A Key Element in Surviving the Startup Phase

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In the world of startups, there are many challenges that executives must concern themselves with including: making sure financial support is in place to adequately meet needs, orchestrating production schedules to ensure product inventory is on the shelf and ready to go at all times, making sure quality standards are met, and ensuring FDA regulatory requirements are met and exceeded (if marketing a medical technology or device).

Having personnel on board that can — and will — wear many hats with can-do attitudes is imperative. It’s one effective way to address the seemingly unending list of critical tasks to prepare a company for success.

An additional, yet vital, aspect of a company’s success is so basic that it’s difficult to imagine it being anything but front-and-center: sales.

Like many entrepreneurs, I have been a part of very successful startups that ultimately had profitable exits. Conversely, I have been part of unsuccessful startups where management was left asking “What the hell happened?”

In almost every instance where the latter took place, it was because somewhere along the line, usually early in the process, management became so bogged down with attending to other aspects of the business, that it simply failed to prioritize that all-important sales number. In building the infrastructure for the company’s long-term success, or seeking perfection with the product so much so that the R&D process became endless, management lost sight of the critical need to sell its product immediately and to continually increase its sales.

I’m not saying continuous improvement of a product is not a good thing, or that we shouldn’t be concerned with building a solid and sustainable infrastructure. But these tactics shouldn’t come at the expense of selling a product quickly.

When most entrepreneurs start a company, it’s usually because they have identified a real need in the world, have created a solution and have demonstrated a market for that solution. Management can’t lose sight of its most important obligation: to quickly help people address a need or solve a problem with its product.

Expansion, even if the product is not yet perfect, cannot come at the expense of sales. Regardless of other shortcomings a startup may face, as long as its sales curve keeps growing at acceptable rates, investors will stay in the game.