From Concept to Company: The Early Operational Lessons we Learned

‍GrowthFactor is a young company with a small team..  Thriving with a small team means learning how to run the most efficient business possible, and it's been a pretty cool problem for me to solve as our Chief Operating Officer. Over the years I’ve learned how important the small things are to the whole machine running smoothly, and I’d like to share a bit of what I’ve learned.
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From Idea to Execution

You may have a great idea for a new company–perhaps it’s the application of a new technology, a way to do something better, or the identification of a customer base that could be served by a new product. You may even be right and on the path to build a household name. 

However, even the most groundbreaking ideas don't automatically evolve into billion-dollar enterprises. They don't inherently attract venture capital or generate revenue simply because they exist. So, how do you transition your idea into a tangible, thriving business? 

This question has been my responsibility to solve. We definitely did not get everything right on the first try, but learning from what we did wrong has been one of the more rewarding aspects of this experience. I know I couldn’t do what I am doing without the input of others, so I hope my story serves to help any aspiring founders or early-stage operators wherever they are in their journey.
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The “Boring Stuff” That Matters

When we first started GrowthFactor, I volunteered to manage all of the minutiae involved with “turning the company on.” My cofounders, who took on the responsibilities of more conventionally interesting things like software development and customer research, looked at me curiously when I did. To me, however, these “boring” problems are the most fun problems to solve. I bucketed all of these tasks into the “operations” function and thus advocated to give myself the title of Chief Operating Officer. If there was a light switch that needed to be flipped, I was the one who wanted to do it.

‍I had previous experience operating in ambiguity at two early-stage startups, so I felt like I would know what I was doing. However, as I learned quickly, very little can prepare you for actually building a company from scratch other than actually doing it. We weren’t perfect, and we made some errors that leave me scratching my head wondering why we did what we did. If you are reading this, you are probably interested in learning how to move past mistakes that allow you to not break the startup you are building. For my experience, three rookie mistakes stick out, and hopefully by sharing them you can learn to not make them yourself.
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#1. Incorporating the Company: Lawyers don’t know your business as well as you do

One of the first things we needed to do was actually create the company. There are a few major decisions we had to make here: Who were our lawyers going to be? What kind of entity should we create? Where would we locate the company? Who were the officers? 

We answered the first of these questions quickly, selecting a law firm that one of us had worked with previously. Thinking that all law firms had the same set of capabilities, we unknowingly selected a law firm that lacked experience working with startups and entrusted them to make these other major decisions associated with our incorporation.

As a result, our first corporate entity, “Growth Factor AI,” was incorporated as a Massachusetts S-Corp, as that was the type of corporate structure with which this law firm was most familiar. As I am sure anyone reading this with experience in corporate law is saying in their heads right now, “this was possibly the worst way that we could have set up a new startup” (for reasons worth getting into in a different blog). Today, I can laugh at how silly we were to not know that on our own.

As a result, once we made the decision to do our first SAFE note a few months later, I got to learn how to do something else for the first time: completely shut down and close an entity. Our new entity, GrowthFactor, is a Delaware C-Corp, as it always should have been.

Down arrow: Ensure the law firm you choose specializes in your area, and validate major decisions they make with other sources. Also, unless there’s a good reason, you should probably be a Delaware C-Corp.
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#2. Building Systems: Be realistic about your capacity and leverage software and third parties to reduce the time you spend on ancillary activities

When we were setting up the first entity, my focus was for us to operate as lean and scrappy as possible. To me, this meant doing things myself that could otherwise have been done by systems or contractors that I would have to pay for.

For instance, our accountants recommended hiring a dedicated HR firm. At the time, with only the founders involved, I assumed I could handle it myself. In practice, this meant diving headfirst into the complex world of tax filings and employment law. I soon realized how ill-prepared I was—after all, the U.S. Tax Code alone spans more than 6,800 pages. Building an effective HR system wasn’t just another task; it was a specialized field that experts spend their entire careers mastering.

Fortunately, I got a second chance on this. When we set up our second entity, one of the first tools I purchased was a PEO to ensure that I would never need to personally file payroll taxes again.

Down arrow: build the systems you think you’ll need six months from now, don’t be stingy paying for the tools that will save you time.
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#3. Building the Team: Be serious about job descriptions

Building a startup with friends and classmates is a lot of fun. Especially when in an environment like business school, it can be tempting to have a “the more, the merrier” mindset with respect to building an initial team. However, if you intend to be serious about building a company, it is essential to have a clear idea of the roles and responsibilities for every person you bring in.

To this end, while it might feel like a silly activity at such an early stage, take the time to write out the job descriptions for each person on the team. In fact, I would suggest spending at least one hour each quarter repeating this exercise. Ensure that each person has a clear set of responsibilities and capabilities that they bring to the team, and that you don’t find yourself having to invent job titles or activities to justify people’s membership on the team – if you do, you’re opening the door for a tough conversation a few months down the road. 

It might seem in the team’s best interest to keep friends around, but if any job descriptions cannot be easily written, a conflict is guaranteed to arise down the line. Take it from me, it was a hard but necessary decision to ask someone to leave the team if their role and responsibilities were not serving the growth of the company. 

Down arrow: push yourself and your team to ensure that your roles and responsibilities actually align with business needs through formal job description drafting.
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Conclusion

Building a successful company isn’t about having a perfect blueprint from day one. It’s about acknowledging mistakes and learning from them. For us, missteps in incorporation, operational systems, and team structure taught us invaluable lessons that now guide how we run GrowthFactor.

Over time, the “boring stuff” becomes more than a set of tasks to check off. It evolves into the backbone of a sustainable, scalable business. By sharing these lessons, I hope to empower other founders and early-stage leaders to embrace the operational challenges they face—and ultimately turn great ideas into thriving companies.