Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to another episode of the Startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rotan, joined by Will Schroeder, my friend, the founder and CEO of startups dot com. Will, there are a lot of things that are important in a startup. Uh There are a lot of important characteristics of a startup founder. I would put accountability chief amongst those, especially
Wil Schroter: now. I mean, you know, we're in an era for folks that are listening. You may be listening to our back catalog by the time this thing goes out and we're heading into what's gonna be a brutal downturn. This is when accountability actually starts to matter. This is when across the organization. I think this is what's such a hot topic right now across the organization. When things start going south, that's when you hear about accountability, when things going up into the right company is taking off and we're raising money and all those cool things are happening. No one talks about accountability, right? Um No one talks about accountability. When you win a Super Bowl, they talk about accountability when you lose the Super Bowl and that's what we're gonna talk about. We're gonna talk about why we as founders inherently feel accountable. But we get frustrated when it's time to look across the whole organization and all of a sudden nobody else seems quite as accountable as we are. Everybody else seems like they're just kind of like phoning it in, by comparison. And we're trying to kind of like, make everybody as fired up as we are. You know what I mean?
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. And it's tough uh because they're, you know, like you said, sometimes we are, we're inherently most of the time, uh probably all of the time. We're inherently motivated. Uh and, and, and have accountability based on that. Uh And because we're the founders, right, we decided to do this. It's our, it's our whole thing, right? We live, breathe, eat sleep for other people. It may just be a job. Right. Right. Uh We tend to see less of that in startups than you would like a, a massive corporation where your badge number is 52 oh seven, but it's still not the same thing. And I, I think it's, it's important to remind ourselves that and not to become overly frustrated, but it can be right. I not quite the same thing. Uh But I had a football match on Sunday, uh soccer uh for those of you listening uh everywhere but the rest of the world. Um and uh we went down to zero and I felt like I was the only one that was fired up and pissed off about this and, and I started getting pretty vocal and pretty fired up and I started getting more fired up when I realized that just getting fired up wasn't getting everybody else fired up. And I'm like, but can't you see now is the time guys, right? And so, you know, nobody else seemed to want to be as accountable, uh, or, or feel that level of responsibility, uh, that, that I did to uh to, to set the score straight quite literally in this case, which we did, we, we leveled 20 or 22 by the end. So it, it did work. Um I'm not sure that it was my pent up angst and anger that got us motivated. But uh we, we were accountable at the end.
Wil Schroter: The angst is what we're talking about. Uh I remember when I had this, this first issue at scale during the dot com crash and everybody that I knew all people in company with a huge uh staff at that point like six or 700 people, nobody really understood what was happening. And part of that's always the way when things start to happen, you get crazy like people get it. But I saw exactly what was happening even though I'd never seen it before. This is my first time. But, you know, I knew the numbers very well and I was like, well, things were kind of going wrong direction,
Ryan Rutan: things, things just started to move the other way. They've been going up into the right, never happened before, down into the right. And so
Wil Schroter: all of a sudden I'm hounding everybody by trying to get them fired up in the same way you were. Right. We, we, we're down 0 to 2 and I'm trying to get everybody fired up and no one seems particularly motivated, not the way I was feeling motivated and I didn't get it at the time. It sounds so obvious now, it sounds so obvious now because now I look at it and I think, ok, well, I was about to lose everything. Everything I had worked for, everything I had built, everything I had bought was pretty much about to go away, but nobody else's, everything was about to go away. And we talked about this in other episodes where the founders obviously don't have the same stakes as everyone else. And I'm not saying everybody else's stakes are inconsequential at all. Definitely not correct at all. But everybody else can leave, right? If things go totally sideways, if Enron implodes, you just go get another job. It's not easy. It's, it's disruptive. Uh but
Ryan Rutan: consequence, but it's a more easily managed consequence,
Wil Schroter: right? I was comparing my freak out moment of like we've talked about this before. Not only am I gonna lose my job, I'm gonna lose everyone else's jobs too. That's accountability. Now, the challenge we have and this is a lot of what we'll talk about the challenge we have is projecting that level of accountability across the whole organization, especially in a couple cases. And this is so timely for us, the first case is things haven't gone bad in startup land in a pretty long time. And there have been plenty of flame outs during that time, last 10 years, but generally speaking, stuff been up to the
Ryan Rutan: right on the whole, it's been up and up and up, right?
