It was the old story: consultant meets CEO at an investors summit, they think alike, and like each other’s spirit (both talk and think damn fast), CEO offers job, consultant gets convinced to join in an interim VP Growth position then full, teams get built, projects kicked off, craziness, madness, friction, and growth occurs, after six months+ the “no longer consultant, now employee” looks back and quits. It was a short stint; it was a wild ride. Here are some of the things I learned. (Disclaimer: These views are my own and my own alone.)

1. Failure

Yeah, I could do some fabulous Failure P*rn, that I tried, failed, tried again and then succeeded, that I am so reflective that I am not afraid to talk about my failure and yada yada yada. Using the “Hero’s Journey” story template to reposition my failure as a hidden success. But in the end, it was just failure. After committing myself fully to the company (after losing the “interim” of VP Growth*interim after two months), I set myself a hard 6-month goal. It included changing how the company thinks about Growth, how the company acts, and how I work with the company. Plus, how the company interacts with the outside world. I had a vision, and I had self-set hard number goals. I did not reach them, neither the vision nor the goal. I do not believe in deteriorating goals as this always leads to a trend to low performance and sets a bad precedent. Hard goals, hard decisions. I failed; I quit.

Also, I am impatient as hell, and I am so focused on delivering projects and growth that it borders on madness. Which caused some — in my point of view — necessary and healthy friction. Friction is fun and engaging for some time, but if it goes on for too long, it becomes an annoying distraction, so I removed myself from the equation. I failed, I am learning from it. End of story, start of a new story.

2. Dashboard First

One thing I learned is how far data-based decision making can go. I worked with so-called data-driven businesses before, but what I experienced here was a new level. Every project, every initiative started with the question on how to measure it, and the next step was outlining a dashboard with a world-class data team. Having a dashboard — a visualization of what we want to achieve — changed the whole discussion: goals refined, plans adapted, strategies revisited, the scope expanded or reduced.

Dashboard first thinking (which goes way beyond data first) is something I will implement for all future clients: dashboard first moves the discussion of theoretical goals and metrics into the practical, down to earth, easy to grok[1], actionable, visual domain.

3. SaaS First

Overwhelmed at first with literal hundreds of different online software-as-a-service tools after some time, I saw the logic and the upside of it. Most workflows in the modern online business world are solved, not one time but probably hundreds of thousands of times. Each company on its own. This was true even ten years ago. Now for any workflow, there is not one but probably tens to hundreds of different SaaS. Some are solving precisely what you need, some part of it, or something very similar or much more. Most of the time, these Saas are leveraging the full capabilities of the supercomputers in our pockets, our smartphones.

The massive time you invest in reinventing the wheel via some spreadsheets or docs can be used to buy a ready-made mobile solution — for the price of a coffee (well, at least a coffee in London …) a month. Most of these services with the ability to chain them together via additional connector and automation SaaS-tools. Yes, it is an entirely new level of complexity, but you can move a project from 0 to 1 much faster than otherwise possible. Yes, this complexity needs to be managed to be fully integrated, but overall it’s a solution that saves the most precious resource: time.

This movement, sometimes called “No-code” has just started. It will form the next decade of how businesses operate.

4. Training the next generation

I am “doing” websites, web-stuff since 1998. And sometimes, it is hard to remember all the things I learned over the years. Figuring out over more than two decades of what works and what doesn’t (the second one even more valuable than the first one) and watching the cycles of technology and project paradigms which supersedes and repeat each other.

Now the workforce which enters the online world starts with high-level tools and task. They choose a tool after some short googling, evaluate if it would support them in their tasks, start experimenting, and watching some YouTube videos in rapid succession. If it helps them moving their tasks forward, keep at it; otherwise, try something else. Still making all the mistakes that we did ages ago, but in a much, much faster fashion, on a higher level and with new tools.

All that combined with a complete lack of project experience but lots of buzzwords like agile, Scrum, Kanban, that are unquestioned “just the way how you do things”.

Training this new generation means challenging them, not only on results but on the understanding of why they do things, how they do things and why some of the things they do projectwise work and why some don’t. Just moving on from tool to tool and task to task is not good enough. But instead of training from basic tasks to complex projects, this process starts from a high-level solution (SaaS tool) to the understanding of the basics and their dependencies.

5. Hiring

I learned a shitload about hiring. The company grew in my time from 80 to 200+ people. The best hire you can do is not to hire. Only if this solution is not feasible, hire. And then do not hire the people you think are best, but the people who are best for the company. As a company in hypergrowth changes every two weeks, what is best, changes rapidly, too. So hire precisely for that, people who embrace change and challenges. Here was a big learning for me the cultural differences, whereby in good old mainland Europe we seem to hire for potential, then give them time to grow into their tasks. Employees in fast, fintech London are hired for “hit the ground running”, and also candidates expect this. I learned a lot, I am now probably a much better (and faster) interviewer than before, but if you ask me which hiring strategy is better, I will counter with a clear “it depends”.

