One idea to Build your Business, one idea to Scale your life. Every Wednesday.

Welcome to Winformation Weekly. My 13 years’ experience of growing a business from £0-£100m, and the life that goes with it. All wrapped up, in one winning weekly email.

Simon Says

Winformation This Week…

Honestly the internet is awash these days of people literally selling you information on how to start or scale a business, when most of them have never built one in their life. To combat this, in today’s Business Section I give my personal top 10 tips for entrepreneurs. I’ve crammed in every bit of value I could in the 45 minutes I had to pull this together. What have I missed? Need advice on another area? Hit that reply button, I read every email.

This week’s Life Section is all about productivity. But not just any advice, this comes straight from the world’s richest person. Love him or not, Elon Musk’s leaked productivity email to his Tesla team has some valuable nuggets worth exploring.

Business

My Personal Top 10 Tips for Entrepreneurs Looking to Start or Scale

My god, I could have written 50 of these and maybe in future I will bring out a part 2. Looking to start a new business or scale an existing one this year...then this is for you.

1. Plan, but not too much. I highly recommend putting together a detailed business plan before launching a startup or scaling an existing one. Think about how the process will work, who your ideal suppliers are, and what the costs will be. You need to have a good grasp on these things before making any big moves. Speaking from experience, my co-founder and I jumped ship from our jobs without a solid plan. He quit during his end-of-year review just because he didn’t want to fill out the paperwork or prep for the meeting. I know…(ha!). We definitely left too early, and it cost us.

   That said, there’s a point where planning turns into procrastination. You can’t plan forever. At some stage, you’ve got to stop planning and start doing. It’s all about finding the right balance between getting prepared and actually taking action.

2. Your biggest decision? Choosing a business partner is right up there with choosing who to marry. They say there aren’t many business decisions that are totally fatal, but one of the biggest reasons businesses fail is due to issues between the founders. That said, I wouldn’t want to go on this journey alone either a solid partnership is so important.

   I’ve put together a guide on how to choose the right business partner, filled with tips and insights. You can grab it for free at the bottom of this email.

3. Feedback, feedback, feedback. Pick up the phone and call your first five customers. If you have to, drive to their house. Offer them a refund or a voucher for their next purchase in exchange for 30 minutes of their time to chat about the process. Ask them what they liked about buying from you and what the competition did that you didn’t. Tweak, adjust, and act on what worked. Scrap what didn’t. The goal is to make your customers happy, and the best way to do that is by listening to them and making changes based on their feedback.

4. Experts hiring experts. When it comes to hiring, the ultimate goal is to have experts in their field bringing in other experts. So, for example, a marketing expert hiring a junior marketing specialist, or a finance expert hiring a junior accountant. But when you're just starting out, it’s usually just you. And as a Founder (like me), you're probably more of a generalist, juggling a lot of roles and not really an expert in one specific area. In the early stages, it’s generalists hiring other generalists as the chaos of starting up unfolds. As the business grows, the next phase is generalists hiring experts to cover specific areas. But the sweet spot, the third phase, is when you have experts hiring other experts. The quicker you can arrive here, the better.

5. Hire on personal attributes. We used to hire based on this order: experience, knowledge, and then team fit. And honestly, we struggled for years. Now, we do things differently. We hire in this order: team fit, personal attributes (resilience is our top priority, and we test for it), then experience (if they have any). We hire the person, not just the CV, and believe me, everything changes for the better.

6. There is a solution for everything. Often, you're faced with a problem that feels like no one else has ever experienced. Whether it's a people issue, a problem with a process, or a system that just won't work, trust me, it's been encountered hundreds of thousands of times before. It's important to remind yourself of that. And on top of that, there will always be a company, platform, app, or person somewhere who can help solve the problem for you. Don’t panic. A focused hour on Google followed by two hours on the phone with potential solution partners can usually get you sorted, or at least help you come up with a plan.

7. Ignore the career entrepreneurs. A word of warning from my 14 years of experience: there are two types of founders or business operators. One builds their business quietly, staying mostly outside the typical entrepreneurial circle (me), while the other group fully immerses themselves in the start-up world. I attend networking events where this second group tends to hang out, and after just a 15-minute conversation with some of them, I often have to remind myself who’s built the £100m company and who hasn’t.

