Execepreneur: From Executive to Entrepreneur

Tamara Nall founded The Leading Niche, a consulting firm to the federal government and larger firms.  She shares with us the secret of growing her company to $4M in revenue - the relationship map.

For complete show notes: http://www.launchandlead.com/20 

Rachel Rodgers started the Rodgers Collective, a cool, innovative take on a law firm.  She has grown the company over the past 5 years or so, and has lot to share, including a great way to think about protection as an entrepreneur.

Four questions for Rachel this week:

For complete show notes, visit www.launchandlead.com.

Rand is known as the Wizard of Moz - the godfather of SEO and all around highly respected online marketing thought leader.  He's the founder of Moz, a suite of popular tools to help build and manage your online presence. The episode covers the six different channels to market your business online, and talks about how to focus your activities on what's most relevant for your business. The Venn diagram Rand mentions is certainly a game-changer if you’ve been wading through tactics (vs. strategy) to build your online presence.

Brittany Hodak is co-founder of ZinePak, a company that creates custom, interactive publications for super-fans. They partner with top brands and entertainers (ahem... Taylor Swift) to elevate regular consumer promotions (e.g., CD in a store) into an interesting and memorable experience. Several months ago, they were invited by Shark Tank Producers to pitch their company, and walked away with an offer of $725,000 from Robert and Lori.

We had 5 questions for Brittany this week:

1 – How’d you get the company off the ground?

2 - Tell us all about your Shark Tank Experience

3 - You’ve had fantastic growth - what’s been key to your customer acquisition strategy?

4 - What has been critical to growing the business well?

5 - Tell us about how your Shark Tank experience inspired you to start a charity?

For complete show notes, visit www.launchandlead.com.

Aman Advani co-founded Ministry of Supply while at business school at MIT. They have created the performance professional category - business professional attire that's actually comfortable.

You can see from the way they run themselves that they’re engineers solving problems in  the fashion space. A Fast Company piece on them put it this way “its conception, its design process, and how it interacts with customers, Ministry of Supply arguably has more in common with the likes of Apple and Google than with J. Crew “

So that's why we wanted to Amam - to understand how they've applied that hypothesis driven testing approach to the fashion space, and how you can leverage testing to benefit your business.

www.launchandlead.com/mos

How have engineers created a new clothing category?

"We think with our engineering hats on more than we do with our fashion opinions or ideas. It's a deeply rooted customer insight-based focus on how can we create a new category that is not just creating a slightly better pair of socks - but a truly rethought pair of socks or rethought undershirt"

My questions this week?

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Gary Swart joined oDesk in 2005 as CEO and led the company for over 8 years, turning into the market leader in the online work industry. It was the first workplace to reach $1 billion in work, and has over 5 million freelancers and thousands of jobs posted daily. Gary led the company through a merger with #2 player eLance before leaving to join Polaris.

In this episode, part II of our conversation, he shares with us the importance of focus in a company, iterating quickly, why he thinks being an execepreneur is a good idea – and why he’s ok being hit by a pitch.

My question for Gary this week: Having been involved with large corporations like IBM, and a number of startups, what motivates you to help grow small to large and what’s your advice for execepreneurs?

“I remember flying home from Seattle in a small Alaska Airlines plane and I got claustrophobic… I said I don’t want to wake up 15 years from now saying I didn’t step up to the plate.  That wasn’t going to be good enough for me.  Even if I didn’t hit the ball I wanted to stand at the plate”

Questions: