Everyone Sucks

I recently had an entrepreneur tell me, “No one can perform up to my standards.” I asked her, “What about Steve Jobs or Arianna Huffington or Martin Luther King or Donna Karan or Elon Musk? Would they be okay?” As entrepreneurs, we lose perspective all the time. In our eyes, regardless of their compensation or arrangement, everyone is underperforming. We get frustrated that people won’t read voluminous materials and don’t spend every waking moment living our perspective. We just believe that everyone sucks! It’s crucial for us to understand how to get the most out of these scarce resources by managing them and assigning them to the right tasks.
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.

“We get frustrated that people don’t spend every waking moment living our perspective.” 

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.

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