23 Sep Start With Why: How Two Companies Found Their Reason Before Their Product
Start With Why: How Two Companies Found Their Reason Before Their Product
Why the reason for a business matters more than the idea behind it
5 minute read
“In both companies, the why came first. From there it was just a matter of how to solve the problem.”
Simon Sinek wrote a book called Start With Why that I believe in deeply. The idea is simple: understand why you’re doing something before you decide what you’re going to do.
In the professional world, that has meant something very specific to me. It’s the difference between having a reason to start a business and having a product you then need to justify. Plenty of companies get built the second way. The ones I’ve been part of got built the first way, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence in how they turned out.
I’ve been lucky. In both software companies I started, the why came easily, and it came first. In both cases it was an intersection of my professional life and my personal life, and I believe that clarity had a lot to do with whatever success followed.
Notify: a test result I couldn’t get answered
Notify was communication software for hospitals, physicians, and other care providers. We saw a major issue with how care providers communicated, both inside hospital walls and outside them. Getting test results from one doctor to another, say from a radiologist in a hospital to a primary care physician or an orthopedist, was a real challenge. Getting those results from providers to patients was worse.
Then it happened to me. I received very scary test results while I was on vacation. I spent days trying to reach my primary care physician. I didn’t know what I could eat, whether I could have a glass of wine with dinner, what any of it meant. I got the results on a Monday. It was Wednesday before I found out they were wrong. I’d been sent incorrect results.
I wanted to make sure nobody else went through that, and we already knew the same breakdown existed inside hospitals every day. That was my why. It was personal, and it was clear.
CareFlow: the same paper form, every year
CareFlow started with a phone call. A prestigious boarding school in Connecticut reached out because they were struggling to collect and track student health records. Those records have to be on campus in case of an emergency: an allergic reaction, an injury during sports. What permissions does the student have? What medications are they on? How do we reach the parents?
This was not our area of expertise. We were focused on hospital-based technology at the time. But I was a parent, and I knew this problem from the other side.
Every year I filled out the same health form for my kids. On paper. My handwriting is terrible, so the school nurse called me every year to clarify what I’d written. The form was mailed to us, we mailed it back, and we hoped it ended up in the right file. Why couldn’t this be done electronically, with updates only for the rare things that changed?
And it wasn’t just about convenience for parents. Imagine an emergency on a field. Do you really want someone running to print out paperwork before treatment can start? My daughter has a peanut allergy. If she had a reaction at school, could they find her information? Could they make sense of it in time?
So again, the why was absolutely clear. From there it was just a matter of how to solve the problem and what to build.
What a clear why does for you
Being passionate about both of those causes made everything downstream easier:
- It was easy to explain to my teams why the problem had to be solved, and to build teams that were focused on the mission.
- It shaped our company values. We created them based on our why, not the other way around.
- It was easy to explain to prospective clients that we could solve their pain, because we’d felt it ourselves.
When the why is real, you don’t have to manufacture conviction. It’s already there, and people can tell.
My why at SchoolSims
I recorded the video above in late 2020, shortly after joining SchoolSims, which provides simulation software for the professional development of current and aspiring school leaders. At the time my why for joining was to give back. I’d been lucky enough to have people make sacrifices for me along the way: mentors, investors, people who bet on me. I wanted to help another founder the way I’d been helped.
But while I was recording that video, I realized I had a second why, and it’s the one that has stuck. School leaders need to manufacture experience. They need practice with situations that feel real before they face them for real, and during COVID that was nearly impossible to deliver in person. Simulations solve that. And the people we’re helping are the ones leading the schools our children attend. That’s an important group to serve, and I feel great about it.
That second why is a big part of why I’m still here.
Finding yours
If you’re starting something, or deciding whether to join something, start with the why. Not the product, not the market, not the exit. Why does this need to exist? Why you? If the answer comes easily and it connects to something you’ve lived, you’re probably onto something worth building.
One more thing: a clear why also makes your personal elevator pitch a lot easier to deliver, because you’re not reciting a story, you’re telling one you believe.
I’d love to hear your why. Send it to brian@thebkcg.com or reach out here.
@call_me_bbk
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