Who’s On First?

I am an organiser. Acute, chronic, obsessive — all of the above. Which gives this pre-natal stage of the start-up its own special brand of stress for me.

Once a company has been established and operating for some time, a manager may have a longer list of tasks to scratch off of the to-do list each day than I had today, but the manager of an existing business also has patterns and systems already in place that can help give all that work some sense of order. Once ways of doing things have been established a business can find its rhythm.  (It’s only a few years later that this rhythm turns to regimen and later to tedium).

But a brand new company such as the one that inhabits my living room on Tongren Lu hasn’t always found its rhythm yet. Right now, Winni the Wonder Assistant and I are together responsible for sales, marketing, finance, editorial, IT and HR for our little company. While there may not be a large list of daily responsibilities for each “department,” running after all of these different areas at once seems to require as much planning as running my former staff of 30+ folks.

So there are lots of Microsoft Project files, Gantt charts and budgets.

• Thursday was strategic planning day — chart out what’s going to happen when for the rest of the year (especially everything that has to happen for us to start making some sales)
• Friday was budget day — calculate what we have to spend when to get ready for those sales
• Monday was admin day — get together all the documents for the WOFE registration, and plan out the week
• Tuesday was website design day — rewrote the project brief for the site and drew up briefs for all the major functions of the site
• Today (Wednesday) was an IT day or maybe it was a marketing day — anyway, I spent the day researching fun facts on the Net so that I could map out the fields for our website databases. Painful at times. But it’s also exciting when you realise that you may actually be learning something about your topic.

Actually, my schedule is not anywhere as neat as all this in reality, and I’m not always sure that there’s a great reason why I take care of a particular task on Wednesday instead of on Monday. (Just because I wrote something down in a list doesn’t mean it’s organised).

In any case, the big goal is being able to start selling effectively as soon as possible, so our general approach is to follow these priorities

1. Strategic planning — figure out what we want to do, and how it will work. (Pretty much took care of this over the last two years)
2. Adminstrative set up — create the corporate framework that will give us a legal, stable platform to operate from (Mostly done now)
3. Website planning and IT development — make the product that we will be selling
4. Website data gathering — find sources for all of the information that will give the site its value and start shoveling it into the site
5. Marketing — make sure the world knows about our cool site
6. Sales — Where we really find out whether we did our jobs right in #1-5

All of this fun stuff overlaps, meshes together and relies on the other elements around it in far too many ways to be covered here tonight. So that’s one of the toughest parts of the start-up phase — knowing how much of your limited resources to devote to which element of the business at what time.

Or just knowing when to stop stressing about it and leave it until tomorrow.  And with that in mind — goodnight!