6. Money

For lots of startups, available money is a restriction, until the point where it is not. The time of big, awesome investment rounds that make the news. Having literally speaking an unlimited stash of money available showed me one thing: At best Money is a halfway decent accelerator. If you have something that works, and you can scale it up with money alone, it will work “more”. Well, it will work “more” until a point, nothing ever scales with cash alone.

Money alone is always about “more”, never “better”. If you have something that does not work, and you put more money behind it, you will end up with more things that don’t work. Understanding what works and what doesn’t gets much, much more critical when you get money, not less. Did I already mention that having a world-class data team is worth their weight in diamonds?

7. The Ads Trap

I never wanted to become marketing. As a matter of fact, I believe in Growth, but I do not believe in marketing. And I definitely do not believe in paid ads, either online or offline. Said that, due to historical reasons, I did a lot of ads, spending the ads budget I used with other European startups in a year now in a month. Yeah, the fintech world is crazy. I worked with the teams that plastered the London tubes with awesome looking print ads. It was fun. But in the end, ads are a trap, and online ads are an online trap.

Noise vs. Signal

Ads are, by definition, noise. More or less creative noise, more or less honest noise, but in the end, they are still noise. Noise with some effect, noise that companies spend a lot of money, internal resources, and brain share on. Once you start spending on ads, you must keep spending on ads to keep your growth level. You grow because of noise, so instead of focusing these resources to create a stronger signal, you invest more and more into noise. As is everyone else in the industry.

Google and Facebook Ads

As soon as you spend enough money, Facebook/Instagram and Google come knocking and send you specialized salespeople/consultants to help you make better ads. Which is, of course, a big illusion. These companies do not want you to grow your userbase efficiently; their key result is that you spend more. The ad-companies/ad-marketplaces want your ads to be as efficient as their other client’s ads. But rest assured, ads companies never wish one company to have much better-performing ads than another company, they want competition (a.k.a. more spending) on similar performing assets. Optimized for the illusion of good performing noise.

But for the company, the goal of ads must be not to do ads anymore. Countering every sweet carrot that Google and Facebook or other ad agencies put in front of your nose. This goal is lost the more you rely on noise, while ads are continuously depleting your brain share and other resources for creating a stronger signal. A major risk.

And as always, competitive advantage is not to do what your competition is doing, but doing what the competition isn’t. A.k.a.: If everybody jumps out of the window, it doesn’t mean that you should do it, too. Advertising is a trap. Growth strategies mean reducing noise and creating signal. Growth is the opposite of ads-marketing.

8. OKRs

In a hypergrowth startup, you are confronted with a new company every month. New teams spring up every week. It is impossible to keep up, it just is. But you still need other people, other teams, other groups to reach your goals. Introducing OKRs.

Objectives are short, inspirational, motivational and engaging descriptions of what you want to achieve.

are short, inspirational, motivational and engaging descriptions of what you want to achieve. Key Results are the hard metrics that measure your progress towards the Objective.

Even though that OKRs are by now pretty common, getting them right, including outlining the dependencies between teams, is your lifeline in a massively growing company. The time we invested in defining OKRs was time well spent.

9. Compliance

Fintechs are strongly regulated. And I mean regulated. Want to use the word “free”, better think twice, thrice, … with a lot of lawyers in the room. Want to do a giveaway? Plan in a lot of iterations to the terms and conditions. A new angle on your product, that’s going to be some fun discussion. Said that compliance is fantastic, it’s a set of rules that every player has to adhere to, and it’s a framework that can be understood. A good compliance team is a strong enabler, so the quality of your compliance teams matters, a lot. Gladly I worked with one of the best teams ever.

10. Ambition

To be honest, if you launch a Fintech that is going to change how the world uses money, then you need to be completely and utterly mad. The finance world is hypercompetitive, over-regulated, conservative, and has colossal knowledge and other entry barriers. But what is madness other than the will to do what others don’t? And this will is ambition. I think I knew ambition; I was wrong. Working with a visionary, of-the-scales ambitious CEO was a gift I never want to miss. It changed my own ambition for the better.

[1] to grok: To understand something profoundly, intimately, and thoroughly.

About the Author

Franz Enzenhofer changes the internet since 1998. Over his career he worked with startups, market leaders, startups then market leaders, market leaders that reinvented themselves as startups, state-owned companies, freelancers, concert halls, cities, political parties, betting companies, NGOs, economic chambers, TV stations, family-owned small businesses, Fintechs, old school banks, national and international newspapers and news agencies, media houses, media conglomerates, sport teams and more. He worked with organizations in the US, UK, D.A.CH, Ireland, India, Thailand, Peru, Colombia, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Croatia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Gibraltar, Sweden, Cyprus and more. He cares about systems growth.

fe /at/ f19n dot com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/franzenzenhofer

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