Entrepreneurship changes the world because of the millions of consumers it caters to daily. In this episode, Elliot Begoun encourages entrepreneurs to be resilient and efficient like tardigrades. Why? Because each entrepreneur has the power to ignite small changes in the masses that will end up changing the world for the better. That is why Elliot shares essential tips on how you can succeed in your business. If you want to know why certain business founders outperform others, this episode is for you. Factors like being passionately dispassionate, having the ability to pitch, and knowing how to build your community are all vital for your success. Tune in to learn more!

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Entrepreneurship Changes The World: Tips To Succeeding With Elliot Begoun

I’m using the episode to do something a bit different, to chat a bit about what I want founders to know. There is no guest. I do have a list of things that I want to talk about. I usually don’t do this and I struggled a bit quite frankly about making this an episode. There are things that I’ve wanted to say and I’ve tried to weave into some of the conversations we’ve had with guests and weave into some of the questions that have come through but haven’t had the chance to dig in deeply.

I’m going to go ahead and take the show prerogative and do that. I’m going to start first with what I want you to know about the why. Why am I doing this? Why did I start TIG? Why are Waven, Jenny, Juliet, and Charity alongside? The answer is simple. Let’s look at numbers data first. From 2009 through 2019, roughly $18 billion of market share move from the top 25 CPG companies to emerging brands. That’s a big number. Comparatively to the size of it, percentage-wise, it’s not huge, but $18 billion makes for many good successful businesses.

80% to 90% of brands during that timeframe started to fail within two years. To me, those competing forces were maddening. How could so much business be moving? How can it be so obvious that consumers want to do business with entrepreneurial brands, brands that are authentic and transparent, and who are doing things, and yet, those brands’ failure rate be so high? It came down to the fact that founders and entrepreneurs were continuously chasing the same thing. They were following the same road or the same path.

Tardigrades, Not Unicorns

Last I checked, every single brand, founder, and team is unique and they need to be looked at differently. Of course, as many of you know, I’m a supporter and believer in the tardigrade, which is my antithetical response to the unicorn. It’s not that I don’t believe the unicorn is something that is fun and is wrong. It’s just what it is. It’s mythical. It’s rare beyond rare. Even those that we think or we’ve learned or we’ve been told are unicorns usually have a deeper backstory than what is apparent. It’s ultimately about being resilient, smart, and efficient with deployment, use, and acquisition of capital, and nimble and agile, and being able to see the change, meet it, and get ahead of it.

Small Changes Matter

That’s what we do and that’s why we’re here. We’re imperfect in our actions. We are learning alongside you and we are the beneficiaries of all the lessons in aggregate that are learned and we can cross-pollinate. I wanted to share that. The other thing I want to share and talk about is something that I want to make sure all of you continue to see for yourselves. Each of you is changing the world and that’s a huge motivating factor for our team. It’s a huge motivating factor for me personally, but sometimes, in the drudgery, bullshit, and exhaustion of what you’re doing, you all might lose sight of that. You all might lose sight of the fact that you are driving the change that we need.

Let me express that a bit more. The biggest changes to human health and climate health come from small changes to the masses. It’s going to be unrealistic to think that we’re going to solve some of the problems we’re having. Let’s talk about human health. From getting everyone to stop snarfing down Pringles and start eating Kale chips or to stop drinking Coke and start drinking kombucha. It’s not realistic. There’ll always be a motivated few. It’s because of the size of our population, that motivated few is many, but it isn’t going to necessarily bring the large-scale change that we need. That’s the same as we look at things like meat consumption, our fisheries, and all of those kinds of things.

Full transparency, a bit about me, I’m a vegan. For my personal health, it’s the best diet and it does good work and helps support planetary health and the animals on it. I know that that is not a reasonable or realistic solution to say, “We can solve everything if we get everybody to go vegan.” That isn’t going to happen. What is realistic is making current habits better habits, small iterative changes on a mass scale. If we get people to eat fewer burgers and a few more Beyond Meat or Impossible, then we’re going to see a reduction in the CAFOs, the Concentrated Animal farming that put so much methane and waste. Eighty percent of the world’s grain is grown to feed our animals.

