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Culture fundamentally is about how you treat your clients and how you treat each other. In the early days of a startup, when things are extremely tense (money’s tight or non-existent, you don’t really have any business yet) there are a couple of crucial components.
1. Lines of communication must be kept open. Talk every day. When I was involved with my startups, I talked to my team everyday. We talked early in the morning and at the end of the day. It helped us discuss what we needed to get done in the day and also know what the other people were up to. It also gave us a chance to address any issues that were coming up. Most importantly, it gave us a chance to start to get to know one another. Don’t overlook the fact that you’re dealing with other human beings, not just work robots.
2. We are the they. In a small startup, there are no bosses, no executives, no one is ‘assisting’ anyone else. It’s a team. Work as a team. Even if one of you is drawing a salary and the other one isn’t. Even if one of you is making 3 times as much as the other one. You want a fully empowered team that’s operating at their best capabilities. Eliminating the sense that one person is another’s superior goes a long way towards making this happen. Nobody’s working for anybody, we’re all working for the team, and for each other. You create ownership of purpose that way.
3. Set a reasonable work schedule for yourself and for everyone else. There’s always more stuff to do. You want to avoid a culture built on face time (who can show up the earliest, who can stay at work the latest). Do you value people getting stuff done, or do you value people looking busy? It’s really easy in those early days to work yourself into exhaustion and then set that as the standard. You want to have a constant workflow, not a workflow that’s intense up to the point where it breaks down and then needs to build back up. Everyone worked really hard in the organizations I’ve started, but at the end of the day, we make sure to wrap it up so that we’re able to come back in tomorrow and do it again.
4. Ignore the noise. The early days are fraught with noise. It’s not working. We’re stupid to do this. We’re going to be out of business by the end of next week. Put your head down, focus on execution, and ignore the noise.
5. Every client, every time. Clients are hard to come by early on. Make sure you’re returning their phone calls and emails promptly. Blow them away with the speed and clarity of your response. Grab any opportunity to serve a client, and serve the hell out of them.
Focus on these things and you’ll make it through the rough early days with a culture founded in reason and execution, rather than irrationality and panic.
