S: What are some of the hardest parts of owning a startup?
M: It’s interesting because I know when I was originally thinking about this question, I was applying it to, what was the hardest elements of starting my business and I’m interested to see if it’s similar, and I have an inkling that is similar to many other people and what I’m seeing – it reflects in what I’m seeing when working with startups and founders.
For me, I found that starting the business is not so much the hard part it’s all of those moments that happen afterwards, everything from figuring out and navigating your relationship and disagreements you might have with your co-founders and the other partners on your team, it’s everything from navigating a pandemic but even just figuring out when to grow your team, when to step back as a founder, all of those growing pain elements, and I was thinking about my journey and that in the past year – I think there’s been some really key moments in time that have been really difficult, and I would say it’s always been around either relationships or growing pains and what I mean by that is 2020 was a little bit all over the place and it was very – well no, I shouldn’t say that, it was very focused!
But it was a huge learning opportunity, and for us we grew our team, that really exposed a lot of gaps in our systems and processes a lot of startups don’t put the time into downloading everything from founders brains onto like some sort of actual process some sort of actual thing, that, if that founder were to step away for whatever reason, someone on the team would actually be able to pick it up and move on with it.
So, we also fell into that trap as many do and when we’re having these growing pains of we need to start doing things more quickly, we actually have a lot of business coming in, we need to get some money to get proposals out, we need to figure out our internal communication system, we need to onboard people, we need to learn how to hire people in a different way, and all of those pieces were like we hadn’t prepared for that in the time frame that it showed up for us.
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