A recipe for startup and early growth success

A recipe for startup and early
growth success
Rob Wilmot

Ingredients
decisiveness, determination, savvy, tenacity,
self-confidence, focus, visibility, resilience, passion,
care, diplomacy, drive, ambition, insight, self-awareness,
self-belief, inner-strength, humility, trust, networks,
reality, receptiveness, faith, love, integrity, generosity,
hunger, health, humour, persistence, agility, enjoyment,
support, motivation, courage, time, resolve, space,
gratitude and serendipity.
Twitter @robwilmot Linkedin LinkedIn.com/in/robwilmot

Decisiveness
A good decision may or may not lead to success.
A bad decision is a learning experience.
Not making a decision can kill or at best stifle growth.
Failure is the absence of decisiveness.

Determination
When you’ve decided to do something, don’t let anything stop you.
Try, try, and try again.
Potential customers like to see determination.
If you have staff, your determination will rub off on them.

Savvy
Everything in life is a negotiation. You’ll come across lots of different
characters as you progress in your venture. Some of them will be
tricky and cunning, out to get the best deal for them not you –
win-lose, not win-win.
Being savvy means evaluating opportunities, assessing them quickly,
effectively and practically to get you to the right position in a
negotiation (which should be a win-win where possible).

Tenacity
Hold on to the core belief of what your venture is about and your
values.
Don’t be discouraged if success is not instant.
Be firm in the value of your product or service.
Never let go of a potential customer until you've exhausted every
avenue of persuasion.
Tenacity and determination go hand-in-hand.

Self-belief
Have confidence in your own abilities and judgment. Trust your gut
instinct – it’s usually right!
People will try and put you down and convince you that your
business venture will never work. This is often due to them
consciously (or subconsciously) wanting you to fail, as it validates
their life choices in not having had the courage to quit their day job
and follow their dream like you did.

Self-awareness
Establish and acknowledge what you're good at as well as what
you're not. You can learn new skills to fill the gaps or surround
yourself with those with skills that complement yours. Either way,
you need to cover your blind spots.

Self-confidence
People will warm to you when to you talk enthusiastically and openly
about your products or services.
Showing self-confidence to those around you makes them more
confident in you and themselves.
… And yes, smiling really does work!

Focus
There will always be an opportunity to sell something a little bit
different to your existing products and services, and there’s always a
new market-place opening up somewhere. How many times have
you heard a potential customer say ‘it’s nearly right for us, but can
you just…?’
It’s usually easier and more profitable to sell a standardised service
or product than to bend to each and every potential customer’s
demands. You can still develop new products and services and look at
new market places but you should plan for this based on structured
opportunity analysis and not shoot from the hip.

Visibility
You can have a killer product or service but you’ll lose competitive
advantage or get lost in the market noise unless you get yourself out
there!
• Networking (in the right places)
• A good website (doesn’t have to cost the earth)
• Word of mouth, including social media (which is really just word
of mouth with technology)
• Happy customers: Customer referrals are invariably the best
route to new business
• Public relations and marketing. But make sure you build in
measurement of results.

Resilience
You're going to face rejection, disappointment, intractable obstacle
and fatigue along the way. This is where mental resilience is
important.
You've got to be able to pick yourself up, bounce back and carry on -
even in the face of that 4.30 am can’t sleep despair (trust me I’ve
been there).
Remember
• It’s always darkest before the dawn
• Success isn’t final, failure isn’t fatal

Passion
Don’t hold yourself back or reign in your enthusiasm for what you do.
Let your passion for the market and your products and services shine
through.
Passion is infectious and there’s nothing like it for closing a deal.

Care
Caring about the quality of your products and services and – most
importantly – the customer experience is the difference between
being average and excellent; break even and profitability; success or
failure.
You also need to care for your employees, suppliers, and market
influencers (including bloggers and social network leaders).
Take care of you. You need to be physically healthy to be on the best
of form. Take it from someone who neglected their health for far too
long. Eating late and not doing enough exercise so you can stay at
your desk does not make you a hero and will damage your venture in
the medium to long term.

