Below is an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here.  

Next in line and closely related to Agency is Resourcefulness. As a founder of a startup with limited resources (and all but the most well-funded startups have limited resources), you need to learn a lot, stretch every dollar, do more with less, solve the big problems, land the big meetings or deals, and build the great product or service. Frugality is a related trait. 

You will never have the resources to do everything you want, so you have to be Resourceful and figure out how to acquire the resources you need to succeed. Again, very similar to Agency but worth mentioning as all businesses are about prioritizing resources. 

How to Build Resourcefulness

Admit to yourself that you will never have enough resources to do everything you want and that you must prioritize, make trade-offs, and use your existing resources as much as possible. Learn to make do with what you have at this time, and strategize to get what you need to take you to the next step in your plan. 

Resourceful people look for answers and solutions themselves and don’t need their handheld. For example, later I recommend you choose and use a digital calendar and task manager. Now, I could provide all kinds of recommendations, instructions, steps, and even step-by-step screenshots of how to set them up and use them. However, I promised not to waste your time and I’m going to trust that you’re Resourceful enough to click “Help” on the website or app and read the most up-to-date information in learning these tools. When you have employees, you want them to be Resourceful too and not need constant hand-holding.

Being Resourceful also means knowing what not to focus on, and one thing I see startup founders do a lot is jump over dollars to get to pennies. You definitely need to be frugal in a startup, but obsessing over anything under $100 is likely not worth your time unless you’re completely broke. 

Worrying about costs under $100 will send you down a rabbit hole of frustration and lost time. You’ll spend half the day and all your mental reserves chasing down, arguing, and contesting a $49 charge with the merchant, your credit card company, or bank.

Also, don’t be cheap with yourself. It’s much better to have the good cup of coffee and a decent meal than live like you’re in a prison camp. Treat yourself every now and then. Otherwise, what’s the point of it all? 

One way to value your time more is to know your Effective Hourly Rate (EHR). This is the amount that your time is worth and is based on your income divided by the number of hours you work. Remember it and post it on your computer or the top of your to-do list. If you don’t know your income or don’t have any, then set it at $100/hour. I’m serious; founder work is easily worth that if you’re being effective. 

Also for motivation, always remember, “I’m being paid $100/hour for this; this is valuable work.” If you have extra time, handle the small stuff, put it on a list to do later, or get a virtual assistant. The best business people pay others to make problems go away. 

This was an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here or see our previous excerpts here.

Below is an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here.  

“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.” – Carl Jung

The ability to Execute and get things done is probably one of the most valuable abilities a human can have. In business, it’s absolutely essential, and if you can get things done, you will be handsomely rewarded, not only in business, but in life as well. 

Hopefully you are starting to see how these superpowers work together. If you have a clear Vision and can Execute on that Vision, then you are an incredibly effective person. Add in Energy and Leadership (the next chapter) and the ability to get other people to execute, then you’re basically unstoppable.

“I shall either find a way or make one.” – Hannibal

My favorite word for execution and the ability to get things done is Agency. Agency is a powerful word, but you’ve probably not heard it used in this manner. It’s the skill that every venture capitalist is looking for and every employer as well. If you have Agency, then you can be trusted to get done almost anything that is capable of being done. Most important, Agency is taking 100% responsibility for your life and its outcomes. 

If you have Agency, you can be given responsibility for something and the person who gave you that simply knows it will get done and done well. Pretty much all of the other execution habits are related to or tactics related to Agency. If you don’t like fancy words like that, then a related concept is “Git’er done” made famous by comedian Larry the Cable Guy. It is the same concept: just get the job done. 

Agency means I can ask someone to do something, and it will get done within reason. If somebody has Agency, you don’t have to follow-up with them, you don’t have to beg them for task or project updates (they’ll proactively update you before you need it). Agency is taking ownership of the task and responsibility for getting it done right. Agency is doing even mundane tasks well. 

Agency is what we want from presidents, generals, project managers, employees, assistants, partners, babysitters—almost anyone. If you want to get ahead in business, be respected by pretty much everyone, or improve your career, then become someone known for Agency. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Agency means you take responsibility for your decisions and any consequences that result.

A big clarification: Agency does not mean hard work, and knowing the difference is critical. I always respect hard workers, but you have to know and reward the difference. My local landscaper works hard, the people at your local restaurant work hard, and people at your office may work hard. But an absolute critical distinction is that hard work, while admirable, is not necessarily getting the right things done that need to get done. 

