Grit, growth and the gig economy — early learnings from running a Startup People Clinic
In February of this year, Craig Winterton and I launched the Startup People Clinic. The original idea was to give a little back and help new businesses in our part of London (Craig and I are both Hackney-based, and clinic started off as the East London Startup People Clinic before it became obvious that the idea had wider potential). However, it wasn’t all altruism. In January I launched a new business — PeopleUp — aimed at helping startups to be great with people. The Startup People Clinic was a way of getting close to future customers, and by doing that building my knowledge, credibility and network.
So far we have run three drop-in people clinics in co-working spaces (thank you to Tower Bridge WeWork, Main Yard Studios and Huckletree Shoreditch), and we are on the verge of branching and bundling the People Clinic into accelerators, starting with Plexiglass at Plexal in East London.
My reasons for writing this are as follows. It’s been a great learning experience so far and I really want to share that. I also want to make sure I make time to take stock of the learning, and writing thoughts down forces me to do that. And partly I want to continue to raise the profile of the work we are doing in the clinic. So, at the point when it seems like the clinic could kick on, here are some personal reflections.
People really connect with the idea behind the clinic i.e. that there is room for startups to be better at people
When I describe the thinking behind the Startup People Clinic, it makes intuitive sense to people, and is generally really positively received. Specifically, that the startup/tech ecosystem has something of a people blindspot, and that most startup founders are building businesses without access to people expertise and support. On that basis you’d think that we’d have founders knocking our doors down to get to the clinic. But not so fast…
It’s not easy getting startups to “buy” your help, even if that help is free.
Looking back on the first Startup People Clinic — on a snowy day in late February — I have managed to reframe it as a success and great source of learning. But the fact of the matter is that no-one showed for the first Startup People Clinic. In many ways it was a classic MVP: two guys in a co-working space with a sign saying “People Clinic”. Well it turns out that is not enough to get people asking for help! We have added some sophistication to the marketing for our event, and we have managed to avoid any more blizzards. People have found their way to us, and we have had lots of great conversations. But getting people to come to us with their problems, ad hoc, continues to feel like hard work. (This is part of the reason for the switch of tack toward accelerators.) Which presents us with an interesting puzzle to figure out, i.e. everyone says it is a great idea, but it is hard to get people to ask for help. I think part of the explanation is in the type of help we are offering. Startup founders typically do not have enormous people expertise or experience — they don’t know what they don’t know. However, I also think that some of it is the nature of startup life: fast and focused on the task in front of you. As one investor said to me, it is the difference between a known need and a latent need. Startups don’t really have time to worry about what latent needs they might have. This is something to consider for anyone building a business offering services to startups or small businesses.
Not every startup is focused on fast growth
Setting up the Startup People Clinic I was expecting to be helping business grow, and grow fast. I’d done my reading on “blitzscaling”, and came prepared to help businesses understand and unpick the people short cuts they had made in haste. We have met businesses like that, but we have also met businesses who are not really sure that they want to grow at all. They don’t want to be unicorns, they just want a job where they are doing something they love on their own terms, meeting their needs financially and in control of their own destinies. And I find it hard to criticise that. I am not anti growth — for many businesses and founders fast growth is necessary to achieve the purpose that they have set out for themselves. But the key word is purpose. For anyone setting out on the fast growth path: make sure that you know what you are doing it for, because it is hard work, and your chances of failure are high. For founders with more modest — but equally valid and admirable — dreams: fair play to you, but be straight with yourself — you are not going to be delivering the multiples that investors want, so you probably need to pay your own way, and you’ll struggle to move fast enough to lead the market.
Starting a company is a tough, often lonely, business
Sometimes people come to the clinic just to have someone to talk to.
I know that feeling. Working primarily on my own for the past few months, on a project that is dear to my heart, with a family to support, has been exciting, amazing, and really tough. This set of experiences — my own and those of others — has made it very clear that, from a people perspective, the only game in town for embryonic startups is resilience. This is not grit — keeping going at all costs — it is knowing what you need around you to keep going and keep well, and organising your life so you get it. For me I’ve broken it down into three things: being around people, intellectual stimulation and variety (looking at the same pitch deck week in week out can get old!), and exercise. Early stage founders: prioritise looking after yourselves, and pay attention to your physical and mental health.
(If this is something causing you concern, talk to your GP. However, these guys www.sanctus.com are also doing some really good, sensible stuff.)
Many startups are looking to the “gig economy” as a way of scaling, and this is creating new people problems to solve
Many of the businesses I encounter are platforms for accessing a pool of flexible human resource. Many — like their infamous precursor Uber — access unskilled, or at least less skilled, labour. One (www.shepper.com) hires for checking tasks such as rental property inventories. At the other end of the scale one startup (currently in stealth mode) is building a flexible workforce to provide structured data for supervised machine learning. Whether the gig economy provides a fair deal for staff has been well discussed, but not resolved. But there are plenty more people challenges or questions in this model. How do you hire your flexible resource, and how can psychometrics — the science of people measurement — help with that? (On this one I see real potential in game based assessment — thanks to Lara Montefiori from Arctic Shores for giving me an hour of her time to chat.) How do you build a culture — shared values and implicit norms of behaviour that have a direct impact on your customers and colleagues — in a group of people who are not directly employed? If this is your model, and you are thinking about the same things as me, feel free to reach out for a chat.
So in summary, It’s been a fascinating few months with the Startup People Clinic. The aims were to help people, and to learn, and to make connections. Even after only three session these are all happening. I’m really excited about the second iteration of the People Clinic where we’ll be taking it to Accelerators. We are also going to be adding some great people to the team (watch this space) so we can be really ambitious in where we take the clinic. I look forward to reporting back in a few months’ time!
