When the Headaches of Business Set In
Why the way we work, govern and communicate is fundamentally broken
It’s been a few months since I began writing about our journey at Charli. And in those few months, there have been some wonderful highs and some day-to-day headaches. It’s the typical stuff, but as an entrepreneur and/or CEO, I can quickly get migraines 🤕when the “paperwork” piles up. Shifting gears from innovation, strategy, and product development to the administration of running a business can be a herculean task. Yet, this is an all-too-necessary shift.
In my previous post on Why We Built Charli, I shared where the idea for Charli came from (I wanted my chief of staff back). And today, I want to dive deeper into the problem that we’re designing Charli to solve. Because it’s a big one that any CEO, CFO, business owner, or entrepreneur is all too familiar with. I like to call it “work about work”, and it’s the stuff that creates the headaches – and migraines.
Examples of these headaches include incorporation and governance documents, legal filings, insurance contracts, vendor proposals and agreements, payroll paperwork, payroll administration, benefits tracking, employee stock options tracking, invoicing and receivables, bills and payables, client and customer statement of works, addendums and all the other important elements that are required in running a business. It’s not all the glamour of a “startup”. It’s real businesses with very real issues on a day-to-day basis. Not keeping your corporate records organized can come back to bite you and it’s important to keep them up to date. Even in the startup world of organizing a data room for investors can be a real aggravation.
You get the picture: it’s all the stuff that induces groans and that takes away from fun work (and billable hours).
The “Work About Work” Phenomenon
People run and businesses because they’re passionate about an idea, a product, or the opportunity for growth, not because they’re excited to spend hours a day managing all the administrative and governance stuff. Yet, approximately 60% of our time is spent doing “work ABOUT work”. That’s a big imbalance and it adds up to several days each workweek. That amounts to sometime upwards a month per year of lost productive time. This shouldn’t be the case, but the way we work is fundamentally broken, and a lot of time and effort is spent trying to find the golden ticket to fix this imbalance.
For the C-Suite, leaders and founders alike — you’d rather be operating the business.
This problem isn’t reserved just for startups, but it is amplified for them. Most startups, small caps and even mid-sized businesses don’t have large or dedicated finance teams, legal teams, and so on. Yet, these leaders and owners do have the same requirements and responsibilities to learn and manage governance tasks carefully.
In fact, there are very significant risks and costs to your business that come up if you’re not keeping on top of certain tasks (think: missed deadlines, missed tax filings, risks to IP, lost clients, lost investors, and so on).
Software is Eating the World
“But what about all those productivity apps?” you might say.
Sure, technology has evolved dramatically over the past decade, and the dominance of cloud software has ushered in thousands of SaaS solutions ranging from productivity software to automation tools. Yet, I would argue that these solutions haven’t actually taken work away from individuals. If anything, it’s required us to learn more, do more, and pack more “stuff” into the day. It’s fueled an exhausting quest to optimize every moment of every day.
Think about it like this:
We have more apps, spreadsheets, and communication tools than ever before, yet rather than less work, they’ve amounted to more data entry, coordination, and headaches than ever before (not to mention notification 🚨🔔overload).
We have more innovative cloud-based solutions, but also more complexity in accessing documents and people who are distributed across different platforms and geographies.
We have more ways of optimizing workflows, yet there’s a learning curve to new software and many automation tools (and even AI) require specialized knowledge to set up and manage. The burden is still on users to unlock value, integrate with other tools, and orchestrate all the pieces.
Even our startup team at Charli uses many apps per person to get our work done, and each app has its own set of tasks that involve data entry, updating, tracking, and organizing--nevermind the endless learning curves. And, as an international team (which is increasingly the norm), staying organized in order to collaborate effectively is a challenge. The bright side to this, though, is that we understand the problem firsthand. We empathize deeply with our ideal users because we are them! We live and breathe the challenge, and we’re building a solution that will bring us value too.
So what’s it all mean...
Yes, the challenges of working in today’s hyper-connected digital world are vast, and for CEOs, CFOs, founders and business leaders, these challenges run deep. While it’s easy to get excited about running a business, it’s harder to execute some days without feeling like you’re drowning in a sea of joyless stuff.
Can you relate? That’s precisely why we’ve built Charli.