Everyone Sucks

“As entrepreneurs, we lose perspective all the time. In our eyes, regardless of their compensation or arrangement, everyone is underperforming.” 

At early stages, you don’t have the financial or human resources to put in place “normal” relationships—relationships in which people are paid market salaries and have normal working hours and conditions. This applies to many constituents such as employees, vendors, advisors, board members and consultants. When people are working for below market salaries, and often with undefined roles, our lack of management of them and aligning them to the most efficient tasks given their time commitment causes frustration.

Understanding the Reality

Not only do we lack to the capital to pay constituents customary rates, or to pay them at all, we lack the resources to manage them effectively. Combine this with a few other realities:

• First, no one cares as much about the business as we do.
• Second, no one has spent as much time thinking about it as we have.
• Third, these people have lives in which they laugh, relax, sleep, drink for fun and even take things lightly.
• Finally, what we spend all day thinking about is a blip on their radar screen.

With the exception of full-time employees, these resources dip in and out of our world. When a member of your advisory board wakes up in the middle of the night (like we do), he likely did so because he was worried about his sick daughter or his new boss or his mortgage bill or his golf game. Think of it like a pie. Our pie is 99.999 percent our business. Their pie is life, love, family, business, sports, travel and the rest of their normal lives.

You Need All Hands on Deck

We have to take advantage of every resource at our disposal—employees, advisors, board members, interns, friends, family or other outside resources that have offered to lend a hand. But each of these resources are operating outside the normal bounds of working relationships:

• Employees are often working crazy hours for below-market compensation packages, for equity, or even for free on the side of their current jobs.
• Vendors are rarely paid full freight and are often asked to make financial concessions for the promise of working with the company in the future.
• Advisors or board members may be available only a small portion of their time and may be working for below-market compensation if they are compensated at all. Even individuals who help with raising capital, especially at early stages, may not be paid normal compensation.

The resources in an entrepreneurial venture will only be effective if you understand their situations and allocate an appropriate set of tasks to them. Everyone only sucks if you fail to put them in a position to have a positive impact on the business.

How to Manage Them

The sooner we realize this, and understand that it is our responsibility to manage these resources by aligning their skills and time commitment with actions that serve the business, the sooner we will no longer think that everyone sucks. Try the following:

• Understand Time Commitment and Skill Set. Understand each person’s time commitment and his/her specific set of skills and compensation arrangement.
• Assign Tasks Appropriate for Commitment, Compensation and Skill Set. Align their efforts to a finite set of activities that are appropriate to their skill set, time commitment and compensation. To say to an advisor who has a financial background, can you please help us build a financial model versus “help us with the investment process” is a big difference. For the latter, you are likely to come back when your frustrations boil over and say, “I can’t believe that it has been two weeks and we don’t have any investment leads.” However, you might very well be able to get the same resource to build a financial model in two weeks. Pick specific tasks appropriate for their place with the company.
• Create a Regular Check-in Process. Create a process to take advantage of their limited time, bandwidth and mindshare. This takes the form of a regular meeting at intervals that are commensurate with their time commitment. For example, for constituents you are paying and that are tied to key deliverables, you might have a weekly meeting to stay on top of product development, marketing plans and the like. For non-paid advisors, a bi-weekly meeting that addresses their roles and how they are doing against their areas may suffice.
• Nurture. Nurture and appreciate their participation. This involves thanking them, but also clarifying that your job is to best align the company’s scare resources with its needs. Communicate that you understand that this is not their day job and that they may not be accurately compensated, but you still need their best effort on behalf of the company. Communicate your appreciation while asking for accountability.
• Make Accountability Public. You must create accountability and follow through. Setting standards and expectations in a public forum, encourages a group commitment to progress, empowerment and mutual assessment. Individuals who make a commitment not only to you, but to a group of their peers, are more likely to perform to a higher standard and take responsibility for their work. When commitments are only to you, it is common to hear: “Something came up and I couldn’t get to it.” However, when that commitment is made to a group, they will find a way to get the job done, especially if progress is also reported and nurtured in a group set- ting. When you publicly set tasks for your team, make sure that the forum involves their peers, but also a variety of advisors who are also accountable to each other. Committing to tasks in this setting encourages greater integrity and pride in performance.
• Introduce the Process. Try introducing the following process, which demonstrates that you have taken into account obstacles and limitations but still expect accountability:

“First of all, I want to thank each of you for taking time to help the company. Your time is valuable and I want you to know how much it is appreciated. With that in mind, I would like to create a process to make your time as productive for you and the company as possible. I suggest a biweekly meeting for one hour during which we will review what each of you is doing and the specific issues we need to discuss. In the first meeting, we will identify issues that we would like assistance with, and knowing your time commitment, the specific tasks you might assist with. We are open to other suggestions, but hope to make this productive, enjoyable and valuable for you and the company.”

If we don’t allocate our scarce resources, our company suffers in several ways. We fail to move forward with the tasks at hand. We create misaligned expectations that lead to frustration with the resources we have. In an ideal world, people would manage themselves and perform without fail. On Earth, our resources need to be managed and we if we do this well, we’ll quickly find that the only thing that really sucked was our perspective.