After consulting on a start-up that needed turning around or 'restarting'-up, I noticed that for some strange reason a few things keep turning up in start-up businesses.
Firstly the business loved to spend money like it was going out of fashion (and these days it is). This is a classic start up problem. The firms get all hot and sticky under the collar and to celebrate their own wonderful glorious success they decide to start shouting staff free cans of coke, pool tables and an xbox lounge with expensive coffee. As always - it's "someone else’s money" so let’s have a party. The most dangerous bit about this is that once the party gets rolling, it can get very hard to stop it. The few staff that are prudent are the first to find themselves sidelined, partly because they are a walking rebuke to everyone else. Another danger is that once people start spending, they stop thinking – literally. Business is about making the most out of limited resources – that's were innovation comes from. Once everyone starts signing off purchase orders, cash management starts to go out the windows and people stop thinking about the best way of doing things. Optimisation and resource management go by the way side.
After all it is easier to buy a second widget, than to figure out how you’re going to get by on one. Worse when the money starts to run out, management will spend more time on cost cutting, than they would have, had they done it all the way along; and this is at the very time when they should be looking for more customers.
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