I have done over 30 business startup ISO projects, and there are a couple of reasons that I have seen more than once that are causing these businesses not to thrive. So often these things are apparent to me, an outsider, whereas the operators themselves don’t get it.

The Talent Set is Different

Your typical business startup is when a couple of people in a soul draining corporation decide that they have a better idea, and decide to go out on their own.

Invariably, it is because they want to make money doing something that they perceive they have talent in. Talent is one of those things that is not readily measured, and it is tempting to equate success in some sort of corporate environment with “talent” in operating a business. But, the “talent set” in an entrepreneurial role is completely different than the “talent set” as a corporate drone, starting with raising capital, and managing employees.

So what they find out is that even if they are experts in their field from a technical standpoint, it’s hard to translate that immediately into finding customers, and operating a sustainable business.

They Don’t Set Up Processes

One of the “talents” of running a business is the setting up of processes. A lot of the people in startup situations are gifted, often with very high intelligence, and exceptional drive and work ethic. What that means is that they are quite often hands-on in terms of the technical aspects of their jobs.

But, they are terrible in setting up processes that can be followed by someone less gifted than themselves.

I see this most often as it applies to design. A brilliant engineer who enjoys problem solving becomes limited as to how much work he or she can do. Without a disciplined design process, nobody but the founder can do that job. Potential assistants get annoyed and walk away.

This is usually made worse by the fact that the founder, being a gifted designer (ref: “Top Gun Pilot”) had little tolerance for processes in the stuffy corporate environment that he or she escaped from.

A second failure mode is the “empowered” sales person. So often, this is the boss, who also felt limited in his or her corporate role as having to follow restrictive sales processes. They don’t do a good job of capturing customer requirements. They accept business, because they need to, keeping the engineers in the dark. The company is left to scramble when the customer finds out that the product doesn’t meet the specification.

In either of these cases, the business gets too closely limited to the health and well being of the founders or the tightly held circle of employees, and the value of the business is limited.

This is the wisdom of the ISO system: A potential customer that wants to make an investment in a business wants to do so and have it sustainable beyond the lifetime of the founders. In order to do that, there have to be systems, and processes, and the ISO process is all about setting up systems and processes.

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