What I do

How I can help often depends on what stage your startup is in, and what pain points you’re experiencing. I typically work on a project basis, short contracts, and/or weekly or monthly calls. But if you have a burning question and just need on demand advice, you can set up a call with me on Clarity.

Ideation:

This stage is probably a bit too early to involve me, at least fully. Your focus should be on identifying a solution for the problem you’re trying to solve, validating the market and market size, and thinking about that killer product you’re going to build. What I can help you with however is defining who and what you need in a co-founding team, and laying the groundwork for productive and healthy relationships. Getting this part right can make all the difference between success and failure.

Pre-Seed/Seed/Post-Seed:

These are the sweet spots for us to start a conversation. While you’re acquiring customers, booking revenue, and refining your product-market fit, I’ll do the same for your people-culture fit, and ensure that you have a people strategy with the smooth running systems, tools and activities to underpin and drive your people operations. Let’s increase your odds of securing that (often elusive) Series A!

Whether you’re thinking about your first hire, first handful of hires, or planning to expand your team by 5X or 10X, it pays to be proactive. Typically I’m asked to help with problems like:

• Attracting top talent to your startup – Competing with other companies who are better known and/or pay better may seem like a lost cause. But you don’t have to compromise and settle for second (or third, or fourth) best. We’ll develop strategies so that the best candidates come to you first, and for the right reason, and build a strong candidate experience and talent pipeline so that you’re not always scrambling when you need people.
• Compensation – what you pay your team shouldn’t be arbitrary, unrealistic or unfair (or worse, unaffordable). We’ll benchmark your current and future positions against the market, and develop a pay structure that’s transparent, flexible and scalable no matter how big your team gets (let’s hope really big). And since compensation can be a very touchy and emotional subject for many (no kidding), we’ll develop a plan to communicate the what, why and how to your team so everyone is in the loop at all times.
• Culture – this is a biggie. Culture is often misunderstood because it’s often intangible and invisible. But the results (good or bad) are very real. Think of culture as your company’s physiology, or the immune system that makes you resilient and less susceptible to the bad things that can often happen. We’ll develop a culture plan together that will act as the foundation for all of your people practices, and ensure that your mission, vision and core values are front and centre in everything you do. Having a strong culture can lead to less turnover, higher performance, and higher operating margins too. Who wouldn’t want that, right?
• Hiring – We’ll move away from hiring exclusively for skills, experience and likeability (which never works out anyway), and implement my 3H System (Head, Heart, Hands) to ensure all of your hires have the thinking, working and relating skills needed to crush it. I wrote all about it here: https://link.medium.com/P1E4EzfhDdb
• Roles & responsibilities – most startups are terrible at this (no offence). Sure it can be a fluid environment, but having gaps and overlaps in what people do is a waste of valuable time and money. Not to mention an added headache for you as you try and sort it all out. We’ll build customized performance oriented job descriptions for every position that focus on results, not tasks. If you want to hold people accountable, it starts here.
• Managing employee performance – people perform best when there are clear and consistent standards and expectations set. Unfortunately, many startups don’t do this, and instead rely on loose and subjective metrics where favouritism and bias can creep in. This is a dangerous and slippery slope, and will often lead to your culture eroding right under your feet. We’ll build a program together that redefines what performance really means, and emphasizes what truly matters — like contributions to the culture and living your core values.
• Founder/Co-Founder leadership and management – this will be the toughest part of building your company, because your role will change as your team and your company grows. I’m here to coach you every step of the way so that you can focus on your priorities, manage your time and resources effectively, and maintain your emotional health and well-being.

Series A/B/C and beyond:

Many startups have at least one HR person on the team at this point, but not always. Not sure who or when you should hire one? My article will help: https://link.medium.com/apVavayhDdb

If you don’t have an HR person, and you (or your COO) find you’re spending a lot of your time on people issues (probably more than you should be), then let’s talk. We’ll baseline where you are, where you want and need to be, and lay out a prescriptive plan that will introduce positive change to shape hearts, minds and behaviour. And will last. And yes, that sometimes means making the hard choices to let certain people go.

Also, employee disengagement and churn can be rather high in these growth stages, as people grow tired or disillusioned, the culture changes, and your investors press you to become profitable. I can help you navigate all of it.

Did I miss anything? Reach out anytime – email me at glenn AT nishimuraconsulting.ca, or fill out this form — and we can create a plan that’s right for you.