According to Michael Watkins you have the first 90 days of a new job to make your mark in a company.

Nine days in to my new role with Pollenizer, where we work with many early stage web start-ups, I can report it’s unlikely a start-up would exist after 90 days if that was the case.

The principals of Watkins lessons still stand – that you have to adapt and change rapidly – but you have to do it in a much quicker timeframe and within your (limited) budget.

The advantage ofcourse is that start-ups tend to have leaner teams, in fact they often only consist of one person with a bright idea that they’ve executed after-hours from the spare-bedroom (no, it’s not a cliché).

But this also what allows them to be agile and execute change rapidly. In fact you have to be agile, and if you aren’t, you’re doing it wrong. It’s something we are big on here at Pollenizer and we try to test ideas and measure successes as quickly as we can.

Ninety days to find that your approach isn’t valid is simply not viable and probably means you’ve spent a large proportion of your budget on an idea that has no foundation.

So while Watkins lessons have some resonance in big corporates, I’d propose that the start-up alternative to “The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels” would be about the first 9 days.

We’d like you hear your stories about the first 9-days of working in or running a start-up. We’ll give the best comment  a copy of Four Steps to the Epiphany by Stephen Blank.