How to move from a startup founder to a scale up founder.

The idea for Float was hatched almost ten years ago in 2009. I’d had the privilege being over at a Y-combinator event in Berkeley, California. It was there I knew that I wanted to bring this idea to life, and returned to Scotland inspired and determined to make my vision a reality. My co-founder Phil and I began working on Float at the end of 2010. It was just a concept of how we could take what we’d build in a spreadsheet and roll it out to businesses everywhere that needed help with making sense of their numbers.

It’s easy to romanticise that time. Like any new relationship, the unknown and uncertainty makes it exciting and all-consuming. Once you launch a product to customers, you’re not only focusing on feedback and user testing, but bug-fixing, marketing, raising money, business planning, hiring and product development — all at the same time! Living constantly in this whirlwind of activity eventually becomes unsustainable. It can be an emotionally challenging time, where you’re forced to make some big decisions about your future. Founder fall-outs and burn-outs happen in this stage, but even if you avoid those pitfalls, there is another one that is just as deadly: lack of focus. Essentially constant fire-fighting and working on things that aren’t the best use of your time, or your team’s.

Steve Blank defines a startup as “The search for a business model”. The startup phase is about survival and building something of value. However, the whole team are often so operationally focused with so many things to deliver, that strategic thinking in this period is very difficult to find time for.

I attended an event by Deloitte recently where they identified 5 key roles leaders need to consider where, and at what percentage, they invest their time.

These roles were:

The exercise here is to think about where you’re spending your time currently and what you’d like it to move towards over the next year. As you move from the startup phase to the scale up phase most CEO’s will need to move from being the operator or the captain to spending more time in the orchestrator, strategist, and ambassadorial roles. This transition is especially true as you begin to make more senior hires or when you’re helping team members transition into senior leadership roles.

I have loved the captain role, but realise that we’ve grown and split into different departments, operationally it’s more likely I’ll just get in the way. Letting go of some of the operational aspects of a business you’ve started can be really difficult. But it’s necessary. I don’t want to be choosing the coffee when we’re a team of 50 people. (Ok, maybe I do).

A key element for me in becoming more strategic has been taking time out of the office to get some headspace. It’s very difficult to take time to reflect or think creatively when your mind is preoccupied and you’re watching your inbox fill up by the minute. It’s common to hear business leaders talk about their best ideas coming to them in the bath or shower, or even on a flight, when they were away from a screen and able to relax.

Putting in scheduled repeating events in your calendar acts as a reminder to just do it, but also help to keep that time from being booked by other meetings or calendar invites.

To give an example of this in practice: I’ve had a big strategic piece of work that I’ve promised to do for one of my quarterly objectives. When I did take time to sit down and work on it, I found I wasn’t getting very far. Knowing that it was a huge piece of work I’d been finding it difficult to start working on it. Then, in one of my scheduled sessions to work from home I was sitting outside, drinking a cup of coffee, and journalling about work, which is something I’ve practiced for years. I found myself scribbling down some notes that came so naturally, and made so much sense, and that one piece of writing has been the source of so many internal conversations ever since.

So I know life is crazy right now, and there is so much to do, but open your calendar, and schedule a repeating event in your diary. Call it thinking time. Plan where you’re going to be, and commit to making it happen. Start with a blank page, and write down all the things that are in your head. Get it all out, then give yourself time to see what comes to you. What feels important? What could you delegate? What could you scrap completely? Where do you need to apply more focus? What relationships in the business need work? Whatever the questions are, writing it down gets it out of your head, and allows you to move beyond the whirlwind.

In a startup — it’s difficult to be both operational and strategic, but as you scale up, making the transition will be exactly what your business needs.

Thanks to Catriona Bane for reading and editing drafts of this article.

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