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Entrepreneurship Is Full of Hard Work that Is Rarely Sought After

I posted recently about the importance to periodically check how a current role/ position fits into the greater journey – “Before Making Moves Based On Today’s Bad, Chart How All The Dots Align to A Path”. I took this to heart recently by reviewing my resume and updating my skills and experience. It’s made me aware of my career progression and my upcoming path as I head into my mid-30s. In short: optically, I’ve been rather stagnant.
Building a startup is incredibly hard work. Many startups do not come close to the type of success that is read about in the news or even the local startup digest. Entrepreneurship, though intrinsically rewarding, is not well-received professionally.
As I’ve had the great opportunities to lead sales at Body Boss Fitness, SalesWise, and SalesWise’s new product/ brand Burner Rocket, they’ve all been tough experiences to get through. Starting from virtually nothing and fighting to get scraps of the first 10 customers and then the next is rarely seen from the outside. The mind soaks up more information than what any “normal corporate” job may provide. However, it’s, in some ways, specialized. The bruises and cuts that I have felt by leading the charge for what a sales process may look like, what are the pieces of collateral that will help sell, how do we support our customers when we don’t even know the full metrics of what is working and what is not… those lessons are not always visible to the outside world. And yet, I know the incredible value that has been learned. I know the pains and the difficulties to get to where we are. I have good hypotheses for why we may not have grown at a faster clip, but from the outside, there’s little stock. Growing from 0-10 may not be as impressive as being a leader who hit the $2MM ARR quota from last year’s $1.5MM. Should that be?
Again, periodically looking through the portfolios of seemingly little accomplishments for early-stage opportunities, I can sense there’s a strain. There’s a pull and a fight between the desire to hop into a role where the hard work has mostly been done. Perhaps, there’s a need for an optimizer or a player to just “grow more”. It’s a struggle – to be a part of something so early that the chances of success are low. The challenges and rewards are greater. Or, do I take the easier route by following the path others have already trotted on before. In that way, perhaps I can have the requisite bullet points for others to note and say, “yes, he’s had that experience of hitting XX of quota”.
Being an entrepreneur and taking a real fight to creating something special isn’t always lauded. It’s rarely what folks are really looking for. But they’re the opportunities I’m looking for. It looks like I’m still on the right path.
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Build the Bridge to Tomorrow On Today

A startup debate that has been weighing on me recently is building a solution for today vs. an idea for tomorrow. David Cummings recently wrote a post touching on this – “Funding Today’s Business or Tomorrow’s Idea”. We could be talking evolutionary vs. revolutionary. This could involve a high-degree of market education and long sales cycles.
I remember early on with Body Boss this very issue. My co-founder Darren Pottinger really started the company off an idea to bring heuristics and predictive modeling to exercise. The idea employed regression forecasting to recommend the weight an exerciser should do next.
Body Boss was originally intended for the Consumer market. However, we pivoted towards the B2B crowd of professional strength coaches – institutional teams and training programs. Where coaches thought the algorithms and forecasting were interesting, they wanted full control of what athletes should be doing. For example, they wanted the ability to prescribe the percentage of an athlete’s one-repetition maximum weight. Body Boss would just calculate the weight to be done from the percentage and the one-rep max via a “test assessment”.
As a startup with no real expertise in professional strength and conditioning or other exercise research, we did not have the credibility to recommend our algorithm vs. the coaches’ traditional methods. Though there was real potential in our algorithm – the Idea of Tomorrow – coaches wouldn’t buy Body Boss without the ability to build percentage-based workouts – the Business of Today. The opportunity of Body Boss, then, was the ability to collect and organize workouts and their results.
We saw prospects who were hesitant to buy early on convert to paid-customers once we implemented the percentage schemes.
Entrepreneurs will likely have their visions of grandeur for tomorrow. However, tomorrow may never come. Instead, build a base off of today’s business. Then, run research behind the scenes to validate the ideas of tomorrow. This isn’t much different from traditional research and development teams in large corporations today. But they all start from a position of a stable base.
Build the bridge to tomorrow on today. When you have the credibility and resources, you can influence tomorrow.
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Consulting as a Means for a Product and Business

