Has anyone gone from working for a well-established organization (with thousands of employees) to a startup (of under 20)?!

5 Comments

1. Barb HansenApril 12,2022 at 7:41PM UTC

   I went from working in the very structured world of medical laboratory work to an eight-person startup as a worker not a Founder.

   There is nothing more structured in the world other than nuclear energy than a hospital lab where everything (and I mean everything) is documented, down to how you use a stopwatch to time a test. You can line up ten or twenty lab techs single file in front of a bench; they could do one minute's work on any lab test and hand it off to the person behind them in complete silence because of structured process documentation and months of training.

   And then there's small startup land that is the complete opposite with no structure, no training, changing deadlines, unclear responsibilities, and a swinging pendulum of what needs to be approved or not approved.

   It's normal for C-suite/Founders in a startup to want (perhaps need) that approval layer that you wouldn't find in a larger company.

   C-Suiters/Founders are usually the sources of knowledge for a startup - it's their baby, and they (we) can feel like we need to be involved (speaking as a Founder) because we have all of the institutional knowledge.

   The founders hired you. They trust your work, yet they know more about their company or product than you do at this point. Take some time to speed up the trust and your knowledge.

   Here's how you can speed up the process:

   Set a short daily/weekly meeting with your CEO to give them a heads up on what you're working on.

   - if you are interacting with your CEO daily anyway, get ahead of those meetings and set a 10-to-15 minute daily call where you can lead the discussion. It's always best to look like the leader. :)

   Identify their most concerning issues and learn how they think about that particular issue. When reviewing your work, do they focus on design, copy, strategy, planning, budget, or analytics? What's their biggest concern? Schedule a deep dive meeting (or two) and ask lots of questions about that issue (or issues). Use them as a source of knowledge on the company and whatever they are concerned about with your work. Learn how they speak about a particular issue, find keywords/phrases, and start using them.

   The company hired you to bring new skills, ideas, and strategies to your work. The company wants your input; you just have an additional step called "trust-building" with a C-Suiter/Founder, which is a great skill to learn.

2. AnonymousApril 13,2022 at 5:26PM UTC

   thank you so much. this is super helpful!

3. Crystal HowellApril 23,2022 at 12:25PM UTC

   Growing Pains is all I can say. Start ups great ideas, great money thrown at them, so work, some don't,they all need time. Also, you should review the business plan, who are the investors backing them. Branding a company, it their name. Keep in mind.

4. AnonymousApril 27,2022 at 1:34PM UTC

   I have worked for both global companies with 120k employees and those with 10 employees or less. Generally speaking, we all always have a boss - even the CEO who answers to the BoD. In a small start-up many of the decisions impact a more significant amount of resource than in a tiny co. The CEO is on the hook to manage resources very carefully in a start-up.

5. KatieMay 17,2022 at 8:02PM UTC

   Yep, I have. I went from a Fortune 500 company to start-up and it was a huge shift for me with wearing multiple hats and understanding the strategy wasn't the clearest. Usually the CEO of a start-up is not a micro-manager, sorry to hear about your experience.