You know what you are good at, what you like to do, and what you can learn to do. But there are many skills that you don’t have and you know you need them to accomplish your goals. This is where you identify these areas, then go out and find other people or companies to fill in your gaps. The process of doing this and doing it well has been a learning journey.
I have learned a lot during my process of running CareBand and other ventures. Not only about working with people and partnering with companies but with how people work and how the world works.
The scope is focused on those:
- People who approach you on LinkedIn or cold email and want to work with you to help your startup.
- Someone you meet at a startup event who says they help startup founders do X, Y, Z
- Startup events are buzzing with these types of people.
- You can’t ignore these people, but you have to learn the patterns of them. You have to learn what to look for, what to look out for, and how you can vet then leverage them and their skills, experiences, and assets.
- An advisor, consultant, or firm who you seek out to support you
I want to share some of my learnings with you today:
When you strip all the buzzwords and terms away from the person or firm there are 6 categories people fall into:
- Business development (most under-rated task for early stage startup, most important task – how are you going to create a sustainable market channel to acquire customers)
- By far the largest category of people.
- I include many folks in here because at the core of their value is the act of business development.
- They include startup advisors, fraction C-suite (including CFOs, for most early stage startups), people who help you/say they help you raise money, investment bankers, pure business development or sales, and go-to-market advisors (you can create a plan, what you hire them or what you want from them even if you don’t articulate it clearly enough, is customers/channels to the market).
- CFO/Accounting
- Insurance
- These include for
- employee insurance (i.e. healthcare) and benefits
- company insurance (i.e. liability, cyber)
- These include for
- Grant writers
Vetting and Deciding
How do you know if the person or firm will do what they say they are going to do before you work with them?
Some claim and don’t deliver while others claim and deliver. But how do you know who is who? How do you trust someone you just met who says something that you don’t know enough about to say it that is real or possible or likely or what?
This too me a long time to understand but I have a pretty good handle on it now. In reality, you don’t really ever know if the person or firm will do what they say they are going to do, but this is what I have learned.
You have had a few conversations with a person or firm and you are ready to consider their offer to work together.
- Do your own due diligence. Take in as much information as you can to learn. Do not spend any money on this, just your time (which you should know equals money, so set a time limit). – LIMIT 2 hours
- Search on google and read everything you can find
- It is important to look at the dates of what you read to know how recent it is.
- Find them on Linkedin
- Look at their profile and level of expertise of putting their profile together
- Look at your mutual connections
- Do you like your mutual connections? Do you know any of those people well?
- Consider reaching out to those mutual connections to ask if they know your person and what they think of them. Ask your mutual connections to jump on a quick call with you and share their thoughts.
- Consider telling your mutual connections your goal. Why are you looking to work with that person? What job to be done are you looking to solve?
- Look at their posts and activity. Read their comments
- Read their blogs on medium, LinkedIn or on their website.
- Search on google and read everything you can find
- Ask them for 3 references. Only 3. – LIMIT 1 hour
- The person or firm will only give you references that will speak highly of them. You must know this in advance and take what the references say with a grain of salt.
- The person or firm is selfish in doing this, but it is what they should do if they want to win your business.
- Ask pointed questions to get the right information that you need to help make your decision. Write these questions down before hand and be sure to ask the same questions to all three references in order to assess the quality of the answer you seek.
- Why only 3 references?
- Knowing that the firm gave you those references and why the firm choose those people, then talking to more positive influencers won’t help your case.
- Your goal in talking to these people is to validate what you read and learned in step 1 in your own due diligence.
- So learn what you can, validate your assumptions, be done, and move on.
- The person or firm will only give you references that will speak highly of them. You must know this in advance and take what the references say with a grain of salt.
- Does the offer make sense. – LIMIT 3 hours
- Read the offer. Read the entire contract. Add comments and questions. Then ask your attorney to answer and explain things that don’t make sense. If you don’t have an attorney, then ask an advisor, friend, or someone else to help you make sense of it.
- Never sign something that you don’t fully understand.
- At the very least, on any contract you receive, review and understand the Term and Termination clause to figure out what your out is.
- If things go badly, how do you get out of this contract.
- Ask yourself if the offer logically makes sense. Is what they are saying even possible to do?
- If it seems too good to be true, it usually is. So stop wasting your time and move on.
- Read the offer. Read the entire contract. Add comments and questions. Then ask your attorney to answer and explain things that don’t make sense. If you don’t have an attorney, then ask an advisor, friend, or someone else to help you make sense of it.
- Make a decision – LIMIT 1ish hours (more than likely you will spend time when you are not working, thinking through this, so it is hard to put a “time limit” on this one)
- You have invested a significant amount of time. If you understand the concept of your time is money then you know that you have invested at least a few hundred dollars of your time if not more into the process.
- Check in with yourself – how do you feel about the person or firm?
- Feel okay – go for it
- Feel not okay – don’t go for it, tell them in a simple email, move on.
- You may never feel 100% yay or nay, but it is crucial that you make a definitive decision and notify the person or firm of that decision.
How to feel after a decision is made
Making decisions is hard. Being confident enough to make a hard decision without a full picture or without a clear ROI is hard. Being a founder is hard. It is our job to make hard decisions, take risks then learn and keep going.
Once you make your decision, it is crucial that you follow the tips below. I have learned how to do this and how to trick my mind to focus on this, it is very hard but very important.
- With a decision made, your job is to move forward. Try not to look back and play the “IF” game in your head
- Say you are 2 months in, and you question IF the decision was a bad idea, then it is very easy to let your unconscious mind take over and tell you that you messed up and are a terrible person for making this terrible mistake.
- Instead, work on your mindset (this is hard to do but important to practice, practice makes you better)
- Convince yourself that you made the best decision that you could with the information that you had at the time of the decision.
- That is all you can believe.
- When you doubt yourself, you return to that statement. Repeat it in your head until you solidify your belief in it.
- Then look at where you are now, reflect on what the good and bad lessons have been and file those into your brain to inform your decisions or decision-making process for next time.
Why I believe working with people and firms is valuable even if the agreed upon goal fails
One of the most core beliefs I have about people is that each person, no matter who they are, is valuable. Every person I meet has some value that I don’t have or I have not experienced. By working with that person or firm, I can tap into that value and learn to be better individually or learn to be better as a company.
I know this to be true because every person lives their own life. They have made different decisions than me and walked on different paths to where they are now and where they are heading.
My mindset is that each person then has something (i.e. a lesson, a story, a skill, etc.) they know that if shared with me could be useful for my personal or professional growth.
When you enter into an agreement with a person or firm, you have access to that person’s time and attention for the term of the agreement. That is insanely valuable as an idea of its own. Knowing this, I can:
- Learn what they know
- How they see and interact with the world
- Watch and observe how they process information
- Seek to understand what they do with that information and how they plan their next steps
I also am aware of the fact that people are selfish. I don’t mean that they are selfish in an egotistical way, rather in a human or psychological way (maslow’s hierarchy of needs) that person thinks about themselves first. Then they think about their family and friends (strong connections), and then their friends of friends (weak connections).
If what you and/or what you are doing can help them, their strong connections, and/or their weak connections, then you are aligned to succeed together. As I have learned, “help them” could be through a personal or professional desire to achieve their goals or needs.
Further, assuming the person or firm knows the value of their time then their actions of entering into an agreement demonstrate that they see something valuable in you and/or what you are doing.
In turn, that person or firm will do whatever they can to help themselves which will help you.