Six things you never knew you'd have to be as a startup founder

You've had a great idea for a tech startup, you've quit your job or you've taken a severance package, and you're ready to roll. In your mind, you're going to be planning strategy, mingling at trade events, and discussing product features till the early hours of the morning with your other founders.

What no one tells you is that the life of a CEO/founder is a lot less glamorous than it may at first seem. You have to wear a lot of hats, many of which are not going to sit comfortably.

Welcome to the wonderful world of "founder's multiple personality disorder":

Administrator

Running a startup involves admin. Lots and lots of it. You're going to need to invest in a new filing cabinet just to handle the increase in paperwork, or in a top-range printer/scanner. Bills need to be paid on time, there are invoices (you know how to generate an invoice, right?) to send and chase up, government incorporation forms, tax forms, bank application forms and insurance forms to fill in and submit.

Although oversights and missed deadlines can be fixed, they usually come at a cost because you'll have to bring in a professional. And unexpected extra costs can kill a startup.

If you're the kind of person who throws all the bills that arrive in the post onto a pile on the hallway table for later, and you don't know where your stamps and envelopes are, you have a lot of improving to do.

Lawyer

Are you the kind of person who, when faced with a click-through license agreement, just checks the box and clicks "I accept"? That's going to have to change. You'll have non-disclosure agreements to review, and licenses for your product to draft and review.

You'll have to understand your local legislation for limited liability companies, the responsibilities of the board of the company, contracts for project work you take on, and when you hire your first permanent employee there's labor laws, pension and vacation obligations, health and safety mandates. And if you need to lay off an employee, there's further obligations, collective bargaining agreements, and union responsibilities and more employment law.

If you manage to raise investment, there's term sheets, memoranda of understanding, and more and more contracts.

And finally, there are tax laws. You'll have an accountant to deal with the day to day bookkeeping and the ordinary declarations that need to be made to the authorities, but you'll have to have a handle on value-added tax, import and export taxes, corporate taxation, and unless your accountant is pro-active you'll be the one giving them guidance.

You can hire a lawyer to handle the really difficult stuff, but given that you're going to be strapped for cash, and in any case, because the buck stops at your desk, you are going to have to get familiar with legal language.

You are never going to be able to use the excuse "I Am Not A Lawyer" again.

Accountant

You've got an accountant. As the company administrator, you're gathering up the receipts, expense claims and bills and sending copies to the accountant and they're maintaining the books and producing yearly financial roundups for the regular company audits.

What they won't be doing is tracking your revenue versus expenditure and managing cash flow, budgeting, working out how to pay or receive foreign payments at the cheapest possible rate, and deciding how and where to spend your meager financial resources.

You will have to get your head around double-entry bookkeeping in order to double-check the accountant's work (after all, you're ultimately responsible). Financial projections, spreadsheets, graphs for pitch decks. Market analysis work to explore and explain your company's position in the big wide world. Loan terms, repayment schedules, and again - tax optimization.

You had better become a spreadsheet-ninja overnight.

Therapist

Running a startup is stressful. Some people are better at coping with that stress than others. You're going to have to assess the mental state of your co-founders, employees and yourself. Is this founder thinking about leaving? Is that employee overworked and heading for depression or a nervous breakdown? Are you personally starting to rely on insane quantities of coffee in the morning to wake up, and one too many whiskeys in the evening to calm down and go to sleep?

You are also going to have to learn all about confidentiality. It's tempting to talk to everyone and anyone about what you're achieving, whom you're partnering with, what you've invented and how badly your startup is doing. But half of this stuff is going to be under a non-disclosure agreement, and you can't afford the other half to reach the ears of your competition.

When people ask you, "how's it going," the most detailed answer you can give is, "fine, thanks!"

And of course, it's not.

Salesperson

If you like sales - great! If you don't - learn to. You simply can't outsource full responsibility for sales to an employee or a contractor. Sales are both the lifeblood of and the guiding star for the company. Without sales, you won't have any money coming in, and what's more, it's the most important source of business intelligence you can gather, so you need to be right next to the wellspring.

If you're not phoning potential customers, networking with potential customers, emailing potential customers and asking failed sales prospects why they didn't sign up with you, you are literally going nowhere.

Fortunately, there are lots of books out there that can teach you the obvious sales mistakes people make, and what's more, most salespeople are really bad at selling.

So you'll be in good company.

Gambler

You need nerves of steel and the intuition of a cat. Or whatever animal it is that has a lot of intuition. You may believe that you can reason your way through business, analyzing numbers and researching the market and the competition, while investigating technological advances and research papers. But brains alone don't cut it.

Most of the time there just isn't enough sensible reliable data out there for you to make an informed decision, but that decision just has to be made. And you'll be staking what seem like eye-watering sums of money on it.

Other times you'll be negotiating the deal of a lifetime, and you'll have no idea what price to ask for. Your buyer will quite happily take your time, product, and sanity for free. If you can't bluff or hold fast, you will lose.

Or worse - win, but feel like you've lost.

Summary

There's a reason so many successful founders appear in videos talking about how many books they read a week. A truly capable founder is fully aware of the fact that there is much more that they don't know than there is that they know, and they're always working on improving their knowledge and skillset.

In summary, you'll need to:

• be organized,
• be willing to learn all the time, and
• get out of your comfort zone.

Good luck!

You'll need it.