Management Reviews for Start-Ups

In principle, start-ups are not inherently different from companies which have been around for a while. In practice, there is at least one important difference: many Start-Up leaders, while they may be inspired, creative entrepreneurs, are not normally experienced managers. It is easy to dismiss this as an irrelevant detail, especially when the new business is basking in the glow of early success; the thought process tends to be that “I have always been my own person and I will figure this management stuff out as we go,” presumably from one triumph to the next. This thinking generally betrays a lack of experience and understanding of how companies change over their lifetimes – these lifetimes can turn out to be quite short without some measure of management skill.

One approach to acquiring that skill is through training. However, when a company is already up and running and the CEO and his staff are already in place, the time and inclination to invest in management training are likely to be in very short supply. Another approach is through staff meetings. Unfortunately, a lack of management training in general is often accompanied by the lack of a very-undervalued particular skill, the ability to schedule, organize, and conduct successful meetings. Because of their emphasis on inclusion and face-to-face interactive communications, their strong business orientation as reflected by the Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat (SWOT) analyses and their history with respect to quality assurance, MRs can be a low-risk, low-cost, high-benefit step toward closing the management gap.

A Facilitator may be helpful in setting up and conducting an MR. It bears repeating that the Facilitator effectively knows what he doesn’t know; he does not know the answers but he knows the questions and the way to ask them. By asking the right questions, the Facilitator can guide the CEO and his team through this learning experience. In the process, the CEO is likely to discover that there were things about his company that he didn’t know.

It is highly likely that critical information on which future company success depends will come from within the company. In that sense, this makes the Facilitator a special kind of consultant. He will not pretend to be an expert in the given field or to know anything, at least during a first MR, about the company. This lack of knowledge explains why a Facilitator can make an MR successful. He lays out the questions, using briefing templates, which might not occur to company experts precisely because they believe that they already have the answers. In the worst case, the MR will confirm what the CEO already knew; however, it is highly unlikely that he will learn nothing new.