Today, I am currently an advisor/mentor/investor in 10 early stage start up companies, 3 accelerators and 1 venture fund. I pride myself on spending a lot of time with each company and getting as involved as possible, in many cases having projects assigned to me. Regardless, I am regularly shocked by a simple fact:

Only one of these companies sends me a regular update.

I know I shouldn’t be shocked, as the early days of building a company are hectic and busy so updating advisors and investors is never a high priority. There is also a natural fear of bad news, so if things are not going extremely well it is easier to say nothing than admit things are hard.

Unfortunately, the side effect of a lack of updates is that I’m not as engaged as I could be. As a founder you live through a hundred battles everyday, but if I never see them then I can’t understand. For all the time I spend with a company, not knowing about the struggles, the victories and the defeats means that when I do help it is with only a limited perspective. Even worse, I have no idea if the advice that I provided proved useful as I rarely get told the end results of any given decision.

But it’s not the fault of these companies. Almost all entrepreneurs are really bad at closing the loop.

Closing the Loop

One of the fundamental components of continuous improvement is feedback. If you don’t know how you are doing today, you can’t get better tomorrow. Modern engineering processes such as Scrum or Kanban encompass feedback as a core part of the process through the use of retrospectives. This is why the engineering teams at many startups are the best run teams, since they have a clear and well understood process to follow. So what of the rest of the company?

The best way to make sure your company is focused on continuous improvement is to make sure you always close the loop. For every decision that’s made, for every goal that is set you check back on it in the future to see whether it worked. Did that strategic partnership pay off? Did you meet your goal of 10% weekly growth? Make it part of your company culture to always review decisions and goals in the future, and learn from them.

All companies make decisions and set goals, but surprisingly few will review them on a regular basis. Many start up board meetings involve a review of key metrics, but not a review of key decisions and how they worked out. If you don’t review the decisions you made and the results of those decisions, what do the key metrics matter?

It can be scary to review past decisions since many of them will not work out well. However, fear of bad news will slowly paralyze your decision making because it will evolve into fear of failure. If you develop a habit of sharing news, both good and bad, you will feel a weight lifted from your shoulders – the weight of that fear.

Communication as a Core Competency

Making sure your team closes the loop is easy if you’ve set communication as a core competency of your team. If you have done that, then you already have plenty of tools and structures for communicating, you just have to make sure you communicate retrospectively.

Some examples of how you can close the loop:

• Regular Updates. Send regular updates to your team, investors and advisors on your progress that review the results of key decisions (Leo has a great template for these kinds of updates that is short and easy). These serve not only to update the team around you but force you to put in writing what has worked and not worked on a regular basis.
• OKR Reviews. Many companies use OKRs, but not many have regular public OKR reviews. Such a public review of individual OKRs should not serve as a punishment or a reward, but instead a chance for everyone to learn from what worked and what did not.
• Waterfall Financials. When projecting your company’s financials, the only guarantee is that those projections will change (a lot). Keeping track of changes in your projections will help you understand the flaws in your forecasting models and waterfall financial reporting is a great way to do that.

The best way to make sure you are closing the loop is to make it part of your corporate culture. Any decision that gets made comes with a report on how it faired later. Remember, the goal of closing the loop is not to punish failure but to learn from your mistakes.

We all make plenty of mistakes, why not turn them into assets?

Image made available via Creative Commons by Coasterman1234.