In November 2021, one week before I was going to sign investment docs for our first investment round for Orkestra, I woke up having a panic attack.
It was the second attack in two weeks, but I’d never experienced them before and haven’t experienced them since. That morning, my wife had to ring my cofounder, telling him I wouldn’t be working for a while.
Orkestra cofounder James Allston
I had completely burnt myself out. It was very, very nearly the end of my startup, right before it had begun.
It was only through the incredible tenacity of cofounders Chris Cooper and Michael Jurasovic, and our advisors at the time, Danin Kahn and Kat Kimmorley, that Orkestra survived.
I am the cofounder and co-CEO of Orkestra – an ambitious, fast-growing SaaS business on a mission to enable teams to decarbonise the world’s businesses with our energy feasibility and modelling software for commercial new energy projects. (Think solar, battery and EV chargers for businesses.)
With this post ahead of RU OK? Day on September 12, I want to share my story of mental health in a startup and some tips for other founders in the hope they may avoid what I and our business went through.
1 in 20 start-ups fail due to founder burnout. The pressure to succeed is enormous, and founders pull out all the stops to succeed, but the costs can be significant. It should go without saying that Founders are essential to a startup’s success.
But what we can often forget is that our capacity to manage our mental health directly leads to our effectiveness and, thus, our business’s productivity. A founder who manages their mental health effectively is more likely to manage their business effectively.
So here goes – here are my nine tips for founders to avoid burnout and manage their mental health effectively.
1. Don’t go it alone – make sure the founding team is structured for success
I wasn’t doing it alone; I had two incredible, hardworking Co-Founders. But I may as well have been alone due to an equity and management structure that made me largely responsible for the business.
During New Energy Ventures (“NEV”), Chris and Michael were my employees, I owned NEV outright and therefore owned all the IP to Orkestra.
Photo: AdobeStock
When incorporating Orkestra, I really wanted Chris and Michael to be cofounders. But given I’d been taking all the risk to that point, I made the “logical” choice that I should have a majority stake in Orkestra and that Chris and Michael would have minority shares.
As I was the Managing Director of NEV, it was also “logical” that I appoint myself as CEO of Orkestra.
These decisions were among the key reasons I hit the wall. I had doomed myself and almost the business to failure.
In structuring the founder cap table with me as the majority shareholder, I’d not created the environment for Chris and Michael to make the transition from employee to founder.
I was, quite literally, far more invested than them. As a result, I felt the responsibility to pull the long hours and work the weekends rather than trying to share the mental and business load more evenly.
In further hindsight, Chris would have been a far better choice of CEO during the early days of Orkestra.
Chris had run several businesses before joining NEV. He has an instinctual knack for startups and product, a hunger for understanding customer needs, and a bold vision for our future. I, on the other hand, had never run a “proper” startup, and I had always worked in supporting roles in corporates and as a consultant.
While I can say I ran an excellent and successful management consultancy, I was not yet well suited to be the CEO in the early days of SaaS start-up Orkestra. Chris should have been CEO from the get-go.
After the dust settled and I had returned to Orkestra, we redistributed the cap table to make it more equitable. Chris and I have also since made the decision to Co-CEO Orkestra, allowing us to better share the burden of leading our business. This has been an excellent decision, one that I would strongly endorse for other founders.
2. Don’t take on too much – delegate, delegate, delegate
It’s extraordinarily hard making the transition from being an operator to managing a team. By their nature, start-ups need strong individual contributors to start the business. But as the business takes on staff, the founders need to get really, really good at delegating.
It might be painful to delegate something that you know you could deliver yourself in the same time it takes to complete the task yourself, but that is a false economy in a startup. As founders, you’ll only make it big if you can delegate effectively.
Delegating effectively means identifying tasks that are “operational” versus “foundational”. This is the old adage of work on your business rather than in your business.
Another way of thinking about it is that every operational task you continue to take on, is another opportunity for learning you take away from your team. You’ll only get good operators if you give them the chance to be good operators.
3. Focus on your circle of influence, not your circle of concern
This is the first habit of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Since that book was written, that habit has become even more relevant. This is about being proactive, focusing on the things you can have influence or impact over and blocking out the rest.
This means ignoring the news, ignoring social media and essentially ignoring all irrelevant noise to your business. Unless you genuinely get pleasure and energy from reading the news or doom scrolling through social media, or you have to consume it as part of your business – just stop when you’re stressed! Chances are you’ll feel less stressed and pressured straight away.
If I’m feeling stressed or have a lot on (i.e. have plenty of stressors), I make a concerted effort to turn off the news.
4. Ruthless prioritisation – stay focused by planning your calendar and do the tasks you need to do.
There are literally millions of things to do to build a new business. Not only that, there are about 100x as many things to do that you could do that will just be a distraction and waste of your precious time.
There are many ways to do prioritisation. Find what works for you. For our business we create quarterly strategies for product or half-yearly strategies for growth.
Within these strategies, we set out targets and key strategic initiatives that we will undertake as a business to achieve those targets. Then I personally create a to-do list that I refresh every month, and then every Friday we have a team call where we plan all the tasks we are going to work on and actually block time out in the calendar to do those tasks.
We aim to schedule the highest-priority and deep-thinking tasks during our most productive work hours (for me, that is Monday afternoon and Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings).
I also make a habit of avoiding meetings before lunch unless they are “co-creation meetings”. This means you can shut down too much context switching which is really hard to do.
