Step one of the first 90 days of marketing at a startup–finding clarity and finding your place in the team.
Over the next couple of columns, I’m going to go into my approach to the first 90 days of marketing at a startup. Silicon Valley coined the phrase “building the plane while flying it.” You have to iterate and do good-enough stuff while making the sparkly shiny thing in the background. You’ve got to connect with people. You’ve got to make choices and you have to execute while managing. It’s a tough balancing act and never perfect, but with good communication and a little patience and compromise, you can find your way through.
The first things I’m going to talk about are finding clarity and finding your place in the team.
The Best Part of Waking Up–The Morning Routine
One of the keys to maintaining perspective is that every morning I wake up and write for 20 minutes or three full pages, whichever comes first. Some mornings with kids as a single mom, I only have 10 or 15 minutes and I take it. I write first thing after the coffee boils, the dog’s been out and the cats have had their breakfast. I do this while the kids are asleep or just waking up. It has helped me see holes in my thinking and be a better listener.
In my morning writing, my worrying mind will record things the founders have said, and they will come back out on paper as problems to solve. Sometimes I find solutions at that moment and my day is completely altered by what my mind has told me in the morning. My day is more impactful as a result. Morning writing is kind of a miracle and I highly recommend it. Whether you call yourself a writer or not.
People Person, Not Politicking
At a startup, different than corporate culture, there is not a lot of coddling going on and not a lot of processes. In my life, that’s a good thing. I am highly entrepreneurial, and I’ve been around long enough to know what I need to do to get things started and where I’ve made mistakes in the past. I am both an extrovert and an introvert. I can spend days alone writing and working and forget to see people until suddenly panic hits me that it’s time to see people again and I start making plans and reaching out again.
Knowing that’s who I am, I made sure to initiate one-on-ones with everyone whose role I would impact and whose role would impact mine. In a lean startup, that means business development and sales, UI/UX, the product owner, and operations and finance–the people creating the math that makes it all work. Pretty much everyone who is not a developer.
I sought to listen before speaking. I had a boss who struggled with that himself tell me to “understand before seeking to be understood” before every meeting. This is not easy, but it is imperative. Also, if you’re new somewhere whether you are in a leadership role or not, you really don’t know anything yet. You need to swim in the pool with the other fish and get a tour of the lake. At the same time, you can’t just sit there completely silently because people need to know who you are and what you will do.
A fellow Chief member in our core group suggested I ask people what they had really wanted to do that had been shelved or abandoned. Knowing what people are passionate about is an amazing way to understand their value and see opportunities at the company that might be getting lost in the shuffle. You can sort through the sands of lost projects and look for gems before starting from scratch.
Feature Image Credit: Getty Images
