Your First 100 Days of CEO

TomLeydiker.com

The first 3 months in a new job position are the most crucial as they define your ability to adapt well. To start your job on the right track, you need to be well aware of the various things you should focus on in the first 100 days. Therefore, planning yourself well beforehand ensures that you hit the ground running while boosting your productivity as a CEO. Here are some tips on how to get prepared for your first 100 days as a CEO.

Focusing on the Introductions

As you walk into the top-most job in the organization, your first assignment is to get yourself settled well. Founding interpersonal relationships with the existing workers is the most important thing that you should start with. Getting to know every member of the organization who is working under you ensures that you have an easy time from a social and productive standpoint. To be effective on this, you may opt to organize an internal social event such as team building.

Understand the Business’s Drivers

The second thing to do is to focus on the nitty-gritty of the business in terms of how the business functions and what or who the key drivers in the business are. You should, therefore, focus on knowing the key elements that affect a business’s performance from a technical and human point of view. It is highly recommended that you take a few weeks of your time to observe how the business operates on a day-to-day basis. This thorough understanding ensures that you know the particular strengths and weaknesses experienced in the business.

Rebuild and Reorganize where Necessary

After the first 60 days of operation, you will get to know and understand some areas that the business is not doing well in. These should be the first areas where you should focus on making an impact on. When it comes to reorganizing the business, you should go as deep as you need to get things on track. This may need you to reorganize the top management team or even set a new bunch of rules that will help boost your productivity. You may also find it suitable to create a new organizational strategy that will be keen on fulfilling the business’s goals while also meeting its market expectations.

Employee Satisfaction: Why Your Startup Should Invest In Your Team

Originally published on Tom Leydiker's website.

Your startup will never reach its maximum potential if you don’t cultivate a positive and inspired community within your office. Your team is as important to the future of your business as cash flow and clients are. If you do not invest in your employees, how else can you foster a team that challenges themselves to exceed even beyond their own expectations of themselves?

The more involved an employee is within the company, the more dedicated they will be in helping propel your business forward because they are equally as invested. Implement these practices into your workplace and start prioritizing the growth of your employees:

Professional development and continuous training.

Before a potential employee comes in for an interview, there is a list of things they are looking for in a company that will often determine whether or not they accept the position. For some, on that list is reoccurring training and development. This education gives employees the opportunity to learn new skills and hone in on their strengths, allowing them to further expand on their talents, which could help them better shape their professional career path.

Curating a welcoming environment.

As your team continues to grow, you want to make sure that the environment your employees are walking into every day is welcoming. Your team spends the majority of their day working alongside one another; creating a welcoming environment is good practice in inspiring collaboration and prosperity.

Encouraging a balance between work and personal life.

If your company is still fairly new, both you and your team will be constantly preoccupied with ensuring that everything is getting accomplished in a timely manner. It’s important that you set boundaries with your employees at the onset that there needs to be a balance between work and personal life. Even if they are adamant about extending their work hours, it’s important that you reset their expectations. There is no quicker culprit for employee burnout than an imbalance of work and personal life.

Make your employees a top priority. When you showcase their importance to the company by investing in them, in turn, they will become invested in the success of the startup, wanting to bring about growth as much as you do.

Sustaining Startup Culture: The Biggest Challenges To Overcome

Originally published on Tom Leydiker's website.

This is an exciting period of time to be an entrepreneur. There has been an increase in the number of entrepreneurs who have successfully turned their passions into a fully-functioning, thriving business – some even managing to do it in short periods of time. Funding for startups is also more substantial than ever before, with more alternative options that are replacing the traditional small business loans of the past.

It has been said that we are in the “golden age” of entrepreneurship. What this means is that there are more opportunities available for entrepreneurs to build startups that actually have a significant chance of being successful. This is not, however, to imply that entrepreneurship is easy. It is still a very challenging pursuit, filled with hard work, dedication, sacrifice, and unpredictability. Many small businesses still don’t make it past their first year.

There are so many positive things about startup culture to embrace, but it’s important to recognize the challenges that we still have yet to overcome. If not acted upon, these 3 issues could ruin the progress we have seen so far:

1. A lack of diversity.

There has been some progress in entrepreneurial diversity over the years. For example, since 1997, the number of African American women starting their own businesses increased by over 322 percent, officially recognizing them as the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S. While this growth showcases that more minorities are creating a place for themselves within the entrepreneurial world, the numbers are still very disproportionate when compared to the number of white male entrepreneurs.

This is dangerous because it limits the perspectives that are available to the community, which also limits growth.

2. A focus on repeating ideas rather than creating new ones.

After reading the success stories of certain companies, there has been an onslaught of people who, instead of using that inspiration towards their own business ideas, have chosen to piggyback off of the prosperity of others by repeating their success stories. This hinders their growth because they are now competing to grow in a territory that is already full of similar companies. This void in new, innovative ideas being brought to the forefront is dangerous because we are not creating additional products or services that are serving to help sustain our culture and benefit us as a country.

