Fixing, Finding, & Firing

Them: "What have you been up to lately?"

Me: "Fixing, finding, and firing."

Fixing, finding, and firing basically sums up my role in the enterprise. It's what I wake up in the morning to do and personally couldn't imagine doing anything different.

Knowing this is my role as the founder and leader settles my mind because it helps clarify the types of problems/opportunities I work on. I find that so many founders struggle with time management - 'what should I be doing?'. I find that most founders asking this question don't have a team built out yet. If you have a team, there is almost always something to do. If solo, or just a few team mates, the time management thing is more of a problem because they are doing so much of the 'doing'.

Based on our current stage I should be spending roughly 40% of my time in each of the "fixing" and "finding" buckets, and 20% of my time "firing".

Where do you spend your time?

Fixing looks like:

• Unblocking your team
• Fixing the business model to operate more effectively
• Determining who should be doing what role
• Closing the prior month on Day 3 vs Day 8

Finding looks like:

• Finding a new team member
• Identifying new revenue opportunities
• Discovering a feature that will attract customers away from a competitor
• Researching a new bank that has expense management built in

Firing: When your fixing and finding efforts go awry, eventually you need to cut bait on something. This looks like:

• Literally firing a team member
• Stopping a revenue line because it's a net loss to the team
• Ending a partnership with a vendor
• Saying bye to a bad client
• Killing a team meeting that isn't producing fruit anymore