Wil Schroter: We also have a generation of people that came into startups. This is all they know. They've only seen positive. We had something called the the great resignation, which when people had so much job mobility, there was, there was talk about how many people we're just willing to resign, right? That that
Ryan Rutan: will be I, yeah, I can't wait to see the essays that are penned on that in the future.
Wil Schroter: But that's my point. Um It's, it's folks coming through a very different time. No different Ryan than you and I did in the first part of our careers where this gets tricky is now, all of us as founders are gonna run around and we're gonna try to motivate all of the people in the organization to feel about where we are in the game, the way you felt at, at zero and two. But again, the difference is we're gonna try to do that in a way that matches our intensity with their intensity, which is very very,
Ryan Rutan: very different. Yeah. Again, go, go, just go back to the severity of the consequence if it even exists. Right. And I think that's something we can dig into is consequences. Are, are there consequences? Do they exist? Do they not? Um, if they don't, then, then certainly responsibility and accountability uh can, can become very, very flexible. There's no consequence. Uh Then you're, you're essentially only relying on that person's internal moral, ethical, you know, compass around work to, to drive and motivate them. Uh So, but we have to keep that in mind, we have to keep in mind the fact that there is a significant delta between the level of intensity that we can sort of ever expect out of somebody. Um Or at least that what motivates that person is going to be very different than what motivates us as the founders. And it's, I think critical to tap into that, understand what it is and then leverage that specific motivation uh to help drive accountability
Wil Schroter: if I see someone in the organization and I see that they don't have motivation. 99% of the time I can tie that to their accountability if they do a good job or if they do a bad job is the outcome, the same. In most cases, it is and to be fair, not every job and every organization is that consequential, right? Some jobs just, you know, whether you do a great job or a poor job, you kind of don't move the meter. But let's talk about jobs that do move the meter. Let's talk about sales sales. Is it easily the most binary component uh of any company? Right? And the the very people directly change that scorecard. But tell me if this sounds super visual and and this is this is just a good metaphor for the whole thing in a good sales month. What happens? Everyone says huh. We killed it, nailed it. This is a team effort. This sales month was because of us. We own. We are accountable to that outcome in a bad sales month. Could be the next month. Wasn't our fault. Oh my gosh, man, there, there was a whole insert external event that clearly was not our fault and that's why it happened
Ryan Rutan: seasonality marketing season. It was that that three day weekend, right? That three day weekend, man, we lost that day of sales. So that's let's let's see that one day of sales would equate to about 3% or let's let's call it 5% of your total, but we're down 24% this month. So I maybe not
Wil Schroter: right. It's, it's every every sales or I'm not picking on sales. I mean, it's across the board whenever things are good, it was a team effort. Whenever things are bad, it was someone else's fault.
Ryan Rutan: It was an individual effort but not the individual who's accountable,
Wil Schroter: right? And the Super Bowl in my team effort. The team brought us here. It wasn't just me, it was everyone else. What I would love is after the Super Bowl, they go to the quarterback of the losing team. He's like, what my fault, that guy couldn't catch a pass. This guy couldn't defend my team sucks. It's funny, your team only gets credit when things go well. Right. And I guess what I'm saying is that's the kind of accountability we're looking for but we rarely see
Ryan Rutan: it for sure. Yeah, I, I think it's, it's in times of pressure, it's in times of need. I mean, like how many famous generals were, were ever, uh, minted during peace times? Right. It's just doesn't happen. Right. Like, and I mean, maybe they were doing a great job of whatever they were doing. But, like, there, there's a huge difference in terms of, like stepping up when, when there's a lot on the line and being accountable then, um, you know, what's funny about this? I, I see people, I, I see people get this wrong and not, not necessarily founders but people on the teams get this wrong where in a moment where they can step up and be accountable for something that, that didn't go the way that it should. Right. And instead try to defend, try to defer, uh, try to push responsibility elsewhere, uh, because they feel like that will give them some safety. Right? And it's the opposite, right? When you as, as the founder, you as the person's manager, see, see someone miss an opportunity at accountability. It tells you a lot about that individual. It tells you a lot about what you can and cannot count on them for. Uh, whereas they look at it as if I stand up and, and I accept accountability and I'm accountable for what just happened and it's not a positive thing that somehow this will count against me. Well, here's the short version, it's gonna count against you no matter what because everyone else can see that you're responsible and you're accountable for it. Uh and you're just not accepting that. Right? So that's not going to count for you. What it does is give you the opportunity to, to air it out and to look for ways to avoid the same mistakes in the future or to achieve whatever it was that you, you failed at in that moment. Right. Right. If it's, if it was, you know, a bunch of perfectly thrown passes that you dropped and you're like, man, you know, the, the passes just, you know, they weren't where they were supposed to be. Video review is gonna prove that they absolutely were. If you had owned it, you'd be working with the, uh, the, the receiver coach now, right? And you'd be getting what you needed, right. So this is a big part of accountability in those dire consequences in those moments of, of strife in in the bad times is this is actually where we grow from, right? It said differently if we're not accountable during bad times. Uh Way worse shit happens. Well, goodbye business.
