Neda Sahebelm

Unless you're a serial entrepreneur, gear up for one of the steepest learning curves of your life. Taking a business from 0-1, especially when you haven't done it before, looks like infinite online resources, podcast and book recommendations and decision paralysis. Here's what I'd suggest: - Fail fast and often as you would with any other startup - Learn by doing instead of agonising over the right decision - Other than accounting or legals (unless you're really keen), learn the other bits of your business from scratch. Don't pay upfront for snazzy software until you have enough capital to keep it up. Focus on learning by doing + doing more with less, and you'll be fit to sustain scale and your own sustainability for the long haul.

Tough pill to swallow - but this is 100% down to you as the founder. No one else will do it for you. What fills your cup? For example, for me it's a daily walk in natural light, 3x a week gym session and reading 10 pages a day. I block these in my diary and treat them like meetings with myself. Remember that you can't pour from an empty cup. Even if you love your business, your brain needs time away to regenerate and get out of 'doing mode'. Treat time away as the best investment you can make into your business, and see your attitude to boundaries change.

A distraction that hasn't been mentioned is chasing cash for low ticket items. When you're small and scrappy, getting quick payouts seem like an easy win - but they're taking you away from your ideal customers and holding you back from optimising your offering. If you continue selling to low ticket clients, you'll be forever tweaking your product further away from high ticket buyers.

Performance evaluation starts as early as the candidate interview. The interview should give you 90% confidence to hire; month 1 in role is for the other 10%. If you've provided clear onboarding milestones, KPIs and resources to your new start, you should know within the first month whether they're on the right track. You'll see how they show up quickly - whether that's taking stock of their development, asking questions and being on time to meetings, or whether they're disengaged or disorganised. Use data and regular conversations to get your people where they need to be quickly, then leave the rest up to them. Don't wait to have performance-related conversations with new starts - your business is only as strong as your weakest link.

Get to 51% confident, then make the decision. Leading a startup is all about failing fast and often. Have milestones, metrics and data gaps you want to fill - but once you've collected enough to be 51% in a direction, go for it, learn from it and codify your repeatable good decisions. The exception is anything that could shut your business (eg legal, tax or compliance risk), in which case you'll want to involve an expert to help you make calculated decisions.

Growth is doing more with more. Scale is doing more with less. If you want to improve your cash flow, increase your company valuation and avoid needing to raise, you’ll want to focus on scale - without compromising quality. A simple framework founders can adopt is KAOS: 1. Take an aerial view of your Product, People and Processes with a realistic lens of your received revenue (don’t use booked - it’s not guaranteed). 2. Use KAOS to internally audit what to Keep, Automate, Optimize, Scrap. An example in practice: - Keep: paying someone to manage your calendar if the ROI speaks for itself - Automate: subscription comms for email marketing - Optimize: client management from a spreadsheet to CRM - Scrap: the fancy PM tool no one uses