When looking for an advisor, look for someone with battle scars. Someone who's made mistakes and who has failed. There is no better resource than a real person with lived experience of the struggles of starting up and managing a new venture. "Lived experience" is code for "made a lot of mistakes". Contact us.
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TL;DR — Our advisory services can help with:
Preparing pitches and planning fundraising campaigns
Creating and managing business models and revenue operations
Putting together strategic plans
Maintaining a positive culture and developing leaders
Aligning technology and business decisions
While no two advisory engagements are exactly the same, here are a few of the common key deliverables that we expect every new venture needs assistance with. Oh, and if you'd like to chat, feel free to contact us and we'll set something up.
PITCHING
Note, this isn't just a matter of googling what other successful pitch decks looked like, throwing something together that looks pretty and matches what you expect investors want to see, and being personable enough to ask people for money without looking like a chump. We think of pitching as more of an exercise that helps you to better understand who you are and what you think.
And it's more than what you see up on stage. It begins with all of the work that goes into market research, messaging (both words and numbers), and really highlighting a value prop and business model that is so compelling (and obvious) that it makes a complete stranger take notice to the extent that they will give you their money.
It requires time spent on networking (and the research that should come before any attempt to network). It requires getting far out of your comfort zone. It requires the ability to get up in front of a crowd (or occasionally sit in front of one person on the opposite end of a table) and be able to take whatever withering criticism they hurl at you. And to take it gracefully, because you never know where things may lead.
If done thoroughly and with intent, this research and this process (and this occasional heartache) will make you question everything — and that's exactly what you should be doing if you are so crazy as to want to start a new venture.
Pitching is about making people see something that was so evident, that not only do they not understand how they never saw it before but they do not understand how they will continue to live without it. You'll know you've done it right when you can't convince people not to support you.
TALKING ABOUT NUMBERS
Nine out of ten times, we get an initial look at a founder's new idea and they completely blow over the bit about finances, projections, and details about why (and how) customers are going to pay them. So, we take an approach wherein we guide founders to understand how to tell stories with numbers — and how to talk about their values and their strategic sense through the creation of a pro forma.
Your business model is more than a plan for starting something up. It's a way to present the kind of company you want to create. The numbers in that pro forma tell a potential investor how you see the world — and how you understand what your place in it might be.
Likewise, your sales team will look to you for an example of how to pitch your products and services to the world. Having a solid "numbers story" can make all the difference in the world. And a strategy for revenue operations is not something that should be put together last minute. It should be an intregal part of the development of your company.
You will never predict the future. That's not the point of a startup's projections and forecasts. It's not the purpose of a revenue ops plan. But what you can do is use finance narratives and sales objectives to describe the company you want to build, to encourage debate and deeper conversation with those who may be taking a serious look at investing in your idea, and to demonstrate something about yourself as a leader and as a thinker. You can't predict the future. But you can help investors — and your own operating team — know if they think that they can trust you or not.
If you are doing this right, your numbers (and the way you message your numbers) will be more persuasive than anything else you could say. Not in that you are pulling the wool over anyone's eyes (most investors have seen that before many times over and have become immune). But in that numbers are a mysterious and powerful tool of communication — and to wield them effectively, and with honesty and transparency, is a noticeable trait.
FORWARD A WEEK, A MONTH, A QUARTER AT A TIME
We often talk to founding teams who want to tell us what their company will look like in five years, but who could not tell us how much cash they have on hand or what their bank account will look like in 30 days.
Part of our role as strategic advisors is to play the role of calendar planner. We will help you to map out what a successful week looks like and we'll help you to turn successful weeks into recurring events. We'll also be candid that sometimes bad things happen — and you have a responsibility to be prepared to mitigate, because it can be the difference between whether your business thrives or fails.
In our own ventures, we learned the wisdom of planning — and it is not just about getting things on your calendar and making projections that you are sure you can hit. It's about embedding flexibility into your workflow so that you can take on unexpected challenges without everything grinding to a halt. And it's about extending beyond your comfort zone and pushing into a zone of proximal development where you will learn from taking part in whatever challenge you face.
UNDERSTANDING (AND ENJOYING) TEAMWORK
The ability to convince the right people to join your team — and the ability to delegate authority to those people so that the strength and diversity of their experiences is reflected in the way your company operates — is a critical skill.
Like a film director, or a baseball manager, or the head chef in a kitchen, you — as an entrepreneur — are bringing your vision to life in a setting that depends on the brilliance of the people around you. No one succeeds "despite" their team. And you wouldn't want to work in that kind of environment even if the case were different. Rather, in putting together your team, you have an opporunity to tell the world what you value.
ENSURING THE TECH IS PART OF THE BUSINESS PLAN
Think of it this way — if my goal was to sell better wooden baseball bats, I better know something about wood and I better know something about baseball. (It would also help if I knew something about physics. And supply chains.)
Too often, founders have obvious gaps that never get addressed. If you are building a software product, the worst possible gap is not knowing anything at all about software. You don't want to be the baseball bat manufacturer who doesn't know anything about wood, baseball, physics, or supply chains. Maybe in the past, companies could get by with the bare minimum knowledge just on account of being in a market with little competition. But now, every market is competitive.
So to found a software company and not know anything but the end-user's perspective of software is to put yourself at a disadvantage.
But all is not lost. You don't have to be a coder to start a company any more than you have to be an accountant to start a company. But, understand that — like you need to trust your accountant — you are going to need to trust and empower your software team.
They need to be allowed the autonomy required to build technology using the professional skills and knowledge that they possess. And they need to be allowed to do it on timetables that work for everyone. One of the worst things you can do in a technology startup is to treat your technologists poorly. (Note that you are also treating them poorly if you let them go off the rails — something far too common in many a software startup).
Your technology team should be thought of as business partners (even if they don't want to be called "business partners"). And your technology should be thought of as part of your business plan. Because it might be that the choice of programming language ends up being a killer barrier to entry that keeps competitors off your turf. It may be that the decisions of which libraries to use have a direct impact on your monthly spend — even on your ability to hire as you scale. A good software team will be able to make code-level decisions that have culture-level reverberations.
Your technology decisions should be made strategically just like any other decision in your business. And the professional opinions of your dev team should never be relegated to the "stuff I don't understand" area of your mind. Engage them. Ask them why they are making the choices that they are making — even if you don't understand the jargon and the "math" behind it all. If you are doing it right, you'll soon realize that not all technology decisions are the same and that occasionally the decisions made are the thing that makes or breaks you as a company.
WORKING TOGETHER
Interested in talking about your situation? Contact us. We look forward to hearing your story. And we promise to be upfront and clear about whether we think working together would bring value to your venture.
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