Wil Schroter: Think about it though. Like I, I think accountability only happens on two ends of the spectrum. The top 10% and the bottom 10% the top 10% get their exponential rewards, they get raises and promotions and the bottom 10% get let go more or less. That's a huge stratification that leaves 80% of the, the work and the people that are actually responsible for our organization in good times and bad kind of on, on the sideline. Which is absurd. It is. So I, I would say you show me a organization, a startup. We're known as accountable and I'm gonna show you an organization that will guarantee fail. If you show me an organization where everyone is accountable, there's no guaranteeing success but the no accountabilities is failure, time and time again nowhere. I've seen it more than when I would work with big companies at the agency. All we had were fortune 500 clients and I had such a hard time understanding the difference because this is such a weird thing where we're a fast growing startup that does work for very slow, lumbering wildly rich fortune five hundreds. And I'd sit in these meetings now to be fair. They were hiring us because we could do the work that they could not do. Right. Sure. Ok, I get that. But we'd talk about timelines, we'd talk about outcomes and I would say, ok, we could probably knock this out within two weeks assuming you get all your stuff back to us and, and they would look at this like, two weeks. What do you mean? I was like, oh, boys. Uh, that's probably too long. Like, no, that'll take us closer to two months and I, I, I just scratch my head and I'm like, what the hell are you talking
Ryan Rutan: about? You've got all these resources, all these people,
Wil Schroter: my God, six hours worth of work, you're gonna get it to me in two months. Like literally, what do you do here? Not to mention you're hiring me to do your job. It blew me away because I saw firsthand what an organization looks like that has no accountability by way of that, no motivation. Where if I work harder or less hard, the delta in that, in that impact is so small and in some cases unrecognized at all that you've taken away my motivation. Why do it in two weeks? If I can get it done in two months and get paid and rewarded the same way? Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: exactly. Yeah. Nothing changes again. Goes back to the hell out of me, right? There's no negative consequence. There's no positive consequence. Meaning that I'll do it when I feel like doing it, right. Which especially as you and, and it's amazing that this type of inefficiency compounds so greatly, you know, these larger and larger organizations, the amount of allowable bloat just continues to go up. What, what's mind blowing to me is that it doesn't lead to immediate collapse. If you just looked at it from a percentage standpoint, you take a, you know, you said you had the same percentage of, let's just call it apathy like this middle ground where there's no accountability. If you had the same percentage of that in a startup, it would almost guarantee its failure. And yet these large companies managed to, to, to cruise on this despite having it in, in much larger proportions, uh based on total head count. It's, it's mind blowing to me. Uh But again, like startups, we live on the razor's
Wil Schroter: edge, I would argue and I've said this long ago that my, my thesis is that every great company was built decades before anybody worked there. Uh And, and all the work was done by those people and the new people are there are just not screwed up, but that's all, all of the podcasts. What, what I think that uh when we're thinking about this around uh how we get accountability, I think it's got two components. Let's let's expand on this a little bit. One component is ownership, who specifically owns that outcome. And do they recognize that they own it? Right. In other words, when we set up in a meeting and say this doesn't work. This person immediately raises their hand and say, of course it didn't work because I didn't get it done. That's it.
