What is the Growth LeapScholarship program?

AtGrowth Leap we for tech startups boost their founders/builders’ skills with actionable online training and coaching programs.

Over the years, we have helped hundreds of companies from around the world scale and expand into new markets.

But we know that the road to a growing and sustainable business can be challenging and full of unexpected hurdles. And let’s be honest, 2020 has been brutal so far. That’s the reason why we decided to launch the Growth Leap scholarship by Stun and Awe.

The program allows participants to join our Growth Leap online training and boost their business builders’ skills and accelerate their startup’s growth.

At Stun and Awe, our purpose is to transform businesses into designers of positive change. With our scholarship, we want to help driven and hardworking startups emerge stronger from these difficult times.

What does the program include?

Our 4-week Scholarship program includes:

• Access to our online course, Growth Leap: Design Your Startup for High Performance and Impact

• A 45-minute strategy session to discuss your goals, challenges, and needs
• Personalized feedback and advice on course assignments

Who should apply for the Growth Leap Scholarship program?

You should apply if you meet any of the below:

• You run a tech startup that generates revenues, but has struggled to get consistent results or scale.
• You understand that there’s no silver bullet in business and that you have to put in the hours to achieve your goals.
• You’re not afraid of challenges and you have a strong work ethic.
• You are coachable and understand that to achieve different results you need to try different approaches.

Who qualifies for the Scholarship?

The scholarship is not for everyone. It specifically targets tech startups who are struggling financially, but who have the drive to push through.

Successful applicants will have to adhere to the following criteria and guidelines:

• You are highly committed to complete the training within 4 weeks.
• You are not currently an active Growth Leap student.
• You will write a weekly 1,000-word article (4 in total) on a public blog of your choice for the duration of the scholarship.
• You’ll have to submit your weekly blog post URL for approval by the Stun and Awe team.
• Your post will cover your thoughts on what you’ve learned in the program and how you are acting on your learnings.

We’re looking for serious candidates, and these criteria/guidelines are non negotiable. Since we only have limited spots, only apply if you’re fully committed to adhering to them. If you think you won’t be able to do so, well, that’s simply not the right fit for you.

Next steps

Now that you know the rules of the game, here are the next steps:

1. You submit your application HERE.
2. You’ll get an email from us within 3–5 business days of completing your application.
3. If your application moves to the second phase, we will schedule a short phone interview with you.
4. You’ll get an email from us a few days later informing you of if you have been accepted into the scholarship program.

Subscribe Here and get practical tips right into your inbox

✔ Actionable tips for Startups

✔ 3 minute read

✔ Free

Learn to accelerate your startup’s growth with our scholarship program was originally published in Stun and Awe Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Have you recently been in a virtual meeting that was unproductive? A meeting where no decisions were made, no clear topics were addressed, and people weren’t engaged?

As a tech startup founders or team lead, your meetings should be a productive means to prioritize, solve problems, decide, and achieve your goals. Not a time waster.

There are tons of posts on meeting productivity, but they often focus on superficial tactics:

• Hold smartphone-free meetings
• Make sure everyone has their camero on
• Keep meeting shorts
• Meet standing up
• Come prepared

These are nice ideas, but they don’t address the core issue with meetings: human nature and egos.

In this post, we’ll give you a few key hacks that will definitely transform your virtual meetings into a productive and effective alignment and decision-making tool.

What Meetings?

In his book High Output Management, Andy Grove explains that there are different types of meetings:

• Process-oriented meetings: include one-on-ones, staff meetings, and operational reviews.
• Mission-oriented meetings: often ad hoc meetings that you schedule to address a specific problem or decide on a strategic direction.

Today, we’ll cover the operational reviews, or the weekly meetings you have with your core management team.

3 key obstacles to having highly productive virtual meetings

There are three problems that fundamentally turn your virtual meetings into time wasters.

1. You use meetings to share information.

Too often meetings become a lazy (or default solution) to share information. It’s not a good use of your time to spend an hour in a meeting to have someone read information on a slide. I’m not saying that productive virtual meetings do not include information sharing. You just need a smarter way to get the information flowing.

Instead of setting a meeting to get an update on a project or on how sales are going, create a simple Executive Dashboard to track key metrics or milestones on a weekly basis. If you see metrics going in the wrong direction, you can start asking questions, dig deeper, and use the meeting to make a decision. If all is on track, you can focus on something else. You can also use a simple Issue tracker to monitor special or unusual problems. Whenever you want an update, you can simply have a look at your document. Of course, these solutions only work if your team updates these documents regularly. In our Growth Leap online course, we teach you how to implement these tools with your team without creating a massive bureaucracy. We show you exactly how to make your virtual meetings more productive and help you accelerate growth.

2. You don’t have a set meeting agenda

Over the past 15 years, I’ve attended plenty of virtual and in-person meetings on four continents. I’ve seen a clear trend.

Asking your team to add any items to the agenda a few days before your meeting doesn’t work. Instead you end up with:

• The same people talking about the same topics
• People rambling about their problems
• “Recency biased” agenda items (people bring up recent problems instead of the most important challenges)
• An empty agenda

And that’s normal. You and your team are busy selling, developing, and supporting customers. It’s tough to get out of the weeds and think clearly about what needs to be discussed and prioritized in the next meeting if you don’t have a simple system to track your projects and metrics.

For many years I struggled to find an approach that would make my virtual meetings consistently productive. The solution I found is quite simple.

You need a well-organized agenda structured around key themes. This helps you reduce decision fatigue and the last minute rush to fill out your agenda. It also helps remind you of the critical business challenges that you and your team need to address.

Your agenda should cover themes like:

• Employee, customer news/issues
• Product releases
• Metrics monitoring
• Follow ups
• Key issues
• Recap and to-dos

3. You don’t have clear rules

Many people like to hear themselves talk. Some like to show off their knowledge or accomplishments. Some like to repeat the same problems over and over again. Some like to speculate or gossip.

To have productive virtual meetings, you need to establish a few rules. You don’t necessarily need to print a series of 10 commandments and show it at the beginning of each meeting. But you need to agree on 3–4 rules that people are allowed to remind the group whenever someone gets off track.

For example, here are some rules I put in place:

• No blaming/finger pointing We use meetings to solve problems and improve our business, not to blame each other for past mistakes. If someone screwed up, we do a retrospective to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And then we move on. Ray Dalio talks similarly about creating a culture in which people can make mistakes, but they’re not allowed not to learn from them.
• No speculation Speculating (in meetings and in general) is a waste of time, unless you work for a 24-hour News network or are into investing for the wrong reasons. If you don’t have the facts or data needed to have a meaningful discussion or make a decision, stop talking and go do your homework. Don’t speculate.
• No rambling about or rehashing the past Whenever there’s a problem some people like to rehash old problems that they faced 2, 3, 4 years ago. In our meetings, you cannot do that. We focus on getting better, finding solutions, and moving forward.
• No selling Meetings should help you come to the best possible decisions and solutions. It shouldn’t be a pitching show in which the loudest wins. We use meetings to look at the problem from different angles, analyze the data, and come up with various scenarios.

