Defining the ‘right’ founding team
Experts often drop statements like “You need the right founding team to start a great business”. They’re right.
However, they tend to not elaborate on it as much as they should. They feel the meaning of it is implied to their audience that usually just scribbles down these golden words on a notebook. Additionally, there is no shortage of articles on the internet that overuse this phrase.
However, what does the ‘right’ founding team even mean?
The word ‘right’ , like other similar adjectives, serves no purpose. It’s vague, abstract and subjective. Let’s break it down.
In layman terms, the right founding team would consist of people who:
- Can postpone the need for hiring new talent or the search for external assistance in your early stages
- Are capable of up-skilling and have a high saturation point
- Have a great amount of common sense
- Have the time and patience to stay with the business while you are still learning about your own business
- Can transform dreams into actionable business strategies
Let me break it down further.
#1 — What technical, non-technical and soft skills does your founding team consist of and not consist of, is a question you need to ask yourself.
Let us say you have an idea for an E-commerce website. Would you rather have your founding team make the website or would you rather hire an external agency to do it for you? Of course the founding team. But what if your founding team doesn’t have anyone who knows how to make a website?
If your initial team offers no actual skills needed to set up the core business or offers enough skills to only set it up and not sufficient skills to continue it by itself for at least 4–8 months, you’ll eventually feel the pinch and realize that you’ll have to hire someone. If you’ve just started*, chances are that it’s only you who loves your business enough to work without a salary. Others, including your latest hire, expect to be paid.
The money that could have been spent in core business areas is now being spent on an avoidable expense — hiring an employee you didn’t really need if you had been more thoughtful about who you actually decide to set up the business with.
Even if you do have the money to hire a 3rd party, they’re probably not going to be there for you at 3 AM when you need an immediate change to your website. Your “immediate” requirement will require ‘3–5 working days’ to respond to if you’re lucky.
Let’s take another example. You wish to carry out some social media promotions. You hire a freelancer to make some social media promotional material for you and you use the same to make some sales. However, your existing promotions don’t bring in enough sales. So you want to try something else. However, because you have no sales, you have no more funds for online marketing and because you have no more funds for online marketing, you have no sales. It’s an oversimplified cycle but you get the point. A lot of people would typically blame the lack of funds for such a situation but the more probable problem could be the lack of in-house skills.
Convert your business idea into the must-have skills needed to achieve that idea. Try ensuring that most of them, if not all, are present in your founding team. Make everything in-house. Control the quality and timing of everything you do. Avoid avoidable hiring. Save yourself A LOT OF money by just starting with the right skilled people ensuring the survival/sustainability of your start-up in its early stages.
- [In this context, you’re 0–1 years old and have transformed your idea into a legitimate product/service and have begun to serve your first customers]
2 — You’re growing and you’re coming across new challenges & opportunities in your business.
You either feel the need of a few extra hands or feel the need to hire a new skilled person to do certain things for you.
Now let’s think about this. Does your problem really require an extra person? Or would it not help if the existing team worked 15 hours instead of 12 hours and got the same job done?
Does your problem immediately require the new skill or can your existing team take up some time to up-skill themselves and learn the skills in order to avoid hiring people?
Identify the problem and the solution. What do you need? Do you need the skill or a new person with the skill? Chances are that you always just need the skill. So why not learn it yourself and contribute to the team, thereby saving time and money?
As much as possible, try foreseeing what kind of skills would your early-stage business require in the short-to-medium term and ensure that your team is growing and remaining relevant accordingly. You will not be able to look outside for every skill gap that you identify. You shouldn’t have to. Ensure that your initial team has a high saturation point — can sit down and work for hours, don’t complain when things get tough and don’t mind clocking in a few extra hours. You shouldn’t have a problem as long as your founding team has character.
#3 — Not all business decisions are rocket science. Not all require you to go into hours of thinking, analysis, never-ending discussions, research and more importantly, skepticism.
Some answers and decisions [regardless of the scale of the decision] are fairly obvious if you have good enough perspective of things, can make reasonable assumptions and speak for the rationals and the irrationals.
Ensure that your founding team in most aspects has a good amount of business common sense. That doesn’t mean they need to have prior business experience. It means that they can, by their own nature, understand needs, foresee some situations, understand how people might respond/react and make wise decisions.
You don’t want people in your team making every small decision a complex matter or ones that would take unreasonably long to arrive at fairly obvious conclusions.
#4 — A business isn’t something you can create overnight so don’t try to.
The early months/years of your business is not for you to become a unicorn. It’s for you to learn about your own business and become a wiser decision maker.
Allow yourself the time and make sure your team is patient enough to make through this phase.
Ensure that your team realizes the value of the initial years and is willing to commit to the importance of learning about the business first before inviting investors, aggressively chasing customers and what-not. A wider bandwidth of skills, patience and time will help you set the right foundation needed to take the right team forward.
#5 — It’s great to have big dreams but even greater if you achieve them.
Your team can be full of passionate individuals, innovators and dreamers. It’s nice if you do. Unfortunately, a business doesn’t operate in accordance with the vastness and magnificence of your dream. It requires you to break your dreams down into relevant tasks, monotonous operations, and instrumental strategies. Team up with people who are actually willing to get their hands dirty and not just the ones who dream to ride upon the trend of being an “Entrepreneur”.
Conclusion:
The concept of “right founding teams” should be spoken of in terms of what does the said team allow and not allow, enable and not enable the business to do and become.
Although this by itself is not the sum and substance of what the definition of a “right founding team” is, I feel it’s sufficient enough to shed more clarity on it. There are of course other factors that you may consider such as past history amongst team members and synergy created out of experiences but they don’t require to be elaborated.
None of my opinions are meant to dissuade people from seeking external help or are meant to burden a company’s founding team. They are mere suggestions of arguably sensible and convenient ways of starting a business.
Liked what you read? Check out more articles by Business Unscripted!
