When our company was hiring its 100th employee, I sort of felt like the world was starting to close in. Problems were getting harder and more plentiful. I felt like I had fewer answers. I knew where I wanted to go but I couldn’t quite figure out the right way to get there, so I defaulted to keeping my head down and just powering through. But that wasn’t fixing anything.
I reached out to a friend of mine, with whom I’d done some consulting work. He was a smart guy who had worked with companies big and small, so I called him up to come for a visit to just kick the tires and tell me what he saw.
When he got to town, I gave him the grand tour. We looked around the buildings, introduced him to some of the people, then sat down to chat. I told him all of our problems, lamenting that everything was hard and I wasn’t sure what to do.
He paused and asked, “How many employees again?” I said about 100.
He said, “…and what are revenues right now?” We were around 12–14m in annual revenue.
He said, “Yeah, those are the problems you should be seeing.” Then, he dug around in his bag and produced a chart that listed the stages of company growth broken down by number of employees and revenue, and then correlated each stage with the problems a company should be dealing with at that point.
This chart immediately took the sting away. I wasn’t screwing everything up! I was right where I was supposed to be; I was on track! It felt like seeing that your new baby has an egg-shaped head and you go to the doctor, certain you’ve got an alien baby, and she says, “Nah, that’s normal, it’ll level out in a few days.” You didn’t mess up your baby’s head! What a relief, it’s normal. Sure, it’s a problem, but it’s on track with the problems you should be facing.
My friend was looking at the situation through the lens of HR, management and growth, since that was his world. So his chart looked like this:
What he saw in my company of 100 people is that I was due to hire my first HR Manager. We needed some formalized training, we probably needed to start working on an employee handbook, and record-keeping was an issue. I nodded along, and he said, “Yeah, it’s all right here. You’re overdue for those things.”
His advice gave me the clarity I needed to get back to work, with the first order of business being to find someone to takeover the HR functions of the company.
When I hired that HR Manager (HR Wizard, we called her) all my problems didn’t go away, but all the ones on the top of the pile that I couldn’t figure out, did, and that freed me up to get working on the next problems that I did know how to fix.
My thinking here is that startups aren’t all unique. There’s a lot of stuff you’ll deal with that everyone else who has gone through your phase or struggles has also seen.
Simply having someone listen as you describe how tough your problems are, and how you think no one else has ever seen them, and then see them nod and point to a magic chart and say, “Yeah, it should hurt right now. You’re right where you’re supposed to be,” well, it means a lot.
Fast-forward a few years and I had outgrown my warehouse, orders are going out late, and I’m designing and building a new warehouse based on videos I’ve watched on YouTube about Amazon’s fulfillment centers … in way over my head and drowning more than swimming.
I reached out to a different buddy, went and sat on his porch, and on the verge of tears I described how my problems were different than every other company that has ever taken orders over the Internet and shipped them out of a warehouse. He nodded along, chuckled a bit, gave me a big hug and said, “You’re right where you’re supposed to be,” and told me of all the companies he’d seen battle the same thing.
Then, he pointed out the biggest problem I couldn’t see how to fix, showed me the options I couldn’t see to fix it, which gave me the clarity I needed to jump back into the fray. I tackled it, we got the train moving again, and I was on to the next one.
Surround yourself with those people who have been there before, and if you don’t have them, grab me. I’ll listen and nod, give you a hug, and get you back out there.
If we do it enough, we may end up with our own startup chart to point to, and if we do that, we should probably laminate it or something special right? I’ll let you know.
