Partner Article

Entrepreneurs: Where are you driving? Exit or deadpool?

It’s entrepreneurship focus week on Bdaily. Dominic Tarn, Founding Partner & CEO of DTCW Communications, offers his view on the subject.

Startups are all the rage these days. Not a day goes by without the media reporting another influx of funding, a high profile name getting behind startups (London Mayor, Boris Johnson), a successful exit (Tumblr being bought by Yahoo for $1.1bn), or the release of a new product.

Not many make it to the promised land of the exit, where an entrepreneur sells their equity for the kind of valuation they could have only dreamed of a few years earlier. Many take a wrong turn to Exit City and find themselves in Nowhereville, in the Miserable State of Deadpool.

Most entrepreneurs understand that launching any business is a steep learning curve. That is to be expected. But not all accept the realities they are faced with, and not all learn from their mistakes, and you can count on the fact that all entrepreneurs make mistakes; that’s just one of the costs of doing business.

We need to overhaul our traditional rose-tinted vision of what an entrepreneur does, because as any real entrepreneur will tell you, it isn’t about laying out a grand vision, hiring, delegating, raising investment, travelling to overseas conferences, and being interviewed by the media. Depending on how well you are doing, this may all come, in time. They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, the main things you should be doing. If that is how you spend your time as the founder of a startup, then quite frankly, you are doing it wrong.

Due to the economy, more investors are making bets on startups over the stock market, which means there’s too much money being put behind those, especially in the consumer web (B2C) startup scene, who will never achieve sustainable growth. This has enabled the influx of too many ‘wantrepreneurs’: those who have half an idea, half a clue, and want to launch a startup because it sounds like a cool gig.

These are the wrong reasons to launch a company. Running a startup is about management and learning. It is about setting a pace, creating a culture, and once again - management. Micro-managing every last detail, to the point where your team is constantly being second-guessed, will lead to a sense of dissatisfaction, followed by defections.

However, taking your eye off the every-day details, and failing to properly oversee the implementation of key elements of your strategy, will lead to mission drift. I have seen it happen. If you fail to go with your instincts, which should be supported by data, customer interactions, your vision, and the resources (staff, funding, time) at your disposal, you will rapidly find yourself on the road to Nowhereville, Deadpool; population: fellow disillusioned and frustrated entrepreneurs. Your team will have defected, investors written you off as a bad bet, and your vision will be dead beside the road, with buzzards circling overhead.

There’s only so much time in the day to read articles such as this, listen to advisors, or read books like Lean Startup, by Eric Ries, so I’ll get to the point: if mission drift is creeping in you need to sit down and take stock. Just you, with a pen and paper, and some time to think. Here are three things you need to do next:

• Break down all the tasks you and your team spend time doing in the average week, and work out what’s necessary, and what is merely ‘busy’ work. Get rid of anything superfluous.
• Consider the next steps which will get you closer to your vision within the next three months. Plan out your journey, dispense of anything unnecessary, and aggressively go after securing what you need to drive your company forward.
• Be critical of your own leadership. Often, the reason a startup fails is because of poor leadership; the wrong manager at the helm. For great leaders, self-awareness normally comes with the territory. People have followed you for a reason, so look into what you are doing wrong, and fix it.

As the founder of a startup you can access a lot of support, from business coaches to life coaches, libraries full of books on the subject of leadership, and numerous peer-to-peer networks. Get a mentor, if you don’t already have one, and be realistic about your own abilities and limitations – get help and support with the areas you know you struggle with, to help your journey go without a hitch.

No one accidentally finds themselves at Exit City, but many arrive in Nowhereville, simply by ignoring the GPS.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Dominic Tarn .