Re: New Video Startups Keep It Simple And Fast
Mazie Wingeier
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Earlier this year I invited a former Oliver Wyman consulting colleague and friend of mine, Lisa Cousins over to help me think through my Q2 plans and long-term strategy for my business. Yep, even business coaches and advisors like me need outside help in strategizing to succeed in business. Lisa is a super-bright Harvard MBA and has worked in both large firms like Oliver Wyman and Disney and now is at a startup, so she sees both perspectives. We did this work while sitting on the couch in my living room using big flip charts I keep around for getting ideas on paper.
What struck me was how different expectations are for What Good Looks Like (#WGLL) in large corporations vs. startups. The standards are wildly different, yet appropriate for each context. In my experience there is a lot startups can learn from big companies in terms of business practices and standards, and many large corporations would be well-served to take on more agile and focused startup behaviors.
In the last 8 years I worked for a software company that grew from a successful startup to a mature, mid-size, global company. It was a unique trip, and as one of the leaders of the company I had the opportunity to learn some exciting lessons about working in a fast growth environment. I wrote this post to share a highly subjective selection of my experiences and learnings that might be interesting for others being on a similar journey.
I learned this lesson when I was trying to build up a better resource management system for my team. To put it euphemistically: It did not work very well in its basic form. I put many hours in refining it, but it just did not improve our daily work.
Instead of changing the whole concept at an early stage, I kept waisting my time on enhancing it for quite a while. Finally I decided to completely change my approach and soon after I found a much better solution based on brand new, simple concept that really helped us to plan our resources more effectively.
What I will always remember: Start with simple things and test them to see if they are fundamentally working. If not, trash them at the earliest possibility and start thinking about new approaches.
In my view Mission, Vision and Strategy (MVS) should be simple tools (like a compass) that help decision makers in their daily work to make the right decisions. Though most companies do have their MVS written in some corporate documents, but these are rarely appropriate to support the daily decision making process.
I ran into this problem when I made my first attempt at creating an MVS for my business unit. I wrote a lengthy document and sent it to my colleagues to read it. A few months later I had to realize that very few people could remember anything of it and it was certainly not their fault.
This awakened me to the fact that I cannot create the MVS of my team without involving them in the process. Obviously as the responsible leader I had to keep some of the strategic decisions for myself, but the whole concept had to be built upon the shared values and knowledge of the team. Furthermore I also realized that the MVS will only work, if it can be distilled into some very simple guidelines that people will surely remember when they are making their everyday decisions.
To make this happen I started a process of involving people by handing out little cards with open ended questions on the related topics. This worked out really nicely and using their feedback I could formulate the final MVS in several iterations. On the one hand this approach helped me to better understand the different views in the team, but also seemed to help them to understand how our MVS was put together and remember it later.
What I will always remember: Involve your team in creating your Mission, Vision and Strategy from the very beginning. Distill the results of this exercise into some very simple guidelines that are easy to remember and can be used to help everyday decisions.
One of the first things I learned in business was that there is only one boss, the customer. This has always been one of my main guiding principles showing in a highly customer focused, exceptionally supportive attitude towards our clients.
This way of thinking was greatly appreciated by our customers most of the time. However, sometimes the same philosophy put us into very difficult situations when our clients requested something that may have seemed reasonable on the short-term, but would cause irreversible damages to my team or the customer on the long-term. In most of the cases we managed to explain the risks and convince our partners to use a different approach, but there were a few occasions when we just failed to do so.
What I will always remember: Always try to find a reasonable way to say yes to customer requests, but in those very rare occasions when there is really no way to do so, don't be afraid to say no.
As a freshly promoted business unit leader, I used to work extremely hard to meet the high expectations of the new role. Until I learned that being a hard-worker is a great thing on one hand, because it helps you to achieve your goals very fast, but it also has some serious drawbacks.
Working hard continuously means that you are always busy with actively doing something and you have almost no down-time. It took some time for me to understand that slowing down a bit from time to time is not bad at all, but a very important part of my job, simply because it is a prerequisite for long-term thinking and creativity.
It seems to me that the human brain (or at least mine) is in a completely different operational mode when solving specific daily problems or when freely wandering through the different aspects of the future. And the switch between the two is not very easy. The problem-solving mode works relatively well under time pressure or other constraints while the creative mode needs a more relaxed environment.
When I noticed this, I reorganized my management team to be able to delegate much more and encouraged them to do the same in their areas to loosen up our schedules a bit. This way we could get a chance every now and then to shift into the long-term thinking mode.
I also realized that physical environment counts a lot. Even the most creative office space is still an office. So I got into the habit of working on my long-term tasks in coffee lounges or libraries, where I had no external disruptions, but a stimulating background.
What I will always remember: To foster creativity and long-term thinking create structures that allow people to slow-down regularly, if possible in a stimulating environment out of office.
From the time I was a kid, I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I was sure that at some point, I would own my own business. Like many entrepreneurs, the first business I had was mowing lawns. I started it in third grade and had lots of clients that would pay me $5 to $10 a week, depending on the size of their lawn. It was great.
By this time, in between school and work, I had been writing code for a secret software project that I hoped I could turn into a business. This was my chance to make that leap. On my last day at that company, after putting in a tremendous amount of overtime during the past six months, I walked away with a check for just under $20,000, and I used every penny of it to fund the software company, Somnio World Web Solutions, I co-founded a few months earlier.
What seemed like a bottomless bank account, my money dwindled fast. In that first year, we had to buy servers, pay for a colocation facility to host those servers, and pay our bare minimum living expenses. My partners and I worked day and night that year to launched our beautiful CMS platform. This was almost four years before Wordpress was founded. We were ahead of our time.
The web was super-hot leading up to our launch. It was growing exponentially, and every business needed a website. I knew that in order for websites to be beneficial for companies, they would need a way to manage their website content on their own. There was evidence of this all around us. As a rookie entrepreneur, I also thought that once people saw our elegant solution, they would rush to sign up for our service. Boy, was I wrong! Just a few weeks before we launched, the .COM Bubble burst and set the web on fire. It decimated the website market to the point that people felt websites were only a fad. That seems hard to believe now, but that was the reality we were stuck in. We were just weeks away from launching our much-needed solution only to have that need evaporate overnight.
On launch day, my bank account was back to normal, and by normal, I mean empty. I was broke again. I had spent nearly every penny of my $20,000 bonus payout that I had worked so hard for. Things were looking bleak. I had been working for well over a year on a product that launched to crickets chirping, and we had zero money to market it. I had no idea how I would survive.
During the day, I would go door to door, talking to business owners, and handing out flyers. I joined Business Network International, the chamber of commerce in several local cities, and I started networking. I hated it. I am naturally introverted, and have an extremely tough time in any networking situation, even now, after all these years. But do you know what I hated even more? Not surviving! Networking sucked, but I had to do it.
In addition to creative cost cutting for our business, we were also creative at home. One of my partners and I found a fantastic deal on a three-bedroom rental house through some people we knew. We rented it and reconfigured the bonus room so we could sublease it along with the other spare bedroom. We took a shed that was attached to the back of the house and remodeled it, turning it into an office space for our company. We built a custom desk and shelf so we could all squeeze into our new corporate headquarters. It was amazing.
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