Dear Entrepreneur. Danny Bailey

      Clear Returns

      Dear would-be Entrepreneur,

      So much about building a successful start-up is about confidence and self-belief – you hear this all the time – but what about that little voice in your head that tells you “I’m just not up to this. I really don’t know what I’m doing”?

      The most useful lesson I have learned in starting up Clear Returns is that it is perfectly ok not to know everything. In fact, believing you know everything is probably going to do more harm than good. You’ll be wrong and too deluded to even see it.

      Becoming an entrepreneur, especially if you’re in the CEO role, is a strange journey from specialist to generalist. Forget all the years you’ve spent becoming an expert in whatever it is you do, now your job is to find better experts than yourself and orchestrate some magic. First you have to woo these great people to work with you (probably for a ridiculously low initial reward, or as a free advisor) and then you have to keep wooing them to stay with you as you run headlong over distant mountains.

      Make yourself official keeper of the thank you cards (I never go anywhere without an emergency thank you card in my bag). You may not be able to spread cash around (and you don’t want to scatter equity too liberally) but you can express gratitude and kind thoughts where deserved.

      The faster growing and more successful your start-up is, the less realistic is the option of going alone and doing everything by yourself. You need people around you who know more about their stuff than you do.

      At the beginning especially, you’ll find it strange that you spend less and less time doing your special thing you’re really good at (in my case analytics) and more and more time doing stuff you suspect you are bordering on useless at (filling in forms, for example). You’ve got to soak up enough about all sorts of random stuff to get you by – and to help you identify those subject specialists you need to help you (particularly as informal advisors).

      Get the perfectionist in you under control, good enough will just have to do – you’re on a time and energy constraint. Books like The Personal MBA and Accounting Demystified have been a godsend to me, as have the Stanford Entrepreneurial Lectures on iTunes (it’s great hearing that the CEO of Spotify or Dropbox has been wrestling with the same challenges you are going through right now). Being part of the start-up incubator at Entrepreneurial Spark has opened the door to critical external expertise; it’s definitely worth considering locating your startup in a programme like this.

      Don’t beat yourself up about your knowledge gaps or personal weaknesses – instead, objectively identify those traits and use them to define the “job descriptions” of the people you’ll need to surround yourself with. (These don’t need to be employees or co-founders, they could be people you want on your advisory panel, or as personal mentors.) For example, I’m such a ridiculous optimist, I’d see opportunity in the apocalypse (just think of the sunset!) If I didn’t balance that trait with more grounded, rational souls than me, we’d be on a one-way trip to the end of the world.

      By understanding that it’s OK to not know everything, you can turn it into a personal opportunity to always be learning. There’s nothing wrong with “just in time” learning – and of course you can learn from your customers, your community and your peers, as well as through more formal channels. By pooling the skills of your advisors and team, you can only gain. Your business will be way more valuable if it’s about more than just you. And you can foster that flexible, opportunity-focussed mindset that is so common in the best entrepreneurial businesses.

      So, there is hope after all – not knowing everything is positively essential! It makes you listen to your customers and advisors, learn all the time, work hard, focus and stay flexible.

      I hope that reassures anyone who was not feeling super-human this morning.

      Best wishes,

      Vicky Brock

      CEO, Clear Returns

       www.clearreturns.com