Six-Word Operating Manual for Entrepreneurs

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HEIDI: Welcome to the Startup Solution. I’m Heidi Roizen from Threshold Ventures.  

In about eight weeks, a new administration will be taking on the leadership of the United States. And that new administration plans to make some very big changes.

For some entrepreneurs, this is exactly the election outcome they were hoping for, and they’re thrilled about what they think is going to happen.

But for other entrepreneurs who had hoped that the election would turn out differently, many of them seem to be in a state of distress, anxiousness, and even paralysis about how to move forward from here.  

.  .  .

The reality is, if you’re an entrepreneur, it doesn’t really matter how you’re feeling about how the election played out. What matters is how you lead your company through whatever is going to happen from here on out. Because that’s your job, and the sooner you can figure out how to do it, the better.

And if you’re feeling stuck, I think I have a way to help you get unstuck.

That help comes in the form of an operating manual for entrepreneurs.

It’s one that I’ve already shared with a number of entrepreneurs who seem to have gotten value out of it. And it’s not just a good roadmap for how to run a startup; it’s also pretty helpful for dealing with any challenges that you might face, both business and personal.

And luckily, it isn’t some two-hundred-page book that you have to spend five hours reading.  

In fact, my operating manual for entrepreneurs is only six words long. 

For me, I’ve found these six words to be so powerful that I’ve even had them printed on a set of bracelets. I wear them as a constant reminder to keep me focused and moving forward when I’m feeling challenged by what life may be throwing at me.

.  .  .

So, let me tell you what those six words on my three bracelets are. 

The first one says, “embrace truth.”

It’s so easy to say, yet so hard to actually do.  

In order to embrace truth, the first thing you have to do is to find the truth. As an entrepreneur, this might mean asking hard questions of your employees, your co-founders, your customers, or even your friends. It might mean seeking out data that you just know is going to contain bad news. Or running an analysis on something that your gut tells you is going to deliver a negative result. Or when it comes to that new administration we talked about earlier; it may mean studying up on a new policy even though you don’t personally agree with it.

You may be squirming as you hear me say this, and trust me, I get it. This kind of stuff can be emotionally painful to do, and there’s a great temptation to just look the other way, focus your attention on one of the million other things you have to do, and hope it all just sorts itself out on its own.

But as the saying goes, “hope is not a strategy.”

That truth you’re avoiding may be painful, but it’s also highly likely to be very illuminating about some aspect of your business. In fact, if my experience indicates anything, the more painful it is – the more useful it is. Startups will die if they don’t constantly evolve, and from what I’ve seen, those painful truths often provide some of the most telling indicators of what needs to be changed in order to be successful. 

What’s often the case for a startup is that the signals are already kind of showing long before that truth is finally acknowledged and accepted. It might come in the form of missing your revenue projections, month after month. It might be a high turnover rate in your employee base. Or it might be a lackluster response to your ad campaign or beta test. And if I or other people working with you can see it, you can probably see it too if you’re brave enough to look.

If this is making you uncomfortable, even just a little bit, let me poke at that feeling for a second because maybe there’s a truth that you know you’re avoiding. Well then, great, we’ve just made some progress. Because as painful as that is, that also means that there’s probably a great opportunity for you to bring it front of mind and do something about it.

.  .  .

Which brings me to bracelet number two.

It says, “make choices.”

Again, easy to say, but sometimes, surprisingly hard to do.

I’ve seen “analysis paralysis” so many times that it’s hard to pick out just one example to illuminate the point – but I’d say where I’ve seen it the most is when it comes to personnel decisions. You know, someone’s not working out, but it would suck to fire them. And it also sucks to then have a hole in your org chart and maybe have to do all that person’s work yourself in the meantime while you’re looking for a replacement. So even though you know the person is not working out, you just don’t want to make that hard decision to let them go.  

But let me tell you, from my many decades of experience, that the chance a personnel issue will turn itself around if you just give it time is about zero.

