The conversation started pleasantly enough with discussion about stable, risk-managed growth, careful operational controls, market analysis, future targets, engaging customers, and so on. And then things got ugly. (Not really, but they may as well have.) The discussion shifted to “operationalizing” these predictable ideas when the assembled executives began describing investments in personnel, infrastructure systems, [...]
The second in a 2-part post. In the first post I opened with a published list distilled from 101 start-up postmortems of start-up failures that identified the most common “causes”. The gist of that post was my own list of five common mistakes many start-ups make. Mistakes readers can avoid once being aware of them. For [...]
First in a 2-part series. A few months ago much ado was made about the “top 20″ reasons start-ups fail. That list was distilled from a collection of 101 post-failure analyses. I have no argument with the list or with the smart people who performed the analysis. I do have a few nits to pick [...]
A first-time COO of a start-up recently asked me what he can do to prepare for scaling up their company? I asked him to elaborate with some examples of specific challenges and impediments. He was trying to figure out how to prepare for balancing resources and commitments and that he was stumped by a Catch-22: [...]
A well-intentioned software entrepreneur recently asked me why software companies would need a COO. After all, he reasoned, aren’t COOs for companies that have a “production facility” and need to manage “hard goods” and “physical logistics”? In particular he thought that startups and smaller software companies would certainly have no use for a COO. Perhaps [...]
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