The Entrepreneur Ethos

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Hey everyone. Stay tuned to the end of the interview where I’ll give you some actionable insights that I learned from my guest. These insights are also in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.

Now on to my guest for today, Bryan Clayton, CEO and cofounder of GreenPal, an app that connects homeowners with lawn care specialists. 

Bryan has been in the lawn care business since he was a kid mowing lawns for his neighbors. He eventually grew his lawn-mowing business into a successful landscaping company that he eventually sold — a rarity for that industry. His next venture was to figure out how to harness tech to help both service providers and their customers. As someone experienced in the field, he understands the challenges providers face, from finding customers to getting paid, but starting a tech company was new to him. He started by focusing on building a roster of service providers, and then went about finding customers to use the app. With some trial and error and lots of feedback, GreenPal has grown over the last 11 years to being recognized as the "Uber of lawn care" and runs thousands of transactions daily. 

While Bryan understood the lawn care business, founding a tech-based company was definitely out of his comfort zone. In this episode he explains how he had to "go back to kindergarten" and realize there was a lot he still didn't know. One critical action Bryan and his cofounders took was asking for feedback on their app when they first developed it, so they would know how to tweak and change it. They also had to work on themselves and "level up" alongside learning how to build the company.

Now, let’s get better together.

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Hey everyone. Stay tuned to the end of the interview where I’ll give you some actionable insights that I learned from my guest. These insights are also in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.

Now on to my guest for today, Jordan Crawford, founder of Blueprint, helping businesses scale by improving their outbound outreach. 

Jordan didn't really find his "thing," until 2016, when he started working on helping businesses grow. In this episode Jordan provides a lot of insights into his strategy and how he uses data. 

Jordan's approach is to focus on problems, not personas. He uses data about people to identify the problems his client is trying to solve. For this he culls data from LinkedIn and looks at people in relevant roles to figure out what the pain points are.

He then uses this critical information to help businesses compose outbound messages to target potential customers. Jordan says that there are a lot of great tools that can help businesses, but what it comes down to is figuring out what to say to someone and how to say it - something only a living breathing person can do. 

Ultimately, Jordan says, a business's understanding of the market must match what customers in the market actually want. To do this, Jordan recommends getting into discussions with customers to really understand what their pain points are as well as using the data.

One unique thing about Jordan’s data is that he looks at job openings. This is a clear sign of a problem or pain point that a company wants to solve because they are willing to spend money to solve it. 

Now, let’s get better together.

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Hey everyone. Stay tuned to the end of the interview where I’ll give you some actionable insights that I learned from my guest. These insights are also in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.

Now on to my guest for today, Jeff Greenfield, a serial entrepreneur who has worked as a magician, chiropractor, and product placement guru, among other roles. His current venture is Provalytics. 

Jeff started out wanting to be a magician when he saw one perform at Disney World when he was just five years old. And that's what he did, putting on shows while he was still in grade school. 

He went to college for biochemistry and while he considered trying to be a magician professionally, instead he became a chiropractor. He had a thriving practice until an injury forced him to find another career. This gave him the opportunity to dive into professionally performing as a magician, getting gigs on college campuses. 

At the time, the internet was in its infancy, but he realized the importance of having a website in order to market himself. After trying to hire someone to build one who failed to do so, he figured out how to do it himself in a weekend. Before he knew it, he was being hired to build websites for other businesses. The next step was to figure out how to get businesses on the web to rank higher, which led him to develop an understanding of how SEO works. He worked with a developer to create an automated SEO platform. 

Though he'd found success and was having fun, Jeff wasn't content to stay where was. He worked in product placement and branding, but soon his projects led him to ask how to better measure the efficacy of the marketing he was doing. The result was C3 Metrics, a platform that's worked with companies like JP Morgan, Hertz and Nestle.

Jeff next tried joining a company's management team, but while he learned a lot, it didn't suit him. He realized that new challenges in the area of marketing measurement brought about by new regulations was an untapped opportunity. So Jeff founded Provalytics to help companies find new ways to approach marketing analytics without the benefit of cookies and other tracking tools. 

