What I have learned and realized about working with startup advisors, consultants and firms

You know what you are good at, what you like to do, and what you can learn to do. But there are many skills that you don’t have and you know you need them to accomplish your goals. This is where you identify these areas, then go out and find other people or companies to fill in your gaps. The process of doing this and doing it well has been a learning journey. I have learned a lot while running CareBand and other ventures. Not only about working with people and partnering with companies but with how people work and the world works.

You know what you are good at, what you like to do, and what you can learn. But there are many skills that you don’t have, and you know you need them to accomplish your goals. So this is where you identify these areas, then source and find other people or companies to fill in your gaps. The process of doing this and doing it well has been a learning journey.

I have learned a lot while running CareBand and other startups. Not only about working with people and partnering with companies but with how people work and the world works.

The scope of this post focuses on those:

– People who approach you on LinkedIn or cold email and want to work with you to help your startup.

– Someone you meet at a startup event who says they help startup founders do X, Y, Z

Startup events are buzzing with these types of people.
You can’t ignore these people, but you must learn the patterns of what to look for, what to look out for, and how to vet various people. Then leverage them and their skills, experiences, and assets.

– An advisor, consultant, or firm who you seek out to support you

When you strip all the buzzwords and terms away from the person or firm, there are three categories people fall into:

Business development (most ignored, yet crucial job for an early-stage startup – determine and execute how to create a sustainable market channel to acquire customers)
1. By far, the largest category of people fit into.
2. I include many folks here because at the core of their value is the act of business development.
  1. They include startup advisors, fraction C-suite (including CFOs, for most early-stage startups), people who help you/say they help you raise money, investment bankers, pure business development or sales, and go-to-market advisors (you can create a plan, what you hire them or what you want from them even if you don’t articulate it enough, is customers/channels to the market).
CFO/Accounting
Insurance
1. These include for
  1. employee insurance (i.e., healthcare) and benefits
  2. company insurance (i.e., liability, cyber)

Vetting and Deciding

How do you know if the person or firm will do what they say they are going to do before you work with them?

Some claim and don’t deliver, while others claim and do deliver. But how do you know who is who? How do you trust someone you just met who says something you don’t know enough about to tell if it is possible to accomplish?

This took me a long time to understand, but I have a pretty good handle on it now. Of course, in reality, you don’t really ever know if the person or firm will do what they say they are going to do, but this is what I have learned. Below are the steps I take once I have had a few conversations with a person or firm and am ready to consider their offer to work together.

Do your due diligence. Take in as much information as you can to learn. Do not spend any money on this, just your time (which you should know equals money, so set a time limit). – LIMIT 2 hours
1. Search on google and read everything you can find
  1. Determine how recent the post or article is to today’s date to see how relevant the material is.
2. Find them on Linkedin.
  1. Look at their profile and level of expertise of putting their profile together.
  2. Look at your mutual connections.
    1. Do you like your mutual connections? Do you know any of those people well?
    2. Consider reaching out to those mutual connections to ask if they know the person and what they think of them. Ask your mutual connections to jump on a quick call with you and share their thoughts.
      1. Tell your mutual connections, your goal and why you are exploring working with that person.
  3. Look at their posts and activity. Read their comments
3. Read their blogs on medium, LinkedIn or on their website.
Ask them for three references ONLY. – LIMIT 1 hour
1. The person or firm will only give you references that speak highly of them. You must know this in advance and take what the references say with a grain of salt.
  1. The person or firm is selfish in doing this, but it is what they should do if they want to win your business.
2. Ask pointed questions to get the necessary information to help make your decision. Write these questions down beforehand, and be sure to ask the same questions to all three references to assess the quality of the answer you seek.
3. Why only three references?
  1. Knowing that the firm gave you those references and why the firm chose those people, then talking to more positive influencers won’t help your case.
  2. Your goal in talking to these people is to validate what you read and learned in step 1 in your due diligence.
  3. So learn what you can, validate your assumptions, be done, and move on.
Does the offer make sense? – LIMIT 3 hours
1. Read the entire contract and add comments or questions. Then ask your attorney to answer and explain things that don’t make sense. If you don’t have an attorney, ask an advisor, friend, or someone else to help you make sense of it.
  1. Never sign something that you don’t fully understand.
  2. At the very least, review and understand the Term and Termination clause on any contract you receive to figure out what your out is.
    1. If things go badly, how do you get out of this contract?
2. Ask yourself if the offer logically makes sense. Is what they are saying even possible to do?
  1. If it seems too good to be true, it usually is. So stop wasting your time and move on.
Make a decision – LIMIT 1ish hours (more than likely, you will spend time when you are not working thinking through this, so it is hard to put a “time limit” on this one)
1. You have invested a significant amount of time. If you understand that your time is money, you know that you have invested at least a few hundred dollars of your time, if not more, into the process.
2. Check-in with yourself – how do you feel about the person or firm?
  1. Feel okay – go for it
  2. Feel not okay – don’t go for it, tell them in a simple email, and move on.
3. You may never feel 100% yay or nay, but you must make a definitive decision and notify the person or firm of that decision.

How to feel after a decision

Making decisions is hard. Being confident enough to make a hard decision without a complete picture or a clear ROI is hard. Being a founder is hard. It is our job to make hard decisions, take risks, learn, and keep going.

Once you make your decision, you must follow the tips below. I have learned how to do this and how to trick my mind into focusing on this; it is challenging but essential.

– With a decision made, your job is to move forward. Try not to look back and play the “IF” game in your head

Say you are two months in, and you question IF the decision was a bad idea; then it is natural to let your unconscious mind take over and tell you that you messed up and are a terrible person for making this terrible mistake.
Instead, work on your mindset (this is hard to do but essential to practice, practice makes you better)
- Tell yourself that you made the best decision possible with the information you had at the time of the decision.
- That is all you can believe. You owe it to yourself. Trust yourself, you have your best interest in mind in your gut.
When you doubt yourself, you return to that statement. Repeat it in your head until you solidify your belief in it.
Then look at where you are now, reflect on the good and bad lessons, and file those into your brain to inform your decisions or decision-making process for next time.

Why I believe working with people and firms is valuable even if the agreed-upon goal fails

One of the core beliefs I have about people is that each person is valuable, no matter who they are. Every person I meet has some value that I don’t have or have not experienced. By working with that person or firm, I can tap into that value and learn to be better individually or learn to be better as a company.

I know this to be true because every person lives their own life. They have made different decisions than me and walked on different paths to where they are now and where they are heading.

My mindset is that each person then has something (i.e. a lesson, a story, a skill, etc.) they know that if shared with me could be helpful in my personal or professional growth.

When you enter into an agreement with a person or firm, you have access to that person’s time and attention for the term of the contract. That is insanely valuable as an idea of its own. Knowing this, I can:

Learn what they know
How they see and interact with the world
Watch and observe how they process information
Seek to understand what they do with that information and how they plan their next steps

I also am aware of the fact that people are selfish. I don’t mean that they are greedy in an egotistical way, but rather humanly or psychologically (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), that person thinks about themselves first. Then they think about their family and friends (strong connections), and then their friends of friends (weak connections).

If you and/or what you are doing can help them, their strong connections, and/or their weak connections, then you are aligned to succeed. As I have learned, “help them” could be through a personal or professional desire to achieve their goals or needs.

Further, assuming the person or firm knows the value of their time, then their actions of entering into an agreement demonstrate that they see something valuable in you and/or what you are doing.

In turn, that person or firm will do whatever they can to help themselves which will help you.