Ryan Rutan: Oh, man. How many times do we ask questions like that though? And, and, and two or three people look at each other. Yeah. You know, you know, you're in trouble at that point. It's like, ok, nobody knows who's supposed to be doing this but nobody seems
Wil Schroter: to have a problem with, with the answer when things went well, when things went well, everybody's, you know, success as many Children and, and uh failure as an orphan. It's, it's exactly what it looks like. Ownership means, whether it's good or whether it's bad, it's your fault and I mean, fault in a good way in this case as well. The other side, the other component to this is consequence. Consequence says if I do well or if I do poorly, there is a consequence on either side. If I do well, here's my upside and the better I understand my upside, the better I'm going to do just simple, straight, straight economics of litigation. The second is if things go poorly, I actually know that there could be consequences. Now, the, the, the most obvious consequence everybody points to is I'll get fired and I think that's an extreme consequence. I don't think, I don't think it's healthy to run an organization where the consequence keeps feeling like you're gonna get kicked off the boat. That should be like the worst possible case. Sometimes consequences is having to stand up and, and tell the rest of the organization that you fucked up. Right. That's as painful as to, to a lot of people as getting fired. And I'm not saying do it in a punishing kind of way. Of course, I'm saying it's a matter of pride. You know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done 1000 in times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it, but that's ok. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all day long at groups dot startups dot com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do, let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it.
Ryan Rutan: Well, it's, it's a matter of ownership and accountability. I mean, this is exactly what we're talking about, right? If, if you're, if you're not accountable for it, right? Like if you're allowed to not get up in front of the organization and say that if you're allowed to obscure the fact that it was your doing that led to some misfortune within the company or, you know, some, something didn't happen that was supposed to and there's, you, you, there is no consequence of any sort you're allowed to let that slide by then there's no accountability, right? And, and this is a huge problem. You may know that you own it, but ownership is only one half of it, right? Like you said, it has to be ownership and consequence that, you know, one without the other uh doesn't work at all. We also see the, the, the converse, right? And this is really problematic and this is a hallmark of, of, of very bad leadership or very bad management, which is that there are consequences when there wasn't clear ownership, right? And, and we, we see this too, right? And we gotta be really careful about this one because you want to talk about demotivating, right? This is, this is a huge one, right? And you get your hands smacked for something you didn't do because you didn't know you were not, you were supposed to do it, right? That, that's a tough one man, right? I run into this one with parenting every once in a while. But, but it was implied that you would do this thing, right? They're like, that's not how it works, right? It doesn't work in parenting doesn't work in management or leadership either.
Wil Schroter: OK. So first off, we're saying that if people don't know that they own the outcome, if we don't make that crystal clear, that's not super clear. A as managers and leaders, founders what have you, if we are not super clear at every possible level in the organization, make no mistake, the metric, the K P I that we're gonna work toward that, that we're, we're succeeding or failing on is your metric. And there's no question about that. I think that one alone in, even if it's implied, let's say you're running customer success and the implication is that you wanna have good customer success that you wanna have good interactions, you wanna retain customers, you want to do good things. But if I don't have three metrics that say whether I'm doing a good job or not. And it's not clear that the person sitting next to me does not own that metric in the same way I own it, that person can influence it. The person sitting next to me taking calls or doing whatever like they can screw it up. But if they do and I'm the team lead, it is my job to correct for that. If my team goes wrong, it is my, I, I can't say, oh, that person completely threw things off, dude, he's on your team, right? You, you can't, you can't say that the, the people that I manage, the people that I oversee or the, the numbers that I'm accountable for. If I can control them, that they're not mine or said differently. If that's true, then if you have a single good month, we're also gonna not give you credit for it. We're gonna say it had nothing to do with you. It was your team, you just stood there, which by the way also happens all the time. Yes, it does. The second part of it. Like who's saying we're on consequence? Let's talk about either end of consequence. On the one hand, the, the part we understand which is people get fired. And I think consequence has more of a dire connotation to it. But con consequence should also be if things go well, there's 100 different ways you can be rewarded. Sometimes people just want the, the, the recognition and knowing that they did. Well, that, that's,
Ryan Rutan: there's an intrinsic benefit of knowing. I, I came and I did what I was supposed to do and, and, and in my own small space within this whole big thing I won. I did what I was supposed to do. It
Wil Schroter: is, it, it is a tragedy if, as management, we don't pay that paycheck out.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, it's the easiest one to pay. I,
Wil Schroter: I'll give Elliott credit. Our coo he's phenomenal at this. He does a great job when we're on calls and stuff like this. He does a great job all the time of paying that bill, right. Somebody, somebody worked really hard. They put an extra effort and he, he takes the time and he's thoughtful about it and he calls people out and he makes them feel great and every
Ryan Rutan: time he's made up shit. I've never done and congratulated me on it just when he knew I needed a boost. Man. It's, it's
Wil Schroter: incredible every time he does it, the thought goes through my head. Number one, I'm so glad he did it. And number two, I'm like, I wouldn't have done it. I, I was trying to not do it as much as I know.