Now, let’s get better together.

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Hey everyone. Stay tuned to the end of the interview where I’ll give you some actionable insights that I learned from my guest. These insights are also in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.

Now on to my guest for today, John Li, cofounder of PickFu, an online tool for market research. 

John and his cofounder met as college students and both got jobs in high tech, but they were always interested in starting their own business. Two businesses they started were Menuism, a place where restaurants can offer menus, and Wedding Lens, a place where participants and attendees of weddings could share pictures. In the course of starting these businesses, they developed PickFu on the side to help them with market research. The business grew out of a need to get better feedback about products and marketing. As they saw it grow, they decided to turn their attention to building it as their central business. 

PickFu is built on existing consumer research panels to provide users with fast feedback on business collateral like websites, logos, and ads and products sold on ecommerce platforms. While they started out with providing ways for businesses and entrepreneurs to ask open-ended questions, PickFu has built a resource of templates and best practices businesses can use to create polls. Through the use of such feedback, businesses can gain valuable insight and validate ideas and strategies. 

In this episode John and I talk about the importance of market research and consumer feedback when building a business and how PickFu can help entrepreneurs quickly and easily get the feedback they need. 

Now, let’s get better together.

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Hey everyone. Stay tuned to the end of the interview where I’ll give you some actionable insights that I learned from my guest. These insights are also in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.

Now on to my guest for today, Chad Price, CEO and founder of Life Grows Green and co-founder of Kettlebell Kings. 

Chad was a competitive football player and earned a scholarship to Rice University. After college, he brought that competitive spirit to the business world. He was always interested in entrepreneurship, but decided to join an existing company at first. Once in corporate America, though, he realized it wasn't for him. He didn't want to just go to the office and draw a paycheck; he wanted to make things happen. 

Now over 11 years old, Kettlebell Kings is being acquired by a larger company. In 2019, Chad founded Life Grows Green, which sells alternative health products. 

While he didn't know it when he started, Chad's businesses have become successful lifestyle brands. Kettlebell Kings cultivated a community by offering a good product and partnering with organizations that sponsor lifting competitions. He believes strong connections and positive partnerships are key to building a lifestyle brand. With Life Grows Green, Chad wants to shift the perspective of CBD and hemp products as being "hippie," to being embraced as healthy and viable alternatives to pharmaceuticals. 

Now, let’s get better together.

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Hey everyone. Stay tuned to the end of the interview where I’ll give you some actionable insights that I learned from my guest. These insights are also in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.

Now on to my guest for today, Brent Freeman, founder of Stealth Venture Labs, a full-service growth marketing agency that has worked with such companies as Home Chef, Factor, and MUD\WTR. 

Brent has had his share of failures. He's been an entrepreneur for 15 years, has been involved in 20 startups, and is founder of eight of those. He describes his experiences as "failing forward," taking what lessons he's learned to eventually find success. 

Before starting Stealth Venture Labs, he was using this knowledge to help other entrepreneurs, too. Nine years ago, he realized he wanted to do more than just advise others; he wanted to be part of business-building again. Originally founded as a studio to help e-commerce brands go to market, Stealth Venture Labs evolved into an agency that provides growth marketing services. However, Brent explains, the company is more like a "staff augmentation team," differentiating itself from other agencies by focusing on performance rather than time spent, where each team focuses on a company to help them grow. His agency provides a month of free onboarding and then contracts on a month-by-month basis to ensure clients are getting what they need. He says this unique approach is key to their success.

Now, let’s get better together.

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Hey everyone. Stay tuned to the end of the interview where I’ll give you some actionable insights that I learned from my guest. These insights are also in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.

Now on to my guest for today, Krish Ramineni, CEO and founder of Fireflies.ai, a tool that takes notes - and more - to help knowledge workers be more productive. 

Krish got his start with Microsoft as a product manager after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania. He explains that his primary responsibility was having a lot of meetings. With meetings costing a lot in terms of money and time, Krish wanted to find a way to more easily record what happened during the meetings and be able to easily refer back to the conversations. For people who have 5-7 meetings per day, as much as 50% of the information gained from those meetings is lost. 

