StartUp Founders: Arsonist.

Hey Reader,

If someone sets your house on fire, your only job is to put out the fire. Running after the arsonist to explain why they shouldn't have done it would seem stupid. Right?

tl;dr You are the firefighter, the arsonist, and the house.

It's the exact same with your startup. When shit hits the fan, founders spend way too much time explaining the situation to others, complaining someone didn't do the thing, waiting for them to magically change who they have shown you to be.... instead of just solving the f&cking problem.

It's really hard to be a few years in, have real $$$ revenue, have great customers that like your thing and pay their bills, and still feel like you're the string holding the whole thing together. I get it. But stop holding a debrief on why the building is burning. Put out the fire. At all costs.

Every founder has the same moment, a shitty customer call, and you are sitting there blood boiling, head in your hands, in disbelief on how the f did everyone fail me, why do I have to do everything, how can a grown-up <insert job role> and a whole team let this happen (to me!).

You feel like the victim of incompetent people and it's comforting to think that but also, it's poison. You hired them. You set the expectations. You built the culture where this was able to happen. Feeling failed by your team is almost always an emotional stall tactic, it lets you stay angry at the people instead of looking at the system you built around them.

So. Put out the fire. Call the customer. Fix the release. Rewrite the proposal. Replace the person on the account. Do whatever has to be done to contain the damage. Now.

Sure, the books that tell you to stop firefighting aren't wrong. The small fires distract you from the important work - work on the business not in the business. That they're the cost of delegation. The price of scale. Maybe.

Unless that fire can burn the company down.

Then ask why they were able to fail in the first place - WHY not WHO - what made it possible, was it inevitable, is a shitty conversation you have been putting off now coming due? Was it actually incompetence, or did you just think something was obvious because it was obvious to you, but you never gave them that clarity. Both answers point back to you.

What's awful is realizing you lit the fuse. The hire you made without setting expectations. The conversation you avoided. The decision you are delaying. Yup.... You are the firefighter, the arsonist, and the house.

The fire is the exec you're hoping glows up who is actually dragging everything down. The product bet you keep postponing. The pricing model you know is wrong. The client you should have fired three months ago. The loyalty you think you owe that is now costing you. The cofo conversation you never have. The pivot that would mean admitting fault.

These fires aren't random. They're a pattern and the pattern is you. You're not unlucky, you have a signature, it just so happens your signature is arson. Until you change the pattern, you're just rebuilding the same house to burn it down again.

The sooner you stop being surprised that you're the arsonist, the faster you become a founder who fixes things instead of a founder who explains things. You have a finite amount of energy. You can spend it chasing the why, or fixing the what.

The why feels productive, makes you feel better, and sure is part of the journey to scale. But. The what is where the work is and the company only survives on the what.

Put out the fire. Then do everything you can to stop yourself burning the house down again.

Which leader do you want to be - what would you like to hear yourself say as you approach the fire - one makes you feel better, one makes the company better:

"They failed me." vs "What condition allowed this?"
"They should have known." vs "What did we assume?"
"This should never have happened." vs "What did I tolerate?"
"The customer is unreasonable." vs "What system do I need to change so this does not happen again?"

I happen to be rather good with arsonist founders. If I can be of service, feel free to grab time.

LFG.

— James