— by Hamilton Powell

Early on in a start-up’s life, one must be prepared to iterate…a lot. To think you have got it right on the first try is naive. You don’t have it right. You will need to duck, dodge, and weave your way into the right business model and solution for your target customer. Enter the “good idea fairy.”

She is a crucial component of the early years of any start-up. And she is you, the founder. An important part of your role is avoiding failure by inserting a flood of continuous ideas into the company. Armed with a healthy dose of pessimism, the good idea fairy sees problems before they occur and always has a multitude of alternative paths to take in case of failure.

She is a vital member of your early team. While your company is nimble you are able to heed to the many callings of the good idea fairy. She captains your pirate ship of a business, filling your days with swashbuckling with your merry band of marauding team members. But this merriment and lawlessness can’t last forever. Eventually, your company will need to graduate from pirate ship to naval fleet. No company is sustainable as a pirate ship long term. Privateering must be replaced in favor of a deadly combination of processes, systems, and strategies.

This does not, however, mean the good idea fairy must not be thrown off the ship. She simply must be enlisted in a different way altogether. A new operating system must be adapted for making decisions. Remember those late-night emails with your impulsive ideas? That has to stop. Remember your ability to jump out of your chair and announce a new initiative you have been thinking about since lunchtime? Nope – that has to go.

Once your company has begun to achieve a “naval fleet” status, you must filter your ideas through an operating system based on your company’s long and short-term vision, available resources, priorities, and values. Here at Crown & Caliber, we chose the EOS model (adopted from a book by Gino Wickman called “Traction”). This has revolutionized how we take great ideas and decide what to pursue and what not to pursue.

Completely cutting off ideas will lead to stagnation and eventually death. No one is suggesting that. But if ideas flow in unfiltered, they will kill your company in a different way: fatigue. Imagine a bus.

When you are driving the bus and you choose to take a sharp turn, you don’t feel it that much. However, the passengers in the back of the bus are probably on the verge of nausea from these sudden changes in direction. Once your company has reached a level of maturity, you can no longer just “throw out” ideas with your team as freely as you once did. It will confuse the team and may even send a subtle message of distrust.

At this level in a company’s life, your words matter more than ever. My coach, Bob Lewis, has said on multiple occasions: “When the CEO whispers, everyone else hears a scream.” The ideas you freely float to the team must be done so responsibly, through an operating system like EOS. 

The world is competitive. For that reason, you cannot be a mile wide and an inch deep. The good idea fairy can ultimately destroy your business more than any competitor could. Imagine how elated you would be to learn your fiercest competitor just decided to spread into ten other categories. You would be ecstatic because you know this lack of focus only serves you, the competitor.

In the same way, fairies and pirate ships and impulsive bus drivers require a process and a system to turn from a liability to an asset. Only you can make that happen.

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[ Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash ]