Consistency is hard to achieve in a startup. Sales can be sporadic. Hectic schedules introduce chaos. Late nights lead to wonky sleeping patterns. Product development sprints hit roadblocks and frustration. And entrepreneurs are often more high-energy jumpy than heads-down consistent.
Building a machine requires consistency. For this reason, “Be Consistent” is an important part of the AccelerEyes’ culture list. Here are some ways to build consistency:
- Put emphasis on working together in the early days, even if it would be easier for everyone to work from home. Before we had an office for AccelerEyes, we would meet together every day at one of our founder’s apartments and work together there.
- Eat lunches together as a team. It provides an efficient way to sync without extra meetings, while also building team rapport.
- Use tools to make regular processes consistent. Here are some of the tools we use:
- Sales: Salesforce.com (especially Tasks to not miss follow-ups), Lead Follow-up Plugin for Salesforce (for drip emails), Quotewerks, Ringcentral (for phone call routing)
- Engineering: GIT, JIRA (for task management), Jenkins (for automated testing and release builds)
- Customer Support: Join.me (for screen sharing), JIRA (for bug and feature request tracking)
- Marketing: Tweetdeck, Google Reader, Google Alerts, Webex (for regular webinar hosting and recording)
- Personal Productivity: Google Apps (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs), Dropbox, Mediawiki (for internal communication), Skype, Instapaper, Remember The Milk
While tools can help, being consistent really is a matter of choice and self-control.
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve our personal and collective consistency. It always requires finding a balance between hitting efficient consistent execution and being able to handle the inconsistencies that are inherent in a startup.
How important is consistency to you? What are things that you do to improve your consistency?
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