To make these rules stick requires commitment, time, and consistency. You need to allow everybody to call it (in a nice way) when they see someone break one of the rules. In the long run, this will boost the productivity of your meetings especially as many are working remotely now.

Make sure you discourage the show-offs, speculation, sales pitch of ideas, and instead, encourage people to find the root cause of your problems and fix them for good.

Get your meeting agenda template

If you’re tired of wasting your time and are ready to transform your virtual meetings, start using our meeting agenda template. This template walks you through each section of the agenda and what needs to happen.

It’s an extremely effective tool to increase productivity, keep your team focused, and make faster and better decisions.

After reading a lot about virtual meeting productivity and a lot of trial and error, I developed an agenda structure specifically designed for tech startups and scaleups.

Agenda Structure: You can download the template here

First part (20 min.): Quick reporting on key metrics/aspects of your business

• Good news (5 min.): Start meeting on a positive note with the right energy
• Scorecard (5 min.): Speed reporting on key numbers for Finance, Sales, PubDev, P&E. to flag any issues potentially preventing us from reaching targets/completing OKRs. All
• Customer/Employee/Product Releases (5 min.): Raise awareness, flag any potential issues
• Follow up on last week’s todos (5 min.): make sure we keep ourselves accountable on our to-dos

Second part (30 min.): Solve your top three issues

• Here you will discuss, clarify, and decide on the top 3 issues that are blocking the team or that need to be resolved.

Conclusion (5 min.): Recap the to-dos and their owners, and agree if there are any messages that need to be cascaded to the teams

Total meeting length: 55–60 minutes.

This post have been original written at stunandawe.com by Michel Gagnon

How to make your virtual meetings radically more productive [FREE agenda template] was originally published in Stun and Awe Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Six months ago, you thought your business was scaling up nicely. Now, it feels like your business is a case study for Murphy’s law — whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. You feel more like a firefighter putting out emergencies than a team leader.

Your backend team is in a spat with the UX gurus. The quality assurance analysts message you every hour saying they can’t test for bugs if there’s no product coming down the pipe. On top of that, your inbox has 220 unread emails and counting!

Perhaps worse yet, when you’re not focused on work your newsfeed reminds you of slumping global markets. The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t making things any easier for businesses to stay afloat.

To stay focused and effective, you need a simple system to manage successfully all the challenges that life will throw at you and your business.

What can be done?

Lately you’ve been thinking that it would be nice if one of the following things could happen:

1. The world could slow down
2. You could win back a few hours of your day to manage your stress and focus on scaling your business

Unfortunately, it’s not likely that #1 will ever happen. Luckily, there is a way to achieve #2.

You need to start thinking about your business in terms of systems and stop improvising. Instead of managing a to-do list, a simple and effective business growth and management system will help you get clarity, feel less stressed, and get better results.

We have designed our Growth Leap System based on 15+ years of experience. It includes four essential elements and a series of tools to help you run your business like a boss. Let’s look into these four essential elements.

Element One: Strategy

In a growing startup, spending time on giving clear directions can literally 10X your company output and results. It’s probably one of the management levers most under utilized by startup leaders.

But strategy too often ends up being a long and detailed slide deck hidden somewhere or a high-level fluffy statement.

A strategy is not a muddled document that describes what your business is currently doing, then promptly collects dust on the shelf. Designing a strategy isn’t an activity you do to “check a box.” A good one is visible, clear and meaningful.

A strategy is also not a list of your goals. Instead, a good strategy is the way that you achieve your goals. It’s the types of questions you ask yourself and the types of decisions you’ll make along the way to get to your goal.

At Stun and Awe, strategy incorporates a few key components:

• a diagnostic of your business now
• an overall strategic direction, a.k.a. your True North
• a set of focused initiatives to achieve your goals.

A good strategy involves asking important questions such as: Are you targeting the right customers? Are you in the right market? Is your operational model scalable? It’s also designed to be easily trackable and communicated.

Element Two: People

The second element focuses on getting the right people on the team, supporting their growth, and making sure you foster the right culture. That’s one of the toughest parts of running a tech startup.

The best way to lower your stress and simplify your business is to take a step back and evaluate your team. When you have the right people in the right seats, life gets so much better.

To assess one of your employees check if they have the ambition, the understanding, and the skills to perform in their role. An employee who doesn’t want the role is at the wrong place. An employee who doesn’t understand what you expect from the role is at the wrong place. For an employee who doesn’t have the skills yet to do the job, well… it depends on the answers to the first two questions.

With a good strategy that informs your hiring process, you should also start asking yourself important questions like:

• Am I promoting people who will contribute positively to our company culture?
• Is the organisational structure helping or hurting productivity?
• Do the teams have the right mindset for us to scale?

There’s a proverb that says:

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

The effort and time you invest in your people will almost always pay off.

Element Three: Execution

With the first and second elements of a business management system incorporated into your company, don’t just think that you can sit back and relax.

Your business still needs to master the third element — execution. Companies go bust because they can’t execute well.

You may have the most clever strategy, but you still need to execute your plan. You may have world class players on your team, you can still fail at delivering. Ask Brazil when they played Germany at the 2014 World Cup.

To execute like clockwork, you need a combination of well chosen KPIs, a disciplined mindset, a few lean processes, and strong problem solving skills. What can you expect if you got that right?

• You’ll be able to scale more efficiently
• Your resources will be allocated properly
• Your teams will be more accountable to one another
• You’ll start shipping like never before

Element Four: Sustainability

The last element, sustainability, permeates all others. There have been many studies who found that sustainability-conscious companies have quite consistently outperformed their peers. But that’s not really why we included that into our system.

We are interested in building businesses that create a positive impact. With a sustainability mindset, your business becomes a true agent of change and gets better at the same time.

There’s a way to include sustainability into your business without having to hire a whole new department. We don’t believe in analysis paralysis. We believe in starting. Think about:

• Potential negative impacts your business operations can have on the environment or community. If you run a tech company, think about your servers, data, privacy.
• Key people/group of people who could be impacted by your business.
• A series of initiatives to measure and reduce/eliminate that negative impact.

In the end, having the right sustainability mindset will influence how you hire and empower your employees, how you design new products, and how you run your daily operations.

The Benefits of a Good Business Growth Strategy

A good business growth and management system can help boost your company’s success and radically improve your life as a business leader.

By following through with the four elements — Strategy, People, Execution and Sustainability, you’ll start to notice a huge impact:

• Reduced stress
• Less time spent in calls and meetings
• Boosted team productivity
• Bigger positive impact

With a simplified business and more time on your hands, you can accomplish much more than the daily firefighting that you’ve become accustomed to.

Sounds too good to be true? Maybe, but we’ve done it and can help you do it too.

