4 questions answered by successful entrepreneurs: Part 2

One of the participants in Advice For Good, after donating an hour of time to a charity and then blogging about it on the AFG website, asked me if she could ask the list of advisors four questions to help her with her startup. What a great way to use the AFG community! Because each question has many answers, I’ll share these over time so its not too overwhelming of a blog post.

Question #1

Question #2:

What didn’t go well when you were first creating your firm (i.e. what would you do differently if you had a second chance)?

– Keeping clients and dealing with clients reorg are hard.

– Make sure you provide white glove service to those initial clients and they can’t leave you. Even when new CMO comes in.

– Make sure you have the right people helping you. Get a good office manager/assistant first. Be sure you are doing the things only you can do and you have help for all other.

– Prioritize your people. People build the business, never forget it.

– I wasn’t obsessed with a great culture in the early months and the company had to be rebooted to get back in culture alignment.

– Starting too broad — you can always drill down further.

– I would promise less and over-deliver on expectations. Also I would temper my own expectations. I thought we would/could clear $1M in revenue in year one, and the reality was it was more like $275k.

– Understanding how to sell to our market took a lot longer than I thought. I would have put more focus on this at the beginning if I had known that.

– We should have paid more attention to finances, legal, taxes etc. things that ended up costing money down the road that could have been easily set straight up front.

– We spent way too much money early on, with the naive view that we’d raise outside money within 6 months. It took us 18 months, and we almost died.

– I would have started sooner.