Andy Kurtz of Kopis On Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup

Own your mistakes — for us, if we end up writing bad software or there is a problem with an install, we own up to it rather than pushing the blame on something else. We’ve salvaged client relationships by being honest about our mistakes and have turned clients into Kopis advocates by creating a real relationship with them.

Startups have such a glamorous reputation. Companies like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Uber, and Airbnb once started as scrappy startups with huge dreams and huge obstacles. Yet we of course know that most startups don’t end up as success stories. What does a founder or a founding team need to know to create a highly successful startup? In this series, called “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup” we are talking to experienced and successful founders and business leaders who can share stories from their experiences about what it takes to create a highly successful startup. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Kurtz.

In 1999, Andrew Kurtz founded Kopis, serving as President and CEO since that time and, together with his team, has successfully delivered solutions for firms, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Kopis specializes in custom software development, Business Intelligence solutions, application development, DBA services and ERP solutions for rapid-growth organizations whose growth typically outpaces their legacy systems and the ability to support and innovate their technologies.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

After graduating from Furman University with an accounting degree, I began my career with the accounting firm, Price Waterhouse, as an accountant. I quickly determined I did not enjoy public accounting so I joined with a client. Having become interested in software development in high school, I soon found myself actively using my seven-plus years of self-taught programming skills to expand upon and build new software systems for my employer.

In 1999, I founded Kopis (formerly ProActive Technology), serving as President and CEO since that time and have successfully delivered solutions for firms, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

In 2003, I founded Vigilix, the leading provider of remote monitoring and management solutions for the retail and hospitality industry, a business I continue to run today.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

There wasn’t really an exact aha moment. When I left the accounting firm and started software, things grew naturally. There was never a moment that clicked that software was what I should be doing. I enjoyed it, followed it and here I am over twenty years later.

Was there somebody in your life who inspired or helped you to start your journey with your business? Can you share a story with us?

There wasn’t any particular person that inspired me. I knew I always wanted to work for myself and I would read about business startups, creating business plans and those kinds of things fascinated me. But there wasn’t any one individual that was the great inspiration.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

We aren’t just focused on the project itself — we are focused on the problem we are trying to help our customer solve and then working with them to solve it with the right solution and the most simple solution. Along the way, we teach and coach our customers on how to recognize pitfalls, visualize success, and craft the simplest, most effective solution to accomplish what they want to accomplish.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Being in the tech space, there is a notion that developers get worked down, there is no work life balance. But the goodness that I try to bring to the world is providing a really great place to work, but also a place that allows people to do the other things that are important in life. It isn’t all about work and we need to focus on our people as people, not just billable resources.

Having a positive impact on our team and their families is something we strive for every day. But also positively impacting our community. We are part of the startup community, we get involved in mentoring programs and city initiatives to help build up our community.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Vision — It is important to not just be able to see what is, but to see what could be. Being able to see the possibility in challenges, a lot of problems, roadblocks and challenges are thrown at an entrepreneur, and it is very important to see the possibility instead of being paralyzed by the pressure. I frequently remind my team that we will make lemonade out of lemons.

Focus — one of the challenges of having vision is having too many ideas. So I think to be a successful entrepreneur, it is also important to be able to stay focused on any strategy long enough to give it a chance to be successful.

Confidence with a touch of stubbornness — being able to have the confidence to say to others that this will work and sticking with it long enough to figure it out. So having the confidence in your team and product/service to know you can meet the challenge. This comes with a fine line of being able to end something that won’t work, but there is an element of confidence you must have in yourself, your team, and your offering.

Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?

I was given the advice to productize a service and sell it as a product. The reality was we were not geared up as a business to sell a product. We are a professional services firm so we weren’t organized in a way to be successful selling a product. As a result, we took something that was a potential feeder of professional services and turned it into a money losing product venture that we eventually ended.

Following this advice took us off our focus, it wasn’t what we did at our core. The broader lesson there is to really do an analysis before diving into a venture that isn’t your core focus.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

I first started Kops in mid-1999. We had immediate success. We were growing, helping clients with getting ready for Y2K and also helping them get started with their internet development. Between Y2K and investing heavily in this brand new thing called the internet that everyone was jumping on, we were starting a business at a very unique time in the market.

But then, suddenly we turned around in March 2000, the NASDAQ stock market bubble burst and everyone got through Y2K without issue, it was all over.

We went from zero to 60 immediately, we staffed up to handle all the influx of new business, but come March when the market turned we suddenly had a whole bunch of team members we no longer needed.

Rather than scaling back our team though, we choose to rise to the challenge of finding work for our team. We wanted to grow more intentionally with a bit more structure and we met our own challenge and we’re a better company for it.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard? What strategies or techniques did you use to help overcome those challenges?

Early on I think it was simply I was too naive to understand the risk and I always had the confidence I would muscle through. We did, but it took an incredible amount of effort at times.

As we have grown, I struggled initially because I always loved creating and building solutions. As the company has grown, we have grown out of me doing that on a daily basis. But at some point, I reframed what I do daily into creating and building our company and our culture, and that mindset has helped keep me motivated.