If you’re ready to manage differently, check out Growth Leap coaching or our upcoming online course. We’ll show you how to manage your business with simplicity, predictability, and a conscience. Sign up to get exclusive updates, early discounts and be the first to have access.

What if you could bring together profitability and sustainability without any sick twist?

Develop the skills to lead and build the future.

Get early access to our online course

If you haven’t done so already, join our newsletter here to get tips and tools that can speed up your progress.

This post was wrote by our Strategic Advisor: Michel Gagnon and originally publish at Stun and Awe Blog

Growth Leap: How to Simplify Your Startup Management in Crazy Times was originally published in Stun and Awe Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Have you ever had that impression of working like crazy just to end up feeling exhausted and without any sign of progress?

I spent a lot of time in the past caught in hustling mode. Just mindlessly plowing ahead with the next task on the list. It worked for a while, but I got to a point where it felt like swimming upstream. Lots of efforts without moving much.

As you’re scaling up your tech startup, hustling could become your worst enemy.

In this post, we’ll show you how moving from hustle to focus can boost your team’s output and help you transform spread too thin into laser focused.

The most important skill to scale a startup

As you scale, tasks and problems start to pile up. To reach your goals, you’ll need to get awesome at focusing on the wildly important.

One of the most famous examples of “extreme focus” is Steve Jobs’ return to Apple in 1997. At the time, the company was struggling and lost in creating a huge (and forgettable) catalog of products — printers, cameras, servers — you name it.

Knowing that the huge number of offerings only caused the company to lose focus, Jobs completely streamlined the company’s product line cutting it by 70%. He focused on the company’s strengths and visualized the new product portfolio into a grid.

At the end of the exercise, the grid held just four products. The iMac and iBook targeted consumers while more powerful versions catered to professionals.

Applying this extreme focus to your own startup is very tough. It’s a bit like the investment advice: buy low, sell high. Easier said than done.

There will always be an opportunity to expand your product portfolio, add a new feature, partner with another company, launch a new market.

Your human fear of missing out will ruthlessly fight against any attempt to focus.

If you manage to focus though, you will get two instant benefits:

1. Better resource allocation People always complain that there’s not enough people and too much to do. Once you narrow your focus, you’ll discover that you may have enough people. A streamlined product portfolio and geographic footprint give you the opportunity to concentrate your resources on what will move the needle. Remember the Battle of Trafalgar.
2. More headspace Focusing on less will also allow you and your team to put calm, centered, and productive effort into your projects. That means less interruptions and mental noise and more accomplished faster. It’s no surprise that mediation has gone mainstream.

Removing should be your first reflex

In any company, there’s always someone adding another project, tasks, initiatives to the list.

Let’s launch in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Latam, Asia. World domination! Let’s make a sales push for a specific customer segment. Let’s completely revamp our UI or build this new cool feature that will give users more control and customization options.

Human nature seems to be hard-wired to always add, not so much to subtract.

Instead, try taking a smarter approach to your work. Don’t get bogged down with distractions. Think about how often your employees and partners come up with the next big idea.

Every single week, employees, CEOs, business development reps, and entrepreneurs reach out to me to talk about a new project, how their AI tech could help 10X my sales results or how we could develop a strategic partnership.

I could talk to all of them. But every minute I put into listening to them is not invested into the company’s wildly important goals. The brainpower I put into evaluating their ideas does not go to the company’s wildly important goals.

I’m not saying you should be an asshole, but you need to develop the habit of removing instead of adding.

At every opportunity, ask yourself whether adding another thing to your to-do list is the best idea. You don’t need a junk filter on your client email. You just need to learn to be your own filter.

The simplest way to narrow your focus

To narrow your focus, try applying the now well known Pareto Principle. If you’re not completely sure about what’s really critical in your business, it’s the simplest way to know you’re on the right track.

The Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule suggests that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. For instance:

• 20% of your customers or markets generate 80% of your revenues or profits.
• 20% of your product development efforts bring your platform to 80% of completion.
• 20% of your products drive 80% of your growth.

By flipping the principle around, it also means that another 80% of the clients could contribute to only 20% of profits. That’s a lot of time being used on generating far fewer results.

Find your 80/20

Your first job should be to identify what’s your 80/20. Have a good look at your data and find where 80% of the value is created by 20% of your efforts. If you don’t know where to start, check the details of your customer segments, markets, products, marketing channels. There’s an 80/20 everywhere.

If the French market brings you 80% of your revenues, focus on it. If small businesses represent only 20% of your customer base, but generate 80% of transactions on your digital marketplace, focus on them.

Once that’s clear to you, make it clear to your entire management team. With everyone onboard, it will get so much easier to stop wasting time and energy.

I’ve had so many meetings in the past where we got bogged down in endless discussions about a tiny operational issue. Once your team is clear on your focus, give everyone the right to raise the “80/20 Flag” when time gets wasted on minor things.

If you’ve rewired your reflexes and learned from the Pareto principle and Priority Reminder, the answer should be clear. From an operational excellence perspective, narrowing your focus leads to large gains in company execution. You’ll make better and smarter decisions and achieve greater success for your efforts.

Fighting the shiny object syndrome

Now that you’re sold on the importance of focus and of removing instead of constantly adding, you can move to the next stage of your rehab process: overcoming the shiny object syndrome (S.O.S).

S.O.S. is a problem that plagues even experienced leaders and commonly diverts company resources away from reaching their full potential. It’s when the latest social media fad or a recent news release completely derails your efforts and makes you revert back to your old ways of chasing the latest and greatest thing.

In a tech company, it’s often easy to diagnose S.O.S simply by looking at the product roadmap. If you’re running a feature factory, chances are you got S.O.S. In a feature factory, there’s often a long list of new features to be developed.

A product feature is something your product can do. An outcome is what your product can deliver or the problem it can solve. Converting to an outcomes-based product roadmap can reduce S.O.S in several ways:

• You reduce the number of planned features for your products. Prioritizing outcomes means you’ll stop overloading your product with shiny new features. Less is more, remember? Instead, you’ll focus on improving your existing products, which tends to be a better use of your resources since you’re not starting from scratch over and over again.
• Your teams will work better together because outcomes raise accountability. For example, a desired outcome “to reach a thousand new users by the end of the year” involves teamwork with different departments in your company. The traditional alternative to attract new users is to focus on adding marketable features to your product. The latter simply isn’t as binding to your whole company since it only puts a single department to work — marketing.
• Outcomes are more measurable than features, meaning you can track progress and stay on top of your goals.

Once you know your focus, you’ll start making progress, but you will most likely relapse. To stay on track there are a few tricks to use.

Lead by example

Say no to new ideas, no matter how great they may sound. In Rework, the Founders of Basecamp recommend an even more radical approach: Say no by default.

“It’s so easy to say yes. Yes to another feature, yes to an overly optimistic deadline, yes to a mediocre design. Soon the stack of things you’ve said yes to grows so tall you can’t even see the things you should really be doing. “

“Start getting into the habit of saying no — even to many of your best ideas.”

