Why StartUp Advisors Fail

It is so important before any founder turns to a StartUp Advisor they understand out the gate why the advisor will turn down your business or why they will never be successful and you will resent the engagement.

True customer success, for you and your company and for me, is about absolute transparency, genuine understanding at every step and being clear about what to expect.

StartUp Advisory is incredibly complex, one cannot simply take a prior startup experience and believe that is going to apply to your organization, and you certainly cannot believe that the frameworks that accelerate success for larger companies will trickle down to your startup.

For StartUp Advisory to work, it takes true relationship building, understanding of the vision, the product, the market, the expectations and providing insight that can be IMMEDIATELY converted to value. No founder needs the long term play at the beginning, show me a strategy or playbook that could impact my organization tomorrow.

Moreover, most founders are not looking for more ideas or more vision, they are actually in dire need of more people to help execute, but often trapped by lack of funding, revenue or ability to source qualified candidates.

StartUps generally don’t need an advisor, they don’t need more brains, they don’t need more ideas and they have a pretty clear vision and direction. What a StartUp Founder needs is more cooks, less chefs. A StartUp Advisor is not going to execute the idea, they will create the menu and the recipe book, but you have to execute it. Where a StartUp Advisor succeeds is where the founder recognizes a competency they are missing or an opinion they need to flesh out and value the conversation and thinking through the problem.