Rich Christiansen | Entrepreneurship, Bootstrapping A Business, Bootstrap Business, Start A Business

Rolling It off the Giants’ Shoulders

Friday, June 6th, 2008

Small businesses have a tendency to grow a little. The founders move out of the garage and into an office. Part-time and then full-time employees start to appear. Business goes well–and then it hits an almost invisible hump. Well before bootstrapping is over, the business is too big for the founders to run on their own. As the giants, the founders hunker down and brace themselves under the heft of the team standing on their shoulders. Somewhere in there, reality strikes. The team has to step forward and the founders have to roll the responsibility onto their shoulders. If the founders hold on too long, they collapse under the weight. If the team steps off early and isn’t ready, the founders watch as their fledgling company crushes their workers. When giants are working with humans, it takes maturity, balance, and vision to keep the company rolling forward.

“It’s tricky for the owners to let go,” Rich says. “You see companies where the owners can’t let go and it crashes and burns.” It takes maturity for a founder to do what is best for the business. Think of it. You’ve lost sleep over this. You’ve sacrificed family time (hopefully not all of it). Whatever it is you’ve done, you’ve poured your heart and soul into your enterprise. If the company grows, you can’t baby it forever–but by the same token, growth isn’t necessarily eternal. Walking that line means making decisions with your head as well as with your heart. You love the feel of that team standing on your shoulders. Each colossal step forward shakes the earth. But giant though you be, you’re still a mortal. Be mature enough to trust your team.

Trusting your team and shouldering the burden is always a delicate balance at first. They didn’t keep a futon in the office for six months. They have a steady income. They haven’t seen everything you have, so shifting the burden starts with little things. “A great example is this monitor,” Rich points out, one that had died a few days earlier. The team member poked his head into Rich’s office and asked what to do. Rich remembers how before, he might have dealt with the problem himself. Now? “What are you going to do about it?” he asked. Obviously the owners keep their eyes on things, but having your eyes on a project is different from being up to your ears in it. Ron adds that “one of the things we’ve also seen is that we’ve got guys . . . who’ve come from more of a corporate background. [Their] initial attitude is, ‘Those guys are the founders. They’ll take care of it.’” Ron shakes his head. “Some of it’s environmental, but some of it’s physiological.” Some team members naturally invest themselves in the survival of the business. Others need to learn. For both, there is only one way.

That way is the vision. Helping your employees catch this vision at the appropriate time keeps things rolling. “So oftentimes people look at the physical compensation,” Rich says. “Typically, that’s the smallest compensation in a company of this nature. What [our team is] using, five-year-college-grads couldn’t get the knowledge.” They need to lose sleep the way the owners lose sleep. They don’t just have to sweat deadlines; they have to sweat bullets. “Give guidance, direction, and incentive,” Ron says. Rewards or profit-sharing programs help take the team from balance to vision. For me, if I stick this out, I have a career path. If I don’t, I putter along and fizzle out. In bootstrapping, make or break is not one day or one deal. Make or break is the whole tenor of the work. Humans have to step down and race forward. Giants have to let work roll onto the team’s shoulders. When that happens, fire doesn’t belong alone to the bellies of the founders. Fire fills the office, the enterprise, and the vision of the future.

Posted in Rich Christiansen, Ron Porter, Loyalty, Bootstrap Business, Accountability, The Team, Peter V. Hilton | Comments Off

Tonight, on 80/20 . . .

Friday, May 9th, 2008

True to the company culture at CastleWave, when time came for Rich and Ron to give me the next round of assignments, we sat down and planned. That said, there were no battles fought with flying memos, no flurries of emails, and no two-hour meetings.Â What we did–what has to be done–was to sit with a pen, paper, three minds, and the list of tasks at hand.

There is a giant whiteboard in the hall at CastleWave. Ron has a big one in his office, as does Rich (not to mention Rich’s little one on the other wall). There is planning software, people who work on planning, and notepads and Post-Its galore. With all of this potential for planning, how do things move forward? Simple: byÂ prioritizing. “It’s so easy to get caught up in all the superficial things,” Rich says. The fluff has to be cut, and it has to be known to be cut.Â ”It doesn’t matter what mechanism–Palm Pilot, task manager, Franklin Covey, whiteboard–do it weekly and daily, if needed.” Overplanning is dangerous, but not planning can be even worse. The whole purpose of these tools is to know what needs to be done when, and what fluff needs cutting. That sort of planning empowers you. It makes tasks happen.

