The 8 Things Entrepreneur-Me Would Tell Corporate-Executive-Me, If I Could Time Travel

After a career built running big businesses, I’m now an entrepreneur. My team and I are working hard on launching Ellevest, a digital investment platform for women.

I recognize that management and leadership are learned skills, and so I’m an avid student of both. I’ve learned a great deal as an entrepreneur, very quickly: starting a business from scratch and having little money in the bank focuses the mind in a way that running a multi-billion-dollar business never does. It brings the key drivers of performance into sharp relief. I promise.

If time travel were possible, I would get into my handy dandy time travel machine, and here’s what I would go back and advise my big-company self:

1.It’s all about the team. A dysfunctional team means a dysfunctional – and likely doomed – company.

Google’s research shows that the most important driver of their teams’ success is psychological safety. That feels right to me: Can you be yourself at work? Can you take risks at work? Can you ask the “dumb question” at work? Can you fail? Can you trust others to deliver what they say they will?

So what to do at big companies? Throw out the big company forced stack rankings. Throw out the anonymous 360-degree reviews. Those winner-take-more systems are absolute poison to a well-functioning team; they instead invite “gaming the system” by trying to improve one’s relative positions on the team. Psychological safety? Quite the opposite.

 2. A broad-brush view of your customer doesn’t cut it. Instead, you increasingly have to understand your customer in great detail. What life stage is she in? What is her family situation? What does she read? What does she read, but not really want to admit that she reads? (I’m looking at you, People Magazine.) What does she do outside of work? Who influences her? What is her “pain point”? What information does she need to engage with your product?

At the big companies at which I’ve worked, there was little of this: clients were pretty much tiered in terms of wealth. If you had more than $250K in investable assets at one division, they wanted you as a client; if you were a company with more than $1 million in revenue, you should be a client of this other division.

Why these broad strokes? Well, the reasoning went: we were big, so we needed a lot of clients in order to get bigger. Micro-targeting felt too small to make a dent. And so…honestly…hard. And so those companies lost share to more nimble competitors all day long.

3. Information is the lifeblood of a company, and it should be shared broadly. If it’s not shared among a start-up team, then it’s only close-to-coincidence if product, marketing and engineering are aligned. Those odds are too low for a successful start-up.

In contrast, many large companies were built in the day when information was scarce and expensive to gather. Thus, one gained power by hoarding it; this enabled “command and control” management systems, in which power was disproportionately held at the top.

And, boy, power is a tough thing to give up. You’ve heard it: “We can’t share it, because what if the competitors get ahold of the information?” “What if it were to leak to the press?”

Today, information is less expensive to come by, but no less valuable. To some degree, this gets back to psychological safety at work: can you share power (in this case information) with others and trust that this does not leave you disempowered?

 4. Break big projects into small pieces and use the calendar as a weapon to drive progress. At Ellevest, delivery dates are chosen and it takes almost an Act of Congress to move them; features can be postponed, even some bugs can remain, but the date is close-to-sacrosanct. And these delivery dates come often: the product is user-tested at every step along the way, and adjustments to the product – based on the feedback that is gathered – is the norm.

In contrast, I’ve been part of big businesses that never seemed to make a tech deadline. This was often because the team would (consistently) underestimate the amount of work to be done, or the complexity of a project….or the project would suffer feature creep….they would only add, never subtract from a tech project. Thus, it could be a real recipe for a late, over budget, over-engineered roll-out….that in many cases didn’t resemble what the team started out to build in the first place. Or the world had simply moved on.

 5. Call a spade and spade and don’t fall in love with a particular strategy or product. Instead let the customer tell you what she needs…and change with her as she changes.

In asset and wealth management today, you see pitched battles on the future of the industry. Will clients want an in-person experience, with a Financial Advisor? Or an on-line experience? There are a number in the industry who are in the “Financial Advisor forever and Financial Advisor only” camp. Ok….but what does the client want?? (In my view, that answer is shifting, in some cases pretty rapidly, and will continue to; my best projection is that those who shun technology in this space are pretty much eventually doomed, whether delivered as an on-line-only experience or in conjunction with in-person Financial Advisor.)

6. Values matter. You’ve got your values written down; they’re even hanging on your break room wall. So of course they matter, right?

Well, I know we all say that; but at a start-up, where you are making many (important) decisions for the first time, they can serve as a key prism for those company-make-or-break decisions. As a result, they provide guiderails to decisions for the team.

Wait, you may say, we’ve got value statements. But are you really living by them? Many Wall Street firms’ value statements include “putting clients at the center of everything we do” and “respecting our people.” But were all of them really living them?? And wouldn’t they – and the economy – have been better off if they had?

 7. Are you really sure it’s Marketing’s fault? Really? I’ve always found that when someone says “if they could just do a better job of telling the story,” it was time to dig deeper.

I stopped advising one start-up when the CEO told the board that the product (which was his idea) was great….it was the head of marketing’s fault that it wasn’t taking off…and then that it was the next head of marketing’s fault…and then it was that that B2B customer was too set-in-his-ways to understand……you get it.

At a start-up, you don’t have a the luxury of the time – or the cash – to blame the other guys; a much better path to success is to be honest with yourself.

Because, believe me – at a big company, you may say you spend the money like it’s your own. But you don’t. Not til it’s really your own. And it’s the that real drivers of performance come into sharp relief.

An edited version of this post was published on FastCompany.com.

Sallie Krawcheck is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ellevest, a digital investment platform that is re-imagining investing for women, to be launched in 2016. She is the Chair of Ellevate Network, the global professional women’s network.

(Photo: Georgi Kostadinov, Flickr)

For information about Ellevest, a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registered investment adviser and its financial advisory services, please visit the firm’s website (www.ellevest.com) or the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure website (www.adviserinfo.sec.gov).