I came across a great video tonight by chance after reading a tweet by @PaulHelmick about something completely unrelated that took me through to his great blog.

I am doing some work for an couple of upcoming pitches we have for Loyality with potential pilot companies and a number of Angel Investors.

This video below features some really good advice from Sanjay Parekh from StartupRiot about creating a great slide deck for pitching your startup. The original video is featured on the brilliant startup blog Startup Foundry.

The core message of the video is that you need to tell a story with your presentation people connect with a narrative and the speaker not facts and figures. Cut out the text it just frustrates people and loses their attention. Make sure you don’t forget the WHY element of your startup, assume the audience no absolutely nothing about your startup.

I would urge anyone who does any kind of presenting to give this video a watch and learn from it’s message.

In a startup even more so than an established business it is absolutely essential you make the right choices when it comes to building your team, this applies to the people you recruit, the roles you create and the timing of these recruits. Getting it wrong can be the difference between success and failure.

First off, don’t rush things, you don’t need to go and and hire an army of people as soon as you raise some money, in most technology startups the biggest overhead by far is people. Finding the right people takes time and effort and you should make sure you approach it this way. Save your cash to make the right hires at the right time.

When recruiting make sure you look at the skill gaps within the team and look at who in your current team is spending time doing something they are either uncomfortable with or under skilled in – for example at OR I have delegated a number of tasks and recruited specific individuals to undertake certain areas of the business that didn’t maximise the use of my skill set or that I didn’t enjoy. The impact of this is that it has freed me up hugely to really focus on the areas of business that I add most value to and ultimately this has led to a great improvement in productivity and profitability.

As well as looking at skill sets and experience it is important to consider the social implications new recruits have and consider personality and team fit. You will have to work long hours and face good times and bad with these people so make sure you can live with them. That certainly doesn’t mean you have to find people identical to you, in fact just the opposite.  Certainly at One Result we have a real mix of individuals who have a wide range of interests and very different personalities and I think that is great as it brings us a wide range of perspectives. The one thing they do all have in common is a passion for technology and delivering great solutions.

A lot has been made recently of Silicon Valleys obsession with Computer Engineering degrees and the Yahoo CEO who may have “misled” shareholders in his bio and an SEC filing about his educational background claiming he had a computer science degree, which he didn’t, this has since cost him his job.

Now personally I have quite strong feelings about this. I didn’t attend university out of choice as I wanted to be out there in the real world working with technology and learning first hand about running a business. That said I am always impressed by people who have attended University and achieved a first class honors as they clearly prioritized their education during their time at university.

Personally having interviewed numerous people straight out of uni who had various computer science based degrees a large majority are absolutely useless, it has not been unusual for many of these so called graduates to score less that 25% on our tests. The ones that stand out are the ones who are passionate about technology and to be honest would be great developers regardless of the degree they have, they typically score over 90% on our tests and guess what these are the guys and girls we employ, some like me don’t even have a degree (crazy huh!).

So to summarise I think that to build a great team for your startup you need to take your time to find the right people, identify the skills and experience you are lacking, ensure the people will fit into your culture and most importantly of all don’t rely on pure academic achievement alone make sure you really test people technically and get them to prove why you should hire them.

Follow these simple steps and you should start to build a great team that can achieve anything.

I absolutely love doing what I do with One Result and to be honest I don’t consider it work.

That said no matter how much you enjoy what you do you have to make time for your friends and family as you can very quickly become so focused on achieving success in your business life that you forget the people most important to you and become extremely 1 dimensional. This is not only unfair on the your friends and family but it will actually hold you back from achieving the success you are focused on.

I recently read a great book called Do More Faster: Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup which is co authored by David Cohen and Brad Feld – Brad writes a fantastic chapter all about discovering a work life balance. Brad talks about how he became technology obsessed, worked incredibly hard and regularly being exhausted (I know the feeling), but as I read on it became obvious whilst he was extremely successful it ultimately cost him his first marriage at just 24 and nearly cost his second. His wife used to get “the dregs” of the weekend after he had slept and caught up on all the things he hadn’t got done in the week.

As I said it almost cost him his 2nd marriage as well – his wife Amy said “I’m done. I’m not mad; I just don’t want to do this anymore. You either have to change or it’s over”

Now I had been reading this and had related to a lot of the stuff that Brad was talking about and this made me sit up and take note. I have an extremely supportive wife Victoria who enables me to focus almost all of my effort on making the business a success but everyone has their limits and it caused me to refocus my ideas, I shared the article with Victoria and said this is me isn’t it, she agreed.

Brads solution that worked for him was to agree to take 1 week off each quarter with No Email, No Mobile and No Computer, his assistant could get hold of him in an absolute emergency but other than that he has unavailable. They also created a date night on the first day of every month.

Now whilst Brads solution may seem a little bit structured for some I think there is merit in this approach that ensures that you do make time for your friends and family and take your head out of the business or “Be a human being Dave” as Victoria says after reading the article and picking up on Amy’s “Brad, be a person”

Ultimately taking this time out will improve your performance in business, make you sharper, more creative and most importantly ensure you have family and friends around you that enjoy spending time with you and understand how much your business means to you.

So with this is in mind I am off to Cornwall for a few days for my first family holiday since my Honeymoon in 2010, hopefully this break will be the first of many and I can start to see the benefits of taking some timeout.

I have been extremely lucky to attract some exceptional mentors to invest into One Result and I am extremely grateful for their continued support and interest. As a group they all have varied skill sets and different approaches so it really helps when faced with difficult decisions to more often than not make the right one. Each individually has had tremendous success in their business life and have exited companies for 7 and 8 figure amounts.

I think when looking for a mentor it is important to find someone who will challenge you at every opportunity, but does not constrain your creativity and ambition. Also you should look to someone who has experience in the particular vertical/sector you are looking to dominate.

What I have found is that most people who are interested in mentoring are not primarily motivated by money, they enjoy passing on their experiences and seeing the impact that their involvement can have on the success of a business. That said you should never undervalue your mentors, with One Result I made a fundamental decision in the first 12 months that I was much, much better off owning a smaller percentage of the company and having a number of great mentors involved. So I got my mentors to invest in me and the company and now have a fantastic board and team of shareholders that provides a sounding board of advice and a healthy stream of new business and great introductions.

I think whatever stage you are at with your business you can benefit from having mentors involved. Running a business is a journey with lots of twists and turns and ups and downs and no matter how super human you think you may be everyone can benefit from a trusted ally.

When looking for a mentor, make sure you consider the 5 tips below.

5 Tips for finding and working with a great mentor

1. Success breeds success – find someone who has already had success in your sector, they will add credibility and value to your business and can stop you making the same mistakes they made.
2. It’s not about the money – people provide the best advice when money is not a motivator, high net worth individuals make great mentors as they look past short term financial gain and give you the honest advice you need.
3. The Little Black Book – everyone knows business is as much about who you know as what you know, make sure that your mentors are well connected and willing to introduce you to their network when the time is right.
4. Respect – it’s essential that you and your mentor can get on, this doesn’t mean you have to be like minded on every topic but there will of course be disagreements along the way. This is to be expected – after all they are there to challenge you, but it is important you take their advice on board and don’t dismiss it quickly.
5. Regular contact – mentors are usually extremely busy people but if they commit to helping you don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and reach out to them if you have a problem, they want to help and will provide the most value if you keep them informed with regular progress updates.

So in summary I can’t stress enough the importance of having mentors in and around your business, they may only be involved a fraction of the time but their impact on the success of you as an individual and your business can be exponential.