From Duty to Startup: What Military Guys Can Bring to the Table in Entrepreneurship

Two real-life examples and two core learnings from my time as an active reserve?officer

Both warfare and entrepreneurship are all about being bold and reaching challenging goals. Whilst setting the overall targets is a strategic activity in both warfare and entrepreneurship, achieving them requires tactics.

In the Swiss Armed Forces, tactical planning is guided by ten tactical principles. Let’s look at the two tactical principles I use most in entrepreneurship.

Freedom of action propagates keeping or seeking the initiative. If you leave the initiative to your enemy or your competitors, you will have to play by their rules. The initiative can be won or kept by planning, knowing your enemy or your competitors, and keeping adequate reserves of manpower, material, or cash.

Once you have the freedom of action on your side, form centers of gravity to reach your goal. No army and no company has enough manpower, material, or cash to work on everything at the same time. Forming centers of gravity means employing the right resources at the right time. At the same time, this also means taking risks by shifting resources from one area of operation to another?—?at least for a short, decisive phase.

So much for the theory. How does this work in daily entrepreneurial life? I’ll illustrate two examples and two learnings from my experience as an active reserve officer in the Swiss Armed Forces and as the Founder & CEO of Yonder.

Example 1: Closing a Financing Round

The strategic goal of a financing round is to increase freedom of action: securing adequate cash runway to finance business operations and growth.?

When a financing round is launched, you will have to talk to multiple investors to test the interest in your round. Commitments will not come after the first meetings, but typically only when a first commitment is confirmed and the key terms are defined. A classic cold start problem.

When interest in your financing round is firming up and the first soft commitments come in, you need a term sheet. And a term sheet needs a valuation for your company. Whilst the valuation is by far not the only important term in your round, it is often the key element to get to the first commitment.

Seeking the initiative in this decisive phase of your financing round is about being bold with the valuation. Communicating a reasonable valuation to your potential investors can break the deadlock and get those commitments fast.

Of course, you can discuss back and forth if you would have gotten to a higher valuation if you had waited for other feedback, or went in with a much higher valuation only for it to be negotiated down. Besides the negative energy such discussions consume, remember why you need freedom of action in the first place: Runway. Time is your enemy. Get that term sheet signed, close the round, and move on.

As an entrepreneur, you will have to prioritize your time for fundraising over doing sales and running your company. The quicker fundraising is done, the quicker you can shift your center of gravity to other activities again.

Example 2: Winning a?Tender

In contrast to a financing round, the initiative to launch a tender is not taken by the company answering it, but by the company issuing it.

So as soon as a tender is published, form a center of gravity. Let everything else aside, and put your time and energy into answering it as professionally as you can. Can we fulfill all the requirements? Do we need a partner, or can we answer the tender by ourselves? Who will be our likely competitors in this tender? What edge can we achieve over our likely competitors? What financial model will we offer?

Once the tender answer is submitted, you are in for a phase of waiting. When you are finally invited to a product presentation, the center of gravity is back. Put everything else aside and do whatever it takes to deliver a successful presentation. Prepare for every question you can think of; you will have only one chance to get to the next round.

The next round brings procurement to the table. Procurement usually needs some discount for them to show their value, but they often also delay things considerably. Be bold with them?—?trade discounts against time. They can get their discount, but they will have to sign the contract until an agreed date. Or the discount is gone.

Learning 1: Embrace Uncertainty And Ambiguity

Legend has it that Winston Churchill called military planning a “necessary evil”, and experience shows that no military plan survives the first shot. Today, people rather talk about VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity), but they essentially mean the same thing as Churchill.

Officers need to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity?—?because there is plenty of it in military operations, and there is no way of getting rid of it.

The same is true in business?—?create as many business model spreadsheets and project Gantt charts as you like, you will always need to adapt them when problems surface.

Business leaders still tend to work in budget cycles and approve annual plans?—?why not start adapting planning if and when required, irrespective of the budget cycle, previous plans, or personal plans for the weekend?

Agility is a great principle for adapting to new situations. At the same time, agility is easily misunderstood with changing operational plans all the time. For both military operations and business, constantly changing plans can divert efforts from the main objective. So, therefore, you need to learn the fine art of being agile, and at the same time “letting the division roll once it rolls”.

Learning 2: Get Help from?Others

This one is the most important lesson, and the one least talked about. Staff officers are generalists?—?they don’t know anything. They only know about connecting different chunks of information, and about synthesizing solutions from these chunks of information.

The same is true for entrepreneurs: When you start a company, you just do whatever needs to be done, without really knowing how to do it. As an example, I was doing payroll myself in the early days of our company, not knowing anything about social contributions, payroll accounting, or taxation at source. Only when the company started to grow did we contract a payroll accountant, who took this task from me to execute it way better. I then used my time to take care of the next task which I didn’t know anything about.

Therefore, staff officers and entrepreneurs are completely lost without their teams. Learning is a lot easier if you know a person you can ask for help?—?imagine you needed to search the internet to learn about tank tactics or payroll processes!

Those knowledgeable people will also be able to give critical feedback on your solution by answering whether your solution is simple enough to work in the real world.

Last but not least, working with others raises morale and makes work more fun. And if you enjoy working in difficult times with difficult missions, you’re more likely to succeed.

Growing a company ?? in troubled times ???? is a marathon.

As a tech entrepreneur ??, active reserve officer ??, and father of three ??????, I can help you with ?? practical entrepreneurship and resilience advice for all aspects of life. To the point ??, no fluff, because entrepreneurs are busy.

When I’m not busy, I get my rest and inspiration in the beautiful mountains ??? around Zermatt ????.

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