Starting from Nothing - The Foundation Podcast | Building your business ENTIRELY from scratch.

Almost exactly a year after she went part-time, Cat Lavery’s life has changed beyond recognition. Since she joined The Foundation, she followed the process and embraced the concept of idea extraction, developed her product and accomplished $6500 of pre-sales. She has also made $25K through a Kickstart campaign, learned to understand copy and made some great friends along the way.

Ari Weinzweig is the co-owner and founding partner of Zingerman’s – a deli company. Having started off in 1982 with a $20K bank loan, Ari has helped lead the company to be the $50 million company, with a staff of 675 that it is today. Having adopted an open book policy, concentrating on energy management and employee engagement, Zingerman’s has consistently grown and are used as a shining example of how empowering employees works to the benefit of everyone. 

Chris Stevens was another one of the top Foundation students from last year. When he was feeling thoroughly disillusioned with his job as an IT Consultant, Chris attended a conference in an attempt to rejuvenate his work. The opposite happened and he was ready to give up, but when he joined The Foundation, Chris found his ‘why’ and learned how to focus on being happy and fulfilled through his work.

Chris Wackerman was another one of the top Foundation students from last year. When he was feeling thoroughly disillusioned with his job as an IT Consultant, Chris attended a conference in an attempt to rejuvenate his work. The opposite happened and he was ready to give up, but when he joined The Foundation, Chris found his ‘why’ and learned how to focus on being happy and fulfilled through his work.

Rich Armstrong is the President of the Great Game of Business and helps established businesses to grow by empowering their employees. Rich’s expertise come into play when businesses reach a state of ‘no man’s land’, where they have grown enough that they need to start relying on other people as an entrepreneur cannot get everything done. Through Rich’s help, businesses can expand organically, ensuring that employees are happy, involved and working towards a common cause.

Katya Dominguez has been through The Foundation program and is just about to quit her job to work full time on her own business. Her career as a successful business analyst wasn’t giving her the fulfillment that she was looking for, so she decided to look for something that did. Having followed The Foundation framework, Katya has found her business growing steadily and is now looking at ways that her business can help her to give back and pay forward.

David Hassell is the founder of 15Five – a company who has developed a SaaS product which helps communication within companies. He is a long term entrepreneur but only really began to feel fulfilled when he started using his skills to change people’s lives. David has concentrated on nurturing the right culture within the company which has resulted in 0 employees leaving involuntarily, and helped his company to grow from strength to strength. 

John Logar is The Foundation’s Number 1 student from last year in terms of sales. He has smashed The Foundation records by selling $120K in his first 6 months and has done this by using idea extraction, listening to potential customers and then helping them to solve their problems. John has fully embraced the idea of pre-selling and is continually using this to grow his business, and his next goal is to rack up multiple pre-sales of 6 figures.

After the success of the 50th episode, Dane and Andy get together again to discuss and debate the concept of alignment. They have both recently been looking into the deeper aspects of entrepreneurship and alignment is a topic that is close to both of their hearts. The idea is that being in a state of flow and alignment means that success and happiness naturally happen in all areas of our lives.

Josh Pigford is the founder of Baremetrics, an analytic platform for Stripe, which he developed last October. He needed analysis software for his own businesses and when he couldn’t find anything which wasn’t extremely complex he decided to build his own. With a bit of help from Twitter, he got his first customer on the first day, and has since bootstrapped to see almost instant success.