For Starters #13: There are No Customers Inside Your Office
Hell, the entire idea of an office is anti-customer.
I spent the morning working at a startup accelerator, there’s a dozen companies in the program right now. In the office today, maybe three.
While the energy of having everyone in the same place is amazing - and a large reason why I love going there - it’s not the right answer for any of their business ambitions.
There are no customers inside this office. Nor should there be. Customers are out in the world, and the best way to understand them is to find them and be with them.
So, get out there.
The rub though - your customers shouldn’t be in their office either. They should be out with their customers.
As I wrote years ago, in “Where’s your Buyer Platform” - https://garrickvanburen.com/wheres-your-buyer-platform/
“Most important of all – [your customers] all have families they love, kids they don’t spend enough time with, and hobbies they haven’t pursued in much too long. In short, their calendars are booked solid with challenge and fulfillment. These are not people outraged by the latest Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook drama (product-related or otherwise). These are people fighting to make their vision a reality. Every. Single. Day. Fighting to transform their organization’s products and culture. They’re not tweeting it.”
Your job, leading the development of a new product, is to find out where your customers are - wherever they are. It’s not a new job. Nor is it one that can be solved by the hottest new technology. It’s solved by building relationships.
The question isn’t: How many days should I spend in the office?
The question is: What’s today’s most important work and where’s the best place for me to do it?
Rarely is the most important work in a beige office with uninspiring art and carpeted walls.
Our current telecommunication technology (where ‘current’ is the past 75+ years since the invention of the direct-dial long distance phone call: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-distance_calling ) has made work is placeless, made out-of-office replies and “return to office” policies - anachronisms.
The office, like the internet, is no longer a place we go - but instead an on-demand context around us, just one nervous impulse away.
I primarily take Zoom calls on my phone, update spreadsheets on my phone, coordinate with collaborators….on my phone. Where ever I am at the moment I choose to receive the message - walking from a meeting to the car, waiting for a sandwich at Jimmy Johns, taking a break in drafting this week’s For Starters. I’ve such a habit of popping in and out of my messages throughout the day that a startup founder once commented, “I hope I can reach your level of responsiveness some day.”
Sure, at the individual scale, this introduces challenges of comfortably stepping away from work for your mental health. If this means setting hard screentime limits on work apps or the entire device - not a bad thing. If anything this, geographically agnostic and asynchronous work, allows work to fit into life most sustainably, and a continual engage/disengage rhythm with hard problems has the potential to create more innovative solutions simply because it’s easier to step away from - and re-engage with.
Too many well-established organizations still have a very 20th Century collaboration culture requiring any decision of significance to be determined by people around the same conference room table. Which, as a policy is a fantastic way to slow down decision making to the speed of a slime mold ( https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ <- highly recommended presentation, the tediousness only underlines the point) if not outright discourage decision making.
Here in Entrepreneurial-land (and also coincidently in Powerful Corporate CEO-land) decisions aren’t made on a schedule - on weekends, outside of normal business hours, in transit - whenever the right moment is. When there’s an urgent discussion to be had, no one waits for everyone to arrive in the same physical location - everyone dials in from wherever they are.
The banking system needs to be propped up, response to an acute disaster needs to be coordinated, terms of the deal need to get hashed out - we don’t have much time.
Am I suggesting startups shouldn’t have dedicated physical offices?
100%. Early on an office is completely unnecessary overhead, maybe an office lease comes well after making bringing the founders’ compensation to market-levels. Definitely not before. There are loads of temporary places the founding team can meet for a day and collaborate synchronously in-person for no or very very low $$ (the very first agency I worked for collaborated out of a spare room in their main client’s office).
More importantly, I’m arguing the most important competitive advantage startups have is their ability to quickly develop very rich, responsive, authentic, human relationships with their customers. A dedicated office can too easily become a place to hide. I’m always disappointed when startup teams mask, hide, obscure, or otherwise create distance from their customers in marketing and other correspondence (e.g. running all outbound messages through ChatGPT first).
As my friend Paul ( https://www.mnheadhunter.com ) advised me almost 2 years ago, “We’re all hungry for human connection. Whatever you can do to make a connection.”
As true as ever.