Cameron Herold is an accomplished entrepreneur and growth guru, having built 4 companies to over $100 million in revenue. He is also the author of Double Double, a guide to doubling revenue and profit in 3 years. Cameron sat down with us to share three of his best growth strategies for building a successful company. Read more below or watch the full video here.
Create a Vivid Vision
This “vivid vision” is a 3-4 page written description of exactly what you want your company to be three years from now. More specific than a mission statement, this paints a picture of your ideal company and makes it easy for employees to work towards that vision. Once you have the final plan, it is easy to reverse engineer and create manageable steps to get to...
Why are Founders often so lonely? It's a combination of things.
First, unlike most other jobs, Founders often don't have a lot of relatable peers in their close-knit group. Most people can sit at lunch and complain about their jobs and get a bunch of nods.
Us Founders often explain what we're going through and get the "thousand-yard stare" from someone wondering how to get out of the conversation.
The first thing they do is to find other Founders to meet up with.
The one amazing thing about Founders, by the way, is that they immediately tend to connect with and appreciate other Founders.
It's amazing.
Every Founder understands what it means to be staring into the abyss daily, and how those feelings are...
One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.” It’s inspirational, always calling the team to try harder and do better. It works to undermine excuses for poor or shoddy work. And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. Especially in teams that are managing by objectives (or OKRs), the pressure to deliver is intense. Under such pressure, the temptation to cut corners, to quit prematurely, or to hand off shoddy work to another department is overwhelming. It requires courage to stand up and say: “this work is simply not good enough. Sure, we could get away with it, but that’s not how we work.” Good managers work hard ...
Last week I got a call from Patrick an ex-student I hadn’t heard from for 8 years. He was now the CEO of a company and wanted to talk about what he admitted was a “first world” problem. Over breakfast he got me up to date on his life since school (two non-CEO roles in startups), but he wanted to talk about his third startup – the one he and two co-founders had started.
“We’re at 70 people, and we’ll do $40 million in revenue this year and should get to cash flow breakeven this quarter.” It sounded like he was living the dream. I was trying to figure out why we were meeting. But then he told me all about the tough decisions, pivots and firing his best friend he had to do to get to where he was. He had been through heck and back.
“I made it t...
I am 7 years in and I have come to accept that it is not possible for me to take a “movie vacation” — ya know on a beachfront bungalow with no internet connection, remote from the working world…. And let’s be real — to an entrepreneur that simply doesn’t actually sound fun or relaxing at all. My ideal lifestyle is to be semi-connected on vacation. I’m a phone call/text message away and I will choose when to respond to emails. That may be the extent of my ability to fully “vacation”…and I’m honestly ok with that. Just as I sleep better when my kids are under my roof, I also sleep better when I’m accessible to my business.
Where do most people find the...
I started angel investing almost by accident, which sounds strange to say. Who “accidentally” invests tens of thousands of dollars into highly speculative ventures? Well, I did.
A friend introduced me to Clayton Christopher who was raising money for his new liquor company Deep Eddy. Their first product, a sweet tea vodka, was amazing and he was an experienced entrepreneur, so I went in.
Investing was an exciting, interesting process. Then the company took off, and I got to tell everyone I know that I invested in that new vodka that everyone in Austin was drinking. Winning is the ultimate intoxicant, and from there, I was hooked.
I started investing in companies left and right. I became a huge cheerleader for angel investing. I wrote about h...
More often than not, what we avoid saying to investors is as valuable as what we do say.
With our best intentions, we often shoot ourselves in the foot making lofty assumptions or declarations that investors hear all the time and just start shaking their heads.
Let's avoid that.
The moment we open ourselves up to saying our estimates are "conservative" we risk the conversation pointing to whether our assumptions are actually "conservative", "aggressive" or just "wild-ass guesses."
All estimates are guesses.
Let's avoid giving them a label at all, and instead say "These estimates are based on our best assumptions across our entire business." Investors would rather know the assumptions are based on what we ...
The cap table is a ledger of who owns stock in our company. If you and I are the only owners of the company, there are exactly two entries in the cap table.
Easy peasy.
But as the company grows, and we start handing stock out to more people, the accuracy of the cap table starts to become really important
The moment we start handing stock out to more people than ourselves.
At that point, we start to run into keeping records of not only who we've allocated stock to, but who we may be taking it back from (former employees who may not have exercised their stock options for example).
The constant changes within the cap table start to become a bit more complex, and having an accurate ledger become...
There’s a popular misconception amongst first-time entrepreneurs that sharing an idea without signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) will lead to some version of The Social Network, where Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, steals the Facebook idea and becomes a billionaire.
The mythology sounds horrifying, but the reality is much different.
In short – investors don’t sign NDAs. They won’t sign your NDA. Asking them to will make you look like you don’t know what you’re doing, and there are a few reasons for that.
No One Wants Your Idea
You may have the world’s most amazing idea. It may be a complete pile of rubbish. Either way, it’s not about ideas.
Investors want entrepreneurs, not ideas. Anyone can come up with a great idea, but...
“You didn’t ask.” Of all the things a business should hope to never hear the customer say, this has to rank near the top. Because it is so easily avoidable. Because the fault for never asking falls entirely on your shoulders. There are even automated tools to help you learn more about what your customer is thinking – to ask without asking!
UserCompass automatically sends NPS (net promoter score) surveys so you can know what your customers really think of you and so you can track their loyalty over time.
Currently, UserCompass surveys your Stripe customers. All you have to do is connect your Stripe account. Then UserCompass will automatically send NPS surveys and give you their feedback.
The service strategically waits three days from the t...