What I've Learned from 10 Years as a Successful Founder (Part One)...

Below is part one of an ongoing series of raw and honest posts, designed to share stories directly from our own personal experiences of start-up success. They are a little rough around the edges but full of real world advice, starting with an answer to one of the most asked questions of all….just why were you successful?

It’s the question that every experiencedentrepreneur is asked the most: If you could name one thing that made yousuccessful what would it be?

The answer is one I’ve spent the last four months pondering deeply since leaving my last business, as I search for the answer to ‘what’s next’, and to ensure I add as much value as humanly possible to our portfolio companies here at Haatch.

The answer to it is incredibly complex, asit asks for the distillation of, what is often, years of toil, stress, hardwork and problem solving into a handful of words or single phrase.

A lot has been written about this verysubject too of course, often pointing the reader to believe that it’s all aboutworking with an intensity that no one else can match; a superhuman effort thatinvolves sacrifice and pain.

There can be elements of sacrificeabsolutely, and in most cases those that have been there and bought the T shirtcan attest to that. But that’s not really the answer.

My own personal experience involved plentyof sacrifice sure and saw me making ends meet by selling personal belongingsand often doing side jobs to pay the mortgage. It also meant I drifted fromfriendship groups for many years and some of those relationships have neverreally recovered as a result. There is always a cost to any ‘success’.

But this selfish focus and intensity is not the sole ingredient to success, nor is it a necessity in all scenarios in my experience, particularly if you are looking to run a funded business as opposed to a bootstrapped one.

Instead, the true answer to the question lies in two key traits, or approaches that I call Unerring Consistency and the Velocity of Deployment.

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Consistency

By far the single most important trait ofthem all is that of consistency.

It’s a term that can mean many differentthings, but in this context it captures the single-minded-stop-at-nothingbehaviours that you must exhibit from day one of your start up in order to havechance of success in the mid to longer term.

Starting a business is hard, stressful,lonely and fraught with difficulty and your job is to unpick that minute byminute, hour by hour, day by day and week by week, one step at a time and withoutmissing a beat.

It is a skill that is perhaps the most difficultof all to master, especially given the amount of distraction available to usall now – but master it you must if you are to stand any chance of victory.

To do that, however, we must make thecritical distinction between what I’m talking about here as consistency and whatmany may make you believe it means.

Intensity v Consistency

If you, like me, read a lot of posts,listen to podcasts and follow lots of advice on social then you’ll be veryaware of the importance of delivery, but a lot of people misunderstand whatthis really means.

Instead, what they describe is really intensity.Their belief is that they should work like dogs, incessantly, 12 hours aday, seven days a week, when, in fact, this can actually be detrimental to yourefforts.

You see, by definition, ‘intensity’ isunsustainable and, quite frankly, bad for your mental and physical health.There are periods where a little of this is necessary of course but an approachthat involves any significant amount of this is set up for failure.

Winning in done in the trenches, grindingout improvement – whether that is applied across your product roadmap, serviceoffering, brand development, audience growth or any other critical path – whenthose around you may have long given up or been distracted onto something else.

It’s the 201^st blog post youwrite, the 20^th conference you speak at, or the 7^thversion of your product that you roll out that may be the tipping point foryour business.

And everything that comes before this ishard slog. It’s endless days and weeks of consistently delivering the samething, often without the feedback loop of better sales, customer satisfactionor happiness, in the unflinching knowledge that it WILL work.

But you don’t get there immediately, oreven quickly. It’s why many describe building a successful business as being alittle like an iceberg; three quarters of it is under water. The bit thatpeople see is really the result of the months, or years, of toil underwater.

As Amazon’s Jeff Bezos famously said:

“All overnight success takes about 10 years.’

And he’s not wrong as there are countlessexamples of business success stories, including my own, that play testament tothis.

The 10-year timeline

Being able to deliver such consistency andrepel negative thoughts of giving up takes a certain type of character and itis that very trait that ranks at number one on the Haatch tick list ofinvestment criteria – it’s that important.

Ask a founder if they want to be a successand they will obviously say ‘yes’. But what is most important to understand isthe determination and unerring will power behind the answer that allows thatperson to go to places few have the ability to go – and you should ask yourselfthis question before jumping in.

The problem is that you often meetentrepreneurs fed on a constant stream of overnight success stories. Such beliefs make people impatient, shortcut-minded and capricious, allof which have devastating effects on performance and judgement. It is my job,as I see it, to train that out of them, installing an understanding of thepower of consistency.

Delivering consistency

In order to follow such a disciplined process,it is clearly imperative that you have a framework to work from as without ityou have little chance of success.

And this is where habit forming daily andweekly routine comes in. To give you an example here’s how I planned my daysfor the first three years of Zazzle Media (the last business I founded).

Daily tasks

• Reply to allcommunication within an hour – night and day.
• Plan out the day’stasks at the beginning of the day and don’t close up’ until they are complete.
• Add at least one ideato a list of blog posts I’d write to power our audience growth agenda.
• Arrange at least onecall or meet with someone to grow my network.

Weekly/Monthly tasks

• Write one blog postper week.
•  Create 1+ case studies and upload to the site.
• Improve at least oneservice page on the website
• Pitch for at least oneconference speaking slot per month

This was done without fail, 365 days ayear and all despite the fact that often there was no discernible increase intraffic to those posts or audience growth. All I had was an unshakeable beliefin our core vision.

This structured approach is not new or unique of course, but it is critical, and I called it my Domino Strategy. Start with one thing and keep it simple. Become the best in the world at it and then just keep knocking those dominos over day by day, week by week until you have momentum. At this point you can then begin expanding laterally into adjacent markets, geographies or services/products.

But what about ‘Velocity of Deployment’?

So far then we have established thatconsistency is critical and incredibly difficult to deliver well. But, it isalso nothing without the ability to lead others in a way that promotes Velocityof Deployment, especially as you begin to gain traction and start the scalingprocess.

At the start of your founder journey youmust have consistency, often for years, but eventually there comes a pointwhere you start to scale, and others pick up that batten alongside you.

This can be a powerful, pivotal moment inthe history of the business and with a strong foundation and clear vision andmission statement behind you (I’ll be writing more on this in a future post)you can quickly scale up.

And when this begins to happen your rolechanges. Consistency is still key of course but you now play a dual role; oneof leader as well as founder.

In this new world you are required toensure that the framework you laid down so meticulously in those first fewmonths and years is followed and scales as you add people.

And this is where Velocity of Deployment comes in.

The focus should now shift to making surethat your growing team ships improvements as consistently as you did thosefoundations all those months ago. You are the guiding energy that adds theextra 10% to productivity and output, customer happiness and everything inbetween. And you do that with velocity.

If your culture makes it OK to finishsomething late, or even attend a meeting late, it can quickly double down aspart of your culture. Your role is therefore to ensure people understand WHY youfight so hard and WHY it’s imperative to keep shipping ‘better’ every. Single.Day.

Success is never achieved. It is never afinished picture so keep everyone focused on ‘next’.

Do that and you know that you’re on thepath to scale up victory. But more of that another day…

To read part two click here