Avoidance of decision-making is often highly correlated with the fact that there will be pain involved, like the pain of letting someone go. But decision avoidance can also crop up when there just isn’t a clearly definitive path forward. And guess what? For most things in business and in life, you aren’t going to have a complete data set that lays your path out like a strip of runway lights. And if you delay decision-making until you amass that perfect data set, you’re probably going to be making the decision too late to really matter.  

I also see indecision happen when there is no clear or hard deadline, which makes it easy to just keep kicking the can down the road or forget about it for a while. But even things with no hard deadline have a nasty habit of disappearing at some point if you don’t pay attention to them and make a decision. And regardless of why this happens, it results in missed opportunities. 

.  .  .

Now that you know what the most common indecision eddies are, I’m hoping that you can navigate past them and make those hard decisions. 

And in doing so, you now get to move on to bracelet number three, which says, “take action.”  

Because embracing the truth and making choices doesn’t amount to a hill of beans unless you take the actions necessary to put those choices in motion.

In fact, what can be even more demotivating to a team than a CEO being in denial is to have a CEO who knows about a situation and may have even told some people that they’ve made a decision, but then they don’t act on it and the issue just drags on.

And, of course, the primary reason people don’t act on tough decisions is, once again, that completely human desire to avoid pain. But pain is a part of the job. Entrepreneurs I work with probably get tired of hearing me say, “Just rip the band-aid off,” – but I’m a big believer in dealing with the pain as quickly as possible once you’ve made a decision. Yeah, just rip that band-aid off and move on because it doesn’t get easier the longer you wait.          

There can be a different psychology that may keep you from acting, and I’ll chalk that one up to FOMO – the Fear of Missing Out. Acting on one thing often means giving up on something else. For example, picking between two equally good but very different candidates. Or choosing to double down on one product direction or vertical segment at the expense of another. I see a lot of this early in people’s careers, where they try to keep so many options open and so many bets on the table that they never fully commit and then never fully succeed at anything.  

And, of course, inaction can also stem from one of our deepest fears – the fear of failure. If you don’t act on your startup idea, you won’t have any embarrassing failures with all the things that could go wrong, like demoing a product that crashes and burns, or getting beat by the competition, or having investors turn down your pitch.  

And if you do start a company, you're taking on some big risks, like quitting your job and maybe going without a paycheck for months or even years. That’s scary stuff, too.

There’s one more way I’ve seen entrepreneurs fail to act. Sometimes, what you have to do is just plain old hard, boring, or tedious work. That’s frankly not as fun as some of the other stuff you get to do. That saying about 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration? In my experience, that’s about right. Some work is just not that fun. But it’s still got to be done. And if you’re the leader, it often falls to you to do it.

.  .  .

So, there you have it.  

Embrace truth.

Make choices.

Take action.

A six-word operating manual for entrepreneurs and for life in general. 

That’s simple to say and remarkably hard to actually follow.  

But this is what leaders have to do. Leading is not about your personal emotions or feelings. It’s about getting to the core of what’s actually going on. Making hard decisions that will likely not be perfect. But making them anyway. And then executing on them to move you, your team, and your company forward. That’s the job of the entrepreneur. And no one said it was going to be easy.

.  .  .

So now, let’s at least end on a light note. No kidding, the bracelets are quite helpful to me, and if you want a set for yourself, I’ve put a link in the show notes to the entrepreneur on Etsy who makes them. Just to be clear, I’m not making any money off that link, and she doesn’t even know I do this podcast, so if a bunch of you order them, boy, is she going to be pleasantly surprised!

And that concludes this episode of the Startup Solution. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please forward it to someone else who could use it. I’m Heidi Roizen from Threshold Ventures.

Further Reading

No additional reading for this episode, but as promised, here’s the link to the Etsy shop that sells the bracelets. You do have to specify to the shop owner what you want the bracelets to say!  

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