The Journey

Technology is revolutionizing how we live, work, play, and do business. But apps can’t (yet) clothe, feed, or shelter us; we still live in the physical world, and as a result, need tangible products and real-world supply chains to meet our needs.

But tapping into those supply chains and actually getting your idea from prototype to production line to store shelves is hardly an easy feat.

“My dad always says, ‘It's easy to sell [a product]. It's hard to buy it and produce it. That's where you make a business successful.’”

Bill Gamber is the founder of Big Agnes, a company that designs cutting-edge outdoor gear for even the most seasoned backcountry explorers. Coming up with an innovative tent or sleeping bag design is one thing, but actually finding someone who can produce them? That is a totally different beast…

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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.

One of the hallmarks of the human experience is finding where you fit in – what club to join, what sport to play, what friend group to associate yourself with, what career you’re passionate about, what partner to settle down with, what city to plant roots in… the list goes on and on.

And just like in life, in business, a huge part of the struggle is trying to find where you fit. Who is the perfect customer? What is the right way to reach them? Who are the right employees for the job? And what’s the right culture to build for those great customers and employees?

“We have such an amazing team. In a lot of ways, we hired people that we really enjoy being around and that's what is such a great part of what we created is that we genuinely love being together, working together, spending time together… It’s an unbelievable feeling as a founder.”

Vishal Sunak, is the co-founder and CEO of LinkSquares, and he is thankful every day for his amazing team and their growing network of all-star customers. But before he built that, Vishal was just a guy with a great idea but no customers and no employees to help turn that idea into a reality.

Building that framework of the right people is as complicated as designing the architecture of a skyscraper in a big city. But as Vishal puts it, that network means everything.

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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 hear one business story after another, a pattern begins to emerge: that there is no pattern.

There are underlying themes, common lessons, similar key takeaways… but there is no formula for entrepreneurship; no step 1, step 2, step 10.

And that truth is scary... but it can also be a massive comfort, especially when your story starts a little like this:

“When I was between the ages of 21 and 23, I did a lot of crazy stuff, and it all was rooted in a love to party. I liked to do everything to the extreme, and that was a huge issue. When we sold our company, I had 19 cents [in the bank].”

That’s Sam Parr, now the Founder and CEO of The Hustle, a media company well known for their daily tech and business newsletter.

Before he was sending his thoughts and ideas out to more than a million of people, Sam was stuck in a destructive cycle of alcoholism and rebellion – a cycle that left him out of a job, broke, and nearly homeless.

But that’s the thing about entrepreneurship, it doesn’t matter where or how you start, every decision is an opportunity to not just build your business... but to rebuild yourself.

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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 haven’t picked up on it already, startup life is not for the faint of heart… Starting, managing, and growing a small business is a feat few can check off their bucket list.

And as multi-time entrepreneur Sean Chou will explain, it’s easy to tell the story of your company after it has seen success. The arch is clear, the hero’s journey obvious. It’s when you are stuck in the trenches, riding the ups and downs with your team, that you’re haunted by the big question of “What’s next?”

“We were constantly being forced to innovate along multiple dimensions. And I say in retrospect that we were innovating, but at the time it felt a whole lot like we were just making stuff up as we went along, which is of course what we were doing.”

Today, Sean is the CEO and Co-Founder of Catalytic, a company transforming how people work. But before he was helping other business leaders fine-tune their operations, communications, and accountability systems, he spent two decades identifying what works for him and his teams.

And as Sean shares today, it’s investing in the creation of that fine-tuned business machine that makes it easier to not only enjoy the good times but to survive the more ‘innovative’ ones as well.

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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.

How would you define yourself? Are you an introvert or an extrovert? A wallflower or the life of the party? A leader or a follower?

What if, just maybe, you’re a little bit of all those things?

Nick Mehta has gone from self-described wallflower to the CEO of Gainsight and he’s on a never-ending mission to learn and grow into the most authentic CEO possible.

“For some tech CEOs, I think leadership is the necessary evil. They love the product or the technology or whatever. I love the product and the technology. What I really love is leading people… To summarize my philosophy on leadership, probably one of the core things is embracing a style of leadership that's authentic to who I am."

But how do you learn your leadership style and how do you grow into an emotionally composed captain of your company’s ship?

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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.

Businesses are changing all the time. From company-wide layoffs, to acquisitions or exits, to new investors or leadership, to unexpected crises… the list of ways a company can change goes on and on.

