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My recipe for building trust isn’t "working hard"

My recipe for building trust isn’t "working hard"

This one thing can become your super power

February 25, 2023

When you start anything new, there is an overwhelming sense of needing to prove your mettle and merit.

The long term play is showing up and getting the work done—there is no shortcut around that.

But there is a shortcut to a pressure relief valve in the early days. This trick works for any stakeholders or boss, and will quickly build confidence in your superiors.

That shortcut?

Over communicate.

The scenarios and recipes

My readers here are a mix of founders and leaders. I’ll give examples for both, starting with founders. The leaders section also applies to founders.

Communication for founders

Within the founder archetype we have a lot of types of founders—bootstrapped, angel funded, and VC backed. Even if you don’t have investors, you still have stakeholders. Bootstrapped (self funded) founders will benefit from over communicating to cofounders, employees and even early customers about their progress—it builds trust. Founders who have raised capital will find tremendous value in over communicating about the company’s progress to investors before they even ask—it again builds trust, and makes the next funding round easier and faster.

I went full time with GoWild in 2018. I started sending monthly investor updates to investors that fall, and still send updates (although I’ve moved to quarterly now). My updates were thorough, highlighting revenue, sales pipelines, new hires, product developments, challenges, app growth, etc.

Today those updates have become more focused, including a brief letter from me, and updates around five pillars—Culture & Team, Marketing and Growth, Product & Member Experience, Financials, Key Performance Indicators and a link to an interactive Tableau dashboard showing all of our growth metrics. They’re factual, have fewer superlatives and the systematic approach makes the task of crafting the update quick for me and sets expectations for investors on what’s coming each quarter.

I meet founders all the time who complain about investors who hound them for information. Every time I ask them how often they send updates, they say something like, “Yeah, I need to do better about that.”

GoWild’s investors rarely ask for updates, because we are constantly sharing how the company is doing. Bootstrapped founders can similarly over communicate about the company’s progress to their cofounders and team (actually, funded founders, you need to over share with your team all the same). Simply sharing this information can be a seismic shift in an organization’s culture, because the team feels the momentum. Otherwise, they’re left in the dark and they will always come to a conclusion about the company’s health—make sure it’s a well informed conclusion.

I will share a personal success story with this approach below, but first, let’s talk about how this can work for other leaders.

Communication for leaders

Similar to founders, leaders have to over communicate to their team. A well informed team functions with a singular focus, mission and cadence. When leadership lives in secrecy, toxicity forms in the shadows. I have seen this time and time again, and I’m sure more than a few of you would agree.

But what to share and to whom?

For most leaders, there are two levels to this. The first is your team. I share very openly with my team about our funding, runway, revenue and potential clients. Much of this goes into our Slack (chat platform), but if it’s something I want to ensure doesn’t get lost in the banter, I’ll email it. We even built a Slack bot that reports hourly revenue to our entire team. They know exactly what’s happening with the company at any given time, and that narrative is coming directly from me, the CEO. We believe an informed team makes better micro decisions throughout the day, which compounds to mean a healthier company.

The second point for many leaders is going to be your superior. This actually works for any position, and is literally a super power if you can master it. Just how some founders complain about investors, I often hear people complain about bosses who harass them. The one surefire way to kill this behavior is to smother your boss in updates. Once a week, sit down and send your boss an email with all of the work you’re doing—project status updates, jobs completed, deadlines hit, task barriers, etc. The goal is to not complain, though—this is critical. It should be a brief, factual memo, not a novel about office place drama. I recommend setting aside 30 minutes per week on your calendar for this task.

The results of over communicating

Founder success story

In 2019, my investor updates were jam packed. I often found myself struggling to decide what information to leave out. I told the story of how we were growing, got into one of the top accelerators in the country, were landing monster partnerships, and so forth.

At the end of the accelerator in July, we were launching a funding round. I had laid the groundwork for months—GoWild was blowing up, and our investors had seen the progress. Via email, I announced that we were going to raise a $1M funding round. We closed $850,000 in a mere two weeks, and barely lifted a finger to do so. Investors knew the story and were happy to jump in. Some deals were literally closed via text message. Had I not over communicated, I would have been forced to try and pack in all of that excitement into individual updates with each investor and it would have been a grind to get to $1M. Instead I simply said we were opening a round, and the FOMO kicked in.

Please know I don’t say that to brag—I’ve never told this story so publicly. I see enough value in the lesson in communication here that I’m going to allow myself to be vulnerable to potentially being called a braggart because I see too many founders screwing this up.

Founders, you will never regret creating a process for sharing your story with your investors. (I could write an entire post about how you owe this to them regardless, too, but we’ll save it for another day.)

Success for the leaders

Time and time again, my team shares directly with me how much they appreciate our openness at GoWild. My nature is to just be raw—I don’t have the competence to hide truths or lie, I’d never remember who I told what. You may have the mental capacity to spin those false narratives, but you’re building a team on a cracked foundation. In due time, the whole house will crumble.

As for managing up, it’s key to remember most bosses aren’t harassing you—they’ve probably done a poor job checking in and are panicking because their superior is putting pressure on them. The best way to fix this is to ensure they always have what they need in hand. When they ask you for information you’ve already sent, politely give them the answer and say, “and if you forget, that answer is in the update I sent you last Friday, too. So you can reference it there if you need it.” My, how fast you will become their favorite.

3 steps to over communicating

1) Choose the frequency

It’s the same for any audience. You need to choose a timeframe that is not a burden for you, and also allows for you to have enough to write about. I used to do monthly for investor updates, but it became too much work. I switched to quarterly, which was more attainable and still kept our investors properly informed. Pick a cadence that works for you, and just go. You can always change it.

2) Set recurring time on your calendar

This sounds silly, but I don’t care how organized you think you are, if you don’t have a dedicated time set, you won’t do it. I have recurring meetings on my calendar specifically for preparing this information.

3) Share the good and bad

One of the most important things to remember is this is not your hype song. If you turn your updates into cupcakes and rainbows, you’ll end up doing more harm than good. Your stakeholders can see through that BS—everyone faces hard times. Share the challenges, and talk through how you’re working through them. What seems like a weakness is often a chance to show that you are tough, smart and can conquer adversity. Being strong enough to realize this? Another super power.