If we support and do things with the right transparency and supply chains, we’ll see more regenerative agriculture and more transparency. There are many things that you are involved in and all of your brands are solving some of these problems as well as food access and all of those things. In those moments where you’re like, “What the hell am I doing this for?” You’re changing the world. Entrepreneurship commerce is the single most powerful change agent and you are all part of that. Close to that, I want to take the next step and talk about what I want you to understand and know. Whether you plan to, whether you intended to or not, you are influencers. It’s the fact.

Your brand has the power to influence its consumers and you have the ability to influence your brand. Shout out to Nick McCoy. He’s an amazing data hop. He shared that there are approximately 50 million consumers who fall into the natural product space, so it’s a big swath of our population. Within those 50 million, we have a voice as an industry and you have a voice as entrepreneurs and brands. I want to push you all that silence is not an option. Standing on the sidelines or being fearful of speaking your truth should be something you don’t allow and you don’t seek refuge in. Stand up for what you believe, be the change you want to see, and speak about the things that are uncomfortable.

I’ve said this to most of you that the best marketing is polarizing, so you’re never going to appeal to everybody. If you do, you’re going to be irrelevant. You’re going to be not something people will engage with. You have to take a stand regardless, whether that’s in your brand voice or on causes. There’s so much going on in our world. There are many competing forces, competing voices, discord, and more that you all have the opportunity and quite frankly, you all have the obligation to put a voice to that and be willing to speak your truth, whatever that truth is. This is one that I want you all to understand because I worry about you. What you’re all doing is so damn hard.

I don’t know that I could identify anything that is harder in aggregate because it’s hard work. It’s hard emotionally and it’s hard from a vulnerability standpoint and all of those things. For the most part, I don’t think anyone in this space got into it solely to be the capitalist and make the money. You all got into it to solve meaningful problems and fill an unmet need. Just a reminder, it is not the destination. In this business, for many reasons, it’s all we ever talk about. “What’s your exit? What’s your long-term plan? What does that look like?” You want to get there and ideally, you want to see all this hard work, all this effort, and everything that you’re pouring your heart and soul into to turn into a monetizable opportunity that changes your own life and personal wealth.

That’s the gravy and the upside, but there’s a lot of joy and incredible learning on this journey. There are a lot of incredible moments to celebrate with your team, peers, and help others and yourself through in this journey. There is nothing like this. Being a student of this business for many years, I’ve learned far more from you than I did back when I took a break from corporate life and went into grad school. All of you are learning far more than you would that way. This is the toughest MBA program you could ever be a part of. Remember, it’s the journey and the impact that this journey has on you and on others.

Another thing to share. Most of you know I’m weird, but here’s a question that sits with me all the time. This is where I put on my social science hat, which Juliet would tell you I am a misplaced college professor and that was my minor. The question that I’m always trying to understand and answer is that, “Why do some founders outperform others?” Expressively, we’ve all seen founders, frankly, whose products are kick-ass and we’ve seen founders who have a kick-ass product have success. Part of it, of course, is timing. Part of it may be luck, although you create a bit of your own in both cases.

Be Passionately Dispassionate

In my studies, examinations, conversations, and experience, I’ve learned that there are some key factors and I want to go through some of those if I can. They’re not necessarily in chronological order or in order of importance, but there were in the order that made sense to this adult brain. First, the founders that outperform the other founders are passionately dispassionate about their business, so they are unabashed in questioning everything and challenging everything. Not only anything that comes across their desk from their team, which some people will find or will think is micromanaging and it’s not. It’s being dispassionate. It’s being willing to put a critical lens on this business, but it’s also about being equally so about themselves, their products, and everything that they’ve created.

Passionately dispassionate means that you’re always looking and challenging your unit in channel economics, your product-market fit. Asking yourself, “How scalable is this? How much opportunity is it? What’s realistic? What’s in the way? What’s keeping me from achieving success? Am I an impediment to my own success or my brand success? How investible am I? Let me give myself an honest evaluation of my investible.” Always asking the tough questions, not just chugging down, drinking your own Kool-Aid or getting high on your own supply. It’s doing that. The other is, and I use this term, it could be called a myriad of things, but I call it a growth hypothesis.