You can work insanely hard, but if you’re not working on the right things, then hard work can actually be counterproductive. After you have hired and managed enough employees, you’ll understand this critical difference. Some people can manage to be extremely busy all day yet accomplish half of what a person with Agency will accomplish in less time.

How to Build Agency

Here’s the best part: Agency is a capability that can be called from within. I believe every person has Agency in them, they just need to light the fire. 

Here’s an example: 

Imagine you are broke but you owe me $1,000. If I casually said I need that $1,000 in 6 hours, you’d probably dismiss this as not possible and tell me to pound sand or “I’ll get it when I can.” 

However, if you are broke but need $1,000 in 6 hours for a lifesaving medication for your loved one or they will die, it will get done. 

It may require extraordinary energy, running all over town, calling, pawning, selling, begging, or even something illegal, but the point is that most people can call up the resources within to get this done. This is Agency, and if you place enough importance on a task, and as long as it’s capable of being done, you’ll get it done. Find it within yourself. 

Another thing I’ve noticed with people that have Agency is that they have a very simple outlook on getting things done along the lines of Yoda’s famous “do or do not, there is no try” statement. In many ways, it’s almost a martial mindset; sometimes simple thinking is powerful thinking. 

How do you lose weight? You eat less and exercise more. How do you get motivated? You wake up and start working on the most important task and motivation will come. How do you have that hard conversation? You pick up the phone and call the person or meet them. 

There’s something that needs to get done, and they do it. There’s not a lot of over-complication or over-thinking in people with Agency, which is the curse of a lot of intelligent people and founders I’ve known. 

This was an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here or see our previous excerpts here.

Below is an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here.  

Great founders typically have a very clear vision of how their business, product, or service should work, how their clients perceive and interact with their business, and include details on how the product looks and feels. Many founders work very hard on perfecting and even micromanaging the user experience from beginning to end and I believe this can pay huge dividends. You can truly tell when you’re doing business that has a founder who cares about these things, usually from the moment you go into their business location or visit their website. 

If there’s a disconnect between a founder and the average employee, it’s because many times an employee just doesn’t “get it” in regards to creating a truly great client experience and having high standards (especially if the founder has not communicated the importance of that to the team). This is why I see a lot of people quit companies and start their own company; they have higher standards than their former boss or manager and believe they can definitely do it better. 

The average employee may not understand that misspellings and bad spacing/formatting on website, emails, or marketing material are bad and reflect poorly on the business. Why broken signs, dirty bathrooms, and dirty counters look terrible and indicate sloppy management. Why the company name “DeBeers” is written properly and “Debeers” is not. Details matter. 

Try to find any of the above-mentioned issues on anything that Apple does from their website to their retail stores to their emails; it simply doesn’t happen, and that’s because Steve Jobs made the user experience an obsession. If your employee doesn’t understand why a misspelling or dirty counter is a huge deal, then that person needs proper training or needs to work somewhere else with lower standards. You usually know you have a superstar employee if they start noticing things that would drive you crazy and pointing them out, or better yet, fixing them. 

If something in your business is allowed to go below your standards and is not fixed or noticed by anyone, then you actually have set a new standard whether you intended to or not. If employees have noticed it and have not done anything, then that’s even worse, and you need to take action to make sure your standards are known and clear. 

How to Build a Great Product or Service 

1. Focus on good design. Whether you have good taste in design or need to hire a good designer for your product, focusing on good design is usually step one in building a great product. Note that designing a great process or service is design as well.
2. Have written standards. If how you expect things are not known, then how will your team know? Write these down as policies, procedures, and even core value or mission statements. See Step 5 for more on this. 
3. Experience it yourself. Actually use your own product or service like a client would (or have a friend or family member do this) and make sure you want to use your product (it’s a big warning sign if you don’t want to). Make this a regular habit and fix anything below your standards. 
4. Have a roadmap. Write down exactly how your customer experiences your product, and examine the process from beginning to end for ways to simplify and improve the experience. Centralize and prioritize feature requests and improvements so you know where the product is going. 
5. Focus on the customer. Be focused on the customer and what they want, not on what you want or what your competition is doing. Watch competitors, yes, but keep your focus on your customer and you can’t lose if you listen to them and meet their needs. Keep a list of client feedback or complaints and fix the issues one by one. 
6. Provide superior service. This is almost always the easiest differentiator when starting out, especially if your product or service is not up to your standards yet. You may not be able to offer a great product or low prices, but you can hustle on service. The advanced version of this is to build a product so great or intuitive that it doesn’t require much service or that clients can self-service. 

