Experience and Expertise are Critical to Startup Success

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell became famous for arguing,

“10,000 hours of practice is required to become a world-class expert.”

I am not sure it is 10,000 hours, but my experience indicates that experience and expertise are probably the most important factors in successful startups.   That doesn’t mean you need expertise in everything, but it does mean you need to have some hook into the effort you are pursuing.  In fact, one of the related facts of this approach is you frequently acquire skills in areas where they are lacking.  Two examples that illustrate this are as follows:

Creative designers and other right brain thinkers are frequently lacking and typically don’t like or feel comfortable with financial analysis.  If this is you, one of the first things you should do is hire an accountant. Over the last couple of weeks, I have had a number of clients with seemingly great ideas and the passion to follow them up who overestimated their gross margins by 10-20 %.  They simply didn’t go through the effort to do the necessary detail work and failed to understand this could make a difference between profit and loss.

On the other end of the spectrum, entrepreneurs frequently take internet marketing for their business on themselves and believe anyone can be an expert with a workshop or reading a book.  In reality, internet marketing involves a number of skills including web development, social media, SEO, etc., and each one requires different skills and demands.  At a minimum, most entrepreneurs don’t have the time to devote to all the marketing related requirements and are usually far less effective than professionals who devote all their time to these efforts.

The above examples are in no way intended to ignore the importance of passion, commitment, innovation, testing, and the fortitude to accept making mistakes when starting and running a new business.  Rather, I am arguing that individuals and organizations need to realistically assess constantly the risks of failures and the rewards of success.  To make these assessments, expertise and experience are critical to be able to properly evaluate opportunities and new innovations.

Bert Shlensky is president of www.startupconnection.net and is an expert at helping to analyze organizational needs and solutions and turn them into a total startup program.