Does your startup have a concierge?
When we think of startups, we usually picture a core group of (mostly) guys coding in a room with cans of coke or Red Bull lined up. That room might be smelly. No frills. Just getting it done. That’s the stereotype anyway.
As a seed investor I certainly like to see no waste in spending with as much of my investment as possible focused on building product and a user base. Still, I am beginning to think that startups also need concierges. Counterintuitive? I say not.
As investors and as founders what we want is performance. We want our team members to have no distractions and to be able to just crank out code and continually move the company forward. If you remove barriers to performance, you tend to get – you guessed it – performance!
What that means is that, as CEO, one of your jobs is to remove performance bottlenecks. That usually means making sure people understand the goals and priorities. But it often also means taking care of little things so that your staff don’t have to.
If you take that principle all the way then what that means is concierge service. Google has done this for a long time. Staff are encouraged to eat all their meals on campus. They can bring in their laundry. They can take a wifi bus to work. etc, etc, etc. All these “perks” enable staff to just work.
Now, clearly, we can’t afford Google style perks, but there are likely things we can do that would enhance team satisfaction, remove distractions and enable higher performance.
Office managers used to be considered old school or a bit of an indulgence. But maybe having one very early in a startup lifecycle makes sense. Especially if that person clearly understands that dealing with personal items for the team is part of the job.
Even before you can afford a full time team member, subsidizing virtual assistant services could make sense. Have dinner catered one evening/ week. Pay for task services like Task hire.
There are lot of creative, low cost ways to make your staff’s lives easier and enable to just get s#$t done. You should invest in them!
Thanks for this post Mark.
As a start-up CEO, all of my time is spent on issues that the keep the programmers (the DOers) focused on their tasks. I try to do everything else from dealing with service providers (usually to negotiate a better price…) to coordinate production efforts to sending birthday cards! I was starting to second guess myself as to why I was doing all this. You kind of re-assured me.
Now, of course I am looking forward to the day where I will be able to hire someone (a team in fact) to help out with all this.
In my opinion, one of the main duties of the CEO is to be a concierge — like when Joel Spolsky was installing window blinds in their new offices himself. My official title in my new company actually is "chief janitor".
Strongly agree. First hire at TandemLaunch was a business ops manager (admin, accounting, HR, IT). Then lots of tech hires followed by one activity coordinate (e.g. project manager, product manager. etc.) for every five activity executer (e.g. developer). Highly recommended, especially if you anticipate some scale in your business. We knew that we would ramp to 15-20 more fairly quickly after founding so we could plan our hiring sequence accordingly. It's a bit harder if you make up each hire as you go.
Apart from improving overall efficiency, doing so also saves you hard money in the long run. In my first (naive) venture we ended up spending easily 2x the annual salary of an early Ops hire just to clean up the "home-made" books when we finally did hire real back office staff.
Great post. We're considering hiring a virtual assistant. Would love to hear more specific ideas on how to do this on a budget, either from Mark or from other commenters.
Charles Hudson (softech vc) had an interesting post on his experience with a virtual assistant: http://www.charleshudson.net/my-experience-using-...
I have a non-virtual one (we have a chief of staff supporting all the partners at the fund). It really helps a lot.