Founders need Focus

I can tell whether or not a found is likely to be successful or not in one conversation.

It boils down to one thing:

Are they focused?

This manifests in a bunch of different ways:

Wanting long-term growth but creating short-term behaviour among staff. This includes imposing lofty 1 week requirements, rather than measured 6 week bets. Or getting the right people ‘on the boat’, but kicking them off just because you didn’t need that person to row today.

Wanting 8 different things to get done at the same time. And everyone to be responsible for those 8 different things to get done, at the same time. This lack of patience blinds them to the benefits they’d unlock were they to do their best with one thing at a time, one after the other.

The plan changes every week. They read an article about something and now we’re doing this. They heard a peer mention something and now we’re doing that. This freneticism keeps them in one place, spinning their wheels but going nowhere.

The team doesn’t know what they’re doing. They’re all secretly wanting things to move forward, but despite the executive rally cry that ‘we move fast’, movement is in fact very slow due to the founder’s inability to focus on anything for long enough to make a decision they’ll stick to.

These are easy things to fix.

They have nothing to do with the founder’s hard skills, nor with their team’s.

They have everything to do with focus.

Focus.