Every year, Trajectify coaches and clients put together a list of books they've been reading and recommending. With summer approaching, vacation time and opportunity for days away from the office ensue. Wherever your adventures take you (even if it's just in your backyard hammock!), use this OOO time to de-stress, reflect, read, and learn.
Read MoreI attended my first Philly Tech Week (PTW) in 2012. There weren't a ton of events, but my notes say I attended 14, and scheduled another 8 meetings in between events. Pretty intense, especially for someone who leans introvert. That year I also hosted the first Philly Bootstrappers Breakfast during that week (more on that below).
Read More"How can you think out of the box when you spend your day in a box?" Why is it important to get out of the office? People are the core of my business - and likely yours, too. Strengthen relationships. Meet new people. Find opportunities. Let serendipity and collisions happen.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreI was planning to be entertained, which I was, but surprised at how many notes I took. Speakers like Ed Mylett, Andy Frisella, Hank Norman, Tim Storey, Micheal Burt, and Lewis Howes were surprisingly moving and informational - hence motivational. I also got to meet Silicon Valley mogul Naveen Jain. We also had speakers for sales training and marketing education, one who sold $3M in product right after his presentation. Who needed training when you could watch the masters sell right in front of you?
Read MorePeer 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.
Read MoreWith summer upon us comes an opportunity for days away from the office - fun Fridays, vacations, hammock and beach days, or quiet mornings at the campsite. If you’ve planned for it, you should be able to turn off “work” for a fews days or more and shift your balance. Tune your body with healthy activities. Fuel your body with good food and drink. Then feed your mind. Take this opportunity to read, learn, and reflect.Trajectify coaches and clients each year share what we’ve been recently reading and recommending. We hope you find something here to enjoy and grow your awareness, skills, and confidence.
Read MoreAmidst the tension, I was making every rookie management mistake in the book. Except I didn’t even have a book. I had no management experience and no training, nor did anyone around me. I made hiring mistakes. We were offered a course on Behavioral Interviewing, (which was the best thing I learned and saved my book, 20+ years later, pictured here), but even with the training, I put the wrong people in the wrong jobs. I recall my QA Manager being a disaster. There were other performance issues on my team. Wondering what to do when I found an employee sleeping under his desk. I didn’t know how to handle any of them. I tried to use my engineering skills to fix the problems, but you can imagine how that turned out.
Read MoreI just got back from Suzanne Evans' Be The Change Event - something different that any event I’ve ever attended - with lots of stories and lessons learned, some of which I’d like to share. The punchline - which you’ll get if you read further - is that you need to keep an open mind and look for learning in every situation. While I’ll likely never be a member of Suzanne’s “tribe” or attend the event again, what she taught and how she executed gave me some invaluable lessons, one’s I’ve already started to use, and I think made me a little less judgmental.
Read MoreIn April, I was invited to participate in the first ever Tech Meetup at the White House. Organized by Meetup.com and the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Megan Smith. Tech Meetups have been around for about a decade. They are events where new technologies and new tech companies get to demo and network with a community of entrepreneurs, techies, service providers, and investors. They’ve evolved to also include education - speakers, lectures, courses and classes. I co-founded and co-organize the Philly New Technology Meetup along with several Bootstrappers Breakfasts. It was an honor and privilege for me to be part of the first Meetup at the White House.
Read MoreWhether 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.
Read MoreEntrepreneurship 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.
Read MoreToo 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:
Read MoreStartups and Small Businesses sometimes find themselves at the edge of a chasm. With success in developing and growing their business, a stage is reached where they find that the "next step" is a big one! Trajectify partners with the entrepreneur to build momentum and trajectory to be able to cross the chasm.
We offer private and group (Mastermind) coaching and hold frequent events and seminars.
Trajectify is founded my Mike Krupit, veteran of eight startups. Mike has helped dozens of companies grow and mentored and advised hundreds more.
Ask a room of leaders why they set goals and most will say accountability. That answer creates the problem. Goals exist for alignment. The company needs to reach a number, so this group does this, that group does that, and together the math works. Everyone is pointed in the same direction. Focus comes second. A good goal tells you what to say no to.
The instinct to build a team that moved in the same direction, at the same pace, with the same set of perspectives is limiting. Consistency is created at the expense of range. The goal isn't alignment of strengths. It's coverage. The most dangerous teams I've seen weren't the ones with conflict. hey were the ones with none. Where every conversation ends in agreement. Where nothing gets surfaced. Where the people who see things differently may have learned to stop saying so.
The same restlessness that makes it hard to stay on plan is what made them start the company in the first place. The wandering mind, the refusal to be satisfied with what already exists, the ability to see something before it exists: that's not a disorder. That's the source.
If you're building a company, knowing your role isn't optional. The visionary needs someone who will build what they see without getting in the way of the seeing. The integrator needs someone who will point at the moon and mean it and keep pointing at the same moon long enough for the bridge to get built. The mistake I see most often: trying to be both or hiring someone who mirrors you when you need someone who complements you.
The fear of success doesn't usually announce itself as fear. It sounds like planning. It sounds like due diligence. It sounds like being responsible.
What it actually is: A limiting belief. It’s spending today's energy on problems you'll only face if you win
Right people, right seats doesn't mean everyone eventually moves into a leadership role. It means finding the seat where each person does their best work and building a structure that makes those seats worth staying in. Create a path for people who want to grow as individual contributors. Create a separate path for people who want to lead. Reward both. Respect both. Pay both.
Don't prevent scraped knees; prevent bus crashes. A scraped knee hurts. You might carry the scar for years. That's the point. The pain is proportional to the lesson. A bus crash can lead to catastrophic loss. The project. The company. The relationship. Something that can't be recovered. The leader's job isn't to eliminate mistakes. It's to know the difference between those two things.
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Sometimes exploration is worth it. Sometimes you just spent a week of the team’s attention answering a question the founder could have tested in an afternoon. That is the part I think leaders underestimate. Ideas do not only cost money. They cost time, focus, and brainpower long before anyone approves a budget. The question I’d want answered is: how much of the organization does this idea deserve yet?