Use the Priority Reminder

The Priority Reminder is a technique I use that works like magic with direct reports. Here’s how it works.

In your next one-on-one, work together to determine her top 3–5 priorities. As time goes by, that direct report will come to you with ideas or potential new initiatives. Everytime she suggests something new, ask her: “What are your top priorities again? Does your new idea will help you reach those top goals faster or better?”

Most of the time, they will say no and get back to work. Make sure you do the same with yourself.

By staying on track to accomplish your company goals, and ignoring everything else, don’t think of yourself as a bad guy who always says ‘no.’ Instead, you’re the hero that leads by example and demonstrates to your teams that focusing on the wildly important is the best path forward to scale your startup.

Build that One Magic Skill to Scale Your Business

If you realized you got S.O.S. or any other focus issues in your business, what are you going to do about it? We’re launching an online course soon that covers focus and execution. It will also look at how to design and grow a meaningful and impactful business from end to end. Sign up to get exclusive updates, early discounts and be the first to have access.

Develop the skills to lead and build the future.

Get early access to our online course

If you haven’t done so already, join our newsletter here to get tips and tools that can speed up your progress.

This story is thanks to Strategic Advisor Michel Gagnon and original published in Stun and Awe

The One Magic Skill To Propel Your Business was originally published in Stun and Awe Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We put so much toil, sweat, and tears into our business. Day in, day out. It can be discouraging to feel stuck. You got the ideas and a relatively good team, but it doesn’t seem to click. You start wondering… Am I good enough to bring the company to the next level? Do I have what it takes? Is there a silver bullet that I’m not seeing that could get me out of that plateau? Or is there some esoteric dark force whose only purpose is to see me fail? Sorry to break it to you, but it might be none of the above. We have made or seen others make typical mistakes when trying to build a meaningful business. Instead of visiting your shaman and invoke the spirits (no disrespect here), review our list of mistakes to see if you make one of them.

#1 You manage a to-do list instead of a business

One of the most non-scalable ways of running a successful startup is to manage a long to-do list instead of using a structured system.

There are three evil forces (to stick to my earlier spirit reference) that come with a to-do list.

1. First it gives you a false sense of progress, of getting things done. Our tendency to do the easier, faster, or more pleasant tasks first often means that we postpone what really matters. You decide to send unimportant emails instead of firing someone who’s not doing the job. You review a presentation instead of developing your go-to-market strategy for your new product. Unless you’re a master prioritizer you’re human nature will most likely fail you.
2. Second running a tech startup is a pretty tough job that involves so many different activities: hiring, product development, strategy, process improvement, communication, fund raising, etc. If you put everything you have to do on a list, you’ll go nuts! I got a pretty easy trick to help you figure out if something is good for you or not. If you look at it and it makes you feel like throwing up, it’s bad. Since your to-do list will never shrink (there’s always another task to add to it), you’ll feel constantly overwhelmed.
3. Third, to-do lists may give you the “do-whatever-but-do-something syndrome” (I made that term up, nothing scientific about it). That’s basically a state that makes you feel good when you’re doing something, even if it’s just shuffling papers. A friend of mine works in a company where they’re constantly on Google Chat. Some people used to manage by emails, now people are managing by Chat or Slack. Instead of prioritizing and organizing themselves, they just shoot messages, asks, orders at all hours of the day. Chatting gives them a sense of movement, a sense of accomplishing something.

#2 You and your team are not clear on the destination

If you and your team are not clear about the end goal, the strategy, your purpose or True North, it’s very difficult to expect people to take initiatives.

Employees come to you to know what to do next or how to deal with a specific problem. If you have to get involved in all tasks and decisions, here’s your red light.

For example, if you want to focus this year on improving your profitability, but haven’t communicated that priority across the company, you’ll have to deal with salespeople who may be too aggressive on pricing to hit their revenue targets.

If your positioning and product strategy are not clear to the team, you’ll have employees come up with new product ideas that don’t fit with the vision. That wastes everyone’s time.

That’s not scalable.

#3 There’s a gap between strategy and the day-to-day

Having a nice strategic plan on some slides hidden on a drive somewhere is not ideal, but at least it’s a start. Without a set of objectives, key results, and clear initiatives, you will end up with a big gap between your high-level strategy and daily operations.

You cannot hope to have proactive and strategic employees if they get sucked in the daily firefighting and paper shuffling. They won’t deliver if a significant amount of their daily tasks are not directly attached to the strategy and the big goals you’re after.

As Peter Bregman wrote a while back:

“ The reason strategy execution is often glossed over by even the most astute strategy consultants is because primarily it’s not a strategy challenge. It’s a human behavior one. To deliver stellar results, people need to be hyperaligned and laser-focused on the highest-impact actions that will drive the organization’s most important outcomes.”

You need a system to balance the day-to-day workload and monitor progress on strategic projects.

#4 You got wrong players on the team

If you’re a decent person who generally wants your employees to grow and succeed, having to fire or address someone’s performance is probably not your favorite task.

Failing to act is pretty much like shooting yourself in the foot though.

Working with great people makes your life so much easier. They’re often ahead of you. You don’t have to explain to them every single task or project. They know what is needed, how they can contribute, and just get the job done.

Hiring and firing costs time and energy. In some countries, like Germany where we live, labour laws are quite strict and relatively favorable to employees. You need to be smart and do the right thing both for the person and your company.

There are many reasons that can explain why someone is under performing. Your employee may have personal issues, lack the experience or training for the role, or simply not be happy in that role.

People are complex creatures. I know I am. To get your tech startup where you want it to be, you need an approach that will simplify how you assess, coach, promote your people.

Postponing difficult conversations with your employees is rarely the right move.

#5 You’re driving blind without leading indicators

Another typical mistake that’s holding startups back from success is reactive operations. That’s usually what happens when you don’t monitor leading indicators.

Many startups track monthly or quarterly data like revenues, margins, operating expenses. These numbers reviewed on a monthly or quarterly basis show what happened in the past. But it’s usually too late to change anything and improve performance.

Others review daily vanity metrics like social media followers, page views, subscribers. None of them really help you be proactive.

If your company counts more than 75 employees, implementing anything starts to take a while. You cannot wait a month or a quarter to see if you’re on the right track.

Leading indicators act a bit like your own mini crystal ball. They can include marketing, sales, operations, and customer success data. Your indicator list will pretty much depend on the type of startup that you have and which metrics are key to success.

Leading indicators show you on a daily or weekly basis how your month or quarter will end if you don’t change course. If the trend is not going in the right direction, you can be proactive and act.

Without that, you are basically driving blind. And that’s a very scary place to be.

#6 You forgot to build a sustainable and meaningful business

It’s easy to get caught up in the glamour around entrepreneurship. They dream of massive funding rounds, fancy offices in trendy neighborhoods, successful IPOs, designer clothes.

They get obsessed with new user growth, push their team to the max, and listen more to investors than to their customers.

