🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

Find help to give you guidance because it's so easy to get enamored with your entrepreneurial journey and everything is fresh and new and exciting. We're kind of adrenaline addicts when we're entrepreneurs, so we can get really high off the adrenaline and not really see the situation for what it is. So even though you think you're really smart and you think you know what you're getting yourself into, there's so much that happens behind the scenes to make a company successful and have the longevity that it is worth investing in, getting a coach to help you to pivot to success and build things up properly.

Action, taking action, and learning because I think most of us learn best as we're going through the process. We could sit here and talk about business, or you can read books, which are very good and valuable. You can learn a lot from those but most of the time, the best learning is getting out and doing. Not being afraid to take that action, but also being smart about it. Getting a mentor or getting other people that are ahead of you to have taken that journey, hopefully learning from their mistakes so you don't have to repeat those. Take action, even if it's just baby steps because taking that action is key.

Figure out what you are great at and passionate about and as soon as you can get enough revenue going, find a way to extract yourself from every other piece of the business.

Be very frugal and make sure you hire the right people to work with you because you can't do it all by yourself. You need to hire consultants or other suppliers who can do some things for you. Make sure you hire the right ones. I threw some money away on a website company that I hired early on to build a website for me, and they really did a terrible job. They didn't answer my messages, and all that was just not a good relationship. So be very careful with who you hire and get references. Talk to people and make sure you have the right helpers. I think that's crucial.

Take a look at your business model and the problem that you're solving in the specific space that you're in. There are numerous amount of resources, so educate yourself. There are plenty of resources out there whether it's from funding or whether it's resources. I highly believe your network is your net worth. So utilize your network and learn as much as you can from reaching out to individuals within the industry that you're in.

In general, be ready to not listen to a lot of people, because you're going to hear a lot of no's and don't do that but what the world needs is innovation. As a society, we aren't going to get very far unless there are people willing to not listen to people.  If people only did the easy things, we wouldn't have any innovation. So, yeah, I'd encourage people to go for it. You can try and fail quickly, that will help but just do it.

It's always be learning, be open. I think I've been doing this for so long. I have proof of concept, of the kind of magic that I can create for the clients that I have but the world is always changing. People's needs are always changing, and there's always something to learn. People are innovating all over the place. So I think that to be humble and courageous and to continue to be open to learning.

Stretch to yourself early and often. As early and often as you can. When I graduated undergraduate a semester early and I could have stayed for the last one, but I already was thinking that and that time is like, okay, well, I have one more semester of time to fail, make failures to learn from things. I stepped out and left a cushy job as an EVP at a 3000 person company in 2022 and took on those interim CMO roles at the startups and what I'll say about that is I learned a lot from it and I'm better because of it. So always just trying to stretch yourself, always just trying to keep learning. Always learning.

Surrounding yourself with smart people is probably always good, whether those are employees or former employers. I think just being really diligent about the relationships you've built wherever you are in your career. Like, if you've got 20 years like me, or you've got two years and your fresh more, you know, the university is more recent than professional experience, leverage those relationships.

Have courage. You can have courage or comfort, but you can't have both at the same time. So I believe if you're going into a startup, there is nothing safe about a startup. There's nothing safe about anything, to be honest with you but with a startup specifically, you really have to have courage. You have to go in every day knowing that things might not work out the way you want them to and so it's easy to choose comfort, it's easy to choose the option where you feel like you're the safest, but courage is what takes you to the next level.