Diplomacy
This is an art you really must master. Especially as it seems that the
larger the client the greater the need for diplomacy due to
hierarchies of management, diversity of departments, and
complexity of priorities.
You need to bring your emotional intelligence - the ability to
empathise. Finding solutions to individual needs and requirements in
order to build relationships is a key skill you need to acquire in order
to navigate selling into and servicing bigger companies.

Drive
The ability to keep going and to motivate others around you to go
with you towards a common goal (make your goal everyone’s goal).
You need to also understand that some people naturally move at
different speeds and this is a good thing. Slow and considered is
sometimes as good as fast and dynamic – especially where financial
or legal details are involved.
You need the right mix of fast and slow pace in your team to
maximise success.

Ambition
You've got to have ambition for your venture. What are you aiming
for? What is your goal? Are you looking to build a lifestyle business
that only depends on you, or a larger venture which requires more
diverse skills and people to get you where you want to go?
Establishing your ambition in your own mind allows you to then set
goals and plan how you'll achieve them.
Sharing your ambition with your team helps crystalise the mission for
everyone.

Insight
Use every opportunity to find out what your potential customers
need and how you can improve your offering to encourage customer
loyalty, as well as new business. This should be an ever evolving
process as customer expectations change with advancements in
technology and cultural shifts.
Simply asking existing customers what you can do to make your
offering even better can give you unexpected insights which – if
implemented – often leads to increased revenue and profitability.
Social networking is becoming a wonderful channel for market
insights, because of immediacy and reach. Embrace it.

Inner-strength
This is not about having a belligerent attitude that you're always
right, but the ability to continually look inside and ask the honest,
difficult questions about how you're performing and how you can
improve to make yourself and your venture stronger.
It’s also about the ability to accept evidence based external criticism
and suggestions, and the willingness to adapt, even when it might
initially appear counter-intuitive.
Equally though, inner-strength gives you the power to stand up for
what you truly believe in.

Humility
Admit when you’re wrong. Don’t hesitate to do this. If necessary
apologise, but always adapt and move on. This is not a sign of
weakness but of integrity, and you’ll be respected for this.
We all make mistakes. What is unforgivable is if we do nothing about
them and the situation continues to degrade. Or even worse, you
repeat mistakes without learning from them.
Remember in business reputation is everything!

Trust
You'll never be able to grow unless you can delegate and delegation
requires trust. This is one of the biggest reasons for startup failure.
You can’t do everything yourself, but you need to accept that there
will be some mistakes made by those you delegate to. The key here is
to maintain your trust and help correct these mistakes to mitigate
them happening again.
Your customers need to be able to trust you. Always aim to be
transparent and open in all that you do in business. If you say you'll
deliver on a date – deliver on it.

Networks
Networking is king, but the key is to network in the right places with
the right people. Saying that, it’s good to throw in a couple of
wildcards – events which you might not normally go to – as
serendipity can often bring wonderfully unexpected results.
Don’t be that guy. The one who treats every encounter as a speed
dating session. Networking is about listening just as much as talking.
Learn just enough about someone to legitimately exchange cards and
then follow-up the next day with more detail of products, services
and interests.
Use a blended approach of offline and online networking. Social
networking tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter are a natural fit.

Reality
Optimism is vital to building a business, but don’t fall into the trap of
becoming delusional. Be realistic about objectives and targets. These
can and should be a stretch, but inflating projected revenues or
profitability can be have a disastrous effect on the health of your
venture. You can’t reinvest revenues in growth or seek investment if
your income doesn’t come anywhere near what you've forecasted.
Get real!

Receptiveness
Being single minded about your goals is often seen as the most
positive trait of an entrepreneur.
However listening to what your team, your customers and your
market place as a whole are saying will allow you to adapt and build
on your success.
Being receptive is not a sign of weakness, it’s a great strength.
Bloody mindedness will only get you so far.

Faith
Faith in what you’re doing… faith in why you’re doing it… faith in your
team… faith in yourself… faith in your product and services… faith in
your customers.
You gotta have faith!
… but it’s better if it’s not blind faith.
Plan, execute, review, adapt: keep it real.

Love
When you love what you do this comes through as enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm is infectious to your team, your existing and your
potential customers. Love will get you out of bed in the morning,
even when things are difficult or tight; it will give you the energy to
work the seemingly endless hours that you need to prime and feed a
hungry startup.
But don’t forget to show love for family and friends equally or more!
Their love will bolster your strength and resolve to succeed, even in
the darkest of times.

