How Startups Dig Themselves Into an Early Grave
Not too long ago, I visited a mom-and-pop breakfast place with above-excellent reviews on Google.
I’m a foodie, and I’m a content marketer: so that means, a) I’m always Googling for new places to eat and b) I’m using every organic geo-targeted keyword to read every online review about the food place before I enter it.
Let’s call this place Joe’s Breakfast Shack. It really was a “shack;” right next to a gas station, it had all the limelight of a little department store entrance tucked into a list of other buildings with the same type of signs: Nails Done For U, A & B Cleaners, you know, that type of lineup. Parking was awesome, because you shared a huge lot with everyone else in the low, one-story, but super-long building.
Hubby and I pulled up, and a sign promised Fresh Made Bagels and Fresh Kolaches Made Here. Kolaches are a Texas thing; they’re a lot like corndogs, but with baked bread dough. I haven’t ever really acquired the taste. (Thank my east coast eating habits for that.)
We entered. It was a cramped space at 10:30 am on a Thursday. Three picnic-style seating areas, dingy green, which no one had time to apparently wipe off all morning; a line of 12 people cramped in what had to be a 15x7 room.
Serious. It was just a room, bakery shelves showing off the fresh-made donuts and kolaches, a counter to pay at, and a tiny table on the far wall with condiments, napkins, and silverware.
An elderly Asian and what appeared to be his wife were behind the counters, working feverishly and apparently not able to catch up to the orders, despite working hard; everyone’s faces told a sad, grumpy tale of waiting-in-line-too-long. I could only spot one other person, also elderly, working in the kitchen in the back. It was more than apparent that this was a family-owned, family-run business. Which I am all for supporting.
We ordered. Four donuts, a bacon sausage croissant, and an egg taco. The donuts were placed in a bag, then horror of horrors, heated up in a tiny microwave that stood on the counter where we purchased the food.
It would have been rude to walk out at that point, but being the Austin food snob I am, I was tempted. Yet we resolved to see this through. At that point, we had all the food bagged, except for the taco. The hard-working, older Asian man taking orders was very soft-spoken: I could barely make out the joke he tried to make about not selling us a taco. What he really meant, we found out, was that they had to make it in the kitchen and we needed to wait.
Wait we did, about 15 minutes for one taco. We got our food, including the weird, slightly warm/muggy bag of donuts from the microwave sitting by the cash register, and departed.
Food verdict:
The croissant actually tasted delicious; the donuts were far too sugary and gave me a toothache, and the egg taco was declared as “so-so” by my husband, who is also an Austin food snob.
The above example was what inspired this post, which I had in my mind as we drove home.
Businesses dig themselves into an open grave, and don’t even see it happening.
Rewind back to 2011.
I was a naïve business owner, just starting out, just filing my sole proprietorship status and launching my website (which I self-coded). I hired three writers, but the staff part of my business — I mean every staff role, I kept for myself.
Why?
I told myself I couldn’t afford staff, and believed that for a couple solid months. During those two months I was the busiest I’d ever been in my life, and sanity was a thread I nearly lost every day. My day began at 8 a.m., ended at 10 or 11 pm at night. I made my own sales calls; I answered and wrote all my company emails; I made all my appointments, searched for my own leads, emailed 100+ marketing emails daily, followed up with all my sales, placed the sales, wrote some of the orders, delegated to my writers, edited all the orders, and…wrote and posted all my own blogs and articles to market myself as a new writing agency.
I was insane.
Within three months, I tentatively, hesitantly, stuck my feet into the waters of hiring strangers in staff roles, and once I felt how amazing it was to be freed enough to build the next big steps in my company — I’ve never gone back.
Six years later, after a lot of hiring and firing, I have AMAZING staff in place today. Tara M. Clapper is managing new clients, strategy calls, developing content with me, and seriously increasing our client mojo. Tamila is our full-time sales genius, handling every billing and sales inquiry and delegating to the right people where needed: Hannah is our incredible Project-Manager-slash-Outreach-Specialist, working in lead generation with me, managing clients and their projects, and even writing incredibly good copy to fulfill some orders. Katria, our Content Manager, is managing assignments for writers, revisions, and all the internal pieces that make our content service function. Rachel manages our amazing community at #ContentWritingChat and helps me with social media and managing our blog. Then, we have about 40 writers, some of which make their full-time living at Express Writers. We have incredible designers, incredible writers. It’s an honor to lead them in developing amazing content. See more of our faces on the About page, and check out our Values here.
I used to do all that, myself.
Granted, we had less clients back in 2011/12, but there was still new clients and work coming in like CRAZY, and I was on the line for every new email that said Hi, I’d like to place an order.
And you know what?
I wouldn’t have the amount of clients we have today, if I didn’t spend the money and time to hire the right staff. Even on a bootstrapped budget without outside investment.
The good thing, as I look back, was that I knew I had to get out of the day-to-day and pay someone to do that for me. And I actually DID that, no matter how scary it felt.
Today, I can do the next big steps because of the staff I have in place: I can work on business expansion, new products, new marketing, podcast, and write more books.
Rewind to my visit to Joe’s Breakfast Shack.
The elderly owners were obviously running it all by themselves. Even though the food WAS actually not so bad… here’s the things I saw that were bad:
- A lot of orders were messed up (managing orders and keeping up with volume wasn’t their strong suit)
- Every single customer looked grumpy as hell — because they weren’t being serviced in time
- The kitchen staff (was it really just one elderly woman back there?) was really slow at getting food cooked
- They had extremely old, outdated equipment; the oldest equipment ever, incredibly ancient looking microwave
- No one had time to clean anything, so the few places to sit down and eat at were dirty
- With orders not finished right or in time, a cramped space where everyone smelled each other’s body odor, and there was no room to sit down… the environment really sucked
If they did the unthinkable: a) put money into hiring a whole lineup of competent staff who could keep up with demand and b) took out a loan, got a beautiful new place with real restaurant space — this place would be rocking and I’d have nothing but good to say about it. As it is, I would never go back or recommend this place based on: #1 the environment, which was really crappy and #2 the customer service, which was lacking.
So there you go…
How businesses/startups dig themselves into an early grave.
Fear of expansion.
And: fear of investment in expansion.
Subsequently, not expanding in time. Losing customers because the holes aren’t patched up. Losing them for life.
That’s a worse tale than the fear of expansion itself.
I won’t lie, expansion scared the crap out of me. It requires money, time, and stretching your strengths to find the right people, putting trust into someone who looks good on paper, but you’ve never had to rely on before.
It’s stressful.
But it’s necessary.
To hit your next level, it’s required.
Are you running a business?
Take that leap, and expand. Find people you can trust, include and invest in them, and expand. In Nike’s words, just do it. You’ll thank me later.
