Why 51% And 85% Are Key Founder Metrics

What founders can learn from Roger Federer

 In my recent podcast I asked Helen Tanner , CEO and funder of Data Cubed, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bootstrapconfidential_bootstrap-confidential-episode-18-helen-activity-7429780738977452033-FV_Y?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAF1UkEBCY-a17j1ZdCo5zlZPvZI1z0Bcbk, what lesson she wished she had known back when she started and she replied that she wished she'd known that getting right 51% of the time was enough. Winning 51% of the time has now been made famous by Roger Federer in his commencement speech at Dartmouth but from these two numbers, 85% and 51%, which are interlinked, have long been key for founders. To understand why we need to look at the type of culture which a startup needs as it starts to seriously scale https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7417128591777394690. At the heart of any successful scale up is a fast moving blame free culture where decisions are often made on the fly.

Hindsight is always 2020 but decisions in real time are usually far from perfect. One of the issues that catches a lot of founders by surprise is simply the vast volume of decisions that need to be made on a daily basis. As you begin to scale these decisions just speed up and increase in volume. Overwhelming doesn’t begin to cover it and if you’re not careful you can suffer decision making paralysis.

Decision making paralysis is the first step on a slippery slope to implosion and is usually due to one reason. A founder wants to make a perfect decision.

 All founders want to make the best decision possible at all times but what I am referring to here is the situation when a founder wants to be 100% certain in advance that it is the right decision. This is like chasing a unicorn as it is impossible to foretell anything with 100% certainty but lots of founders want to be as close to 100% certain as possible. This is an error and this insistence on being as close as possible to 100% causes over thinking, hesitation, delay and sometimes contradictory instructions.

This is the reason that 85% is so powerful. Every founder must learn to understand that when they get to 85% it is good enough. When you are 85% certain that it’s the right decision you are good to go. This applies not just to decision making but to pretty much everything. A sales campaign, a new product, a marketing initiative- it doesn’t matter. When it’s 85% good enough it’s good to go. Nothing is ever perfect and if you plot the extra time taken vs the increased benefit and value of trying to get something from 85% to as close to 100% as possible you will quickly see why any fast growing startup has to go at 85%. The extra time in going further, even assuming it is possible, causes delays that inhibit growth with little increased value.

In order to be content making decisions and sending products out the door at 85% is something you can comfortably do you need to also understand why it is lined to 51%.

If you are right 51% of the time that is good enough for your startup to continue to grow and scale. As I mentioned Roger Federer now famously pointed out that he only won 54% of his points but 80% of his matches.  Simon Sinek investigated the analysis of this and discovered that what separate the top 5 ranked tennis players from the rest wasn’t skill, talent, stamina, etc it was the ability to forget about the dropped pints or missed shot and focus on the next point. In other words if you can understand that just over 50% is good enough you can mentally recalibrate every time and not be still beating yourself up over the last one when you should be focused on the current point.

 It’s the same for founders. Once you understand that you only need to be right 51% of the time you don’t worry about the failures or making bad calls. You simply see them as stepping stones on the way to success. They seemed right at the time or were good to go at the time and fast decision making is key to maintaining speed.

When you only need to be right 51% of the time it’s much easier to make decisions when you’re only 85% sure. Simultaneously you can't get too hung up on making decisions or launching products that are 85% done when you’re know that they only need to work 51% of the time.

Wrapping your head around these two interconnected numbers is not as easy as it sounds. Instinctively you want to be right all the time and you want to be as close to a 100% as possible when making decisions or launching new products or campaigns. As soon as you can get into the habit of 85% and 51% the speed of decision making in your business will speed up which eventually will always drive faster growth, if these metrics are good enough for one of the greatest tennis players of all time then surely they should work for you 😊