David Cummings on Startups

Category: Entrepreneurship

  • Celebrate the Small Victories

    In a startup, there are so many moving pieces that change on a daily basis it is easy to spend all your time putting out fires and being reactive to what’s going on in the company. One of the more important things I underestimated is the value of celebrating the small victories. I’m talking about progress-type victories as opposed to serious, signed-on-the-dotted line victories.

    It is important to stop everything, get the team together, and do some cheerleading.

    As much as technology like IM, Skype, and email make it easy to not do things in person, nothing beats the emotional connection of being face-to-face. I recommend teams get together once a week and celebrate the small victories.

    Note: Celebrating the small victories is separate from an accountability-type weekly tactical.

  • Amazing Interview with John Imlay

    Wow, I just finished reading an interview with John Imlay about his life and storied career. It is packed with great stories and insights that every entrepreneur should read. Here are a few key points from it:

    • Employees are the most important thing in a business
    • Relationships matter across all fronts
    • Software isn’t as differentiated as people think — most products will solve a problem, the key difference comes from how well the people that sell it understand your business

    This really is one of the top 10 entrepreneurial articles I’ve read this year. Read it on DocStoc:
    An Interview with John Imlay.

  • Blogs I Read Part Two

    Here’s the second and final piece on blogs I read. My goal is to skim 100 posts per day.

    Naturally, I’m biased towards technology and startup blogs. I hope this helps!

  • Blogs I Read

    I mentioned earlier in the week that I read 100 blog posts per day (that’s blog posts and not blogs). The blog posts act like my personal version of a newspaper and give me food for thought on a daily basis that I can bring back to my company. Here are the blogs I subscribe to in my Google Reader:

    Well, that’s almost the half of the blogs I read. I’ll add the second half tomorrow. Here’s Part 2 of blogs I read.

    Note: I didn’t include links to the blogs of our competitors, for obvious reasons.

  • Budget vs Actual

    We don’t use budgets in my company. There, I said it. Yes, many executive would view it as blasphemous to not set budgets and measure actual against it. What do we do in lieu of budgets? We do have quarterly sales bookings goals, recognized revenue goals, profit margin goals, etc. Yes, we look at our salary cap, trailing 12 months revenue and expenses, and a variety of other metrics. On a monthly basis we have a chunk of money to use for whatever comes up, and department managers submit requests and we make decisions to allocate money, or not, within a week.

    I’m guessing as we continue to grow, and work through the process of exiting No Man’s Land, we’ll have to do budgets. For now, we’re in no rush.

  • The Art of War

    I’ve seen several entrepreneurs and business leaders cite The Art of War as one of their most influential business books. While I haven’t read it yet, a colleague of mine just started a weekly practice of picking a section or quote from the book and writing about how it is relevant to our company. There are a few takeaways here:

    • Look to military books and other non-business books for inspiration
    • Find third-party ideas and adapt them to your business
    • Look for things you’re passionate about and use them to inspire your team
    • Never stop reading

    I’ve added The Art of War to the list of books I want to read.

  • EO Accelerator Sales Day

    Today we had our quarterly EO Accelerator education event on sales and marketing. It was an all-day session from 7:30am – 4:30pm held at my office in Buckhead. Our expert instructor was Jim Ryerson of salesOctane, and he did a fantastic job.

    One part of the class was about persuasion and communication techniques to aid in the selling process. Here are a few takeaways:

    • Don’t talk — spend more time listening
    • Use short questions
    • Start questions with who, what, why, where, when, and how
    • Don’t ask yes/no questions
    • Offer alternate choices (e.g. do you want to start sooner or later?)
    • Always set an agenda for the next meeting at the end of a call, make sure both sides have homework, and promptly follow-up with an email reiterating everything

    In my experience, sales is the number one area entrepreneurs fail to do as well as things that come more naturally like product development and team building. I highly recommend making sales a top priority for entrepreneurs and really understanding how to create a repeatable process.

  • New Employee Lunches

    One of the most important things the entrepreneur of a startup company does is set the tone for the company’s corporate culture. Corporate culture truly is a competitive advantage when done well. The best time to set the tone for new employees, after the actual interview process, is their first day at the office.

    I like to take new hires out to lunch on their first day as the CEO of the company. Corporate culture starts at the top. Of course, this isn’t always feasible as the company gets larger, but for companies under 100 people, it should be doable.

    I recommend startup CEOs and co-founders take new employees out to lunch on their first day.

  • Feedback-Driven Businesses

    One of the biggest strengths of startups, and a major reason why they can compete with much larger companies, is the ability to innovate faster. It’s truly a competitive advantage to be closer to the customer and iterate quickly. Much has already been said about customer driven development related to talking to your prospects or customers throughout the product development lifecycle, but I don’t think enough has been said about using the same tenants of soliciting feedback to drive all aspects of the business.

    Here are some common examples:

    • Listening to employees to improve corporate culture
    • Asking the right questions with potential employees to effectively recruit
    • Interacting with suppliers to find how to work better together

    Obviously, this is a broad topic but I encourage you to work to build a feedback-driven business.

  • Shotput Ventures 60 Days After Demo Day

    So we’re exactly two months after our first Atlanta Shotput Ventures Demo Day. Let’s take a quick look at how things have played out so far:

    • Three of the eight companies have stayed in Atlanta and five have moved out (almost all that left returned to where they came from)
    • Two have raised a professional angel round or are about to close the round
    • Two have raised money from friends and family
    • One is trying to raise a Series A
    • One has pseudo shutdown while evaluating next steps
    • Two companies were put in part-time mode while the co-founders took consulting jobs unrelated to their startup
    • Two are generating revenue

    That’s all I have right now. Stay tuned for more updates in the future.