Yesterday I presented to the current Prepare 4 VC cohort of early stage founders about conscious team design.
And as happens with nearly every founder community I meet, the conversation gave space to the challenges and opportunities in being inextricably tied to your business.
Being a founder is hard. You bring so much of yourself to your business, while facing the reality that you’re not operating in a vacuum.
How do you know when to elevate your personal truth, and when to embrace outside forces in helping you to find the best path for your business?
Here are three truths to keep you on the path of building a meaningful, sustainable business.
1. Best practices aren’t the end-all, be-all.
While the startup world thrives on offering guidance to founders from people who have “done it before", what has worked for someone else’s business may not necessarily work for yours. Blindly following best practice, rather than reflecting on your personal truth and seeking your business’s truth, could limit your potential to have the impact you dream to have.
What to do:
Formulate and test hypotheses about the paths that seem the most viable for your business (Reference: Is it time to pivot?). Choose advisors who can balance offering their wisdom with encouraging you to discover what’s going to work best for you. You may face resistance from advisors, investors, or other community leaders in the path you ultimately choose. But if your choice is grounded in evidence, bringing it to market may be your only way of uncovering what’s true for you.
2. Sometimes your business will need you to do things you don’t want to do.
Being a founder grants you freedom to do things “your way”. It’s a promise that pulls many into entrepreneurship. But as you grow as a founder, you’ll discover that your business has wants and needs that may be different from your personal wants and needs. To thrive, your business needs you to bring objectivity to how you lead it.
For example, as I started Year 2 in business, I had to accept that my business needed me to implement stronger systems and repeatable processes. I was resisting it. Routines were boring! But I was seeing a pattern of narrow peaks and valleys in my revenue and I knew that my resistance to routine was one cause of it.
What to do:
View your business as a living, breathing entity that has an identity outside of you. To borrow personas offered by the Prepare 4 VC cohort I spent time with yesterday, take on the persona of an advisor, friend, or parent, and interview your business. Ask it:
What do you need today to meet your goals?
What do you anticipate you’ll need in the future?
How is the way you’re currently managed helping or hurting you?
3. To survive, you have to keep a pulse on what’s emerging and be willing to change.
Finding focus is challenging as a founder because it can take multiple iterations to land on your optimal audience, solution, and/or growth path. Once you’ve found the best combination for your business, you may be relieved to “catch a break.” However, the hard truth is that you can’t sit back. You have to keep a pulse on emerging trends, as those trends might be the next survival or growth path for your business.
What to do:
Even as you execute against your focus areas, keep a pulse on voices from the market that are sharing new perspectives and needs. These voices may be quiet or loud. They may come from anywhere: your existing customers, your connections in adjacent industries, the media. Monitor early trends, and be willing to listen with an open mind. When you uncover a trend, ask yourself: Am I willing to hear this, explore it, and act on it where relevant to further my vision?
*COMING SOON*:
Accepting these truths can be hard, and it’s one reason why I’m soon launching a video podcast series featuring interviews with six founders who have maneuvered pivots. These conversations will be honest perspectives not seen elsewhere. The goal? To normalize and humanize pivoting, one aspect of business that embraces all three of these truths. Stay tuned.
Can’t wait to see your podcast series, Farah!!
View your business as a living, breathing entity that has an identity outside of you. oof that hit hard hahaha. Legally sure yes I had thought of this but it immediately brought to mind how I'm in my own way here. The best practice one also resonates. In my first attempt at starting my coaching business, I was lured by endless 10k months people, pressure to scale until I realized I was burnt out and didn't want to scale right away. Great read!