“It’s important that you get them out in front of you,” Ron adds, “so you can say, ‘Yeah, that’s it, I’ve got them all. I’m considering everything, seeing the full picture, and not just running after something without consideration.” In their book, Get a Life, Rich and Ron talk about something called the 80/20 principle. “Twenty percent of the effort always yields eighty percent of the results,” Rich says. “The trick is identifying the twenty.”

Young startups need life to roll forward. Life isn’t found in carefully orchestrated and thought-experimentally-tested business plans; the juice for bootstrapping comes from cash, action, and customers. “Do the things that bring the biggest fruit first,” Rich says. Brainstorming, whiteboarding, planning, pow-wowing–each of these means the same thing. You have to find what brings the biggest fruit. You do what I did with Rich and Ron. You sit down, create a task list, find the crucial twenty percent, and set your priorities from there. Nobody will be judging your business plan before permitting you to enter the entrepreneurial scene. Good, old-fashioned bootstrapping is only good when the boots fit the foot and the foot starts walking.

Rich closed his thoughts on this by talking about quarters in a Coke machine. If you’ve got four quarters and the first one doesn’t bring anything from the first machine, you don’t stick the other three in three separate machines. You feed that first one until it pays out. Prioritizing is a must. “Lots have written and talked about it,” Ron added, “but boy, it’s even more critical nowadays.”

In my life, I have got to know what constitutes my twenty percent. With everything I get up to, I would be helpless if I went in firing blindly. Poring over trivial details would be just as crippling. When you look at Rich and Ron (or any bootstrapper) and throw in their added responsibilities–family and full-time work leap to mind–it’s no wonder thatÂ they are adamant about this principle. Going through eighty percent of the motions does nothing for the momentum. Twenty percent of the effort yields eighty percent of the results. No matter how fast the world is moving, finding your twenty keeps you on pace. Perfection is nice, but success is better.

Posted in Rich Christiansen, Ron Porter, Bootstrapping, Bootstrap Business, Castlewave, Peter V. Hilton, Get A life, Priorities | 1 Comment »

Growl At It

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

I was on some entrepreneurial forums this morning reading over some concerns that people have as they maintain a full-time â€œjobâ€ while startinâ€™ up a startup on the side. Most of them spoke to sleep (or lack thereof), commitment and effort they are able to give their day job, and enough focus and energy for their venture.

As I was perusing the comments and wondering what my experience offered by way of an answer I overheard Rich telling Shanna a story about his kids. Rich has always encouraged his children to become business minded. As a response to their Dadâ€™s success with websites Richâ€™s sons started 2tieatie.com with the intent to learn how to generate a profitable website. The profits will go to a couple of places, mainly their college funds and their familyâ€™s humanitarian effort in Nepal. As they reviewed their traffic this weekend they were a bit disappointed by the results. When Rich asked them what to do his eleven year old said,

â€œLetâ€™s growl at it!â€

Well, in Christiansen language â€œgrowling at itâ€ means buckling down, gritting your teeth, and MAKING something happen. And thatâ€™s what they did. They had a meeting to discuss strategy. Richâ€™s sons came up with things that Rich would never had thought of, include chain emails and youtube and every other internet related option at a teenagers disposal. The traffic has more than doubled.

So many people are right on the cusp of starting their own business or finally being free from their corporate ties- but how do you make sure that your plans come to fruition? Well- growl at it! There are solutions! One post I read said that a man moved closer to work, saving him about 3 hours every day. Now that might not seem like a lot to you- but when you work a 9-5 and then go home to your venture to find a full inbox- 3 extra hours is looking pretty good.

Look at the resources available to you- maybe it really is as simple as going viral on the internet. Maybe you need to schedule a lunch with a solid contact. Maybe you just need to put in a little more time. There are more opportunities waiting for you than you realize. You just need to hunker down and give it a good growl.

