Creating a Start-Up is a Team Effort

Healthcare professionals, in the leading role, without a doubt contribute many of their attributes to the team but should be conscious also of their limitations. Healthcare professionals have not received specific training in the business world and therefore, lack much of the necessary knowledge to carry out the idea successfully. When creating a start-up, a new company to bring the idea to the market, entrepreneurs need to remember that it is fundamental that they surround themselves with capable people that complement their shortcomings and help them to carry out their vision.

Teams are especially essential in the health sector because:

• The accelerated rhythm of the progress that shakes the health sector requires entrepreneurs to develop teams with many diverse talents in order to move forward and grow at that required speed in an effective and efficient way. No single person, including the entrepreneur, has all the answers for what the entire team is going to find during the initial development of the start-up.

• The convergence of diverse bordering sectors, for example health and technology or health and engineering, make it necessary to have experts in each field who are capable of productively exploring the great opportunities that exist on the frontiers of each discipline.

• Healthcare innovation, both incremental (little improvements) and disruptive (advances that transform the sector), has enormous potential in the presence of different styles and manner of thinking.

The most important asset of any company or idea is the people behind it. The ideas and companies need people to make them happen. It is, once again, the central argument of this article: ideas are worth nothing. It is the execution of these ideas that is valuable and therefore, what makes them valuable. The team is the difference between success and failure.

ATTRACTING TALENT TO THE COMPANY

How Should Our Team Be Structured?

Healthcare professionals with the desire to create a start-up should not only be capable of surrounding themselves with a group of individuals with complementary abilities, but also of organizing the team, giving each member some objectives and categories of common work that will move the initiative forward. The members of the team should become mutually responsible for the idea’s success. Therefore, all have to feel involved and responsible for the project’s progress.

As a professional in healthcare, the entrepreneur is already counted on to have adequate knowledge of all the relative scientific aspects of the idea, but probably lacks financing, marketing, sales, or distribution skills (and many other ones too). Therefore, the entrepreneur should be capable of recognizing the value of the remaining members of the team and be prepared to learn from them. Given that the team will have very different backgrounds and nobody has all the necessary abilities to carry this out alone, it will be important to learn how to collaborate and trust the members.

It requires several factors to build a good team:

• There should be a clear leader who assumes responsibility to decide the jobs of the rest of the team and to state the priorities.

• The different professionals involved on our team should know perfectly well their own strengths and weaknesses and recognize them in relationship to others so that all can complement each other in an effective manner.

• The team should pay special attention to continued improvement of the relationships and of the efficiency of the joint work.

• The team should be capable of change, and should be flexible over the first months of the company’s life, when there is a great probability of unexpected circumstances.

When selecting the members of our team, we should look for:

• Analytical skills. Analytical people, capable of applying the strategy we decide for the group, with deep knowledge of our needs (for example a chief financial officer (CFO) should have essential skills for finances in the sector).

• Emotional intelligence. People with the ability to communicate with us and with other members of the team, the ability to become a member of our team and to work within it, the ability to provide feedback with the members of the team in all of its phases, and the ability to manage the ambiguity, change, and integrity so that we can trust them.

• Implementation intelligence. People with organizational skills to complete the tasks on time, the ability to carry out the coordinated effort with the rest of the team, and the ability to pursue the global objective of our initiative.

Similarly, the efficiency of our team will be evaluated in three different dimensions, all of them equally important:

• Does it satisfy the needs of our start-up? Is the product or service that our company is delivering to the market of great quality?

• Over the course of time, is it able to improve? Is the team able to periodically increase its work intensity in an effective manner?

• Is it capable of meeting the needs of its members? Does it provide an interesting job environment so that they can feel motivated?

Where Do We Find Our Team?

One of the principal challenges that the entrepreneur will face is finding all the collaborators needed to make the idea a reality (Figure 1). Where can we look for those collaborators?

Some of them can come up naturally from the field. Frequently healthcare professionals that have detected a need find and convince those from their own surroundings to join them on the road to carry out this project. But at times, those closest to us are not those that we need to move the project forward. There are certain basic needs that we should cover, that are not easy to find.

Some of the most important are the position of general manager (the one who will help with the organization), the CFO (the one who will help with the numbers), and the sales director (the one who will help with the sales).

One of the most common places to find these types of backgrounds is in a business school. Many students that are getting an MBA or other related economy and business degrees are candidates. Because of their youth and enthusiasm, they would love to hear about this type of project and to collaborate from the conceptual phase, until the company is up and running and receiving financing.

There are many difference sources, difficult to categorize here, but all of them consist of networking to find people, from medical field, from management, and from friends of other professionals. When entrepreneurs know what they are looking for, it is not too difficult to find.

We have to take into account that at this stage, we will probably not have raised any money yet; therefore our ability to contract people that might be interested in our project is somewhat limited. Although it might seem surprising, in this initial state of the idea, it is usually easy to convince qualified people to form some part of our team without the promise of any economic reward. On many occasions, it is enough to establish a confidential relationship and to promise to create a position, (general manager, and so on) when we get financing, so that many of these professionals feel attracted to our initiative and they agree to collaborate provisionally.

Entrepreneurs sometimes think that the natural way of creating a start-up means having an idea, looking for financing, and afterward putting together the team. This is wrong. The real entrepreneur develops the idea first, creates the team, and finally looks for capital.

Before looking for financing, the entrepreneur should be clear about who will be the team members and what their attributes are. In this way, there is a greater vision for the development of the start-up.

Excerpted from Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Healthcare Sector: From Idea to Funding to Launch by Luis Pareras, MD, PhD.

Figure 1. Finding a Team