Most of life isn’t what we see in the videos we watch or the articles we read. Many of these narratives are spoon-fed to us by social media channels whose algorithms are set to deliver only the most uplifting stories of success to, in turn, inspire us to reach great heights. Alternatively, these cheery tales cause the opposite reaction — they tell us how much we suck and how wildly we are failing. For the majority of us, whatever we’re doing right now is flat out a grind. It ain’t easy, it’s hard. And that’s how it should be.
I was reminded of these truisms during a recent meeting at Remind; reminded how it takes persistence and resilience to create success one day at a time. Or one meeting at time. I was reminded how important it is to bring people back to the realization that creating a valuable business means developing a plan, prioritizing initiatives within that plan, and executing a little bit every day to build layer upon layer of value for your users and customers.
The plan may very well be the easiest part of the equation. Most of us are pretty decent at mapping out a path from “here to there”. We start with crafting audacious goals like: “Scale our user base to X million…Grow revenue to $Y million.” From here we might lean on the boundless set of comparables to craft the critical investments in product, people, and promotion needed to reach our goals. For startups, planning must be an iterative process. Each year might be broken down into four quarters, each quarter distilled into six two-week long sprints, and each sprint carved into 10 business days (or 14 total days for those startups in the ultimate all-out race against time).
So what do you do here? Define your ultimate goal around creating a sustainable business that delivers value i.e. impact for you users and eventually a base of paying customers. From here you can define a bright line to the metric that matters most right now so that your company maximizes the value it creates. Early on that might be user growth and engagement. Later, the focus might shift to converting that user base into revenue growth that can scale to support a profitable, dare I say, sustainable business.
Again, the plan is (relatively) easy, or at least fairly straight forward to craft. Prioritization is where stuff gets real. What gets built by your product teams? How much do you invest in your technical infrastructure? When do you start experimenting with your business model? Who’s the next e-team member you need to hire? The more goals you try to define, the more diffuse your focus, and ultimately the more extensive your list of “must do” initiatives becomes. First, get to your metric that matters. Pick one or two at most. And if you have two, make sure they are sequential, meaning that one goal is your ultimate north star, and the other is the one you need to advance in order to ensure you reach your north star.
Then, be ruthless. Be ruthless in how you prioritize and be more than ruthless when it comes to your collective willingness as an e-team and as a company to say “no, that’s below the line…we ain’t gonna prioritize that right now”. When your company is small, the answers will be more obvious and you can prioritize by consensus (though even when you are small you’ll be amazed at how scope creep magically appears!). As your company grows you’ll need to actually create some process to define initiatives in a way that allows your team to evaluate their impact on your metric(s) that matter, and so you can make those prioritization decisions in ruthlessly objective manner. Nothing corrupts a company culture more than when prioritization decisions are made subjectively.
Finally, once you’ve navigated how you plan and prioritize, it then comes down to how you build in the muck. Which brings me to the aforementioned meeting at Remind. You see, even when you’ve crafted a smart and cogent plan, and you’ve developed a transparent and effective process that allows your company to collaboratively prioritize its efforts over the near and medium term, you’re still left in the muck. What’s the muck? It’s the daily slog, the sausage making, the “roll up your sleeves and just get s#&@ done” stuff. In this recent meeting, a group of us were wading through the muck. It was frustrating. We didn’t feel like we knew whether we were progressing — whether we were learning anything new about an important part of our business. Frankly, it felt like we were taking one step forward and then a step and half (or more?) back.
And then we paused and kind of looked around at each other and laughed. We essentially came to the happy realization that this is how you actually build a company. One painful meeting at a time. Chunks of time spent flailing, faltering, and feeling like you’re failing. We took solace in the fact that our plan and priorities were aligned, and that therefore we knew we had to just get back to scrubbing our Google sheet. We had to keep asking more hard questions that we didn’t know the answer to or that we weren’t even sure how to go about answering. We just had to keep building the next layer of value in Remind — one learning at a time.
Great companies don’t stop at defining plans and setting priorities. Great companies create value every day through each internal meeting they conduct, through each customer interaction they schedule, and through each new system and process they establish. It’s the muck of building and execution that really matters.
Originally published on Medium on June 17, 2018. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.