Last night we had most of the founder's come to the Founder's Co-op office for our second "founder's only" event. We now hold these meetings every other month. I'd say the event was a win. We met for 2.5 hours and then had dinner. The meeting started with everyone doing a shot of Maker's Mark whiskey. I blogged last time how we were going to have an symbolic drink at each Founder's Only meeting -- last time, we didn't have Maker's so we had Patron tequila. The Maker's Mark set the right tone for the meeting. The agenda was as follows:
- Everyone go around and give a 1 word assessment of how they're feeling
- Go around and get high's and lows report from each company. Followed by -- what item would you like to talk about in small groups? or more succinctly, what issue would you like input on from other entrepreneurs?
- We then broke out into 2 smaller groups: one group was the sales and marketing group, the second group was the strategic prioritization group.
I met with the strategic prioritization group. The question we talked about was given the wide range of options of tasks to undertake at a small group, how do you prioritize? The following tactical steps came out of the meeting:
- Schedule in your calendar a day a month for the founder's to leave the office and talk about strategy and priorities
- Every day come in and write down on a piece of paper the highest priority thing to accomplish that day. Get it down before lunch.
- If you're making revenue traction, be satisfied with where you're at and what you're doing. It's too easy to get distracted by the company that just sold for 1 Billion dollars and wishing it was your company. It's ok if you're not Groupon or Zynga.
- It's your job to know where you're headed.
- When in doubt, focus narrower rather than expand.
- Get dominance before expanding. To do this, you need to define very clearly and quantitatively what dominance means.
- Business is hard -- don't expect it to be easy. Growth is hard.