Raising Capital

What I’m saying is that the founders that perform develop a cogent bottoms up hypothesis of where they can build a brand that is testable, measurable, and chunk down so that they’re able to look at, “If I invest X, I should get Y.” That comes down to both brick and mortar and eCommerce. They have this and they have this laid out for at least five years. The next one is capital. This is probably one of the stickiest. What often happens is the way most people are raising capital is when their toes are dangling over the cliff that is impending death. They’re down to their last little bit of money and they’re raising money. The founders who think differently and perform differently have a heads-up five-year vision tied to their growth hypothesis of that capital.

They’re thinking through strategically about, “Where that is going to come from and when it’s going to be needed. What am I likely going to want in terms of structure? Is it equity? Is it debt? What’s the right combination? Here’s the thing that is critically important. If they become students of the space, not of the CPG space, but of the investing space, they start to understand the nomenclature and expectations of investors that are listening to podcasts by VCs. They’re reading books and doing those things. They are beginning to balance out the dissymmetry of information so that when they have those meetings with Angels and funds, they’re coming at it as an equal.

The Ability To Pitch

That’s scary because we love to over-complicate and put as much bullshit language into the process as we possibly can. Simply, an investor is investing in a brand because they believe that brand will give them the best return. It’s not that complicated. We complicate the hell out of it with all of those other things, so be a student of that. Tied to that closely, the next item on my list is the ability to pitch. When we think about pitch, we think about our investor pitch or our version of our Shark Tank pitch. In everything that you’re doing, you have to be able to pitch. You have to be able to pitch to investors.

Of course, you have to be able to pitch to buyers, but you also have to be able to pitch to the advisors and mentors you want to have around you. The team that you want to hire, keep, and retain, and the people that could open doors or support you. Your peers, industry, buzz, and all of that stuff comes with your ability to articulate the vision that you have for your brand and your business. Those need to be tailored to this specific application, but I know many of you are absolutely fearful of doing this. It’s not easy. It is hard. You are putting your kid out there and letting people tell you that that kid is ugly and that can hurt. It’s critical that you get good at it, comfortable with it, and confident in it and you look at it as iterative and something that you continue to learn, grow, improve, and so forth.

Growth Hacking

Anytime you have an opportunity to pitch, whether that’s to an investor in a formal setting or in an informal setting, whether it’s getting in front of a chamber of commerce or something along those lines. If you’re uncomfortable with it, take some lessons on doing it. Join a Toastmasters group. Do something to get better at it. Next on my list is one of my favorites, which is growth hacking. In the perfect world, we all have huge budgets and we can employ large consumer insight studies. I’m not necessarily a believer in those anyway. At the end of the day, what consumers say they’re going to do and what consumers do is wildly different, and that’s been proven forever.

People will say, “I eat healthy,” and then they leave and stop at 7-Eleven and get up a package of Ho Hos. The only real way to begin to validate the assumptions that you’ve made in your growth hypothesis around pricing, the efficacy of trade spends or the efficacy of your acquisition strategy online, and so forth. It is to build controlled experiments, isolate some of those variables, and understand that’s an imperfect thing because it’s difficult to isolate variables. For example, if you’re struggling with, “Is this item going to sell at $499 or do I need to go to $399? I could use that extra margin because I can reinvest that margin in more trade spend and a whole myriad of activities.”

What usually happens quite frankly is you talk to people who will help you and you talk to yourself and you wind up going down to the lower price because it feels safer. That’s why we consistently see that. What I’ve learned in my timeframe is that the price you start is never going to be the price you finish. This industry finds a way to compress it down. In this particular case, using this example, what you might do is let’s say you have two decent size-independent chains. Let’s use a brick and mortar example. In one chain, you go in at your $499 price point and run your regular promo calendar. In the other similar chain, you go in and say, “I want to do an EDLP at $399.”

You run that for 90, 120 days, or whatever it is, and you look at the velocity difference. There’s going to be some geographic differences and store traffic difference, but you should be able to get intuitive level data as to which works. What’s suppressing? Are you selling enough more at $399 to warrant the lower GP percentage? You can’t answer questions that you’ll never get answers to unless you hack it. The same experiments work online and it works for every variable. Sit down and think about the questions you have and the underlying assumptions in your business, and then think about how the hell can I test it? How can I isolate it?

