As an early-stage startup, you’re on borrowed time. You have a limited amount of runway, have a patchwork product at best, are oftentimes dependent on the goodwill of your first customers and are still searching for a clear and compelling value proposition for a yet to be fully defined customer persona.

During this period, startups must make thousands of decisions and are constantly iterating. With that, when a decision is made is oftentimes more important than what decision is made - or as the US Army General George S. Patton put it:

“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.”

For most decisions, there’s no clear right answer anyways. And since you don’t know what the right answer is, the best you can do is to simply decide and move forward - like the basic law of physics: an object in motion tends to stay in motion. When you fail to make decisions, you stop. When you stop, the company stops. And stopping while you’re on borrowed time can be a deadly sin.

In the earliest days of company building, a lot of your decisions are going to be wrong. And that’s ok. Very few decisions can’t be undone during this phase. If needed, mistakes can be fixed quickly and each decision leads you down a path you likely didn’t think about before with new opportunities and learnings.

Even with your (early) customers it’s ok to make mistakes - your first tier of believers are much more forgiving than you think. Especially when they are building the product with you. While engaging with them, the faster you make decisions, the faster you can address challenges that come up. And the faster you address challenges, the further their confidence in your ability to execute is increased.

On top, you having a fast time to decision and action impacts their time to decision and action. If you have a short turnaround time, your customers’ turnaround time will be short too. They have many other things going on besides working with you and you’re usually not top of mind for them. If you show them that they’re top of mind for you by reacting fast, trust is established in you and your ability to execute, it shortens their reaction time and also causes them to be much more forgiving when mistakes are made (because they know you’ll fix them fast).

Once you move into scale-up mode, things change and you need to shift the balance from doing things fast towards doing things right. The larger your company, the longer it takes to reverse wrong decisions. And the more embedded your product is with your customers, the more they depend on it. Thus, mistakes become more costly.

How Ron and Briq do this:

• No formal decision making process: Early on, Briq got everyone in the same room and tried to reach a decision fast after hearing everyone out (they didn’t require consensus decisions). Only as they grew beyond the earliest stages did they start to put more formal processes around decision making.
• “Just say it”: For both speed and quality of decision making, an essential part of Briq’s company culture is that everyone - from the CEO to the most junior person - can and should voice their views and / or concerns in the moment if they have any. Sending an email later on or revisiting a decision because someone didn’t speak up slows everyone down.
• “Don’t wait, do it now”: Since day one, Briq’s been putting a big emphasis on doing things now vs later. If you e.g. have someone to call, call them right away. And if a decision needs to be made, make it now. Today is better than tomorrow and right now is better than six hours from now.

Thank you for sharing this insight Ron!

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