Interview with Sean Darras of LUXTECH, Making Millions with Social Impact

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Interview with Sean Darras of LUXTECH, Making Millions with Social Impact

Sean Darras, a Trajectify client and CEO of LUXTECH, a young, innovative LED lighting company in Old City, sat down for an interview with Mike Krupit during Trajectify Live. Sean founded the company in 2012 and over the last 6 years he has filled the company with people who care about the good of the company, the environment, and each person the products touch. The company has had impressive growth, and each quarter brings a new series of challenges for the team to learn from and conquer. In the Trajectify Live interview, Sean and Mike walked through some of the lessons learned in each phase.

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Overcoming Challenges to create 100+ Jobs and a Multi-Million Dollar Business

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Overcoming Challenges to create 100+ Jobs and a Multi-Million Dollar Business

Growing a multi-million dollar company rarely comes easy. The path to success is certainly different for each hungry entrepreneur. Lisa Robinson was one of the keynote speakers with a heart-warming story that opened our eyes to a new perspectives. Her story to success was unconventional. She didn’t start out as the leader that we see today taking over the stage or the owner that the U.S. SBA recently named Eastern Pennsylvania District Minority-Owned Small Business of the Year.

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Mike's Insights on Leadership Communication as He Pushes Himself (and you) To Do More Video

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Mike's Insights on Leadership Communication as He Pushes Himself (and you) To Do More Video

In a recent video, Mike shared three basic and effective essentials to achieve greater leadership communications.  (1) Feel It. You are your company's evangelist, you need to show that passion. (2) Speak It. You need to talk loud and clear. (3) Communicate It. Your words and meaning must be coherent, so write them in advance and practice-practice-practice.

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Peer Groups are more than just Words With Friends

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Peer Groups are more than just Words With Friends

Peer groups are not a new concept. One of the notable first suggestions of the benefits of business peers working together was by Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich (1937). In his huge best seller (some say as many as 20 million copies), he wrote about a “master mind alliance… with one or more persons who will encourage one to follow through with both plan and purpose.” In a later book, Master Key to Riches. Hill writes “every mind needs friendly contact with other minds, for food of expansion and growth.”

Why a peer group is the most powerful business and leadership development tool.

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An Experienced Startup Founder Learns Some New Lessons

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An Experienced Startup Founder Learns Some New Lessons

On the surface, the business didn't succeed inthe first two iterations of IntroNet for the same reason that 90% of tech startups fail: we did not find a product-market fit before the end of our cash. It’s a math equation that is pretty deterministic. Why didn’t we find product-market fit? Perhaps we were solving for a pain (e.g., LinkedIn sucks) instead of a real problem (e.g., I can’t find expertise)? Did we try to change user behavior in a way that wasn’t tractable? Yes, probably all of that. There must already be thousands of blog posts on these very topics of startup road bumps and failures. Search for "reasons why startups don’t succeed" and get many perspectives on the same few themes. I want to share something more insightful.

The fact is that both Martin and I are experienced in startups, entrepreneurship and tech. We built a really good team. With the money and talent we had, the business didn't succeed after two attempts. So what is unique about our IntroNet experience that can serve as lessons for the future? 

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Good Leadership is a Prerequisite for Good Business (#1 of 8 Lessons Growing 8 Companies)

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Good Leadership is a Prerequisite for Good Business (#1 of 8 Lessons Growing 8 Companies)

The first lesson came from my time at KnowledgeSet Corp in the late 1980’s. KnowledgeSet (KSC) was a pioneer in the early PC days, one of the first to put data on a CD-ROM, before CD readers were standard on PC’s or windowed operating systems were the interface to your computer. The company was founded by Gary Kildall and Tom Rolander. It was a company of about 15 geeks - and I mean that with every connotation of the term.

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Passion and Emotion May Be Destroying Your Business

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Passion and Emotion May Be Destroying Your Business

I do think it’s important to be able to feel passion. I have a lot in my life for which I am passionate. I just don’t let passion run my business. That’s a revelation that has come to me over the past couple of years, mostly as I’ve been building Trajectify and able to look at many companies from the outside-in and work with dozens of entrepreneurs. Two years ago, I was likely quoted as saying that passion is the first thing I look at when evaluating an entrepreneur’s business. I was wrong. The way to grow a business is through being practical, measurable, and grounded, not by being “barely controllable.”

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Leave the Office and Make Millions

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Leave the Office and Make Millions

We spend a lot of time in the office - working with our team, on our projects, with our money (investments, revenues). We see our business through the eyes of those who know us well - employees, investors, family. It’s a very narrow perspective that we get when we only interact a typically homogeneous and friendly population. Every week, I drag entrepreneurs out of the office nearly kicking and screaming - they say they have too much work to do! - in order to me to help them view their business by talking with customers, competitors, partners and their market. Here are three stories to show how some of my clients and I did millions of dollars in deals by following an outside in approach.

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An Entrepreneur Makes Their Own Luck (Looking from the Outside-in)

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An Entrepreneur Makes Their Own Luck (Looking from the Outside-in)

Luck, serendipity, and random collisions are often credited in helping entrepreneurs become successful. Being in the right place at the right time can make all the difference. I used to hope that such luck would strike us at one of our startups. Then, someone really smart told me to stop waiting, that luck doesn’t usually happen, that we must make our own luck. I wasn’t sure that I completely believed that luck wasn’t random. And then I met Bianca Thompson.

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Core Values through our Behaviors (and how not to be a Rob McCord)

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Core Values through our Behaviors (and how not to be a Rob McCord)

Whether you're looking for a job or building company, you need to look beyond culture to assess - or establish - core values. The US National Park Service has a good and simple definition for core values: "The values underlie our work, how we interact with each other, and which strategies we employ to fulfill our mission." It's not easy to establish and communicate values. Lots of companies study and publish their values, and many don't do it very well. How many companies think "Integrity" is a core value? Too many. The problem is that Integrity is a high level concept and doesn't necessarily make it clear how we should or will behave.

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It's Never Too Late for Me, BoJack Horseman, or You

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It's Never Too Late for Me, BoJack Horseman, or You

Entrepreneurship favors youth. I coach entrepreneurs of all ages and meet a lot who are 35 and older and appear to be discouraged by the ageism they feel and see. It's part of my coaching to help break limiting mindsets and not let obstacles - real or perceived - get in the way of achieving goals. If you're an entrepreneur that's starting later in your career, or beginning to consider it, I want you to know that there are ways it give you advantage over your more youthful peers. Here are five reasons how your stage of life makes you a different entrepreneur.

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The Difference Between Coaches, Mentors, Advisors, and Consultants

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The Difference Between Coaches, Mentors, Advisors, and Consultants

Too often I hear the terms mentors and coaches interchangeably. I'm sure of you search for definitions, you'll easily find ones that support how you've been using the terms. For me, clarity is important. When I built Trajectify, I wanted it to be clear what it is that I am doing - for my clients and myself. If I could put clarity around the definitions, I could better understand the problem and build my business to serve the greatest need. I looked at four roles - Coach, Mentor, Consultant, and Advisor - and tried to simply describe the nature of the relationship:

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