Starting up quickly

At this point, we have been, essentially, starting a new company more than once a month for a few months, and I thought it might be worthwhile to share the experience.

The timeline

There are two basic challenges in starting up quickly, assuming you have the things you need to get started already available to you.

• Level of effort: The level of direct actual effort, again once you have what you need, is about 40 hours. I say this, but it assumes a lot of things already in place, and a use of automation for great efficiency.
• Calendar time: It takes about 3 months from start to finish, mostly because of all the waiting and coordination.

40 hours over 3 months seems easy, doesn't it?

The things you need to have in place

Ah! There lies the rub. Here is a quick list of the things we have in place to start companies that makes it such a relatively quick process, arranged as we arrange things in our methodology:

• Governance and management: In addition to the structural definitions and ability to select and customize, we have the equivalent of a fractional CFO, basic HR and other administrative functions defined and documented, standard internal technical infrastructure via a cloud provider, and other things identified below. You need to have at least a CEO who knows their field and is willing to follow good advice but make their own decisions.
• Marketing and sales: We have a well-defined approach to rapidly codifying go to market strategy including standard approaches subject to modification, and the top of a sales sieve ready to go, customized to the strategy at startup. You need to have someone to lead the marketing efforts and who is also able to close sales effectively and adapt closings to the situation.
• Fulfillment and execution: You need to have something to sell and it has to be close enough to market ready that it will be more than a minimally viable product or service by the time you sell the first one and have to execute on it, which better be pretty soon.
• IP and special sauce: You need to have all the intellectual property properly locked down to create any necessary barriers to entry and stickiness and bring you whatever business advantage it is supposed to bring.
• Financial situation and path: You need to have enough cash committed based on all the other things to get to cash flow break even with a reasonable level of sales before the funding is exhausted. In our case, for startups we are starting, we already have a fund in place, but we still have to get a YES from the investors based on providing proper documentation for the startup stage.
• Legal and regulatory items: We have all the contracts relatively standardized for certain classes of companies we start, so we have already paid the legal bills and need only customize a few parameters for the process. You need to understand and already have addressed all of the regulatory controls, and we try to start businesses with as few of these as feasible.

So before you try to start the company, you should have all of this stuff figured out and documented, even if the documentation is spread around. If you have the stuff you need, then it's only another 40 hours of effort to assemble it all into a reasonable format, get the team on board and ready to go but not yet started, do the paperwork, open the bank account, put in the initial funding, and hit the market.

Why over 3 months?

If it only take 40 hours, why does it take 3 months to spend the 40 hours? Because the processes take time to complete. Here's a quick list of the time frames if you are quick about it and your folks do everything right away:

• Day 1 - Make the decision to go: After checking to make sure you have everything you need, you decide to go. You sign up to one of the services that helps found companies, like Legal Zoom, enter all the data for all the forms, put in a few hundred dollars and use the expedited process, and you are off to the races.
• Day 3 - Find out what went wrong: Even if you did everything right, it will take them a few days to tell you what else you need to provide that their forms did not include. And if you had good legal advice in place, you probably wanted to use some customized paperwork that you now provide.
• Day 8 - You are on the path: Awaiting the state of incorporation to complete the paperwork and get back to you on their most expedited path is perhaps, in the best case, 5 days.
• Day 12 - Your registered agent tells you you are good to go: You now technically have an entity legally in place and a state identifier you can use to get a federal Tax ID, You do this online using the forms and...
• Day 13 - You get the Tax ID online: That is a really quick online process that really works well.
• Day 14 - You provide copies of all the agreements you had ready to go for signature: You do this by customizing them to the people and entities you are ready to sign up with and have pre-negotiated terms with.
• Day 17 - You get all the paperwork you need to go to the bank and open an account: Or at least all the paperwork you think you need. Best to call the bank first and find out exactly what they need. But assuming you have it all and assemble it in paper on time, you show up at the bank and open your account.
• Day 19 - You get all the signed contracts in place: Everyone still agrees to everything they agreed to before they had to sign on the dotted line. They actually sign and get it all back to you.
• Day 20 - Start accounting: Time to form the chart of accounts and get bookkeeping up and running. If your accountant lives with you this happens right away, but otherwise you have an appointment to make.
• Day 21 - Your initial deposit is in place: You can now start spending money, best to reimburse yourself for all the money you spent along the way and keeping all the necessary paperwork and receipts for accounting purposes.
• Day 25 - Get the credit/debt cards: It takes a few days to actually receive the credit cards you arranged with the bank, and this is necessary for most of the services you will be using over the Internet.
• Day 26 - Start the services: Now that you can pay for all those services, you sign up to them and get onboarded using your new company credit card.
• Day 28 - Start actual accounting: You connect your accountant to all of your bank and credit card accounts so they can get the information they need, and they confirm it is all ready to go.
• Day 30 - you are in business: Time to start selling and all of that.

Multiply by 3

Of course it never actually happens that fast or with that little effort unless you do it every day, and nobody does this every day. We do it once a month or more, and it really takes 90 days. Most of the time is spent in getting to the decision and assembling the team and things This takes calendar days not just because of convenience for all, but more importantly, because making good decisions and convincing a team that the decisions are indeed good ones takes time. They need to think about it and so should you. There is a lot of adjustment involved and we learn a lot along the way about what will and will not likely work, because the good people we work with have a lot of experience that they bring to bear to help us do better.

We also have the good fortune to have tools we have developed over many years to make the assembly of all of the material and analysis behind it far more efficient and demonstrable in less time. This helps us to understand what we have and where we are in the process, and to share that with the team. We have meetings as a team where we go through it all and help each other adapt and get more detailed in our specifications.

A call to action

Want to get started quickly? Have everything you need? Want to find out? Sign up to our:

There you can start to get ready to begin to quickly start your company. And if you want to start using tools to help you, you can present next month (add 15 days average to the timeline) at:

In summary

You can get started very quickly, in only a few months, if you have spent all the time and effort to be ready to start quickly.