How to Think Strategically About Spending Your Startup Funds
This may seem a bit outside of the scope of our normal conversations of grant funding tips and tricks, but just as important as grantsmanship are the overall strategies needed to help you get funded. If you’re just starting a faculty position and working on building a successful research career, it’s crucially important to know how to lay the groundwork for continued grant success.
So let’s dive into that with a focus on start-up funds.
How Faculty Tend to (Mis-)Use Start-up Funds
The whole point of your start-up funds is to get you started. But beyond spending some of those funds on your lab essentials (e.g., equipment), many early career faculty view their startup funds as a finite resource that they need to rely on to sustain them through some rough patches or use as bridge funding between grants.
Ultimately this approach comes down to seeing start-up funds as a safety net instead of being proactive and using those funds to become successful.
And there are a couple of reasons this happens.
You see start-up funds as a pool that you have available to spend instead of a pool of money that you can invest to achieve a specific outcome.
You don’t yet have the confidence to bet on yourself and your ability to secure grant funding.
This ‘security blanket’ approach prevents you from using these funds as a tool to get your foot in the door at NIH and any other granting agency.
Think Of Your Start-Up Funds as a Tool to Invest in an Outcome
The first thing to do is to think about your start-up funds as a tool you can use to invest in a specific outcome. To help you think about this a bit differently, let’s use the analogy of being a small business owner (which I happen to know a lot about, since I am one).
I know that this may not be how you want to think about your career (who chooses a research career thinking that they’re going to run a small business?), but there are some striking similarities—namely, the constant worry about where revenue is going to come from.
One of the greatest shifts in my business happened when I realized I needed to invest in the outcomes that I wanted, particularly when it came to generating revenue.
Ultimately, what I learned was that—especially in the early days of running my business— the best investment I could make was in my own ability to generate revenue consistently.
Early on, that looked like building my skills, and later it looked like hiring staff to take over some duties, and eventually, that led to me hiring consultants to help me strategize about how to improve areas of my business that would increase my revenue.
Let’s bring it back to you and your research. One of the smartest things you can do is invest in your own ability to secure grant funding.
This could look like building grantsmanship skills or hiring someone to take on some of your other duties so you can focus on grant writing. It could even look like hiring a consultant who knows how to get your R01 in fundable shape and across the pay line (ahem! I can help with that).
No matter how you choose to do it, investing in your ability to secure multi-year, multi-million dollar grants over and over again is always going to give you a massive return.
And because your startup funds are finite, being able to leverage those funds to get you the biggest return on your investment is always going to be hugely important. And that’s why it doesn't really matter how much you have in startup funds. What’s more important is how you leverage those funds to your advantage.
And I can’t emphasize enough just how vital investments are in your own ability to secure grant funding. This is the key to the highest possible return on your investment you will ever get. Betting on yourself is always smart.
How to Use Your Start-Up Funds Effectively
Most early career faculty struggle with a lack of confidence around their ability to secure grant funding. It makes sense: you may have had success with smaller grants or career development awards that focus more on your potential - but as soon as you’re entering the grant writing big leagues and trying to secure enough research project funding to run your lab? With success rates as low as they are? That’s understandably daunting.
It makes sense that you’d hold onto your start-up funds to protect your “inevitable” downfall.
A lot of this worry stems from the unfair stories you tell yourself, but it’s also tied to that first point of investing in your own ability to generate grant funding. So, in essence, you’re worrying about not being able to secure grant funding as if it’s completely beyond your control. But it’s not.
Back to point #1: what you actually need to do is develop that ability to consistently, repeatedly secure grant funding. Again, there are plenty of ways to do that, and I recommend that you take advantage of all of them at some point.
Developing grantsmanship skills will build your confidence and your ability to secure funding.
Hiring well and Delegating tasks so that you can focus more of your precious time on writing grants will help you think and communicate more clearly and confidently.
Working with an expert who knows NIH inside and out and knows how to position your grant most competitively so you can actually get across that pay line.
Building up your ability to secure grant funding (and then succeeding!) is the greatest confidence boost any early stage faculty member can get.
Invest in Your Own Ability to Secure NIH R01 Funding
Betting on yourself can be a scary proposition, but honestly, what’s the alternative? What does your career look like if you don’t bet on yourself?
If you want to be a leader and enjoy a long, prolific research career, you’re going to have to take some risks. You’re going to have to trust yourself and your ability to figure it out, even if you don’t have all the answers right away.
But again, if you’re investing in your own ability to secure grant funding, that’s going to create long-term security and stability in the long term, which is exactly what you’re relying on startup funds to do in the first place.
So if you take that long-term perspective with your startup funds and think about investing your funds to generate your biggest return on investment, that’s going to set you up for long-term success.
Strategic Grant Reviews for NIH R01 Resubmissions
As a grant consultant who works with PIs to get them funded, the work we do has proven to be one of the best investments you can possibly make in your research career. Why?
Because we remove the risk.
If you qualify to work with us in our strategic grant review service, we promise that you’ll achieve a fundable score on your R01 resubmission. And if you don’t, we’ll work with you again on the same grant for free.
So investing to work with us is a way to generate a massive return on your investment, which means you can count on having grant funds to pay for things you may have previously considered paying for with your startup funds.
Which is ultimately where you’re meant to end up, right? Having grant funds to pay for your research costs, salaries, etc.
If you’re ready to make a smart long-term investment in your research career and start trusting your ability to secure funding, apply for a strategic grant review today!
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