David Cummings on Startups

Limit the Brain Damage Work in a Startup

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David Cummings

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Brain Damage (photo officielle du groupe)
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A friend of mine who’s been an entrepreneur for the last four years likes to refer to any of the stuff he doesn’t enjoy doing as brain damage. In his world, he doesn’t have back-office personnel support resulting in a quite a bit of brain damage. Most entrepreneurs have to deal with minutia that isn’t fun. The simplest test for the amount of brain damage work you have to do is to look back on your day and ask yourself what work energized me and what work sapped my energy. Work that takes energy from you is brain damage work.

Here’s some example brain damage work in a startup:

  • Taxes (need I say more…)
  • Basic infrastructure problems like the phones or internet going down
  • Government paperwork, licenses, fillings, etc
  • Letting employees go that aren’t working out (big relief when it’s done!)

My recommendation is to do what you can to limit the brain damage work in a startup so that you can focus on items that you enjoy.

What else? What are some other brain damage work items?

Comments

5 responses to “Limit the Brain Damage Work in a Startup”

  1. Mike Wilson Avatar
    Mike Wilson

    After all, it is YOUR business. If you can focus on what you like/are good at/make money with you will be so much better off.

    Mike

    http://microbusinesssolutions.wordpress.com/

    Reply
  2. adamwexler Avatar
    adamwexler

    although monetization is always important, i think it clouds creativity so i would throw that into the potential brain damage mix as well.

    Reply
    1. Adam Avatar
      Adam

      Isn’t the discovery of a business model/monetization the most important responsibility for an entrepreneur?

      Reply
      1. Adam Wexler Avatar
        Adam Wexler

        should have been more specific, but with a b2c model, i think it can be as important to focus on collecting the data and/or building the community than worrying about how we’re going to monetize things.

        case in point: what we’ve been developing at http://gorankem.com — nobody else is aggregating the data like we are. we know there’s a number of entities that will value it as the sample increases. in the meantime, the focus has been on the data collection.

        on a separate note related back to the original premise, i think scheduling and travel plan are other bullet-points to be added that could be ideally handled by an assistant.

  3. Craig Avatar
    Craig

    If it’s not fun and not important, why were you doing it in the first place?

    Reply

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