Stage gates, scorecards & deliverables, the oil in the machine

Momentum, once you have it, one should never let it go. Some say it only comes once. While I’m not in that camp, I do believe it’s something to cherish. When you’re working towards it, you never know what will make it happen, and once you’re there, it’s obvious. I believe that it’s very similar inputs for every studio to reach the momentum for success.

Stage gates

The first thing to build and keep momentum within any studio is their, unique to them, stage-gate model. For the uninitiated, a set of predefined criteria/goals which need to be reached per period of time for each venture a studio builds. Only when the goals for each gate are met the next is unlocked, feels just like a game to most. This way entrepreneurs and studios are not tempted to work on goals which only make sense in later stages, what we call premature scaling in most cases. Restrictive? Sometimes, helpful to keep the momentum pumped, hell yes.

Sometimes I wonder why we didn’t build and run our startups like this in the past. Especially in the early stages of company building, the stage gates are a great indicator if you’re onto something or if it’s just taking way too long. The way to keep momentum in a studio is to be strict (before starting) on how long a gate can take in its entirety and what the desired deliverables are during that period.

Momentum can be kept high by killing off or pivoting ideas as soon as humanly possible. Most of the time, way sooner than you’re comfortable with. The added value of the alignment the studio has with its co-founders will also definitely help to maintain the momentum. But when to kill or pivot can be quite the emotional rollercoaster. We’ve added some objectivity to the decisions with simple but all truth-telling scorecards.

Scorecards

We all love to manage by numbers, right? While a studio stage-gate model is very clear on deliverables, it can be 10 weeks before you reach that gate and you don’t want to just know how you’re doing, you want to know how well you’re doing compared to before/others.

We’ve implemented scorecards for that. So when all is set and done, we’ll just put in the scores and know that we should move forward! To me, the scorecard feels like an intermediate due diligence checklist. And we’ve actually turned parts of it in a technical due diligence checklist that we help our investment friends with once very blue Monday. So how does one tell their cofounder that getting scored is a good idea?

Well, actually we don’t. These scorecards are visible to anyone we partner with and are scored by the business co-founder of the company. So it’s the co-founder convincing the rest of the founders and the team that more should be done to pass the gate or that we’ve passed with flying colours. Which also could mean we’ve done too much on the subject already. And this is also the most important part of being a Builders born company. We don’t want to be a program you run with, or a summer camp. We want to impact the future of work and living with our co-founders and have a data-driven and proven way todo so.

Deliverables

Might be the most controversial way to keep momentum, between each stage gate, we’ve defined a set of deliverables we believe need to be completed to reach the next phase of the venture, or pass the gate. Controversial because the perception of these could be that you just have to check off some tasks and that no entrepreneurial skillset is needed. Hah, wish this was true. Nah, deliverables are there to keep momentum between gates. At the start of each phase, we’ll talk about what we should achieve in the next period of time and what really needs to be done to reach our goals. Guess what!? 80% of them we’ve defined as deliverables. Within these, of course, notion pages of knowledge, we’ve documented our early endeavours, what worked and what didn’t. If possible, we’ll link to those cases and to all the templates we’ve created throughout the last cycles. This keeps momentum high because there’s no searching for knowledge or starting points, it’s right there. Yes, it makes a lot of things easier, but it doesn’t change the fact that it needs to be done right, with the right grit and turned into magic.

Hopefully, you see what we see. Entrepreneurship is beautiful and when made a bit more data-driven, supported by a core team, it becomes even more than that, magical.