Yesterday, I indulged in a little bit of entrepreneurial wisdom from the BlogHer Entrepreneurs conference I went to last week into coping with your infertility journeys. Today, I wrap it all up in part 2 of Why Infertility Patients Should Think Like Entrepreneurs.
I’ll tell you this, it’s more than just aspiring to have the same “go-get’em” attitude as most entrepreneurs. It’s about learning from the culture of “go-get’em-ness” that can teach us invaluable lessons to understanding and coping with our own family-building efforts.
Co-Founders and Titles: Why They Matter
This metaphor is going to take a little while to articulate, so bear with me here.
At the Creative Bootstrapping session I went to, I had the privilege of listening to BlogHer Co-Founder Elisa Camahort Page talk about BlogHer.com’s origins and how their trio of partners became a team of co-founders. At first, they were all equal partners, each claiming the title of President. When it was time to pursue venture capital funding, they were told three Presidents weren’t going to fly. They needed to parse out a CEO and other executive leadership.
This meant many candid, emotional conversations between the three co-founders. It meant being really honest about who could best do what for the overall good of the company. It meant stepping on egos while celebrating strengths. In essence, naming executive leadership is all about realizing the vision of a company through its strongest talents from within.
Brad Feld (author of Venture Deals) also added to this overall conversation about founders. He noted that solo entrepreneurs rarely make it; it’s just too much work for one person to do all on their own. The optimum number of co-founders, Feld says, is somewhere in the 2 to 4-person range. More importantly, he adds, is that at least half of the co-founder team should be focused on the company’s product.
So what on earth does this mean with regard to infertility?
Well, think of you and your partner as Co-Founders. Your company? Well, that’s your family unit. Your product? You guessed it: your future child(ren).
Who’s the CEO of your company? It’s not who wears the pants or who earns the most money. There’s a CEO in every long-term partnership. Who’s more organized? Who advocates for your brand as You + Your Significant Other? Who seems more invested in the long-term vision of You Two?
So maybe you’re the CEO. Maybe it’s your partner. Either way, your CEO is going to need a COO – a Chief Operating Officer. I mean, the bills don’t pay themselves, do they? (Well, they might. I mean, I have automatic bill pay for some of our bills.) The COO is going to be just as organized as the CEO, but they’re more organized about the day-to-day operations of Your Company. Think grocery lists, budgets, making sure you packed a lunch and the like.
Now, at least half of this team should be focused on product: your future child(ren). But product development isn’t conducted in isolation. Both the CEO and COO need to understand what’s happening with R&D (research and development) about your product: what’s your clinic’s SART data? What’s the average wait once you’ve completed your homestudy? There’s plenty of R&D to keep you and your Co-Founder busy. And you might have to outsource your prototypes, like bringing in a reproductive endocrinologist, a therapist, a birthmother, a sperm donor, a surrogate, etc.
See where I’m going here?
Just because one of you might be more focused than the other on the product of your family-building journey doesn’t mean you can’t have company meetings from time to time to make sure everyone is still on the same page. That there’s enough money in company coffers to forge ahead. That the co-founders still share the same vision.
That you’re both still in the game for the right reasons.
What’s Your Exit Strategy?
Startups all have an eventual exit strategy (or, they should). In the absence of my business degree, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about what that actually means:
“In entrepreneurship and strategic management an exit strategy, exit plan, or strategic withdrawal, is a way to transition one’s ownership of a company or the operation of some part of the company. Entrepreneurs and investors devise ways of recouping the capital they have invested in a company. The most common strategy is the sale of equity to someone else through a trade sale.”
So basically, exit strategies should be about having an end-game plan for the eventual sale of your company so that both you and your investors make some bank. Exit strategies are an interesting concept when you think of a “startup” – even though a company is new and having just been created, it’s still something created with the end in mind. A profitable end, no less.
I think a lot of us think our exit strategy is simply parenting. It could be that simple, but it might not be. In our case, our end-game is that we’re parents no matter what. Exit Strategy 1 looks like donor egg IVF. If that fails, we move on to Exit Strategy 2: adoption.
But maybe your Exit Strategy looks like stopping treatments entirely and choosing to live childfree, because maybe adoption isn’t part of of your Exit Strategy.
Maybe you have no Exit Strategy: you’ll keep pushing forward for as long as your body and mind can take it. In that instance I ask: is that really what’s best for you? How will that benefit you in the long term? Are you prepared for the near-superhuman physical and emotional commitment/toll that will take?
We all get off this infertility train at some point or another. It’s just a matter of thinking intentionally about where you’d like your next stop to be.
Having an Exit Strategy about your infertility journey can only help to prepare you for the next phase in your life, parenthood or otherwise.
So there you have it: all of the insight I could glean from what infertility patients can learn from entrepreneurs. Here’s one last parting piece of wisdom. A lot of people say that in order to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be lucky.
Here’s a quote that Brad Feld shared with us about luck:
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” – Seneca
The end of our infertility journey is hardly just left to luck. We go to great lengths to prepare. The rest is simply inviting opportunity to come a-knockin’… so that hopefully, we get knocked up 😉
