5 Most Common Mistakes at Series-C and What to do About Them.

It is estimated that 44% of Series C startups will fail in 2023. Why? Here are the most common mistakes I've seen come up and time again and some tips on what to do about them.

1. ?? Smart Growth vs. ?? Growth for Growth's Sake

Common Mistake: Succumbing to the allure of hyper-growth without a strategic workforce plan.

What to keep in mind: Never neglect the importance of an HR strategy. Founders often think HR is a "nice to have" and that they can figure it all out on their own or with minimal support. In fact, when budget is tight, HR is usually the first to get cut because everyone thinks they know it well enough. But strategic workforce planning and prioritizing business agility is the only way to protect your investment in human capital. Business agility coaches are specialized in guiding founders in the process and empowering HR to provide valuable input on the human impact. They can also help build a data-driven culture, so that they can track their progress and make informed decisions about where to invest their resources and avoid knee-jerk decision making.

2. ?? Team Health vs. ?? Team Size

Common Mistake: Neglecting team dynamics as the workforce grows quickly.

What to keep in mind: Leadership can become overly obsessed with team sizes, the number of management layers or any other buzz word of the moment, but by prioritizing employee engagement, regardless of the organizational structure will ensure performance much more effectively than just moving around the boxes on an org-chart. With effective HR management, you can conduct regular employee surveys to gauge satisfaction, identify pain points, and foster a healthy workplace culture. Use Agile HR practices, such as regular feedback and continuous improvement, to identify and address team dynamics issues early on. Once engagement is solid, you can reorganize as you like but don't skip this step.

3. ?? Funding Management vs. ?? Wild Spending

Common Mistake: Overspending without a clear understanding of the return on investment.

What to keep in mind: Implement Rigorous Expense Management. Use a robust financial tracking system to regularly review key financial metrics, such as Burn Rate and Gross Margin. Business agility coaches can help founders to develop a rigorous expense management process and track key financial metrics.

4. ?? Leadership Alignment vs. ?? Disarray

Common Mistake: Not addressing leadership misalignment as the organization grows.

What to keep in mind: How many times have you come out of a board meeting or Executive Committee meeting realizing that you're discussing the same issues week after week, month after month, spending hours and hours of time of your highest paid executives to achieve... nothing at all. Lack of alignment persists, conflict is not addressed, people say one thing in the meeting and tell their teams whatever they want, agree to do something and just don't... It's imperative to strengthen Leadership Effectiveness. Invest in leadership coaching and development programs as well as facilitation of key meetings to ensure you have an ROI on that time and move things forward more swiftly. Use 360-degree feedback to identify areas for improvement. Agile coaches can help founders to develop a shared vision and strategy for the company, and implement agile leadership practices, such as servant leadership and decentralized decision-making. This can help to ensure that everyone in the company is working towards the same goals.

5. ?? Customer-Centric Growth vs. ?? Blind Expansion

Common Mistake: Expanding into new markets without understanding customer needs.

What to keep in mind: Integrate Customer Feedback. Establish a customer feedback loop to gather insights for product development and market expansion strategies. Agile coaches can help founders to develop a customer feedback loop and use this feedback to inform their product development and market expansion strategies.

What I'm getting at...

By now it's clear that I'm quite biased that there is one answer to preventing serious cash loss at this stage of growth- and it's investing in business agility in a strategic and purposeful way. In fact, large public companies have entire departments dedicated to transformation or engage sizable teams of external agile coaches to help leadership and other teams address all of the challenges I listed above at all times. Founders need help to grow more efficiently, effectively, and sustainably and it's the boards or the VCs that need to step up and insist on it, because the founders don't always know they need this help, or don't want to admit that they do...