As they say, don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. You can’t isolate everything. It’s not always going to be statistically significant but it should be insightful and provide you enough to make the next best assumption, and then you take that next best assumption and figure out a way to test it. You continue to roll forward those assumptive tests. You keep rolling them forward until you get to the point where the market has given you enough feedback that you feel more comfortable with the assumptions that you’re making, but never ever completely comfortable. You should always have the growth hack mentality because if you think you’re arriving somewhere, you’re wrong.

Consumer behavior changes, market dynamics change, new entrance come in, and all of those things. This is the journey. Growth hacking is the journey and constantly trying to use every interaction you have with consumers and every interaction they have with your brand or buyers and so forth online or on a shelf. You need to figure out how and where and in what manner you can use those interactions, experiments, and tests to better inform you to make you better before doing a large-scale promotional activity or large-scale pricing changes or roll-ups. There’s a lot more on that.

Start Activating Your Brand

In fact, what I’m trying to do in a future episode is get Thomas Both who is the Head of Stanford d.school. That’s where I learned human-centered design, which growth hacking is a part of. I spent a couple of days with him and I’ve become an evangelist, so I’d love to get him on an upcoming episode. We talked about growth hack. The next one is you start activating your brand. You have to build what we call an activation wheel. You need to be encircling your consumer. I’m beginning to hate the word consumer because it sounds like it’s one-way and it’s just them consuming. It’s more like your brand participant because it’s two-way. It’s relational. Let’s call it the participant.

You need to encircle that participant with ways to interact with them and to involve. The best one is to think about that. They look up and down that continuum, that consumer shop. In this industry, we do a nice job of talking about channel strategy and segmentation, which is great for looking at elements of the business in isolation. In reality, that’s not how we shop as individuals and that’s not the experience that our participants have. The reality is we shop up and down the continuum. On one side of the continuum is where we discover things, new items, try new things, impulse, etc. The other side of that continuum is where we replenish, where we restock and go to buy more. If you look above that continuum, let’s say, it’s the physical plane. It’s where we physically do those things.

Build Your Business To Scale

If it’s discovery, it may be Hudson news in the airport back in the olden days when we could travel or a yoga studio or coming out of Equinox gym or SoulCycle or corporate campus. Where we replenish is a club, grocery and mass. In digital, same thing. We discover through influencers, blogs, podcasts, paid social, advertorials and PR. We replenish through Amazon, Thrive, our own websites, and things like that. The key is to build your go-to-market around where you can intersect on that continuum and in those two planes. That’s vitally important. Let’s talk about the next thing, which is you have to build your business to scale.

Here’s the thing. Many founders are heads down caught in the transactional nature of their business. As a founder and as an entrepreneur, you have a third job. You’re a founder and an entrepreneur, but you’re also, for most of you, CEO. A CEO’s role is always to look three years down the field and think about what’s next. One of the questions you have to ask is, “All this work, everything that I’m doing, if it happens and if I hit these numbers and I drive this scale, am I going to be able to absorb it? Am I going to be able to deal with it?” Looking through two things and I also find this helpful. I encourage everybody to build a five-year organizational design.

Plan the future of your team over five years based on the milestones and the things that you’re trying to hit. Build that and understand that because that’ll also roll into your capital strategy and growth hypothesis and that is important. The other is to start building the culture you want. I see this happen all the time. We think, “We only have 2 or 3 people,” or “It’s just me and some fractional,” or “Five people.” Culture is something I do on the other side. The problem is that a lot of times, it’s two years later and you have 10 or 15 people, you look up and you’re like, “Shit. The horse has left the barn. Now, what do I do? I’ve got a culture, but it wasn’t the one I wanted. It wasn’t the kind of environment that I wanted to create.”

Build Your Community

Start thinking now about the culture you want to create and start fostering that and making sure that you’re able to tell people what the core values are and all of those things. We’ve talked about scale and activation. The last thing about scale is that you have to be plugged into the ecosystem. You can’t do this alone. It takes multiple people, which leads to my next point, community. The founders that outperform one of the single biggest variables and differences is the way they’re able to build community. There are three specific communities and I learned how to segregate these three from a guy named Jono Bacon.

