There is a harsh reality that you just cannot do great things all by yourself. You may be able to come up with a concept and perhaps do a bit of a test pilot, but the second you start to try to have an impact, then your individual efforts will not be enough. You will then be faced with the need to build a working group of people, contractors, and vendors to help you implement the process you have created to achieve something great. This is when you learn that building a working, functional, and efficient group is much harder than you realize. This is when costs start to be incurred, and capitalization, tools, and processes are incorporated into what you are attempting. It is at this point you find out if your idea, your vision, is actually going to work.
Facing the Challenges
Most of the time, it will not. Most of the time, you will not have thought through everything. You will learn that your idea will not generate enough income to pay for the costs that it takes to run the process at scale. You will then falter, stumble, and potentially fail. In your planning process, you brushed over the ‘trivial’ details only to later discover that these were not that trivial after all. They become stumbling blocks that cause disruption and prevent progress. One of these trivial considerations is finding, sourcing and then establishing a relationship with the people that will ultimately help you succeed. You think this is the easy part because you are a good talker, but you soon learn that this will only take you so far. There is actually considerable work in building a working group that can assist you and underestimates this workload at great folly.
The Importance of Trust
A solid working group of people requires a bi-directional and transitive trust relationship that takes considerable effort to establish. You are not automatically going to accept people you meet as having the expertise and intent to assist you. Equally, the people you want to hire or partner with will have identical concerns in reverse. This bi-directional demonstration of intent and expertise takes time and experience working together to establish. Never underestimate how valuable this is because it just will not happen quickly. Once you have this type of relationship with someone, treat this like gold – because that is exactly what it is. A working group of people that have a trusting relationship with each other becomes even more valuable when that trust relationship is transitive. This means that connections to you also trust the other connections that you have. When you see that start to happen, then you know you are doing something right and your working group is ready to thrive.
Common Mistakes and Their Consequences
Unfortunately, many do not understand the critical nature of this type of working relationship between people, and they make decisions that cut this short or interrupt it before it can become meaningful. In my estimation, this is the hidden cause of failure that is hard for people to describe but is always present in any downward slide. In the case of a young company, the true cost and time were never considered in the growth plan, and as a consequence, the trajectory does not look anywhere near what was anticipated. In a larger, more established company, this usually occurs when leadership underestimates this value and forces mergers, divestitures, or reorganizations on these teams and breaks down these working groups. They take the value inherent in these for granted and then are shocked when new teams do not produce the same results as the old ones.
The Value of Leadership
Building a fully functional, trusting working group takes an investment of time, effort, and capital to establish. This is the primary reason why a solid leader makes all the difference in success. This is the thing that good leaders work toward naturally, and it is why the highly skilled are always mystified by what that “bozo” is successful. They completely undervalue team building and over-emphasize individual effort. They are both important, but only a true leader knows and understands why a functional team is needed for scale. In the investment space, we are always interested in the team that will be getting the capital. When a founder says they are going to use the capital to build a team, that makes everyone nervous. We instinctively know how much it costs to establish a good working group.
Building for Success
When you go to market and/or gain a leadership role, the first and foremost consideration is the team that is being built. That working group, the relationships built between them, and the ability of that team to trust each other, move fast, and complement each other skills is the most important ingredient for success in any large-scale endeavor.
