In recent weeks, I’ve been caught in the upswing of operations and business development that I’ve grossly neglected everything else – e.g., producing content for this blog. Now that we have completed our main order for Jindal Southwest and await the beginning of that trial, production has slowed and I’ve had a chance stepped back to pause and recollect my scattered responsibilities.
When we started production in May, the new stream of operations workflow brought with it a whole host of challenges, which I won’t revisit. Amongst other challenges, setting up and running productions was like a black hole that consumed all my extra time and energy that sometimes could’ve been better spent elsewhere. For the first 2.5 weeks, I sat for whole days working with the women in the workshop, at the end of which was left little time for all the business development work. Even as the workshop became independent enough to run itself, there still remained the daily check-ins on progress, productivity, quality, etc. Between these daily interruptions and the frequent fire drills of supply shortages or unexpected employee absences, the long-term workplans simmered away on the back burner, overlooked.
I realized that the myopia that occurred during our heavy production phase was just one incidence of shortsightedness amongst many. Perhaps, one of the most difficult and unexpected challenges that I’ve faced in working with a start-up has been to remain focused on the bigger picture. I expected that business school and management consulting had trained me well enough to focus on the 10,000 ft. view, and yet it was so easy to get caught by the immediate concerns – daily production reports, last minute sales meetings, networking opportunities, etc. – that I never realized that my 10,000 ft. view was really a 10 ft. view. I realize in hindsight that the trap is easy to fall into because addressing immediate concerns gives a more tangible sense of productivity than working on something with a longer timeline. Everything that we did was in line with our general objectives of getting the business going, but I doubt that we structured and used our time wisely.
In the past few weeks, my partner and I finally had time sat down to talk about the company. There are things that we should’ve done at the very beginning – broad framework exercises – which could’ve better informed some of the decisions that we made. With more time on our hands, we’ve sat down to do a detailed stakeholders’ analysis. As we talked through the various customer segments and the purchase motivations, I realized how differently he and I perceived the buyers’ motivations, which explained a few of our major disagreements. In discussing our raw materials’ suppliers, I again discovered just how differently we could’ve managed our supply chain and avoided a number of our daily stress instigators. So many of the decisions that we disagreed upon simply stemmed from the different perspectives and understanding we had of the business.
The entire time that we were working on generating more sales and manufacturing for orders, we both thought that we had fixed upon the larger vision and were aligned in our understanding of the business. The first week that we started working together, we created a workplan with short and long term goals and sales targets – this was what we thought the big picture meant. But now I realize how myopic that was. The bigger picture discussion should’ve meant objectives and targets even broader than simply sales targets that would inform a framework for how we would make business decisions. For example, should we take on an order if we don’t have the production capacity for it or if in order to produce it we would have to hire men workers? The sales targets and goals we established for ourselves were tactical and are useless in the evaluation of the option. Especially since it turns out my partner and I had different understandings of the business, we should’ve established broader values for our business so that we knew what to prioritize when a decision presented us with a conflict of objectives.
Seeing the bigger picture is hard. Certainly harder in a dynamic, changing business scenario. It’s easier when you’re looking at it as a static business case in a classroom or consulting conference room. Constant reevaluation of your understanding of the business is a must. In a start-up, you can’t stop stepping back and making sure that you’re making decisions with a 10,000 ft. perspective, because it’s so easy to think that when you’re actually about 10 ft. from the ground. I’m sure that a month from now, I’ll be feeling myopic all over again.