A friend recently asked me about starting a business/ building a product as a side hustle to a full-time gig vs. consulting as the gig to reveal a business opportunity. Given his personal life, building a business as a full-time gig could be extremely risky without strong revenue upfront. The potential flexibility of consulting, however, could income, flexibility, and market insight.
I’ve had experience doing both with Body Boss and 5 Points Digital (5PD), a consulting company – as a side hustle to a full-time gig and with consulting to find the next big move.
Thoughts on pursuing consulting as the means to an end:
·      Consulting is a great way to learn of problems, design solutions, network, and test market interest. Companies (startups, big corporates, etc.) serve markets with solutions at scale. Consulting is akin to a one-off solution for a singular client. Products are then extensions of solution for greater scale.
·      Practice asking questions to understand situations and uncover problems. Much like entrepreneurs would do well to perform customer discovery, consultants use probing questions to learn of problems, bottlenecks, information silos, etc.
·      Practice disseminating information – telling stories and detailing processes. Effective consultants can communicate effectively. Many can tell a story interweaving cause and effect. They can lead audiences through flows. Practicing case studies can help reinforce information dissemination and asking questions (previous tenet).
·      Remember what you’re looking to do. Consulting can be comfortable like any other job. I suggested to my friend to take a step back periodically to synthesize lessons and their opportunities. When I started 5PD, things were easy. However, I did not find the inspiration for a new product-oriented startup. I got comfortable and locked into the tactical projects. I had to stop consulting. Pick when to leap into and out of consulting according to your grander purpose.
Consulting can be fun. It can be financially rewarding and offer flexibility. It’s also a great way to leverage experience and expand into other areas to lean into and build a marketable solution.
Start practicing and expertise will come. 
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When We Ignore Our Previous Experience for Our Great Startup Idea

I met up with a friend recently who is noodling over an idea. What was interesting was how she was so deep into her idea, and didn’t use her life’s skills and work to help validate the idea.
Like me, she started her professional career in consulting. Like me, we both ignored our acquired consulting skills when building a startup (my example was Body Boss, as described in Postmortem of a Failed Startup).
It’s a funny and sad mistake I’ve seen a lot – starting with yours truly. There’s excitement in the initial idea that people put on the blinders. They (we) ignore experience in the previous “corporate” world. I attribute much of this to emotions running high. Emotions have ways of clouding our judgements and processes.
This happens especially in endeavors we get excited about but do not have explicit professional experience in. For myself and my Body Boss cofounders, that area was fitness. We loved fitness, but we came from outside the industry.
For example, what makes consulting so effective is the initial phase of any project – discovery. In startups, you throw in “customer” in front of the word, and you have a critical foundation of building a company – “customer discovery”. In this phase, consultants interview stakeholders, assess processes, gather surveys and analytics, etc. to formulate a plan. The same should happen in building a startup.
If you have an idea, be careful of being emotionally attached. Balance excitement with grounded thinking. This doesn’t mean shooting down ideas so early on. Instead, take a moment, and recognize how you can apply previous lessons to the opportunity in front of you. Sometimes, that means playing the role of pre-idea. Be the third-party.
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Risk-Reward vs. Success-Failure and Others Lessons from a Serial Entrepreneur

Serial entrepreneur Gregg Oldring recently wrote a post about his recent startup that failed – “Afraid of failing at a startup? Let me tell you what it feels like.” Naturally, I wanted to dive into the title given my past.
There were a couple lines I really enjoyed. Sharing those here, and highlighting my own experience.
  • “When I frame the analysis as risk-reward instead of success-failure, we did well.”Maybe because I failed before with Body Boss, but this was incredibly resonating. Like Gregg highlighted, there was so much gained from the experience that isolating the outcome based on commercial success would be vain. In the end, we threw out risk to attempt something special. The reward beyond was worth it.
  • “One of the things that I hate about being an entrepreneur is that sharing the uncertainties I have about my business usually carries with it negative consequences that outweigh the benefit of transparency. When someone asks, ‘How’s business?’ the answer can seldom be, ‘It doesn’t look like it’s going to be sustainable.’” Geez, this ateat me towards the end of Body Boss. I felt like a fraud when I spoke to others – prospects, yes, but especially with my personal connections (friends and family). The weight of faking a smile was heavy. So heavy, in fact, that I avoided any discussion about the venture as much as possible.
  • “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed that Inkdit didn’t thrive. My friends, family and community haven’t made me feel that way. In fact, they’ve done quite the opposite. I’ve been reminded that I have many people who support me.” As the dust settled from shutting down Body Boss, friends and family came from everywhere pledging support. It was humbling. In many ways, too, I was proud. Many applauded our courage and how we built something from nothing.