Posted in Rich Christiansen, Everest Web Solutions, Family, Shanna Gale, Castlewave | 1 Comment »

Learning to Love our Limits

Monday, December 17th, 2007

The last few weeks have been chaotic here in the office, and with things in life. In addition to working hard here, Erin and I are both about to face our last finals week of our undergraduate education. All of us are getting ready for the holidays, and I will be leaving town on Friday to be with my family in Washington. On top of all of this, I just got engaged and am now in the throes of stressful wedding planning. Now, typically I deal well with a busy life, I even enjoy it. But I am also a stress case. I get sick at least every couple of months from wearing myself out with worry and concern. Last Thursday the stresses of recent weeks seemed to be evident on mine and Erin’s face. As he often does, Rich took us to the white board and decided to teach us an important concept.
He said that for everyone there is an area of concern, and an area of influence. In our area of concern are things we cannot control, like the weather, or traffic, or others’ actions. People typically spend 80% of their time in this area of concern, a place we can do nothing about. What we need to do is focus on our area of influence, and not just right in the middle of it, but right on the perimeter. As we utilize our influence in this way, it will actually grow. Rich emphasized this point more on Friday when he asked me to take on a task that is somewhat outside my comfort zone, pushing me to use my area of influence further than I normally do. He again explained to me that if I push through these sometimes awkward tasks, they’ll eventually become natural, and my area of influence has grown.
This has been extremely helpful in my life the last few days. As I studied for finals this weekend, I started to do the normal overreacting thing I do. I began to think about when my finals were scheduled, wondering if I would have time to study in between. I learned that one of my take-home finals is due sooner than I thought. And I began to stress out about whether my flight home would be delayed, and I couldn’t shake images of sleeping on the airport floor for days. But as I thought about Rich’s wonderful lesson to me, I decided to stop wasting my time in this area of concern. All my energy has been focused on doing what I can do to prepare for finals, and today on getting caught up in the office before I leave for home. By leaving behind that area concern, I have been more productive than I ever would be in my area of influence. Learning to love our limits can actually help us to expand them.

Posted in Rich Christiansen, Erin Hattaway, Bootstrap Business, The office, The Team, The $5,000 Millionaire, Shanna Gale, Castlewave | No Comments »

Embracing Failure

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

Up until I was about 17 years old I didn’t have to learn too much about failure. I was one of those “blessed” kids that swings through school like it was Saturday morning cartoons. My last year of high school I met a teacher who recognized me for what I was, someone who had never gotten knocked down. What did he do? He gave me the first D of my life. I was shocked, I couldn’t believe that I had done so poorly! I had prepared! Reviewing my paper with another girl in the class I saw that she had done something very similar and gotten a much better grade. I went to my teacher and he explained that I had not risen to my full potential, and that he measured everyone on a scale of what he thinks they can do, not what they have done in the past.

That semester was full of D’s and C’s and yes, even some F’s. It was awful- but I soon learned to embrace what seemed to be my biggest obstacle. I spent the time to get it right, I challenged myself in new ways, and, resultantly, ended up with the grade I wanted and a new understanding of how to push myself. Funny- years of success had resulted in mediocrity, but a few months of failure gave me a chance to find out what I was made of. I’m just grateful that I had that first experience with failure in the playpen of high school instead of in the real world.

What can your failures do for you? As a business owner you won’t get it right all the time. Occasionally you’ll hit a wall- what then? It starts with your attitude. Don’t let your failures define who you are. Just as my failing grades didn’t make me a failing person- your failed business or decision doesn’t mean you are incompetent. It just means you’re human.

There’s another side to embracing failure that requires you to take action. After a failure you can’t just pat yourself on the back and move on. You need to reflect, understand what went wrong, and change. Rich has shared this with me on a variety of occasions, a couple of times in the context of mountain climbing. When trekking in the Himalayas understanding your failures is not something you put off. Making the same mistake twice could mean you’ll never get out- instead, it’s essential to be grateful for survival, and to take immediate action to make sure you’ve changed.

Long story short? Don’t come out of any situation empty handed, whether it be a success or a failure. Make your failures work for you.

embracing

Posted in Rich Christiansen, The Search for Guidance, Mountain climbing, Accountability | 1 Comment »

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Rolling It off the Giants’ Shoulders

Tonight, on 80/20 . . .

Growl At It

Learning to Love our Limits

Embracing Failure

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