Looking After Yourself
I’ve written elsewhere about the lengthy time horizon for growing a B2B SaaS business. If you begin with the expectation that it will likely take a decade to build a company and realize its potential, you will hopefully be motivated to set down some roots to anchor you and your business over the long run. You may reach your goals sooner, and in my experience, you are more likely to do so if your business is designed to be sustainable for you from the start.
Startup investors provide a good yardstick for what is important in their field. They look for a robust market, a great approach to tackling it, and they look for “top talent”. Often described as people showing the courage to stick with it and learn through the hard times, having the genius to be creative and solve each problem as it comes. That sets a high bar for such Talent.
So if you want to maximize your chances of success, then you should start with nurturing Talent and that must begin with yourself. It’s a long uncertain road to exit. When you take the decision to strike out on your own with all the risk and uncertainty that brings, you are probably lowering your short- and medium-term earning potential. You are pinning your future livelihood to your own dreams, where the odds of those dreams surviving are not favourable, and where being on your A game is a must. But I believe that you can acquire the resilience, patience and creativity that help you succeed in business and dare I say, have a more fulfilled life.
Resilience
Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. It’s having the flexibility to spring back from problems and move on without being too wedded to a particular outcome or over commitment to how a particular situation must go.
In a start-up, getting back up again and being the agent of fluidity that keeps rematching your means with the ends you seek - is a daily requirement.
My view is that the source of this resilience is acceptance that opportunities will always unfold if we are open and looking out for them. This is the embodiment of entrepreneurship.
On the other hand, if we try and force everything with an ego-plan for what must happen we become extremely attached to ideas that are likely never realised. This can lead to a fragile, catastrophising attitude that fixates on progress limitations against idealised plans. When such an attitude takes hold, the resulting cognitive overload from focusing on insoluble issues results in a mental shut-down, a freeze-up of inflexibility where the rest of life’s opportunities pass by unnoticed.
Treat Body and Mind
The first step to resilience is to be kind to yourself and not listen to the internal criticism that you will inevitably give yourself when looking to succeed. When you make mistakes and then doubt yourself, it’s very important that you can overcome that feeling.
As I was growing up, I struggled a lot with self-criticism. It began as an adolescent. At the age of twelve I shot up in height. Suddenly I was six feet tall and stood out in a crowd at school. This made me a target for teasing by kids my own age, as well as getting intimidated, threatened, pushed around by much older boys. Living in this environment day after day made me extremely unhappy. It damaged my view of myself and left me with some self esteem issues and a bit of a loner in many respects.
Over time I developed many coping mechanisms that allowed me to overcome feelings of low self esteem and hyper self-criticism. Everyone will develop their own tools for reducing stress and anxiety and building self esteem – hopefully some of these ideas should be useful tools to other founders who need to treat themselves kindly.
Taking exercise allows us to get out of our own heads. It is a chance to feel our bodies doing what they were designed for—moving about, feeling exerted, getting our heart rates up. Physical activity stimulates the release of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. These hormones play an important part in regulating our mood and fighting depression.
Researchers also believe that exercise can be particularly helpful for people who deal with anxiety and panic attacks. When you engage in strenuous physical activity, your mind and body mimic the physiological responses that can come with anxiety, allowing you to learn how to manage these responses and not be overwhelmed by them in other situations.
If your brain is telling you that you cannot overcome the next obstacle, then do something different, something physical, and I guarantee you’ll probably feel better at the end of it and have a more positive attitude. For me, during my time at CloudSense, I discovered running was a helpful part of my daily routine for reducing stress. To this day I seek out physical, in-the-moment experiences, including meditation, biking, paddling on water, and continuing with my running.
Learn to recognize but release your sabotaging thoughts—those unsettled and uncontrollable thoughts described in Buddhism as the “monkey mind” which everyone has—is a learned discipline, though a counter intuitive one. In meditation, the noise of your conscious mind is allowed to run on, whilst you focus on your senses, taking in stillness of your surroundings and your breathing. By choosing to be aware of the thought without engaging with it, you can let sabotaging, unhelpful, or intrusive thoughts slip out of your consciousness as readily as they arrived uninvited. These days my meditation practice has moved on from mindfulness and I find TM very helpful. TM is a mantra-based meditation technique that releases stress and quickly quietens the mind as well as contributing to all round health. Such self-nurture can be a valuable part of staying well and being fresh to take the right decisions when under pressure.
Remember Your Support Network
The second step to building resilience is your support network of family and friends. As an entrepreneur, you bring people along on your journey. They follow your dream as you bring it to life. I hope that this trust people place in you builds your sense of responsibility to those people. It did for me, and that was a motivator.
But during difficult times, this dynamic can be lonely and isolating. Having people that you can open up to, lean on, and rely upon is one of the things that will help you to bounce back and find resolve.
