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One thing about a startup is that you’re continually being challenged by your budget. It’s a nasty beast that threatens the vision you’re trying to shape on a daily basis, and unless you learn how to tame it and make it work for you, you’ll face huge challenges down that final mile to your launch date.

One important factor in shaping the use of that budget is defining your weak points and addressing them. It’s pretty easy to identify strengths, but defining the areas you’ll need help with is something you should work hard to identify earlier rather than later. It can be scary, but identifying your weaknesses early is a key to any success in early stage companies. Once this has been achieved, you have a few choices of addressing them dependant on how strategic they are to your plans where consultants and contractors offer a boon of resources that usually provide a hell of a lot more bang for the buck than hiring staff.

You like to think you’ve covered your bases when it comes to the key components of your management team, such as technical, marketing, sales, finance etc… but working with experts who live and breathe one of these verticals daily makes all the difference. Working in a startup requires a generalist’s approach even when focused on a particular area, and just the mere distractions that occur on a daily basis can take away from the output in areas you consider yourself to be an expert in.

One thing I truly believe is that when it comes to certain key areas, you can’t “No Frill” your way to success, and I was reminded of that after a 3 hour brainstorming session with the brilliant Marketing/Design team we contracted to help us with the brand strategy of our closed beta. We went through a thorough RFP process to identify our vendor of choice, but after the legal contracts were out of the way the fruit really started to shine as we’ve progressed to digging in on actual work.

I’ve learned it’s very important to focus on quality versus quantity when outsourcing important segments of your project. Identify the best, because even though they may be pricier than someone in your family or network, the output is almost always worth the expenditure. Top firms, whether they are a law firm, design firm, marketing firm, or tax consultants, attract the best talent when they consider new additions to their team. That talent and the associated deep resources are what you’re trying to leverage with your limited budget. Even though they may take a somewhat bigger piece of your budget pie, the odds are in your favor that they’ll have the resources and creative to go beyond your expectations in filling out your weak points.