Posted on 01.26.12

Entrepreneurs Unpluggd: Scaling Startups

by Joy Burke

Joy attended this month's Entreprenuers Unpluggd event and returned to work the next morning with gobs of insight to share with everyone, thanks to inspiring talks from the founders of 37signals, Eved and Centro.

Tuesday night I attended one of the most inspiring events I’ve ever been to. Entrepreneurs Unpluggd is an event series created by Stella Fayman, a member of the founding team at FeeFighters, and Tim Jahn, a local Chicago developer, to help (you guessed it) entrepreneurs find inspiration and gain insight into the success of other start-ups. While most events geared toward this type of audience can feel like a boring lecture with very few take-aways, Entrepreneurs Unpluggd events are more like an insightful conversation than anything. They are kept to a smaller audience, and speakers present without slides.

As previously mentioned, Tuesday night’s speakers were Talia Mashiach, CEO & Founder of Eved, Jason Fried, Co-Founder of 37signals, and Shawn Riegsecker, Founder & President of Centro.

Talia was the first speaker of the evening, and shared her experiences in growing Eved from a tiny start-up to the successful business it is today. She started by sitting down and writing out her business plan, which she stressed as being a vital step for every business. Not only did it define the mission statement, but it also answered questions like “What problem am I trying to solve?” and “How much money am I going to need?” Having this basis is crucial in order to understand what was going to create value in your business, and how to build the best company to accomplish this. Some of the key suggestions from Talia include:

• Go as long as you possibly can investing your own money into the business before turning to venture capitalists or even angel investors.
• Build a good relationship with your investors. When it comes to funding, date first, and get married when it feels right to take that next step.
• In regards to scaling money with investors, ask your investors for their feedback and responses to their experience with using your product or service. And never underestimate the power of networking. That’s what led to angel investors for Eved.
• When you first start out, define all positions you’ll need to run the business successfully. Fill in your own name for each position. Then slowly start replacing yourself with professionals in those fields as you hire them on.

When Jason Fried and his co-founders started 37signals back in 1999, they knew they wanted to always be a small company, so they set a specific limit on their growth. Instead of specifying the number of employees or clients, they established one rule for their company: the most any one customer can pay per month is $250. Everything else can stem from making that one single decision.

The problem with taking on larger investors, he explained, is that you get a few big companies that are paying you a lot of money, which means they have the ability to majorly influence your business because they’re so highly invested. If you don’t make them happy or suit their needs, they can leave and you lose a big chunk of money. It’s better to have many smaller paying customers (at least in the product business) because if one isn’t happy it doesn’t hurt the business nearly as much as when a large-paying company leaves. This way, you’re able to keep control of your business and maintain its identity.

The biggest lessons I took from Jason’s talk were:

• Always be in control of the choices made for your business. Once you start taking money from investors, you start giving up some of that control.
• Always hire late. People aren’t (or at least should not be) cheap. When you start hiring a bunch of people and things start to slow down, before you know it you have a bunch of people sitting around looking for something to do. You then make up something for them to do and your business focus is lost.
• Only hire after some one internally has tried to do it and sucked at it. You have to know the ins and outs of the job you are hiring for so you know what to look for and what to ask potential employees.
• Don’t poison the water with employees who aren’t right for your business.
• Put all of your heart into your product so you can then sell it as your own.
• Everything great is built slowly. Think of oak trees!
• Customer support are some of the most important people in your company. They are client-facing, so if they’re not happy, that gets reflected when they have to respond to clients. Keep them very happy!
• Think about hiring a copywriter before hiring a marketer. It’s crucial that you’re communicating a message that reflects the character of the business.
• 37signals’ sole investor, CEO of Amazon.com Jeff Bezos, told them to focus on the things in your business that are not going to change. Don’t focus on trends. For example, Amazon.com will always need to be easy to use, have lower prices and have fast and free shipping, so the business maintains those core values first and foremost.
• As a business owner, make things easy on yourself. Set some rules and standards that you and everyone working for you will stick to. Otherwise you’ll end up making bad decisions, those turn into bad habits, and you end up running the risk of hating your own business.
• Know what to stand for and say no to when taking on new clients.

Last but not least, we heard from Shawn Riegsecker. When Shawn quit his day job and decided he was going to start his own business, he told himself, “If I’m going to do this, I want to do it the right way.” After thinking a lot about what was really important to him in running his own business, he and the other co-founders of Centro realized that what they wanted, above all else, was to create an environment and culture that takes really good care to maintain the happiness and well-being of its employees. To this day, they keep their company manifesto as a top priority in maintaining the business.

“Success breeds success!”

Sensing the ants in the pants of the majority of audience members towards the end of his Q&A session, Shawn ended quickly with several important take-aways. I didn’t catch most of them, but the one I did was worth the listen: “Culture is everything.” I couldn’t agree more.

It was interesting to me that all three speakers, though leaders of three very different companies, stressed the importance of a few key aspects to growing your business.

1. Be slow to hire and fast to fire.
2. Write a business plan and/or manifesto and stick to it.
3. Take care of your employees and create a culture that promotes creativity, experimentation and learning.

I hope this helped all of you entrepreneurs out there who weren’t able to make it Tuesday night. Let me know your thoughts below in the comments, and do try to make it to the next Entrepreneurs Unpluggd event coming up in March!