No one plans to build a shitty company — but it happens and it’s ok!
I wasn’t planning to build a bad company, but there were a lot of times during my journey with Smove when I felt I had done just that. It felt like I had built a company that wasn’t “successful”, a company that did many things wrong and only a few things right.
I looked at other companies and thought that they had it all figured out, but the problem with that was information asymmetry: I didn’t know what was really going on behind the scenes. I usually heard entrepreneurs talk about how they had overcome an issue in retrospect, after the solution was already found. Much later I realised that the shiny funding news in the tech media is not the reality and that those companies haven’t figured it all out.
I believe I speak for every entrepreneur when I say that no one plans to build a shitty business. But many times we end up with one and it doesn’t feel right. I can hear the “if only we had executed as it was planned”, ”if only we had the right people” or “if only we had more money or the right investors” and many, many more reasons why the company ended up that way. But those were not the real reasons why I ended up where I was.
The trade-offs
For me it was the deliberate trade off that many start-up founders make between creating growth and perfectionism. When you start your business there are many unknowns about your product, your market, your customers and ,for many first time entrepreneurs, how to build a company.
So there is a lot to learn and you could go two ways about it: sit-down and do research about all aspects of building a company/ product etc and wait until you believe you have it absolutely right OR do some basic research, be aware that you will never find all applicable solutions to your business right away and get yourself to a stage where the learning curve for you and your business is much steeper.
I personally prefer the latter option, but I’m now fully aware that it is a trade-off that comes with challenges further down the line.
If you wait until you think everything is perfect, and remember your perception of ‘perfect’ might also not be aligned with the perception of the market, your product or service might no longer be needed, another company may have executed on it or you may never get out of research mode.
The different growth stages also naturally lead to ‘shitty’ phases.
Remember the saying that in the beginning you should build a company that doesn’t scale? You build excellent customer service where you send a personal, handwritten note to each user or a ‘no questions asked’ return policy. When you actually scale you might have to get rid of some of those features/ services that customers came to love and there will actually be disappointment.
Or team members that went through thick and thin with you, but you realise that some are not suited for the next stage. It will create disappointment if you have to let go of people that were there from the beginning, but most of the time it is the natural evolution of a business.
So, as you are going along and building your business you are also making compromises. Sometimes they are deliberate i.e. you can not launch this product at this point, you can not have a world-class marketing/ finance/ tech team yet as you do not have the funds available etc. But sometimes they are made through unconscious choices i.e. you are not able to focus on one product or service in the beginning and you tried to do it all or you are not focusing on the company culture that you are creating creating or not focusing on the type of people who your letting into your company (that includes employees but also co-founders, investors, advisors etc).
Whatever the reason, you might end up further down the line with a problem, most often several of them, and you have to solve it. That is usually the time when the entrepreneur feels down and feels that the company is a failure.
The shitty phases are inevitable
But guess what: solving those problems is your main job when you are growing your business. Because of the compromises & trade-offs, these problems are inevitable. You are supposed to solve problems for your customers, so you have to also solve the problems to get your company an inch closer to perfection, but just like the concept of mastery, you will never reach perfection because the compromises will continue no matter how big or mature your business becomes.
So your job, and that of your leadership team, is to keep a growth mindset and come with an attitude to solve these problems. Make sure you don’t let the problems demoralise you and you will start welcoming problems as new challenges. Take a few steps back and see if you can solve problems by creating more strategic solutions or deliberately make a problem bearable if you can’t solve it right now.
But yes, no one plans to build a shitty company, but most end up with one at some point. You can continue to improve and most entrepreneurs get better over time to deal with the problems and live with the ones that you can’t solve immediately.
