An Early Stage Dilemma for Founders — Chief? Indian?

Building an Early Stage Startup Mean Having To Be Both — But At The Right Time

In an emerging start-up business, founders and senior leaders will have to play both roles. In one corner, as a C-Level executive, you must have a high-level grasp on the various levers and projects taking place inside the business. You must be able to summarize performance, highlights and challenges to the board of directors or even prospective investors. When it comes time for board meetings or quickly updating an interested party, less slides are often preferable to more. Accomplishing this is easier said than done, but it comes down to spending a little bit of time on many different things during the day.

This approach is effective but when you find yourself having to play the role of office staff, a big challenge is presented. While it may take only an hour or so to put together a short presentation deck for a quarterly update, the building blocks for such will take some more time. For instance, developing the full budget projections or actively maintaining a sales pipeline takes a little more focused time and effort.

A big mistake is treating all work the same. You must be able to differentiate between C-level work and staff work and apply the appropriate mindset. Sharing a few key points about the performance of a marketing campaign can be done in short order if you have command of the various efforts. Setting up a few dozen marketing campaigns across different audiences, devices and requiring various creative and ad copy can take several hours (if not more) of uninterrupted time and focus.

Be aware of the type of work you have to engage in. Approaching the tedious set-up of a marketing campaign as an executive and taking a high-level stance will likely end up producing less than effective results. Remember, your competitors — particularly the established ones — likely have full-time staff getting into every nook and cranny of the campaign structure and monitoring. When it comes to doing a financial model, you must be prepared to invest the many hours to think through the levers and get the formulas right. A high-level financial recap may satisfy the board but if the underlying inputs and infrastructure are constructed with a high-level mentality, many important pieces will be missed and your financial clarity will be at risk.

Then, on the other side of the equation, you must be prepared to seamlessly shift back to C-level status when your board or investor calls for an update. Sharing a click-by-click commentary in a 100 slide deck on marketing campaign 73 of 153 probably will not be well received.

Until your start-up can stand on its own and is in a position to hire additional staff, you will have to fluidly and competently play both roles — and know when to be a Chief and when to be an Indian. Resist the urge to be too detailed when a concise statement or two will do; resist the urge to take some light strokes at a project that requires great detail because you have so much on your plate.

When it comes time to put in those several hours of uninterrupted work, slap on a set of headphones or get out of the office and get the work done the way it can be. Then, be prepared to shift gears back to multi-tasking, jack of all trades start-up executive wearing many hats at the same time.