Your startup is a real business. It's more than just a side hustle or a passion project. You need to grow it into a big business while maintaining the advantages of being a startup.
The problem is, the lure of those big-business crutches will always be there.
As a 30-year startup vet, I've reached the point in my career when I get called to come in and fix companies -- high-growth startups and big corporate companies alike. After dozens and dozens of fixes, I've developed some controversial takes.
Here are the top things I have to undo, the statuses I have to un-quo, and the corporate traps that startups keep falling into, from the most tactical to the most strategic.
Oh, and for the record, no judgment here. I've fallen into all of these traps myself, sometimes more than once.
1. Eliminate Your Status Meetings
As innocuous as this take may seem at first glance, it's one I get the most pushback on. And not just any old pushback, but the "you're an idiot" kind of pushback.
So let me first clarify that I understand the need for everyone in your company to know everything that's going on as soon as anything happens. Information is the lifeblood of success, and I am in total agreement with the desire for that information to flow freely and often through an organization.
But the status meeting is the crutchiest kind of crutch that ever walked on crutches.
Here's what happens in almost every corporate environment the world over. Let's say you schedule an hour status meeting on Mondays at 10 am. What will happen is everyone who has responsibility for that status will spend an hour from 9 to 10 am working as hard as they can to create the most convincing visualization of progress possible. Then they will over-explain that visualization from 10 to 11 am. Then, at 11 (or more likely, 12 pm), they will go back to doing whatever they were doing before the status meeting.
Then add up the hourly equivalent of the salary of everyone in the meeting. That's what that theatrical display is costing you.
Instead, foster a transparent culture of accountability and communication throughout your organization and remove the crutch of status meetings. I can write another post about that if you'd like.
2. Stop Creating Roles to Hire Into
You don't need a CTO. You don't need a VP of revenue. You don't need a director of marketing.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen startups completely overhire for a position, because they didn't know they could just ask for what they needed.
Let's take CTO for example. The title of CTO at a five-person startup -- or a 20-person startup -- is meaningless. If you put out a job requisition for a CTO, and you don't have a technical team of at least 20 people, you're going to attract a bunch of people who just want to lead a technical team of 20 or more people.
Instead, conduct your search for an exceptional talent who believes in your vision and mission and can grow with you. You'd be shocked at how much money you will save and how much better results you will get when you're honest about what you want.
3. Don't Implement Off-the-Shelf Methodologies
OK, let me put this out on the table.
I've seen more implementations of the Entrepreneur Operating System over the past few years than I have since I became an entrepreneur, and almost all of them were installed by some kind of certified firm. By the time I get involved with the company, this has usually resulted in a number of spreadsheets that are mostly empty over the most recent six months.
This feels like PMI/PMP all over again with a different name and better marketing.
But I'd even extend this to methodologies like Agile. For a startup, the risks of over-analysis, over-documentation, lack of clarity, and increased technical debt often far outweigh any reward from getting goals centralized.
Instead of going all-in on any one prepackaged methodology, just pick the parts you like and make sure you're consistent with them.
4. Quit Siloing Your Teams
Avoiding this seems like common sense, but it often happens as a by-product. A startup will create teams across technology, finance, HR, marketing, sales, and so on, then hire leadership into them, and then let them set their own goals and work to achieve those goals completely independently.
It's almost a foregone conclusion that creating an independent team is going to result in that team working in a vacuum. Why does it happen? People will talk about the company growing too large to work as a single unit. But in my experience, it almost always happens because the first three traps I talked about have already happened.
Instead, encourage everyone in your org to reach out to anyone else in your org, whenever and for whatever. Then create rules for when to use email, Slack, Zoom, phone, text, and/or walk over to someone's desk.
5. Spend Money on Tools That Make Progress, Not Track Progress
You know those movies -- Dodgeball comes to mind -- where the owner of a struggling business is getting audited for some reason and they pull out a box of crumpled receipts?
They kind of have the right idea.
Until your growth makes tracking progress too complex for a spreadsheet or too unique for a free third-party app, spend the money on the tools that will make that growth happen instead.
6. Ignore Outliers
Listen, I know I'm not the first person to tell you this. You don't have to serve or satisfy every customer. You don't have to plan for every use case. You don't have to load every ounce of prevention on your startup's scrawny shoulders.
You're going to make mistakes, the unforeseen is going to happen, and the unpredictable is waiting around every corner, no matter how prepared you are. Be underprepared and over-energized instead.
7. Never Say the Word Brand
There's a reason why one of the most famous rock bands over the past 30 years is called Foo Fighters. It's because the guy who started the band was working too hard to spend any time thinking about the name.
In a more business-centric vein, I've seen startups spend money on ads that just included their beautiful logo and their catchy slogan. That money might as well have been torn up or burned.
I get it though. One of the reasons we became entrepreneurs was to make cool stuff. And the desire to make that stuff attractive will always be a part of that. In business, that's brand building.
But every moment a startup spends thinking about its brand is a moment that startup loses gaining the market share that would make brand-building pay off for it. Instead of playing that game of Catch-22, focus on the value behind the brand and let the brand-building happen on its own.
8. Underindex on Macro Trends
I've lived this. I've asked founders about it. I've polled founders about it. The smaller your startup, the less chance macro shifts and trends will impact your success, in both good and bad ways.
For example, the best time to start a company is in a bad economy. A shaky macroeconomic outlook is usually a recipe for change, for lazy businesses to have nowhere to hide, for incumbents to be disrupted, and for talent to be cheap.
On the other hand, while every company in the world with more than 1,000 employees and $100 million in revenue is bending over backward to shove the square peg of AI into its round holes, I've been recommending forever that startups just ignore AI, unless they're specifically building around it.
Unless your business is local and the macro trend or shift will go micro, like inflation, the shockwaves that follow -- again, both the good and the bad -- almost always dissipate by the time they reach the startup and small business level. Instead, anticipate how those trends and shifts impact your customers and your competition, and be flexible enough to react.
These aren't golden rules, but rather just what I've learned over the decades. And at some point, your startup will grow large enough to have to take on some of this corporate weight. Just stay out of these traps for as long as you can.
EXPERT OPINION BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, TEACHINGSTARTUP.COM@JPROCO
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