Why Startups Need to Create a "Stop-Doing" List when Considering Growth

I’m going to assume that for most people, if you’re either starting or have started your own business, that you’re at least a moderately-organized person. At the heart of any organized person’s arsenal is a to-do list that can range anywhere from the classic pencil-and-paper method to project management software like Asana (my personal favorite). But have you ever considered that keeping a stop-doing list can be just as beneficial as your to-do list?

I’m constantly looking for new ways to better optimize my time as I grow my startup, AssureTech, and started seriously considering stop-doing lists after reading about practices of successful leaders in Jim Collins’ work, Good to Great. I’ve toyed with the idea quite a bit and found two questions to ask yourself when creating an effective stop-doing list that will positively impact your business and life.

1. What’s Lowering Your Ceiling?

Think about the different hats you wear in your company. If you’re just starting out, chances are that you’re the CEO, CFO, CMO, CTO, and every other conceivable role from top to bottom. As you grow, you need to think about what jobs you should continue to personally oversee, and which responsibilities you have to turn over to someone else.

I start with the following phrase:

If I continue to remain the leading authority on _____________ at my startup, then we cannot grow beyond a certain point.

Anything that accurately completes this phrase goes on the list. And it doesn’t matter if you know the solution yet either.

You may recognize that your accounting ability, for example, is eventually going become a liability, but not know whether adapting better software, engaging a firm, or hiring will raise your ceiling. The important part when adding items to your stop-doing is that you recognize key areas for improvement before they start to seriously limit your growth potential.

Early recognition of potentially-limiting factors will help you make smarter decisions when you start to hire, build an advisory board, or seek out strategic partners to invest in your company.

2. What’s Wasting Your Resources?

Your company’s resources, like time, capital, or materials, are finite. Recognizing practices that are wasting your company’s resources and adding them to your stop-doing list is good, but is just the first step.

The second step is being able to identify what kind of waste they’re creating. “Waste,” in my opinion, falls into three categories: waste that needs to be eliminated (1); waste that requires additional support (2); and waste that requires a more efficient process (3). Each needs to be added to your stop-doing list, but requires a different remedy according to its type.

Waste that Needs to Be Eliminated

This waste is anything that serves no long-term purpose for advancing your company. If you’re just starting out, you might be engaged in activities that stray outside of your core business. This could be something like doing “side jobs” that generate revenue to keep the lights on, but are not part of your main offering. The best way to address this type of waste is to recognize what practices aren’t long-term opportunities and begin strategizing the best way to phase them out before they slow your company’s momentum.

Waste that Requires Additional Support

You’re eventually going to hit a point where your business is growing beyond what one person can manage on their own — that’s a great problem to have! I’m not quite there yet, but I have been trying to forecast ahead and look for effective strategies for scaling a business and hiring smart. I’m adding a short video below that I found particularly insightful.

I like the video because it does an effective job of establishing a hierarchy of different responsibilities that need to be delegated out as the organization scales, thereby reducing the time and energy you need to personally exert on these areas.

Waste that Requires a More Efficient Process

This type of waste is time-consuming enough that it can slow your company’s momentum to a grinding halt, but doesn’t require an additional hire to fix. These processes affect your productivity and can be expedited by adding easy-to-integrate automations into your workflow. Two examples of processes I needed to automate for my business were getting contracts signedand sharing introductory information with new contacts.

Getting Contracts Signed Quicker

Any startup that’s developing IP is going to send out a number of NDAs prior to each new meeting. These, plus engagement letters, formation paperwork, and the work of filing each contract upon its completion, can be hard to keep tabs on and wastes time that could be better spent elsewhere. I started using an eSign service, DottedSign, to work more efficiently. I like this service because it’s free to create a basic membership and can be easily managed from my smartphone. It tells me which contracts I need to sign, which contracts I am waiting on signatures for, and even lets me scan documents with my phone’s camera and create a contract on the go.

Sharing Introductory Information with New Contacts

The other process that I found essential to automate was sending out a proper welcome to new contacts. I personally like Mailchimp for this because it’s easy to set up automatic email chains for up to 2,000 contacts and integrates well with my website platform, Wix. Nothing should replace forming a strong personal connection with your customers, but setting up automations like these can be a very effective way to share critical information with anyone that joins your mailing list or fills out a contact form on your website.

Structuring Your Stop-Doing List

The last thing I find important when constructing an effective stop-doing list is making sure you have a structure in place that sets you up for success. Some of the items mentioned above that you need to add to your list, such as getting out of activities that are outside of your core business, might be difficult — or even impossible — to quit cold turkey. I use a board in Asana to manage my stop-doing list because it lets me track the different items I’ve identified for the list and phase them out as I go. The trick is to make sure you are aware of the items on your list without feeling like it’s an either-or situation (i.e. stopped or didn’t stop).

The image above is a screenshot from my “Stop-Doing” board on Asana, with “Still Doing,” “Phasing Out,” and “Stopped” columns

Challenge Yourself to Build an Effective Stop-Doing List

The impact of a strong stop-doing list on your startup and work/life balance is great because it helps free your time to do the things that you’re most passionate about — both professionally and personally. I encourage every entrepreneur that wishes there was more time in the day to make creating a stop-doing list the next item on your to-do list!