The Journey

Being too young, or being too old. Having an accent. Overcoming a disability. Being female or a person of color. 

These so-called ‘boxes’ that we fall into shouldn’t play a role in how others see us or how we see ourselves, yet so often we find ourselves trapped by the burden of our labels.

Dionna McPhatter has a different perspective. In her opinion, standing out doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, with the right mindset, it may just be a superpower.

“Everyone has the boxes that they check, but seeing those as a superpower that can allow you to connect dots for people is how I would encourage people to see themselves,” says Dionna. “Maybe I can connect the dots between two disparate rooms and use those things that people see as a difference or a reason to classify me as a point of connection.”

Dionna is the co-founder and CEO of Nacci, a company on a mission to use data to help us all unlock more of our humanity. Over the course of her impressive career, Dionna has learned one thing for sure: that connections matter. 

Sometimes what gets us in the room isn’t always what we want to get us in the room… but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing if you learn to leverage those points of connection for good.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A huge part of growing a business is understanding what can scale and what can’t.

What will HR, sales, marketing, customer experience, employee experience, or even the foundational business model all look like as the company grows?

The truth is that none of these systems will look exactly how they did when you started. It could be like comparing apples to oranges when you put Iteration 10 up against Iteration 1.

Scale requires doing things that don’t scale and then pivoting.

“Our journey is full of these experiences where we legitimately have survived off major pivots and doing things differently at every point of scale,” shares Ryan Smith.

Ryan is the co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics, a company that he started in his basement with his dad nearly 18 years ago.

During those years, Ryan has faced a number of what he calls ‘success disasters’ – moments when something so great happens that it breaks your current system.

And that’s the problem with scale – if you aren’t thoughtful, it’s the very things that are supposed to grow your business that may very well destroy it.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Every decision we make brings with it a certain amount of risk. Sometimes the risk is so small it’s negligible. Other times the risk is so daunting it scares you into submission.

Going all-in on a new and novel business idea, saying no to the steady paycheck and yes to financial instability, investing your life savings with a co-founder you know well but maybe not well enough… these are common high-risk, high-reward scenarios that entrepreneurs often find themselves in.

To the outsider looking in, these situations are far too risky to be taken seriously – to engage in them is not only irresponsible, but foolish.

Tiffanie Stanard has a different opinion… She believes that risks - big risks - are absolutely necessary for success. 

“You have to put yourself out there. … If you're not happy with what you're doing – if people don't know about what you're doing – then what's the point of doing it?”

Tiffanie is the founder and CEO of Stimulus, a relationship intelligence software suite that helps companies build better relationships.

But before she was leading Stimulus, Tiffanie had to make the leap from having a stable income to being her own boss – a decision that taught her if you aren’t ready to go big… then get ready to go home.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We’ve all heard some variant of the phrase “Good business is just about building good relationships.” 

But, as true as this statement is, it’s also true that building and maintaining good relationships is hard - it takes time, thought, passion, and connection.

And perhaps one of the most challenging business relationships to nurture and keep healthy is the relationship between co-founders.

“Starting a company, no matter how much experience you've had, is always a challenge. And it starts with the founding team... You have to have the same vision. You have to be aligned with what you want to create.”

Kraig Swensrud is the Founder of Qualified.com, and partner to an all-star team of co-founders. 

The commitment of time, money, and mental bandwidth that “going all in” requires is all-consuming to say the least. But doing it with a co-founder - or co-founders - who you trust is the secret ingredient to making it all a bit more manageable, and also making it a lot more fun.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you are a fan of this podcast, then you are likely a business owner, an aspiring entrepreneur, or at the forefront of innovation within a growing company. Today, you are the one creating jobs, but think back to when you were the one applying for them. How much did you get paid? Were you paid fairly? Were you paid what you were truly worth?

These are difficult questions, but questions that Cynthia Medina Carson faces head-on every day.

“There was a woman who literally found out her colleague was making 30 K more than her, and she was there longer. [But] she had that information and she sat on it for like two months, just not knowing what to do with it. When we talk about wage transparency and salary transparency, the data is a piece of it, but then what are we doing to transition people to a better space?”