Your support network may be made up of a variety of roles, starting with your family. My default style when talking to family about my business was to focus on the good things: “It’s exciting,” or, “It’s great to be on a journey with a super team.”
What I didn’t want to say to them was, “I’ve got work coming out of my ears, the business is really stressful, and I don’t have enough money to pay myself for the things my family wants and needs.”
Unfortunately, this approach of not sharing and of silently shouldering all the problems meant I wasn’t being honest. My family didn’t know when I really needed help because I wasn’t communicating, and instead became tired and irritable. I lost track of when I was overstepping the mark and creating problems for loved ones. When I couldn’t afford to pay myself sufficiently during a particularly hard time, rather than sharing this with my wife, I took out loans to cover household costs. One day I got home to find letters from the loan company open on the table and my wife extremely unhappy with me, not only because I was indebting our family but—most importantly—I’d not told her things were that bad. When I went into business, I certainly never meant to bring pain and stress on my loved ones, but I’d done exactly that in my efforts to own every problem and put on a brave face, and by failing to be completely open and totally honest about the challenges and the realities of the business.
My advice to anyone who finds themselves putting on the brave face and seeking to “protect” others from what’s happening is this: The best course of action is transparency, and the best attitude is “a problem shared is a problem halved.” My experience was that not only will you feel more supported with the comfort and love of those close to you, but you’ll get the best advice for free and the unjudging emotional support that is missing when you take it all on by yourself. Your business dreams will have an impact on those around you for good or bad. Do them the courtesy of taking them on the journey! You owe it to them, and you will feel much the better for it.
Another impact your focus on business can have for your family is you become less available to them. I don’t mean only that you are physically absent, but that even during those precious family moments together your head is filled with work. You find yourself half listening, half answering, and all the time trying to cover up that your mind is elsewhere. If you can attend family occasions, you find yourself checking email and making calls. All this is understandable. Your business is your dream, and more than that, your current reality relies on its success too.
The fact is that you will be a clearer thinker and better decision maker if you have proper down time. I find it unlikely that any entrepreneur is wired to coast along with no spark and no competitive spirit. You’re probably working harder than just about everyone else. Therefore, if you could do a better job by working a little less, you could also be there in the present for your family. This will connect you back to what most probably motivated you to start out in the first place: success for you and those dear to you. Not only will your decision making be clearer, but you’ll find more contentment. You’ll be nurturing yourself and building the resilience you need to keep on your journey for the long run. Help keep everyone connected with routine diary planning and the discipline of agreeing with your family when you will be there (phone free) and when not. Use an assistant, better business planning, and a routine, so that the business relies less on you and does more by itself on autopilot. Over the lifetime of your business, this will free you up to be a better leader and more present for those around you.
Over the ten years you commit all your time to your work, friendships can easily wither away. To counteract this, make a list of your friendships that you plan to nurture during this time. Each friendship probably works differently—one may be a close confidant, another a sports buddy, a third someone you let your hair down with. Focus on the friendships that are mutual, healthy, and bring you positive energy. If you think about what makes each friendship thrive, then you can also begin to plan time doing with these people the things you enjoy. Become the proactive one who takes the initiative to fix things up and use an assistant to help. Even if you only meet up occasionally, keeping the embers of the friendship burning during this busy period of your life will help maintain a healthy support network and add to your resilience.
This lesson took me a few years to learn. I threw myself into my work to the exclusion of old friends. By year three, as the size of the project I’d undertaken was sinking in—both for my wife and I—and when I commented that the email, text, and call invites I’d formerly received began to dwindle, my wife astutely encouraged me to make a few calls. Seeing good friends should be a pause from work, and a reminder that there is a big world full of other people’s lives and interests. When you commit to nurturing friendships, you are investing in the important stuff that connects us all, and that will make you a better entrepreneur.
The final category in your support network I’d call coaches. Your coach—one or more of them—may help you in a formal capacity, such as a good business coach, board member, personal trainer, or sports team coach.
Being a leader in a start-up can often feel like you are expected to have the answers and to take the lead. Letting someone else guide you to better decisions and better health can be extremely nurturing. It can bring balance to the way you think and act. I’ve talked about my business coach transforming for the better the way I ran my business. I could list several people to whom I’ve turned for help and guidance over the years, such as an amazing personal trainer who patiently kept me strong and fit when I had little time and arrived distracted, having skipped my warm-up routine, only for me to leave the sessions feeling energized, relaxed, and thinking more clearly. Or I could mention an old colleague and friend of twenty years who sat patiently listening to my start-up journey every month for many years, always offering objective thoughts from a distance. Truly a problem shared became a problem halved!
