Why we love and need organization freaks in startups

Building a venture from scratch can look like an overwhelming dream. You basically need to think about everything, come up with an MVP and find clients, think about how to operate and guarantee a golden experience to the first clients with usually limited ressources.

Building a venture out of a garage

The well-known stereotype of early-stage ventures is very messy environment where teams need to “make it happen” in very short deadlines. The priority is not to lay clear processes but to have a product and have the first clients. When the traction is there, then it is time to focus on getting the product, operations and generally processes in the team better and ready for the scale phase.

This is a stereotype I’ve heard about many times and that I have seen during my startup experiences. Fortunately, I had experienced other set ups in the past that showed me the importance to be very clean on processes as soon as day 1 (if not before ;)), otherwise it might become too late to adjust stuff once business traction is coming and you need to support increased demand for your product.

The consultant mindset to build scalable startups

I have often worked with former consultants and investment bankers reconverted as entrepreneurs and it has mostly been very good and rewarding experiences. I myself did internships in these industries when I was student, and that gave me a very structured, rigorous and detail-oriented mindset, as well as the ability to interact very naturally with people coming from there.

With them, the rule is simple: from the very beginning, even before the beginning, things have to be organised. Use Excels to track everything. Have a clean Google Drive with well organised projects folders. Use Asana to split tasks (more about Asana & I here) and build trackers to monitor activities. Nothing should be “drafty”, you should aim at being data-oriented in every decision even without data — make estimates and hypothesis. Even if the tech team cannot automate all processes straight away, try to come up with good manual processes that are scalable — using some scripts, or some simple data exports / imports in an Excel with an output tab. I wrote an article about how to use Googlesheets tricks to increase automation and productivity — find here if you’re not the kind of person whose religion is Excel.

Working with consultants and bankers led me to have a very organised view of things. Maybe too much sometimes — it is a startup and you can have room for a little bit of mess all the same ;) But never more than a little bit and try to save some time from time to time to clean up your files, folders and review your processes. In the long run, this will save you a considerable amount of time:

• when new comers join, their onboarding time will be shorter as they will have a clear view of all the documents and processes if you keep everything on clean Google Drive folders / Asana type tools
• once your business is scaling, things will be very smooth if some solid processes are already in there — otherwise, it will be chaotic and might endanger your relationships with your first clients who enjoyed a golden “manual” first experience (everything done manually without tech / processes) but will see that you’re not able to face growth properly.

So focus on getting clients and building a good MVP first, but make it in an organised and clean way to have a bit of respect for long-term and when scale will come.

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