In most spheres, some businesses become great, some break even, and some that barely manage to survive. Business owners define success. Differently, some describe it as a boom in their revenue while others may look at it more in terms of impact on their community and world. No matter what success means to you, there appears to be something familiar to great startups that others may be lacking.
Most of these things do not come up later in the business. They are applied from the first day the company hits the ground and sustains growth.
Delegating and outsourcing
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As you well know, the entrepreneur always has a lot to do. Sometimes even after hiring staff to get the same thing done. It would help if you kept delegating on the front burner to build a great startup. When hiring, remember that you may someday have to trust your CEO duties to those staff, so make sure they are capable.
Outsourcing is the second face of delegating. Expertise and competence are things great startups take seriously. Feel free to outsource the task if you need more staff with the competency required in a particular area. The important thing is that you should have experts handling different functions at every point. This can be difficult for some CEOs and founders as they struggle with guilt over not supervising each task independently. At some point, you will have to step back from the business to scale; you might as well start preparing for it early enough.
They empower staff with precise functions and directions.
For great startups, there is a structure around hiring staff, so they are empowered to deliver the right results right from the resumption. Clear expectations are set, roles are defined, and instructions are given. With this kind of structure, you will hardly have underperforming staff, and when you do, it is pretty easy to spot them and address the issue.
The not-so-great startups hire staff even when they have yet to clearly define the expectation for that role and end up with the team wandering about the office, unsure exactly what they should be doing. They usually would have big titles without clearly spelled out duties and responsibilities. They would also have much underperforming staff, resulting in a bloated budget without corresponding results.
They maintain a two-way communication flow with staff.
As against the one-way communication flow among other businesses, great startups build two-way communication with staff. So, instead of firing staff for not meeting expectations, great startups have a process of finding out why and where they are struggling with their functions and empowering them to succeed. To build a great startup, be ready to teach your staff how your business operates. They may come to your company with their technical skills, but you have to teach them the peculiar operations of your business.
They take data security seriously.
Successful entrepreneurs run a tight ship in data security for their business, and they enforce all the necessary protocols to maintain it. Please be sure to protect the sensitive proprietary data that comes to your employees through their work email inboxes. You don’t want to find out later that data that should have been protected was being compromised, perhaps by employees who save, forward, or text them.
Suppose your employees lose control of their email accounts, forward emails to the wrong person, or intentionally share an attachment against your wishes. In that case, it can tremendously damage you, your customers, and your business partners.
This should be done from the first day because if you fail to define the data security protocols early enough, it gets easier to do so when the firm has scaled. It might require training existing staff on data security protocols and implementing specific security measures.
They maintain a work-life balance.
It is exciting to note that the startups that produce the best results are only sometimes the ones overworking their staff to the bones. A 2014 study by John Pencavel at Stanford University shows that a 55-hour workweek produces the same results as a 70-hour workweek. Overworking yourself and your staff may not result in more productivity, and more hours may translate to less productivity. Maintain a work-life balance and allow your team does the same.