Speed Is Your Greatest Ally
Early stage startups must make thousands of decisions, are constantly iterating and are also on borrowed time. With that, speed to decision making is one of their greatest allies!
Early stage startups must make thousands of decisions, are constantly iterating and are also on borrowed time. With that, speed to decision making is one of their greatest allies! When a decision is made is more important than what decision is made. Even if many of them turn out to be wrong. Because every decision is an experiment of some sorts and leads you down a path or pivot you didn’t think about before. This moves your company forward.
Deciding slowly or not at all (which is making a decision too) on the other hand causes you to stand still and is a good way to run out of runway. This is fatal when you’re on borrowed time. To increase your chances of making it beyond the early stages, decide fast!
Today’s insight is from: Ron Goldshmidt, the Chief Revenue Officer and co-founder of Briq, a startup building the construction data cloud and a new way to look at financial data in the construction industry. Briq’s clients are among the largest builders in the world and use Briq to drive their processes and decision making. They also just raised their $30M Series B lead by Tiger Global (we are proud investors in the company).
As an early-stage startup, you’re on borrowed time. You have a limited amount of runway, have a patchwork product at best, are oftentimes dependent on the goodwill of your first customers and are still searching for a clear and compelling value proposition for a yet to be fully defined customer persona.
During this period, startups must make thousands of decisions and are constantly iterating. With that, when a decision is made is oftentimes more important than what decision is made - or as the US Army General George S. Patton put it:
“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.”
For most decisions, there’s no clear right answer anyways. And since you don’t know what the right answer is, the best you can do is to simply decide and move forward - like the basic law of physics: an object in motion tends to stay in motion. When you fail to make decisions, you stop. When you stop, the company stops. And stopping while you’re on borrowed time can be a deadly sin.
In the earliest days of company building, a lot of your decisions are going to be wrong. And that’s ok. Very few decisions can’t be undone during this phase. If needed, mistakes can be fixed quickly and each decision leads you down a path you likely didn’t think about before with new opportunities and learnings.
Even with your (early) customers it’s ok to make mistakes - your first tier of believers are much more forgiving than you think. Especially when they are building the product with you. While engaging with them, the faster you make decisions, the faster you can address challenges that come up. And the faster you address challenges, the further their confidence in your ability to execute is increased.
On top, you having a fast time to decision and action impacts their time to decision and action. If you have a short turnaround time, your customers’ turnaround time will be short too. They have many other things going on besides working with you and you’re usually not top of mind for them. If you show them that they’re top of mind for you by reacting fast, trust is established in you and your ability to execute, it shortens their reaction time and also causes them to be much more forgiving when mistakes are made (because they know you’ll fix them fast).
Once you move into scale-up mode, things change and you need to shift the balance from doing things fast towards doing things right. The larger your company, the longer it takes to reverse wrong decisions. And the more embedded your product is with your customers, the more they depend on it. Thus, mistakes become more costly.
How Ron and Briq do this:
No formal decision making process: Early on, Briq got everyone in the same room and tried to reach a decision fast after hearing everyone out (they didn’t require consensus decisions). Only as they grew beyond the earliest stages did they start to put more formal processes around decision making.
“Just say it”: For both speed and quality of decision making, an essential part of Briq’s company culture is that everyone - from the CEO to the most junior person - can and should voice their views and / or concerns in the moment if they have any. Sending an email later on or revisiting a decision because someone didn’t speak up slows everyone down.
“Don’t wait, do it now”: Since day one, Briq’s been putting a big emphasis on doing things now vs later. If you e.g. have someone to call, call them right away. And if a decision needs to be made, make it now. Today is better than tomorrow and right now is better than six hours from now.
Thank you for sharing this insight Ron!
📖 - Reads
Want to learn more on this topic? Ron recommends reading:
Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business by Patrick Bet-David
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek
Also check out these articles related to early stage company building:
Speed as a Habit by David Girouard (CEO of Upstart) on the First Round Review
How Decision Making Evolves as a Startup Grows by Brian Halligan (CEO of Hubspot) in the HBR
Reid Hoffman’s Two Rules for Strategy Decisions by Ben Casnocha in the HBR
Single Decisive Reason: decision-making for fast-scaling startups by Rahul Vohra (CEO of Superhuman)