He was an earlier guest on the show and he has written a couple of books, The Art of Community and People Powered. There are three types of community that he describes and these to me were eye-openers when I first encountered them. The first one we’re all familiar with. It’s the one we talk about all the time and that’s our consumers, participant, our tribe. The tribe that we’re trying to build around our brand. Most everybody reading this works diligently towards cultivating that community. The other two, we do so often with less intentionality and less focus. One is collaborators. Building a community of collaboration and we work hard to try to foster that because I’m a huge believer in that.

When you put entrepreneurial minds together and get the hell out of the way, good shit happens. I’m trying to build a community of collaborators. Having intentionality around that as a founder is important. It’s not just collaborators in terms of other founders, peers, or brands, but all kinds of people who can interact and participate with you in collaborating to make you more effective and your brand better. The third community is the community of champions. These are the people that can open doors, make things happen, get you to the front of the line, and help you see a wall before you hit it or a trapdoor before you go through it. These are mentors and advisors, formal or informal. Building that community of champions is critical. The founders that outperform build these three communities with intentionality.

The final one that I realized, and this is probably the least sexy and the least appealing if any of the others haven’t been, is accountability. Instilling rigor into your business and instilling discipline around financials, pre-call planning for important meetings, objectives, and KPIs. That rigor is so easy to push aside because, in my experience, most entrepreneurs are creatives, innovators, and squirrels chasing their next nut, rigor is not something that they like to do, but it serves you. Discipline wins. Accountability is key.

I’ll recap it so everyone can do it. Passionately dispassionate have a good strong testable, measurable growth hypothesis. Understand your capital horizon, be able to pitch growth, have a growth hack mentality, and be constantly testing all of your assumptions. Make sure that you’re able to absorb, scale, activate your brand, build your three communities, and install and instill accountability and rigor. I wanted to share that. A few more things. I want to come back to how hard this is. I’m not saying this to placate you or to soothe you in any way, shape or form, but I have so much admiration for you. I respect all of you for being on this journey. I didn’t enter entrepreneurship until I was much later in life. I don’t think I did it nearly as adventurously as you all have. It’s awesome.

My whole perspective on entrepreneurship over the last ten years or so has evolved to the fact that I encourage my son who’s graduating from UCLA to pursue entrepreneurship, but instead, he’s pursuing law. My friend, Chuck, wins. This is so damn hard and the things that are often the hardest are rejection. I want to talk about that. You all are going to get many more noes in this journey than you are with yeses. In talking to many of the early-stage seed funds and Angels and so forth, I would hazard. If I were to average, I would say it’s a 400:1 ratio between deals that are seen and investments made. You’re going to get 40 or 50, maybe 100 noes before you get a yes.

The one weird thing I’ve seen in this business is that you get all these noes and every time you get a no, you go back and you question, “Is it me? Does my breath smell? Did I not put on enough deodorant? Does my business suck?” You start wavering, but it’s just that there are far more of you than there are investors. It’s often fit and timing and all of those kinds of things. You have to persevere. You have to let that rejection roll off. What I would encourage everyone to do is this within every rejection, within every no, within every bit of feedback, there is some nugget of truth somewhere. Search for that, question that, look for that nugget of truth as small as it may be or as big as it may be, and take that and use that, and then let every other aspect of it go.

Don’t carry it with you. Don’t add it to the pile of rocks you’re dragging behind you because it will wear you down. You’ll show up with less energy and less belief in yourself. Set it aside, use the nugget, get better, and go forward. The other thing I will tell you is that most of you have two companions on this journey. One on this shoulder and one on the other shoulder, and that’s doubt and fear. I don’t know that you can get rid of them and I don’t know that you should. Doubt and fear are your guides. They’re your guardians. What they guard against is complacency. As long as you are doubtful, as long as you have worry and fear and so forth, you will never get complacent. You will never rest. You will never go, “I got it.”