3. The negative connotations around the word “failure.”

Failure is a nasty word and we use it with such negativity. People fear failing because they believe that it defines their worth. Some entrepreneurs are hesitant to even attempt to build their own companies, while fear causes others to take very few risks. This is because the meaning of failure is associated as being permanent. Failure should be celebrated because it provides us with lessons that allow us to propel ourselves forward. Learning from these mistakes is how we can continue to grow and prosper.

As entrepreneurs, we need to come together to combat these challenges that our startup culture currently faces.

Ask Yourself: Are You Destined To Be An Entrepreneur?

Originally published on Tom Leydiker's website.

Entrepreneurs may not appear to be much different than the average person. And in a lot of ways, they aren’t. But in order to be successful in a world of individuals who are all pushing to make their entrepreneurial pursuits a reality, there are certain entrepreneurs who stand out above the rest, who will actually turn their ideas into a functioning business. And of these entrepreneurs, there are qualities they possess at their very core that are quite different from the average person. It is these character and personality traits ingrained within them that provide them with a strong base in order to propel their ideas into successful endeavors.

Are you destined to be an entrepreneur?

Not everyone is destined to become an entrepreneur. It takes more than just great ideas and capital to fund those ideas to be a successful business owner. If one of your life goals is to one day own your own company, ask yourself: do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? If you ask yourself the following questions and can confidently agree that you possess these traits, you are already well on your way.

Are you a problem solver?

Every day, there will be new challenges that you will have to mitigate in order to keep your business functioning smoothly. If you can survive the pressure of resolving a high number of unpredictable issues, and are continuously looking for underlying problems to address before they become unmanageable, than you are equipped to handle the challenges of entrepreneurship.

Can you recognize areas where you need to improve?

Just because you are a confident person doesn’t mean that there aren’t areas that you can improve upon. If you are too prideful to admit that you have weaknesses, then you will not succeed as a business owner. There will be many times you will be forced to reassess and restrategize in order to keep up with the demands of your business. If you are unable to be honest with yourself and flexible enough to make those changes, you could run a company into the ground.

Could you delegate tasks to other employees?

You are bringing your ideas to fruition. You have a vision of how you want your company to be, as well as how you want it to run. It’s okay to put effort into ensuring that it mirrors your expectations, but you need to be able to delegate the smaller tasks to your other employees and let go of that control. You are the mind behind the company, and you also shoulder the majority of the responsibilities, which means that you need to be available to deal with the larger aspects of the business.

Is everything you do done with purpose?

Never do something for the sake of saying you did it. Think about why you are doing something and if it makes sense for your business. Trust your gut and if these decisions are made with purpose, it will be the driving force behind whether your small business succeeds or fails.

Ways To Finance A Growing Business

Originally published on Tom Leydiker's website.

One of the most challenging areas of a growing business is finding the right funding. If your business is doing well, you will need to acquire the funds that will help you continue to expand. Or, there are times when businesses just need extra capital to help them get through a financial slump.

How can you finance your business?

There are a variety of ways to seek out money that you can put towards building your business. Before you pursue one of these options, but sure to sit down and dedicate time to figuring out what your goals are, calculating the necessary amount you will need, and, then, compare these options to find the one that would make the most sense for your specific needs.

Ask family members or friends.

Ideally, the best way to borrow money would be to seek out extra funds from family members or friends who have the financial flexibility to temporarily part with money with no affect on their personal stability. While you will eventually need to pay them back, it eliminates the weighted stress of having to follow a stricter timeline. Family members and friends will be more lenient about how quickly they are reimbursed, however, you could risk destroying personal relationships if you were to completely lose the money.

Apply for a bank loan.

This is the option that most businesses pursue, typically because it seems like the most obvious one. Depending on the type of financing you need, banks offer a wider variety of funding options. However, the approval process of acquiring a bank loan has become very strict, which means that a lot of smaller businesses won’t pass beyond the approval process.

Consider equity funding.

Obtaining money through equity funding means that you are putting forward a portion of your business in return for investment. Venture capital is one of the most common types of equity funding. This is a great way to raise capital for your growing business, but it also requires that you have planned out exactly how you are going to make a return on investment within a specified period of time.

Acquiring a Small Business Administration (SBA) loan.

These loans are available to any small business, but, to prevent everyone from applying, your business must first meet a list of qualifications. These qualifications often eliminate many small businesses from the running at the onset. If you do happen to meet the qualifications, you will still need to go through another financial institution because the SBA does not actually provide loans directly to businesses. The standards of this other institution may be even higher than the other financing options available to you.