Cynthia is the founder and CEO of WAGER, a company helping create the space for individuals and businesses to have a more open dialogue about pay. 

As an employee, the benefits of salary transparency are pretty straight forward – more transparency equals more fair pay. 

But as an employer, the conversation around pay is an often-avoided one. Cynthia is here to tell you that it shouldn’t be and that for a competitive, growing business, salary and promotion transparency are the way of the future.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When you live in a world of curated feeds, it can sometimes feel impossible to know what’s real. Finding the companies and people who are making genuinely great products while maintaining the values that you support is like finding a needle in an ever-expanding haystack. 

And when you are the company trying to stand out in that haystack, how do you gain the trust of customers to show that you are the real deal? 

“We connect brands to their fans, but also we connect fans to each other. And the way that we do that is not based on any basic metrics. It's not based on how many followers somebody has. It's not about how much they bought from you as a brand… How we have attracted so many fantastic brands is that we bring back this layer of true fans that has possibly been lost in the world of influences and views.”

Amber Atherton is the Founder and CEO of Zyper, a company dedicated to connecting the real users of real products to create a real community.

It’s a process that leverages the oldest marketing tactic in the book – honest word-of-month – and is based entirely on two key values that can define an organization inside and out: transparency and trust.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There’s an old saying that goes “Man plans, God laughs.” 

Things very rarely go according to plan. No matter how meticulously we think ahead, the path toward our goals is always subject to roadblocks and detours. But while the journey might rival Pan’s labyrinth, the BIG dream – your ultimate goal and your vision – lives unmoving at the end.

“When I was 18, I was reading about Y Combinator in Silicon Valley from my house in Barcelona. I would always see it as something that's so out of reach… I would have never imagined that I'd be where I am at today. [I realize now that] you really need to be careful about the dreams you choose because maybe they will come true.”

That’s Anna Piñol, the CMO and co-founder of grocery-delivery service Jupiter. Anna’s dreams have required her to leave her home, travel around the world, settle into a new country, learn to fight off self-doubt, AND dive deep into entrepreneurship.

It was – and still is – a challenging journey. But in Anna’s opinion, it’s actually the initial process of defining your dreams that might just be scarier than the path it takes to reach them.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Journey is on break this week, but don't let that get you down! We will be back next week with an all-new season focused on community-building inside and outside your organization. Don't miss it!

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

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Interested in commerce? Check out our newest podcast, Up Next in Commerce, at mission.org/upnextincommerce.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

As we grow up, moments of stark realization are inevitable. Our parents don’t actually know everything. Dinosaurs don’t still exist. A whole dollar isn’t really that much money.

For Warren Schaeffer, one of those moments meant coming face to face with the darker side of entrepreneurship at a young age.

“When I was 12 years old, my father's business totally failed. He went bankrupt and I ended up living with another family when I was 13.”

In Warren’s opinion, there are two ways that businesses die. Number one, they run out of money – like what he witnessed up close and personal as a preteen. 

Or, number two, the founder quits. 

Ensuring your company is making money – and not losing it – is the most basic operation of a business, one every founder, investor, and startup employee is constantly taking a pulse on.

But quitting, giving up, moving on from the project you began... That’s a less discussed, yet very real, founder struggle. 

And the key that helps not only prevent these negative outcomes, but gives a company the traction to find massive success… is having the light of a North Star to guide them.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Leading a team onto the battlefield of business – or quite literally a battlefield – isn’t for the faint of heart. Being a leader is about setting the route for others to follow; it’s a huge responsibility that often results in having to make extremely difficult decisions.

“A month or two into my role as a platoon leader, I'm brand new leading a tank platoon with 15 soldiers and I had to fire my platoon sergeant. And the platoon sergeant is the key guy who is driving the organization. As a 22-year-old kid, that's probably the hardest decision I ever made.”

Chris Hsu is an Army vet, business vet, and current entrepreneur. Cultivating strong teams and successful leadership models has been Chris’s MO since his first job in the military.

The list of reasons a start-up can fail is endless, but leadership is at the heart of many of the issues young businesses face. And no matter how brilliant your product or business is, with poor leadership, success will be hard to come by… and even more difficult to hold on to.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.