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Home > Founder to Founder > #54: Balancing Patience and Urgency
Podcast: Founder to Founder
Episode:

#54: Balancing Patience and Urgency
Category: Business
Duration: 00:11:34
Publish Date: 2018-04-26 20:08:40
Description:

Patience is the most difficult mindset to master when you are naturally urgent. It doesn’t come easily to me or many of my colleagues. And the irony that entrepreneurship is equal parts patience and urgency isn’t lost on us either.

I have found that while you need to be urgent and patient simultaneously, the mix of each one changes with time. The issue is you only realise that in retrospect.
In the early days of a venture, founders are in full control of their time. They can design and tinker in the relative privacy of their development environments. Urgency is high, patience can be low.

As ventures grow and expectations on investment and growth start to take hold, that mix should change.

And it might. Slightly. From say a 90% urgency, 10% patience ratio to 80:20.

This slight increase in patience is afforded to internal activities where larger teams take longer to collaborate and get things done. And for the most part, the activities the team are focused on are relatively contained and controllable.

The nuance here is that growth also comes with additional external dependencies, all of which take time.
The one thing that founders never want to think, hear or embrace is that despite their best efforts to create urgency, the world outside their venture’s walls moves at its own pace.

Partnerships take longer to form, consumer marketing takes time to optimise and product development needs to respond to a broader audience.

The cumulative effect of these realities puts obvious pressure on runways. It also creates stress on the already limited bandwidth of small teams and narrows the universe of available tactics to extend the time in market.

Keep listening or read the full post here.

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