Over the last few years I’ve had the pleasure of visiting many MBA classrooms and sharing my experience with students and future entrepreneurs. I used to give the same talk every time: The four pillars of a startup: Team, Technology, Target and Cash. One evening a young woman named Lauren came up to me after class and said she had been thinking for the last hour about that word, Cash. It bothered her that it didn’t start with a T, like the other three pillars. Then she had an epiphany, “Torque! That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” She was right. Torque is taking all the tools you are given, applying leverage and cranking! You can’t rely on just one pillar, you need them all. And you can’t rely on just a good idea, you need torque.
That’s what I’m hoping to share with you in this book: Team, Technology, Target and Torque. The four pillars that turned my company around and gave us a solid foundation. Whether you are just starting a new business, or trying to turn one around, you will benefit from the principles that follow. Good luck and let me know of your success! You can find me on
I want to hear from you!
Team
Here’s your plastic trophy kid, good job.
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Who is on your team and why? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Many great books have been written about building your startup team. I’m not going to try to write a better one, but I do want to share my formula for team-building and show you how to leverage a good team and apply torque to make it a GREAT team.
It all starts with the right team. But before we get to the secret of finding that team, let me share a few stories about not having a team.
I started three businesses before FastPencil and each one was unique, but they all had one thing in common: me, and only me. I was smart, talented, eager and had more than my share of late-night energy, so I did everything. Ideation, design, engineering, marketing, accounting, sales, customer service—everything. I was running on all cylinders and I was making money hand-over-fist. The problem wasn’t success… the problem was unsustainable growth. There’s no way I could sustain the business and grow myself out of it. I had absolutely no leverage, just pure persistence.
You see this kind of business often. It’s a small business where the owner plays an integral part. If the owner were to die, so would the business. Michael Gerber, in his book E-Myth, The Myth of the Entrepreneur, calls this “owning a job.” Basically, the business owner has built a company around her own skills. She does the work and reaps the reward. She doesn’t own a business—she owns a job.
This is often the case with a consultant or professional services provider. It’s a highly lucrative business, often generating plenty of cash flow, but it’s not a true entrepreneurial venture because it has no leverage. The owner of the business can only make as much money as she is humanly able to work.
In order to have leverage you need to hire people to work with you. You absolutely must have a team. Even though you truly believe you’re smarter than the rest of the entrepreneurs out there, if you want to build a strong business that can sustain growth, you must have a team. You can’t do it alone.
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TorqueTip: Surround yourself with great people
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When you are ready to build your team you must focus on three key factors: Building a team that you can afford, finding good people and filling in the holes. Let’s take a look at each of these individually.
Storytime: Green Shake
My business partner, Steve, is a health nut. He gets the team together and they head over to the YMCA at lunch to work out. Sometimes wrestling matches erupt in the middle of the office just for fun. He’s been known to throw a blow-up football at you while you’re working—surprise! But the thing he is famous for is his green shake.
Every morning he gets out his spinach, peanut butter, almond milk, ice and some other secret ingredients, and the blender goes on. The sound of grinding ice blasts through the office. Everyone puts their conversations on hold for a few minutes until the noise dies down. Then Steve starts handing out green shakes.
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the green shake. It tastes like a peanut-butter-spinach sandwich on ice. But it’s not horrible. Everyone in the office eventually takes their shake. The green shake has become a morning tradition in the office. Every new employee is forced to drink a green shake. We even make visitors drink a green shake if they happen to show up as they are being handed out.
We have never had a green shake turned down yet. Some people even pretend it tastes great! Moral of the story? Have fun with your team, in everything you do… and if offered a green shake, take a chance, you might like it.
Building an A-Team
You may be tempted at this point to run out and hire the most expensive employees you can find, and pay top-dollar to build up a great team. Pause.
It’s not just about leverage, remember, it’s about torque! That means we need to figure out how to generate the leverage we need and apply torque so we end up with an A-Team that doesn’t eat up all your cash flow. The trick here is two-fold: Don’t hire expensive consultants, and look for good people you can develop into great employees!
First, let’s talk about consultants. When we started FastPencil we had about a million dollars in the bank and consultants knocking at the door. They are eager to show you how to spend that money, and just as eager to get as much of it into their pockets as possible. But we were naive and we trusted a guy who claimed to be the first head of marketing for Yahoo, and an angel investor as well as the head of a small Silicon Valley fund. He gave us a proposal to be our marketing advisor and he would only charge us an arm and a leg, plus some equity—of course. We were ambitious and wanted to rocket into the industry with a splash, so we signed him on. He showed up once a week with a powerpoint slideshow, some text-book marketing lingo and nothing of value. After about a month we realized we had just committed a ton of our cash, plus equity, and were losing time. Fortunately for us we caught our mistake early and severed the contract as soon as we could.
This happened three other times over the course of a year, where we hired an expensive consultant who promised to deliver and failed. By the third time we had finally learned our lesson about expensive consultants—just don’t hire them in the first place.
“Wait!”, you might be saying, “If I shouldn’t run out and spend all my money and equity hiring the absolute best people available, the one’s at the top of their game, then who do I hire?” You hire good people that you can train and develop, people with strong integrity and values. If you find people with integrity and values that are inline with you and your company, you’ll be able to grow them into great employees who not only give you the leverage you need, but generate the torque necessary to keep it growing.
Build
