-How to control your calendar
-How to create a schedule that works for you
-Our example Productivity Calendar template
Your calendar shouldn’t be an open season free for all of appointments. Each of us have a special cadence in our day that involves times when we’re most productive, time we want for personal reasons and time when we’re least productive. These are often the same times day in and day out – so why not create a calendar template that aligns your scheduling with your lifestyle?
It’s true, life throws lots of stuff at us daily. Our client calls for an immediate meeting. Our one co-worker strangely schedules meetings at stupid early t...
We all dream about it. Cashing out, getting The Big Check™ and going on a shopping spree with “Bentleys and Benjamins”. But, once the fanfare wears off — What actually happens to all of us?
Do we walk away with a perma-smile until the day we die? Or do we just trade one set of problems for another? Are we actually happier?
As a Founder with a few exits of my own, I’ve had this conversation with dozens of Founders post-exit who have had anything from a $1 million exit to a multi billion dollar exit. What’s fascinating is that all of our outcomes tend to tell roughly the same story — and it’s rarely what anyone thinks it is.
Everyone has their own version of their outcome, but if I were to generalize my observations after some very deep ...
As startup Founders, we are constantly focused on making sure our fledgling companies have enough runway to grow. We believe that if the company’s bank account runs out, the company goes bankrupt and it’s game over.
But that’s not always true. It’s often not until your personal bank account runs to zero that your startup is truly done for.
The fact is that startups don’t truly go bankrupt until their Founders go bankrupt. The problem is that Founders are often so focused on the startup’s finances that they overlook their own ability to stay afloat in the process. I call this ability your “personal runway,” or the amount of time that you can stay alive and fed, regardless of the health of your business.
I learned all abou...
-How to set goals to accomplish before scheduling a meeting
-How to communicate clearly when calendaring
How often do you start a meeting with a clear indication from everyone in the room with what you’re supposed to achieve after you leave? If you’re like most, not often.
Most calendar appointments look like this:
Subject: “G8 Summit: Meet to talk about Impending Asteroid Collision with Earth”
Awesome. You’ve let everyone know that 1. You are going to meet and 2. That there is an open ended discussion happening about the cataclysmic destruction of the planet.
However on the brink of Armageddon it’d be nice to know that the folks responsible for this discussion focused more on the ou...
Every founder knows that company culture is crucial to a startup’s success — as Fred Wilson says, “If you want to be in business forever, you need to build a culture that sustains the business” — but there are seven common mistakes that startups make when creating their culture:
Running a startup means your burn rate is always in the forefront of your mind, and as a result, everything takes a backseat to getting to MVP. Culture can be fixed later, right? The truth is that “culture” is just another way of saying “how we work here,” and by the time you get to your MVP, it will be deeply entrenched.
FiveStars’s founder Victor Ho never took the time to officially define the culture— he felt it was too “chee...
Friends — today I’m excited to share two very big announcements and to give you a peek at what’s in store for 2015.
We’ve Acquired Clarity.fm
Yep, the family just keeps growing.
Clarity was founded by well-known serial entrepreneur Dan Martell to help Founders get personal advice from startup experts in every field, from marketing to fundraising to product development.
Over 4,000 experts have joined Clarity, and last year alone they spent more than 181,026 minutes on the phone helping entrepreneurs. To put that in perspective, that means that 1 out of every 3 minutes of the day (or night) someone on Clarity is on the phone helping a Founder. It’s awesome.
They’ve also created a fantastic Q&A product where Founders can ask hard questions abo...
Let’s talk top startups of 2018. But first of all, did you know that entrepreneurs create more than six million new businesses in the United States every year? Sifting through those multitudes is impossible, even for startup junkies. And when you consider the high number of startup failures, the shifting sands of the startup landscape become even harder to track.
So how can you possibly know what’s good? How can you separate the wheat from the chaff? How can you ever know what the top startups are?
Well, one way is by relying on experts who interact with new companies every day. And it doesn’t get more expert than the team at Fundable, the largest business crowdfunding platform that’s exclusively about helping startups raise money. Fundabl...
We all love celebrating the big wins with big announcements.
✓ We celebrate our big product launches.
✓ We celebrate key partnerships.
✓ We celebrate when we raise a big funding round.**
All of those sound amazing — and sometimes they are. But, what gets lost are the victories that actually matter: the small victories.
Small victories are what lead to the big announcements. But, they often get overlooked for one reason or another. Things like:
★ The first paying customer you signed.
★ The first month you broke even.
★ The first customer acquisition campaign that actually yiel...
What happens when the people who helped start a company are no longer qualified to work there?
▸ What about Kimberly who became CFO because she was the only person at the time who had taken an accounting course?
▸ How do you find a home for Willis who was the jack-of-all-trades …but now is the master of none?
▸ Should Arnold still be leading the engineering team even though he has less experience than the entire team now?
As our startups mature, we are quickly faced with the harsh reality that the folks that were critical at one stage of our growth are woefully under-qualified for our current state of operations. Things get weird. We can feel the tension mounting as we try to wrestle with our own evolution and how it impacts each team membe...