Sometimes these developments barely affect the business and how it operates. 

Other times, they lead to massive renovation. 

And it’s during those extreme transformations when you learn a lot about yourself, what you bring to the table, and where you thrive...

“A number of the companies that I have been a part of in the past have been acquired by larger ones. What I found was that when I'm in that sort of environment, the number of moving parts and the ability to move fast becomes something that's really hard to solve. And so I find that my skill set of iterating and iterating fast is much harder in a place where you're trying to keep multiple trains on the track.”

That’s David Chang, the former CEO of Gradifi, former COO of Paypal, former Entrepreneur in Residence at Harvard, and current angel investor and entrepreneur. Over the course of his sprawling career, David has shaped startups at the earliest stages and helped lead established businesses in their later ones. 

Through trial and error, he has learned to recognize where he adds the most value. And it’s understanding what you mean by value and your role in shaping it that dictates how and where you’ll land when your business finds itself facing new challenges or changes.

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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.

Has there ever been a time when you wanted to tell someone something, but the topic was awkward to address, so you never did?

Now flip the question.

Has there ever been a time when you heard something second hand and it was more upsetting than if the person had directly told you?

Communication is hard and having honest conversations isn’t easy. But most of the time it’s not circumstances that get in the way of being open... it’s our internal machinations – our assumptions and emotions – that stop us.

"The missing conversations are the most costly in marriages and companies… When you say nothing about issues, the issues will never resolve. So... whatever your circumstances are, it's so much more costly to not have the conversation."

That’s Stacey Engle, President of Fierce Conversations. Stacey’s job is to help business leaders have honest dialogues between themselves, their colleagues, and their employees - and it’s something she practices every day within Fierce.

Every operation that goes into building a business matters… but they all start with one thing: a conversation. And as Stacey shares today, its conversations - especially the ones you aren’t having - that matter most.

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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.

Humans are not objective, efficient working machines. Even the highest performer faces times when productivity falls. We get too distracted, too confident, too comfortable. We over commit or under prepare. And as awkward or painful as it may be, we all have times in our lives when we need to have our egos checked. Usually - hopefully-  a candid pep talk comes from your friend or a family member looking out for you. 

But in Ben Hindman’s case, that wake up call came from the person you least want to hear it from… his boss.

“I think they were torn whether or not I was the right person for the job. After about two years working there it became clear that I was not, and that was really hard for me… The people who I worked for and worked with were very clear that I was not performing well.”

Ben is now the co-founder and CEO of an event marketing software company called Splash. But before he became his own boss, he was an employee. And as Ben will share today, sometimes it’s the lessons you learn as an employee that set you up best for success when you become a founder.

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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.

Think back to when you learned how to swim. If you were lucky, you started in the kiddy pool and progressed little by little to the deep end. But if you weren’t so lucky... you learned the hard way by being “lovingly” shoved into the pool.

Whether it was gradually or all at once, one thing is true no matter how you learned: Eventually, you just had to jump in.

“I instructed skydiving and… what I learned is that you really pack your own parachute, meaning that you prepare it, you focus on attention to detail, and you execute. And, just as in skydiving, in entrepreneurship, you can prepare as much as possible but at some point, you just have to jump.”

Dyan Gibbens is the President and CEO of Trumbull Unmanned, and jumping into things - or out of things, for that matter - is Dyan’s specialty. As a skydiving instructor and pilot in the military, turned entrepreneur in the civilian world, she knows what it means to be prepared for the inevitable leap.

And as she’ll tell you, in business as in life, preparation is the difference between barely keeping your head above water and being able to swim laps around your peers.

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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.

Serendipity is defined as “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.”

Many of our greatest moments are these moments of serendipity – meeting your partner, discovering your passion, having that ‘aha’ moment while building a business. These are the kind of moments that in a lot of ways define what it means to be human.

And if there’s one thing you can definitely find in every success story, it’s serendipity.

“I wrote a 400-page book, and I joke, ‘I sold 10 copies of that book.’ But one of those copies was to a gentleman who was one of the founders of HGTV, who called me up and said, ‘Hey, I've got your book and we'd like to license it.’”

For Tara-Nicholle Nelson, now founder of SoulTour and of Transformational Consumer Insights, the journey to success started after her lightly-circulated, self-published book found its way into the right hands.

It was that moment of serendipity that transformed Tara’s life and career. And it’s that type of pivotal moment that can change not just your life, but also change the lives of your customers.

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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.