Lesson 1/ There is no place for improvisation
Learning how to build a start up from scratch (if you can ever learn that) in six months, with lessons that I shouldn’t keep for myself.
During a five minutes Taxi ride before a conference, my boss was explaining me and another intern his first experience with the Samwer brothers, well known for launching the famous Rocket Internet. Very quickly, I understood the importance of execution in a start up and of working with a precise method that allows you to measure everything. Some key points to retain below.
Create a process to understand how your start up should work ideally
The first day I arrived in this early stage start up, my boss asked me to create a process and a checklist for the new contracts that will regularly arrive in the start-up. At first it looked totally new to me and I had to ask for a second explanation. The process was simply the explanation of what should happen in the company every time a new contract comes in (which happens very regularly here). The checklist was just the list of everything that should be checked on every contract in order to fulfill them properly. These kinds of processes and checklists are present at all stages of the start up here. Every actions are organized by a process in order to work properly.
There is no place for improvisation, only for execution.
Thanks to this process we save a lot of time in our daily routine. In the different start up early stage I worked with we had troubles for this organization. In a way that was the good part of the start up but we probably lost a lot of time and maybe clients because of our lack of organisation.
Follow/track employee activity with daily meetings
What counts at the end of the day in a start up is only what was achieved by the founders and the employee. There is no point of having great ideas if you have no results afterwards. Results are the only things that matter at the end of the day. And the best way to achieve that is to work with a clear method. Here the methods is implemented with everyday’s meetup with daily meetings. During these meetings, that take place every morning, the employees have to explain their goal for the day and to give results. The team are separated between sales, operational and developers in order to win time. Again there is no place for improvisation. For example, every sales representative explains his plans every day and regularly changes his pitch during this meeting.
I see two good points to hold such a regular meeting. Firstly, it forces everyone to work fast. Indeed if you don’t, your boss knows it. Moreover, the manager or founder can easily track how things are evolving day after day. Finally, it is probably the best way to improve communication within the company and it allows everyone to raise awareness about the problems very easily. Every day ends with an other meeting where everyone has to explain what he achieved during the day.
Be careful: the wrong part of a meeting is that it can last for hours and no decisions are taken. In this case, the time allocated to these meetings should be limited: 10–15 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes maximum at night. And for the anecdote, the chairs in the meeting room are highly uncomfortable in order to avoid any time lost. “We are not a sitting company” said the founder once.
Measure how actions are efficient from the first day
Measuring actions at the early stage of a start up is an other key point of our everyday work. After working in some start- ups, I already knew that Key Performance Indicator (so called KPI) were an important part of start- ups. But I was imagining it in a very cool way with no idea of how the process should go. Like “Ok the week is over let’s see how our growth was this week”.
The first step was to define what exactly our KPI are. The second step is to track them daily. Even when we just launched the website we were already tracking all KPI in a giant excel file that everyone has to fill out every day. We had no real customers at this time but the following of KPI allows everyone to take fast actions and to resolve problem as fast as possible. As our founder says, the quicker is always the better in start ups.
