🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

Make sure you're aligned with the vision of the founder, because if you have conflicts you know, I think one thing is to be a contrarian, right? To kind of present all sides and all views to see what is possible, but also to make sure that you're aligned to the vision of any founder that you're working for because at the end of the day, what I always tell people, rather bluntly is it's their compa...

Focus. Focus, Focus. I serve on the advisory board of a number of different startups, and the one thing I remind them of is sticking to their core competency. You can't be all things to all people. You need to think every single day when you wake up, it's the number one thing I have to do to survive, thrive and grow. Anything else that does not directly contribute to that quantitative value that y...

Find help to give you guidance because it's so easy to get enamored with your entrepreneurial journey and everything is fresh and new and exciting. We're kind of adrenaline addicts when we're entrepreneurs, so we can get really high off the adrenaline and not really see the situation for what it is. So even though you think you're really smart and you think you know what you're getting yourself in...

Action, taking action, and learning because I think most of us learn best as we're going through the process. We could sit here and talk about business, or you can read books, which are very good and valuable. You can learn a lot from those but most of the time, the best learning is getting out and doing. Not being afraid to take that action, but also being smart about it. Getting a mentor or gett...

Figure out what you are great at and passionate about and as soon as you can get enough revenue going, find a way to extract yourself from every other piece of the business.

Be very frugal and make sure you hire the right people to work with you because you can't do it all by yourself. You need to hire consultants or other suppliers who can do some things for you. Make sure you hire the right ones. I threw some money away on a website company that I hired early on to build a website for me, and they really did a terrible job. They didn't answer my messages, and all th...

Take a look at your business model and the problem that you're solving in the specific space that you're in. There are numerous amount of resources, so educate yourself. There are plenty of resources out there whether it's from funding or whether it's resources. I highly believe your network is your net worth. So utilize your network and learn as much as you can from reaching out to individuals wi...

In general, be ready to not listen to a lot of people, because you're going to hear a lot of no's and don't do that but what the world needs is innovation. As a society, we aren't going to get very far unless there are people willing to not listen to people.  If people only did the easy things, we wouldn't have any innovation. So, yeah, I'd encourage people to go for it. You can try and fail...

It's always be learning, be open. I think I've been doing this for so long. I have proof of concept, of the kind of magic that I can create for the clients that I have but the world is always changing. People's needs are always changing, and there's always something to learn. People are innovating all over the place. So I think that to be humble and courageous and to continue to be open to learnin...

Stretch to yourself early and often. As early and often as you can. When I graduated undergraduate a semester early and I could have stayed for the last one, but I already was thinking that and that time is like, okay, well, I have one more semester of time to fail, make failures to learn from things. I stepped out and left a cushy job as an EVP at a 3000 person company in 2022 and took on those i...

Surrounding yourself with smart people is probably always good, whether those are employees or former employers. I think just being really diligent about the relationships you've built wherever you are in your career. Like, if you've got 20 years like me, or you've got two years and your fresh more, you know, the university is more recent than professional experience, leverage those relationships.

Have courage. You can have courage or comfort, but you can't have both at the same time. So I believe if you're going into a startup, there is nothing safe about a startup. There's nothing safe about anything, to be honest with you but with a startup specifically, you really have to have courage. You have to go in every day knowing that things might not work out the way you want them to and so it'...

You got to change your mindset. I have a lot of people who, during the past few years that I've started coaching, a lot of people who have come from corporate environments, they've got franchises, and they think, oh, man, I know how to run a business. But they also stop looking at the front end of that business. And so how do you get the sales? How do you continually feed that funnel? Has to be to...

Time and time again, you can always talk about sort of technical you can always talk about sort of other aspects like, hey, you need to figure out how you can scalability do something, or you need to figure out what's the return on value or things like that. I believe all those things are to be true, but I do believe that it's one of the most important things to have people that you truly can actu...

Focus on your sales and your marketing. A lot of people always separate two things product and marketing but they're really intertwined because the feedback you get from your marketing should help you develop your product. And the earlier you focus on going through those feedback loops of marketing and selling and figuring out what people like and cutting out what people don't like, the better you...

Coaching. You got to get coaching and the way to do that and the trouble with this, in this day and age that everybody is a coach and you go spend five minutes with somebody on a weekend, it's like, yeah, I'm a certified coach. I would find somebody, In the area that you work in and the area that you want to get great at in your life, I say Google the best person in the world with proven results....

If you are starting and know that funds may sometimes be a bit of issue with people. However, if you are able to get yourself either a business coach or marketing mentor, that would really help amazingly.

Focus on the pace of your learning. As long as you are learning a lot and the things that you are learning are aligned with where you ultimately want to go you can't go wrong. So change jobs, take risks, focus on the person you are working for absorb their brain, gain the skills that you need, and then when that moment of serendipity happens you'd be ready to seal it.

Have faith in yourself and in your abilities and the courage to try. If you are confident in yourself and in your abilities and you have a great idea then you gotta step up to place to win the bet to see if you can make something of it.

Just get started. When it comes to the business plan or when it comes to those ideas that are like the business model, the concept is going to change over time. If you have to balance listen to your customers but you're not gonna ever learn anything like hey if that product was gonna be successful if we can talk about ideas blowing the face but until you're actually hands-on doing that learning.

Start by asking yourself a question - What do I want? Get really clear on what your outcome is. Make it very clear what you want the outcome to be, how you want to structure your business, and who you want to work with. Be clear on the types of people you want to work with otherwise you are gonna end up with people you don't enjoy working with.

Think about the team you are building. In order to achieve the goal that you want to achieve you can't do it on your own, you actually have to have a team under you. Your team is one of the most important assets that you can build.

Validate your idea. Don't write a single line of code until you validate your idea. 80% of startups can actually build no-code prototypes to test out what they are building before they actually go and dive into code. So, really don't write any code, and when it comes to validating your idea go and conduct multiple user interviews and try and sell your product before you have a product to sell and...

Think about the thing that you want or maybe like the person that's doing the thing that you want to do and go to where that is physically and be active there. When people are looking for recommendations, partnerships, or the JVs, they are gonna go to the people around them first and you want to be that person that's on their mind.

Take risks but take risks in a small way if you are trying to start out and build the business. Fail small but think big. So think about where you want to go grant vision but find little chunks that you can build at a time so that you don't just bet the whole farm on one decision.