Founder Series: Navigating Uncertainty & Disruption

Buzzwords like “grit” and “resilience” often complicate how we talk about the psychological and emotional pressures of business building. As it turns out, you can possess both and still have days where you—and your leadership choices—look and feel like a dumpster fire.

I’m always inspired by how our founders navigate uncertainty and disruption. Even more uplifting is how they are redefining what it means to build resilience and show grit... while also caring for themselves and for others.

It's a pleasure to showcase a few of their stories, in their own words. Enjoy!

Matt Verlaque, COO at SaaS Academy*

*Prior to joining SaaS Academy, Matt was co-founder of UpLaunch (RevUp 2019), a gym management platform acquired by Daxko in 2020

1) Knowing what you know about how quickly and significantly circumstances change, how do you think about long term planning? How do you balance the upsides of long term planning with the need to be dynamic, in real time?

I do long term planning on a three year time horizon, focusing primarily on high level revenue and profitability targets as well as a short list (3-7) of key achievements. I don’t typically build super detailed multi-year financial models this far out. I take a much more rigorous approach for quarterly planning, which is always driven by a financial model and OKRs for our various teams.

2) What’s your take on transparency with your team? How do you decide what to share and what to hold back?

We share almost everything with the team - but we don't share data without education. For instance, before we started sharing detailed financial results with our senior leaders, I ran a class for them on how to interpret financial statements, taught them about accrual accounting, gave them a historical performance review of the business (prior 3 yrs), and gave them health benchmarks for key financial performance indicators.

3) How do you help your team navigate uncertainty? In what ways, if any, does uncertainty guide how you set and measure performance goals and other KPIs?

By limiting our detailed planning (Fin. Models and OKRs) to a 1 quarter time horizon, we navigate uncertainty pretty well. Within the context of a quarter, if something causes us to wildly shift priorities, we will - but it’s rare. Outside of things like COVID / market crashes etc, most businesses can get through a quarter relatively on plan. It is important to not be overly pedantic about it - leave yourself room to get smarter / change a goal when circumstances dictate.

4) Do you use any techniques / approaches for managing stress and prioritizing mental health (yours or your team’s) that you are willing to share?

Team: Biweekly 60min long 1:1s that focus primarily on wins, reflection, coaching, and candid feedback in both directions. Also work through a “perfect week” exercise with all of my direct reports to ensure that they’re time blocking effectively, making space for their health and family, etc. Personally, I work out a lot and try to get outside daily which for me helps balance the stress of running a company. I also try to punch out every other Friday to have a no meeting day, if not a day off.

5) There’s been a lot of conversation about the importance of “resilience” in business building. What does that word mean to you, if anything at all?

It means seeing things through - goals in ink, plans in pencil. The mission of the business should rarely change, but you’ll never get there the way you thought you would. Resilience is seeing the mission through without falling in love with your plan - which empowers you to change the plan, learn the lessons you need to learn, and eventually accomplish what you set out to accomplish in the first place.

6) Startup culture has long celebrated “grit” as a pre-requisite for success, but often done so in a machismo way. If you could write your own definition for the word grit, how would it read?

Honestly, see #5. Grit is the personality trait associated with what I described above. Nothing to do with machismo; but stubbornness can be both a feature AND a bug depending on how you apply it - and grit is just a more “positive” manifestation of stubbornness, applied intelligently to certain contexts. 

7) What’s your favorite way to blow off steam or recharge after a tough day?

I have three young kids. If I’ve had a stressful day from project work, I’ll decompress by playing with them…if I’ve had a stressful day from meetings, I usually need to go find 15-30 minutes of silence / outside time first - and THEN go play with them :) 

8) If you could give one piece of advice to a new founder starting out today about how to survive the uncertainty of building a company, what would it be?

Accept up front that you’ll be wrong about a lot of things. The whole process of building a business is just learning things that you thought you already knew, over and over again. The people who fail are generally the ones who already think they know everything / know better than the market. The people who win are the ones who think the market knows everything. Fall in love with the customer and the problem, not the way you thought you’d solve it when you started the company.
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SaaS Academy is the complete business growth system for SaaS founders. We help you build repeatable and scalable growth in your SaaS business so that you can focus on doing the work you love.

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