Turning Chaos Into Predictability: My 5 Management Lessons For First-Time Founders

The original, full version of this article can be found on the Zengrowth blog.

There are few things as scary and exciting as being a founder. And every founder has high hopes for that ultimate breakthrough. Here’s the bad news:

Some things will happen which are simply out of your control.

The good news: there are many areas that you can influence by following your intuition or experience. I’m going to share five lessons I've learned.

They may not help you grow your business directly but will give hopefully give you a couple of useful insights on how to make better decisions about growing your business.

1. Own vs Getting Owned

Your first goal as a founder should be this: get the f* out of non-existence. 

Every successful startup started at zero. There is no shame in it. But staying at zero is painful.

So, what is non-existence? It’s a state or condition where you are just unknown. People don’t know you and they don’t know why they should care. You're simply not creating an effect on the market.

Yet the market keeps on having an effect on you. You keep on producing costs and burning through resources.

Let’s face it. In this phase, you're getting owned. And your job as a founder is to get your company out of this phase ASAP.

Here's how I visualize it:

In a nutshell: it's your job to turn chaos into predictability.

When things are predictable, it means you own them.

When things are in chaos, it means you don’t own them. 

If you feel like you’re being owned, here’s what you can do:

1. Identify which points you’re not in control of

2. Write down the steps needed to get out of it

3. Implement those steps

4. Repeat to infinity

2. Time invested ≠ outcome

Some of the best marketing and sales campaigns come from minutes of work.

Some work that you spend weeks on yields zero results.

Why does this happen? The reason is this:

People don’t care about how long it took you to do something. They only care about the effect it produced.

That actually makes life quite simple. It means the only thing you need to focus on while doing marketing is producing effects at scale.

If you’re unsure how to choose your focus, prioritize all your marketing campaigns ruthlessly by the following criteria:

1. Can we do this soon or immediately? IS IT AGILE?

2. How many people can we reach with this? IS IT SCALABLE?

3. Do we produce a positive effect that will make us desirable? IS IT VALUABLE?

And then do that.

The biggest focal point of those being: can we do this soon or immediately?

3. Always write down & finish your to-dos

There are some companies that fail even though they have a great product, paying customers, and validated processes. 

Why? It usually has to do with self-management.

What you need to understand about tasks and to-dos is that you’re dealing with mental energy and attention.

If you don’t complete tasks, they take energy. If you do them, they give you back the energy.

The reason is simple:

Every single unfinished thing you have to do holds a small portion of your attention.

Once you finish it though, you’re free to distribute your energy to other things.

The more unfinished things you have on your plate, or in your head, the bigger the confusion you are surrounded by. 

And trust me when I say: Nobody, absolutely nobody, makes good decisions while stuck in confusion.

So here’s what you can do about this:

1. Write down all your to-dos → get it all out of your head

2. Start finishing these to-dos unsparingly

3. Write down any new to-dos

4. Do this to infinity

Now, what if you have too much on your plate? Every single day you finish 5 things, but 6 new things are added. That’s pretty messed up. This is usually a sign that you’re:

1. Not delegating or distributing tasks

2. Not prioritizing

3. Not cutting enough tasks

Not everything is as important or urgent. 

Eisenhower came up with a great matrix for this; here is a nice resource by Doist for prioritization: 

Here is the thing: there are no founders who became successful without this minimum degree of organization. So, study the matrix and master your to-dos.

You can also read "Getting things done" by David Allen for deeper insights.

4. Sales is about trust and connection

What makes a good salesperson? Companies spend millions of dollars to find that out.

In my honest opinion, sales, ethical sales that is, is simply about trust and connection.

All the rest are usually manipulation and games to control the other party. 

I mean, it may work for some people, but to me here are the skills you’ll want to train for your sales:

1) Practice to communicate with people freely and openly

Your ability to communicate openly and freely is what allows you to reach people at scale.

Whether that is addressing and walking up to people at events, pitching your product without feeling awkward, and finally getting people to trust you.

While others may stand there having fights with their own thoughts, you’ll already have made lots of valuable contacts to grow your business. 

How to practice this? To be honest, I wouldn’t know for sure, but I think it has a lot to do with a) authenticity and b) being true to yourself.

2) Practice to understand what people truly want

Understanding what people actually want is about two things: listening and experience. If you don’t have the former, your only alternative is to listen.

The reason why this skill is so important is that understanding what somebody wants, actually allows you to sell. And it’s not about some Dr. Evil scheme. It’s simply about creating win-win situations where at the end of the day you truly help your customer.

3) practice to provide what people want

Providing what people want is basically just a double-check to see if you understood point B well.

Now that you know what people want, you need to put in action, create it, or provide it. The faster you do it, the higher your conversion rate.

5. Seeking discomfort is a good thing. The more you fail, the higher your likelihood of success. 

Rejection is a daily practice that can turn you into an unstoppable force or a pile of ashes. 

You decide. 

Many of the greatest founders of all time have confirmed this more than once.

The reason why they become successful is not because of luck or because they were more talented, but because they trained their abilities by failing over and over again.

If you don’t believe me, check this. Or this.

We can take on that same principle in business. 

At Zengrowth we have a simple application of this rule: simply do what others are not doing.

That includes cold calls by me, the founder. That includes Linkedin posts on topics way too personal for LinkedIn to see if they work. That includes reaching out to candidates way out of our league. That means pitching a 400,000EUR/month project and failing.

We fail every day. I fail every day. But that is why we are where we are.

It is the accumulation of failures that determines your success.

So as a founder, embrace these failures. Embrace making wrong decisions. Because these mistakes increase your likelihood of success. And your likelihood of making better decisions in the future. 

Do you find the above lessons to be true? What else would you add that’s crucial? Let me know in the comments below!