As a self proclaimed business guru, I have long advised my clients to hire smart people, ideally people smarter than themselves. Its long been a hallmark of great management; hire smart, talented people, give them the resources and support they need to be successful and let them go do what they do.
Our first hiring decision was to hire an adviser to help us with the project. Due to some relationships we have, we were able to find someone who had several successes in building technology/process based platform companies to assess what we wanted to do and find the best approach to doing so. He undertook an extensive amount of research and was able to: 1) validate that our concept was on target; and that 2) much of what we wanted to accomplish could be done with available software and services. We found that what five years ago would have cost well into six figures could be accomplished for a fraction of that. This was very exciting as it meant we could start this business for a lot less than we thought and get to market faster than we envisioned.
Continuing to appreciate that we knew what we didn’t know, we hired him to manage the project for us. In doing so, he was able to find a great web design/developer for us to work with; these guys are incredibly bright as they have both an understanding of the technology and the business case for technology. This is a very unique trait and once again tied into our philosophy about hiring smart people. As important as finding the right firm to work with, our adviser was able to negotiate a great fixed price contract for us. As some of the subsequent lessons will show, this was perhaps one of the smartest decisions that was made.
At this point in our start up’s life, we felt we were in great shape and doing all the right things. We were able to think beyond our initial idea to find something unique, we identified what we didn’t know and hired people smarter than us to shepherd us through the development process. Just as important, development was moving along and the initial design was looking great. This was early January and we were targeting a late March launch that looked right on target.
This is when we learned an important and invaluable lesson about hiring smart people. Its good to give smart people freedom and flexibility to do what they do best, its generally going to result in a great return. But, one should never forget that smart people also make mistakes. Because smart people are still people its critical to question and challenge them on key decisions and recommendations. This is incredibly hard to do because as someone who doesn’t know, its easy to be intimated by their talent and your lack of knowledge. In as much as its incumbent upon a leader to recognize what they don’t know, its also necessary for a leader to have enough confidence to ask questions; remember there are no stupid questions.
As the next post will discuss, I didn’t have the confidence to dig deep into a decision that in hindsight should have been challenged.
