Any Startup Can Succeed If Built On These 3 Traits

Hundreds of thousands of new companies are founded every year, and hundreds of thousands fail. In 2019, the failure rate for small businesses was roughly 90%, and despite being shockingly high, that number isn’t a significant departure from preceding years. The reasons vary, of course. An overwhelming number of startups end up folding because they tried to fill a gap in the market that either didn’t exist or was too small to sustain them. There are also the quintessential hurdles of being underfunded, not moving fast enough, and struggling to build the right team.

The bottom line, you could say, is that running a company is hard. In some ways, it’s getting harder by the year, with the emergence of more and more factors that founders have to consider. In addition to traditional functions like infrastructure, marketing, sales, and strategy, success in the 21st century also demands a focus on technology, sustainability, social consciousness, and more. And the pandemic thrust another new layer of complexity over everything: remote-work as the only way to work together for so many businesses.

With all of that in the mix, it’s easy to get distracted from the fact that business is fundamentally fueled by people. A company’s first customers and most important stakeholders are the individuals behind its day-to-day operations, and losing sight of that will put it on the fast track to failure. No matter how much funding you have, or how hard you’ve worked to make sure your business is future-fit, lacking the right people and the right culture to execute your strategy will bring everything to a screeching halt. But what makes the “right” culture to enable your team to be successful?

It’s Not Just About the Skills

Different executives find success with different methods, but there’s a reason that I still personally interview every single candidate before inviting them to join our team. By this point, they’ve made it through several filters, and I know they have the skills to do the job they’ve applied for. I’m looking for something else. Three things, actually: passion, persistence, and integrity. All are admirable qualities, but together they form the foundation for high productivity, healthy culture, and positive business outcomes. Here’s how I believe this synergy comes about:

Passion

Passion in a business context is more complex than it’s often given credit for. Initially, it comes from a high level of interest in what you do, the types of problems you’re asked to solve, and the broader meaning you associate with your organization. But even the deepest well of passion can be effectively capped by a lack of freedom to pursue and enjoy it on your own terms.

Imagine a spectrum: On one end is complete autonomy, and on the other is suffocating micromanagement. Every employee’s experience falls somewhere on that spectrum, and it directly affects their ability to sustain passion — to wake up morning after morning with the same level of excitement about their work. The exact location on the spectrum necessarily varies based on an employee’s role (and how they relate to leadership), but the important thing is that it’s satisfying for that employee.

There are two takeaways here. First, that in order to enjoy working for an organization, a candidate should have a certain baseline degree of passion about the company and its mission. Second, that leaders should actively seek to ensure that passion is sustained by allowing employees the right amount of control over their goals and outcomes in the workplace.

Persistence

It’s one thing to be passionate and to be given the space in which to act on that passion, but not all people can work successfully within those parameters, which can lead to productivity and reliability issues. This is a reality that many people and companies were introduced to because of COVID-19. Millions of people suddenly had the opportunity to work from home — and many quickly found out how much discipline and motivation are required in order to stay productive when such autonomy is granted.

This new chaotic digital work-life balance we now find ourselves in only further underscores how important persistence really is. The determination to have an idea, carry it forward, and bring it to fruition — despite all the hurdles being thrown at us — truly sets one apart. Such a level of persistence has become a necessity now more than ever; it’s what ensures that passion translates into real action, in spite of anything that might try to get in the way.

Integrity

Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, wrote, “When you are able to maintain your own highest standards of integrity — regardless of what others may do — you are destined for greatness.”

It’s tough to do a better job than that at extolling the value of integrity, but I will say this: If you can’t be honest with yourself, your peers, and your customers, then even your other top qualities will not help you move forward. You can have the greatest passion in the world, and the persistence to pursue it in the face of great adversity, but if you don’t also have integrity, it all goes to waste.

Companies Don’t Succeed — People Do

Bear with me as I blatantly contradict the title of this piece in order to drive home a point. No matter what an organization is valued at financially, that value would precipitously drop if all its members suddenly disappeared. In other words, if you want to build a successful business, focus on surrounding yourself with talented people. You can do this by hiring for passion, persistence, and integrity, and also by maintaining an environment in which those qualities can flourish.

In our company, the number one objective is to have happy people who are part of a healthy culture. I believe that if you achieve that, the rest will follow.