This was an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here or see our previous excerpts here.

Below is an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here.  

Very closely related to Clear Vision is how you will reverse engineer your Vision into Clear Goals, concrete action steps that need to be taken to turn that Vision into reality. This is where most visionaries drop the ball and remain in the thinking part, not the doing part.

In a well-run company, not only is there usually one big, obvious goal (called a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” or BHAG®️ made famous in the book Good to Great by Jim Collins), but you should have realistic (but aggressive) yearly and quarterly goals that you’re looking to accomplish that moves your company forward to that big goal. Each employee should have an individual goal and that’s usually (but not always) tied to the company goal. 

For example, let’s say my Vision was to build the next “LinkedIn for Businesses” platform and my BHAG was to have 1 million businesses on my platform by 2029. Here’s how I might quickly brainstorm and reverse engineer the steps to make that goal. Note that these are just wild guesses and things will change each year or even quarter.

1. Write specifications for beta version of website 
2. Design mockup and logo for website
3. Get a marketing list of 1,000 random small businesses of all types for testing
4. Build and test website 
5. Invite marketing list for free beta signup and to provide feedback 
6. Interview 10 users a week and build around their biggest feature requests 
7. Launch “Invite my Address Book” functionality 
8. Reach 10,000 signups 
9. Launch targeted ads and newsletter functionality 
10. Reach $10,000 in monthly revenue 
11. Launch “Message my Business” functionality 
12. Launch mobile app
13. Launch national digital advertising campaign 
14. Reach 100,000 signups 
15. Launch “Recommended Vendor” functionality 
16. Reach $100,000 in monthly revenue 
17. Reach 250,000 signups 
18. Launch premium membership option
19. Launch national radio advertising campaign 
20. Reach 500,000 signups 
21. Launch national TV advertising campaign 
22. Reach 1 million signups 

Based on that very rough list of possible goals to get to our BHAG, you can close in on the likely goals you’ll need for the next year or so and then further break down those goals by quarter. So you’ve taken a long term vision and now have a solid sense of what needs to get done in the next year. Now break down what needs to happen this year by quarters, make them measurable and assign them to a responsible person (likely yourself at first). 

The important thing is to have the vision and general roadmap to getting there and adjust along the way. With this example, I know I need to get working on the specs and design for my website right away. Finally, assigning deadlines (even if those are guesses) to your goals is a very effective way to encourage their completion and add a sense of urgency to getting them done. 

A frequent question I get is, “When am I supposed to find the time to work on goals while I’m busy working in my business?” The obvious answer is that building your business should already be based on clear goals, but if not, then you should make a roadmap like I’ve listed above. As I discuss in the section on the superpower of Productivity, there is Real Work and there is Process Work. Process Work is the stuff you do daily to provide your product or service. Real Work is working on Goals and things that move the company forward.

If your vision and BHAG are big, then realize you’ll never get there doing the Process Work all day. I recommend you brainstorm goals yearly and assign goals each quarter to individuals and make sure they are measurable. We’ll go into more specifics about creating a plan for your company in later chapters, especially Step 5. 

This was an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here or see our previous excerpts here.

Below is an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here. 

“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” – Japanese proverb

Vision includes not only the ability to see things clearly into the future, but also how you envision your company, including an obsession with building a great product. Those with great vision can often think ahead to where they want to be and reverse engineer the steps needed to realize their vision, starting with their next logical step.

Superpower #5: Clear Vision

Having a big or clear vision is almost synonymous with being an entrepreneur. Whether you think big with your ideas or not, you more than likely have a pretty clear vision of what you want. You want to develop this skill as much as possible by thinking in a very detailed way. Walt Disney didn’t imagine your average county fair carnival when he imagined Disneyland; he dreamed up something magical. 

Don’t just think that you’ll have a cool business in a few years; instead, write the very specific details of what it looks like, how many employees you have, what the offices are like, what you do all day, and how you feel. Get excited about this, and then make sure you clearly communicate this vision to your team. That’s pretty much it for Vision. Think big, think clearly, and communicate this to everyone on your team. We’ll go over this much more in Step 1: Imagine it. 

The problem is that a lot of visionaries are procrastinators and are even worse if they think really big because they’re paralyzed by the enormity of their vision. This is why you must focus on one idea and make it a reality via execution, which we discuss in the next chapter and why Part Two has six distinct steps to take you from idea to a fully systemized business. 

This was an excerpt from our book Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business. Learn more about the book here or see our previous excerpts here.