Editor’s note: Chris Heivly co-founded MapQuest (which sold to AOL for $1.2 billion), was sole managing director of 77 Capital (a $25 million venture fund), and has been an executive at five software companies. Currently, he is one of two managing directors of The Startup Factory in Durham. A national writer and speaker about startups and startup communities, Heivly is also the founder of the Big Top Job Fair.
DURHAM – Allocating your time based on this decision could be the most important decision for your company.
Every founder has a daily struggle on how to allocate his or her time. Is this you? We can work on developing our product or fine-tuning that Facebook campaign. We can work on managing our staff to generate more productivity or we can work some back office tasks like paying bills.
But there are two very important tasks I left out that could be viewed separately but in which I want to link together today:
- Time spent on acquiring new customers (sales)
- Time spent on acquiring new capital (fundraising).
As mentioned, it is easy to view these as simply two additional tasks in your list of 5-8 company-building tasks. In fact you could view all of these tasks as equally weighted and simply round-robin these every day. But that would be wrong and in fact I would encourage you to consider a much different tack.
Dollars flowing into your business trumps everything else.
For more, read Heivly’s full post at:
http://heivly.com/thoughts/customers-or-investors-who-do-you-love-more/
(C) Chris Heivly
