ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator

Welcome to 2023! Ready to get back in the groove? This year, I start by renaming my Podcast - and  tackling a hugely problematic pattern that can eventually kill your business. First the name change. After tackling saying the mouthful of  Rocket Ship Business Academy for 27 Episodes, I've changed the title the much simpler and on point Rocket Ship Founder.   Less is more. Simpler is...

Wow, hard to believe we are at the end of 2022! All this week, I've been working with my clients to take stock of progress in 2022 and set up to crush the first six weeks of 2023. In this week's Rocket Ship Business Academy Podcast episode , I share the sequence of exercises I take my Founder clients through to set them up to come out of the gate roaring in the new year. I cover how to: Recognize...

This week's Rocket Ship Business Academy Podcast episode is one of my most personal. I hope you will find valuable to you as a Founder, but even more importantly, as a person. This week was a challenging week for several of my Founders. There was dev team drama, co-founder dysfunction, product milestones slipping, big clients wins falling through at the 11th hour, dealing with crazy...

When I was running my startup I loved solving complex problems and creating elegant solutions. As a Type V - Visionary Evangelist Founder Type. And I had a good talent for it. But like a lot of things that helped me in the early stages of my business, my love of creating elegant solutions for complex problems ended up working against us. How could that be? Here’s how. One of the biggest killers of...

For the past few months, I’ve been almost exclusively focused on accelerating product market fit and sales. That’s because when it comes to accelerating your business, there’s nothing bigger than accelerating product-market fit and scaling sales. But this week, I’d like to shift gears and talk about something that  for Founders, is even bigger than sales, bigger than building and growing your...

I’ve had a few conversations with First-Time founders over the past week that have gone like this: “So, what’s your strategy for build your pipeline and sales?” “Mainly thought leadership and content marketing. “ You may ask yourself, “wait, what could possibly be wrong about thought leadership as a sales strategy?” Well, that’s the thing. Thought leadership isn’t actually strategy. It can be an i...

I see a pattern over and over again with both my businesses and the Founders I work with. There’s three times we kinda get kicked in the teeth. The first is when we just launch and test our vision with the market. The second is when we get initial traction and think we’ve cracked it. The third is when we’ve cracked it and then we’ve got to scale it. I think of these phases as: Find it, Nail it, Sc...

If I could only solve one single challenge for Founders, what would it be? Answer:  Accelerate scalable product-market fit and sales. Because if you figure out this challenge, you have the fuel to figure out all the other challenges. But it’s a big challenge for any B2B business. And there are so many variables and angles on it that it can be overwhelming for First-Time Founders to figure out...

As Founders, we dream of building a rocket ship business that takes off, makes a huge impact and creates tremendous financial abundance.  It’s a wonderful dream. The reality, of course, is it’s really hard to do. We can’t flip a magic switch and suddenly have our business 10x. But what if we can find places in our business where we can accelerate 2x? Because before there’s a sale, there’s an...

Founders who work with me know hear something over and over. They hear it so much, they probably get annoyed with me. But it’s the essence of my work. And it’s critical to their success. Here’s how it goes. Client or prospect comes with a laundry list of updates and challenges. Then I dig in with questions and together we figure out “THE problem to solve.” Because usually there’s one underlying pr...

This month is all about troubleshooting sales, the most common pressing challenge selected by the 2000+ founders who have taken my Founder Type Quiz. One of the biggest challenges for any Founder or business is Product-Market fit. Often product-market fit is seen as a distinct challenge than sales. But in my experience, looking at product-market fit as a specific type of sales challenge is really...

This month is all about troubleshooting sales, the most common pressing challenge selected by the 2000+ founders who have taken my Founder Type Quiz. Today I was talking with one of my clients and he mentioned that they decided not to renew their social media agency, since they weren’t getting any ROI (something that’s all too common). He was going to turn his attention to their website and update...

This month is all about troubleshooting sales, the most common pressing challenge selected by the 2000+ founders who have taken my Founder Type Quiz.  Recently, when I asked the question, when it comes to sales, what’s your single biggest challenge, one subscribers responded: “Our sales is complex AND is highly affected by timing.” I have personal experience with this as my first startup, the...

