When Grandpa was 20 years old he left the house and forgot to take his keys, so every time he left the house he checked his pockets for his keys.
When he was 24 he left the house and left the stove on. He learned to check the stove before leaving the house.
When he was 28 he left his wallet at home. He learned to check for his wallet.
...
Now Grandpa is 80. His leaving home routine includes: checks for his keys, his phone, his wallet. He ensures the lights are off, the stove is off, the microwave door is closed, the iron is off, the windows are closed in case it rains...
Grandpa has learned from his mistakes so well that it now takes him roughly an hour to leave the house. Also, he finds he doesn't tend to look forward to going out as much as he once did...
In response to this, I'd like to highlight what I wrote:
> We then need to lean on data and experience of what the trade offs of those changes would be.
As engineering leaders, this is a key part of our job. We don't just blindly add processes to prevent every issue. I should add that we also need to analyse our existing processes to see what should change or is not needed any more.
Thank you for this, it's brilliant! I have spent days drawing the wiring diagram for a modified 1961 MG MGA using LucidChart. The fonts available just didn't look great. I uploaded Routed Gothic and now it looks very natural and original. Great work on the font!
MG produced the MGA roadster from 1955 to 1962. This site has been operating by one person for 20+ years and has the biggest wealth of information on how to maintain and fix these cars. The tech section alone has over 4,000 pages of information on these cars.
You don’t actually have to pay for your own, but you are taxed an extra 0.5% if you don’t and earn above a certain amount. So in practice rather than pay the additional tax, people get private healthcare. If you then start earning below the threshold you can cancel the private healthcare and go back to the public system.
My hobby is tool collecting and occasionally, my wife makes me do work around the house to justify the tool collecting. So, I really enjoyed your creation here! I was going through it today and ticking off all the categories I own tools for (I got 96) and discovered a bunch of opportunities to expand the collection. Thank you!
> Plus concrete tools, for example, didn’t even make the cut
I must say I was surprised that hammers, fancy hammers, and mallets all got their own categories, while my noisy Husqvarna concrete demolition saw was bundled in the same category as regular circular saws. Now it makes sense!
The beautiful thing about art vs. science is that you get to be arbitrary if you like... The main reason there is a separate category for fancy hammers is that I needed a page in the book to rant about how stupid it is to put a titanium head on a hammer. (Every square in the poster represents a 2-page spread in my Tools book.)
Concrete tools are missing because I just don't do a lot of concrete work. Had I finished the book about a year later I might have put some in, because earlier this year I built a new studio that involved pouring a 3600sq ft slab with the help of my concrete foreman friend and his buddies. So messy! I don't like to write about categories of tools I have little or no experience with, so other things crowded out concrete and masonry tools, other than carbide drills and diamond saws (which are fascinating because of the steel/stone hardness ratio that determines which model blade you want, as described in the book).
How do you make sure you get the good type of sales culture that is customer-centric, rather than the bad type of "trick customers into buying things they don't need"? Are there specific policies/incentives/etc that should be used? Or is it really just 'hire the right people'?
Hiring good people is the main key, and a good VP of sales is crucial.
Depending on your product you can control it with comp as well. For example, for an enterprise product, especially one that renews annually and/or has milestone payments, comp the sales person as the cash comes in (and pay out for the renewals same as you would for the initial deal). Unhappy customers don’t pay. I have also paid out commission on time (when customer should have paid, when the delay was due to engineering, and not manageable by salesperson. Sometimes engineering delays are due to sales people though :-(.
Have engineering work out the milestones and deliverables with the customer. Have the CEO sign contracts, nobody else. Count as sales only deals that have both customer P.O. and signed contract (so common to have only one and have the sales person argue that the deal should be booked anyway. Amazing how they could get both in on the last day of the quarter though).
Etc. When I was about 20 my dad told me he’d fired half the sales people he’d ever hired. I shook my head and thought, “what an idiot”. A couple of decades later I looked back and it was about the same for me. I mean table stakes for a sales person is selling themselves. And getting canned isn’t always a bad mark against a sales person. So it’s hard to judge up front, but if they don’t sell “right away”* shove them out the door. It’s not like an engineer for whom you want to invest extra time to help them get into the groove; that’s part of the sales person’s way of life and the good ones are proud of it.
Pay the good sales people well. At your annual sales shindig have the CEO show up for a day, or half a day, to give a pep talk, enthuse about the VP of sales and the top sellers (who made it by following the rules) and then bow out. Maybe have the CFO talk about how many commission checks they had to cut. And have them mention that the top sellers make more than the CEO.
