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Company founders wait too long and lose productivity

When will you maximise your productivity?

A silhouette of a stressed, desperate-looking person trapped in an egg timer on a wooden floor in front of some net curtains

Business owners work too hard.  There’s no other way to launch your serious shot at what you have to offer the market.  You eat,  breathe, sleep, and f*** your offer 24/7, because what else would you be doing when you know what you have is so right?

Someone who knows this explicitly is April Underwood, former Director of Product to Twitter and CPO to Slack.  She knows how the rhythm of productivity when you are creating something truly special and she knows the implications for company growth when CEOs and managers get timing wrong.

My other post discussed her fervent call to action on hiring in her excellent interview with NFX. Just when will you fire yourself from your copy work and let yourself focus on your critical objectives?  Underwood also pointed out:

“Don’t wait too long. Founders tend to wait too long before realizing this. So they may lose some amount of productivity for their team because the Founder must get to a point where they’re just not able to respond quickly.”

You need your time free to respond.  Let Marmalade take your copy needs off your hands so you can get on with your vital work.  I can get that weekly blog off the to-do list, I can sort out that old copy you slightly underpaid for and now can’t use, and I can write up that business paper for LinkedIn that centres your value in your market place.

<a href=”mailto: sarah@marmaladecopy.co.uk”>Email now </a> to see how Marmalade Copy to direct your productivity.

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A CEO’s job is to keep firing yourself.

When will your fire yourself from your copy department?

Four people wearing white shirts, touching fists together.

Business owners focus on growth.  Why are you still writing your copy when Marmalade can write it for you?

April Underwood, a dynamic and successful project manager at NFX, made an excellently salient point in a post for NFX, based on her time as Director of Product at Twitter and CPO at Slack discussing how and when to use project managers at a company.  She said:

“Your job is to keep firing yourself from various aspects. To be clear, there’s a lot of value in a Founder being very close to the product and close to the team for as long as possible. But in any growth-stage company — whether you’re in the zero to one phase or later — you always have to be thinking about how you’re firing yourself from various aspects of your job.”

When it comes to marketing your product, you know best.  You know the ins, the outs, the ups, the downs, the murky inner workings and the crystal-clear sale points.  This doesn’t mean you should be writing the copy.  You have better things to do.

To maintain that hyperfocus on your work, you need – ironically – to step back.  Keep your focus on the pressure points, not the grunt work of capturing the essence of your business needs.

I can help you with your redundancy.  Hand over your specialised understanding of your customer needs and the service you provide and get that white paper finally written that demonstrates your market leadership.  Hand over your mail-outs and mail-shots, hand over your SEO copy tweaking and hand over that weekly blog that slips down the to-do list.

It’s time you fired yourself. Get that email sent today – how can I help?