Integrity
Your word should always be your bond. Integrity creates trust,
and trust creates goodwill. Goodwill leads to repeat and new
business.
Deliver what you say you'll do, by the when you said you would, and
for the price agreed. Pay your creditors on time or be honest and
make further arrangement with them.
With a lack of integrity you might get away with shady dealings for a
while, but eventually you’ll get busted and you'll fail.
It’s as simple as that.

Generosity
Be generous with your time and knowledge. An important factor in
the growth of a business is delegation. You'll need to invest time and
effort, often beyond the average working hours.
Also be generous in sharing success. Ensure that your team know
about wins and their integral part in these. Conversely spend time
working with your team to learn collectively about why you might
have lost or not won a piece of business. If necessary, admit if you're
wrong, adapt, and move on in a positive light.
Help other startups with your time and insights. It helps you maintain
perspective.

Hunger
You need to want it to win it! No half measures! You need full
commitment to your goals; a single mindedness to make your
product the best in the marketplace, the best in customer service –
killer quality!
Hunger should motivate you to hunt down every opportunity, every
potential sale, every chance to up-sell or cross sell until the last
ounce of your strength is gone.
Dramatic, but you get my drift.

Health
You’ll be working very hard to make your venture a success and
expecting the same from your team. But you should not
underestimate the need to look after yourself and encourage the
people around you to do the same. The biggest risk you have is
burnout.
You and your team need to get regular sleep, eat a balanced diet, do
some exercise and spend quality time with your friends and loved
ones.
You’re not a hero by staying in the office until 10pm every evening.
You’ll become less and less productive the less downtime you take.

Humour
Especially when you’re in early start up mode it’s easy to take
everything incredibly seriously.
Never lose your sense of humour.
Smile a lot - it really does make other people smile.
Laugh out loud. It makes you and those around you happy and more
productive.
Smiling and laughter are the best antidotes to pressure and stress.

Persistence
If at first you don’t succeed try, try, and try again. This isn’t a
platitude. You’ll always encounter set-backs such as resistance and
pushback from potential customers. The key to bouncing back and
winning is to find the right approach for each situation and keep
trying different things until something works. You’ll learn from this
persistence, and success will come quicker each time you apply this
new knowledge.
My daughter Grace taught me an important lesson when she was
only six years old. I was having trouble with a problem and she could
see I was on the brink of giving up when she quite sincerely said
“Don’t give up daddy, we’ll find a way or well make one” She was
quoting Hannibal!

Agility
Big oaks get blown down in the wind. Reeds bend but don’t break.
Be a reed. Adapt, bend to the conditions, and roll with the punches.
Be agile. The advantage you've got as a startup is that you can make
an instant decision and execute it on the spot. This is a significant
advantage over your larger more complex competitors who have
many layers of management, decision making processes and politics
to overcome before any change can be made.
A startup is like a taxi that can turn on a sixpence. Larger corporates
are like supertankers that takes six miles to change direction.
Seize the advantage of agility.

Enjoyment
One of the main reasons that people start their own business is that
they no longer enjoy working for someone else and want the
freedom to do things their own way.
Enjoy this freedom and celebrate every success along the way.
Moments I’ve really enjoyed and you should too are:
• Making the first sale
• Breaking even
• Building a great team and seeing others flourish
• Making a profit for the first time
• Closing a funding / investment round / IPO
• Selling up and moving on to the next venture.

Support
You’ll be able to run hard for a while based on the adrenalin
associated with starting up a new venture. But sooner or later you’ll
crash and burn without support.
Startups eat into your family life, but your family are your greatest
support and release. Be honest about the amount of time you’ll need
to work and commit to ‘quality time’ where you switch off from
business and focus on enjoying being with your family.
Get professional support. Accept what your weak points are and
outsource or hire the skills you need to fill the gaps. This will let you
focus on what you’re good at and give your venture the highest
chance of success.

