From my experience speaking to founders, managers and business leaders, laying people off is one of the hardest things a person will have to do during their careers.
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What I Learnt from Laying Off 40 Staff
Category: Business
As a consumer, competition is usually great – it spurs innovation and leads to more efficient pricing. In this post, however, I am going to focus on competition in life, and why it can actually be sub-optimal.
Being a good listener is one of the most important attributes you can have as an entrepreneur. You need to heed some (but definitely not all) of the advice given to you by advisors/mentors/investors, as well as take on feedback from your customers and users. It is also essential to listen to some of the ideas your team and employees come up with – if you don’t listen properly, you will regret it days/weeks/months down the line when things begin to unravel beneath your feet.
Working in (or running) an early-stage startup can be one of the most volatile experiences of your life. The mixture of monumental highs assuming that you’re somewhere on the right path combined with depressing lows is quite unique in a career/lifestyle. There will be times where you question your self-belief and wonder why you are doing what you are doing. Your resilience is an important factor in helping you bounce back, so it is good to have an understanding of what helps keep you strong.
I have heard the phrase “knowledge is power” (“scientia potentia est” is the original phrase coined in Latin) regularly used throughout my life – at university, in the workplace and even in Hollywood movies. Never, though, have I felt this phrase to be more appropriate than when applied to behavioural & leadership psychology (or influencing people).
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Hiring (and Firing)
Over the course of the last year or so, I have met with, spoken to or been to talks featuring many different CEOs and start-up founders. I like to ask them about some of the biggest mistakes that they’ve made (in the futile hope that I can learn from them) or what advice they would give to an aspiring/early-stage entrepreneur. What is interesting is that the answer they all give is almost always the same.
In The NEF Application Process – Part I, I covered Part I of the NEF application process. This involved an online application, video interview, numerical & verbal testing, an assessment centre and a panel interview. I also outlined some general advice I had for these sorts of situations, as well as some things that I thought might have helped me as I progressed.
After a few months of skill building to transition into a more entrepreneurial career, I decided to apply to the New Entrepreneurs Foundation programme. In this post, I’ll run through Part I of the application process (you don’t get onto NEF unless you pass Part I and Part II but, if you’re good enough to pass Part I, you should be OK with Part II – Matchmaking with Host Companies). I’ll also provide some tips about what worked for me (and why) which is largely applicable to job applications. It was quite a pleasant process overall and helped me realise a few things along the way.
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Reasons to Start a Start-Up
There are a whole load of reasons why people might want to start a start-up. It is important to know what reason yours is, because some of these reasons only make sense in certain contexts, and some of them will actually lead you astray.
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What Makes a Great Founder?
When people think of great founders, they think of people like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk or Steve Jobs – people who have this unwavering drive and vision; who can captivate people and lead them on a journey. However, what made these guys truly successful was the support network they built around themselves – their founding team. The reality is that it is almost impossible for one person to have all the characteristics of a great founder. What is possible, however, is having all of these great characteristics shared between yourself and your co-founders.
