Making a Difference for Startups and Scaleups – Step 1: Startups

Starting and growing your business can be exhilarating and fun. It can also be scary and an awful lot of hard work. This can take a toll and the sad fact is that in the UK around 60% will fail in the first three years.

 So how can we make it easier for these budding organisations? After all, we want them to succeed wherever possible as they represent the future.

 First, we need to know why they fail. This interesting HBR article lists a fair number of common reasons which I think can be condensed into a few main areas:

1. Misunderstanding market, market demand and competition
2. Management skills
3. Staff – lack of people and/or wrong people
4. Money and investment
5. Wrong idea / product / service
6. Growing / changing too fast (people / products / services etc)

All these can be addressed by a combination of training, mentoring and coaching. Why all three techniques? Partly because of the types of skill and knowledge that need to be built up and partly because of the way we learn.

In addition, it can really help if the people delivering the coaching / mentoring / training have been involved in startups and scaleups; i.e. they have ‘lived experience’ and really get what it’s like.

There is one first step that can make all the difference. That’s understanding a little more about ourselves; who we are, how we are and how we work. We can use profiling, exercises, quizzes and so on to gain this information. To find out which techniques are most appropriate for you it’s probably best to have an exploratory chat with a professional. 

Who am I? An engineer turned coach with a strong creative side. I’ve been involved in four startups. One failed for Reason 1. One failed for Reason 4. One ran its course and was closed down and one is still going.

If you’d like to chat just go here: https://calendly.com/alr_coach/30min. 

If you'd like to attend an intro call for our Group Coaching initiative please book a call via our calendly link.