Page 162 - 6 Secrets to Startup Success

Startup Agility 141

to a patchwork of practices that won’t scale beyond the first year or
two of venture growth.

In the heat of customer demand, healthy iteration and improve-
ment of processes can be challenging. Even though you are painfully
aware that you need to improve your delivery system, fifteen more
customer orders just came through the door, so you sprint down the
existing operational pathway, improvising here and there, vowing to
take time later to make necessary fixes and improvements. Of course
“later” never comes, and the longer you wait, the more difficult and
complex the necessary fixes or improvements become.

As I’ll outline in the next section, the key is to establish a regular
post-mortem practice, early in your startup trajectory, to look back at
each production or delivery cycle, harvest lessons learned, and im-
plement improvements where necessary. In this way, you instill the
ethic of continuous improvement into your firm as it grows—the spe-
cific learning practices will change, but the will to improve is sewn
into your venture’s DNA.

STRATEGY – Writing about predominantly large corporate organiza-
tions, Donald Sull notes the competitive importance of what he calls
strategic agility, defined as “spotting and seizing game-changing op-
portunities.”11 This notion of iterating at the strategic level is even
more crucial for fledgling ventures that are just beginning to cast in-
novative products into new or emerging markets. New venture teams
can significantly elevate their odds of success by continually assessing
broader market opportunities and competitive threats and adapting
their strategy where conditions call for change.

In launching D1, J.C. Faulkner and his team planned to open ten
lending branches and grow them to the point where each would av-
erage $2 million a month in loan volume. After that, the business plan
called for expanding the number to twenty branches across the United
States, with each branch averaging $2.5 million per month. “When we
first got out there,” J.C. says, “our branches grew with a lot more focus
and a lot faster than we thought they would.” As the original branches
neared an average of $5 million a month, the D1 team questioned its
expansion plan. Why open more lending centers, dilute management

American Management Association • www.amanet.org