Tag: startups

The simple steps to achieve not-so-simple goals.

First, the bad news:

You can’t reach your goals in a day.

Boo.

At least not any meaningful goals that stretch your current skillz and abilities.

Now, for the good news:

You can do something every day to make meaningful progress towards your goals.

Boom!

When you have a clearly identified goal, you can clearly identify actions that will help you make progress towards that goal every single day. Even if you are not single. Or ready to mingle.

If you want to get in great shape, you can make time each day to lift weights, do cardio, eat well, or get good sleep. All of which are steps towards your goal. Even the sleeping part. (How sweet is that?)

If you want to write a book, blog, newsletter, song or screenplay, you can write a few lines every day. That’s how it is done. (And it’s how the 27 lines of this blog post ended up in your eyeballs.)

If you want to start a business, you can work on your offerings, plan your business, map out your next steps, put some money away, talk to other entrepreneurs, or read relevant books every day. That is the business of developing a business.

Recognize that your goals are destinations. You can make progress towards them every day through productive actions. And when you arrive at your goals, you’ll be happy that you started taking those daily steps. Because simple daily steps get you to the finish line.

Key Takeaway

Today is a great day to make progress towards your biggest goals. Make the small investment of your time and energy today that will compound with your small investment tomorrow, and the day after that. Start now. You’ll thank yourself tomorrow.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.

4 Keys to entrepreneurial success I wish I had known before I got started.

I am asked about my entrepreneurial journey a lot. It seems that far more people are interested in starting their own business than ever sail their own entrepreneur ship. If you are considering starting your own business, either as a side hustle or as your main hustle, here are 4 things that I have done that I highly encourage you to do too.

1. I Took Action. 

Everyone has a dream. And I dreamed of starting my own advertising agency for a long time. But to actually start your own business you have to move beyond dreaming to doing. Starting in the fall of 2015 I took an endless series of small actions that led me to today. My business, The Weaponry, will turn 8 years old next month.  So if you want to make sure you don’t die with your dream still inside you, take action to make it real. (Also look both ways before you cross the street.)

Suggested readings to spur your action:

2. I Saved. (Not Like Jesus)

As a professional creative thinker, I take lots of risks with idea exploration. However, I am fiscally conservative. I have been cautious with our expenditures, our office space and our staffing size. I have been conservative about leaving cash in the business, versus taking it home as part of my return. As a result, The Weaponry has strong reserves to outlast downturns. This was a key reason I didn’t panic at the disco in 2020 during the Covid Cray Cray Fest.

3. I Planted Seeds.

Business development is critical to creating a pipeline of opportunities. Over the years I have stayed in touch with old friends. I’ve made one hundred billion new friends. I have had phone conversations, chocolate milk meetings and lunches. I have volunteered my time. I have guest lectured and given talks. I write a blog. I wrote a book called What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? I co-wrote a book titled The Culture Turnaround with Jeff Hilimire. I have given interviews and served on committees and boards.

All of those things are like planting seeds. You never know when they will sprout or what they will turn into. So keep planting seeds and watch what happens, with Andy Cohen.

4. I Delivered

The best source of new business is a happy client. And you develop happy clients by delivering for them. (Especially if you are an obstetrician, or a milkman.) The Weaponry has grown by keeping our clients happy and expanding our work with them. We are also expanding by having happy clients leave for great new jobs and bringing us with them to their new companies. I have a really great team. And I appreciate all that they do for our clients. It is why we are still here, and still growing strong.

Key Takeaway:

To develop a successful business you have to take action. Without action, you are just a dreamer. You have to save money so that you are prepared to weather the storms that will surely come. You must keep planting seeds by creating and nurturing relationships and providing value to others. Then you must deliver the goods. Nothing grows a business like happy customers. None of it is easy. And none of it is that hard. It is simply the price you have to pay to get what you want in life.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.

If you want to do amazing things, find an amazing partner.

When I first started my entrepreneurial adventure I did it with a partner. My cousin Brooks Albrecht and I teamed up to put our complementary skillsets together to create The Weaponry out of dust. We were like Wonder Twins. Except we were cousins. And our superpowers went beyond transforming ourselves into water-forms and monkeys.

Brooks and I didn’t just divide and conquer responsibilities. We filled in our respective weaknesses with the other person’s strengths. Between the two of us, there was nothing that we weren’t excited to do. Which meant we made quick progress on all fronts. Or should I say, Albrecht fronts? (I shouldn’t.)

5 Benefits To Partnering

1. We motivated each other. The progress made by one of us inspired the other to make the next great leap forward. We were like foragers showing up each day to present the mushrooms, berries and the Wilson volleyball we had gathered. It made the other person want to do more of the same to show value.

2. It made the whole process fun. The work didn’t feel like work. It felt like a really fun elective project I took on with a teammate. Which is exactly what it was.

3. When you have a partner you feel a sense of responsibility for getting your work done. You can’t take a day off, or say, I’ll think about doing this later. The accountability you feel to each other helps keep you moving forward, like a black hole. Only without that uncomfortable crushing feeling at the end.

