Teams excel the best entrepreneur

Teamwork is more efficient than gaining all the skills an entrepreneur needs.

Today is my company’s yearly user conference, where over 1,800 people from every law background come to hear the future direction of our software, interact with your team, and party till 3:00 a.m. I attended an event where the outside developers that build software on top of ours were given a roadmap of how kCura would work with them to build even better software moving forward. I’m a member of the team that’s tasked with helping them. I sat at one of the tables to take notes and ask questions about what they needed from us.

The entire meeting lasted two hours, but my interaction with our clients was only 30 min or so. In that short timeframe I was only able to speak with two people, and one person for any length of time. My hope had been to develop a landscape view of our client’s needs, but I really only got a snapshot of one that may or may not apply to the total population.

One of the core tenents of entrepreneurship is customer feedback; what they need, what they want, how you can help. There are those super-creative entrepreneurs who show people what they want before they could voice it, but that’s outside my capabilities and even those folks need to validate their ideas with real people. Although it’s a tenet, that doesn’t make it simple or easy. In fact, interacting with your clients in meaningful ways may be the most difficult part of entrepreneurship. Relationships take time, questions can fail to reveal vital information (such as when they are leading questions), and even accessing the people can be challenging.

I’m freshly reminded how unlikely it is for me - all by myself - to start or maintain a profitable business, much less one that meets a quadruple bottom line. Working with one or two clients is something I could do well, but I do not currently possess the skills to continually expand my network and transition between drastically different clients. While I can make progress on this skill, my best day is likely at the level of an outgoing entrepreneur’s worst day. I had come to the meeting hoping to single-handedly collect the information I needed to make informed decisions, and I was able to learn some things. But I will gain vastly more when the data from the rest of our team is available to analyze.