Transcript
Lean startup is a good option for anybody because it’s more about reducing waste. But I think particularly it’s harder for women unfortunately to often get access to finance. So I think that it’s a great model in order to trial an idea or trial a product. The lean model isn’t necessarily about being cheap. It’s about reducing waste, and waste often happens when entrepreneurs do the wrong things at the wrong time. You do see a lot of new startup founders who’ve just got their funding and they just want to have the amazing office and the huge team and the beer tap and the foosball table. And I think that in the early stages of business, everybody should be watching the pennies. Everybody should be ensuring that where they’re spending their money is really needed. Because at the same time, when you start to just spend money like there’s no tomorrow you end up losing your profit. I think that if you are a small business owner, you really know where all the money’s going. Whereas when you’re perhaps half investment, you’re maybe less careful about the money. For a business to make money and to be profitable, the entrepreneur or the business owner needs to be very careful with where they’re spending the money dependent on whatever size of business. So for me I think that, lean, it doesn’t necessarily mean being cheap, but it really is about ensuring that you’re spending money on the right things. And then obviously when you become like Uber or Facebook’s then go for it.
For a newly founded company, probably the main goal will be to get finance. Or it will be to find co-founders. And that’s more likely if it’s a company that has already serious overheads from the start or requires a lot of tech. For a small company, which doesn’t need much, it’s probably going to be about getting customers and customer retention. I think it’s really important to set clear goals no matter what. When you start hiring employees and you don’t have clear goals or you don’t have a clear purpose then people won’t be on the same page. So I think it’s really critical to ensure that everybody’s aligned on what they’re doing and why. There’s a term in marketing which is called smart objectives. And it’s about having specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely goals. And it’s something that I recommend for all new startups is to make sure whenever you say we’re going to do something that it’s backed up with a timeline and it’s backed up with some kind of specific objective and because that really helps to keep everybody aligned. They say that it’s good to start at the end when starting a new business. So the idea of that is that before you even launch your company, or at least when you’re in inception, that you are thinking about how you want to either exit or where you want to be in three years or five years. Because again, a company with purpose is much more likely to be successful.
