Keep the Engine Running

Hey y’all — how do you keep things moving when your attention gets diverted?

For most of us, our startups are our top priority. Or, at least, priority 1-B or 1-C alongside family and health.

But everyone comes across times when things outside their startup temporarily require the lion’s share of their focus.

Sometimes these are great (the birth of a child, for example) and other times not so great.

In either case, the result is the same for the startup: you need to keep the train on track.

That’s easy to say, but what should you actually be doing?

Read on to find out…

On the Pod: Tibo Louis-Lucas

He raised venture and went bankrupt.

Then he bootstrapped to a $10 million exit.

Tibo’s one of the premier builders I know, and in our chat we went beyond a lot of what he shared to his 140,000 followers on X.

We covered:

• The one mindset shift he made after abandoning VC-backed startups

• How he built an engine to ship a new product every month

• How much equity he gave to creators in order to get them to promote his products

• How to decide how and to whom to sell your company

• How and when to outsource engineering to a dev shop or contractors

• How to identify and buy small products and turn them into real businesses

And a lot more.

Check it out below on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Keep the Engine Running

Communicate Upfront

I probably don’t need to lay this one out, but the issue wouldn’t be complete without it.

Don’t try to keep it to yourself — you will fall behind on things no matter how efficient you are, and your team will wonder what’s up.

The degree to which you let them in is up to you, but definitely let them know something’s going on. Give them a timetable if you have one.

All the other things below assume you’ve already done this.

Cut Down the Roadmap

You’re going to want to resist this, but you should probably cut some things out of your roadmap.

Unless your team is basically entirely autonomous and doesn’t require your input to make decisions (unlikely regardless of stage), there’s a high likelihood you’ll become a bottleneck if you don’t do this.

This is one scenario where I’d say avoid the added stress, as long as reducing the roadmap doesn’t demoralize the team.

Publicly Schedule Your Time

You can’t always clearly schedule your time ahead of time in these scenarios but, as much as you can, post your availability to the team, publicly, each week or day.

They’ll be more than happy to work around your schedule if it gives them clarity on when you’ll be responsive or available for quick calls.

The more limited your time is, the more important this becomes.

Emphasize Your Culture

Company values aren’t just lip service, or a hiring tactic — they’re how you survive crises. They’re also your attempt to get everyone you hire to work a bit more like how you think will best position the company to succeed.

So, lean into them. Explicitly encourage your team to live by the values and hold each other accountable to them.

Delegate Major Areas

Assign single owners for every major part of the business (if you don’t already have them) and ongoing project.

Make this public so the team knows these people have decision-making power.

Ideally, they each use these as opportunities to grow and take on more responsibility. If it sticks, you’ll have more leverage on your time when you get your full focus back.

Rely on Process

Moving fast and breaking things works a lot of the time but systems are good, actually. Especially when your attention is divided.

It may be against your nature (for many founders it is), but this is the time to set up better reporting, KPI tracking, and standard SOPs for how things get done.

This helps you stay up to date on the business in less time, but also helps the team make decisions without your input (assuming you and they have set specific goals).

Consider Interim Help

In extreme cases, where your involvement will have to be minimal for some period of time, comb your network or ask investors and advisors for recommendations of someone to come in and help out with specific things.

This would be someone who’s been in your role before, as a founder, and now offers fractional exec services.

There are some risks to this.

1. You’ll need to spend a non-trivial amount of time with this person early on to get them ramped up. You’re already in a time crunch, and now you have even less to spend with the team. So — beware the bumpy onboarding period here.

2. If your absence goes on for some time, this person’s authority will naturally grow and it may eventually make more sense for the business to move on without you.

I would consider this in a case where:

1. There’s a legitimate chance you may not be able to turn your full focus back to the business in the near future. It may be a scenario where you need to put what’s good for the business above your own desire to run it.

2. There’s a particular, mission-critical project this person has domain expertise in. If it simply can’t fail and you’re on the only person on the team who can make it succeed, you need to bring someone in.

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