Three things we learned launching a new business this year
Every Tuesday morning, Blue Sky Partners meets for breakfast. We alternate between a couple of spots, favoring Phoebe’s here in Austin — because who doesn’t like thick-cut, smoked bacon? We certainly do.
At our Tuesday morning partner meetings we review a spreadsheet that includes a few top-line metrics. Adapted from the Traction methodology, this includes projected monthly revenue, cash on-hand, events attended, leads generated, client happiness rating, that kind of stuff. It’s been an invaluable part of our process, allowing us to break our big picture goals into attainable, weekly chunks and it’s allowed us to meet those goals in a more clear, concise way.
But these metrics are only part of the puzzle. They’re the tangibles, the things that are obvious. Are our clients happy, or not? Are we making enough money, or not? Do we have a pipeline of new opportunities, or not?
The intangibles are just as important, though, even if they are harder to measure.
Questions like, is our ‘why’ still aligned with our ‘what’? What are we learning through this work? What are our clients teaching us about this work? Are our methods for doing this work actually accomplishing our mission of helping companies put systems in place so they can scale? How does our own business model need to change to better serve our clients and achieve that mission? Are we having an impact on our community? How does the work we’re doing need to change in order to stay more true to our founding vision? Or — a harder question still — does our founding vision need to change?
Those are really important questions and ones it can be hard to find time to answer if you’re not intentional about it, so we decided to spend some time at our partner breakfasts talking about those things.
Here’s a quick review.
As of July 1, 2018, Blue Sky Partners had been in business for six months. In our first six months, we’ve worked with over ten startups and small businesses under long-term consulting contracts, led sixteen public and private workshops, and held too many coaching sessions to count (well, truth be told, we just didn’t count them — just made a note to check that metric for quarters three and four).
Through each of those interactions and in the course of building this business, we’ve learned quite a bit—some lessons come from the work we’ve done with our clients, and others from challenges we’ve had to overcome inside BSP. We’d like to share our top three.
1. Systems are… people
Our mission is to “help companies put systems in place so they can scale.” When people talk about systems, they’re usually talking about technology. That’s because people use a lot of technology to build and implement systems. But technology that’s implemented and not actually used by people is… not a system. That’s just hypothetically useful technology. Therefore, technology may be part of a system, but the system is actually the people who decide when and how to use it. In other words, a more technologically advanced system is worth less than a Google Doc if you and your team would actually use the Google Doc. Systems are decisions people make about how to organize the way they do a certain kind of work — they’re habits, and they don’t need to be complicated to be useful. They just have to be used.
2. Incrementalism is the key to exponential growth
In our time talking with founders, CEOs, and founding teams, there seems to be a constant, hovering feeling that they have to push themselves to the extreme in order to achieve exponential growth. In our view you get there by focusing on your next 10%, learning how to sustain that, and repeating. At some point, exponential growth becomes a natural byproduct of the fact that you’re learning and that the systems you’ve put in place to capitalize on that learning are working, easy to teach to new team members, iterative, and well-documented. Getting to the $3 million mark is about building better habits, not implementing a few hacks. Always focus on your next 10%.
3. Find inspiration in your work
I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but Thomas Edison has this quote where he says that “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” What he means is that the work itself has to be what gets you going. The spark may be the ignition, but the work is the fuel in your tank. The word “systems” in and of itself has a really clinical sound to it, but if we can reframe our thought process around “systems” to be primarily centered on the fact that people are what make up those systems — that people have to do and manage the work — hopefully we can come to realize that creating a really engaging, healthy environment to do that work in is the ultimate goal. That’s the really inspiring stuff to us.
We should note that these lessons don’t only apply to the clients we’re working with or to the companies we think we can serve well, they also apply to Blue Sky Partners. To quote a New Yorker cartoon we saw recently, we are “a startup that’s helping other startups start up.”
We try our best to practice what we preach so, when we preach, please know that we’re also preaching to ourselves.
That said, we’re hoping you can find some actionable items from what we’ve learned to apply to your own life and business. And if you ever want to meet for breakfast in Austin to tell us about what you’re learning, you know where to find us.
