13. Financing your business

Have you heard about OKRs? If you heard about it, you are in the right place to explore the topic even further. If not - it is worth your while, as the goal-setting skills are as challenging as they are fundamental. Even more so is the ability to measure how efficiently these goals have been completed. So today  I’m going to talk about setting and monitoring goals using the OKR methodology.

Have you ever wondered what we – managers – should care about most? Preparing for this podcast, I’ve asked this question to myself and some other managers. Most opinions come down to such things as: getting tangible/solid/measurable results from our work, achieving our goals and developing our organizations. Naturally, that is what most of us want and what we aim for.  But sometimes we don’t realize how important is the way how we will actually get there. The things that need to happen to achieve our goals. And when they are actually achieved? How do we define “achieving goals”? This episode is about one on one meetings (1:1) between the manager & employee. Enjoy!

Our focus today will be communicating in a team – one of the key issues for a growing company. It is quite a broad topic, so I’d like to share just a few ideas that may help make a rapid and radical improvement in your team communication. To begin with, you may have heard about the synchronous and asynchronous modes of team communication.

Welcome to today’s episode, devoted to the costs of terminating an employment contract. As it is commonly assumed, the employee dismissal costs are equal to the costs of recruiting a replacement. In this podcast, I am going to explain why this approach is so very incorrect. A closer look at the key aspects of the firing-to-hiring process may actually prove it is a trouble in disguise. We might be losing a lot more than we initially thought.

Let’s have a look at the structure of equity participation in a company and its changes in time. When seeking external investment at the early stage of business growth, founding teams often have to decide what share of their business should be sold to investors. To help you answer this question, I can offer my experience from both sides of such contracts. I have been involved both in acquiring funds and investing. For companies such as Morizon, AirHelp or Saunowy Staw, the total amount I acquired in all investment rounds was several tens of millions of Polish Złoty.

This episode is recorded on request, as a follow-up to the survey posted on the “Startup Talks” group on Facebook, asking what topic you would like to hear about next. Some dozen people responded to the survey, having chosen the topics proposed there or adding their own ideas. It turned out, that the most wanted topic was the changes in the organizational structure in a fast-growing company. I’m glad this was your choice, because the structure transformation is one of the hardest processes that founders of small companies must face.

In today’s podcast, let’s focus on asking for advice and building relationships between those who ask and those who give advice. An attitude that I often come across, especially among the founders of new businesses (where there are no fully-developed sales processes or competencies), is that asking for advice is a sign of weakness. Since we are asking, we can’t be fully professional, our product or service must be incomplete and that’s why we have to ask others how things should work. In this short talk, I would like to share my views on this matter, based on my experience of building up sales and businesses. Seeking others’ advice doesn’t expose our helplessness. It’s a symptom of maturity and determination to understand the challenges that we and our customers are about to face. There is a saying I like to quote in this situation, which I fully adhere to: ”Ask for money – and you’ll get advice; ask for advice – and they’ll give you money”.

In today’s episode I’d like to talk about something that personally matters to me a lot – charity. In the business jargon, it is known as CSR – being Corporate Social Responsibility. Some people refer to it using a more sophisticated term - philanthropy. In fact, philanthropy denotes a more general personal and social commitment of which charity is a practical manifestation.

In this episode we’re going to think about setting business goals. Unlike lots of previous podcasts, this one wasn’t inspired by one or a few SaunaGrow mentoring sessions. Its idea came from an exciting LinkedIn discussion, started by Marcin Majchrzak of Harmony Team. One of the questions that Marcin asked was: What is the optimal number of sales meetings his sales team should carry out? To give an answer, the respondents – trainers, male and female leaders and sales experts – were first given company parameters, its industry and salesman’s job description. The debate that followed had a few unexpected twists. It inspired me to share my opinion on how setting company goals can work toward positive ends or they can damage the leader and his team.

In this episode, I’d like us to think about ways of financing a startup – how to raise funds to kick off and then develop a business. These are common questions on Facebook groups as well as at meetings with entrepreneurs at various stages of business growth. They concern those who are just planning to start a business as well as those whose ideas and decisions have been verified by their first achievements. They also accompany the managements of well-established companies who are beginning to realize it’s time to consider new forms of financing to introduce new products to new markets or globalize their business. My experience in financing startups or company growth comes from being a venture partner at venture capital fund Black Pearls VC. It is also my practical knowledge as an entrepreneur who did have to acquire financing from various sources. Each case described here has actually taken place in at least one of my companies that I have been developing over the last 20 years. This is my hands-on experience on what I’ve done both as an investor and an investment seeker.