It’s easy to get lost along the way. I’ve worked for publicly listed companies. The pressure to get the numbers right and meet the market’s expectations can be extremely stressful and overwhelming.

But in the end, what pays off is to build a startup on solid foundations. That means putting sustainability and meaningfulness at the center of the business.

How are you creating a positive impact in your community? How are you encouraging diversity? How can you improve your environmental footprint? Is your company bringing value to the world or is it just creating noise?

How can you fix those mistakes?

If you’re guilty of any of the above, the good news is that there are simple ways to fix those mistakes. Our upcoming online course may be the help you’re looking for.

It introduces you to our Growth Leap System designed to help you manage your tech startup like a boss. Sign up now to get an early access discount.

Develop the skills to lead and build the future.

Get early access to our online course

If you haven’t done so already, join our newsletter here to get tips and tools that can speed up your progress.

Author: Michel Gagnon

6 Mistakes Derailing Your Startup’s Growth was originally published in Stun and Awe Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the middle of firefights and as you tirelessly work to bring your company forward, it’s often easy to get lost. A few months ago, someone on the team said:

“Why are we doing all this for? It’s no longer clear to me where we’re going.”

That’s OK. That’s normal. Every now and then, you or people on your team will lose sight of what we call at Stun and Awe, your True North. It’s the destination or ultimate end state that you want for your business.

That’s why it’s crucial to:

• Have a clear True North defined in the first place
• Communicate it constantly

In times of crisis, I wanted to share part of our very own True North to help you stay on track as you progress on your journey.

Why the Heck Are We Doing this

Our True North plan is a simple two-pager. It starts with our purpose or what Simon Sinek calls our why. Our key reason for getting up in the morning (apart from having to feed the kids:)) is to transform businesses into designers of positive change.

We want to help tech startups build effective businesses that are profitable and sustainable and that ultimately create a positive impact in the world.

It’s not meant to be a nice statement that you hang on a wall. That simple statement implies that there’s a lot of companies we will not work with. No let’s-make-loads-of-money-and-screw-the-rest type of businesses. No gimmicks. No startups selling dumb apps and trying to monetize them.

How We Behave Along the Way

Once we know our why, we need to know how we will behave along the way. How are we going to face a crisis, like the one we’re going through right now? How are we going to work together and treat each other? This is where your values come into play.

A crisis gives you the opportunity to discover the true nature of individuals and organizations. When shit hits the fan, you realize who your true friends are. Make sure that your values are aligned with who you really are so that you can stick to them in tough times.

Showing off values that you can’t uphold is what phonies do.

At Stun and Awe, there’re a few things we live by and believe in:

• Aiming high and challenging the status quo are the only way to build something meaningful
• Collaboration & diversity create better solutions and help solve big problems
• Being authentic is the first step to building true relationships
• Life is too short not to let our creativity go free
• Since the world constantly change, we must constantly learn

What are your values?

Committing to Something Bigger

We love the operational part of running a business. Reviewing our company scorecard, optimizing conversions, strategizing on a new product. But we also believe tech startups should be agents of change.

Our True North two-pager also includes the causes that we want to contribute to. In our case, we decided to align them to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The SDGs cover a series of challenges that, if properly addressed, will help “achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.”

Based on our individual beliefs and on Stun and Awe’s expertise, we chose to focus on three key goals:

• GOAL 10: Reduced Inequality
• GOAL 13: Climate Action
• GOAL 17: Partnerships to achieve the Goal

Once you know where you want to make a difference, there are plenty of ways to act. You can donate a portion of your revenues, offer pro bono expertise to NGOs, make your operations more sustainable or partner with other organizations.

Getting Crystal Clear on Who You Serve

Our True North is not just about purpose, values, and contributions. Like Rocky would say: “the world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows”. It’s also about building an effective business. To do that, you need to get crystal clear on who you want to serve.

The second part of our two-pager focuses on your target market, offer, and brand promise. Many startups make the mistake of targeting a very broad range of potential customers. It’s the constant fear of missing out. But too much is like not enough. Trying to be everything to everybody is a sure way to fail, both in life and in business. I’m sure someone said that somewhere.

Of course, it’s OK to pivot and adapt based on the feedback and traction you get from the market. Focusing on a well defined niche or personas will still get you better results.

At Stun and Awe, we target :

• Tech startups with 15–200 employees who face challenges with their performance and impact
• They are looking for different ways to lead and run their business
• They are open minded, coachable, and forward-looking

We target tech companies because that’s what we know best. And we want to help people who want to get helped and who are open to new ideas. We’ve learned the hard way that trying to win the wrong client never pays off both financially and spiritually. Amen.

What’s in it for Them

Once you know who you are targeting and what their problems are, it’s time to define your offer and brand promise. We help startup leaders build effective, human-centered, and sustainable companies by offering a few products and services, such as:

• Learning experience with online courses and coaching
• Design thinking consulting
• Business management and problem-solving tools

If you’re not familiar with the concept of brand promise, it’s not meant to be another fancy business buzzword. A nice way to think about it is simply to see it as the experience your customer should expect to have every time they interact with you.

Apple’s brand promise is “Think Different”. You may like or dislike the company, but it has been quite consistent with this brand promise across its products, services, and stores. Everything they have introduced was different. Their beautifully designed products. The simplicity of its UX. The revolution they brought to the retail experience.

At Stun and Awe, our brand promise is a bit longer, but still straightforward: Unconventional thinking. Creative solutions. Impactful actions.

Transform your ambitions into reality

Having grand aspirations is a good starting point. Achieving them is a lot more fulfilling. As Anthony Robbins once wrote: “If you talk about it, it’s a dream, if you envision it, it’s possible, but if you schedule it, it’s real.”

I’ve seen many strategies that were so far away from the teams’ day-to-day tasks. You need something in between the two.

On the second page of our True North, we define top three-year and one-year goals and how we intend to achieve them. This is where aspirations turn into action. That’s where you decide the top initiatives you need to launch to get to where you want to go.

The final step is to communicate relentlessly. We all get caught up in our daily hustles once in a while and forget about our True North.

The beauty of our True North is it’s simplicity. Easy to understand. Easy to communicate.

If you want to build an effective, human-centered, and sustainable company, make sure you and your team don’t lose sight of the destination.

Speed Up your Progress

If you’ve been struggling with defining your True North and keeping your team aligned, our upcoming online course may be the help you’re looking for. Our Module on Strategy guides you in developing your own True North and shows you the actionable tools we’ve developed to run a high-performing startup aligned with your values. Sign up now to get an early access discount.

Develop the skills to lead and build the future.

Get early access to our online course

If you haven’t done so already, join our newsletter here to get tips and tools that can speed up your progress.

True North: The Secret to a Successful and Aligned Tech Startup was originally published in Stun and Awe Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why T-shaped People? and How you can drive innovation within your team

Managing a tech startup has never been so complex, even before the pandemic. Increasingly advanced regulations (GDPR and CCPA for example), better or misinformed customers, climate change, social inequalities, and challenges with strategic focus amid all the new tech noise all make running a startup more complicated.