Acknowledging the importance of yourself as a complete person, beyond your business role, and investing in the people who make you whole brings greater fulfilment and makes you a better leader. A famous contemporary Buddhist quotation that sums this up for me is, “Through friendship we have the opportunity to develop the virtues of generosity, compassion, patience, and forgiveness.”
Share the Challenges
The third step to resilience is making sure that you share the load. I don’t need to illustrate again the remarkable difference that business planning made to my business. Empowering your senior team to problem-solve with you means you are not trying to win each battle on your own. I’m not suggesting your team must solve everything for you, because abdicating leadership responsibility is no more helpful than micromanaging. As a confident leader, you can choose when to drive and when to be a passenger in problem solving. Indeed, the best ideas will flow in your team when people feel assured they’ll be listened to and valued, and aren’t second guessing that you’ll immediately overturn or hijack their view.
It should be your goal that your business will reach a size where you cannot physically or sensibly make all the decisions!
Also, you need the very best talent. You need people who are self-motivated. How will you be able to retain talent if the only talent you value is to follow your will? You don’t want robots, you want high achieving superstars on your team.
Most critically, when you set people up to collaborate and self-organise to solve for your business, you will nurture your own resilience and that of the business.
Day to day, we did some little things that made a big difference. We created a new email group, execteam@, and rather than sending a note to just one of the exec team, we soon started sharing significant cross departmental communications in a very natural way that everyone could be involved in responding to. We also instituted a 30-minute stand-up video call with the exec team three mornings a week, early in the day, which meant people could join from anywhere. This became a regular, short check-in that kept everyone coordinated and away from the typical endless corporate meetings that companies suffer from through the day. Once we had synched up, it was very easy for each executive to focus on the priorities for their teams and the most critical cross-team collaborations. The stand-ups were a chance for each leader to briefly list the objectives they were working on, explain barriers they foresaw, and ask for help.
The guard rails for this are business planning.
For those of you who decide to have co-founders / equity partners, you have a ready-made support network at work. Partners are there for the tough times, and you can be very open with them, and they are there to celebrate the good times.
Build Up Self-Belief
The fourth step to resilience is creating a culture of confidence in your company. You can take practical steps to build this so that the company has “self-belief.” Remember that everyone needs to feel they are on a positive journey in your company, and that means recognizing and enjoying the successes and the good times. The competitive way I brought to the business meant I naturally took very little time to enjoy its successes. When a goal was reached, I was already thinking about the next one. But this is not always healthy for culture. I remember in one tough quarter, things had gone down to the wire, and we missed quarter target. I was all over the analysis of what had slipped and how we’d get off to a faster start for the next one, and then one of my sales managers invited me to lunch. As I headed for the Italian restaurant around the corner from the office, I had a few misgivings about taking a longer than usual break. When I got there, I found all the sales team were in there, laughing, joking, and having fun. I joined the table smiling and thanked them for their hard work. My sales manager and I got chatting and I asked him what had prompted him to arrange this.
“We always do this after quarter end,” he said. “It’s a chance to celebrate when things have gone well, and an opportunity to regroup and plan the coming weeks when things haven’t been so good. I invited you so you could see the energy in the room.”
Even after a miss it was a chance to bond, draw breath from the frenetic daily activity, acknowledge the hard work of the last weeks, and plan how to quickly close the gap. He went on to educate me that over the previous couple of years I’d lost good people from various roles in the company by being too focused on the next big goal and never stopping to acknowledge achievement and having a bit of fun with the team.
I felt a bit uncomfortable when he reminded me that while the business was the creation of my co-founders and me, for everyone else it was a job; and although it was an exciting place to work, it was up to me to make the team feel part of something, valued, and like they were on the journey together. I could see around that table how people were bonding and cementing important human ties.
I reflected on this conversation afterwards and realized it was true. In our private lives we’d find time for fun with those close to us, and such things were bonding experiences. We need fun and friendship at work too. When I brought this subject up with my management team, it became a regular topic that we worked on to keep the company engaged. We decided that in the interests of building a thriving, confident culture, we must proactively find the successes to celebrate and show gratitude to our committed, hard-working people.
It turned out that this was not so hard to do, and the business case of making a capital efficient investment in staff retention really worked out. We set aside a budget for a team get-together every last Thursday evening in the month. We’d pay for food, drinks, and activities chosen by the staff. It got teams from different departments talking. We did this in every office worldwide, and we’d share on the company intranet the pictures and stories from these get-togethers. I began running monthly company updates, initially as calls and later by video. With a little bit of help and preparation, I always had successful wins and customer projects to talk about, and I made sure I personally thanked the teams involved. There’d always be a Q&A session using the chat thread on the video call. I made certain to answer every question in a direct and honest way, and this led to a remarkably open and engaged dialogue with staff.