Gregg’s experience from failure sounds a lot like mine. As I read the comments to his article, I’m reminded of the power of sharing unsuccessful stories and being vulnerable. Confidence in what we’ve achieved and where we’re heading gives us power to go again. Sharing our stories gives others the confidence and support they, too, can go for greatness.

By the way, you can read more about my experience from my book Postmortem of a Failed Startup: Lessons for Success. It’s a quick read so you can learn, apply, and go (e-book and paperback available).
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300! Reflecting on How I Started

Yes, this is my 300thpost!
My very first post was back on May 3, 2012 – “To be an effective consultant”. Yes, back in the day, I started the blog as SC Ninja Skills (SC = Supply Chain). I remember it – I wrote the first post sitting in a hotel in L.A. I went there before starting my MBA program at Emory. I remember having this idea to start the blog a year or so before. However, I thought I needed more experience. What did I have to offer?
In that seemingly random moment in the hotel room, though, the question flipped: “why do I have to wait till I’m in my 40s to influence others? To teach? To be influential? Haven’t Fortune 500 companies been hiring my consulting firm or requesting MEas a subject matter expert? I do know a lot even in my short career so far!” This was a huge moment for me as I realized my own worth. Confidence just flowed from there.
I started my pivot in September 2012 towards startups and entrepreneurship. I was in the throws of building Body Boss, and was helping another entrepreneur launch his startup. The energy and action was exhilarating, so I took those experiences to fuel Entrepreneurial Ninja. In fact, I remember responding to a David Cummings post about part-timing a startup – “Bootstrappers, we don’t have it easy, but Magic Pens gives us hope!”
It’s amazing reflecting on the journey from the beginning.

I’ve overcome a lot, and I’ve adapted perhaps even more. (Just like a startup!) I used to hate writing and reading till I shifted the context. And perhaps that’s the most important lesson from Post 1 to 300 – I’ve consistently approached my curiosity by shifting context and doing.

Looking forward to the next 100 and beyond.
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Sales and Customer Success Hinge On WOW

I’ve been reading a lot about customer success and onboarding recently. It’s top of mind for me these days as we continue to onboard more and more customers at SalesWise. Two articles that have stood out: 

The Slack article was more about go-to-market strategy. In it were important tenets that were also echoed by WP Curve. This includes the importance of getting to the “wow” factor.
I wrote a post before titled “U in UX Stands for You: The Evolution of Consumer Engagement”. I highlighted the importance of early user experience like Spotify which enables users to get up and running quickly. Then, I highlighted the importance of empty-state design in “Starting With Nothing: Solving Early Churn With Empty State Design”.
After reading the WP Curve and Slack articles about the “wow” factor, it’s important today more than ever to present value immediately. For Slack, the “wow” moment was user engagement. For Spotify, it was signing up and browsing channels before listening. For a marketing automation platform, it’s seeing an automated campaign in action.
At SalesWise, many customers share their “wow” moment — getting real-time visibility into insightful data they hadn’t seen before. We do this with simple, secure Oauth for services like Gmail and Salesforce. In 10 minutes, an entire company can be up and running. The algorithms and heuristics work in the background to organize it all. That’s how we get to “wow” fast.
One President of a customer company said it simply: “You deliver on the SaaS promise”. That is, our platform just worked. Some customers share how other SaaS platforms they started trials with took too much effort to set up. Even in today’s world of SaaS and APIs, set-up friction is high.
Body Boss, back in the day, required too much effort to get to the “wow”. We required too much setup of strength coaches. Thus, we had many coaches bail after the first and second visits.
It’s critical for companies to recognize “wow” moments, and how to deliver that as soon as a user signs up. The SalesWise “wow” factor is seeing real-time sales activities automatically organized. We’re developing some new features that will highlight even more “wow”. We’ll be able to help our customers instantly identify sales opportunities that may fall through the cracks. This will drive immediate value by spurring a sales rep to take action. This, in itself, will be massive in value to our customers.
Find your “wow” factor, and deliver it as soon as possible. Find ways to present value and insights without having to do much set up. Show enough to get the user to get value. You can always get more data and do more set up once the user sees immediate value.
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Role of A Startup Advisor

Over the last year or so, I have become an Advisor for a couple startups. It’s been a great experience for me to teach and continue learning as an entrepreneur. I do meet with several startups and entrepreneurs weekly, but not officially as an Advisor save for a couple.
During (and especially after) Body Boss, I realized the importance of having Advisors. Advisors help startups and the executive team navigate the go-to-market waters bringing specific experience to the table – industry, technology, etc. With that comes connections, too.
The role of a startup Advisor includes:
  • Guiding the startup on its direction
  • Provide valuable insight into the industry, competition, market, etc.
  • Share connections to move the company forward – prospects, new hire candidates, other
  • Establish cadence around metrics for progress

In exchange for devoting time and attention (and reaching success, hopefully), startups typically provide stock or cash to Advisors. This ensures both parties are aligned on objectives and provide the necessary feedback.

