When I left my job at City Hall to start a new enterprise I had no idea of what I should be focused on. Unlike many entrepreneurs I did not know others who had started their own business, nor had anyone in my immediate family done the same.
Don’t get me wrong, there were and are a huge number of books, blogs and other sources that talk about marketing, investment, product development and so on. The problem was it is a bit like someone telling you to construct a plane and describing all the elements but forgetting to mention what it would be like to actually build the thing.
Couple that with the fact that managing an enterprise as it grows is a bit like building that plane in mid-air and you have a recipe for disaster. An in-depth understanding customer acquisition cost modelling is of little use while you are struggling to re-attach the wings.
This post and the others that follow are written in the spirit of something I wish I had read back when I started. To kick things off I have introduced the three areas that you must always get right. Each of them could merit a book, let alone a post, in their own right but for now let‘s cover the basics…
People
Whether you are providing a service or a product, people are your organisation. Every successful enterprise needs talented, driven people with skills that cover the full range of activities — from product engineering to finance and marketing.
Now most of us will have some but not all of these people in our circles. That’s ok but only as long as you are prepared to go out and fill that gap. For social entrepreneurs one of the most common gaps is technology. In an age where digital is absolutely essential for scalable operation this can severely hamper an otherwise successful enterprise. When we began Stickyboard we had a fantastic digital agency to build our first products. The problem was this allowed us to put hiring a dedicated developer on the back burner, a decision that was to cost us valuable time and money down the line.
Plan
This is not about business plans! After five years and umpteen versions I, like many other entrepreneurs, have developed a pathological hatred for these dreaded documents. No, this is about Planning, specifically defining:
- what your end goals are
- what stages you need to reach them and how you know when you are ready to progress from one to another
- what your alternative plans are if you fail
Write these down on a piece of paper, draw them, whatever you feel like, just make sure you think them through. Before you move on try to evidence your thinking. For example if you have decided to use Visitor Traffic or Monthly Recurring Revenue as a criteria for success then look at similar enterprises and see what they were doing at this stage. Don’t just shoehorn references either. This is your enterprise, you are basing yours and your team’s success on these plans so make sure you are confident in the numbers before building a future on them.
Lastly make sure you think through your success and failure scenarios. We have a strange myopia where despite knowing that most enterprises fail to meet their original goals, we spend most of our energy thinking through the minority of cases where everything goes right.
Resources
The usual adage of things taking twice as long and costing twice as much is true. However this is more about challenging yourself as to what your enterprise needs to succeed and how are you realistically going to get that money. If you have done your planning correctly you should have a pretty good ball-park figure (and it will only ever be that precise). This will be based on your own experience and projections supported by independent references for your enterprise type and stage.
You should also know who might be able to provide those funds and have a realistic plan for pitching, negotiating and closing such deals (this incidentally applies to all types on finance — bank, VC, crowdfund, grant etc). One of the biggest lessons we learnt with Stickyboard was that the finance market was as, if not more, important than our customer market. Finance rounds take a long time, particularly once you have gone beyond seed stage, so this is not something you can address as you go.
Landing
When I look back on our experience (and stripping out the role fortune always plays) I can trace everything that went right and everything that went wrong to how well we managed these areas. No matter how pressured things become, focus on the above and you’ll make it through.