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.Estrogen
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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. 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: by 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. ”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 that 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.

Connecting intrigues me. And connecting in a way that really matters compels me.

Throughout my career it is the one question that, well, uh, mattered. Peeling back the layers of time (not so easy for an old guy like me) it becomes clear it’s what my parents attempted to teach me by not just giving me work, but giving me work that mattered and explaining to me why it mattered. It’s what Bill Wallace tried to ingrain in my head as I lounged in his Current Events class. “You’re not a bump on a log so stop acting like one! Do something that matters!” he continually chanted. The image of him stalking the classroom aisles, demanding participation, expecting excellence, extolling the virtues of knowing what was going on in the world so we could make a difference in the world is imprinted on my mind.

Our ability to connect the dots as business owners is one of our greatest challenges. Take a moment and reflect on your work. Can you clearly make a connection between the work you are doing today with your defined strategic objectives? What about everyone else in the company? If you can’t connect those dots then your daily tasks likely don’t really matter. The connection appears to be an elusive one for most companies to make!

The following statistics are presented by Ascent Global in their booklet “Executing The Work Itself.”

100% of workers need a systematic process to help them execute strategy.
73% of workers do NOT think their organizations goals are translated into specific work tasks they can execute.
56% of workers do NOT clearly understand their company’s most important goals.
69% of workers do NOT think employees should be trained on how to execute organizational goals.
87% of workers are NOT satisfied with the results of their work.

Creating & communicating your company objectives is important but ensuring every worker’s daily tasks are aligned with objectives is critical!

A special emphasis is given throughout the book, and here in the office, on priorities. Rich and Ron believe whole-heartedly in the idea of always keeping priorities straight throughout the entrepreneurial roller coaster. Life is not constant, and never will be. But our priorities should be. There will always be something else that we could do, another opportunity or responsibility that can come up, that can cause us to push the important people and things into the background. Often we think it is just temporary, but many times it can become a permanent negligence. Especially in the world of entrepreneurship where so many sacrifices have to be made, it is so important that there are certain things we are never willing to sacrifice. For Rich and Ron, these things include the safety and security of their families, their relationships with their spouses, and very importantly, and frequently neglected in our world today, their relationships with their children. They are both so intimately involved in their family’s lives, and no matter what happens at work, continue to keep those relationships strong.
I learned personally the importance of this concept this last week, as I lost my cousin in a tragic car accident. She was only twenty-two years old, and was returning to Utah after spending Thanksgiving with her family in Seattle. The loss of someone we love seems to always cause us to re-evaluate our lives and our priorities. Seeing a life cut short so unexpectedly has made me reflect on my life, and truly face the fact that I may have neglected relationships, goals, and many things I enjoy. And what do I sacrifice these things for? It seems always to be something that is only temporarily important, but that takes priority. Maybe I don’t see an old friend because I have to study for a test. Or I have put off spending time with my brother and sister because I feel too stressed with work. As I have reflected over the last few days, the most important thing I have realized is that it should not take a loss so great for us to see the important things more clearly. We should not regret that we did not spend more time with someone only after we have lost them.
As Rich and Ron discuss in the book, the goal of entrepreneurship should not just be making money. In life we need to have a drive for the things we do. When we have pure motives for our actions, such as desiring to be successful in order to provide security to our family, or in order to participate in humanitarian causes, our most important relationships will not be sacrificed, because they are the reason we work so hard. The death of someone so close to me will never be easy to understand, but it has helped me to think about my motives for doing the things I put my time into. I have learned how important it is that I commit to keeping my priorities, no matter what comes up. The right priorities shouldn’t just be important when we have time for them to be.

A little while ago I wrote an entry about rewarding yourself. I explained our goal/ reward system here in the office, and laid out our main goals for the summer. I was excited to get some good feedback! I think it’s time to do a little checking and find out if we adhered to our own philosophy, and how it helped us out along the way.

My main responsibility is editing the book and making sure we’re making progress. Accordingly, a first stepping stone or interim goal was to have 5 chapters of the book done and the book proposal outlined and ready to fill in. We wanted to take each chapter (which, at the time, were what Rich and Ron call “mud”) and make sure the ideas were innovative, coherent, and that we were keeping our promises with regard to telling real stories, applicable to real entrepreneurs. The reward for completing that goal was lunch, on the office. The BIG goal for the entire summer was to finish 10 chapters of the book, along with the book proposal, before August 1st. When we made that goal I was to receive a BIG reward: plane tickets home for my wedding celebrations in Massachusetts on August 10th. (John and I are getting married out west, but going home to celebrate with family and friends out east, too!) Other Goals/rewards included: Getting all the office work caught up, for which I received a weekend with Rich’s Z3. Also, Ron finishing the initial white paper project of the summer, after which Rich and Ron went golfing.

The Criteria for the reward system were as follows:

1) Don’t forget to reward yourself! If you set a reward and don’t follow though, you’ll lose trust in yourself and motivation to get things done. 2) Chose something that motivates and inspires you, and vary the rewards so that you always have something to be excited about.

The big announcement today is that YES, we got it all done! 10 Chapters, ready to be added to the first official draft our the book! Along the way we reached the interim goal, and enjoy a nice lunch at Zupas. I have to admit, at that point I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed with the amount of work left ahead. It was a nice time to take a break and appreciate how far we had already come, regroup, and plan specifically how we planned on accomplishing the rest of our goal. For this final push, it was really nice to have a final goal AND a reward to shoot for. I’ve been getting all caught up in wedding preparations and could have easily been very distracted. Instead, I knew what I was shooting for. We had a clear goal outlined and an exciting (very exciting) reward planned. As a result, I was able to push through and do what I had to do to get it done. I can’t wait to fly out to Massachusetts- I can’t believe that we’re already three months down the road with this project! Time to enjoy the reward, and then gear up for another big push.