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us from ever having to repeat that process again.
Think of automation as progress, and manual
labor as failure.
Ideally you would run your organization without ever
having to hire any additional staff at all, but that s not
likely to happen. Instead, with a focus on removing the
human element in every aspect of your business, you
can feel confident that when you do go to hire someone,
it s because they can create less work for everyone, not
just inflate your payroll.
Recommendations:
" Look for every possibility opportunity to take
manual processes out of the process. Anything
that can be done with some other service or
technology should be done by some other
service or technology.
" Be proud of how small you can keep your staff.
Big companies with big payrolls are fat whales
waiting to get speared. Go BIG companies are
proud of their margins, not their payrolls!
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Lighten your Load
If you were to pare down most companies to just the
people who actually produce and deliver the product
you would be surprised at how little those companies
really are. Over time companies add people to perform
all kinds of tasks from payroll to customer service to IT
implementation.
The problem with staffing up more full-time employees
to handle all of these roles is that they become horribly
distracting to the core business which is delivering
quality products to customers. Not only do they add
more people to monitor they also require a great deal of
time and expense to staff, train, and retain.
A Go BIG company doesn t really need all of this extra
baggage. These days the answer to fulfilling
requirements that are outside the core business of the
company is simple outsource it!
Outsourcing isn t simply about saving costs, although if
you re lucky you can save a few nickels while you re
doing it. Outsourcing is about saving time and focus.
Even large companies with lots of cash have only a
limited amount of time and focus. Outsourcing allows
you to push those activities that do not drive the
business forward off to the periphery so you can
278 GO BIG OR GO HOME!
maintain a razor sharp focus on your product and your
customer.
Once again we want to develop a mindset of if it s not
core to the business, we ll find someone else to do it.
Every problem that you can solve by pushing it out to
your periphery brings you one step closer to gaining
total focus on your core product.
Here are some places that startups can begin to remove
non-critical processes from their plate:
1. Clerical Tasks. This should be an easy and
obvious one. Most tasks like payroll, billing,
travel planning, and the like can and should be
moved to an outside firm. They are probably
not only better at it they ll be more cost-
effective in the long term.
2. Find Partners. Even the delivery of your
product can be streamlined by finding partners
who can service non-essential aspects of your
product offering more efficiently. For example,
at our ad agency Blue Diesel we offered
everything from Web design to email marketing
to Web hosting. But we didn t actually do all of
that work in-house. We found partners who
were better-equipped to deliver these services
and paid us a cut of the new business generated.
It worked out better for everyone and allowed us
to grow our core product which was strategic
Web development.
MANAGEMENT 279
3. Temporary Everybody. Not every new project
or customer engagement requires you to hire
everyone onto your payroll full-time. When
possible, try to augment your full-time staff with
consultants, contractors, and part-time
personnel. The great thing about temporary
staff is that you are not beholden to them if
things go bad (and they do) but if things go
well you ve already had time to test them out in
case you want to offer them a full-time position.
The list of places to outsource jobs and lighten your
load is endless. But it starts with the goal of trying to
maintain as much focus as possible by keeping non-
essential tasks and personnel out of your day-to-day
view.
Look around your office today (if you have one) and
ask yourself, are we spending even one minute on
tasks that aren t directly tied to delivering a quality
product to our customer? If the answer is yes, you
know where to start making some changes.
Recommendations:
" Make a list with two columns stuff you do
that directly relates to delivering a quality
product to your customer and stuff that
doesn t.
" Run down the list of stuff that doesn t and
think of alternatives to performing these tasks
yourself. Then you can begin reducing the size
of the organization and staying small.
280 GO BIG OR GO HOME!
Chapter 20
Stay Focused
The definition of a startup means you have very few
resources to employ and little time to get them to do
something valuable. The clock is always ticking, and
the money (if you even have any) is running out by the
day. With so little to leverage, you need to make sure
that the focus of your company's product offer is as
razor sharp as possible.
At the same time most startups have very few resources
to mobilize. You really can t afford to run off in ten
different directions at once. Staying focused is as much
about strategically positioning your company as it is
about making the most efficient use of the limited
resources at your disposal.
A startup in its formative stages is like a newborn baby
it has the potential to become anything. And that s
the problem. You re lucky enough in this lifetime to be
MANAGEMENT 281
the best at one thing. Maybe it s golf and your become
Tiger Woods. Or maybe it s software and you become
Bill Gates. But you re not going to become a champion
golfer and a software tycoon at the same time (although
many of us are trying).
That point is that a startup company needs to stay
focused on being the best at one particular thing
whatever that thing happens to be. In this chapter
we re going to look at the strategies and related benefits
of staying focused in the short term to make the best
use of your size.
282 GO BIG OR GO HOME!
Don t be all you can be be as
little as you can be
Most startup companies fail because they try to be too
many things to too many people from the onset. They
think of every possible option they could load into their
product offer.
While this may give them the feeling of being one of
the big boys, the grim reality is they are not. In fact
by trying to be too many things from the start, these
companies often end up delivering little real value.
PayPal: Really Good at One Thing
Instead of trying to be all things to all people, try
being one thing to all people. Think of PayPal, the
highly successful startup that allows users to email
money over the Internet to each other. PayPal
could have chosen a million options for their offer.
They could have become an online credit card
company, an auction site, a loan provider, and so
on. But what made the company successful was
their focus on only one offer emailing money from
one person to another.
PayPal understood that their ability to do one thing
really well would help set them apart. For a while
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they even competed with auction giant eBay, the
very same company who ended up purchasing them
for $1.5 billion in 2002.
eBay launched the very same service (emailing
money) on their auction site. But eBay was busy
being an auction company, not a payment services
company. By staying focused on doing online
payments better than anyone, PayPal was able to
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