admin You’re Fired! Female Founders Are Still Fighting For Respect in Tech — Here is My Comeback Story!
I am certainly more jaded now; I am not sure this will ever change, given how ingrained these unconscious biases are in our society. But I can at least offer some insights from what I have learned through this process — to ensure my next one…and maybe yours… won’t suffer the same fate. Some of my top lessons learned include:
1. Choose Your Investors Carefully
It is critical to choose investors that share the same morals, vision and have demonstrated they will support founders when there are bumps in the road. If you don’t, things can go very wrong. And those investors can make or break you and your company. I heard this a lot, but was in a situation where I desperately needed the money to keep SupportPay going and to pay my employees. Doing it again, I would rather shut down the company and regroup than take money or a deal from someone who is not in agreement with my mission and goals for the company, who didn’t align with my morals and who I did not trust 100% to support me not only in good times but also when there are bumps in the road. At the same time, I am incredibly grateful to anyone that invests their money in me and my mission. I believe in recognizing investors for their support. In fact, after I created my new company, I gave previous investors equity in my new company, based on their previous level of contribution and support. I didn’t have to do this. I did it simply because it was the right thing to do.
2. Will They Pay?
If someone is not willing to pay for your service then it isn’t worth your time, energy and effort. In a world where many things are free and there are stories of these companies with massive users whose only business model is advertising, realize your chance of reaching that scale is slim, very slim. If you can’t build something that someone else is willing to pay for, then it simply isn’t worth you wasting any more time on it.
3. Focus on Revenue
One critical lesson my mom taught me, and that I try to teach my daughter, is to never be financially dependent on another person. The moment you are financially dependent, you are there because you HAVE to be, not because you WANT to be. I certainly followed this rule in my personal life but I failed to follow this rule in business. Because I spent the first few years focused on users and growth, knowing there were a million ways we could make money with SupportPay, I quickly became completely financially dependent on investors to keep the company going. Revenue gives you independence. Revenue gives you choice. And let’s face it, people want to give you money when you don’t need it. Don’t get caught up in the hype. When you have revenue, you have the luxury of accepting the money because you want to, not because you have to.
4. Hire Fast, Fire Faster
If an employee is not delivering results or doing their job, give them the proper warnings and set a clear timeline to revisit the conversation. If they are still not delivering, it’s important to make a change quickly. This could be the difference between the success and failure of your company. Especially in a startup every role, every dollar spent, is critical to your success. I believed early on that I was “lucky” to have anyone work for me because I wasn’t able to pay top salaries like other Silicon Valley companies. But that thinking ultimately led me to keep people when they should have been replaced with someone who worked as hard for the company as I did. This also means making everyone in the organization accountable. Many days, it felt like driving revenue and getting new customers was something only I was thinking about. In reality, this has to be what EVERY employee thinks about. If they aren’t, then they aren’t a fit for your startup. At the end of the day, it’s the smallest details in your business that could cause its demise. As you delegate responsibilities its critical to randomly inspect an employee, vendor or contractor’s work. These inspections and audits will ward off long-term and significant issues while making it clear to everyone that you are paying attention to what they are doing. In the end, the success or failure of your company will come down to the people you hire to help deliver on your mission.
5. Reward for results, not for promises
Finally, when it comes to success or failure, in the end, all that really matters is results. While most people have good intentions, overwhelmingly people make huge promises yet fail to deliver results on those promises. A motto I live by is “Don’t talk about it, be about it” and in business, this is that more important. Instead of rewarding people for what they say they are going to do, reward them with the results they deliver to your bottom line.
This is just a small fraction of what I learned. What are the top lessons you have learned after a failure?
About Sheri Atwood
Sheri Atwood is an Entrepreneur and Single Mom. She is a Founder & CEO of SupportPay, the 1st automated child support payment platform that enables parents to share child expenses & exchange child support/alimony directly with each other.
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