The journey of an entrepreneur is never easy and is filled with challenges, failures, setbacks, as well as joys, thrills and celebrations. Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder”?

My experience has always been that on both the highs and failures that everything comes back to normal. Sometimes the successes and failures bring with them a new normal to adjust to. For example, if you’re in the middle of your comfort zone but you land a big deal and suddenly need to hire and grow the team by 20%, suddenly you’re a much larger team, payrolls are higher, management is bigger and all of that is more of a challenge. It can be incredibly uncomfortable until you recalibrate to it being your new normal.

The takeaway here being that it’s important to realize that victories can cause stress too.

One thing to remember is there have been times when you can get overly euphoric when you hit big success and you start to make bad decisions because you aren’t grounded in normal, you’re grounded in euphoria. So staying grounded is really important no matter which end of the spectrum you experience. Don’t make big decisions after a big win.

An example of that that happened at Kopis was that we took on a project with a partner that we signed a new customer with and it required us to increase our team size by about 30%. We managed to hire and bring on a team and it was a contract that was supposed to span three years. So we suddenly had a team that was 30% bigger. We are one year into our contract and one day I received a phone call from the partner saying they have to cancel the project in 30 days. Now we are faced with a big team that we don’t have enough work for that is eating into our overhead. But we challenged ourselves to meet the new normal of a bigger team and we pushed hard to get new customers on board to fill the demand of our new larger team.

Let’s imagine that a young founder comes to you and asks for your advice about whether venture capital or bootstrapping is best for them? What would you advise them? Can you kindly share a few things a founder should look at to determine if fundraising or bootstrapping is the right choice?

It depends. The biggest question to answer is ‘will the money accelerate you?’

The point of VC money or any external money is valuable when it allows you to move faster, and moving faster allows you to gain ground in what you’re trying to accomplish.

If you have a scenario where you have an idea but the market of opportunity will close, VC money might make sense to get the product done faster so you can start selling faster. If you have a product and you have started having success selling it, then VC money might allow you to ramp up and accelerate those sales.

But there is a cost to that money, and if that money doesn’t accelerate you, or if you’re not sure how it can accelerate you, then I would bootstrap until you figure out how VC money will have a positive impact. Don’t take it just to take it.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Many startups are not successful, and some are very successful. From your experience or perspective, what are the main factors that distinguish successful startups from unsuccessful ones? What are your “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

1. Learn about your potential customers, their pains and their struggles.
2. Focus on how you can help them overcome those challenges and reach their goals.
3. Test your theory as cheaply as possible. Spend as little time and effort on building the solution until you are confident you know it’s the solution your customer will buy.
4. Get to the point where you are asking people for money as quickly as possible. It’s way too easy for people to tell you they would buy from you when you aren’t actually asking them to buy. What happens when you actually have the product/service and go back to that person asking to buy, then you get the real truth of why they won’t buy. And that is ultimately what you need. So you want to spend as little money as possible to get to that point.
5. Own your mistakes — for us, if we end up writing bad software or there is a problem with an install, we own up to it rather than pushing the blame on something else. We’ve salvaged client relationships by being honest about our mistakes and have turned clients into Kopis advocates by creating a real relationship with them.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

Not starting with understanding their customers. Early on, CEOs should focus on selling, not building. Real growth as a company in size and maturity comes through focusing on the customer, not the solution.

Not “letting go” and allowing their team to take ownership of different areas. When starting small and wearing all the hats, you learn you CAN do (almost) everything. But the question that took me a long time to answer was SHOULD I be doing (almost) everything. Once I had reached the conclusion that I should not be doing everything, there was a second layer of challenge which was trusting the team — and it was a subconscious challenge. If I had been asked if I trusted the team to make the right decisions, the answer would have been “yes,” but subconsciously, I don’t think that was true. It took time and watching them make good, sometimes different, always well thought out decisions. Over time, as that trust built, my ability to “let go” and allow the team to function without my direct involvement in everything grew.

The thinking that “If you build it, they will come” — simply building good solutions is not enough. Young founders need to learn how execution and skill around sales and marketing are, if not more, important to success than technical skill.

Startup founders often work extremely long hours and it’s easy to burn the candle at both ends. What would you recommend to founders about how to best take care of their physical and mental wellness when starting a company?

Early on in a startup, it’s just going to take a lot of energy and a lot of hours. But to help combat that, you should block time on your schedule for things that are important for you. I didn’t do a great job at this, but I wish I had.

Block your schedule for things that bring you peace. It might be meditation, reading or exercise. But you need to not just block your calendar but keep it sacrosanct. If you aren’t strict about your blocked time, people will start to think they can use that time and it will disappear.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I would start a movement to bring back factual truths. People are always going to have different ideologies and that’s okay, we have different beliefs of what we think is the best way to approach something and fix something, but if we can’t even agree on the basic facts, we will never get anything done.

So if I could start a movement it would be toward factual truth.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

On Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpvxandrewkurtz/ or by following Kopis at https://www.linkedin.com/company/kopisusa/

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!