Managing a startup and building a team are something of a delicate art in the current business world. As leaders of their collectives, entrepreneurs are constantly under the pressure of having to make the right decision, which does make the job a bit too stressful sometimes.
However, making mistakes is often the best way of learning.
With over twelve years of experience in trade services and having founded her own business, Mez Graham from Fix It Faster shares her 8 tips about mistakes and learnings in running a business and leading a team.
- Failure to plan. Set a road map that covers off milestones your need to reach by certain timeframes. Don’t try and do everything at once.
- ALWAYS keep cash position in mind but don’t assume that funding has all the answers. It’s amazing what you can achieve by clever financial planning and asset allocation. Prioritise your funding allocation. Don’t try and do everything at once and don’t assume you need the big bucks to go to market. You just need clever planning and, most of all, a great idea that people think they need!
- Recognise your weaknesses as a founder and build your team to fill those gaps.
- Listen to ideas but remember this was your dream and you have to trust your instinct. It is very hard not to be swayed by everyone’s advice and it is a real challenge to decipher between the right people to listen to the wrong ones. Choosing the wrong advice can devastatingly divert the course of your journey and hamper your business growth. Careful thought out planning and modelling that is also somewhat agile will assist in self-doubt. Getting confused about your choices is a major challenge.
- Create a support system with both your team and your investors. Everyone needs to share the vision- the humps in the road and the successes. The path is never straight forward and without collaboration with an invested team and investors it can be very difficult to achieve anything.
- Don’t settle for “that/they will do”. Especially with your team.
- Understand that you will need to take risks and they won’t always be worth it. It is the research and the ability for you to learn and bounce back from the setbacks that will put you back on the road map.
- My biggest personal challenge in this start up is that I am doing something brand new. There is no precedent predicting how people will use and respond to our concept. Because I am in the tech space, my team comprises of operations and marketing and sales but also new to me is an engineering, software development and coding team who have different not easily solved or understood challenges. Getting all the departments to come together and communicate to achieve a common goal is very difficult with this added dimension because on group often doesn’t understand the others world.
Read more:
5 things I’ve learnt from launching 8 businesses
Why leaders shouldn’t blame external factors for non-performance