What kind of people do you need on your team to build a scalable and meaningful business?

If you haven’t heard of the term ‘T-shaped people’, it’s time for you to start paying attention. For your business, T-shaped people may become your diamond in the rough.

What is a T-Shaped Person?

The idea of a T-shaped person has been around since the 1980s. It wasn’t really made popular until more recently when Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO design consultancy, threw his weight behind the term.

A T-shaped person is somebody who has a deep understanding of one particular discipline (signalled by that little vertical line on the T). They’re experts at their craft. Strong product owners, star engineers, marketing wizards, or fabulous customer success reps. On top of that, they have some knowledge, interest, and ability to work across other disciplines (the horizontal line).

For instance, you may have a solid backend engineer who also understands and is interested in marketing and business. Or maybe your team includes a high performing sales person who really gets technology and data.

Basically, it’s someone who is great at their given role and can leverage their knowledge and interest in other disciplines to support cross-functional projects.

Why T-Shaped People?

You may be wondering: “Isn’t’ a T-shaped employee just a great employee who gets shit done? Why the need for the label?” Good question.

In the past, I never was a big believer of frameworks and concepts. I always felt it was a way for consultants to invent terms and charge you a big fee without bringing any real value.

I’ve changed my mind since then. Not because I was a consultant for a while, but because business frameworks and concepts around people (like T-shape) help you mentally structure your challenges and your business. They force you to shift your mindset.

The true value of T-shaped talent is in their ability to connect the dots, see problems from a different vantage point, show genuine empathy towards your customers, and come up with surprising innovations.

Concretely, they can:

• Drive multidisciplinary innovation
• Bring a more holistic approach to problem solving
• Improve communication across departments

How Your T-Shaped Employees Can Drive Innovation

The functional structure of many tech startups often hinders multidisciplinary collaboration. Instead, you get teams, or tribes stuck in stage 3 of tribal leadership, believing that they are superior and better than everyone else.

People say things like: “Engineers are just modern day bureaucrats. The only difference is that they go through JIRA tickets instead of stamping paper forms.” Or something like “Sales is full of bozos who have no clue about what our product actually does.”

T-shape employees can help you get out of that stalemate. They thrive in multidisciplinary teams. They can drive innovation and collaboration by bringing experts together and connecting disciplines.

Think calligraphy, design, and technology with Steve Jobs for example.

Given the unprecedented impact the pandemic is having on people’s lives and the economy, tech startup CEOs need all the collaboration and innovation they can get to reinvent their business.

Here are some concrete ideas on how you can empower T-shaped employees to innovate:

• Give them the project lead on a project to completely transform your customer experience from the very first touchpoint with your company to them becoming true fans.
• Ask a small group of T-shaped people from different departments to come up with a new product idea.
• Ask them to figure out how your supply chain could save lives.

How Can You Help T-Shaped Employees Grow and Excel

Your organisation might be new to this way of working, and you’re not the only ones. But just because you haven’t actually hired specifically against the T style, doesn’t mean they don’t already exist in your business.

If you’re a company that encourages collaboration, and doesn’t expect people to stay in their lanes, then you’re already on to a winner, friend!

If not, there’s a few things you need to work on:

• Develop a culture where idea meritocracy prevails: You don’t want your product or sales team to have the not-invented-here syndrome. The best way to help your T-shaped is to give them and your whole team the space to put new ideas on the table and experiment with them.
• Design projects based on multidisciplinary teams. For example, you could bring marketing, sales, customer success, product, and engineering together and ask them to create three ways to improve the customer onboarding process.
• When you hire, look beyond just vertical expertise and hire with diversity of interest and experience in mind. If you take a look at the Stun and Awe team, you’ll discover quite a lot of diversity in terms of experience, nationalities, and professional path. History major turned CEO, Civil engineer turned entrepreneur, marketer and design thinking practitioner, and even a nurse illustrator!
• Most importantly, you need to genuinely believe that there’s something to learn in every discipline and give permission to T-shaped people to mine their past experience. Having a great designer that understands what is important to a copywriter is important. Having a supply chain manager who has worked as a sales buyer will allow them to understand the need for flexibility in ordering. Allowing them to enable their curiosity and draw from their vast background will only improve performance and creativity in your projects.

What if you could boost your team’s performance and creativity

If you’re curious about T-shaped professionals and how they can help your business, you’re in luck. We’ll be launching very soon an online course in which you’ll learn how to design an effective and meaningful business. Our module on People covers more on T-shaped people and on building tribes. If you sign up now, you’ll get a great little discount rate too. We can’t say fairer than that!

Develop the skills to lead and build the future.

Get early access to our online course

And if you haven’t done so already, join our newsletter here to get tips and tools that can speed up your progress.

VISUALS BY PAULA SAMPAIO

How T-shaped People Can Help You Drive Innovation was originally published in Stun and Awe Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you don’t live in a cave, you should know by now that these are difficult times. Every newscast, every radio show, every social media post talks about “trying times”, “testing times” and “ unprecedented times.”

I’m sorry mate, but there’s no playbook for these things. We’re all in this together, while also strictly a few meters apart.

Resources may be stretched in your business and the economic outlook uncertain, but there are many ways you can contribute to the effort of fighting the virus.

Can Your Supply Chain Save Lives?

Plenty has been said about the sheer scale of economic hardship that is being faced across the world, but there’s also stories of companies repurposing their assets and ways of working for the greater good.

For example BrewDog, the Scottish Brewery, has transformed its brewing plants into an operation that produces masses of hand sanitiser and is giving them away for free to National Health Service (NHS) staff and carers across the British Isles.

BrewDog has used its infrastructure and supply chain that is already in place, and leveraged it to create a completely new product that will help save lives and prevent the spread of disease across hospitals in the U.K. In short, they’ve seen the bigger picture and decided to be massive legends.

Is there some more off-the-shelf thinking that you can use from within your business to help in ways that are workable for you, but beneficial for others. If BrewDog can go from beer to bacteria (or viruses, to be exact) then I’m sure you can step up to the plate and do your part.

Collaboration Providing Positive Action

If you’re a bit familiar with us at Stun and Awe, you may know how gung-ho we are about collaboration. While it can be sometimes messy, it can often create absolutely fascinating undertakings. In a coronavirus world, it’s nice to see some big hitters bat for the side of collaboration.

Just this week, Mercedes Benz F1 team and University College London created a breathing aid, in just under a week, that can help keep coronavirus patients out of intensive care. The plants used by Mercedes can produce 1,000 of those machines a day. Let’s see a big salute for these guys.

Also in the UK, a coalition of tech initiatives created COVID19 Tech Response (CTR), a group whose mission is “to find technology solutions to help people during the COVID-19 crisis.”

The group brings together a number of initiatives including, coordinating the supply of available tech talent, providing a library of resources, and offering a direct line into local community efforts. The group already counts 400 tech volunteers together.