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Take A Step Back For A Moment If You Want Clarity

I re-read an article back from 2013 “7 Guidelines for Startups in the Crunch” from LinkedIn. The article is about entrepreneurs and startups on a “foggy island” where revenue is trickling in, and they’re at a precipice of either folding, pivoting, or otherwise.
The first tenet of the article was “Be an athlete, not a robot”. That is, it’s easy to continue working day in, day out, hour after hour, like a robot, but that’s not necessarily conducive for successive. Athletes, on the other hand, know that to operate at peak performance, they must take time to exercise, eat well, rest, and recover.
This guideline comes coincidentally after speaking to a friend about the importance of taking time to rest and step back to assess directions. My friend has been burying herself in her craft for years, and only until recently has found time to step away, look around, and gain clarity on her direction. It’s been refreshing and eye-opening.
Reminding me of my own experiences (and perhaps recently), I focused so much on trying to get keep my startup alive that I just buried myself in my computer, trying to sell, and the like. I was so focused on today and tomorrow that I didn’t step out to assess if what I was doing was the right direction.
This happened when we built an awesome feature that no one got to use at Body Boss. We spent so many hours grinding to build out a new feature and trying to sell it that we burnt ourselves out. We didn’t step back and assess if our approach was correct. We were exhausted and dejected.  
When we’re so focused on the things right in front of us, we don’t see what’s really happening at the grander scale. We’re grounded in our purpose and our why – good. We’re doing what we want and what we believe to be right. However, we get lost when we focus too much on what’s in front of us without stepping away to take care of ourselves (to prevent burn out), and gain clarity on our direction.
Stepping away allows us to assess the WHAT and the HOW of what we’re doing. Can our process be tweaked to achieve desired results faster (or realized our direction is incorrect faster)?
Even for a startup in the crunch, it’s important to take time away, assess our state of the business (and ourselves), and gain clarity on what we’re doing. It could be save your business, and prevent you from burning out.
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Build Startups With Influential Values

One of the most fun parts of a startup is building the vision and culture.
I remember one of my business school professors preaching companies with purposes addressing the needs of the world. He had a successful company built on the company’s ethos within organizations as a rallying cry for employees. 
Purpose give us the WHY of the company, while values give us the WHO of the company and its people. These influential values, as BrightHouse calls them, aren’t the simplistic, broad words like “teamwork” and “community”. These words are generic — loosely applicable to any company or group. Thus, they drive little loyalty amongst an organization’s people.
Instead, my former professor demonstrated the importance of influential values that an organization’s people would live by. BrightHouse cites influential values drive 65% more employee loyalty and greater returns to the company — 1,681% returns vs. 118% of the S&P over a 15-year span.
I’m a firm believer in my former professor’s message, and I was excited to develop Body Boss’s mission and values. I included these elements in Postmortem of a Failed Startup: Lessons for Success, too, to share our greater vision. 
So recently, I was pleased to hear a friend share with me how the values in the book resonated with her, and helped her form the values of her company.

Here were Body Boss’s values:
  • Set the benchmark. Be the leader in the work we do and the lives we live. Never settle – always strive for greatness. 
  • Work smarter, not just harder. Couple intelligent decisions with smarter actions to produce the best outcomes we can all be proud of.
  • Spot others. Motivate and support the community around us and be ready even when never asked.
  • Hold ourselves accountable. Play a fair game and live with the utmost integrity to ourselves and our team.
  • Have fun even with hard work. Every set, every rep is a challenge that consistently pushes us. Enjoy the challenges and reap the benefits of hard work.
  • Admire the mirror. Have confidence in yourself and your abilities, and know you can improve as much as you push yourself.
I admit the values can read a bit cheesy, but that’s the fun of it! We were excited and happy about the values. They were specific to our company and our company’s ethos. They were values we rallied around.
What are the values of your company? How do you and your colleagues align with those values? Do they give you greater meaning and engagement?
Side note: so far, the book has had great feedback amongst people all over — from consulting to startups from wantrepreneurs to corporate employees, and from early entrepreneurs to more seasoned. It’s been great to hear how different chapters of the book have resonated on so many different levels.
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