One of the most important of Yeh’s Laws of Entrepreneurship is simple but universal:
Get someone else to do the work.

I’m not advocating laziness in entrepreneurs–entrepreneurship is hard work. But you have to realize that hard work is insufficient.

Even the most dedicated entrepreneur is hard-pressed to work more than 12 hours per day. That’s only 84 hours per week, assuming you never take a day off. And towards the end of those long days, I’ll bet our workaholic entrepreneur would be working at only 50% effectiveness–or less.

In contrast, if you simply get three reliable people to work for you 40 hours per week, that’s 120 hours of productive work, in addition to whatever you get done.

It often seems like young entrepreneurs think that working ridiculously long hours makes them morally superior. All it really makes them is tired.

Professionals work hard, but understand that the real key is figuring out how to get others to do the work.

So many times when you are at a technology start-up you get caught up in the day-to-day drudgery of trying to make incremental progress. While it is essential to make the tactical decisions and efforts, you have to understand that you are doing something great. Only in making the world a better place (no matter how small a part of the world you are affecting), will you really create value. This thought was on my mind in an email I sent to one of our portfolio companies, PBwiki, this week:

John Wooden is famous for saying, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.” Unfortunately, it’s hard to act on this Yoda-like utterance. That’s why I’ve rephrased it (glancing nervously at the sky, hoping to avoid a lightning bolt) in my own words:

Be decisive, but don’t rush in.

Sports is one of the most popular metaphors for business, along with war. Famous players and coaches can make a mint off of books and speaking engagements. The same holds true for successful generals.

But here’s the funny thing–a lot of ex-athletes and ex-coaches (as well as ex-soldiers) have failed in the business world. Not all of them–just look at the success of guys like Roger Staubach and Magic Johnson, as well as military men like AG Lafley of Proctor & Gamble–but more than the general population of folks with similar advantages (rich, famous, well-connected).

It’s not because athletes or soldiers are unintelligent; many are smart and capable. The problem is that their instincts are ill-suited to business success.

The business world operates on a different time scale than sports or combat. How often do we talk about how fractions of a second separating victory and defeat or life and death? For athletes and soldiers, reflexes and instant aggressive reaction are the keys to winning.

I’ve been in the business world a long time, and even during the era of “Internet time” I cannot recall a single instance where a fraction of a second meant the difference between success or failure.

Be decisive, but don’t rush in. It’s rare that time frames less than a day matter, and unheard of for time frames of less than an hour.

When something happens, take the time to make the right decision.

This is not an excuse for dithering…being decisive and aggressive is incredibly important to business success. But recognize that whether you respond to that proposal in 1 second or 1 hour generally doesn’t impact your options and that you can come up with a much better decision in an hour than you can in a second.

Rather than thinking of business as sport or war, think of it as chess. Every move must have its purpose. Make the right decision.

On a visit to one of our portfolio companies I was struck by the amount of progress that was being made. Every front — sales, engineering, finance, customer service, and marketing — were making daily strides. And when I left I sent the team this email:

I spent a few weeks in the HQ, and I was left with a thought of great progress. Every functional area is making great progress on building a world-class, second-to-none SaaS delivered collaborative solution. This made me think of a Latin phrase that I have used in the past: nulli secundus. This means “second-to-none” and is really the goal we have set as a company.

Often companies put their emphasis and focus on monetary goals, e.g. profitability or sales numbers. And while these are great and important, the striving to greatness is really the key. If everyone in an organization is focused on building an amazing company/product, the monetary results will follow.

“Nullis Secundus” should be the catch phrase for any start-up.

I often hear people advising young entrepreneurs to “work harder” or “work smarter.”  While this is good advice, neither is the ultimate secret of business success.

Working harder is a good starting point.  There’s no question that all other things being equal, I’ll put my money on the harder worker.  The problem is that many people think that hard work is good in and of itself.  Not true.

I’ve known plenty of “grinds” who beavered away, expending vast quantities of effort, but without getting commensurate results.  At the end of the day, while the gritty, hard-working underdog makes for a nice story, he usually doesn’t win Superbowl MVP.

When folks realize that hard work is insufficient, they usually graduate to the next step: Working smarter.  “Work smarter, not harder” is a time-honored maxim, and yes, it is often effective.

The entrepreneur who builds a better mousetrap is more likely to catch a mouse than the entrepreneur who works hard running from mousehole to mousehole trying to catch rodents with his bare hands.

But people who truly understand success know that working smarter is still a tactic, rather than a strategy.

Those who press on past working harder and working smarter discover the ultimate secret of business success: Working on the right things.

Trying to catch mice is fine, but wouldn’t you rather devote your time to starting a company that changes the world and makes you mind-bogglingly rich than to catching mice?

I’d rather be Steve Jobs than the world’s greatest mousecatcher.  Heck, I’d rather be even a moderately successful entrepreneur like Evan Williams (the founder of Blogger and Twitter) than the world’s greatest mousecatcher.

Focusing on working harder and working smarter begs the question of judgment and prioritization.  It’s the worker-bee mentality: How can I better carry out the wishes of my boss.

When you start asking yourself, “What is the most important thing I can work on,” you’re finally taking on the responsibility of being your own boss.

Don’t go into entrepreneurship, then chain yourself to an invisible boss by focusing on working harder and smarter.

Be your own boss.  Work on the right things.

This week one of the companies that we advise had a major technical meltdown. Their service was offline to all of their customers, and things looked like the outage was going to last for awhile. Within seconds of the outage being detected, the entire company sprang into action. All of the technical folks began working on the issue at hand, marketing began crafting a message for the press and customers, and support handled any of the incoming inquiries. This frenzied effort was wonderful to see and really showed the dedication and skill of the team. The net result of this effort were a shortened downtime, ZERO customer complaints, and a great internal sense of pride on the excellent effort put forth.

This made me think of a memorable quote that every entrepreneur should live by, “It is not important how many times you fall down, it is how many times you get up.” In running your business, you are going to fall down.  Things are going to break, you are going to miss sales numbers, bad things will happen. The key is not to worry about those things. The secret is to adopt/adapt and move forward. You will build a stronger company by overcoming problems more than you could from never experiencing the challenges at all.

Have you been watching any of the NBA playoffs? Although the games have been great and competitive, what is even more interesting is the fallout from the first round exits in the West. Avery Johnson and Mike D’Antoni were both fired when their 50+ win teams exited the playoffs stage left. These firings showed a great correlation to what life in sales management at start-up is like.

The parallels:

• You get paid pretty well (i.e. NBA coaches are all 7 figure men, and sales people usually make the most money at a company)
• When things are going well (i.e. playoff wins or lots of closed deals), you are a hero. You are almost like a god. Everyone thinks you are a genius, and you probably have the ego to prove it.
• Even when things go well, if you don’t reach expectations (i.e. not winning big games or making an inflated sales projection), you are probably in trouble.
• Expect to get fired or minimized sooner or later

Currently, I am filling the role of VP of sales at a start-up. The start-up has shown great strides the last 6 months of my involvement. Although April was the second best month ever, it really didn’t hit the expectations that I made public. Needless to say, I feel like an NBA coach today!