Setting the right bar for your company
What is the realistic bar you can set as an early stage founder?
This is a question i’ve wrestled a lot the past few months. The question of “what bar do you set?”
It’s easy to just say “I’m going to set a really high bar and hire people that are better than me.”
After all, isn’t that what all the famous CEO’s say?
But when you’re in the early days of a scaling startup I don’t think this is realistic. At least not if you want to remain as fast & flexible as i do.
And so this is the question I will dissect this week.
What does it mean to set a high bar?
A high bar means that you are trying to get really good people. People that are smart, have the know-how, are good at execution, etc.
I think of it a bit like my consulting days. When I was in BCG the bar was very high… everyone was as smart and motivated as I was. Some even a lot more so.
If you get these types of people then you have a very strong foundation because they can work without much direction. They make smart decisions and are more likely to come up with creative solutions when they get stuck.
Plus they will likely be more self-motivated and more apt to want to take ownership.
When you don’t have folks like this you need to invest a lot more time into monitoring them and giving them more explicit instructions. Which spreads you thinner.
Most likely you cannot set too high a bar if you are bootstrapping
The problem with an early stage startup is… “Why would these high bar people want to work with you?”
Either it will be because:
You give them significant equity as a co-founder (and they really believe in you and your company)
You pay them well (which is hard to do unless you are venture funded)
You catch them very early in their career (but this is difficult because it’s hard to find these people)
You catch them when they are in the midst of a career transition and so they are more flexible (this is one of the best times to exploit this).
I generally do a combination of the 3rd and 4th bullet. But while i start flexible.. i do aim to provide very fair terms to everyone that does a good job as things evolve and get bigger.
And still.. I cannot say i’ve nailed it. And so the reality is that you need to make do what you have and try to grow your people.
You need to decide what is important and what you’re willing to live with if it is not up to par.
For example, I prioritise people that are willing and able to stick to my ‘Beast method’. And am willing to sacrifice a bit in experience because my general view is that we can figure it out together.
If you follow the system and work in a disciplined way then you will probably do just fine and enjoy working with me.
What do you do if someone doesn’t meet the bar?
When someone doesn’t meet the bar you need to do several things well:
You need to be have the transparency to figure this out relatively early on
You need to have a relatively flexible working engagement such that you can remove them quickly and easily (ie. not too expensively)
I find Beast Method to be very efficient at this.
Since everything is a task I see via their updates what they are doing and what they are achieving. As well as how disciplined they achieve their work.
And as we use all contractors with flexible contracts it makes it easy to part ways very quickly.
Having said that you need to be fair and equitable. If you’re parting ways with folks when they are doing a good job, others will begin to lose faith in working with you and your company.
So you need to strike a balance.
Case Study: I just let go of an agency
The other day I let go of a Tiktok agency that I’d sourced through Upwork who had been working with us for three weeks. We were paying them hourly with a fixed cap on hours per week.
Mainly I’d decided to go with an agency first as I thought that there was perhaps some special know how in finding affiliates. Maybe they have established relationships with creators that we could leverage?
The first week I gave them a lot of flexibility, but I wasn’t really seeing the value they were creating. They’d created some banners and registered us for flash sales, but then i told them i didn’t want to ever discount our product and so pretty much all of the work they did was a waste.
When i gave this feedback they didn’t seem to care.
Rather they acted as if everyone needs to use flash sales and i “don’t understand Tiktok” if I don’t use them. And my strong retort was… “No Jack! You don’t understand our product and business.”
The second week I told them they needed to follow my process and created Clickup cards that I wanted them to update each time they worked on something. Basically I wanted the details on what they were doing.
I reminded them of this several times and even got on a call with the guy to drive the point home.
None-the-less the process wasn’t followed.
The third week I gave a hard warning and it seemed like perhaps it was registering as they gave me a spreadsheet with affiliates that they had “researched”. But I decided I was gonna dig in.
As I clicked through the creator profiles I found it was full of people that had nothing to do with our niche and many of them were talking Spanish, which is not our target.
Then I spent two hours making my own similar spreadsheet and realized that I could achieve far better results in these two hours than they had achieved by billing me for 7 hours.
Sure I consider my own time much more expensive than their’s, but I am very good at creating a SOP and assigning it to one of my own vetted VA’s who charge me far less.
I’d had enough. I fired the agency and left a bad review.
They bitched. I didn’t give a shit.
You do shitty work, you deal with the consequences.
Closing thoughts
Why did I give this example above?
It is to make a point. That if you want to hold a reasonably high bar as an early stage startup without fancy venture funding then you need to be willing to dive into the details yourself.
Don’t just outsource it. Most people will give others the benefit of the doubt because it costs them nothing.
If I hadn’t enforced transparency and gotten into the details, this agency would have probably continued creating garbage work for another month or more. And probably would have spent at least 2-3x more on them.
Even more importantly everyone else in the team would have seen that it is ok that this agency does a shitty job.
And I can’t allow that. Because that shit’s contagious.