As an entrepreneur we make plenty of mistakes. Some trivial that have no impact on the business, yet others are much larger and can greatly affect the operation.

Entrepreneurs are required to wear many hats – when you first start the company you are product development, investor relations, sales, marketing, finance, accounting, administration, HR, custodial and so on. While you wear those many hats, you can’t possibly be an expert in all of them.

My biggest mistake came to fruition just over a year after starting the company.  I used to always say “our greatest asset and biggest liability was me not being a tech person.”  It benefited us greatly because I didn’t think narrowly about the business, but not having a tech background (mine is in marketing) didn’t give us a subject matter expert for our software.

They key:  surrounding yourself with people who are subject matter experts or have experience in doing this before.  This is where having a cofounder or advisor to strengthen your weaknesses can be the difference between getting funding and going to market or crashing and burning.

For me, I needed a CTO (chief technology officer) or key advisor who could be our eyes and ears with the product and give us honest and good intentioned advice on the decisions we were making. Because we weren’t experts in that area, we relied on the outside development company to be our CTO.  The problem:  they were only concerned about their company and didn’t care about ours.

Looking back it was ridiculous to start a tech company without someone with a tech background on our team. But hindsight is always 20/20, and the mistakes we made – while painful and costly – taught us invaluable lessons about where we needed to go as a company.

They say when one door closes, another door opens.  For us, the struggles and challenges we faced because we didn’t have a CTO allowed us to pivot and find new paths to sell our product. Now some of those opportunities probably would have presented themselves regardless – which would have saved us the stress, time and money of learning these lessons – but the key is we kept fighting and moving forward even in the face of adversity.

Today, we have our own development team who is amazing, completely invested in the product, and bring their own ideas to the table (which are always better than mine).  We have two senior leaders who are our subject matter experts for the platform, database and technology we are using.  My knowledge in the field has certainly grown as well (enough to be dangerous), but whether we are talking to a potential investor or business to business client, we have people on our team leading the discussion about the product.