The right work-life balance for your startup

By George Deeb

Let's face it, startups often feel like an all-out sprint to get your product to market before your competitors do. That typically means you are living and breathing your startup around the clock, often putting in long hours. And, you typically can't ever get away from it, even in your limited free time. Your friends want to talk about it, your best thinking is while you are alone in the shower, you get that great idea while at the gym, etc.

That is fine and dandy, until you realize that a sprinter can only go all-out for a limited period of time before collapsing from exhaustion. So, I prefer to think of a startup as more of a marathon (albeit a really fast-paced marathon) and not a 100-yard dash. So, like any good athlete, you are going to make sure you set your pace accordingly with the proper work-life balance.

You have to make time for your personal life, to clear your head and start fresh each day. You simply can't think clearly if you are continually exhausted, burning the midnight oil seven days a week. Now, this is going to sound completely out of character for a typical startup executive, but why can't you work a normal 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-to-Friday work week, leaving your evenings and weekends for yourself, if you are religious about your work prioritization and how you spend your work time?

Prioritization is the absolute key to solving the work-life balance for any startup. Every minute you spend on non-mission-critical items requires you make up that time in other ways, late at night or on the weekend. Do you like to sit back and chit chat about last night's ball game? If so, do it in one minute, not 10. Do you like to brainstorm ideas with your team? Fine, do so in a pre-scheduled hour, not an impromptu four hours, tying up your time and your team's time. Do you really need to call your phone service to resolve a billing dispute, or can someone on your team do that for you?

I try to prioritize all tasks (for myself and all team members) in a way that will maximize revenue and increase the odds of hitting our goals. So, if 10 projects are on the list, you have to knock off No. 1 before you start wasting any time on No. 10, since your prioritization efforts dictated a higher ROI from those efforts. And, guess what: If you were right in your assumptions, revenue and profit will follow, and then you will no longer feel you have that "cash burn-out gun" constantly pointed at your head (which is never healthy to any startup executive's peace of mind).

A lot of time gets wasted in startups, particularly from the perspective of reinventing the wheel. You are not the only startup to ever launch, quite the contrary. So, surround yourself by proven entrepreneurs that have "been there, and done that" that can be your sounding board on various issues you run into. Because the odds are, nine times out of ten, that they have already run through the same problems before, and can help you solve it in one hour, not one day. So, piggyback on them to save you the time from trying to solve that same dilemma from scratch. And, if you don't directly know people that can help, there are tons of online Q&A sites, like Quora and ChaCha, and business networking sites, like LinkedIn, that may be of use. If you can free up all those wasted hours, now you have more time to focus on the problems that really matter, issues specific to your business. And, did I mention, more free time to spend on your personal life.

Also, it is important to avoid the usually time sink a founder experiences: their inability to hand off tasks and key projects to their staff. You are not doing this all by yourself and you are not the only smart person in your office, if you are hiring correctly. So, delegate where you can, to get back some much needed time for other things, while at the same time empowering your team and making them feel like they are valued and contributing to the overall success.

To me, your personal life is the yin to your yang (work life). You simply cannot have one without the other. How can you possibly focus on your work, if in the back of your head you know you are missing your kid's school play? Or, your marriage is suffering because your spouse feels they never see you? Or you just need a change of scenery from a quick vacation to clear the head? You have to make time for these kinds of things to recharge your batteries and make your work time that much more efficient (the key word to all of this). And, equally important, you have to encourage and permit your staff do the same, offering flexible work hours or otherwise (in this case, preaching what you practice).

Now, stop wasting time reading this blog and get back to work!

George Deeb is a managing partner at Red Rocket Ventures, a Chicago-based startup consulting and fundraising firm with expertise in advising Internet-related businesses. More of George's startup lessons can be read at "101 Startup Lessons -- An Entrepreneur's Handbook."

George's posts appear on Crain's blog for Chicago entrepreneurs on Fridays.

Follow George on Twitter at @georgedeeb.

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Crain's small-business editor Ann Dwyer is on Google+.

Tapping into customers' emotions: Priceless

By Anne Fisher

As an ad man at Interpublic Group and McCann Erickson, Kevin Allen brought in hundreds of millions in new billings from clients like Microsoft, Marriott, L'Oréal, and Johnson & Johnson. Most notably, he led the team that came up with MasterCard's famous (and often parodied) tagline, “Priceless.”

He's now head of his own firm, Kevin Allen Partners, and author of a new book, "The Hidden Agenda: A Proven Way to Win Business and Create a Following." Its main point is that facts and figures are fine, but “the currency of business is human emotion.” The key to growth, he says, is learning to connect with your customers' unspoken desires—the hidden emotional motivations that move them to buy (or to bypass) what you're selling.

Some excerpts from a recent conversation:

What's wrong with the way most companies pitch their wares? Why isn't it enough to say, in effect, “Hey, look at this great thing!”?

The biggest reason is that, in the new technology-driven economy, there is a proliferation of great products, all very similar to each other. The pace of change is such that any new feature can be copied in a month or two. In the old economy, everything took longer, so you had more time to develop a following. Now you have to grab consumers' attention, and their loyalty, quickly. You do it by tapping into their emotions.

Your book goes into detail about how to do that, but what's the first step?

Ask a human question, and you'll get a human answer. The process calls for getting very close to your audience and sifting for clues to what they really want, underneath what they may say they want. It's a matter of peeling away the outer shell of hard facts. It's really closer to psychoanalysis than to data assembly—an act of human empathy.

This isn't a new idea, is it? Way back in the '60s, Revlon founder Charles Revson famously said he wasn't selling cosmetics, he was selling “hope in a bottle.”

It isn't new, but it's more important now than it ever was. The business environment is more emotional now. Yet many businesspeople still operate on the weird assumption that people's decisions are all based on facts and figures. The “Priceless” campaign, which zeroed in on what people are feeling when they use their credit cards to spend money on things they care about, almost didn't happen, because it didn't test well. But [then-MasterCard CMO] Larry Flanagan had a gut feeling about it. He went to the board and said, “Yeah, the test numbers are lousy. But we have to do this anyway.”

Anne Fisher writes the "Executive Inbox" column for Crain's sister publication, Crain's New York Business, where this post originally appeared.

In addition to her work for Crain's New York Business, Ms. Fisher writes the "Ask Annie" career-advice column at CNNmoney.com.

Join Crain's LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain's free daily e-newsletters.

Crain's small-business editor Ann Dwyer is on Google+.

Wednesdays @Starbucks 003

Our weekly live show. Tony and Sean talk about the taxi project and Stephen tells us about his new client. There are some good tips in this show about working with clients. Next Wed we are taking break because we all some projects to work on but the following week we’ll be back. Let us know if you want to call in and be on the show or just share some topic ideas in the comments.