Day 1: Lets build this, lets hustle, go go go!

Day 300: Wtf. “What am I doing? What should I be doing? What’s my job scope as a founder? What’s my team’s job scope? Where’s my team? Oh f*** its Saturday. No wonder I’m the only one in the office.”

Yup. Whether you’re a startup founder, SME owner, bootstrapped or funded, there will come a time where you’ll question if the work you’re doing is really what needs to be done, and also if its what you should be doing. (This usually happens around the same time you lose track of the days and there’s no such thing as Thursdays or Fridays, just today and tomorrow).

You find yourself asking: “Should I still be doing sales calls? Why am I writing copy or code? This seems inefficient, maybe I should create a process? Perhaps I’ll hire someone to do it. Oh I hired someone, should I park this under them? What are they doing again?”

These are all legitimate questions. Better to be reflective and intentional about what you and your team does rather than reactive. It’s never nice to have a frustrated “whats my job scope?!” conversation with your staff, make no progress and then watch them leave the company and write nice things about “work culture” on glassdoor.

I’ve had my share of these conversations, both with team members and inside my own head. Overtime, I started using a mental framework, to:

1. Help me stay sane and purposeful with my own work (and identify what I, as a founder, should/could be working on)
2. Understand what my team is doing, and if there are any gaps, bottlenecks or weak performance areas
3. Evaluate team structure and hiring requirements
4. Make sense of what’s going on when situations change

I call it the “Think-Do-Manage” framework.

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To some extent, we all already know these somewhat intuitively. But just as a quick orientation,

1) “Think” refers to work that involves planning, strategy, innovation or structuring. This includes business plans, go-to-market and functional strategies, product innovation planning, development of processes, developing organizational structures and any other work that usually results in generating a document to refer to. In a startup or SME, these are the ‘behind-the-scenes’ work that is done before the team executes on the ‘doing’ work which ultimately generates money. Thinking is needed at any stage of growth, but becomes increasingly important as the company gets larger. The type of ‘thinking’ will evolve as well. Where the initial phases may have required product roadmaps and weekly work plans, a company with multiple departments or country teams will require much more cross-team coordination. Lack of planning or process can derail entire departments’ progress for weeks or months.

2) “Do” refers to turning the “thinking” work into some form of tangible output. This would include writing code, content creation, sales calls, manufacturing line work, hiring interviews and any other work which either builds and delivers the product or service, or that brings in new customers or employees.

3) “Manage” refers to any work involving dealing with humans for the purpose of running an organization. Internally, this includes managing team members, conducting meetings, 101s and other direct manager-subordinate interactions. It can also take the form of project and process management of different stakeholders with different reporting lines. Externally, this includes working with vendors, agencies, freelancers or other outsourced capabilities.

As the company scales, the type of work that founders, leaders and staff are responsible for will change. Lets look at how this works from a founder’s perspective.

Day 1

It’s just your co-founders and you. Or maybe its just you. Bless you. There’s probably only two types of work here.

You think of a startup idea, you (hopefully) write a plan of action and you go and do it. Build the product, make sales calls, conduct demos, handle onboarding and client servicing. Repeat. Typically all this work is divided between the founders in the initial months or years until there’s some form of meaningful traction (or in the case of VC-backed startups, meaningful funding) before you begin hiring.

The moment you make your first hire, your work changes.

First hire onwards

Whether its a full time staff or an intern, you now have a third type of work: managing.

It helps to think about the type of work you want your team members to be doing. Do you need individual contributors who simply follow processes to the tee? Or do you need staff who can themselves ‘think’ and ‘do’? Perhaps someone who not only knows how to handle sales calls and demos but who can help improve sales processes? Or content writers who can come up with their own content themes and calendars?

The first few hires would usually be brought in to offload some of the ‘do’ type of work from the leadership team. Where there is clear process and repeatability, these new hires will be able to get up to speed quickly. Without direction and instruction, these hires will have to figure out what the founders want them to do, which is a type of ‘thinking’ work. (Really, you’re just making them read your minds). Documentation will be what helps accelerate the transfer of work.

Having said that, early stage startups tend to fare better with hires who can ‘think’ and ‘do’ rather than just one or the other, since, at the barest minimum, processes will need to be rewritten as the team gets larger.

Similarly, what the ‘do’ type work looks like will change over time. For instance, the type of marketing work may evolve from basic website building to SEO and content marketing, or paid advertising with landing page optimization and so on. Having early hires who can figure things out as the situation changes will help free up time and mental bandwidth for founders to think about other higher level topics. Individual contributors who are able to figure things out on the fly will be the most value-adding to the company, and will likely navigate the changes happening to the company the best as well.

Hiring a VP to build their own team instead of going for junior staff

Companies with larger bank accounts or VC funding may opt to hire a VP to build out their own team early on instead of taking a ground-up approach to hiring. Typically this is done to ‘short cut’ some of the scaling processes and to tap into experience of more seasoned functional experts. This may work if founders are very clear about the skills and knowledge needed in the VP or equivalent hire, as well as the role and ideal performance of the team they build. In my experience, this only works when the founding team knows for certain what high level approach that department needs to follow and when there is some semblance of strategy and process for the hire to work with. Where things tend to go awry is when founders bring in a VP to fill a perceived gap which they themselves have not attempted to address. Instead, they expect the hired leader to figure it out. Most of the time, this ends badly for everyone.

