Last week the Collider12 startups had a workshop with Andrew Farrell, co-founder and CEO of Matchbox Mobile. He shared a few of tips for startups based on his experiences during the last eight years.
Sales and Relationships
- In order for any business to grow, you need someone selling your business, making a decent sales team essential.
- You need to have people speaking for you and about you at every opportunity, and this can only happen by meeting lots of people
- By building rapports you can create a mutual understanding and genuine friendship that could take you anywhere in the future.
- People can transcend companies and so one relationship could be your key to many different opportunities.
- Never turn a meeting down, you never know where it may lead.
Maintain standards and Reputation
- The individual values behind the reason you started need to be maintained and shared with employees and customers. If you lose this vision, you’ll lose direction and your principles.
Hire the Right People to Build the Right Team
- The single biggest challenge I have ever faced is trying to hire the right people. Perhaps it’s a bit simplistic, but I've always found the pub test to be the best way to decide. If you could go and have a beer with them and happily chat for a couple of hours, 90% of the time they’re going to be the right fit for you. You need a rapport that goes beyond their skills and talents, as a time will come where you need to depend on them.
- I don’t think it is cheating to hire friends, as long as they have the skills you need.
- If you have to offer them an incentive to join your startup, they aren’t the right person to join your startup. You need people who are committed and that have the passion and interest already there. Once you start offering incentives, you have to keep it going which is a commitment you cannot make.
- How you manage your mistakes with the customers (as, trust me, everyone makes mistakes) is can be incredibly important. We have made some of our strongest relationships by handing our failures very well. You have to share your successes and failures with your customers as well as your team.
Adapt to Change
- There will always be multiple and rapid changes in and around your business that you will need to adapt to.
- There will also be changes to how your product is used, what your product is, and changes within your company. If you cannot evolve with these changes, you are going to fail.
Make Decisions
- The worst thing you could do is to make no decision at all. It is far better to make a wrong decision as that’s all part of the process to the right decision. By recognising your mistakes you can correct your course to get on the right path to success.
Being the cleverest person in the room counts for nothing if you’re unable to manage your business:
- Taking care of the business is your number one priority.