Ryan Rutan: It's true. It's slipped by. Right. I was on, I was on to the next thing. Yeah,
Wil Schroter: I also, I had this is just kind of a weird admission, but I have this weird thing where if you give me a B plus effort, that doesn't feel extraordinary to me. A B plus effort kind of feels like what you get paid for now, an A effort to me feels like something you should hide five for. But, but if, if I give you an assignment and you get it done, my expectation was that you were going to get it done. That's right
Ryan Rutan: here. Right.
Wil Schroter: Kind of to me that's the baseline, right. That's if you did it faster, if you did it more exceptionally, et cetera, that's when I say, OK, let's get a better grade that said I'm creating my own mechanism to grade that and the person who got the assignment, I failed to tell them how this was going to be graded or how I'm grading it, et cetera. So they think they, they busted their ass and did this incredible job. And then they just get crickets from me. That's a failure on my part. Right. I didn't explain kind of how I was grading this or that what mattered in the work. What Elliott does a nice job of it. I'm just kind of give him a high five for this is he does recognize when the work was beyond what he thought it was going to be and he calls it out for what it is. And I'll, I'll say this, I've rarely seen an organization give us it. Pay as many of those bills. I'm gonna call it right. And bills in a positive way, kind of pay those paychecks of, of gratitude and recognition. Um As well as he's done it now, that said I've watched it happen and I've watched the motivation from the folks that are getting it and it's extraordinary. It works. And then that, that's why I, I want to talk about the other side of consequence. I, I wanna talk about the part where again, it's not just people getting fired, it's people getting rewarded and there's 50 different ways to reward people. And you know, the one is, oh, you'll get paid for. That sounds awesome. And that's great. It's, it's not the only
Ryan Rutan: thing. It's also the hardest one to, to guarantee and execute,
Wil Schroter: especially, you know, if you don't do. But I think that for us, um as we're trying to think about how to create this ownership, if we create ownership without consequence, downside or upside. It's a mess because what I'm saying is I busted my ass out and you hear it all the time, uh Employees are complaining. I worked so hard. I did this, I did this and did this and I have nothing to show for no one else has the opposite complaint, which is I kind of screwed off and sat home and watch Netflix all day and like barely answered Slack and uh and I got died for it. Right. That's, that's Netflix's fault. But, but I, I guess in my mind if you have an organization that's well aligned with this concept of ownership, people know exactly what they own. They're highly visible and we haven't talked much about this. They're highly visible, right? This is why sales is great because it's so metric based,
Ryan Rutan: so measurable. So the sales point,
Wil Schroter: right? But a lot of other folks in the organization don't have that luxury, right? If you're in customer success, I'm just picking on customer success for today. You don't necessarily get that. Uh DEV team has a difficult challenge too because depending on the project or the engagement, they have stuff that might run nine months. Kind of hard to feel like you're really killing it in month four. It's just kind of
Ryan Rutan: hard to say nine months is a long game,
Wil Schroter: right? Uh Sales can, can look good daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. A lot of other people have a hard time doing that. But it's our job, it's our job to divide those responsibilities, to create that visibility. The visibility is what I'm talking to create that visibility so that in positive or negative, everyone's got a chance to stand up and, and, and explain, you know, what worked or what didn't, for sure, for sure. I think the worst thing you can do is take, take people's voice off the table. It's a huge
Ryan Rutan: 100%. And, and I think there's another, there's another thread to this. Uh, and, and it's still around the, the, the topic of visibility, but it's being visible across the organization and having visibility across the organization because one of the things that I found highly motivational is when, you know, right, if you're not accountable for something that it's going to impact someone else's ability to do what they need to do directly or that when you do what you're supposed to do, that it helps or augments what they're doing and then it feeds into something larger. Right? Uh, you know, DEV could say like it ends when we ship the code. Right. And that'd be one way to look at it and they can high five themselves and say we've shipped the code we're done. Now. Um, if the code they shipped doesn't impact, the sales team doesn't bring more leads like we thought it would or whatever the objective of that was, doesn't make a better product then a little bit different, right? Then. So this is where like knowing what those end outcomes are and knowing that because few of us work in a vacuum, especially in a startup company. There, there's almost always intersection amongst the work and having that visibility and tying your accountability to the total outcomes, right? This is where like frameworks like OK K R K P I S uh metrics based things where you see how it all fits together can be really, really powerful, really, really motivational, it's a social proof and social pressure kind of thing, right? Like if I know if I don't do what I need to do this week in marketing that next week, somebody in the sales team is gonna have trouble hitting their numbers, right? Hopefully, that's an intrinsic motivation for me to get what I need to make sure that right?