As typical of many Founders, I was always looking for the silver bullet: that one thing  that would enable us to bust through and get that rocket ship momentum.  We need a killer new product or feature, I’d think.  ​Or we'll get on Hubspot and when the content happens it’s all gonna take off.    ​Or now that we’ve spent a fortunate on Salesforce, it’s gonna happen. &n...

This week’s podcast episode comes in response to yet another question from my list - and it’s one that’s sure to resonate with many Founders. When asked what their single biggest challenge is, this founder answered: ”Scaling to increase revenue and expand services.” Scaling sales is a big topic. There’s a ton of information out there on positioning, building funnels, doing cold email outreach, con...

This week’s episode of Rocket Ship Academy Podcast comes directly from a question from my list: S hould Founders be equally going about building up a personal brand at the same time we are building up our non-personal companies? For instance, my company is a software and digital publishing company. Should I be actively promoting myself (e.g. puff pieces about me in magazines, 40 under 40 list etc)...

” I don't know if it's covid related but prospects that expressed interest are very slow or don't get back to me. How can I get them to respond to my follow ups without feeling like I'm pestering them?” This week’s Rocket Ship Business Academy Podcast episode comes from a question I got in response to my recent question to my  list, “What’s your biggest current challenge?” When prospects show...

I was in the process of writing my weekly Sunday Steve email for my coaching clients, when I saw an email from one of my clients pop into my inbox,  "Are you available today for a quick call today? I need some support in planning our next moves before Monday kicks in." This Founder is facing some very hard decisions. Decisions that need to be made quickly and involve dramatically shrinking th...

Steve"But they looked great on paper...." One of the most common challenges I hear Founders facing is a recent hire that didn’t pan out. It’s one of the most frustrating aspects of Founder life. It feels like you spend a ton of energy, time and money only to end up back where you were, having to start over to fill that position. In this week's episode of the Rocket Ship Business Academy Podcast,&n...

In this week's episode I describe the 3 stages of your business: Handcart, Locomotive and Rocket Ship. Clocking in at insight-packed 12 minutes, I talk about how your business needs to evolve and how you as a Founder need to evolve with it. Just a few of the learnings I discuss: 1. How to reduce overwhelm by working on the right problems for your stage. 2. Why Handcart to Locomotive stage is the h...

In this episode of the rocket ship business academy. No matter what’s going on in our business, the real action is inside of us. In this episode, I am reading from my book 33 Meditations for Seed Stage Founders. This is a book I wrote in 2020 when I gave myself a challenge to write a daily meditation on entrepreneurship - based on quotes from philosophers and thinkers who I admired. This is Medita...

As a Founder, you’ve likely learned the important of metrics for your business. The thing is, there are so many metrics to choose from. There are financial metrics like revenue, gross margin and profit. There are marketing metrics like CAC and churn. There are product metrics like Net promoter score and month-over-month growth. All of these metrics tell you really important things about your busin...

When I started out as a Founder, I believed that product innovation and brilliance was THE key to creating Rocket Ship success. However, business is a merciless teacher. As my first startup grew in fits and starts (and was outgrown by competitors with less innovative products), I learned the hard lesson that product/service brilliance only gets you so far.  ​​It's the ability to execute,...

There was a point during my first startup where I thought the whole thing was going to slide off the cliff. This wasn't in the early days - it was later on after we had momentum. We had a stupendously bad quarter and lost over $250k, which was catastrophic for us. It felt to me like we were really strapped and extremely thin on resources. I brought in a contract COO who help me right the ship and...

In every Founder journey there is a moment (sometimes more than one) where you find yourself at the bottom of the well. Frustrated, burnt out, feeling defeated, isolated, knowing you have to keep going, but having a hard time seeing how. In this 9-minute episode: I share my own experience at the bottom of the well Why I call them "Swimming pool moments"' Why these moments are crucial for you 3 thi...