My friend Dave Parker made a great post called “The Startup Crisis Framework Applied” is too good to not share. Dave’s been in the Seattle Startup scene for decades as a Founder, CEO, investor, and a mentor to many other startup founders as well as creator of The 6 Month Startup Program. He outlined the following things in his Startup Crisis Framework that really resonated with me. There’s too much good stuff in each of these things so I’ll just list out the 5 parts of the framework. Definitely check out his article.
- Protect The Team
- Stress Test Our Financials
- Defend Against Revenue Declines
- Stabilize Operations to a New Norm
- Play Offense
Another great article that I read was “Operating as a Wartime CEO: How My Communication Strategy Has Changed“. In this article Drift CEO talked about narrowing down his priorities to focus on 1) Protecting our families, customer, employees, and investors and 2) Ensuring Drift is well-positioned to dominate our markets once the crisis ends. He’s gotten very clear on what his responsibilities are during this time. There is no #3 focus. He also talked about reducing the number of meetings and doing pre-recorded video calls as way to get his thoughts out to his team so that they knew what was going on and they could watch the short 5 minute videos at their own time. I don’t think any of us really want another Zoom call plugged into our day!
