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"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

- Aristotle

Startups are hard work!

Posted by Grant Brewer on 03 Jul 2007

Staring up a new venture is hard work. It is hard work, regardless of whether you’re establishing a real independent start up business, starting a some kind of non-profit organisation or starting a new line of business in an existing organisation. Everything just seems to take much more effort and take much longer than you originally think. I don’t think I’ve ever met or read about a entrepreneur that commented with hindsight that turning their idea into reality turned out to be far easier than they had imagined!

The fact that setting up a venture to commercialise your new idea is a lot more difficult than it seems at the outset means that entrepreneurship needs to go far beyond ideas. We’ve commented before that developing a strategy is difficult, but often more easily achieved than implementing it. This is entirely true of strategies focused on implementing new ideas – truly talented entrepreneurs have skills that extend past the ideas to encompass operational skills and a great deal of patience!

I can recall meeting Mark Shuttleworth in the mid-nineties when he was still building Thawte and being struck by the sheer amount of hard work, dedication and operational activities that his team were working through in order to build a viable business. Of course, the culmination of those efforts are the well known sale to Verisign a few years later for several hundred million dollars. Although not many entrepreneurs will achieve that kind of success, the lesson learnt is that you need to pay attention to the details so that the business becomes a reality!

Drowning in red tape

The feeling of drowning in red tape is common amongst start up teams. Often the vision is so compelling and attractive that the team get frustrated with the length of time it is taking to implement and the amount of details that need to be worked on in order to make the vision real. Frustrating details may range from collecting the mail to registering the company for income tax and unemployment insurance.

It seems that you can’t avoid interacting with some arm of the government at almost every turn. It if isn’t frustration with the time that it takes for Telkom to deliver telephone lines or the cost of bandwidth, it is the number of registrations that are required at SARS for a myriad of taxes. I heard recently that Mauritius has committed to setting up a new business in just a few days. If that is true, it is definitely something that the South African government could be inspired by. Surely there is a way to make clearing the regulatory hurdles much easier? Perhaps some kind of central authority through which you can register for all the associated taxes and regulations, instead of having to deal with each department separately.

There are examples of progress, but many organisations still struggle to make their services easy to understand or easy to work with. Changing this complexity should be a focus of all organisations, regardless of whether they are in the public, private or non-profit sectors. SARS is a good example where government has made terrific improvements (well perhaps terrifying, since it makes for better tax collection!) in their processes and systems. Whilst they may have a long way to go, they are showing material improvements in processes and systems each year and seem to release a steady stream of fresh ideas.

It isn’t only government that could learn from that idea. Banks for one, make it pretty difficult to get started if you fall between big business and tiny on-person-trading businesses. They can’t decide whether you should talk to their retail bank or to their corporate bank; they can’t decide what type of internet banking you should use or define clearly the differences between their various products. The apparent product choice can be overwhelming yet the ability to package products together in a way that matches the individual entrepreneurs requirements seems to be limited. One bank we worked with in setting up the venture I’m currently part of, took almost six months to set up a fully functioning business account that met our requirements. Of course, that didn’t stop them from charging fees in the meantime. We were caught between changes in their account managers, changes in systems and quite simply a lack of decent customer management. To their credit, it took First National Bank days to take over our business and establish everything that we needed. They demonstrated real commitment, won over a sceptical client and earned a long term client relationship as a result.

The paradox of a start up is that to achieve the big vision, you have to follow through on the details. Whether it is setting up accounts, registering for income tax or buying stamps (because there isn’t a mailroom in most start up companies!), you and your team need to become comfortable with working in the day to day details. Although it seems that it is distracting you from the big picture, the business can’t exist without all these details. The trick is to be capable of creating simple approaches to getting the job done and in effective project planning.

Creating a shared focus

If you’re kept your head above the red tape, then you might be experiencing the confusion of sharing a common entrepreneur goal with your team mates. It seems logical that large organisations struggle with communicating strategy and sharing a common vision. It makes less sense that small, entrepreneurial teams should suffer the same problem – but they do. Often the problem is more acute in small teams, because they have not yet established a momentum that can carry the business on through the confusion. The key is understanding that each person has a unique “mental model” through which they perceive and understand the world. This means that different people will observe the same events yet interpret them differently. It is what makes people interesting, but it means that you shouldn’t take it for granted that your sponsors or our team understand everything you say or do the same way you understand it. The only solution is trust and communication: and that means listening at least as much as speaking, and trusting other team member’s opinions or capabilities.

Patience

Starting up a new venture is filled with excitement and frustration. In fact, start ups are filled with contrasts: the need to investment when there is limited capital; the need to deal with the details whilst not loosing sight of the big picture; the need to accelerate whilst still planning; the need to take things step by step when the instinct it to run. The successful embrace these apparent conflicts and above all they develop the patience to trust that their vision will materialise piece by piece over time. Rome was indeed not built in a day.

Startups are hard work! was published in Intelligence Magazine as Strategym #50 in July 2007.

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Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym

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implementation (10) | start up (1) | entrepreneur (1) | shuttleworth (1)

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