With the rise of Zoom and virtual meetings during the pandemic, it's no surprise that Fireflies AI took off. But, Krish says, it's actually seeing faster adoption now. The tool accrues value over time, Krish explains, as it builds up information and knowledge that you can go back to to analyze patterns and find key details. Krish is also dedicated to providing transparency with the product, explaining that everyone in the meeting knows the tool is being used. In fact, it is its visibility that has helped make it such a success. Another tool, Ask Fred, takes the usability of Fireflies even further by providing a way to easily search for information from the knowledge base created by Fireflies. 

Now, let’s get better together.

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Hey everyone. Stay tuned to the end of the interview where I’ll give you some actionable insights that I learned from my guest. These insights are also in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.

Now on to my guests for today, Aakash Shah and Damian Felchlin, founders of High Time Foods, a company that provides meat alternatives to the food industry.

They met in business school at Babson College. Aakash is from India and Damian is from Switzerland, and both have backgrounds in the food industry. They saw a need for an alternative, shelf-stable protein source, so they played to their strengths. They won money at pitch competitions, enabling them to launch their company last year, with their first customer being a Mexican restaurant in Boston. 

The mission of High Time Foods is, as Damian says, very data-driven. They want to turn around the high level of carbon emissions caused by the meat industry while also helping people in circumstances where they don't have access to or can't afford refrigeration. They see their product as being attractive to "flexitarians," meat-eaters who are exploring plant-based alternatives. They ultimately hope that their product will be an affordable, sustainable option for meat, regardless of whether their customers are vegan, vegetarian, or flexitarian.

Now, let’s get better together.

And if you want to check out the vegan Mexican restaurant in Oakland I mentioned:

Vengazafoods.com

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Hey everyone. Stay tuned to the end of the interview where I’ll give you some actionable insights that I learned from my guest. These insights are also in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.

Now on to my guest for today, Eleanor Beaton, a business coach for women entrepreneurs and former CEO of a communications consulting company. 

Eleanor explains how she went from journalist to starting her own business. Both of her businesses were prompted from someone else's suggestions, and in both cases she was skeptical but did it anyway. As she ran her business and sought ideas and support for growing it, she noticed that the coaching and training that existed seemed to mainly speak to men or were too superficial, what she calls "Cosmo-ification." The kinds of discussions male entrepreneurs were having were different from the discussions women were having, and she wondered why, and what women might be missing. 

Eleanor saw the issues women founders faced in her communications business, and she decided women needed support and help in ways that most of them were not getting. One observation she makes is that most of the teachings around entrepreneurship have come out of Silicon Valley and tech entrepreneurship. But service-based businesses, of which many women have, aren't being served well by these teachings. 

Eleanor's observations, questions and frustrations led her to starting a podcast and developing other resources for women entrepreneurs, which has become Safi Media. She seeks to make a space where women can talk to other women entrepreneurs and learn from each other, breaking out of the "bro" culture of entrepreneurship. 

Now, let’s get better together.

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Hey everyone. Stay tuned to the end of the interview where I’ll give you some actionable insights that I learned from my guest. These insights are also in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.

Now on to my guest for today, Kim Sorrelle, a longtime entrepreneur, director of the humanitarian organization Rays of Hope for Haiti and author.

Kim's first and second book were written in wake of tragedy. In this podcast, Kim opens up about her experiences with her husband being diagnosed with cancer, followed by her husband's death just six weeks later. Married out of high school, Kim built a life and family with her husband by her side. To cope with the experiences and grief, Kim wrote and shared her writings by email. That resulted in her first book, Cry Until You Laugh. 

Her second book, Love Is, draws on Kim's experiences of losing her husband and also her humanitarian work in Haiti after its disastrous earthquake. It was written in response to her search for the real meaning of love, using the famous Biblical verse from 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 that starts, "Love is patient, love is kind" as a guidepost.

While there's no magic answer for getting over the devastating loss of someone you love, Kim offers some good insight into how she has coped with grief, including deciding to choose the things you can control and being of service, which gives her purpose. 

Now, let’s get better together.

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