5. Be hyper-aware of your mental state
Having been through a dramatic mental health episode, I’m now hyper-aware of my mental state. I’ve gotten very good at recognising when I’m stressed, noting it, and then allowing my brain to simply let the stress and the stressor go. This is a meditation technique that I encourage you to master.
Try to notice when you’re stressed and ask yourself – do I really need to be stressed right now? A little bit of stress can be fine, but recognise when it’s helpful.
Nothing like a deadline to get things done, but honestly, try to avoid setting deadlines unless they are essential to your business. If you are stressed all the time, your ability to make careful decisions will steadily deteriorate until you can no longer make them.
If you’re finding you’re able to tune in effectively to your mental state, I find that a meditation that incorporates a body scanning technique works well for me.
6. Let the fires burn
Startups are inherently imperfect and scrappy, and should be so. If you are not employing Lean startup methods, you’re dramatically increasing your chances of failure.
But not everyone is comfortable with the cultural shift required to really embrace Lean. Being from a corporate and management consulting background, and somewhat of a perfectionist, I wasn’t ready for that cultural shift needed for Orkestra. This massively fed into my stress.
Photo: AdobeStock
To fully embrace Lean methods, you need to also fully embrace imperfection. If you have a working product but it’s full of bugs and the UX is still terrible, this is the perfect time for release. The sooner you shift from building a product to test a hunch, to actually testing that hunch, the better.
This also means coming to peace with the bugs and the potential embarrassment of an initial product release that you know – and let’s face it – is just a bit shit.
Even after the product is out and polished, every customer you speak to will have a new pet feature they’d like you to build. Ignoring the many varied things that customers, partners and even employees want done is a reality for any business. Dealing with it requires clear business and product strategy, then ruthless prioritisation to avoid being pushed and pulled in every direction.
So burn, baby burn – let those fires burn.
7. Do not, under any circumstances, work weekends
Two weeks out from hitting the wall I ended up working a weekend. Our lead investor wanted us to submit a refined strategy and I had promised to deliver a presentation to the entire sales team of our largest enterprise customer. I’d not had the time during the week to do either and felt compelled to do both over the weekend.
That weekend of work was the trigger to the beginning of the end. In reality, I should never have worked it. I should, at a minimum, have told a white lie and called in sick for our customer. (At that point, it was frankly not much of a white lie!)
Let me repeat – short of total catastrophe, there is never a good reason to work a weekend.
8. Take time for yourself, family and friends
As a founder, you are constantly bombarded by information and decision-making. Make sure you spend at least 30 minutes every day doing something that makes you happy and have at least 2 hours for yourself on a weekend.
This can be especially hard if you have a young family as I do, but it will be critical to ensuring you give your brain time to rest and, in doing so, make space for creativity.
I recommend combining this time with exercise. I walk to work most days but also try to get out on my mountain bike before work on Thursday mornings.
Every weekend, I make sure I get at least two hours out on the bike, too.
I’ve even packed my work weekend into 4.5 days by working after the kids are down a couple of nights a week and having Friday afternoons off. This has worked wonders.
I’m far more productive during the week, and I’m now getting to Saturday morning without feeling completely shattered.
As for family, this really needs no explanation.
Is becoming successful/rich/famous at the expense of your family and friends really worth it?
Of course not, so make time for them and do fun stuff with them that will give you energy. It’s not enough to just go through the daily motions together.
9. Come to peace with the chance of failure
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there are 9:1 odds your start up will fail, and 30% chance it will before 2 years in. And yes, your business may go bankrupt and you might lose all your investors’ money – around 75% do that too. Come to peace with this, or it will eat you up, as it did me.
This is not about being reckless with your investor’s money. It’s about acknowledging that even if you do absolutely everything right, you still might fail, and that’s ok.
There’s always next time! If you fail, it will not be your only chance of success wasted. There will be other opportunities and you will have learnt a lot of hard lessons about what not to do next time. This blog is somewhat testament to that fact. Not that I failed, but I came as close to failure as you can just about get without actually failing!
I’ve had VCs openly tell me they will happily invest in founders who have run a failed business. But you do need to prove that you have and can learn from your mistakes.
So there you have it
These are my top nine tips for avoiding founder burnout. My hope is that by sharing my story and learnings with other founders, I can avoid learning about mental health the hard way – through the school of hard knocks.
I also encourage our founders to be brave and talk about their mental health stories.
It’s only through sharing our experiences that we can learn from each other.
So if you’re reading this, I’d love to get your feedback, and perhaps together, we can add a few more.
Good luck!
Final note
You might be wondering: “hey, did you and the business recover?”
Absolutely, but it wasn’t easy. I had to fully tap out for three months, then slowly ramp back up in the business over six months.
By then, I was hungry and sharp! Rest is the only cure for burnout.
Orkestra cofounders Michael Jurasovic, Chris Cooper and author James Allston.
The team managed to keep the show on the road (just) despite the investment being paused indefinitely. We kept bootstrapping and pushing through with a mixture of unpaid work and consulting contracts.
Ultimately, we closed the round seven months later with the same lead investor still willing to back us.
Since then, Orkestra has grown rapidly and has become the leading feasibility and sales software for commercial new energy projects in Australia and NZ. We are now about to expand to Europe.
So if you do burnout or are currently feeling burnt out – never say die – bounce back is always possible.
- James Allston is cofounder and co-CEO of Orkestra.
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