That is probably the single biggest risk to your business. Wishing that fear and doubt go away or wondering, “Am I the only founder that’s experiencing such fear and doubt?” I promise you, you’re not. I promise you that almost every founder is and if they’re not, they should be. That is something that you should welcome because it is that guard against complacency. The key is to understand what it is. The key is to understand that doubt and that fear is all the common logic and all the stuff that’s happening, telling you to challenge yourself. Use it to challenge yourself, but don’t allow it to overwhelm you, cripple you, or paralyze you.

Welcome it and say, “It’s here and it’s protecting me.” I learned that way too late. In fact, somebody who said something. She was bitching about the fact, “I would think at this stage of my life, I would be able to set aside worry.” She’s almost 54 years old and spends so much time worrying. She looked at me and said, “You’ve got two choices. You can take that and make that a negative, complain about it, and question yourself all you want, or you can take it and be grateful for it because I guarantee you that worry is why you’re here. That worry is what’s kept you moving, what has kept you challenging and moving forward.”

Ever since she said that to me, it was an epiphany and I don’t worry any less. Instead of feeling like it’s a drain or feeling like it’s a negative, I thank it. I’m like, “This is keeping me on my toes. This is keeping me focused.” I want to encourage that. The last thing I want to say about how hard this is, is this industry conspires against you. Not maliciously, not intentionally, but it wasn’t built for you. It was not built for businesses like you, the business structurally, and specifically, brick and mortar and eComm, too. The business structurally was built for big businesses, high velocities, big terms, bulk, and all of those things.

Everything about this business conspires against you, except one thing, that $18 billion worth of consumers have been voted towards you. Just know it. There is no easy way. There are no absolute answers. I get this question a lot. “Can you layout a sequential plan?” No. You have to get to one step to take the next step, but that next step may be different depending on where you get to in that first step. It is hard, challenging, inconsistent, and maddening, but it is awesome. Know that you’re not alone. A few more things I want to talk to are my top ten list, and then I’ll go through it all. Let me make sure I’m not missing any important questions.

Bobby asks a question. “What does worry look like for you? What do you worry about? What’s the conversation in your head?” Letting any of you into my head would probably cause nightmares. I’m going to worry about how it’s going to be perceived. My number one worry, the thing that keeps me up at night is, “Am I doing enough? Am I making a big enough impact?” I know I’m imperfect. I know there are times I get overwhelmed and distracted. I am though constantly challenging myself to make sure I am serving you. That used to be tiresome. I wondered when would I ever have that confidence?

Now I realized I don’t ever want that. I always want to be worried about that and seeking it, but I get better at it. I’m able to recognize it for what it is. It’s worry and it’s guiding me. It’s not something that’s weighing me down if that makes sense. My seventh thing is the most important investment you can make in your business is you. Every dollar you get in capital, everything that happens is, at the end of the day, banking on you. It’s easy to lose sight of this. I’ve done it. It’s happened numerous times oddly in my career. It’s different seasons, so to speak.

I have put my own self-care on the back burner, thinking that I’ll come back to it when I have time. I did it in my 30s and I did it again in my late 40s. In years I’ve been doing this, I’ve put that on the back burner, but you start feeling the effects of it. You start seeing diminishing returns because you’re not showing up as the best version of yourself. You’re not fully manifesting in the best way. You need that. You go back to number six. This is so hard and the way to make it less hard is for you to show up at your best and that starts with self-care. It’s easy to sacrifice that. “I’ve got 1,000 emails I’ve got to deal with. I’ll skip my run. I’ll eat at my desk. I’ll sit here and work until 10:00 at night. I’ll work all weekend. I won’t take any time to read a book or unwind.”

Not only do you suffer, but oftentimes, relationships suffer. Too many divorces come out of entrepreneurial relationships. Too many kids don’t have time with their parents. I promise you that the most effective investment you can make is in things like that. Nurture yourself, take care of yourself, make sure you’re having the mental downtime and the physical downtime, you’re eating the right way, and sleeping the right way. You’re spending the time with your family and your partner and doing all of those things even if it seems like it’s taking you away from the business. Even if it’s taking hours away that you could use back for your business.

