The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #65
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
There are some news from my side: I started migrating all my articles to my personal website - like this, you can check out all my articles without any paywall! The site is still somewhat under construction, but my most recent articles as well as the most popular articles are already transferred. Check it out!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- Why I Strive for Excellence over Perfection Any Day
- The Bright and Dark Sides of B2B SaaS RFPs: Lessons from the Front Lines
- Want Your Kids to Work Together? Teach Them Tactics
Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon 👋
Tom
LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Why I Strive for Excellence over Perfection Any Day
Perfection is paralyzing. Striving for excellence is what moves the world forward.
Some people call me a perfectionist.
I’m not. I’m an entrepreneur and a military guy, I don’t have the time to create perfect solutions.
However, I strive for excellence in everything I do. How can we improve a solution, and how can we incorporate our learnings into the next iteration? What can we learn from adversaries or competitors, and what can we do about their actions based on our actual resources? How do we pull our heads out of the sling just in time?
Excellence isn’t an obsession with my ego. Without excellence, that constant will to improve, you will neither build a successful business nor defeat an enemy.
My team (and also my family…) feel my strive for excellence every day. Whilst it can be perceived as annoying, I am convinced that a leader must push people to take the next steps, implement learning, and never lose the initiative.
If you lose the initiative in business, your competitors will push you out of the market.
If you lose the initiative in wartime, the dark forces will take over.
Excellence requires both personality and practice. I guess I was born with that strive for excellence. On an organizational level, I started practicing excellence over ten years ago, when I was leading the Kaizen efforts in the ground operations department at Swiss International Air Lines.
The following paragraphs give some insights into some elements that I practice regularly in my strive for excellence.
Element 1: Read
Whenever I have time, I read quality content from a variety of sources. My objective in reading is to find inputs for making things better. That striving for excellence kicks in again.
Filtering content is essential in today’s information space — besides the daily news, I usually read about entrepreneurship, the economy, technology, history, geopolitics, or renewable energy. I sometimes also read random stuff, helping me to discover new ideas or gain new perspectives.
Element 2: Listen and Observe
Reading is a solitary activity. But both entrepreneurs and military guys are interacting with other people all the time. For me, interacting with people provides an endless source to find out how to make things better, and how to improve. That striving for excellence kicks in again.
Just like with reading, distinguishing between signal and noise is essential when listening to people or observing a situation. Finding the signal in all that noise unearths key information. To me, identifying and using key information is the fastest and most efficient way to make things better.
Element 3: Connect the Dots
Remember, excellence is not equal to perfectionism. We need good solutions in time, not perfect solutions too late. We can always iterate later.
In my view, finding a good solution in time requires two key practices:
- Connecting the dots from different reads, conversations, and observations has often helped me come up with good solutions. Excellence hides not in the perfect solution, but in combining different inputs — sometimes from domains that wouldn’t seem relevant to a solution at first. It helps if you keep your notes from your readings and your meetings in a system that resembles your brain rather than keeping them in folders.
- In a perfect world, resources are unlimited. But remember, excellence is not equal to perfectionism. So, accept the fact that resources are limited, and find a good solution with the available resources. Don't spend any time complaining about the lack of resources; always remember that there are people out there who can do way more than you do with way less resources than you have.
My general staff officer training has helped me very much to live up to these two key practices every day — in business as well as in private life.
Element 4: Implement
Now comes the hardest part. The good solution is ready in your head, and it needs to hit the road now.
The first thing to remember: Nearly all good solutions require team efforts. People striving for excellence need to encourage people, push people, and spread optimism that a good solution will be achievable.
The second thing to remember: There will always be setbacks. The world out there is messy, and progress is usually non-linear. Even when there are setbacks, never give up. Do whatever it takes to achieve that good solution, even if it takes more effort than anticipated, or even if your solution design needs to be adapted.
Element 5: Repeat, or Replan
I hate it, but it happens all the time. As soon as you think your solution is on track and the waters become calmer, the whole situation changes, hell breaks loose, priorities change, and people have doubts.
In the military, we call this a “new situation”. It means that the whole planning process for a solution starts again. It sucks, but it happens more often than you think, and there is no shortcut around it if you truly want to achieve excellence.
In business, better surround yourself with some military guys who are trained for “new situations”, and you’ll be fine.
LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
The Bright and Dark Sides of B2B SaaS RFPs: Lessons from the Front Lines
What founders and sales executives must know about the hidden risks and rewards of B2B SaaS RFPs.
At Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, most of our enterprise customers award contracts only through RFPs. We have an ambivalent relationship with procurement departments, as RFPs are super-tedious to answer. Hundreds, sometimes even over a thousand requirements. Quite often, those requirements contain duplicates, as they were gathered by different departments. Sometimes, requirements are not clearly formulated, and you can't clarify them due to the strict communication rules during an RFP.
But instead of getting stuck with the tedious side of an RFP, let's look at the bright... and yes, at the dark sides of an RFP.
The Bright Side
In general, an RFP is a good thing: The customer tells the bidders what they need. Then, the bidders tell the customer how they would fulfill the requirements, and how much this will cost. Last but not least, the customer decides on the best offer and awards the contract.
As simple as that.
Once the RFP is awarded, the implementation starts. In the case of Yonder, the implementation is always about digital transformation: Together with the customer, we transform the customer's legacy documentation landscape into a fully digital knowledge management solution. Digital transformation always means cultural change, which is why issues or conflicts might occur during the implementation phase.
If you run into issues or conflicts without having a clear definition of the customer's requirements, then good luck. If you went through a well-structured RFP and diligently answered all the requirements, you can always fall back on your RFP response in case of issues or conflicts.
So much for the bright side of an RFP.
The Dark Side
The switch from bright to dark often isn't digital but occurs via multiple shades of grey. So let's look into darker and darker aspects of an RFP using real examples from Yonder. However, we won't disclose the customer names. If you want to protect yourself from those organizations, you can send me a DM on LinkedIn.
Case 1: Light Grey
In the lightest shade of grey, you run into issues or conflicts during the implementation phase. That's normal. But now you find out that some of the requirements contradict each other. Lengthy discussions between the customer and your organization will follow, as each party insists they understood the requirement differently. This leads to project delays, frustration on both sides, and delayed payment as the project doesn't get accepted.
Case 2: Solid Gray
In the next darker shade of grey, you don't even get to the implementation phase: The laws of the World Trade Organization (WTO) allow RFP awards to be contested. In this case, the second-placed bidder contests the award, gets to see your full bid, engages a lawyer, and tries to find a formal error during the RFP process to win over the bid. Of course, you can only contest an RFP award if you engage a lawyer. Or if you are a lawyer yourself.
Sportsmen are taught early on in their careers to be good losers. That doesn't seem to be taught in law school. How I love lawyers.
Case 3: Pitch Black
We're not in the darkest spot of the ocean yet. The creepiest thing I have seen in 50+ RFPs in my career as an entrepreneur was a customer falsifying our RFP answers. They falsified our RFP answers after going live, as they requested a feature we transparently said was not available during the RFP. They falsified our RFP answers using Microsoft Word and Excel, even though we had to submit our RFP answer to Ariba, their official bid platform.
How low can you go? It speaks volumes for both the person who did that and the organizational culture of that customer.
You Don't Hear Dogs That Don't Bark
Don't get me wrong, most of our customers are great to work with. But as always, there are outliers and exceptions. From the three negative RFP examples above, the first two are within the boundaries of laws and international trade rules. So we have to live with such RFP outcomes, that's part of the game.
Only the third example is clearly unacceptable and would probably withstand an appeal in court. But as I am not a lawyer, I chose to leave that horrible customer to our competition and move on.
INSPIRATION FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Want Your Kids to Work Together? Teach Them Tactics
Like it or not, oftentimes you have to put back your individual needs for the common good. That’s the foundation of tactics. A true story of how I explained it to my kids.
“It’s not my job to help you clean up the table.”
“I didn’t play with this toy, I don’t have to help clean it up.”
“It was my sister who made this mess, it’s unfair that you ask me to help clean it up.”
“My brother started teasing me, so I won’t help.”
All parents out there know these sentences, and there are thousands more like this.
The other night, I was alone with my three kids aged 12, 10, and 8, and the above sentences mixed fluidly with the repeated request, “Dad, can we play cards?”. One hour to bedtime, dinner not cleaned up yet, not ready for bed, so what could we do?
Let's Work As A Team
As an entrepreneur and an active reserve officer, I firmly believe that most successes are only possible when working in a team. Like it or not, oftentimes you have to put back your individual needs for the common good. That’s the foundation of tactics.