In Germany, the Federal Association of Startups, the Bundesverband Deutsche Startups e.V., launched a website full of public resources, analyses and events from startups for startups related to coronavirus.

Software engineers and leaders of various tech companies also got together to create a pairing service where you can find and offer help during the crisis. You can sign up to help someone in need near you.

That’s what we mean by fascinating undertakings. Thumbs up!

Think of the Little Guy

On another note, one of the first things to get cancelled during the Coronavirus pandemic was sport. Large, localised gatherings of people in football, tennis, cricket, F1 and more were quickly considered surplus to requirements, with little or no objection.

This was absolutely the right thing to do. In the grand scheme of things sport doesn’t come at the top of the list of priorities right now. And that’s O.K! Nobody wants to watch a car drive around in circles (no disrespect to the fans here) while they’re worrying about their family or their jobs!

But that hasn’t stopped sport leading the way in looking out for the smaller guy, proving that there’s more to the industry than opposing fans shouting at each other from a distance.

In the German Bundesliga, four football teams have created a 20 million Euro fund to help teams in the top two tiers survive the crisis when all revenue streams have dried up.

Borussia Dortmund, Bayern Munich, RB Leipsiz, and Bayer Leverkusen, the clubs to have set up the solidarity fund, are leading the way in economic and sporting integrity.

And this is an idea that local businesses can help each other do, too.

If you’re part of a business that has seen a smaller effect of the crisis, why not try and shop local? This can be anything from raw materials to services, and anything in between.

We’re all in this together and if we pull through, we can help drag each other through the crisis and support our own industries and beyond.

Defeat the Downturn

It’s all very good offering advice, and there’s plenty of great companies doing some awesome work across the world, but each company needs its own strategy to tackle the Corona crisis, and come out the other side too.

Of course, we’re not delusional. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs still applies. You need to keep your startup afloat first before playing Mother Theresa out there. While the lockdown in many countries may well have been a kick in the butt for your company, there are very actionable ways for you to lead and protect your startup during this pandemic.

This crisis may be the greatest opportunity for you to grow spiritually as a leader and to redesign your business to execute like clockwork and build the future. Local stores are doing delivery services, Mercedes F1 are building medical equipment, coalitions of tech startups are developing platforms for people to support their neighbors.

What will be your fascinating undertaking?

If you don’t know yet, check out how we can help your business become sustainable and grow successfully during hard times, growth spurts and more. Check out our free video training,tools, and services.

We like to go from individual empowerment to collective strength. Join our lab now.

And if you haven’t done so already, join our newsletter here to get tips and tools that can speed up your progress.

#startup #growth #positiveimpact #sustainability #designthinking

Repurpose and Retaliate: How Businesses Can Help in Times of Crisis was originally published in Stun and Awe Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Coronavirus has sent the world into a spin. Something that felt a distant problem to many just a few weeks ago has become a very real threat and the reason why you’re most probably stuck home now. It’s first and foremost a sanitary crisis.

What is clear now is that it’s also about to become a pretty tough economic slap in the face of many.

Running and leading a business is hard enough anyway, without the impending social and economical implications of a pandemic that, let’s face it, few people really understand.

How do you lead your startup through such a crisis? With employees raising health concerns, asking questions about the future, or being directly affected by the virus (either themselves or their family), what should you do first?

So we wanted to offer a little bit of help and advice about what you can do to help your business during this period of uncertainty and crisis.

Here are five very actionable recommendations to work on in the next few weeks.

1. Protect your People. Period.

At Stun and Awe, we don’t believe that maximizing value for shareholders is the main purpose of a company. That’s just a dumb statement, especially in today’s world.

If you’re a decent human being, your people should come first. Period.

You shouldn’t have to rationalize this. There’s a potential threat to their health, their lives, and that of others.

As a leader, your very first job is to protect your people. You’re the captain of the ship my friend. That means taking initiatives, following your government’s directives, and sending your employees home if it’s not already done.

Some people will say that showing to your employees that you care will help you build loyalty, engagement, and commitment among them. Maybe, but that shouldn’t be the reason to do so.

Looking after your staff is just the right thing to do.

2. Get into Crisis Management Mode

There are times for being a democratic business leader, and there are times for moving fast. Today, the latter is a lot more appropriate.

If you have a relatively large management team (more than 8) or are used to include a lot of stakeholders when making decisions, you’ll need to change.

What we suggest is to put in place a crisis management committee of no more than 3–5 management team members. Its purpose: expedite decision-making and communication.

Meet them virtually on a daily basis to review people’s safety, organizational issues related to remote work, and key messages to communicate both internally and externally.

If you’re a tech company, working remotely shouldn’t be such a novelty or an obstacle. Still, you’ll bump into a variety of VPN, Slack confusion, hardware, and people issues that will need to be resolved rapidly.

Ultimately, you need to show to your employees that they can count on their leader. That means reassuring them, communicating constantly, showing decisiveness, and providing clear guidance.

3. Be There for Your Customers

The Coronavirus is a sneaking one. It’s basically attacking your business on three fronts: staff, operations, customers. We’ve covered off the first two, but your customers are also under pressure.

If one of them cancels a subscription/order, it’s not the time to call in the lawyers to tell them they breached the contract or terms and conditions. On the contrary, this is the time to show your compassion and that you’re there for the long run.

First, make sure that you send them an email/newsletter to tell them what you are doing to respond to the crisis and how you will be working and supporting them.

Second, come up with a few ways to help them go through the crisis. Think of discounts, more flexible cancellation terms, or allowing them to skip payments for a short period of time if you can afford it. Ultimately, you want to be compassionate while aiming to keep them as customers when things calm down.

For instance, Berlin-based travel startup GetYourGuide allows their customers to get a full refund if they cancel 24 hours in advance, no questions asked. The Project Management software company Basecamp is offering to compensate accounts for first responders, public health officials, and groups along the PPE supply chain for first responders during the duration of the effort.

4. Plan for the Worst-Case Scenario

Unless you sell toilet paper or hand sanitizer, your business will most likely get hit by the crisis. As the CEO or leader of a startup, your job is to rapidly assess the impact the coronavirus will have on your business.

Use our Decision Making Grader to see how strong you are at making decisions

It’s easy to get overwhelmed. You could face staffing or payroll concerns, customer payment or foreseeing supply chain issues. You’re going to need to plan exactly what measures are going to take place for an array of eventualities.

If done right, this planning will save valuable days and resources in the coming months and help protect your business during the coronavirus crisis. But to do this, you become a master problem solver.

An easy way to do this is to start by taking a high-level view of your business. Develop a few scenarios to understand what a 20%, 35%, or 50% revenue drop would mean for your profitability and cash flow.

You’ll probably have to throw your hiring plan or roadmap down the trash can and have to come up with alternative plans. That’s fine. That’s life. As Ray Dalio explained in his book Principles: Life and Work, you need to “embrace reality and deal with it.”

