How To Work On Rather Than In Your Business

One of the most common entrepreneurial advice given to young founders is to work on their business, not his business.

“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business — you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a madman!” – Michael E Gerber

The importance of recognizing this is even greater for tech startups, as most stakeholders expect these companies to be able to grow very quickly (and nobody wants to buy and invest in a job).

When you’re working on an IT product, scaling is easier than, say, physical product manufacturing. However, that shouldn’t give you a false sense of comfort if you’re a tech startup founder. There are many aspects of your business that would not be easy to scale. Yes, you wouldn’t need new factories for manufacturing, but you would need to significantly increase your team to expand your sales and marketing efforts, your engineering capabilities, your customer support capabilities, etc.

If any of these aspects of the business depend solely on your skills, then you’re in big trouble. Dropping the ball in even one of these areas would stifle your company’s capacity for growth.

That’s a lot easier said than done – in the early stages of founding, the success of your business will be largely determined by your own skills and work ethic. The problem, however, is that your personal experiences and qualities are not scalable.

In his book The E-Myth, Michael Gerber suggests that the solution to this problem is to apply a franchise mentality to one’s project.

To put this in perspective, McDonald’s doesn’t just make and sell burgers. They produce a system for a successful burger restaurant. Because of this, the success of an individual McDonald’s restaurant is determined not so much by the individual skills of the franchisee and the people who work there, but even more by the robustness of the entire McDonald’s system.

In other words, as a founder, your job is not only to make a great product, but also to create a great system for making and delivering that product to customers that allows you to easily connect people to it and, just as importantly to separate yourself from it.

Gerber defines three inner business personalities that every founder manifests:

• First, the entrepreneur is the one who has the vision and ambition of what could be.
• Second, the manager is the one who focuses on turning the vision into reality by working with people and systems.
• Third, the technician is the one who does the actual work – building and selling.

Every founder has all three personalities within them. But in the early start-up phase, the two most active are the entrepreneur and the engineer – after all, you’re the one who defines and gets the job done, so an explicit, easily repeatable system isn’t really needed.

However, once you get past the discovery and validation phases and enter the efficiency and growth launch phases, the management work becomes critical. Because of this, it’s relatively common for VCs to push startups to bring on board professional CEOs who have more experience running and scaling a business than the original founders, who are often tech-turned-entrepreneurs.

In many cases, delegating the work of a startup founder is the right choice – after all, hiring (or outsourcing) is all about finding people who are better than you at a specific job.

However, as a founder, doing without management tasks is usually a bad choice. The importance of the founder’s case-specific domain knowledge to the company’s scaling maturity process should not be underestimated.

External hires, even highly skilled, could easily fail if they are not intimately familiar with the intricacies of your project. Because of this, it is vital for the founder to engage in the task of designing the systems that work best for your case.

In short, your goal should be to translate your technical work process in any area of ​​the business into an algorithmic system that anyone can use and apply to achieve similar results.

The success of this process would determine whether you would have a scalable business or “the worst job in the world.” One of the most common entrepreneurship advice given to young founders is to work

rather than in her shop.

“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business — you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a madman!” – Michael E. Gerber

The importance of recognizing this is even greater for tech startups, as most stakeholders expect these companies to be able to grow very quickly (and nobody wants to buy and invest in a job).

When you’re working on an IT product, scaling is easier than, say, physical product manufacturing. However, that shouldn’t give you a false sense of comfort if you’re a tech startup founder. There are many aspects of your business that would not be easy to scale. Yes, you wouldn’t need new factories for manufacturing, but you would need to significantly increase your team to expand your sales and marketing efforts, your engineering capabilities, your customer support capabilities, etc.

If any of these aspects of the business depend solely on your skills, then you’re in big trouble. Dropping the ball in even one of these areas would stifle your company’s capacity for growth.

That’s a lot easier said than done – in the early stages of founding, the success of your business will be largely determined by your own skills and work ethic. The problem, however, is that your personal experiences and qualities are not scalable.

In his book The E-Myth, Michael Gerber suggests that the solution to this problem is to apply a franchise mentality to one’s project.

To put this in perspective, McDonald’s doesn’t just make and sell burgers. They produce a system for a successful burger restaurant. Because of this, the success of an individual McDonald’s restaurant is determined not so much by the individual skills of the franchisee and the people who work there, but even more by the robustness of the entire McDonald’s system.

In other words, as a founder, your job is not only to make a great product, but also to create a great system for making and delivering that product to customers that allows you to easily connect people to it and, just as importantly to separate yourself from it.

Gerber defines three inner business personalities that every founder manifests:

• First, the entrepreneur is the one who has the vision and ambition of what could be.
• Second, the manager is the one who focuses on turning the vision into reality by working with people and systems.
• Third, the technician is the one who does the actual work – building and selling.

Every founder has all three personalities within them. But in the early start-up phase, the two most active are the entrepreneur and the engineer – after all, you’re the one who defines and gets the job done, so an explicit, easily repeatable system isn’t really needed.

However, once you get past the discovery and validation phases and enter the efficiency and growth launch phases, the management work becomes critical. Because of this, it’s relatively common for VCs to push startups to bring on board professional CEOs who have more experience running and scaling a business than the original founders, who are often tech-turned-entrepreneurs.

In many cases, delegating the work of a startup founder is the right choice – after all, hiring (or outsourcing) is all about finding people who are better than you at a specific job.

However, as a founder, doing without management tasks is usually a bad choice. The importance of the founder’s case-specific domain knowledge to the company’s scaling maturity process should not be underestimated.

External hires, even highly skilled, could easily fail if they are not intimately familiar with the intricacies of your project. Because of this, the founder should get involved in the task of building the systems that work best for your case.

In short, your goal should be to translate your technical work process in any area of ​​the business into an algorithmic system that anyone can use and apply to achieve similar results.

The success of this process would determine whether you would have a scalable business or “the worst job in the world.”