Not Fast Enough

Are you feeling in control, regardless of what you show publicly? Maybe you shouldn’t because one of a startup’s powerful advantages is its ability to move quickly. Yet, while essential, harnessing this advantage is challenging for entrepreneurs.

As organizations grow, defined processes, organizational structures, and communication pathways all become stronger and stronger at defining what and how the business is done. With growth, scopes of decision-making authority become more defined and narrow, and, as a result, the whole organization’s ability to synthesize and pivot becomes harder. The ossification of scale is actually what gives a startup a potential speed and extreme customer-focus advantage, which they need to offset a larger competitor’s advantages of brand recognition, existing customer relationships, and substantial resources.

Essentially, scale means there is more ballast in the boat that keeps it tracking along known pathways rather than zipping around in new directions. Of course, that zipping behavior of an early-stage startup carries its own risks of capsizing, tossing a sailor out into the sea, and otherwise careening on the edge of control. The dynamic tension between a large-scale business’ advantages versus a small startup’s business advantages is why a startup must not squander that most valuable advantage of a scrappy startup, which is the ability to spin on a dime and redirect your team’s energies forward as you seek to respond to a flood of incoming new information.

A startup leader making critical decisions is inevitably challenged by:

• Incomplete information
• Resource constraints
• Uncertainty

Even when the world around you feels chaotic, and you wish you had just a bit more insight, clarity, and certainty about which way to proceed in the fog:

Decide you must.

Move you must.

Make educated bets you must.

“If everything seems under control, you just aren’t moving fast enough.” – Mario Andretti

These realities make everything feel profoundly risky and out of control, yet are critical to continue to make necessary progress towards your big goals. To stop and wait until the fog lifts and you have all the answers you wish for is the hallmark of analysis paralysis in the making. So, as a startup leader responsible for driving innovation, translating investor dollars into outsize value, and creating something out of nothing, you must always be on the lookout for the signs that you have gotten stuck.

While there is a balance to be struck to avoid becoming reckless and wasteful with your precious resources, if you do feel like everything is cruising along under control, then likely you are not pushing hard enough to realize your startup’s potential. Here are some tell-tale signs to keep an eye out for:

• You manage to complete everything on your and your team’s to-do lists routinely
• There is time to polish emails and presentations
• You can routinely fit in fun coffee or golf get-togethers with friends during your workweek
• You do not need to check texts, slacks, and emails after hours
• You can carve out regular retreats to reflect, integrate, and document all that you have learned
• Big companies seem to be moving faster and more decisively than you are

Part of a startup’s journey is gleaning just enough information to make a call and then diving into making that bet successful as fast as possible. You will find yourself jumping from thing to thing as you try to keep all of the many plates spinning without dropping (too) many of them. Hopefully, you enjoy the energy of moving fast rather than always feeling competent and in control, because that is characteristic of many startup leaders who are driving for success