How Founders Can Break Free From The Day-to-Day Operations

Welcome to the Dave vs. Startups.

Many founders get stuck in trench warfare, they're down in the trenches doing the day-to-day operations, fighting the same battles over and over.

Meanwhile, what they really need is someone developing the first tank to make trenches completely useless.

This was a huge problem at AppArmor, and I see it everywhere now.

Here's why founders often struggle to break out of operational quicksand:

The obvious problem is that founders get sucked into the everyday of the business.

You can see the bottlenecks in your deployment process, your development process, your sales process, you name it.

But here's the catch: at the same time, you're getting orders, you're busy, things are happening.

So you can't easily move to working "on" the business instead of "in" it.

The prioritization of that is really, really hard.

You need the people in the trenches still doing the trench warfare.

But you also need people above that trying to find a way out of the quagmire.

Someone shared an analogy with me that perfectly captures this:

"It's like you have a flat tire and you're driving, but you need to stop and fix it. But you're still technically driving. Yeah, but for how long before the whole thing pops off and sparks fly?"

At AppArmor, we could see problems everywhere.

We could spot bottlenecks in our deployment process, our development process, our sales process, you name it.

The issue was that at the same time, we were getting orders, things were busy, stuff was happening.

I couldn't easily move to working on the business because I was trapped in the business.

And the prioritization of that is really hard when you're in growth mode.

You're torn between fixing systems and keeping the revenue flowing.

This is what I mean by developing the "first tank."

You need to build systems that make the current way of doing things obsolete.

But most founders stay stuck in operator mode instead of thinking like a CEO about revolutionizing their processes.

The solution isn't working harder in the trenches (or “go hard in the trenches” as the kids say these days).

Senior leadership needs to both plan for and execute getting out of the quagmire.

It's not something you can delegate to people who are still fighting the daily battles.

You need someone thinking strategically about building the "tank."

I learned this lesson the hard way.

Success becomes the enemy of better systems because you're too busy being successful to optimize.

You get comfortable with the trench warfare because it's working, even though it's limiting your growth.

Ask yourself:

What systems could I build that would make my current way of doing things completely obsolete?

That's your tank.

Stop fighting trench warfare when you could be revolutionizing the entire battlefield.

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