How to stay motivated when you're in it for the long haul - Roan Lavery.pdf

1. How to stay motivated when
you’re in it for the long haul
Roan Lavery, co-founder & CEO FreeAgent

2. An existential crisis

3. 2013

4. START UP BINGO!!
FOUNDED 2007
BOOTSTRAPPED
ANGEL FUNDING
VC FUNDING
DEBT FUNDING
CROWD FUNDING
IPO
ACQUISITION 2018

5. Search “keyword terms” for
interesting articles & resources
Photograph this slide for
future reference
THE
FIELD GUIDE
N

6. Individual
Team
Company
Society
Individual
Layers of motivation
Selfish
Altruistic
Team
Team purpose
Colleagues & Manager
Company
Mission
Culture
Society
Purpose
Impact

7. Individual (founder) motivation
• Ownership
• Financial freedom aka money
• Status & sense of identity
• What you do & your role
• Accomplishment
• Personal growth
• Scratching an itch
• Making a dent in the universe
• Improving society
• Building a great company
Selfish Altruistic

8. It’s your baby!
SMALL BUSINESS

9. It’s your baby!
SMALL BUSINESS
Until it isn’t

10. Allure of the Exit
EXIT

11. Personal growth
Needs of the
business
Your ability
• Challenged
• Stressed
• Imposter syndrome
• Poor performance
• Comfortable
• Complacent
• Stagnating growth

12. “Tom Toro”
Finding your purpose

13. “Profit is not the
purpose of a business,
but rather the test of
its validity.”
Peter Drucker

14. Finding your purpose
Your mission
Who are you helping?
How are you helping them?
What impact do you want to have?
Is this pitched at the right level?
Does it inspire people?
Company
Personal motivation
What do you want to achieve?
What are you most proud of?
Has this changed over time?
Personally

15. Motivating the company
Inspiration, mission, goals & culture

16. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum
up the men to gather wood, divide the
work and give orders. Instead, teach them
to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

17. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum
up the men to gather wood, divide the
work and give orders. Instead, teach them
to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

18. Mind your language
“Infinite games by Simon Sinek”
Finite games
Known players
Fixed rules
Clear endpoint
Obvious winners & losers
Infinite games
Players change
No time limit
No fixed rules
No endpoint
“Achieve goals”, “Hitting targets”,
“Beating the competition”

19. Goals
Can be very motivating
Create focus and alignment
Foster accountability
+
+
Demotivating if incorrectly set
Can create short-term thinking
Encourage negative behaviours
Can feel like a hamster wheel
_
+
_
_
_

20. A new car that would be ‘under 2000 pounds and under
$2,000’ and would be available for purchase in 1970.
Goal
“Goals gone wild”

21. “Primed to perform”
Culture

22. • Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time,
roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of
generations through individual and group striving.
• Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.
• Culture is communication, communication is culture.
• Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially
transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.
• A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about
them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.
• Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings
of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions.
• Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive
achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and
especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as
conditioning influences upon further action.
• Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and
are transmitted from generation to generation.
• Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.
Culture
Noun | /ˈkʌl.tʃər/

23. “The Culture Wheel”

24. Company culture?

25. Permission to play

26. Culture is the way we
do things around here.
“
”
Deal and Kennedy, 1982
“deal and kennedy corporate cultures”

27. Choose your adventure

28. LTD COMPANY
SOLE TRADER
PRODUCT COMPANY
SALES COMPANY
What type of company is it?

29. What’s more important?
LTD COMPANY
SOLE TRADER
QUALITY
SPEED

30. LTD COMPANY
SOLE TRADER
CUSTOMER FOCUSED
GROWTH FOCUSED
What’s the focus of the company?

31. PRODUCT SALES
QUALITY SPEED
CUSTOMER GROWTH
What is important to the company?
Decisions, priorities & strategy

32. LTD COMPANY
SOLE TRADER
USE DATA TO
MAKE DECISIONS
IDEAS & OPINIONS
DRIVE DECISIONS
How are decisions made?

33. LTD COMPANY
SOLE TRADER
EMPOWERED TEAMS
TOP DOWN CONTROL
Who makes the decisions?

34. How do people approach conflict?
LTD COMPANY
SOLE TRADER
EMBRACE CONFLICT
PRIORITISE HARMONY

35. DATA DRIVES
DECISIONS
IDEAS & OPINIONS
DRIVE DECISIONS
EMPOWERED
TEAMS
TOP DOWN
CONTROL
EMBRACE
CONFLICT
PRIORTISE
HARMONY
How does the company work?
Structure, management & vibe

36. How are sta
ff
treated?
What’s the
workplace
like?
What is important to the
company?
How does the company work?
How do people behave? VALUES & BEHAVIOURS
STRUCTURE, MANGEMENT & VIBE
DECISIONS, PRIORITIES &
STRATEGY
BENEFITS & PERKS
OFFICE &
WFH
The Culture
Pyramid

37. Closing thoughts

38. Thanks!
roan@freeagent.com
@roanlavery