Wil Schroter: It's a great point today, I was on a call with uh Brian for the folks you hear that don't know uh runs our customer success team. And I was explaining about all the stuff that's about to get released and kind of how it affects him. And more importantly how what he does affects us, right? If, if he doesn't understand the product in the same way, if he doesn't respond well, which is amazing. But then the rest of us are screwed. I think that when you start to put everyone in front of each other to your point and they can kind of see where, where things break down something like this. Uh Ryan's our CMO so Ryan oversees uh marketing. He makes sure that the uh the sales team or, or other folks have leads, et cetera. If you come up short, that has a whole chain of events that ripples through the rest of the organization. The biggest miss we could have is if the arrest of the organization didn't understand it for good or for bad, didn't see it coming, right? Like if, if, if you don't raise your hand and say, hey, uh you know, something's off this month, um, we're gonna have to make some adjustments and, and everyone, and you take ownership of that, but then everybody else down the chain says, oh shit, we're gonna have fewer leads, we're gonna have fewer, um you know, whatever. And now I have to make a change. I can't just say, well, it didn't work out because it's Ryan's fault, right? That doesn't work. What I'm saying is, hey, if there's less leads coming in, then I need to change how I'm operating things, you know, the, the game plan just changed and now I have to have ownership for how I change and, and how I responded to that. Absolutely. That's a culture of ownership, that
Ryan Rutan: ownership accountability, right? And yeah, and one that where, where you understand that it's, it is a dynamic situation, right? Because things do change and we don't work in vacuums. Uh It's a really good point and I, I think this is where, you know, again, that communication, visibility, calling out what's working well, uh calling out what's not um is, is super important so that again, people can adjust what they're doing, uh you know, budgets change, uh you know, performance changes, there are seasonal impacts, a lot of things going on. Um but we don't ever want these things to be surprises for the people who aren't directly accountable, don't have ownership of them, but certainly have consequences based on their outcomes, right? Uh And that's the other thing, right, consequence can, can spread across the organization pretty quickly too. Um You know, if, if you're just a purely sales driven organization, uh and, and sales stop selling, that has pretty heavy uh consequence for everyone in the organization, right?
Wil Schroter: When we start operating in a vacuum. Well, I did my part, it doesn't matter like, like if, if Deb ships everything exactly as it was expected to on time, but we don't get enough sales to pay for that. It doesn't really matter that you shipped it. Yes, you're accountable to that, but you're also inherently accountable to the other pieces working as well, right? So you have to be aligned. Um where I see this breakdown most often is the accountability isn't set by the founder or the founder. Just simply doesn't understand how important the reflection of their accountability is across the or I'll give you some examples. Right now, we're in a very difficult fundraising environment. So there's a lot of founders talking to a lot of teams right now that are saying the fundraising environment is difficult. That's why we, we can't bring in more money and they're not wrong. The fact is the fundraising environment is, is challenging. There's no question and you're accountable to it. Yes. And you, regardless, no matter how hard it gets, you're accountable to the outcome of the company, you're accountable to whether you trimmed staff so that you could be lean enough to be able to make it through this, this next iteration. You're accountable to whether or not you shifted strategy. So you try to generate more revenue to, to cover costs, you're accountable to whether you did a shitty sales presentation, you couldn't raise money, you are accountable to all of those outcomes. These things didn't happen to you. It happened and you're accountable for how you respond. That's a big difference. You don't see it enough.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I just, I just had to have a fairly, fairly tense conversation with the founder last week about exactly this. It was the fundraising environment and they were about to make a decision uh around bringing on new team members increasing their burn rate significantly and, and predicating that on, on a future raise, right? And, and then they were saying, I was saying, ok, so, you know, you're aware of the consequences of what happens if you don't raise that. And they're like, yeah, we'll have to, we'll have to, you know, basically fire everybody that we're about to hire. And I'm like, ok, so, are you communicating that clearly up front? Right. Are you owning that? Are you being accountable for that, uh, at this stage, are you letting people know that that's a likely outcome? And they were like, well, we hadn't really thought about it that way. You know, we're just hoping we'll, we'll raise the funds like, well, um these people are hoping you're gonna keep paying them. Uh So let's look at the uh the hierarchy of needs here and make sure that we, you know, we don't make bad decisions based on, on current circumstance. Right? Again, to your point, you have to be accountable based on the current situation. The current fundraising environment's really tough, ok, make decisions that align with that situation that you will be able to be accountable to weird
Wil Schroter: shit happens. That's the nature of a startup. We all get it. And so we're not pretending like, like everything happens in a vacuum and nothing affects us. Of course, it does. Of course, if funding tightens up that challenges things, there's no question but how we respond to it is exactly what makes us an accountable CEO and, and to that end, it's also what the rest of the organization looks at. If all we do is blame shift in in the C suite, right? If all we do is sit around and talk about how market conditions fed us up or, or this external event, this client messed us up, et cetera. Then we are creating a very, very toxic culture without accountability, which is dangerous place, right?
