The future is uncertain, and the businesses that succeed will be the ones who prepare for it. They’ll do more than a quick risk assessment. They’ll follow a series of careful steps to ensure they’ve planned for whatever lies ahead.
Read MoreGrowing your business has costs — time costs and money costs. Making sure even the smallest investments pay off is key to growing organically and without big cash infusions you may not have.
Read MoreAt some point, that do-it-all person will have to stop doing and start delegating. Otherwise, they’ll begin to feel like they’re on a hamster wheel — doing what they’ve always done but suddenly getting nowhere. Making that shift is challenging. In fact, it’s one of the most difficult, yet important, transitions founders go through.
Read MoreThe concept of a coach used to be reserved for athletes. Now you can hire a coach to help you with everything from weight loss or parenting to public speaking and career transitions. So with all these coaches running around, how do you know what’s a worthwhile investment of your time and money?
Read MoreAll those important lessons you learn over the course of a career can actually hurt you if you don’t know when to set them aside. You have to see when it’s not a time to be the seasoned CEO and instead lean into your role as the scrappy founder — even if this isn’t your first (or your seventh) rodeo.
Read MoreManaging your business’s finances might not feel intuitive. Many of us begin our entrepreneurial careers with a great idea. We spend the rest of that career trying to understand all the moving pieces that will make it profitable. There are people that will give you numbers. The truth is that there’s no clear rulebook. These profit and investment calculations are individual to each business.
Read MoreTrajectify's new Business Coordinator shares the ups and downs of a six-month job search after the pandemic left her industry in decline.
Read MoreHere’s the truth: Our plans for 2020 got blown up. Everyone’s plans. We didn’t plan for our lives or our businesses or our cultures to get this disrupted. Back in the spring, we got scrappy. We came together. We figured out new ways to do things. Back in the spring, we thought we were trying to weather something that would be a few months long. Now, we’re tired. So, what’s the antidote?
Read MoreBeing part of building a seventh company taught me many things. It taught me that tech entrepreneurs can’t do everything — more than that, I learned that honesty about how your skills and expertise line up with what you’re trying to build is much more important than a passion for what you’re selling.
Read MoreMany entrepreneurs believe that being led by their passion is a prerequisite for starting a successful organization. Definitely for starting one that they’ll enjoy running. The problem with this narrative is that passion does not equal success. In fact, I would argue that too much passion in a business leads to failure.
Read MoreFor many young or small companies, managing processes and meeting goals is pretty straightforward. They have a team of three or four people committed to the mission. They’ve defined roles and responsibilities. There are few barriers to communication. Then they start to grow. Now they’re a team of 15 or 20, and they’re not sure why exactly, but things aren’t going so well. That’s where an organizational assessment can help.
Read MoreIn 2005, I was working as a consultant, doing some due diligence on software for a startup. The company, founded by two patent attorneys, was attempting to create an online marketplace for swapping books, music, movies, and video games—back when those were all physical objects that needed to be physically traded. The founders had patented their ideas and written hundreds of pages of specs. They’d already hired, fired, and had sued one software development firm. When the second firm they’d hired went past budget on a fixed price contract before completing the software, the founders reached out to me.
Read MoreConflict is inevitable. Everyone is different—different backgrounds, different scripts, different personalities, and different goals. Difference creates conflict. If we’ve learned anything from the last few months of civil unrest, it’s that embracing differences in our lives and in our organizations is critical. Workplace conflict will happen. By treating it as an opportunity for growth, we’ll help ourselves, our organizations, and our employees.
Read MoreMentorship is a deeper, long-term relationship between two people. Even if it doesn’t start out that way, it becomes so from time spent together and mutual care for each other.
The relationship with a mentor is a meaningful one. We reached out to our clients to get deeper insight into how having a mentor can impact people’s lives. A couple of stories stuck with us and showed the power of effective mentoring relationships.
Read MoreAny successful business that’s been around for more than a few years has found themselves on that plateau, trying to figure out why their growth stalled or why they feel stuck. The plateau itself isn’t a problem. In fact, it may create an opportunity to look at your business, your product, or your market through new eyes.
Read MoreEach year, we share a summer reading list to suggest how you might use downtime to read about leadership, entrepreneurship, or personal development. Given it’s 2020, we’re going to do it differently this summer.
Read fiction. Not just any fiction. Science Fiction. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Warren Buffet, and self-help gurus like Tim Ferriss, want you to read a lot more, and don’t want you to only read how-to non-fiction books.
The experience left a big impression on me. Leadership isn’t theoretical. There are real, perhaps even dire, consequences to poor leadership. Fudging it doesn’t work, and pretending that two wrongs add up to a right could end with you thanking your lucky stars that you don’t have to explain to your board how you blew up a BMW test engine.
Read MoreAs business leaders or owners, we can no longer remain silent about racism. I’ve avoided talking about it for a long time because it’s uncomfortable. I was scared if I spoke up, I might say the wrong thing or be seen as a racist. Silence is not an option, so I’m starting with an apology.
Read MoreIf it were up to me, everyone in a leadership position, or starting or building a business, would have a coach — not because I want to (or could) coach them all, but because leaders who have coaches are better leaders. At the same time, I recognize that every business leader is balancing dozens of competing priorities, now more than ever. Is it time for you to hire a leadership coach? A better question might be Are you fine staying right where you are?
Read MoreMaking the wrong choice doesn’t make you a poor leader. Being unable to make any choice because you’re trying to please everyone? That could. There are dozens of qualities that interfere with the ability to lead effectively. I’m sharing a few that I see most frequently and how to fix them.
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?