Angela McCrory is the co-founder at Rukkus. Follow her @AngelaMcCrory1.
Who’s your hero? (In business, life, or both.)
Melinda Gates. Few have used their influence and energy in such a focused way to help solve major world problems.
What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?
A mentor once told me, “It’s not enough just to be smart,” and that with entrepreneurship, “smart” has much less to do with success than grit. This small piece of advice pushed me to think past whatever natural strengths I believed I possessed and focus more on my day-to-day effort in meeting my goals. A natural strength may be a starting point or a slight advantage, but it’s not a determining factor by any means. This empowered me to think of energy spent rather than talent as the greater indicator of how well I might master new skills and ultimately overcome the challenges I would face in business.
What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?
The biggest early mistake I made was obsessing over our first product and delaying release far too long without seeking enough external validation. We wasted valuable time debating bells and whistles that were far from core, fixating on details of the user experience based on our own gut reactions rather than what customers really wanted.
Of course, it’s easy to say now, when we regularly run A/B tests on fully built-out products with the help of a steady stream of traffic, but it was a big turning point for us when we began to think more in terms of short iterative bursts that could be quickly shipped. As we made this shift, our best source of insight was not the trickle of data that resulted from users actually interacting with our product, but feedback from users we reached out to directly. You might be surprised at how helpful (or helpfully blunt) people can be when asked directly about their experience by someone who cares and has the power to make changes to it. With this, the veil of mystery began to lift and we were able to hone in on what mattered most for our product in that critical first year.
What do you do during the first hour of your business day and why?
I edit my to-do list the night before, and when I get into the office, I like to pick off a few of the easy things on that list first in order to get things in motion. Then I coordinate with team members before jumping into the hardest thing on my list. Much of what I do requires long periods of uninterrupted focus, so getting the small things done and taking care of key communication early both gets me going and clears the way for the rest of the day.
What’s your best financial/cash-flow related tip for entrepreneurs just getting started?
Avoid hiring overly specialized team members too early. Instead, first find jack-of-all-trade type players who can juggle multiple roles. In other words, keep the team lean and mean in the early days by working with generalists. You need people who will be loyal and who strongly feel that working on your team aligns with their own personal goals. One of these will be worth three specialists until you’ve reached greater stability.
Quick: What’s ONE thing you recommend ALL aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now to take their biz to the next level?
Meet other entrepreneurs. Making connections with people one or perhaps many steps ahead of you will offer the kind of snapshots of the future you need in order to better strategize. The closer to your own field the better, but any overlap in what these entrepreneurs have achieved versus what you hope to achieve will help you gear up for future challenges.
What’s your definition of success? How will you know when you’ve finally “succeeded” in your business?
I will believe that we’ve “succeeded” with our business when two things have happened: we’ve cornered the market opportunity we set out to conquer, and we’ve realized a productive and synergistic team that operates as an efficient and effective organization.
