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Book: Startup: An Insider's Guide to Launching and Running a Business by Kevin Ready
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Authors: Kevin Ready
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why and then work your way up to what and how)
Gradually giving up control, providing feedback along the way
Empowering your employees to make decisions and to make mistakes
For key team members, it means connecting performance with compensation: equity or profit sharing. This is key to progressing up to and beyond the self-determining threshold .
Be prepared to delegate as your business gets bigger. You are going to need to delegate. Look forward to this and regard it as a sign of success. If you have run your business month after month, and year after year, and you are not trending strongly toward delegating more and more important tasks to others, then you may need to take a hard look at what it is you are doing.
Knowing that you are going to need to delegate, you should be looking for quality people from the first day you even think about starting a business .
As an employee, it may seem that employers have all of the power. They can hire and fire at will, and they can direct what the employees do. The other side of the coin is very interesting, though: employers need good employees and will do what they must to keep them and grow them.
To attract and keep the kind of talent that can actually take over the corner office and make the strategic decisions that will be needed to keep the company in business without your guidance, you will need to break out of the mold of pure salary-based compensation. This kind of employee will eventually demand a bonus or equity-based compensation that will properly incentivize them to do for you what they could do for themselves (go out and become your competitor). Otherwise, that key person or persons will likely leave the company and work for somebody else, or just start their own businesses. It is the way of the world that you will have to empower them through training, exposing them to your knowledge, and provide operational experience and the ability to make, and learn from, mistakes. All of these things create confidence and competence. The qualities of confidence and competence in executive functions require you to recategorize these types of employees into an executive class that shares directly in organizational success. Not doing this will mean that you’ll lose their talent and knowledge. That puts the future of the company at risk, because it takes years to groom such employees for the rolesthat you have in mind. This being said, even if you compensate them at an executive level, there is no guarantee that they won’t leave anyway. Building a personal rapport and a culture that supports emotional buy-in, and providing a vision of what the business means, and where it is going, are key to increasing your chances of success.
A cornerstone of your plan should be, in most cases, to make yourself obsolete. Why should this be? Part of the appeal of being an entrepreneur (for most people) is being able to call the shots and to be master of your domain. This is truly part of being a business owner/operator. However, this becomes somewhat less rosy if you fall into the trap where instead of owning a business, the business ends up owning you. This inevitably happens at the outset of your business. The goal is to grow the business, its team, and its processes to the point where it can become self-regulating at the least and self-directing at best.
The Self-Regulating Business
A self-regulating business is one where the principal (you) can unplug for hours or days or weeks at a time without the business falling apart. On the long road to making yourself obsolete, this is the first big and impressive milestone. I define self-regulating to be the stage at which you, the founder of your business, can lie dormant in a hammock on Fiji (with mai tai in hand) for two weeks—without e-mail or phone—and be confident that your business will still be happily humming when you return. Self-regulating businesses have competent and empowered employees who know the day-to-day operations and do
Gradually giving up control, providing feedback along the way
Empowering your employees to make decisions and to make mistakes
For key team members, it means connecting performance with compensation: equity or profit sharing. This is key to progressing up to and beyond the self-determining threshold .
Be prepared to delegate as your business gets bigger. You are going to need to delegate. Look forward to this and regard it as a sign of success. If you have run your business month after month, and year after year, and you are not trending strongly toward delegating more and more important tasks to others, then you may need to take a hard look at what it is you are doing.
Knowing that you are going to need to delegate, you should be looking for quality people from the first day you even think about starting a business .
As an employee, it may seem that employers have all of the power. They can hire and fire at will, and they can direct what the employees do. The other side of the coin is very interesting, though: employers need good employees and will do what they must to keep them and grow them.
To attract and keep the kind of talent that can actually take over the corner office and make the strategic decisions that will be needed to keep the company in business without your guidance, you will need to break out of the mold of pure salary-based compensation. This kind of employee will eventually demand a bonus or equity-based compensation that will properly incentivize them to do for you what they could do for themselves (go out and become your competitor). Otherwise, that key person or persons will likely leave the company and work for somebody else, or just start their own businesses. It is the way of the world that you will have to empower them through training, exposing them to your knowledge, and provide operational experience and the ability to make, and learn from, mistakes. All of these things create confidence and competence. The qualities of confidence and competence in executive functions require you to recategorize these types of employees into an executive class that shares directly in organizational success. Not doing this will mean that you’ll lose their talent and knowledge. That puts the future of the company at risk, because it takes years to groom such employees for the rolesthat you have in mind. This being said, even if you compensate them at an executive level, there is no guarantee that they won’t leave anyway. Building a personal rapport and a culture that supports emotional buy-in, and providing a vision of what the business means, and where it is going, are key to increasing your chances of success.
A cornerstone of your plan should be, in most cases, to make yourself obsolete. Why should this be? Part of the appeal of being an entrepreneur (for most people) is being able to call the shots and to be master of your domain. This is truly part of being a business owner/operator. However, this becomes somewhat less rosy if you fall into the trap where instead of owning a business, the business ends up owning you. This inevitably happens at the outset of your business. The goal is to grow the business, its team, and its processes to the point where it can become self-regulating at the least and self-directing at best.
The Self-Regulating Business
A self-regulating business is one where the principal (you) can unplug for hours or days or weeks at a time without the business falling apart. On the long road to making yourself obsolete, this is the first big and impressive milestone. I define self-regulating to be the stage at which you, the founder of your business, can lie dormant in a hammock on Fiji (with mai tai in hand) for two weeks—without e-mail or phone—and be confident that your business will still be happily humming when you return. Self-regulating businesses have competent and empowered employees who know the day-to-day operations and do
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