A friend of mine posted a link in Facebook to a blog entry by Mark Cuban on his rules for startups. Interesting.
I would like to add to this list my own personal rules when I started MARIMORE (and still is). Very simple, only three of them. I always believed that businesses are never static. They grow like any organism and will have to react to changes. So for any rule that you make, you'll have to be prepared to reverse them somewhere down the road.
But anyway, here goes:
- Work hard
- Stay healthy
- Know where your money is coming from and where it's going to go
Working hard is a no brainer. It does not mean working long hours exclusively, but is more towards understanding what you have to find out to make things happen, figure out how to get that information and working to build things towards that end. Most of the time you'll need time to do this and that's where the long hours come from, but if you're smart and have invested time beforehand to set in place processes to help you get those information, it won't take as much time when you have to repeat the process again.
An important pre-requisite to working hard is to love what you do. Have passion for it. Knowledge too plays an important part: The norm is that you won't have the passion for something that you don't know. Likewise, you seldom see people having passion for something that they don't give a dam about. It's beyond I if passion or knowledge comes first, but in MARIMORE we only do things that we know about and love. This gives us the drive to continue improving and making things happen. This drive is important when you only have a handful of people and little money to move around.
The second rule also is a no brainer, but I find it suprising that it seldom gets mentioned in your everyday "rules for startups". I only realized this when I went to Terrie Lloyd's Entrepreneur's Handbook Seminar sometime around a year ago. Terrie explained that the most important element in running his business is being healthy. Which makes total sense.
If you're like us, you'll have a business with a small stream of steady revenue coming in from different sources. You have ideas you want to turn into reality which will help to grow the business, but you don't have that big pile of cash to burn through for a year. So you take up consulting work to supplement that stream of revenue, to make sure everyone has something to eat and to push your ideas to see the light of day. Basically you're boostrapping the business and the key to making all this happen and click is, that's right: You.
Most of us who have day jobs and a check waiting for them at the end of each month usually don't realize this but the saying "time is money" believe me is really not far from the truth. The key ingredient to growth is time, but if you're not healthy physically you'll be busy taking care of yourself and you won't have time for the business.
So staying healthy is of a prime importance. I personally take supplements daily, try to include as much exercise in my daily schedule, like using the stairs and not the escalator, walking to the station instead of taking the bus. Gurgle and wash your hands often. Take your vaccination. Make sure you have medical and dental insurance. And also remember to stop working and take a break when your mind and spirit says "enough!". Usually I go to the hot springs then. Oh and watch the food. You are, after all, only the sum of what you eat.
The third rule is just general business common sense. No company in this world does not have it's own finance. As the one who decides if a company sinks or floats (remember, your decision plays the bigger part, not Lehman Brothers, R.I.P or what Google is building next) I believe you need to have grips on how and where your money is. Based on this information you'll know which vendor is trying to pull your leg and which vendor's leg you can pull, to give yourself the extra leverage to go win more customer's hearts. You'll also know if that espresso machine or that company trip is going to save you on taxes at year end or not.
So far these three simple rules have guided us down the path of growth for the past year. I'm pretty sure these rules can be ported to different sets of organisations, so I'm releasing these Three Rules For Startups under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License to be shared by every one on this planet (or off it).
There.
To celebrate the New Year we have launched a new year promotion campaign. Below is the annoucement that we have on the website:
