'I realised that being successful isn't about how much work you squeeze into a day'

OVER THE YEARS I made so many mistakes. The only saving grace I had was I made slightly fewer mistakes than good decisions.

I tend to work at a million miles an hour. However, I’ve realised that being successful is not just about how much work you can squeeze into a day. You start to notice you can’t go full-speed ahead in this fashion when you start to scale a business.

Since we raised €3.3 million in funding late last year, we have been scaling ChannelSight and growing the team significantly.

When we went over 25 people in the company, something hit home. I learned that you have to take time out to reflect more on the business decisions you are making when going through such significant growth and bringing a lot of new people on board.

That’s something we weren’t doing, because everyone was just so busy working and on their own track. What I actually needed to do was take a step back and reflect on what plans I was putting in place, not pushing ahead at a million miles an hour.

Delegating

While scaling a business, you are completely overloaded with work so delegating is important. However, if you’re not taking time out to reflect on your business decisions, you will notice when you’re delegating that it all ends up in a heap.

It’s only when you’ve thought about what you actually want that you can delegate effectively to other people in the business and be confident they are going to deliver.

If you haven’t reflected on the task you’re delegating and asked someone to take care of a problem, you’re not delegating – you’re dumping. Then if they’re not doing the job effectively and can’t deliver, it’s your fault because you never really defined what you wanted them to do.

So when you’re scaling it’s even more important to take that time out to reflect and put thought into what you’re doing. Even if it means sacrificing something else.

ChannelSight work with brands like Oreo

Measure how you scale

It benefits no one if everybody thinks things are going well when actually you’re flying along in the wrong direction. You want to really understand what’s going on.

I’ve learned it’s important to measure how and why your business is scaling and put in place KPIs (key performance indicators). This means you aren’t acting purely on gut instinct and codding yourself about how everything is going – because numbers don’t lie.

Don’t get me wrong, your gut instinct is still vital. When you’re running a business, lots of decisions are made on gut instinct because you can’t analyse everything to the Nth degree before you make a decision.

It’s important not to fall into this analysis paralysis trap. You will end up constantly thinking and not acting. Every decision you make can’t follow this logic. For instance, choosing the colour paint on the wall is not a particularly important decision.

But for the bigger decisions, before you choose a particular path you need to pause and ask why you are going down this road. I didn’t get this advice from somebody. I learned this the hard way.

Looking back now, I needed more mentors who have been there and done that before to advise me along the way, more KPIs and measurements in place to track the progress of how we were scaling, and to invest in taking time out to reflect on the plans we had.

I’m always looking for ways to further improve our growth trajectory, so that’s definitely something I wish I’d figured out sooner.

John Beckett is the ‎‎co-founder and CEO of ChannelSight. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on business mistakes and what can be learned from them.

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