3 Essential Skills I Learned By Growing My Business From the Ground Up Discover the most effective (and cheapest) way for founders to learn team management, efficient decision-making and other essential leadership skills.
By Aytekin Tank Edited by Kara McIntyre
Key Takeaways
- You can get a business degree, read all of the entrepreneur memoirs and take all the skills courses you can, but nothing will teach you the most about being an entrepreneur than becoming one yourself and building your business from the ground up.
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Before I became a dad, I bought a handful of parenting books. A type-A planner by nature, I wanted to know exactly what to expect when my wife and I were expecting. I thought if I prepared for it like a college exam, there was no chance I wouldn't ace the test. Then, one day, I was talking to a good friend about a couple of conflicting parenting philosophies, when they told me: Your child is going to teach you how to be a parent.
I was gobsmacked. It was such a simple idea, but it stuck with me. Sure enough, the first time I held our newborn baby, the parenting literature went out the window. As our son grew, he taught us the ABCs of parenting, from the best way to get him to sleep at night to how to get him to giggle every morning. We grew with him, as parents.
In many ways, founding a business follows a similar learning arch. You can get a business degree and read all of the entrepreneur memoirs, gleaning their most valuable lessons, but each company is unique. You'll acquire the business knowledge and leadership skills you need by growing your business from the ground up. That's what I've been doing with my company Jotform for the past 18 years, as we've expanded from one employee and one home office to 660 employees in eight offices across the globe. Here are some of the essential skills I've learned along the way.
Related: The Complete 10-Step Guide to Bootstrapping for Entrepreneurs
A masterclass in managing teams
When you launch a company, you're automatically the boss — but it takes time to become a leader and learn to handle key responsibilities like managing teams. It requires more than assigning projects and ensuring they're completed. If it were that simple, then the carrot-and-stick approach would suffice (and it doesn't).
As a leader, it's essential to figure out how to help your teams do their best work, which requires tapping into intrinsic motivation. How do you help employees feel engaged and invested? How do you inspire them to want the organization to succeed?
Treating employees as multidimensional individuals with interests and passions outside of their jobs can make a huge difference. In other words, get to know people and understand what makes them tick. In an interview with McKinsey, author and Babson College professor Rob Cross said that the most energizing leaders tended to have systematic one-on-one interactions with employees, and 50% or more of that time is off task — exploring people's interests or aspirations. Aside from making employees feel valued beyond their output, leaders can help assign projects that align with people's passions.
At Jotform, we encourage new hires to explore their interests, including in adjacent functions, and try to incorporate them into cross-functional teams where they can develop the skills they want most. We also invest in our current employees' goals and ambitions by encouraging education and upskilling at all levels.
Here's the rub: No one can teach you how to understand and inspire your company's employees. You have to get to know them, a task that expands exponentially as your team grows and only happens with time.
Perfecting the imperfect art of decision-making
A few truths about making calls as a business leader: There are countless daily decisions and no decision is ever the same. In 99% of cases, there is no one correct decision. Being a leader requires letting go of perfectionism and settling for what you perceive to be the best choice in a given situation.
As I've found, it's more important to develop the tools for how to decide, rather than what to choose. Growing your business slowly helps you develop your own heuristic for efficient decision-making.
My time-tested approach begins with identifying any relevant data to take into account (or if there is no data). At that point, I decide if I need an outside expert to weigh in. Then, I consider which mental model I'm applying — how am I approaching answering a given question — and whether another mental model might help me make a better, more fully reasoned choice. For example, let's say I'm deciding whether to expand into a new geographic location. I consider the immediate costs and benefits, then I might apply second-order thinking, and run through the subsequent, longer-term effects of that decision. Finally, I tune into my gut. What is my intuition telling me?
Listening to your intuition is like strength-training a muscle. It becomes easier and more reliable with practice and time.
Related: How to Master Decision-Making in a World Full of Options
Make space for reflection
The early days of launching your first business can feel like a whirlwind. The learning curve is steep, as you figure out how to become an expert in marketing, sales, HR, crisis management and more. The adrenaline can easily fuel you to burn the candle at both ends. For me, it was nearly two decades ago, but sometimes it feels like yesterday.
One thing I wish someone had told me: To learn from your inevitable mistakes and to keep advancing toward your greater goals, it's critical to carve out time to reflect. As Tim Brown, co-founder and former co-chief executive at Allbirds, told Business of Fashion, entrepreneurs need to find time to take stock.
"You have the ability to maintain your focus on something for a longer period of time by just pulling back a little bit. And that space allows you the perspective to see something for what it is, which is a journey with steps forward and steps back."
With some distance from the day-to-day, you and your teammates can reflect on what's going right, wrong, and why, and how to correct course if necessary. It goes hand-in-hand with being vulnerable, which might seem like the antithesis of leadership. We're taught that leaders are confident and fearless. Being vulnerable sounds weak. But then again, Navy SEALs learn the importance of vulnerability and there's nothing weak about them.
As author Daniel Coyle explains, Navy SEALs have an "after action" review after every mission. They discuss what went well, what didn't, and what they'd do differently. Coyle says, "There's a moment there — that moment of vulnerable pause — that allows you to really see what's going on."
There's nothing to gain from projecting perfection. Owning mistakes and showing vulnerability will strengthen your company in the long run. In my experience, the more seasoned a leader, the more comfortable and confident they are in showing their true selves, missteps and all. Regardless of where you are in your leadership journey, it's worth figuring out how to carve out time for honest reflection — for yourself, as a leader, and your team.
