A Sense of Urgency

Speed is a startup’s greatest advantage, therefore, startup leaders and teams must always act with a sense of urgency. This is such a comprehensive driver of startup success that I find it weaves together many of thoughts shared on this blog over the past 18 months.

I just realized that, since the birth of this blog, I have written 90 posts. That milestone seemed like a good moment to step back and reflect on some of the overall patterns that knit together these startup CEO reflections – and to highlight how some of these posts interlink and connect with one another. One of those themes that I realized is implicit in what I have been sharing is that a startup CEO must embody a sense of urgency to realize the potential agility and speed that are often startup company strengths. Driving the startup forward as fast as possible builds value, but too fast can create excessive risks and possible breakdowns. In that dynamic tension is some of the art of succeeding as a startup. In the remainder of this post, I collected and connected highlights from other posts, so be sure to click on the links to delve in deeper.

Picking Your Right Target to Tackle with Urgency

Before turning on the gas, a founding startup CEO must choose the destination — a problem to solve that is both worthy of solving and solving urgently. An important customer problem that once solved produces a powerful value stream that justifies the intensive investment of the time, talents, and resources of the startup team and their investors (Startup Genesis: Choosing a Problem to Solve). Often, what will justify all that investment is tackling some problem that is intrinsically hard because successfully solving hard problems creates barriers to entry, competitive advantage and value (The Value of Doing Something Intrinsically Hard). 

The other important selection filter is focusing on solving a problem that has the makings of a real and successful business (The Most Important Thing). A business that can rapidly manifest success in the classic financial measurements of revenue, growth, and profitability is likely to mature into a success. Accomplishing this will mean discerning whether the business idea can quickly be built into a balanced system of fundamentals like real unmet customer needs, great solutions to those needs that are embodied in products that are designed, manufactured, priced, marketed, and sold effectively in a way to products ongoing customer relationships and customer value.

Once the concept is articulated, defined, and tested, the real work of building a balanced system of interlocking goals and capabilities to drive towards the target of creating a viable and successful business – with all of the delicious complexity therein!

Focusing with a Sense of Urgency

Compared to larger, established businesses entrenched in existing markets, existing products, and existing processes, speed is one of the great advantages of small, talented, focused startup teams – and the driver of the racing startup vehicle is the CEO. Yet like racing, it is essential to drive with both a sense of purposeful urgency as well as finesse to maximize speed while not spinning out of control. (Driving for Speed with Finesse)

The fuel for speed is funding. More funding equals more options, more resources, and a greater ability to pursue multiple goals in parallel. Yet some paths do not lend themselves to parallel processing, with an inherent sequence of dependencies necessary to progress that demand wise waiting. Still, sometimes the road is open and you have the opportunity to use one of the most important tools in the hands of the startup leader: the accelerator. How hard to drive is a sequence of pivotal choices requiring you to Pick Your Spending Rate Wisely to build value along a winding road, while not wasting your fuel.

Finally, as you steer your startup, you must attend always to the “why” and “so what” for each choice of path, direction, and pace. By attuning to “why”, you can determine priorities, clarify decisions, motivate your stakeholders, and guide your team (Connecting the Why). And, as you wrestle with the tricky decisions, making direction, speed, and passing decisions, remember that your ability to control yourself to Focus and Execute under pressure will often make all the difference.

Strategies and Tactics for Going Faster

When building a startup, you are constantly iterating on your plans by identifying short, medium, and long-term goals, developing a work breakdown structure that will accomplish those inevitably interrelated goals, defining what must be done serially and what can be done in parallel to figure out the critical path, and wrestling with the endless prioritization decisions including sometimes making big bets to go fast toward your targets. (Are Your Ready to Make the Decision? Aka Big Bets).

Many other posts on this blog relate to additional strategies and tactics for going faster, while balancing the risk. Consider:

• Actively balancing the dimensions of time, scope and resources at the level of individual initiatives as well as for the startup as a whole. The Magic Project Management Triangle provides a framework for managing expectations and setting and delivering on your targets.
  
  
• Helping a team, especially a technical team, build and sustain the momentum to accomplish the next goal by being aware of and actively Managing the Cost of Context Switching.  This is the counter balance to being over-nimble to the point that progress gets swamped by the dynamically changing priorities. 
  

• Despite endless distractions, establishing and maintaining focus is essential for eliminating extraneous, less value-added work and moving with purpose and a sense of urgency.  Sometimes the decisions on what to prioritize are quite difficult, yet one of your most powerful tools is realizing that Focus Means Saying No.
  
  
• When to make choices between forging ahead with the tools you already have in hand and applying brute force to a problem versus taking a step back to invest in a more systemic, force-multiplying solution.  Investing in Force Multipliers sometimes makes the most sense even if it feels like a slower path in the short-term.
  

• Driving focus and continuing improvement by recognizing that What You Measure Will Improve and thoughtfully identifying concrete metrics that are important to your business success. Such measures help investors and customer recognize progress while at the same time providing focus and a sense of accomplishment to the team.
   
  
• Being aware and intentional about your response when the inevitable adversity happens.  As I explored in And A Tree Fell Across the Path – Responding to Startup Adversity, the unexpected, unforeseen, and surprising are routine features along the startup journey. When the ups and downs happen, each is an opportunity to respond well and build value by overcoming the problem.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, learning quickly and effectively is An Essential Entrepreneurial Enabler, and underpins the ability to move with confidence and urgency to leverage speed into success. Noone comes into an innovative startup knowing all they need to know because, by its very nature, an innovative startup pushes boundaries and demands discovery.  Hopefully this post helps in some way to help foster some of that learning.