Building a start-up and finding co-founders in a field that isn’t your core competency.

entrepreneur, start-up, inspiring, journey, success, challenges, perseverance, innovation, motivation, lessons, passion, failure, growth, advice, mentorship

Hi, I'm Rainer. I've co-founded a start-up called NewVolt. We are building a national network of charging infrastructure for electric trucks in Australia. We're trying to get the lowest cost of delivered goods from A to B in a net zero world. My background was not electric trucks or renewable energy. It was actually in software and technology. But I had a passion and a drive to start this business because I saw the impact of diesel trucks on this world and the impact of carbon, particularly in the transport industry. So how do you go about it? Well, it isn't always easy. You need to think more abstract about your skills. You need to think that your skills may be having jumped across different verticals from software and technology, being able to understand different fields, being able to learn different things, who you have worked with, how you have worked, the methodologies with which you've worked. These are the things that you can apply to a new start-up or in a completely new field. And then I think correspondingly, searching out for a co-founder is really, really critical, particularly in a new field. And how do you go about that? And how do you know the right person to start a business with? I think there's a lot of ways. I think one thing you need to think about is managing when you have weaknesses and understanding what they are. So it's a self-awareness about your own skills and your knowing how they match up with someone else very well. I have a fantastic co-founder, and many of his skills match with my weaknesses, and many of my skills match with his weaknesses. And it's really interesting because at times that can cause a little bit of angst, and we have very open lines of communication when it does. But in the middle where we overlap, there's absolutely magic. And it could be that I'm very process-driven and he's a little not process-driven. I'm actually more creative in my process-driven. He's actually a little bit more legal. But we have this magic in the middle where we overlap. How can you do some measurement in this space? I mean, this, I think this is really, really interesting to understand your co-founder's motivations. I would recommend a tool called PCM, and it's a fantastic psychological testing tool. I think it's better than my Briggs or any of the other ones. So that's PCM. Check it out. I think it's a wonderful way to understand your motivations and understand potentially your co-founders' motivations as well, and understand what gets you out of bed in the morning, what motivates you, what excites you, and what allows you to move forward together. But also really, really importantly, when this is where I think PCM stands out above others, it enables you to understand when you're in stress or a little bit of a difficult environment, which we all get if we're co-founders, it is unavoidable to feel these things. What PCM allows you to do is understand what you fall back on in those moments. And I think that is really, really critical to understand because we cannot avoid these situations as founders when we're in these difficult times and it gets a little bit stressful or anxious. So what is the core place or the core characteristics that we fall back on when we're in those moments? Really important to understand and how that matches with your other co-founders. I hope I've been of help, but if you want to reach out and talk about one, starting a new business in a completely different vertical from anything you've done before, because that's certainly what I did, I had no background in renewable energy or trucks, or working with co-founders or selecting co-founders and how you overcome some of those obstacles early on, please feel free to reach out.

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