To mature from being a startup to a profitable, functioning company, you have to pass a few milestones. Anyone who has ever started a company or been involved in the early stages of startup will recognize the quandary — the volume of work vastly outstrips the resources and energy available. The leader’s mind spins with all there is to be done. As soon as you settle on three or four actions, you remember another three you forgot or you get a call reminding you of something else. Working “in the business” starts to get in the way of “working on the business”. We call this “entrepreneur’s swirl”?
To stop from getting so dizzy in the swirl you become ineffective – you have to get everything to stop moving and land on a piece of paper. A to do list? No. A to do list is what the inexperienced might consider. It lacks sequencing, focuses on immediate work, and does not properly assess the comprehensive body or relative priority of the work. You’re going to mature this company to consistent profitability and market dominance — you need more.
Paradoxically, working in sequence could be your downfall. You shouldn’t actually start at the beginning, you start at the very end. Begin with answers to these questions — where do you want to be in 18-24 months? What would “success” look like? Capture your answers and socialize them with your colleagues and investors. Be sure the description is comprehensive – you must have specifics about financials, operations, customer service, products, and technology, sales, marketing, funding and business culture.
From this description of success, you reverse engineer the steps to get you there, and by default create a master list of projects that span the next 24 months. Spread them out and sequence them as they should be done. Make sure to identify the work that is most critical to your value proposition…these are the breakthrough projects. Now you have a roadmap which is the grownup version of the to-do list!
Why start with the end?
- Because you don’t have time or resources to do anything not directly tied to success.
- You cannot afford to get distracted and waste resources on non-critical work.
Why a roadmap?
- Because you don’t want to ignore or miss anything necessary to succeed.
- Success is not solely financial performance. The roadmap forces you to consider everything.
- The roadmap will reveal missing resources and expertise.
- It allows you to creatively engage others to jump the roadblocks.
- The map helps you show others the path to success.
Why identify breakthrough projects?
- They are the critical building blocks; the force-multipliers.
- They cannot fail or slow down. Their speed is your speed.
- The process identifies less critical work that can slide without taking you off track.
Serial entrepreneurs remind us that that things don’t proceed according to plan. They lament that the definition of success can morph as market trends and needs reveals themselves. The roadmap you’ve created has been designed to adjust. You need only the discipline to continually “check in” on the definition of success and recast the roadmap on your journey.
Free yourself from the dizzying entrepreneurial swirl; create your roadmap today. With it you can have an efficient and productive team of motivated supporters, who’ll work with you to accomplish your goals.