   These people are full of knowledge about funding rounds, share options, buybacks, and earnouts. They wear the amount they raised in their last funding round like a badge of honour, and they speak in acronyms that often fly right over my head. I’ve even heard one of them say, “Yes, our business is in the loss-making, pre-revenue stage.” Well, that’s not a business then, is it?

   They know everything about creating and funding a company, but I really think some of them resent the part where you have to actually run the business. I’ve never raised a penny, and I’m not ashamed to admit I wouldn’t even know how. I’m an operator, and that’s what I do. They aren’t.

   So, if you find yourself around people like this, just remember that it’s easy to feel inadequate, but in reality, it should be the other way around.

8. Carefully create your culture. Every business has a culture, even if it’s just two people. To be honest, I didn’t give much thought to the importance of culture at the beginning, but 14 years down the line, I can tell you that culture is everything. Your culture will either be intentionally created or it will happen by chance. But I can tell you now, there are very few businesses with a “chance culture” that manage to retain people successfully.

   You need to make a decision early on about what kind of culture you want to have. Once you’ve decided, every decision should be made with that culture in mind, and you need to protect and sustain it at all costs. Building a culture starts with a purposeful decision, and from there it’s all about consistently enforcing it—whether that’s through people or processes.

   Anyone who intentionally disrupts the harmony of that culture, especially more than once, won’t work out in the long term.

9. Live the values. The values of your business are what underpin its culture. They are what your team, suppliers, and customers can all buy into. Once you’ve decided on what your values are, it’s essential that the Founder(s) live by them. You have to demonstrate these values in everything you do. They should be something that you refer to regularly if not daily, then certainly a few times a week.

   When faced with a tough decision, ask yourself: what would someone who truly lives by the values of the business do in this situation? If your team sees you act in a way that contradicts those values, that’s when things start to fall apart. Values are the foundation; if you don’t personally live them daily your business will struggle to stand strong.

10. Customer retention is more important than customer acquisition. Ideally, you want to retain and delight your current customers while also acquiring new ones. However, I’ve seen too many businesses focus on acquiring new customers at the expense of their existing ones. Some common mistakes include offering discounts only to new customers or acquiring so many new customers that it stretches resources and impacts service for current ones.

    Remember, it’s seven times easier to make a second sale to an existing customer than it is to make a first-time sale. The relationship with your customer is far more important than any single transaction. Think of the relationship as the tree and the transaction as the apple. By growing the tree, you’ll be able to pick countless apples throughout its lifetime. Never cut down the tree for the sake of just one apple!

Life

LEAKED: Elon Musk’s Six Rules of Productivity

Whatever you think of Elon, the man knows one of two things about performance. A leaked email his sent to his team at Tesla gave some insight on how he maximises productivity.

1. Ditch the jargon. All too often communications in business are laden with acronyms. Rather than simplify matters, they make them more confusing. Just say what you mean. So rather than saying DTRL forms are required to initiate DDLP requests, why not simply say – you need to fill out the right form for the sales team to send invoices. If that is what you mean, of course.

2. Avoid big meetings. The larger the attendees at a meeting doesn’t increase its importance. Quite the contrary according to Musk. Unless of course they are creating real value for the whole audience. All too often, I think we know they don’t tend too if too many are there.

3. Avoid frequent or lengthy meetings too. You might notice a theme with Musk and meetings here. He doesn’t see a place for cycles of meetings unless they are dealing with urgent matters. It’s about making sure talking doesn’t overtake doing the necessary tasks in the priority stakes.

4. It is ok to leave. You have dialed into a Zoom call, with your camera on, and after 14 and half minutes you become aware this meeting has little relevance to you. It is ok to drop off that call. It is even ok to leave that meeting in person if you are in a face-to-face situation and you feel the same way. This gives you more time to focus on what is important. If this feels a bit radical, or even rude, consider this – is it rude to leave, or to make someone stay in a meeting that offers no value to them?

5. Take the shortest path. You need to get a message out there. You’ve emailed your line manager and the relevant director, ensuring you have copied in the finance management and the operations lead. Stop! You may think you are covering your back, but you are also reducing work to a snail’s pace. Musk recommends fewer levels between you and the person you need to get things done with.

6. Think for yourself. Just because there is a company rule, there is no need to follow it blindly if there is a better and more efficient solution on offer. So, he recommends using some good old common sense as your guide.

Until next week! 

Let’s win, together!