4. You feel like you have a strategic sounding board for every decision. Entrepreneurship, like so much of life, can be very isolating. Having a partner to evaluate your strategy, structure, investments, and hires improves your confidence that you are making the right decisions before you set them in stone. Like Sharon.

5. You have someone to take the lead when you need a moment to rest or slow down. Like running or biking on a windy day, creating a new business, or other organization, feels like you are always running against the wind, Bob Seger-style. There is a constant resistance from the unknown and unstructured. It is nice to be able to duck behind someone else occasionally and get a brief reprieve from the wind. Quack.

Key Takeaway

If you can find a partner to take on a major initiative with, do it. There is nothing quite like the team-feel to fuel your progress. Partners push, inspire, excite and balance you. They neutralize your weaknesses. They enable you to focus on your strengths. And they can afford you a moment of rest when you really need it. Plus, you have someone else to laugh with along the way. Which, in my experience, is the best part of all.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

Footnote: A year after we got business up and running Amazon stole Brooks from us (with my full support). Then Target stole Brooks from Amazon. Then Chewy stole Brooks from Target. Because Brooks is a rockstar. And The Weaponry is full of rockstars.

Sometimes the most important thing to work hard at is patience.

Hard work is important to almost every variety of success. Unless you aspire to be an outstanding subject in a sleep clinic, you have to put in a lot of effort to achieve your goals. That’s why it is so important to pursuit the things you are most passionate about. It is much easier to put in long days of work when you are genuinely excited about the work and the mission.

However…

While hard work is important, it is not the only contributor to business and personal success. Since I launched my advertising and idea agency, The Weaponry, I have found that the most surprisingly important ingredient to our success has been patience.

Patience

There have been dozens of times over the past 2.5 years when putting in more hard work would have worked against us. That’s because our clients and customers, (and potential clients and customers) have their own timing that has nothing to do with us.

I have had exciting conversations about great opportunities that then took a long time to materialize. I am talking about gestational periods of a year or even 2 years. There are other opportunities that I still expect will materialize 3 years or more after our initial conversations.

That’s a long time to wait for a cake to bake. But there is nothing I, or any of my teammates can do to speed the process along. In fact, calling and asking and pressing the client, or potential client, would only hurt the opportunity.

Key Takeaway

Recognizing when you have done all the hard work you can to generate a new opportunity is an important skill that pays huge dividends over time. Because once you have reached a critical point, less is more. Let the timing that is out of your control take its course. But don’t give up. This is a hard perspective to master. Master it anyway.

*If you have a story to corroborate this need for patience instead of more work, please share.

**Also, this post had nothing to do with people in need of medical care. Thanks anyway spellcheck.

Starting your own business is as easy as getting pregnant.

It is easy to talk about starting your own business. I started talking about it within the first year of landing my first job in advertising. I have heard countless colleagues and friends dream about starting their own business over the years. But few have done it. Last year I started my own advertising and idea agency called The Weaponry. I also started this blog to share my learnings about the process.

So, what have I learned?

Most people think that starting a business is really hard. It is not. It is actually pretty easy.  In fact, as the title of this post suggests, it is as easy to start a business as it is to get pregnant. And for many people it’s actually way easier.

How to get pregnant.

To get pregnant you simply need two people to agree to a somewhat awkward exchange. One time. That’s all. And boom, your pregnant! You don’t need foreplay or formality. You don’t need to be experienced or even be particularly good at it.

Starting a business works the exact same way. Two people agree to a very basic, if not awkward initial exchange. They connect a problem and a solution. And when the money changes hands you have a business transaction. Once you have created a business transaction, even a micro-transaction, you have started a business.

The rest of it is romance. Window dressing.

Congratulations, it’s a business!  Now what?

Once you have made that exchange (become pregnant or started a business) you can figure out what to do next. In fact you don’t have to do much. You don’t have to be a good business owner, or parent. Certainly there are many parents who make their greatest, if not only contribution at conception.

You don’t have to get married to have children. And you are not required to make your business official by creating a separate business entity. It can remain a sole-proprietorship.

Sole Proprietorship

Income and losses are taxed on the individual’s personal income tax return. This is the simplest business form under which one can operate a business. It aint even a legal entity. It simply refers to a person who owns the business and is personally responsible for its debts.    -Entrepreneur

Remember, the pass-fail question here is, ‘Did you exchange a product or service for money?’ Once you have done that, you have a business, whether you claim it or not. Putting a lot more energy into the business is up to you. You get to decide what kind of parent of owner you want to be.

Conclusion

Stop thinking it is so hard.  Stop thinking you have all sorts of prerequisites to starting a business. You don’t. You don’t need any foreplay at all. You just need to play. And if you like it, the after-play is where you can develop the business further.  You have time to figure all of that out as you go.

But if you really want to start a business just take that first small step. It’s really not that hard.

If you know someone who has been talking about starting a business forever, please pass this post along to them. And if you found a bit of value in this post yourself, please consider subscribing to my blog.