I promise you that if you take that time, you’ll be more effective. I always say this and I believe it. To be generous, you first have to be selfish. You have to start that generosity with you and take care of yourself to be able to be there, so invest in yourself. Last three and these are a little bit faster. Don’t get lost in the transaction of your business. It’s easy to do that, all of you. You’re focused on getting orders out. You’re focused on your cashflow. You’re focused on what’s right there in front of you, the minutia and the detail. You need to find a way to do it, think bigger, think broadly, and look down the field.

I would encourage all of you to schedule that into your calendar. Make an appointment of yourself, big thinking time, or whatever the hell you want to call it. Time that it forces you to lift up and say, “Where am I? Where am I going? What’s working? What’s not working?” It takes me to number nine, which is to think differently and challenge everything. I see this all the time. You see brands that are having success with an influencer campaign or success in one way or the other, and then 97 other brands chase the same thing. Don’t do that. Don’t follow. Lead. Think differently. Think about, “Everyone’s doing this. How do I show up over here and do that?” That’s what’s got you here in the first place. That’s why you started this because if you thought like everybody else, you’d be like everybody else and you’re not.

Don’t start being like everybody else. Think differently. Try something that nobody else is trying. I joke sometimes. I call R&D in this industry, Rip-off and Duplicate because I see so much of it. Not just on the product side, but on the go-to-market side and on everything around it. We talked about product. You have to be differentiated. You have to be unique. My number ten, and this one is important to me, I’m a believer in karmic boomerangs. To describe that for you, I have this fundamental belief that the most powerful business building, personal building activity that you can take is to give with no expectation of reciprocity.

Give with no mindset that you’re going to lever it one day, but as to walk into an environment physically or virtually in the world nowadays. Not with the mindset, “What do I want to get out of it? What do I want to have happened?” Rather, “What can I do to help somebody else? How can I give?” This came to me years ago. This is after I started this business. I realized I hated the concept of networking because networking felt slimy to me. I was uncomfortable doing it. I’m a relative introvert in doing that because I was going with the mindset of trying to get something out of it. When I shifted that mindset to, “I don’t want anything out of it. I don’t want anything out of any of these interactions I want to give.” I know that sounds woo-woo. It sounds like I’m not switch and maybe I am.

I promise you it’s good business because if you give and you do those things, you will absolutely see a return on that giving. Not expecting anything back will be far greater, richer, and more than you have ever expected or thought that you would get if you were out seeking those things. It feels damn good to give wholeheartedly without expectation. I encourage everyone to do that. I’ll recap this. Here’s what I want founders to know. $18 billion in market share have moved and we’ve got to do better in terms of the failure rate. Each of you is changing the world. You’re getting up every day and changing the world. You and your brand are influencers.

You have a voice. Use it as much as you want to. It’s not about the destination in this. It is the joy of the journey, the lessons, relationships, and opportunities. Don’t lose the joy in the journey by focusing only on the destination. Founders that outperform or passionately dispassionate have a growth hypothesis, have a capital horizon, can pitch, are growth hack mindset driven, and are focused on building the scale and activating their brands. They are driving, building, and collecting people through community and have rigor and accountability. Number six is that this is hard. Rejection, doubt, fear, industry conspires against you and got a lot of headwinds.

If it were easy, it wouldn’t be as magical. That one worry can serve you. Invest in yourself and make sure that you prioritize self-care, the people around you, and the importance of those relationships. Don’t get lost in the transactional nature of your business. Make sure you look up every once in a while to stop working in your business and work on your business. “Think differently and challenge everything.” Make that a mantra. Say that to yourself often, and then subscribe to the principle of karmic boomerangs. Give with no expectation of reciprocity.

Figure out a way you can do that and I will promise you, I don’t know when it will happen. It may be years down the field, but it will. What will return from being a consistent, honest, and authentic giver will be the riches that you want, hope for, and aspire to, but don’t give with that mindset. That’s it. It’s a different take on this episode. I hope it was informative, instructive and useful. I appreciate all of you taking the time to read. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks. Bye, everyone.

Important Links

• Nick McCoy

• Toastmasters

• Stanford d.school

• Jono Bacon – Past episode

• The Art of Community

• People Powered

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