Once you get the results of your high-level scenario analysis, start jotting down a few options. You can cut discretionary expenses or offer part-time or sabbatical to employees who have already expressed their desire to do so. You can drop software licenses or subscriptions or apply for government financial support depending on what your government has announced so far.

The thing is, you do have options. Everybody has been caught offguard by the pandemic. Now is the time to get back into a proactive mode.

5. Look for Opportunities

The world of business is going to change, that much is true. But things will change at different rates and have different consequences for different businesses.

Instead of getting into a negative, this-is-the-end-of-the-world-omg-mom-help-me type of mindset, start actively looking for business opportunities. Not in the non-ethical sense of the term. Please don’t be like this Amazon seller who stockpiled 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer and is now under investigation.

Crises bring changes, and changes bring opportunities. Sit down with your management team and start identifying upsides to this crisis. This could be shifting your sales mix, targeting a new type of customer segment, or improving your operations. With many currently operating in full remote mode, companies’ operations will be radically transformed over the course of the next few months.

Opportunities also exist beyond your employees and company. At the moment, people are really in need. There are plenty of movements happening for all kinds of workers.

On LinkedIn, for example, the group Creative Industry [COVID-19] Support is a group started for freelancers and members of the creative sector who have lost work on the back of the virus. This was started by one man, Andrew Dobbie, and has now led to 2,000+ people joining, with extra benefits such as advice seminars and mental health briefings.

Honesty is the Best Policy

You’re told this from a young age, but in times of crisis, being a great leader means being positive, but also honest. People are not stupid, and they’ll know exactly what is going on even before it is announced.

The worst thing to happen in your businesses would be for word of any drastic changes to leak out before they’ve been announced. This breaks trust, and breaks spirit. Times are going to be tough, so having the ability to be mature enough with your team may just save time, money, and the company.

These are truly unprecedented times. Most businesses won’t have planned for this scale of disruption, but that doesn’t mean these waters need to be more choppy than they have to be.

Take care of your people first. Then start planning your come back.

We’ve got great resources on our website that can help you navigate business growth (and decline) beyond the here and now. Check out our free video training, tools, and services.

And if you haven’t done so already, join our newsletter here to get tips and tools that can speed up your progress.

Startups and COVID-19: 5 Ways to Lead and Protect your Business was originally published in Stun and Awe Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The year end is always a good time to look back at what we’ve accomplished. It’s also the perfect time to learn from our mistakes. Well, I’ve had my fair share of mistakes. It turned out to be one of my best year in terms of personal and professional growth.

People marvel at rapid growth. When numbers keep going up month after month, Slack channels get filled with lots of “hoorays”, “booyahs”, “bams”, “whoo-hoos”, and “bugger mes”. Hope you get the point. But with growth comes a whole bunch of strategic and operational troubles.

Here are 4 key lessons I learned along the way, and that you should avoid not to screw up.

1. Trying to do too much too fast AKA not prioritizing

When I took the lead of a tech company, I saw so many things that needed to be fixed. Improving lead generation, tackling our massive technological debt, coaching and growing our people and making sure they were at the place place, narrowing our focus, etc.

Being myself a bit of an impatient lad, I wanted everything done yesterday. I wanted to scale the business as fast as possible.

So I started launching a series of initiatives to fix what was broken. The mistake I made was not taking into account what I now call the “organization’s bandwidth.”

Just like any individual, organizations have a limit to what they can take on, cope with, and get done. That limit differs from one organization to another.

Instead of quickly fixing some of the issues I had identified, I ended up freaked out a few folks who got massively overwhelmed and stressed.

Instead I should have worked on keeping my team focused and reducing stress.

2. Not taking the team with me on my mental journey

As a CEO or entrepreneurs, when you make a decision, you usually should have weighted a few key elements, i.e. data you saw, discussions you had, thinking you did by yourself, criteria your deemed essential. I have frequently assumed that my team would see problems, priorities, and strategies the same way I do.

The problem is they most probably rarely followed the same mental process I did.

After a good weekend of thinking, I would come in on Monday morning and make a bold strategic statement expecting everybody to say something like: “OMG, this is the most brilliant idea I’ve ever heard. I think I’m going to cry as I’m so touched by your wisdom and magnanimity!”

What I got was more like a very passionate push back.

If we dig a bit deeper to understand, here’s what happened.

I don’t work 100 hours/week, but I definitely think about the business almost all the time. I’m ok with that. That’s my mental process. That means that I’m constantly reviewing past discussions, analyses, data, meetings in my mind and evolving my perspective on our key challenges and what needs to be done.

What I forgot was that no one else was with me in my mind (except for Bobby, my imaginary friend) while I was doing that mental work. What I should have done is put on paper my thinking process and walk the team through it before dropping my “bold strategic statement” bomb. Then I could have asked them to contribute to the decision-making process and chip in on the solution.

3. Getting distracted by the noise

This one’s a no-brainer. But although everyone knows about it, putting into practice strategic and operational focus is pretty hard.

When you’re leading a company, there’s noise literally everywhere: at the office, within your team, in the market, etc.

It’s so easy to lose track of what truly matters and start chasing another shiny object or opportunity.

As Tim Ferriss once wrote, “being busy is a form of laziness”. Focus and good strategy require making choices. And that’s a pretty tough thing to do when you’re a human being.

We launched markets we shouldn’t have launched and developed features we shouldn’t have developed. I did this because I wanted to hedge my bets. Some markets take off, others don’t. Some products or features become successful, others die a slow or sometimes sudden death.

But my thinking was flawed. There were too many moving objects and too much to deal with.

I basically forgot to keep an eye on the only thing that really matters: solving our customers’ problems and keeping them happy.

4. Mistaking symptoms for problems

With all the stress, noise, and firefighting, I also found it difficult to see clearly. As the company had scaled nicely,it became increasingly tough to know what was really going on in the organization.

Everybody had an opinion, a bias, an agenda. What should have been a simple operational problem to troubleshoot quickly became a 4-season TV drama with dragons, swords, and broken hearts.

I often made the mistake of jumping to conclusions to fix an issue as fast as possible. Many problems that I had to deal with were just a symptom of something deeper, i.e.:

• Not having the right leaders onboard or the right behaviors
• Having broken processes
• Lacking the tools to automate and improve productivity

For instance, I was not happy with the commercial focus and speed of our product development. Instead of taking a few hours to dissect the team, the process, the skills, the tools, etc. I tackled what I believed what needed to be fixed without a proper 5 whys analysis.

Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn

Making mistakes is part of the learning process. If you’re smart enough to reflect and learn from them, you’ll come out as a stronger leader and better equipped to successfully scale your business.

For 2020, we wish you all a lot of success, learning, and sustainable growth in your business!!!

As always, if you need help, check out our free video training, tools, and services.

And if you haven’t done so already, join our newsletter here to get tips and tools that can speed up your progress.

Four unforgiving mistakes I made when scaling a company was originally published in Stun and Awe Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.