Avoiding boneheaded mistakes

I made a work trip to NYC last week. When I checked into the Hotel Pennsylvania, the room they gave me was already occupied. Thankfully, no one was there at the time. What if I had walked in on someone in the shower? We both would have been upset, and the hotel would have had major problems. That’s a giant mistake. Shouldn’t assuring the room is empty be a standard step in their check-in process?

As a startup CEO, mistakes like that really bug me. I’m constantly striving to have more leverage in my time and pushing everyone else to do the same. We don’t have enough time or people to solve every little issue, so we need to pretty aggressively prioritize what we do. We try to do that by thinking about:

1. Can this issue kill (or seriously maim) the company? If so, it obviously needs attention first. A variety of things fall into this bucket at Clickshift. At a hotel, it seems like making sure you check people into available rooms would be in this category.

2. Are the clients happy? As a startup, our goal is to build a long-lasting, thriving business. If our clients are unhappy, we’ll never be able to grow.

3. Will our processes scale? We’re building a software company, so scalability is important. Our team learned a lot of lessons about that at flyswat. If we were building a services company, we wouldn’t care so much about this, but we’re not.

4. Will any of it matter? We can be great on 1-3, but if we move too slowly, someone else will eat our lunch anyway. That’s life as a startup. If we don’t run fast, all the rest of it will be irrelevant.

Simple prioritization should be easy, but for some reason it’s usually not (especially when data is involved). So we end up with boneheaded mistakes like checking guests into occupied hotel rooms.

Related Tags: startups, venture capital