Motivation
What gets you out bed in the morning is what motivates you. Such
things as being the best you can be, wanting to provide a better life
for you and your family, wanting to be rich, own a sports car or a
yacht. We’re all motivated by different things.
The key to a great startup or growing company is to have a common
goal as the key motivator such as providing the best product in the
marketplace. But also every startup will eventually need a mix of
different people with diverse motivations e.g. you’ll need people who
really love the thrill of selling, those who get a buzz from giving
excellent customer care and those who like to ‘make’ the stuff you
sell. You need a melting pot of motivations to create a great
company.

Courage
Sometimes you have to say no to customers! It’s counterintuitive but
often necessary. Especially when you’ve done everything possible to
service their requirements. I’ve even let customers go because their
expectations no longer match those of my company. This isn’t
bravado, it’s just good business sense. This lets you focus on the
customer relationships that are working.
Courage can be to acknowledge that you’ve made a mistake with
staff that aren’t working out for you and move them on.
Courage can also be turning away a potential buyer of your business
because you haven’t finished building the value in your venture.

Time
You’ll never, ever have enough of it. And there’ll always be more
demands on your time than you can humanly deal with. The key here
is prioritisation and delegation. Assess what only you can do, then
delegate the rest as soon as possible by hiring or outsourcing.
If you’re operating in a new niche, it won’t stay niche for long. If you
want to get a first mover advantage, or even just be in the upper
quartile, you need to do things in parallel rather than serial. It’s about
multiplying time by having multiple people working on multiple
vectors. This is the only way that you’ll be able to keep a competitive
advantage.

Resolve
The ability to come to a decision or determine direction is critical to
the forward momentum of your venture. What are you going to do
and how are you going to get there? As you grow, what parts of your
offering aren’t working and what should you do different to maintain
for forward momentum?
Resolve is also important to the morale and motivation of your team.
In World War II there was a saying by troops about their superiors.
“He wasn’t a bad officer because he made bad decisions, he was a
bad officer because he made no decisions”.
So don’t prevaricate, vacillate or procrastinate. Get some resolve.

Space
Sometimes you get so wrapped up running hard in one direction that
you end up taking the wrong path up a blind alley.
You need to make time to give yourself ‘head space’, an environment
and allocation of dedicated time to sit and just ‘think’ about your
position and direction to see if there might be a better way of going
about things. You might come to the conclusion that you're actually
on the right track, but you can now progress with confidence.
You also need to give your team space to get on with the job you
hired them to do. Continually looking over their shoulder second
guessing and micromanaging them creates a dependency culture and
has a negative impact on morale.

Gratitude
Thank people at every opportunity.
Customers: There’s nothing like thanking them for their business –
when you win it, on their renewal of contract, at Christmas. Just do it.
People like to be appreciated and this goes a long way.
Your team: When someone does a good job acknowledge it openly
within the team. If done sincerely you’ll fill them with pride. It’s
highly motivational and great for the morale of your team.
Suppliers and partners: Thank them even if it’s just for delivering on
time. They’ll be more likely to go the extra mile when you need
something last minute or out of the ordinary in the future.

Serendipity
Ask anyone who works or has worked with me what my favourite
phrase is and they’ll tell you it’s “serendipity is a wonderful thing”.
Depending on what dictionary you look at it can mean “happy
accident” or “pleasant surprise”. But for me it’s not a luck thing, it’s a
culmination of doing all or some of the things I’ve written about in
the preceding slides to be ready to respond positively to any
opportunity or misfortune.
My grandfather was a footballer and he gave me this great pearl of
wisdom. He said that he was the highest goal scorer not because he
was lucky, but because he developed a knack of putting himself in
the right space at the right time to make the best of any pass.

I’ve been fortunate to have spent the last 20 years immersed in
startups, early growth, investment and funding (including IPO) and
trade sales. Some have been spectacular and game changing,
others have failed. But most have been nicely in the middle
ground of success. However, every venture I’ve been involved with
has taught me valuable lessons to take into the next one. I’ve got a
lot of satisfaction by sharing my experience with fledgling
entrepreneurs through direct one-to-one and speaking
engagements and I’ve written this presentation to hopefully
inspire others.
You can check me out on LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/robwilmot and
follow me on Twitter: Twitter.com/robwilmot
My current ventures:
bcsAgency www.bcsagency.com , rob@bcsagency.com
Crowdicity www.crowdicity.com , rob.wilmot@crowdicity.com
About Rob Wilmot

A recipe for startup and early growth success

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