Tackle the Hard Stuff Head On
**Originally published 8/18/2013
What coaches first teach you when learning to play football is how to properly tackle an oncoming player. Head up, back straight, make direct contact, keep your feet moving, and drive the player into the ground. If your approach is wrong, you can get hurt badly. Once you feel a stinger down your spine because of poor form, you quickly learn not to make that mistake again.
The best startups in our Promus Ventures community tackle their issues head-on. They may get beat down and dirty, but they pick themselves up quickly, learn from what just hit them and line back up smarter for the next play.
Just as great coaches in post-game interviews quickly identify areas of strengths, weaknesses and where to improve, great startup teams constantly iterate their business in the same manner. When updating us on progress, they can clearly:
- communicate the 3–5 KPIs that define their company,
- list conclusions from what they’ve learned from the data, and
- show concrete areas they are changing to improve their team and product.
(Side note — if you don’t have real-time measurable KPIs that everyone in the organization sees daily, then stop everything and figure this out immediately. As Lewis Carroll says, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”)
I’ve sat in many board meetings that have lasted 3 hours that could have been done in 15 minutes had the team just tackled the honest truth of what the key data said and the changes needed to turn that data around. If you can’t directly face the continual rush of giants coming at you and tackle them hard into the ground, then get off the field.
You may not win the game, but you’ll go down trying, and I’ll pick these people as teammates all day long.