The move into this stage tends to be a very challenging phase in building a startup, especially for first time entrepreneurs. It’s demanding enough to have to plan ahead and then execute. It’s another thing entirely to plan, train, manage output and morale while also executing alongside the team. Add more and more ICs to the mix and it starts to feel like there are no days of the week. There’s only today and tomorrow. (If you have an intern army to manage, you probably know what I mean).

What makes this stage doubly hard is having to figure out how to go about managing a team. What are acceptable ways of working and what is unacceptable? How do you conduct yourself as a leader?

Its also where work culture starts to take shape at an “organizational level”. It’s no longer just you and your co-founders. You have a team to lead, and the way you work with them through the ‘manage-type work’ shapes your culture over time. It is essential to be deliberate and reflective about how you are performing as a manager early on.

Eventually, you will realize you are now the bottleneck. This can take several forms:
1. You have no bandwidth to efficiently ‘manage’ staff, ‘do’ important work while juggling ‘thinking’ of what the company should do next.
2. You realize the type of ‘thinking’ needed to enable those who are ‘doing’ is beyond your current capabilities. You need someone else that is more well versed in specific domains.

This is where you transit to the next phase.

First manager onwards

You are starting to make it out of the valley of death. Now you need to manage managers. Congratulations.

Again, it helps to think about what capabilities you need from your managers. Are they coming in to inherit existing processes and run a tight ship or do you need them to revise strategy and processes over time? This would influence whether you bring in a more strategic leader or one who is more operational. Often in an early stage startup, you would be better off with a leader who can both think and manage.

Candidates for managerial roles can come from within the company, if a hire in a junior position 1 or even 2 levels down has demonstrated competencies for the leadership role. Its usually better to promote internally rather than to hire externally as this creates a culture of growth within the organisation. Staff with professional growth aspirations will be encouraged to develop themselves and look for opportunities in the company rather than look for bigger roles elsewhere.

For departments where innovativeness is core to the growth of the company, bringing in leaders or promoting promising staff who are able to ‘think’ is a non-negotiable. Additionally, if you know that a certain team will have to be interfacing with more and more stakeholders or functions over time, you would likewise want someone who knows how to build structures around cross-departmental work. You don’t want to be having conversations with someone who insists there’s only one way of doing things and everyone else is incompetent except them. Really, you don’t.

Over time if all goes well, you will be doing much more thinking and managing work instead of doing. At this point, the ability to enable leaders to bring out the best in their own teams and to integrate all the moving parts of the organisation together become increasingly critical.

Using think-do-manage for hiring and evaluating performance

But wait, the company has grown but I’m still doing more than think-manage work?

It is important to note that you could be in multiple combinations of think-do-manage at any one point in time. For example, you may be engaging in ‘think’ and ‘manage’ work for a larger department where there are middle managers who report directly to you while simultaneously be in ‘think-manage-do’ mode for a smaller department where you have a few junior hires reporting to you and you need to execute beside them. Such is the life of founders and early hires.

There are also situations where you may have moved to a think-manage role but will need to go back to a think-manage-do role. For example, in restructuring or turnaround situations where leaders need to take on a hands-on role again due to a reduction to a smaller team size or where previous team leadership may have been less than ideal. In this case, founders will have to lead by example.  Showcasing either expertise in a functional area or at least demonstrate willingness to get their hands dirty and work beside the team is necessary to bring underperforming teams back to standards required.

Additionally, opening up a new geographical office or building out a new department always requires the person-in-charge to ‘think-manage-do’. “What does this new team do? What does success look like? What support and cross-functional alignment is needed? How do we hire? How do we train? How come I already have targets to hit even before I have hired anyone?! Better get to hustling.”

A situation where founders may need to take on a manage-do role would be in all-hands type of situations. An example would be during 11.11 season in the ecommerce and logistics industries. Company leaders would have to be on the ground with the operations team to ‘get things done’, both as a way to boost morale and to drive home the importance of the ‘do’ type work in this season.

Using the framework on yourself

To take stock of where you are personally at, have a look at your calendar.

You’ll start to see a pattern pretty quickly. Compare what your calendar looks like against what you believe the organisation needs from you at this point and adjust accordingly. If you’re bogged down by meetings and individual contributor-type work, chances are there’s a ‘manage’ or ‘do’ gap in the team that needs to be reviewed.

Using the think-do-manage framework helped me make sense of my ever changing role in my previous startup. It aided me in identifying gaps, both in my own abilities and in my teams, allowing me to restructure my work, plug gaps with appropriate capabilities and ultimately scale without things blowing up too much.

It also helped me to make sense of my own “changing identity”. The shifts from a founding individual contributor to a manager of individual contributors, then to a manager of managers can be jarring for first time founders, especially for those who pride themselves on the quality of their work. It can throw you off when you relinquish responsibility for ‘real output’ to your team, but its important to recognize that managing staff is in itself both a skillset and a job.

Hopefully this has been useful to you and can help you out in your own startup building journey.

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