Don’t Pretend Until You Make It — Be It

What if you fail, but what if you fly?

Fear of failure is a thought that keeps every entrepreneur up at night. All the time, energy, and investment is meaningless if the idea or delivery doesn’t work.

For many of us, the thought of reverting to an older version of ourselves is no longer an option. I personally will never be able to become an employee again. Mentally and physically, my mind and body would rebel. The freedom and passion that comes with the fortitude and busyness of entrepreneurship are my motivators to wake up each day and keep this machine running.

This all sounds idealistic and overwhelming, but what happens when you’re in the middle of it all — building, planning, procurement, scaling — and the pressure being palpable? How do you handle decision making at those moments when the fight or flight begins? Everything we do in business today is magnified because of social media and the fast pace with which information is shared to create buzz and interest. This is really a catch-22, especially if you find yourself on the premature side of sending information.

Ask yourself: What are you going to do to keep your business going or starting it? Are you going to pretend until you succeed, or do you understand how this mentality can actually be the weapon that destroys everything you want to build? As an entrepreneur and as a consultant who acts as a trusted advisor to many business startups and scaling companies, I want to share three areas in your business to pay attention to and make sure you don’t get too close to the danger zone of pretending. .

Related: 5 Myths That Might Cause Your Startup To Stop

Financial statements

IIf you find yourself preparing for a funding round and looking for ways to “improve” your financial prospects, this is an indicator that you need to take a step back. Rules to be obeyed rarely leave room for interpretation; strong guidance and control. To protect yourself, do the following: Ensure that you or your trusted advisor can refine your accounting policies and assumptions so that they are clearly defined and can be explained. Plus, prepare your validation base, along with supporting documentation.

Finance and accounting are gap areas for many entrepreneurs, which makes bringing in someone who can be your trusted advisor even more important. Not understanding complexity is not an excuse that will stand up in court.

Hyper-growth

There is such a thing as growing too fast. though growth is all we’ve ever heard of. So why is this a potential indicator of a problem? Because you can’t always keep up. If your business grows faster than your internal foundation can handle, internal stress and constraints can easily follow. This creates an environment where people don’t have time to do due diligence, apply controls to validate results, or complete a full 360-degree review of the technology. Some of the main indicators that must be considered include:

• High turnover due to employee burnout and dissatisfaction.
• Quality control problem.
• Huge drop in customer feedback.
• Spend money activating bandaids versus solutions (i.e. the sprint-versus-marathon mentality).

Have people on site who bring you bad news, and be prepared to listen to it and remember it without being offended. I often have to tell people what’s not working, and that’s not easy to say and even harder to hear. But having yes people in your corner will not allow for the learning and change necessary to be successful.

Related: 3 Leadership Secrets Every Successful Startup CEO Knows

Formed vs. intangible

This is a major change that has occurred in business over the last decade. Within the accounting community, we have been discussing this for some time and continue to build a framework for valuation and control for financial reporting.

Why is this important? The volume of trends in financial reporting (customer lists, email lists, follower counts, service contracts, crypto, NFT, et al) has doubled over the last decade. The problem is that the valuation basis for intangible assets can be somewhat subjective. If the basis of your judgment is far off, you could easily find yourself on the wrong side of a massive write-off that could damage your financial position. How well does it look to your current or potential investors? Not good.

All the moving parts of the business serve the greater good. It’s important for us to step out of the silo and realize that we can’t just be sales people, numbers people or [roduct people. We have to understand it all, because when we sell our business to investors, we’re selling the whole operation — not just the product or service in a vacuum.

Some of the most recent scandals to hit the entrepreneur community (WeWork and Theranos, for two) reveal just how quickly a lie or omission can snowball into a larger problem. Being a strong advocate for your business and ensuring that you’re in the center of all decision-making processes will give you the comprehensive authority you need to successfully walk the fine line between faking it and making it. The devil really is in the details.