“Inevitability has been delayed by a few days.”

In all my research, I haven’t found a better example of a negative comment becoming the biggest motivation for success.

This statement was made by an exiting co-founder of my company who was quitting the company and heard that we have signed another customer.  Inevitability meant bankruptcy.

Let me put this in context.

I am an entrepreneur and I run an online marketing company.

A year back we went through huge turmoil in the company wherein a big chunk of the core team wanted to part away with the company. That decision was the easy part. What follows after that is usually nothing less than the most dramatic daily soap revealing every side of human emotions (good, bad, ugly).  Ofcourse the decision was also motivated by the fact that we were not doing as well, and were kind of drifting away from what brought us together 2 years back.

Can this thing really be successful?

I went through a great deal of soul searching looking through every possibility of what I should be doing.  As someone respected and considered by some as one of the best brains, it was a very difficult situation to be in.

Almost everyone I knew offered advices; most of them were sane from their perspective. Most of them offering collaborations, job-offers (ofcourse with very senior roles and good packages) and multitude of other variants, which could support me at the time.

I started looking at why we failed and what can I turn-around to make what I started successful.

Having done strategy / transformation all my life, I was confident enough that whatever I decide will certainly work.

The support at this time came from the most unexpected corners, the team which remained at the company. And what happened after that can be termed as nothing less than a fairy-tale. People who always lived under the shadow of those who were leaving now started to blossom. I could call anyone at 12 in the night, and the person would be willing to spend the next 2 hours putting together a proposal document for a US customer with an urgent requirement.

And then it all started to come together to me. Here is where most companies miss the boat:

Trick # 1

Most companies have their own top performers and average employees. Noone looks beyond the top performers to the average employees. And oh boy, do the average employee have some skills !!

I haven’t regretted a single recruitment decision I have made since the D-day, I don’t think it is because we have been lucky or smart. I think its because we truly don’t believe in the concept of average employees. We continue experimenting with the person till we find the best traits he has. We meaning the employee with full support from the team. And once we find it, we nurture the individual to grow to wherever they want to.

Trick # 2

Donot, and I really mean donot hire very high performers in your team. They are usually unstable, they usually bring the morale of the team down, they usually wont last long. Hire good, stable, confident employees who want to make something of them and are willing to go the distance with you.

I am not suggesting by any means to lower your criterion for evaluating people, but rather evaluate the person’s stability. Those who aim higher than where you are will not last. We have made our set of mistakes here in our first incarnation and have almost resulted in bringing us down.

Trick # 3

Start-ups are usually top-heavy. For a company to be successful you need a set of balanced players.  Donot start a company with zero cash thinking you can do everything now, and then hire another and another and so on. If you don’t have any money to invest, take a high paying job for a few months to get enough to sustain hiring some. Heck, sell your car if you really believe in it. I don’t care what you do, but have a set of individuals to balance it all. Please read the next 2 tricks to get an idea of the most common mistake we make while acquiring this set of individuals.

Trick # 4

A team of 30+ (age) people only is a recipe for disaster unless one of you actually behaves like a 25 year old. However much people kid themselves, everyone goes through a maturity cycle.  From a learner to a slogger to a implementer to a manager to a delegator to a relaxer (to an alcoholic: more on that in a different article). You might be a manager or a delegator who likes to work 16 hours a day, but unless you are The Implementer and are willing to get their hands dirty, it wont work.  Honestly, this is the most important trick people miss. Everyone loves to think they can do it, but very few actually can.

Trick # 5           

Have a leader of the pack. It took me years to actually get this.  You may have a team of multiple founders and directors and leaders, but you need to have one decision maker per decision. Someone who calls the shots (Of course he needs to be respected enough by everyone such that everyone adheres to it). The decision maker can have a set of advisors whose role is to advise with no attachment to their decision being accepted. You can have split responsibilities, but one decision maker per decision. In our first avatar we spent so much time deliberating and making decisions that nothing ever seemed to move.

An organization is not a democracy. I think this might even define why some of the democracies actually end up in anarchies even at a government level, but more on that at a different time.  Democracy is a sure failure in organizations.

Trick # 6

Ensure everyone in the company likes to work with each other and knows and respects the other person’s capabilities.  Trying to hide any such confrontations under the carpet may remove the sh%& but not the stink. Have a regularly unscheduled “Team Meetings”. The objective should be for everyone to be transparent enough to put all the issues on the table and resolve right there.

Trick # 7

Find a common motivation factor. For us wanting to show success for those who were exiting was a large enough motivation. And I have never been shy of rubbing it in everyone’s face for next level of motivation.

We have slowly but surely become one of the best social media agencies in India. Our companies marketing policy is we love to stay under the radar so the big players never get scared of us and the small players consider us their friends. So, I am glad if you haven’t heard much of us. We like it that way.

Trick # 8

A successful entrepreneur is not one who associated with people professionally (as a customer, vendor or employee) but rather one who disassociates well.

We have had customer’s who have been dissatisfied with the results, have fired us and have come back a few months later for some other project they are working on. The trick has always been to end well. I have multiple times been accused by my people to avoid confrontations in such situations, but in the long term it has always worked very well for us.  A perfect blend of aggression and patience is the most enduring skill to develop and an entrepreneur is a master at it. Give your customers a reason to keep associated with you after disengaging, and they will come back.

Handle it differently with employees. I don’t care how close you were with the person, I don’t care what role the person had, when you disassociate, be sharp and focused (just short of plain ruthless). Donot keep any company linkage. Having said this, manage your personal relationship like what you would with the best of your friends. I have made huge blunders in this, and everytime it has come back to haunt me. We kept email IDs active for some people for months, and they caused lot of harm to us.

A successful entrepreneur needs to be humble, very diligent and extremely patient.  I am sure all my employees will vouch for the fact that they have never seen me snap on any of them. Even if one of them snaps on me. The best performance happens when people wants to do it themselves. Not when they are under pressure from you to get it done.