🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

You need to be really really introspective. I know a lot of CEO's that were really happy as the number two in their previous company. As the COO, or CFO or whatever and they are miserable as CEO's. I have hired a number of folks who will tell you they want to be in start ups, who desperately want this to be the right path for them and they should be working at Bank of America. There is a very different support structure that comes with a big company and if your mind set is how to I extract the greatest value for me from this company you are going to have a hard time with a start up.

We had a lot of people on our rookie roaster and I was leader in charge of the rookie class because I was determined, I believed in myself, and I made it happen. Even in business when I discounted myself sometimes saying oh your just an athlete, oh you don't know much about business, This and that. Just believe in yourself and make things happen. It's literally the truth. If you can tell yourself that you really believe that, not just tell yourself that but really believe it, I think anything is possible so you can make it happen.

The most important thing is to keep learning and be an infinite learner. No one is born an infinite learner or made one over night but you need to practice that. You need to constantly grow yourself as a founder, CEO, or as team member, you constantly need to grow. Growth is the only solution. That would be my advice. Keep learning no matter what. You need to enjoy learning and it will give you are really good results.

Value pricing mean that, where our focus as a business is how can we create more value for our clients? How can we change their lives? How can we make as big difference as possible? Knowing that the more of a difference we make, we can also charge a higher price. We create a win win. We both win from that. The customer gets a better result/solution and we get a better price and make more money. So we need to shift away from this cost plus mentality towards value pricing.

My business partner Jill, she owns several companies and has a parent company that runs them all. Since she owns a portion this company, I now have access to her CFO and all the accounting and book keeping that she does. That is part of her investment. She has a cash investment as well as a sweat equity investment in the form of development resources as well as some financial resources. Financing and accounting resource. She did some cash investment as well as sweat equity, so I was able to off load the thing that I will put if off till I am dead cause I hate it. I think my advice is just make sure you know what you like to do and what your good at and find people to come up and help you with what you are not good at.

My piece of advice would be to trust yourself. You are going to make mistakes. I am sure there is not an entrepreneur out there, there is not a business owner out there who said oh yah this is a very smooth process and I came up with this idea, I built it and everything worked perfectly just like I thought it would.  Everybody goes through these growing pains, struggles and self doubt. Every entrepreneur has these stories of yah we are struggling, things are hard, a lot of night working, trying to make this work. If you don't believe in yourself, if you don't believe in your product then you will never go anywhere.

I would lean into partnerships. One of my partners is really good at board of directors, getting all the structure set up, a phantom stock and all of that advance stuff that I don't fully understand. I do know that something I have learned is that partnerships are great. If you can bring people in, even if it's for a small  percentage of your company or even if it is conditionally based I love that idea. It gives people skin of the game and they want to make it work.

Despite everything I went through go after your dreams. Go after what it is your heart tells you that you want to do. For me it's worse to live in the what would have been and regret decisions I didn't make or things I didn't go for versus going and learning. Your going to learn. If you accept that failing is also part of succeeding then that is all part of the big lesson. If I  were to sit back and wonder what would have happened if I had actually done that non profit thing, Put a little bit more effort into that. I Can't live with that kind of regret.

Do your research and take the time to understand the different segments within your market so that you don't have pointless conversations. Your not talking to the wrong people. Sometimes you have to talk to the wrong people to know that you're building the right thing. You want to keep those wrong conversations to as few as possible.

So this led me to create Techspeak for entrepreneurs which is a program where I teach a ten step process that I personally use to mange developers, help entrepreneurs with communication to be able to understand all the tech speak and all the jargon around how to build a start up. Then learn the entire process so they can gain their confidence back and be able to mange and lead with confidence and get the team aligned with what needs to be done so that you can minimize mistakes, spot the read flags sooner. It is unrealistic to never make mistakes but, the sooner you can catch them the less money you are spending and the faster you can course correct.