So, how do you explain this to your kids? How can we clean up and play cards in the remaining hour before bedtime?
I decided to use an example from the military. I explained to them that in the trenches, irrespective of who has done how much, or who has said what, success is a joint achievement. And if you don’t succeed, the entire team loses — with devastating consequences. I could also have used an example from my daily job as Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, the principles are the same. But with all the press coverage on all the wars out there, a military example seemed more practicable to me.
The Mission
My kids understood my example from the military in principle, but they looked for a more practical example. So here is what I said:
“We have to accomplish the following mission in the next 25 minutes:
- Clean up the kitchen
- Everybody goes into the bathtub and washes their hair
- Everybody brushes their teeth
- Everybody puts on their pajamas
If we succeed in this, we can play cards for 35 minutes before we go to bed. If we don’t succeed, we’ll have to do another round to get you trained.”
Excitement, and hectic. So before we started, I asked some questions and gave them some guidance.
Question 1: What’s the key resource?
The bathtub, I explained. In contrast to brushing teeth and putting on pajamas, only one child can be in the bathtub at a time. So we need a sequence, my kids said. With a time limit for each child, let’s say 5 min per child.
Question 2: How much spare time shall we keep?
Not too much, but not too little, my kids said. If something goes wrong, we still want to accomplish the mission, but we also want to use the time to the max to ensure we do a good job.
Question 3: How are we going to clean up the kitchen?
In our family, we have a round-robin schedule, with each kid having the duty to help clean up the kitchen for a week. My kids immediately realized that the one who is on kitchen cleaning duty might need help with his other tasks, as he has an additional task. One for all, all for one.
Question 4: Who else might need help?
My youngest son said he needs my help with brushing his teeth. So the kids immediately realized they needed to plan my resources, too. They said that they didn’t know that they could also plan my resources. What an insight for a bunch of primary school kids.
Let's Go
Three, two, one, GO.
The events unfolded, the first kid went into the bathtub, and the other two were engaged in brushing their teeth and helping to clean up the kitchen.
Five minutes later, change of crew at the bathtub. Everything seemed smooth. I was checking on the progress while simultaneously drying some dishes.
I said, “Why didn’t you wash your hair?” — “Oh, I forgot in the hectic”, my daughter said. “What shall I do now, the bathtub is already occupied with the next kid.” I said that we needed an extra slot to wash my daughter’s hair after the second kid had left the bathtub, and before the third kid went into the bathtub. “I’m really glad we factored in some spare time”, my daughter said. That was the second insight my kids had in that exercise.
Now my daughter announced to her brothers that she needs an extra slot in the bathtub because she forgot to wash her hair. No moaning, no complaining, but positive acknowledgment from the boys. Everybody realized that this extra slot was necessary to achieve the overall mission.
Towards the end of the set time, the kids realized that the one who was still helping to clean up the kitchen needed some help. Otherwise, he couldn’t take his assigned bathtub slot, and as a consequence he couldn’t put on his pajamas, and we’d fail our mission. The kid who was in the bathtub first picked up the clean-up task in the kitchen— again without moaning and complaining.
We finished the mission three minutes earlier than targeted, and we spent the rest of the evening playing cards. Most importantly, the kids felt it was their success that they could play cards now.
What Stayed Behind?
Fast forward one day. I am still on my own with my three kids. During dinner, their request was different than it was the day before: “Dad, can we do tactical cleanup again today so that we can play cards afterward?” This time, it was easier than the day before because the kids already knew the guidelines and had the confidence that they could succeed.
Fast forward another day. Imagine you need to board a crowded train with three kids and luggage. The train arrives, there is very limited time, and it’s chaotic.
I didn’t have to say a word. The kids helped each other with the luggage and finding a seat for the entire team. They also made sure that everybody was on board and communicated with each other to get things organized, all without being hectic.
Tactics is mostly common sense, but it needs proper and regular training. Then it works even with kids.
About Me
Growing a company 📈 in uncertain times 🔥🧨 is like running a marathon—it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.
As a tech entrepreneur 💻, active reserve officer 🪖, and father of three 👩👦👦, I share practical insights and experience on entrepreneurship and resilience in The Resilient Entrepreneur, my weekly newsletter.
When I'm not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains 🏔️ around Zermatt 🇨🇭.
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