Managing a startup presents unique challenges. Money and other resources are scarce, deadlines are tight, and the margin for error is low. Yet founders and their teams consistently overcome these adversities and build companies that eventually become respected in their fields and, perhaps, change the world.
But the path to getting them is long and narrow. Navigating it requires a set of strategies that optimize your processes, eliminate inefficiencies, and promote sustainable growth. Find out more about them below.
Clear Goal Setting
Having a growth mindset and gunning for that next round of funding gives your startup something to strive for. However, not having clear, actionable goals during each stage of development only leads to poor results. Employees perform best when they know what they’re striving toward and what tasks they should do to achieve such actionable goals.
For example, you could focus on achieving better product-market fit by next quarter or increasing the number of daily website visitors by X. Setting goals you can track, measure, and assign resources to will serve as clear indicators of your progress. These goals will help guide your success and allow you to make adjustments if you encounter challenges in meeting them.
Effective Time Management
Your funds stretch only so far and aren’t developing your startup in a vacuum, meaning you’re under pressure to produce results quickly. One way of doing this without having quality suffer is to assess and optimize how you and your teams use the time at your disposal.
Effective time management is all about identifying and eliminating inefficiencies and distractions. Employees lose 720 work hours annually to distractions like phones and nosy colleagues. Management isn’t helping either with tedious meetings, the contents of which would have been better suited for a global Slack message. Managers & the C-suite themselves often fail to account for the opportunity cost of micromanaging teams or stressing over details instead of putting their energy toward securing clients or funds.
Time tracking and calendar tools will help everyone block out their day, weed out inefficiencies, and work smarter.
Streamline Team Collaboration
A lack of communication opportunities and resources can seriously damper growth and your startup’s innovative potential. Siloed teams slow down decision-making processes, may produce redundant work, or even engage in unhealthy competition.
The solution is to mandate open communication and put all the resources needed for success at employees’ disposal. Teams should engage in regular huddles, give and receive input, and be able to voice concerns in a non-judgmental environment.
Due to inefficiency, you’ll want to transition away from email as a means of internal communication. Platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams are better for keeping track of different conversations and secure file sharing. Sometimes, members will also need to share account details securely, so you’ll want to set up a password manager like NordPass to make this possible. With a password manager, your team can exchange passwords through the app without having to use unsecured ways and risk a possible leak.
Maximizing Resource Allocation
Every startup faces a challenge of how best to utilize the modest capital, human resources, and tools at its disposal. Allocating them is a fine balancing act, as focusing on one aspect of the business may deprive another.
You’ll want to identify which tasks yield the greatest ROI and divert resources accordingly. Develop a lean mindset and use only the least amount of resources needed for a given task. Assess your people’s strengths and set them to work on projects they’re the most likely to excel at. Create a budget and direct funds towards the essentials, reviewing and updating it as the situation changes.
You’ll also want to explore automation and outsourcing. The more operational work you can automate or delegate, the more everyone can devote themselves to developing what’s unique about your startup.
Secure Company Data
Part of maintaining optimum efficiency is developing defenses that will protect your startup from business interruptions, financial setbacks, and reputational loss caused by data breaches and other cyber incidents.
Startups rely on data more than most organizations. On the one hand, they collect sensitive information on customers to develop their products and provide a positive customer experience. On the other hand, they’re heavily reliant on third-party digital services for project and customer management, marketing, analytics, etc.
Securely accessing their databases and third-party services is paramount, which is another enterprise password manager strong suite. They streamline unique password creation and access via autofill and additional protection through MFA, allowing employees to work with any tool they need at any given time while knowing their accounts are safe from compromise.
Invest in Employee Training
Developing your employees’ competencies benefits everyone. Letting them hone their existing skills can improve innovation and efficiency, while cross-training allows them to pivot and help understaffed teams during crunch time.
Three-quarters of employees are more likely to stay at their current company if training opportunities are offered. This boosts their confidence and willingness to bring up issues or propose novel solutions. Finally, training is also an opportunity to identify and nurture future leadership from within, which will become invaluable as the startup expands.
Conclusion
Cultivating efficiency in your startup is as much about harnessing human potential as it is about cutting costs and tightening up processes. Now that you have both parts of the equation covered, you can build up an agile operation that’s as irresistible to customers as appealing to your workforce.
