for people. It might seem annoying but it does help.

If you have more questions send me an email or dm on twitter.

What If They F— It Up?

 

There comes a point when your team takes over your day to day responsibilities. It begins with the decisions they make without asking. And it ends with a full scale management team that reports back in weekly meetings. But in between these two points is a mess of personal conflict for any founder.

Early in a company’s existence, the founder is responsible for nearly everything, or at least they think so. Constrained by a lack of cash, founders develop raw survival instincts. Their ability to conserve, out work their peers, make quick decisions, and inspire are all critical traits to turn an idea into success. Being praised as a tenacious hustler is a compliment that any founder would be proud of.

With success comes confidence. Emboldened by the results, the founder continues to do more of what has worked…obsessing about the company, pushing everyone to work harder, and tackling every important decision by themselves.

It is a process that works until it doesn’t. And when it no longer works, the result is hitting a concrete wall at a culture destroying pace.

The truth is, this pattern is nearly impossible to change once it has become the personal culture of the founder and the collective crutch of the company. Although a Board thinks they can fix the problem with a management consultant, you really can’t. Not without dismantling the founder centered culture that built the very company they invested in. It’s like trying to train a lion that lives in the heart of the jungle. You first have to catch it before you can tame it.

The only way to escape this pattern is for the founder to create a company that is so off the charts valuable that they can do whatever the hell they want. Insert Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos.

The alternative is for the founder to avoid this path altogether by building team, empowerment and decision making into the early fabric of the company. To the point that these traits become so engrained into the culture that the team knows no other way.

But in order to do this the founder has to wrestle with two truths.

  1. This journey is not about them.
  2. The team is going to fuck it up.

Tactically these are easy to accept. It’s the mental and emotional struggle that is so challenging.

The realization that this journey is not about the founder won’t become clear until the end. Living without the very company they poured their existence into, is the only way to really appreciate what they had.

The team fucking it up is merely an illusion that the founder has to personally reconcile. Just because the team would do the work differently doesn’t actually mean they are going to fuck it up. It’s just going to end up different than the founder’s “inner control freak” wants.

But getting these two truths right isn’t about doing the work for the team or telling them how you want it done. It’s actually about creating a system of play that empowers the collective group to punch above its weight.

One of the best, modern examples is Pete Carroll. He has spent his lifetime creating a system of play that enables his players, coaches, and general mangers to deliver their best work.

  • He made over 200 roster changes, until he found players that believed in his system. Sometimes removing star players to make room for the yet to be discovered.
  • He trains his staff to become future head coaches. Graduating the next in line when top coordinators move on, he is expecting to spend as much time developing his coaches as his players.
  • His general manager believes in the same system and together they continue to find talent that everyone else ignores.

What inspires me the most about Pete Carroll is he’s not afraid. Even on national TV, while still hurting from an emotional Super Bowl loss, he stood up for what he believes in. Not even presidents will do that.

What you have to realize about Pete is the work you see today has taken his entire professional lifetime to create. This is not an accident, but instead a culmination, anchored in his commitment as a leader to create a system that he believes in. One that even got him fired along the way.

When I built Contour I didn’t understand any of this. I bootstrapped the company out of a cold warehouse, running it the same way in the end as I had started in the beginning…like a bulldozer that would run over anyone that didn’t go the direction I was running. Our system of play never advanced beyond “survive.”

This time around it’s very different. Moment is now 8 people that represent a group tighter than anything I have experienced. We have a printed playbook that is our system of play. We spend days together every quarter outside of the office exploring, talking, and building deeper relationships. We have no vacation policy, no hr department and no bullshit. What bonds us together is a shared commitment in our purpose.

In learning how to build a team the wrong way and now in pushing myself everyday to do it the right way, here are a few practical lessons I have learned.

1. Define A System Of Play
A good friend of mine introduced me to a framework he calls promise (our purpose), offering (what we make), and delivery (how we win in the market). It’s a system of play I have adopted as my own, building upon the foundation he provided. This has to be visibly clear to your team within the first year of the company’s existence. Our version is a printed book that we update every six months.

2. Don’t Compromise On Passion
The first 10 people you hire will cement everything about the culture which means all of them have to be personally passionate about the problem, lifestyle, and opportunity you are solving. This can not be faked and it can not be added down the road. Everyone at Moment is passionate about mobile photography.

3. Inexperience Is OK
It takes a while for a team to learn how to play together. Like seasons in sports they have to go through cycles together (product launches, announcements, new features, etc) to learn how to win. It takes a soul testing amount of patience to let this happen over time. And despite what everyone says you can take a collection of young, less experienced people, and develop them into champions. There is a lot of talent already on your team if you enable, push, and challenge them to be great.

4. Teach A Team How To Make Decisions
Decision making is second nature to a founder. They make so many decisions early in a company’s history that they have a distinct experience advantage over the rest of the team. Therefore it’s the founders job to teach everyone how to make better decisions based on the information they have on hand. Enabling people to make decisions, learning from them, and making better ones next time is critical to building a culture that scales.

5. Don’t Pick Up The Pencil
Hardest of all is NOT doing the work for the team. Make it clear who owns what decisions and when goals are made make sure there is a different owner for each. It’s critical that everyone on the team learns how to deliver a goal to completion. This will be important down the road when the current team needs to lead the next team members.

6. Build Real Relationships
This doesn’t happen at the office or at happy hour or in half day fun-park outings. It takes days together, outside of work, overcoming challenges while sharing personal feelings. Every quarter we go exploring together, which forces us to overcome basic human challenges such as navigating our route, making meals together, and setting up camp. We combine these experiences with team sessions where we talk about what’s working, what isn’t working, and what we want to improve upon.

7. Find A Group of CEOs You Trust
Most important of all is that in order for the team to deliver the founder has to learn how to become a better leader. They can hire a personal coach, but one of the best ways is to meet with a collection of fellow CEO’s on a regular basis. If the group is small and confidential everyone will begin to share very personal and real struggles.

Personally, I struggle everyday with becoming a better leader. Unraveling all the instincts I developed as a first time founder it has taken a lot of anguish to arrive at the point where I finally understand the type of leader I want to become and the system of play I want to run.

At the end of the day your team will win and they will lose but all that really matters is how you prepare them for the battle.

 

*Image Credit: Rob Carr and Getty Image via Creative Commons.