Spend Money Like You Don’t Have It
In keeping with the benchmarks we set for ourselves, FYIndOut looks like it will be a good side-revenue business but unfortunately, it’s not enough to support my co-founder Tony and I as a full time gig. Hence, I’ve recently started looking for jobs again. I’m just getting started, so I’m keeping an open mind. It’s interesting to hear what each company feels are the top selling points for them and the roles they’re looking to fill.
As I’m focusing on senior/management roles, most have P&L responsibilities tied to them. A few companies have mentioned the size of the budget as a big selling point. To be honest, it’s not. I want to know how the company has done with its budget so far. I’m less concerned about the size of the budget and more concerned about their execution and the size of the opportunity.
“We’ve spent $X to build the business so far and have $X more in funding.” That statement concerns me unless it’s followed by other statements like, “…and we’re profitable/will be profitable this year” or “…and we’ve met/exceeded all of our revenue/financial milestones so far.”
Ideally, I want to work at an agile company that’s growing and has the necessary budget to reach its goals while rewarding me properly for my work. That said, I’ve commented before in previous posts that this environment tends to be the case where the most money gets wasted on projects. Why? Bootstrapped startups can’t afford to do anything that isn’t absolutely necessary and product managers in large corporations have to focus all of their energy on getting the “must-haves” through all of the corporate bureaucracy correctly or they end up with a bunch of projects that deliver half of what customers wanted and none of the revenue or cost savings.
It’s the agile and funded companies that have the skills and the money to get caught up in busy projects over valuable projects. Don’t get me wrong, managed creativity and flexibility is great. Many cash-cows have come from cool side projects and experiments. However, the down side is that if it continues unmanaged, it will trend negatively on the company’s profitability and more importantly, the team. Consistently spending time on projects that go nowhere gets everyone down. Especially if you’re hiring entrepreneurial rock stars that want to make a difference. They want to have a direct impact on building a successful company. Nobody wants to bust tail for a year and have nothing to show for it to their team, on their resume, or their bank statement.
The size of the budget or funding isn’t as important as how the company uses it (Insert your own “size vs how-you-use-it joke here). The successful companies spend money on projects like they don’t have it. They ask customers what they want and even better, what will add value that they will pay for, and build that. They screw up, get feedback, fix it, make a little more money, and move on. They don’t have people and managers from ten different groups start a weekly meeting to debate and guess what customers want. Or worse, try to scope projects to meet the budget they have to spend.
The companies that are getting my attention and respect are the ones that have the agility and funding to build great teams and a great culture and focus on projects and profitability like they only have six months of runway left.
