The startup ecosystem has been touted as a revolutionary new way to generate ideas, design products and apps, and develop talent. It is largely sold as an alternative to the existing economic model that has existed for decades. Anyone who has been to a big startup event in the last few years has seen the eager hunt. Startup founders eagerly seeking investor capital so that they can reach an escape, and venture capitalists trying to find the next big unicorn. This idea that a startup will be the next Rovio or Supercell is a big dream, but in the end for most people that is all it will ever be.

Only a handful of companies can achieve the kind of drastic exponential growth required to be a unicorn, that is, to convince more and more investors to continue funding round after round, until the company goes public and the owners escape. Once a company reaches a certain size further growth and scaling requires customer acquisition over satisfaction, and other priorities may shift as well, quantity over quality. Staff salaries may now be seen as a drain on the bottom line, and people may burn out. We see big celebrations and fancy press releases, but what has it actually cost to get to this point. If you take a step back, unicorns may not look as ideal as we imagined them to be.

There are more and more entrepreneurs looking at alternative goals and methods. For example the Zebra movement. They are out to create companies that produce actual value, that develop their staff, that grow to the point that they can be successful and cap out that growth where they can deliver the best quality for their clients. They are out to make companies that like a zebra, can feed themselves, compete and collaborate in a modern ecosystem, and support the upbringing of other Zebra companies through collaboration and mutualism. The most important distinction between a Zebra and a Unicorn is that Zebras aren’t imaginary. 

People spend their time and energy to make money, but at the end of the day the time is gone, and more and more people are moving away from traditional roles where the paycheck has become the sole motivation. People want to work with companies that improve the world. They want to develop and grow and be part of a team that values their unique strengths. They want to balance out their work and their personal lives, and if the Covid situation has shown us anything, it is that the current workplace expectations were just as imaginary as Unicorns. Most people really can work from home, most of the time. They can balance their time between productivity and personal time without insane micromanagement. They can even determine the hours that they are most productive in the day and take a meeting sitting out in the sunshine at a safe social distance if they want to. 

So why not look at the people part of the puzzle? Everyone tells potential founders that the single most important aspect of a startup is the team. They are also the biggest overhead cost in most companies, payroll is the circulatory system supporting everything a company wants to do. There is a direct relationship between the value of team members and the price a company is willing to pay for them. If everyone makes enough money so they don’t have to worry about their immediate problems, they have enough to put aside for long-term goals, and a little extra to play with, suddenly 90% of their focus can be on work when they work. At that point if you are also accomplishing a mission that is important to everyone they will be motivated to collaborate with one another and maximize the value of their time. The final step is revising the concept of the 8 hour workday. If there is a push everyone comes together and contributes, if not set projects and tasks and believe in your team. If they can get their work done professionally in three hours great, reward them by having them manage company time greedily. They can get things done with maximum productivity and go to their kids recital, or spend time at the gym, or just sit in the sun thinking about life.  

So why not design your business model with a higher overhead in mind; take care of your people first, offer them room to grow and support them when they have ideas. I have heard it argued that it raises your costs, but the truth is if you want real productivity you can’t bully or nickel and dime your workers. Your team should be invested, and listened to. The teal company model describes a flat hierarchy in which decision-making is distributed out, small teams manage themselves and coordinate with other teams to accomplish goals and everything gets done without the hassle of management who could never have possibly understood what everyone else in the company was doing in the first place. People prove their value to one another, and coordinate their efforts. Suddenly people stop being workers or management, employees or administration, they are all simply colleagues.

The school of sustainable human resource management has been growing because of many of these very ideas. According to sustainable HRM the business has a responsibility to its stakeholders, that means they focus on providing competitive advantages for the overall company, they focus on development and sustainable employability for staff, and shareholder value for investors. The key is that these factors all have to balance. If you please the stockholders at the cost of the staff, you fail, if you invest in the staff at the cost of the companies ability to compete, you fail, etc. Suddenly long-term strategy becomes valuable to everyone in the company, Do you need more equipment or talent to handle the workload? Everyone in the company can see and balance out the values provided, the cost benefit analysis becomes clear. They can then make the decision that is best for all the stakeholders. At the end of the day the customer is the stakeholder who matters most and they are being cared for by your team, their experience drastically improves when staff are invested in what they are doing and are valued by their colleagues. 

My final thought is that scaling sustainably is a byproduct of these combined systems. If you have reached the point where you can develop new opportunities without diminishing the value you bring to your customers, and there is opportunity in the market for growth, you can grow. Whether that means a spin off project ideated by a team of your coworkers, or a branch located in a new territory, or a team focused on developing new products and services to improve the company portfolio. By balancing the growth, so that teams can always find the skill and training combinations they need, you can grow the way companies should, based on actual demonstrable value. 

This has been at the core of my strategy in developing The Time Repair Corporation. Sure, we are here to ultimately address globally-scaled sustainability problems, but we should be able to do it right. There is a value for what we are trying to accomplish, and just as much there is a value for how we choose to accomplish it. 

If this kind of development makes sense to you I urge you to look at companies that are already making the most of these models, and to join a group like Zebras Unite: https://www.zebrasunite.com/ 

I look forward to seeing you all in a future filled with sustainable enterprise!