People are great at zero to one, others at one to many. There are two types of people in business, people like founders, who are great at taking an idea and executing it, and then iterating on that till they find product market. They're great with that experimentation stage of a business where you are taking something that is pretty ephemeral, like an idea, and actually getting it out to customers and testing it out in the marketplace.
Having a thousand batshit crazy ideas means nothing if you can't execute. I'm someone who loves the creative process. I love ideating. In fact on this podcast, I'm often told my, by my producer, to stop winging it because the reality is that execution means everything. Ideation is only important at the very earliest stage.
Privilege exists. Recognize yours and check it. So without going into a huge amount of detail, I come from a massively privileged background. I went to the right schools, the right universities came from the right family and grew up in the right area. I have friends and family members who are well off, and I am very fortunate to have been able to travel the world and see things that many people haven't been able to.
Start a podcast or write a blog to learn and to share, not because of what it might get. So over the last couple of years I've been podcasting and I've recorded well over a hundred episodes across the podcast that I currently have. When I first started them, I did it because I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn from people with whom I have great relationships and great respect for, and who have been through things and challenges that I have not seen in my own life.
Just because Xero says that everyone can do their accounts doesn't mean that everybody should. So SaaS tools like Xero have democratized access to finance or certainly accounting. For many small businesses, it's meant that with very low effort, one can get their accounts up and running. But there is a reason why accountants trained for many years.
Assume your job will be replaced by AI within the next decade and act according. So we're going through a bit of a golden age of AI right now, but over the last several years we've seen AI grow at an immense pace. It went from being able to beat chess Masters to then being able to beat go masses to today where we have things like chat, GPT, and Dalle, able to provide conversational AI and even generate images for you.
Just because a VC is your friend doesn't mean that they'll invest in you. I have scar. It'll come as no surprise to you that I have a huge number of relationships and even really strong ones with people within the venture capital industry. And when I went out to raise for my business last year, whilst I was able to get in the door, I wasn't able to raise.
You may despise politics, but any organisation over a certain size is gonna. Now we've all seen the sitcoms and dramas that deal with off office politics and the reason that they are great fo, no wait, start again. 63. You may despise office poli no, 63. You may despise politics, but any organization over a certain size is gonna have it.
As a CFO, live and die by this rule. Sh*t in equals sh*t out. As a cfo, your role is to take information, synthesize it, put it into context, and help leaders make decisions. But if the data that's coming into your system is questionable, then the decisions that come out the other end are equally going to be questionable.
A players know how to lift others up. B players only know how to put them. We've all worked with B players in our careers. These are the guys that always step away from blame. They're the first to point fingers, deride and insult other employees and just sort of do their job whilst moaning as they do it.
Higher for attitude, not accolade. . I now don't even look at university as a key reason to hire someone. In fact, I often don't look at it at all. Some of the worst hires I've seen have come from supposedly great institutions with great outcomes, but they're just not able to do the work. And this is because attitude is far more.
Being great at your job does not make you a great. Okay, sorry. 58. Being great at your job does not make you a great manager. . So this typically happens in very technical roles. You may have an amazing engineer or someone who's great in finance. They can knock out a spreadsheet or write code in their sleep. But then as you try and develop them and put them into a managerial role, they really struggle. And there's a lot of reasons for this. When you are really good at doing something, it's very...
Too many people fail upwards. We've all seen. People who are mediocre at best, but always seem to be able to make their way up the ladder. They know how to play the game, they know how to deal with the politics, and they always seem to get ahead even though they didn't necessarily deserve it. This is the sad nature of life today.
Being a great manager doesn't mean you'll be a great leader and vice versa. Management is about what you do, leadership is about why you do it. A manager is there to manage a team, to develop them, to direct them, to tell them what they should be doing and when they should be doing it. whilst the leader is someone who sets the big vision for a business for an organization, something that is five years or 10 years down the track and transcendental, and then they hire in managers to help them exec...
Don't run a business. Run a set of process. ad hoc-ery can kill a business, and this can be really hard to understand, especially when you're a startup founder, because ultimately you are operating in a sea of uncertainty and often there is nothing that you can recognize as a replicable set of processes, but for your business to grow, what you need to do is identify, document, and then replicate a bunch of processes, whether that's sales, whether that's finance, whether that's operations, or whe...
Penny wise and pound foolish. So I've been in lots of businesses where founders would scrutinise the minutia of every line item of spend. And whilst that can be a good thing, it doesn't help to scrimp on the basics. . The reality is that when you are leading a team, especially, they will pick up on these sort of things.
