A couple days ago I talked to my relative, Matt Pihl (owner of Pihl Excavating) about his thoughts on starting a business. The point that most struck me was that, in his view, you need to put in 100 or more hours a week in sweat equity to make a business survive and grow. What’s more, he figures that a lot of failed businesses go under because they were only putting in 80 hours.
As intimidating as his estimates were, I came away from the conversation feeling energized and ready to get shit done. It also got me thinking about start-ups a little differently.
There’s a lot of discussion about what makes a start-up successful, and it’s usually peppered with conversations about raising capital, finding the right customers, clearing a path to market, and which founder traits are most important. Surprisingly little is about hard work. Maybe it’s just taken as a given, and therefore not worth talking about. I don’t know. But I don’t think it should be ignored entirely (which is one of the reasons I liked The Hard Thing About Hard Things so much. Horowitz illuminates the grittiest, least glamorous parts of founding and running a company, and the result is incredibly educational). So, because hard work doesn’t get much press, I want to propose a new start-up theory:
If in doubt, work harder.
- As a founder, your time is essentially free, especially in the early days when a major expense is just your cost of living. In fact, since you need a roughly fixed amount of money to live on each day, your hourly expenses decline with the number of extra hours worked. The deal gets better, too, with your level of frugality. At a certain, very attainable point, you can bring your hourly cash-burn down to just $3 an hour! That’s pretty dang lean! Matt spent about 75 hours a week running excavating equipment, and another 25+ creating the business. That’s powerful when you consider that he created almost two extra employees (for free) by making that effort.
- You’ll learn faster. Whether or not you use start-up jargon like “iterations,” “fail-fast,” and “product-market fit,” there are a lot of things you need to figure out before your business can succeed. The sooner you get this knowledge, the sooner you can succeed. Even if your business fails, your next venture will have the benefit of that extra experience and it’s odds of success will be better.
- The odds of creating a successful business are low. But the odds get better with the number of hours of hard work you put in. You can get beaten down over and over, but as long as you keep getting up and trying again, you are still on the path to success. All you need is one win.
Talking to Matt, it initially seemed like even if I wanted to work 100 hours a week, there wasn’t enough work to fill all that time. But then I inverted it. Suppose you live in a hypothetical world where it doesn’t matter what you do, anything you do for 100 hours a week will succeed. What do you know enough about, and enjoy enough to put that kind of time into it? (seriously, let me know in the comments, I’m interested to hear about your lives)
For me, the answer was surprisingly clear: podcasting. If it takes about 10 hours of work to produce one podcast episode, I could start cranking out 12 a week! From there, everything fell into place because I knew what it would take to do that. And the benefits are easy to imagine: the quality would improve exponentially with added practice, my listener base would grow as each guest shares the episode with their network, my guest network would grow via referrals. I could quickly reach a point where I could support myself with my podcast work! So if you’re on the fence about one idea or another, I would encourage you to try this exercise. It removes a lot of uncertainty, a lot of wasted time, and puts you in a position to really thrive.