Early-stage startups have a massive problem: there are way, way too many things to do, and never enough people to do them.
Whether it growth marketing, or product design, or software engineering or a myriad list of other tasks, something somewhere isn&t going to get done by the founding team and early employees.And so it is only natural to seek outside help to assist with those tasks, part-timers (and sometimes full-timers) who can add their talent and experience to a company early success.There just one problem: consultants are horrifyingly misaligned with startups, as a recent discussion about how to be a great consultant attests.
And so if you are going to work with consultants as a founder, there are massive traps you must avoid in order to make effective use of these people.I&m a big fan of The Browser, an email newsletter by Robert Cottrell which curates a list of five articles a day across the web that Cottrell thinks are the best of the day.
One of his selections in a recent issue was part two of a four part series on being a great consultant written by Tom Critchlow, who is adapting lessons from the theater world into the work of being a consultant.