Too good to be true, always is. We've all heard the phrase, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and this is a reality in life and in business. You may have had a supplier that's come in way cheaper than their competitors. But if you take a step back and think through why this might have been the case, it may be that they're scrimping on quality or on the volume of product that they're selling you.
Find a coach, a mentor, or a therapist. Thank me Later. So I've been really fortunate in life that I've had a succession of mentors who can be either informal or formal, that have guided me through my thinking about what it is that I want to do with my life, how I should operate, and internally what it is that I should be doing.
Family business is cutthroat. So I've worked with a family business for many years of my. And whilst I loved it and felt part of something that was bigger than myself, it was also inherently really difficult. You see issues like sibling rivalry, you see problems like politics entering the system, and equally, when money is introduced, there are often complaints and disputes that arise when you get into a family business.
As a leader, never ever think that your team and your employees aren't watching every step. You. If you are someone that spends out of control, turns up for meetings late, or de rides employees for no reason, your team is gonna see this, and they're also gonna learn from this. Now, it took me a long time to internalize this because you know, we all have egos and we all want to act in a certain way, but when you're a leader, a leader in a business, you have to step up and take a higher road becau...
Measure twice. Cut once. So this is an adage that should be familiar to most people, and it comes from carpentry where you try and make sure that you measure your piece of wood twice and cut at the right place. Because could you imagine if you cut. The wrong length, too short or too long. It won't fit into whatever it is that you're building, but this goes for business as well.
Your plan should be to make yourself redundant within 12 months. So this may seem slightly counterintuitive to a lot of people. Most people get into work to climb the ladder and continue to grow themselves in their, in their existing roles. But the reality is that in order to be a leader and to be great at what you do, you should always be thinking about how to make yourself.
If you don't have systems in place, if you don't have processes, then you cannot scale your business, Because people need to understand the boundaries of what they can do in order to do their job well. If they don't have those systems or processes in place, you're effectively operating without any sort of guidelines, and that means that you'll have a chaotic business.
Physical stock takes monthly and make sure you walk the floor. So this one's kind of personal because as many of you will know, I spent a great deal of time working in manufacturing and trading businesses and in physical goods businesses. It is imperative that you know what's happening with your, I. To give you an example, when you are walking the floor, you may pick up on some slow moving or even dead stock, which you may decide to reduce in price or even write off.
Transparency. In an early stage, VE venture is essential. In a scaling one, it can be suicidal. So when I first wrote this, I got a lot of questions and a lot of pushback because people said, well, isn't it important to be transparent? At any stage of a business, and of course that is true, and it is important to be transparent with stakeholders as best as you can.
Benchmark what you can. I see a lot of founders that kind of operate without any thought. What numbers they're putting together and how they're putting them together. And this is really because they don't benchmark. Now, benchmarking could be done for salaries, it could be done for valuations, it could be done for any number of things.
Do it manually first, then Auto. So as a non-technical founder, I thought that the first thing you should do is write some code and build some software to do the things that you want to do. I couldn't have been more wrong. The best way to get started with a product is to build it manually first and then to automate it. Because by doing it manually, you learn where the gaps are, where the problems are, and which bits you need to focus on to get it right. A great example of this is in one of my bu...
Finances, narrative over numbers. So, as a finance guy, I'm obviously really interested in what the numbers have to. But actually I'm more interested in what you as a founder have to say to me about your numbers. Does your narrative, does your story match what the numbers are telling me now? A year or so ago, I looked at a pitch deck, which had a valuation of 10 million, and ultimately the founder was telling me that they would exit their business in five years for five times.
It's about understanding how numbers flow and what people want, and. Writing out contracts to achieve those goals. In fact, even accountancy is more art than science. As I'm fond of saying, accountants are the only people that can take one in seven and make negative 55. And why is that? Because accounting is a set of rules that depends upon various functions of deferred revenue streams or timing differences, which mean that your cash never matche.
Always be raising. Okay. A lot of people have disagreed with me on this one. In fact, a good friend of mine, GOSL, the CEO of Per Box, who's in the room with me at the moment, also massively, Dre, disagrees with me on this one, but there is a bit of nuance involved. The reality is when I'm talking about always be raising, I'm not necessarily talking about going out and talking to VCs and angels constantly about raising equity. I'm talking about being very conscious about where sources of finance...
