Lionhacks

The last 2 years of my professional life were almost completely devoted to building a company. The experience has been nothing short of surreal with swings up and down that resemble a roller coaster ride. The business which I started with less than $1,000 and no funding, grew to over $700,000 in revenue and created over 16 full-time jobs worldwide in 4 countries. Not the fastest growth that’s ever been seen, but certainly not the slowest. Instead of thinking of the situation as a success or failure, I’ve treated the experience as a series of lessons. These lessons I’d like to share so that hopefully others can learn or refine these ideas and get value from them. All are from my personal experience and should be taken with a grain of salt. Most of these lessons will have a business focus, but many of these principles are equally important in building strong relationships as they are in business. One small note is that many of these will sound very simple and they are. It’s not the knowing of them that I found important, it’s the internalization of the idea into something that you carryout unconsciously. And in my case, that only happened after I experienced it firsthand. I’ve cut it down to the twelve ideas I found most important but I could go on with dozens more: This is the core idea that I’m still working on internalizing. The sole purpose of a business is to create value for its customers. The extent to which the company doesn’t create value is the extent to which the company shouldn’t even exist. As a business owner, I was bombarded with sales/marketing problems, employee issues, office logistics, workflow problems, IT problems and everything else under the sun. On many occasions I lost sight of the fact that the only reason the company existed was to create an amazing customer experience. I valued the details of the contracts signed, the budget we were aiming to achieve, or even employee happiness over our own customer’s satisfaction. Delivering a great customer experience should be the staple behind every business decision and certainly behind the mission/vision. If you have a process that creates happy customers and a business model which makes money, so much the better. If you don’t create happy customers and you make money, there are bound to be problems. Another lesson from this is that if it comes between your customer’s happiness and your employee’s happiness, the former is more important. Ideally you can have both, but often times a decision has to be made which favors one over the other. These are words from President Ronald Reagan. This lesson has been beat into my head more times than I can count. I experienced this with the sales director whom I had brought on to lead our sales team. When I initially brought him on, I was extremely happy with his performance. He created structure and processes that effectively drove the sales team. I trusted him to take the company’s best interest. I trusted too much and didn’t verify. Months into his employment cracks started to show. I saw contracts which were put together improperly; overpromising that had taken place and lastly, his attendance became sporadic as a result of his personal problem with crack cocaine. Every entrepreneur should fully believe in his/her team’s abilities to carry out the vision; however, checks/balances need to be put in place to verify whether that trust is warranted. Empathize with what your team says, but see how their intentions match up to their actions. One of the most interesting things I’ve learned this year is about the brain. According to Truine Brain Theory, we actually have three brains, not just one. Each of which was developed on top of an older one. Our first is the reptilian brain responsible for basic life functions like voluntary motor function, eye movement, and other essential survival instincts. Next is the limbic brain (aka the emotional brain) responsible for motivation and emotion. And lastly, the neocortex (aka the logical/rational brain) which gives us the ability to confer language, create abstract thoughts, plan and perceive. This is interesting for two reasons. First, the older brains always take priority over the newer ones. This means that your survival instincts found in your spinal column and reptilian brain, overpower the demands of your logic and emotion. So this is why if you see a car that’s about to hit you, your body automatically goes into survival mode, your senses heighten, and you unconsciously scramble for safety. Second and more interestingly is the fact that the emotional brain takes precedence over the logical brain. This is why we give into our compulsive shopping habits, burst out at a loved one and say things we don’t mean, or perform poorly when we knew exactly how to execute. For our logical mind to operate at peak performance, our emotional mind has to be positive and in a good state. If our emotions are out of whack, stressed, or negative, it literally makes us unable to think logically because our emotional brain takes precedence over our logical brain. Another way to put it is that “stress makes you stupid”. When working as a CEO or as any role with a lot of accountability, remember that managing stress is just as important as anything else. For if your emotional brain becomes flooded with stress/negativity/anger, your rational brain freezes up and can’t make logical decisions. This also has a lot of ties to work-life balance. Even though I was putting in 80+ hour weeks and sleeping in the office on occasion, I still forced myself to let go on Saturday and enjoy my personal life. I surely could not have made it as far as I did if I ignored my personal needs to relax and enjoy hanging out with my friends. Though life can get extremely stressful at times, I think it’s important to remember that almost all our stress is put in place from our modern social structure. If we take a brief look at Maslow’s hierarchy, most people in the first world don’t even have to worry about the bottom three layers. We don’t have much to truly worry and stress about. No one in the company is ever going to have the same perspective as the owner(s). Empathize with your team and understand their concerns; but realize that their motivations are likely much different than yours. Employees will never feel the full effect of all the liabilities, responsibilities, and accountabilities that the owners face. Realizing this helped me make many of the tough decisions when the team was in disagreement. Solid leadership, equity incentives, aligned values and a clear vision can help to lessen the difference; however a small amount is likely to always be there.