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, excuses are probably the most powerful solvent to dissolve accountability, right? It it it's such, it's such an easy thing to do. Um And I've, I've heard you say this, I've said this bring the problems to me, right? When I'm, I'm speaking to my team, bring the problems to me, but bring a solution as well, right? Don't, don't give me an accounting of what happened because I think that there can be this confusion around accounting and accountability. They're not the same thing coming and telling me this happened. OK, what is our plan? Right? So, you know, it's a bad fundraising environment. OK? So that doesn't mean that that's the end of that story. The the next sentence should be. So here's how we're going to continue to bootstrap or here's what our other plan is, right? What is the solution for this? Right? Because if you let it end with the reason, then the reason turns into an excuse and the excuse erodes accountability and now we're on really, really shaky ground. I
Wil Schroter: use a subtle distinction and I'm sure there's a dictionary definition that doesn't support what I'm about to say. But the way I the way
Ryan Rutan: I do in Webster.
Wil Schroter: No. Yeah. Where I separate excuses from reasons, excuses of are things that could have been worked around and reasons are just why that it happened. In other words that there, there was no work around. This is why it is. And so when, when people come to us and they say, hey, I've got this problem and, and here's what happened, et cetera. And I look at that and say, was it unavoidable? And I don't mean by it like you have E S P, there's a, there's some things where you actually just couldn't have seen it coming. And I get that that was a reason. The excuses when you talk about how you didn't handle that properly when that didn't like that client fell through. Ok, I get that it does happen. Clients do miss commitments, et cetera. They don't pay us what have you. But that's definitely not what I care about. What I care about is what you did. When you heard that for a lot of folks, they're not used to having to be accountable beyond the outcome.
Ryan Rutan: Again, you're just like I, I account for the situation. I, I give you an accounting of it, right? I tell you the story and that's what it is. Yeah, I think, you know, to, to follow on your, your subtle distinction, I think that reasons can become excuses when not properly handled. Right? Yeah. There, there's a reason, right. Like COVID happened. Right. Nobody saw that coming. And that's a reason. It was actually, it's a, it was a reason. Right? Because COVID happened, I am now going to, right is what keeps that from becoming an excuse. Right. It's that, it's that proactive and here's what we're going to do about it versus just saying, oh, it is what it is. Right. And ok, there are some things that are what they are, right? But as founders, if we want to continue to steer the ship, we want to continue to move forward, we want to, you know, maintain or grow. That can't be the answer. The answer can't be it is what it is, right? The answer is it is what it is and here's what we're gonna do uh to, to make it something other than that, right? That's where accountability and ownership uh become really, really powerful and, and fight off, you know, becoming excuses and excuses, becoming the de the deterioration of the entire organization, right? This is where
Wil Schroter: it starts, it starts and stops with us. That's the whole point here, right? That's exactly what we're talking about today. We're saying that there's no possible way we're gonna expect to have a whole organization that's motivated, that has ownership, that has accountability, that has all these intrinsic things that we need without demonstrating exactly all of that coming from us as the founders, as the leadership team. It's kind of the simple if we can't show the organization that we're 1000% accountable, then we have no business expecting the same from anyone else. So in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on startups dot com. That includes all of our education tracks, which will be funding customer acquisition, even how to manage your monthly finances. They're so much stuff in there. All of our software including BIZ plan for putting together detailed business plans and financials launch rock for attracting early customers and of course fund for attracting investment capital. When you log into the startups dot com site, you'll find all of these resources available.