In this month’s Philly Tech Week and anniversary edition, we brought in guest speaker and product expert Joe Cotellese, who shared his journey to becoming his own boss with some important lessons he’s learned along the way.
Read MoreThe NYC Bootstrappers Breakfast is back… with new mentors to help facilitate serious conversations about starting and growing a business. Thanks to our friend Alex Portera, Co-Founder of Nowhere Men Media, here are a few quick and valuable points from the inaugural NYC Bootstrappers Breakfast comeback.
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 MoreBootstrappers Breakfast is a mastermind-style meetup where we have serious conversations about growing a business. This group offers a combination of brainstorming, education, peer accountability and support in a group setting to sharpen your business and personal skills. As a group, we diagnosed the following four topics: referral marketing as a powerful lead generation tool, the importance of practicing your pitch, learning not to stand in the way of your own success, and validating product ideas through user research.
Read MoreMost of us take care of things that are important to us on a regular basis – maintaining our car, going to the dentist for a checkup, and updating software on our computer. But do we take a step back and invest the energy to look at our business model to see if everything is working the way we’d like it to? When you take time to review your business model, you may be surprised by the value you discover by making some tweaks – or perhaps even reinventing what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.
Read MoreWhen starting a business, it’s no secret there are going to be risks involved and difficult decisions to make. It may take a while to find a steady stream of revenue. One mistake could end up costing you lots of time and money. You’re aware of the relatively high possibility that your company could eventually fail. But most entrepreneurs know this and are prepared to take challenges head-on with grit and determination. Here we share three common challenges entrepreneurs face when building their own business.
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 MoreAs a leader or entrepreneur, you get to create vision, set goals, and define success. As a business coach, I’d be negligent if I didn’t say that money (revenues & profits) is important. A business needs to be able to sustain itself (and its principals, team, investors, etc.). To make money, we need people. To attract and keep people, we need team and well-defined values. There is a direct relationship between money, people, values, culture, and organization. Who you hire and how you lead and build team is critical to the long term success of anything you may undertake where organization is necessary.
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 MoreOn 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?
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreI was at a crossroads. Trajectify had grown to keeping me busy nearly full-time. I was organizing the Philly New Technology Meetup (PNTM). And I had my tech startup, IntroNet. For Trajectify, I was working with private clients, small groups, and doing a lot of speaking and business development. For PNTM, we were growing without bounds (nearly 3,000 members in less than two years), gaining sponsors, doingbigger events. merged with Mobile Monday Mid-Atlantic. As for IntroNet, things got very exciting as we saw a pivot from our introductions systems to doing something bigger and bolder with groups sharing their collective connections, expertise and information. I raised $1M for IntroNet.
Read MoreI 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.”
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 MoreWe 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.
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 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?