Another tip: have every member of the exec team, yes even CFO, VP of Manufacturing or whomever, go on a customer sales call every quarter. Sometimes a first visit, sometimes a sales person “check in” call or or whatever. It will make the execs understand how the customer views your product, not what marketing and the sales folk think the product is.
* right away depends on your sales cycle. Could be the end of the second month (but you’re already breathing down their next after two weeks), or first quarter, or six months (ugh). And if you sell semiconductor manufacturing gear with a sales cycle of 48 months, good luck.
The founder should always lead the sales at the initial stage, even if they are a techie. The founder creates the culture, so it's important to have that influence on that org. Then you hire the right people to replace yourself, and fire them quickly if they deviate from what you want.
Welcome to being a founder. If you don't want to do it, you need a co-founder who will, but they must have the same values you do.
It is easier as a tech person to do the sales yourself than to find a good sales co-founder that mimics your customer-centric values. Both are of course very hard, but relatively speaking doing it yourself initially is easier between the two.
And those who don't want to do that should work for a company where those functions are handled by other people, but if you start a company, expect to do sales.
First is the right people - don't hire "Frank" from Paul Kenny's talk.
Second is to join sales calls or watch the recordings (Chorus.ai is great for this). Put yourself in the buyer's shoes and coach based on those recordings - I always listen from the point of view of "If I was the customer, do I think they really care about my problem, and is it credible that they will help me solve it?". Right now I watch 1-2 recordings a week and then chat with the team about what they think went well and where we might improve, and we are figuring it out together. That continuous process is what reinforces the culture. When the CEO is focussed on helping customers, and revenue as a secondary concern, it becomes the culture.
Third is probably for the sales team not to be an island. So get the engineering and product leaders to join the calls or watch the recordings too, so that the tiny features or friction points make their way onto the roadmap eventually.
Thank you for sharing this Kent, I got a tremendously valuable insight from it.
I run a company and I love my work. And I recognise that this puts me in an extremely lucky minority. And my business has been successful enough that I could even quit working, but I enjoy it too much to. I also love my family. But there are never enough hours in the day. I could spend 16 hours a day with my kids and it would not be enough. I could spent it working, and my business would want more. I look back on the last 10 years and feel many regrets about how my time was spent in both directions.
So I feel like a failure constantly. I am not the husband I wish I was, not the CEO I wish I was, not the parent I wish I was. Because they all want 100%. I can’t get this balance right.
The point I took from your post is that this balance is meant to be difficult when you love both sides of the things you attempt to balance. Because giving time to one takes from the other.
I feel a lot more at peace for reading it. Thank you for writing it.
PS:
Lots of the comments here question the “need to work” point or admonish those of us who do derive substantial meaning from our work and wish we had more time for our work. I think that’s missing the point. Replace “work” with something socially acceptable that you love, like I dunno, protecting baby penguins or teaching orphans. You could spend 100% of your time doing that. Now balance it against the other things you love. Don’t feel bad about not getting that balance right, because by giving to one you take from the other, and both would love 100%. If work for you is something to be minimised as much as possible then I don’t think a post about work life balance is particularly relevant to you, because you must have it figured out.
I feel like you’re the only commenter so far to understand Kent’s point. I agree with you: if the balance isn’t hard it means you’re doing some things you don’t love. Correcting that will likely lead to more happiness, even if it makes the balancing harder.
This is an important comment. When a company gets to profitability, the worst-case outcome is the company stops growing, it loses momentum and closes with a tiny payout. There is always an option to do that. By not aiming for profitability first he bet on spending big in pursuit of growth instead, which is the VC model. He was effectively his own VC in this case.
Someone with less funding availability might well write the tweet thread about how they were crushed by the person who had $10m of their own money to spend.
I do think it’s great that he wrote this up and I have to say, as a bootstrapped (profitable) startup founder in a space with heavily VC backed competitors, it made me pause.
When Grandpa was 20 years old he left the house and forgot to take his keys, so every time he left the house he checked his pockets for his keys.
When he was 24 he left the house and left the stove on. He learned to check the stove before leaving the house.
When he was 28 he left his wallet at home. He learned to check for his wallet.
...
Now Grandpa is 80. His leaving home routine includes: checks for his keys, his phone, his wallet. He ensures the lights are off, the stove is off, the microwave door is closed, the iron is off, the windows are closed in case it rains...
Grandpa has learned from his mistakes so well that it now takes him roughly an hour to leave the house. Also, he finds he doesn't tend to look forward to going out as much as he once did...