A Post-Mortem (Mine)
Posted on March 30, 2022 by Bob Fitts, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
While some ventures don't succeed financially they do offer valuable lessons
Some of you will already know that one my recent ventures, SUP-X: The StartUp Expo, a national early stage conference held in Florida for six years, recently met the fate of most startups and is “no mas” as they say here in Miami. When I signed off from SUP-X, I mentioned that at some point I would share some lessons learned from that experience and today is that day.
Do As I Say Not As I Do
As a consultant to SMBs before founding SUP-X, I gave all the usual advice to my clients about planning – strategic plans, contingency plans, staffing plans, financial plans, succession plans – plans, plans, plans, plans, plans. It wasn’t invalid advice and, actually, this sort of stuff is good if the resources are there and there’s scale to the operation, but I now have a greater appreciation for the speed and chaos involved in startups at least that make many of their plans obsolete nearly as soon as they are written. I now think the life-span of a “business plan” is directly proportional to the maturation of the business and there is also inflection point past a certain age as well. For many startups this means that while there may be a long-term vision, most plans are pretty tactical and near term in focus as visibility is limited, resources and time are constrained, feedback loops are fast and tight, the resulting interation is constant and pivoting, which requires new plans, is not infrequent.
SNAFU OK, FUBAR Bad
I can remember specifically the day I knew I had become an entrepreneur and it wasn’t the day I started out on my own or even for a few years into it. It was the day I worked on the seemingly unimportant task of creating a weekly newsletter under deadline for about 4 hours in a new mail service and it crashed and I lost everything. Now keep in mind that the entire SUP-X production team at that time was me and my partner in crime, Nathan Smith, together producing a 1000 person conference by ourselves and we were always, always behind and stressed out and not making a penny. In my prior life and even to that day, a crash like this would have inevitably ended up requiring the purchase of a new laptop or cell phone as those would have met a briefly cathartic, high impact, expensive and, inevitably, regretted end. But on that day, I simply took a deep breath, hung my head for a few seconds to regroup then started rebuilding the newsletter…and it crashed again about 20 minutes later for reasons to this day I do not understand…and I did the same thing again then just thought about workarounds until I solved the problem and got the edition out. I’m sure someone with better skills wouldn’t have had the problem to begin with and I’m certain there was a more elegant solution, but I did what I had to do to get it done and focused on the solution, not the frustration. THAT was the day I really became an entrepreneur as that was the day I realized, as opposed to my previous corporate life, in the startup world it is actually pretty rare when things go as planned and things being screwed up is usually the norm…and that was the day I also gained the perspective to realize that SNAFU wasn’t quite FUBAR and that was worth being happy about. ;-)
It Takes Way More Money Than You Think
Yep, way more. We all know what we know and it’s the don’t know part that will cost you time and money. To make things work remotely the way you have them all laid out in your pitch deck (which everyone, including your investors, knows is hooey) everything has to align – you have to understand your product/service; understand the market; understand how to penetrate that market; recruit, motivate, and retain the talent to go to market; and possibly do this with a team that’s never done this before or done it together before. That’s a lot of things to get right and that’s not the full list. The budget for SUP-X shrank the first three years as the event grew and we learned how to get a better product-market fit, but A LOT of cash was out the door by then. Had there been more gas in the tank, there may still be a SUP-X, but there wasn’t so there isn’t and now I know.
Your Sanity Requires More Than Financial Success Metrics
The sad truth is that most startups will fail and some will fail despite an incredible idea, a great team, plenty of financing, etc. – there are loads of reasons why startups fail and some are random and exogenous (although most are neither). If you are going to measure the experience solely on financial metrics, be prepared for an emotional reckoning that is as similarly cold, hard and depersonalized as those metrics. The experience, regardless of financial outcome, can be enormously positive and transformative regardless of financial outcome. Broaden your definition of success to give yourself both the best chance of true success and to change your perspective on business and life. Ultimately, as a good friend advised me, you need to be able to declare victory and move on and, as he’s both a good friend and smart, I have.
The End is Never the End Just a Beginning in Disguise
Most of the things I learned from the life of SUP-X have more to do with attitude, humility, gratitude, the surprising kindness of others, patience, perseverance, etc., than financial acumen or domain knowledge. Granted, I came to being an entrepreneur after a couple of decades of hardcore finance and project management experience and some time as a consultant as well, but for me, the baptism or de-flowering of going through the deeply passionate experience of being an entrepreneur was life-changing and in a good way despite the hard, humbling and expensive lessons. We’re on to that new beginning now.
Bob Fitts is the CEO of v3.0, a management consulting firm based in Miami, Florida, that specializes in helping small and medium-sized businesses in a wide variety of verticals throughout the country improve their performance. Bob has over thirty years of experience buying, selling, financing, building, growing, integrating and re-organizing businesses, both domestically and abroad, for organizations such as Goldman Sachs & Co. and Prudential Financial. Bob has been consulting small and medium-sized businesses on performance improvement since 2008.
