A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Oisin Hanrahan, the founder and CEO at Handy in New York, a platform that connects individuals to household service professionals. In the Q&A session he talked about the 5 tasks a startup CEO must take care of.
1. Set a vision
The word vision is used quite often without properly explaining its context. I understand vision as the high level, long term plan where you want to go with your company. This is the highest level of guidance that you set for your startup. Once this is done, you start breaking things down to goals, strategies, tactics and activities. A nice vision could be: “Be Switzerland’s largest (in terms of users) job platform.” More on this topic here.
2. Recruit people
This is probably the most important task that you will be responsible for as a CEO. A wrong hire cannot only harm your culture but also end up in a very expensive nightmare and waste of money (we have been there and it’s not fun).
Just some quick thoughts on this topic: Hire effectively – meaning hire for quality and not quantity – don’t hire out of need but because you feel the person is a great fit and adds value. Look for people who are willing to grow and ask them specifically about this during the interview. Check for cultural fit from day one and make sure that you are consciously building the culture. Finally, establish a fast and simple recruiting process – when you know you want to hire someone, just do it!
3. Fundraise
Bootstrap, if possible, until you reach product market fit. Fundraising is very important yes, but also very time consuming and a huge distraction for you to build a business. Additionally, the longer you wait for getting funded, the stronger your negotiating power becomes (assuming you are positively developing your business). Also challenge yourself and ask: Do I really need other people’s money to build my business?
The ideal pattern looks like this: You start working on your idea and build first traction. After iterating based on customer feedback you hit strong numbers to proof your product market fit and are heading towards a cash flow positive business. Now you can either run the business profitable on your own, or, if this is a bigger opportunity, get investors on board to make your business big and scale things up. This is over simplified and will be elaborated in more details in different posts but shows how things look like in an ideal world.
4. Motivate people
You are now a role model. Of course, you also have better and worse days and moments where everything just doesn’t work out as planned. However, you are now fully responsible for your team and act as a role model. Even when you have a bad time, you must stay positive and make sure that your team is surrounded by a positive vibe. There are a lot of startups that fail due to people problems. Don’t be one of them.
The most powerful and probably also sustainable motivator for any employee – but especially for startup employees – is the sense of meaning derived from work. Create learning opportunities for your team, make sure they can take over responsibilities and make decisions and build a great culture that bonds your team. Sounds simple but is way more complex in real life.
5. Spread the word about your company
You are also responsible for getting the word out there about your company. No one really cares whether you exist or not if they have never heard about your company ever. Of course, this means attending conferences, holding speeches and workshops but also building a (personal) brand around your topic. Just make sure that you first spend enough time to actually develop a business that you can talk about instead of spending time on spreading the word too early without building the business first. The latter would be a huge waste of time.