Strategies to boost LTV in many ways with many examples

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Video Transcription: Let's talk about your founding or management team as a part of your business plan document and as you know a part of your business right for your business plan document it's a very easy and small section to write all you do is basically hmm list your management team with relevant experience and sometimes the management team is just you you know it's just a nice way to say you management team or whoever's on your management team right you also want to list your mentors advisors any board members you have so any kind of like big active managers investors or like advisers all those kinds of people all right you want to list them and also list their relevant experience in your industry why they are there and what they bring to the table okay that's it that's pretty simple don't you think too much about it because there are facts you know it's factual information about your company now here's a tough part a tough part is getting a good management team that's like infinitely harder right because at the end of the day as well writing the business plan section is easy but it doesn't matter how you write it it matters what is written in it so if it's written like oh my management team is consisting of my my grandmother and my dog just to give an example that's not a great management team for most businesses but if you say my management team consists of my business partner has ten years experience in marketing in this industry my other business partner it has ten years experience and product development in this industry oh okay that sounds like a serious team right so getting those people getting those right people into your team that's the tricky part that you've got to do and so let me just walk you through a bunch of tips for how you should approach this so don't blindly invite people studies show that if you've never worked with someone before it probably won't work out so don't be so eager to invite them into your team kind of test them because if you've never worked together before you discovering that you're gonna have you you have different work habits .

It's it's most people do have very different work habits from others some people work more some people are more dedicated some people are less and you don't want to learn that about your partner that like let's say they're lazy you know they might sound cool on paper like they're smart went to a good school got a lot of experience but what if they're just not that into your company as you are right it's gonna you know it's gonna like cause kind of like isn't it have bad chemistry working together and you never know that until you work together you got always find people who you've worked with together or collaborated on successful projects that's huge additionally according to a Paul Graham who is also actually the person who gave talks about this previous point I made the next point I make is also from Paul Graham and if you don't know about Paul Graham he's a one of the most respected businesspeople today he's the founder of the Y Combinator startup incubator and he's got a lot of data over a thousand companies that he had his help grow by now I'm pretty sure and so he really sees what works and what doesn't and he advises for most companies two to four people on a start-up founding team ideally three with complementing skill sets or strong coverage in the important skill sets so he have a tech company maybe two people can do tech because that's an important part of the company and he says the reason you don't want to have one person is well what happens if something if something happens to the one person the business is is dead and also they need some support they need to brainstorm with somebody it's it's rare that one person can pull off a successful business and additionally when it gets to four or more people it just becomes a little bit too much because to make any decision you have to have everybody present everybody has to take part in the conversation everything everything becomes cumbersome and you lose that very small nimble company characteristic right so two to four people ideally three is what he recommends of course you gotta have the right skill coverage like I mentioned you gotta have very deep understanding of your the business environment in which your business will be in and somebody has to understand how to do really good marketing right.

Those are often the main the main issues also of course you want to be able to build the right product that's also like you know the product is really important skill sets like understanding how to build a product those are typically you know provide the product grow the company those are like really and build the product those are really some of the really top top skills that are needed and you've got to have them on your founding team either you or one of the partners so here's what you should not do don't invite too many half interested half sort of okay people who are kind of a fit just because they're friends or buddies or like your tell people oh I have a business ideas that they tell you Oh tell me that you tell them they're like that sounds cool and you say oh you want to be part of this you want to work on this with me they say yeah but who are they there's just a friend they're not like a business person they don't provide any kind of a deep skill necessarily at least most of the time so you want to be careful because you'll have a lot of those conversations and then a lot of people be like oh cool I want to be a part of that too and then before you know what you got like ten people on your team who don't really contribute that much and then you gotta figure out a way to kick them out because they're useless usually this is something happens often you know your social you tell people you're excited people feed off your excitement they want to join but they don't want to do the work they just want to participate in the excitement and so you've gotta you got to be a little bit more disciplined and then of course I do want to work work against working advise against working with friends and family because you don't want to risk your friend/family relationship and sometimes business things go sour there's all kinds of disagreements and you certainly do not want to risk your relationships because they are more important than business right you can fix your business but it's hard let's fix relationships.

So that's something to only do in rare rare occasions and give it a lot of thought and if you do actually want to start looking for business partners I have a few tips treated as recruiting which means it's gonna be hard work is gonna take and waste a lot of your time but don't jump on the first candidate right like see if you see a bunch maybe many and test them out you know don't just invite people and you can network at industry events and just meet a lot of people not only see if people are fit for your company but ask them if they can recommend someone ask your existing business peers or business contacts if they can recommend anyone and if you have a tech company there's a couple of websites that when I recommend one is founder dating comm and the other is angel list calm in their talent section sometimes you can recruit co-founders and invite people who have certain skills so that's it you certainly know how to write that section of your business plan but also hopefully I've given you enough to think about in terms of how to actually invite and get good business partners and co-founders for your company because it's so important and having a bad co-founder can really ruin things because a lot of things can go wrong so you want to get a good one and I gave you the tips one tip I want to add is just make sure that you work with good trustworthy people okay there's nothing worse than working with people who are like you can't you feel like you can't trust them so only if you've any doubt in their trustworthiness don't work with them only trustworthy honorable people who will do right by you okay then that's what I'll leave you with so I'll see you the next video.