Build startups like relationships

Due to my experience in the Startup World and having a great relationship with a wonderful woman, I recognized a lot of similarities about the way you should build a great Team.

Find a partner you connect with

The first step in both worlds is to find people you like and you want to hang out with. This step is all about getting to know each other to see if you want to work and live together over the next years. In this phase, most of the beginning startups and relationships break apart. That makes sense since you just started getting to know each other. It takes a lot of time with many trials-and-errors.

In the Startup World, the people aren’t as emotional about these early breakups. They understand that it’s the best for both. They appreciate each other for being honest and for telling as soon as possible if things aren’t working out. This saves time and energy for both and takes them one step closer to a better fitting partner.

When it comes to relationships, the people tend to be a lot more emotional about these breakups. Instead of respecting the decision and be thankful for the person for being honest, they are looking for reasons, excuses and someone to blame. I think we should see it more as a trial-and-error phase with a lot of fun and meeting great people. It would save time and energy as well.

Shared Value

After you assembled a team and feel the connection to the person, you should start working on the shared value of yours. They are very important because that will keep the team united, no matter how big the challenge will be.

You should ask each other, what is important for you, what kind of person do you want to be, where and how do you want to live, how many kids you want and so on. You should share your history with each other, what made you to the person you are today. How do you treat others and how do you want to be treated. Tell each other about your strength and weaknesses and about your working expertise. In this phase, you will also learn about yourself. You will be asking yourself questions about what impact do you want to have on our world and how you can accomplish that goal.

Shared Vision

After you shared your value, you can create a shared vision of your future. This is a very important part. It is about commitment and responsibility.

In the startup world, you have to clear out how long you will commit to each other and to your startup. It is better for you if you commit on a certain period of time instead on an idea. Because your idea will change on this journey anyways and you will be iterating a lot. So you better make sure that you will be there for each other for a certain period of time. In my opinion, some time between two and three years is a good time frame to work with.

For relationships, this step is huge, because it can last for the rest of your life. So you better make sure that you both are on the same page when it comes to life planning. There is nothing worse than waking up one day and realize that you want a completely different lifestyle. For example, if you realize you want to live in warm weather at an ocean instead of living in a cold region in the mountains as your partner wants to. That doesn’t mean you can’t do both, but you should have talked about it before and check if you can connect both worlds. The same goes for family planning, when you want to have a big family, you should check if your partner has the same preferences.

Clear responsibilities

Now you have completed the first big phase of building a great startup or relationship — you built a good team. Next you have to think about the execution of the team, or as Gary Vaynerchuk puts it:

Ideas are shit. Execution is the name of the game.

To have a team execute well, you have to clear out responsibilities. You have to address certain fields to the team members and make them responsible for them. This doesn’t mean they have to do all the work on their own, they just have to make sure that the work will be done. You also have name leaders on certain topics. This will be important when you have to make decisions even though not everyone agrees on it.

In Startups, you often have bigger teams and then you should also name a referee. The referee mediates when members get into an argument. But the referee also has to decide, who is right about the argument from the startup point of view. The different fields are mostly business development, administration, finance, marketing & sales, design, coding, engineering and so on.

For relationships, the fields are more about finance & administrations, household, grocery shopping, work, taking care for the kids, and so on. In my relationship, my wife is in charge of the household, but still I have to do some parts of it. I like to vacuum for example, I think those new vacuum cleaners look really awesome and it is fun to hunt some dust down. So it was an easy decision to assign that task to me.

Clear Communications

The last step is to implement a good communication strategy. Where do you communicate, how do you schedule appointments and how do you communicate deadlines should be some of the questions you should answer in this section. This is more important to startups than to relationships, because a wrong and old communication strategy will cost you a lot of money.

In our consulting startup for digital communications and business model development, we learned that many small and medium sized business are communicating not appropriately. Digital transformation still hasn’t arrived in daily business. Most of the time businesses are highly inefficient because their workflows still rely on paper-mentality. This costs a lot of time, energy and money. The results you can get with new technology communication tools and a clear strategy are enormous.

Start working on your ideas

After you successfully build your team and planned your execution, you can start thinking about ideas and their implementation.

In the Startup World, this means finding real needs and working with new technologies.

For Relationships, this is more about planning your next weekend or vacations.

And don’t forget to iterate once in a while and most important:
enjoy your life with a great team you can build on.