One of the strongest assets in building a successful business is the management team. You often hear VCs or other investors say if they had the choice between an A product and a B management team or an A management team and a B product, more often than not they would select the B product with an A management team. The management team is important in developing and executing the strategy and building credibility with your investors. The depth and breadth of their experience and ability to meet the challenges of a start-up enterprise will be critical to long-term success. If this were a horse race, the management team is your jockey. Management teams should reflect experience in sales and marketing, finance, operations and strategy, preferably in the same industry. If the company is technologically focused, having strong technical expertise is essential. Sometimes in a start-up situation you may not always be able to attract the talent that you need so it is important to find other ways to get it.

This can be one role of your board of advisors or board of directors. Many start-up businesses leverage their limited resources through creating an advisory board of industry veterans or functional experts. These advisors often get paid in options in the company so their success is tied to the company’s success. Selection criteria for advisors should include their ability to spend time with you and the company, their own network of contacts that might be valuable for the company, and an expertise that fills a gap you have in your team.

A successful entrepreneur is a strong communicator. Whether you are trying to raise capital, hire good management, attract a valued advisory board or board of directors, or sell your product and service it is important to be able to articulate simply and concisely your mission and business proposition. It is also important to do it in a way that communicates your enthusiasm and commitment for the business. Entrepreneurs need to convince people to do something they were not intending to do. The chapter highlighted earlier the importance of the elevator pitch, executive summary, business plan and “in person” presentations. Add to that customer and distributor presentations, public, banking and employee relations. These are all forms of selling and communicating your strategy and building confidence in you and your business.

A successful entrepreneur knows what his/her strengths are and tries to complement them, not replicate them. He/she also knows when to move aside. Oftentimes the person who has the vision and ability to get the business off the ground is not the best person to manage the business once it gets to a certain size. We have all heard stories of companies that have failed because the founder maintains operational control when it is not his or her strength. Even Bill Gates turned over the CEO job to his Chief Operating Officer, Steve Ballmer, to allow himself to focus on what he knows best, technology.

A successful business stays focused and prioritizes its resources accordingly. It is very easy to get distracted and spread too thin. Given the limited resources of most entrepreneurial businesses it is important to focus those resources on the critical tasks that need to get done that will determine success. As a former entrepreneur, I kept a list of the top six priorities of our company, made sure everyone in the company knew what these priorities were and reviewed them at every staff meeting. The budget and plans always reflected these priorities, and if we decided to allocate resources outside these efforts, there always had to be a good reason or maybe we needed to reevaluate our priorities.

A successful company knows its customer. This doesn’t mean just your sales and marketing department but also includes your product development, manufacturing or operations and even finance staffs. A strong customer orientation permeates throughout successful companies. Remember the customer is the fuel that drives the engine. And the customer is always right. Even when the customer is unhappy, if you spend time with him/her and try to rectify the situation, you may find an even more loyal customer. A successful company also knows when the customer needs are changing and how it must change in order to serve the customer. Some companies put customers on the board of advisors or even the board of directors to insure sufficient customer input.

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