This summer I am very fortunate to be working at an innovative and rapidly growing company in Boston. Pre-Tuck I worked primarily in a large corporation. My individual group may have been small, but we were still surrounded by 1,000 other employees and lots of staff that helped the place run: mail room, cafeteria, HR, accounting, etc.
It is easy to gripe about other departments when you work in a big company. Certainly I can’t say I never did it. Why isn’t my check here on time!? (blame accounting) What, the package didn’t arrive when I thought it would!? (blame mail room) Why is the receptionist forwarding the wrong calls to me!? (blame corporate receptionist) On and on it goes. I’m a positive person by nature so fortunately I did not succumb to constantly blaming other departments, but it’s inevitable in a big company–at some point you will feel another department let you down.
Fast forward to start-up land. There are no other departments to blame. If I want to do something–or if the company needs something done–guess what, I’ve added another responsibility to my job! And I love it! I used to be frustrated by the sometimes slow pace of things at a large firm. It is incredibly empowering to have an idea, pop into the CEOs office for approval, and then do it all in one morning. Wow!
Here’s the bad news. All those departments I mentioned above. The one’s that sometimes drove me crazy? They’re not here. No one to blame. Also, no one to do all the busy work. So guess who answers the phone when it rings? All of us. Could be me, could be the CEO, could be the CFO, could be the Marketing Director. When staff is small you all become the receptionist. And what a crazy world it is out there! Over half the calls are not even people. It’s a recording, often offering you a product or a debt solution. Some are tricky about this and lull you into thinking it’s an actual conversation. The recording is not as slick so you get suckered into listening and talking for 5 seconds instead of immediately hanging up. Another quarter are wrong numbers. That leaves a quarter of all calls actually for us. I can’t wait until we get a proper receptionist.
Then there’s the mail. No mail room so we mail everything ourselves. That can me racing to UPS to drop something off. Or spending my lunch break buying stamps for the office. So it goes.
Oh, and accounting? Don’t have that either. So our CFO and Chairman have to pull double duty. So it goes.
Summary: It’s a wonderful experience to go from a big company to a start-up. You really see what it takes to make a company work, what things can be ignored, and what absolutely cannot. I am surprised at how much busy work you have to do in a small organization (ok, not surprised anymore, but I was at first) and at the same time it is wonderful to go to work and know that every day what you do makes a difference and is vital to the success of your company.
I’ll post more on start-up vs. corporate life in the coming weeks….
Read the full article: At the start-up watercooler (part 1)