We began using the monthly updates to advertise other key successes we wanted to celebrate, such as anniversaries for the company, new product releases, and awards. These awards celebrated individuals for their standout examples of living the company ethos of trust, accountability, confidence, innovation, and empathy.
Seen through the narrow lens of jobs to be done, morale-boosting events and fun activities may seem to have little value to add. But I learned that as a tool for building a resilient company culture, celebrating success generates confidence to stay resilient in the hard times, and putting fun in the middle of the business creates deep personal bonds between staff that translates into a strong tribal loyalty.
Remain Patient
Being patient on your business journey can spell the difference between achieving success or failing. Tasks are always more difficult and goals take longer to reach than you expect. Without having patience, you will suffer considerable extra strain building your business, as it will probably take longer than you’d hoped. If you are impatient, it’s very likely that you won’t stick at important tasks sufficiently long to realize their benefit. Only patience allows you to overcome the roadblocks that keep appearing in your way.
Setbacks inevitably get in the way as your company grows. No one likes it when they happen. As a founder I have been very competitive and direct, and very eager to reach the goal, and whilst this was helpful at times—a business needs a driver—other traits are needed as well. Being circumspect, having resolve, and knowing when to take a deep breath and reassess will serve you well. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, as they say.
When we started out, we identified a particular critical problem for our customers: they were not able to easily select the products they wanted to sell and build into bundles and special offers to their buyers. This was the emerging “configure, price, quote” (CPQ) category, and we were building great customers and great reputation in it. We were four years into our journey when a new competitor arrived in the market with a bang. They’d raised $40 million, and over the following four years they raised over $400 million. Their focus was singularly in our category. Competition is usually healthy, as it makes everyone get better, but in this case the company in question became notorious for some alleged toxic working practices including misrepresenting what their product could do and trash talking the competition, which was basically us. We lost a lot of new business because of this.
Our choices were to join them in this fight, telling lies and offering things we couldn’t provide, perhaps try to raise an undisciplined amount of venture money and fund an arms race; or we could stick to our ethos and focus on customer success and capital efficient growth. We chose the waiting strategy, hoping that if we stuck to doing what we’d agreed with customers, honoured our commitments, and tried to do a good job, then over the long run our reputation would grow while our competitor’s would sink, along with their “alternative facts.”
It was extremely hard to watch our marketplace change in this way, knowing that our voice of reason was being starved of oxygen by a growing go-to-market investment by a questionable, overfunded business.
As time went by, we saw that we had made the right decision. We would not have been able to put $400 million to work efficiently (neither could they!) and we would have been going against our ethos to treat customers that way. By the second year of our competition, we began to see a steady stream of their customers come to us, unhappy with the treatment and results they’d had from our competitor. We sold millions of dollars of software to them and then gave them the successful outcomes they’d been seeking.
For our customers and us, it was a win-win. Being patient and pursuing the strategy of waiting was the best course of action we could have chosen, but it was not easy. It took strong conviction to remain focused on transparency with customers and successful delivery, instead of telling opaque untruths to seal quick customer orders, which would have been a faster route to growth, but made at the expense of unhappy customers. It took discipline to focus on growth whilst spending so much less than the competition on sales and marketing. We reconciled ourselves to being very targeted on where we judged we could win and worked harder than ever to generate more intelligence on each deal so that we could make sound deal qualification judgments. We were able to make this very deliberate act of patience a key communications theme, showing our teams that we were not unduly concerned or overwhelmed by the aggressive tactics in the market, instead using patience to convey our confidence in our belief that our competitor would be “found out.” We raised about 5 per cent of the venture capital money that this competitor did, but I am sure we made considerably higher percentage returns to our shareholders upon exit because we grew a more efficient business with far happier customers who were committed to us for the long run.
Final Thoughts:
In this note, I emphasise the importance of self-care for founders, highlighting the need to build personal resilience and maintain well-being throughout the entrepreneurial journey.
Key Takeaways:
Acknowledge the Long-Term Commitment: Building a B2B SaaS business is a marathon, not a sprint. Recognize the decade-long horizon and prepare yourself mentally and physically for the journey ahead.
Prioritize Personal Resilience: Develop the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties by staying flexible and open to new opportunities, rather than becoming overly attached to specific outcomes.
Practice Self-Compassion: Be kind to yourself, especially when facing mistakes or self-doubt. Overcoming internal criticism is crucial for maintaining mental health and perseverance.
Incorporate Physical Activity: Engage in regular exercise to boost mood-regulating hormones like dopamine and serotonin, which can help combat stress, anxiety, and depression.
Develop Coping Mechanisms: Identify and utilize personal tools and strategies that help reduce stress and build self-esteem, ensuring you can navigate the challenges of entrepreneurship effectively.
By focusing on self-care and building resilience, founders can sustain their well-being and enhance their capacity to lead their startups through the inevitable ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey.