For as much as we startup Founders love to innovate business models, we sure have done a lousy job of innovating on the employment model. Our salary lines tend to be our single largest expense in a company, and yet the biggest innovation we've had to date has been moving to a remote work system.
We've agreed that we don't need offices or "40-hour work weeks" anymore, so why haven't we agreed that we don't need the "full-time salaries" that came with them?
(Gasp!)
Yeah, I said it. Yeah, I'm about to be exponentially less popular. And, well, I wasn't that popular before, so… But seriously, why haven't we reconsidered compensation in an era where everything has become fractionalized?
Very few people actually work full-time an...
From startups like Allbirds and Harry’s to larger companies like Tesla, the Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) business model is becoming increasingly popular.
Today, the supply of consumer products greatly outstrips the demand that exists in the market. As a result, consumers are demanding a new experience that big box retailers and other “middlemen” simply can’t provide. Companies want a way to reach consumers directly and control every aspect of that experience.
The rise of D2C companies follows off the back of what General Catalyst’s Hemant Taneja refers to as “economies of unscale.” Modular services have greatly reduced the barriers to launching a D2C strategy. Back in the early 2000s, it was difficult for an e-commerce startup to build and man...
Startup Founders are like top athletes — if we don't keep working that startup muscle daily, we get out of shape fast!
Normally while we're building our startups, that's not a problem — we get all the "exercise" we need in the form of unrelenting stress and anxiety (hey, it's burning calories, right?)
But seriously, being active in our startup keeps us relevant, connected, and engaged in our business worlds. The moment we disconnect, whether it be from a sale, a wind-down, or even just a career change, we start letting that muscle atrophy, and it's very hard to get it back in shape.
When we're in the middle of building our startups, one of the things that we can take for granted is how relevant we are at the moment. We...
Not so long ago, the word “outsourcing” had a bad rap as being synonymous with lost local jobs and greedy CEOs looking for dirt cheap labor. Today, however, busy entrepreneurs and companies everywhere are considering the advantages of virtual outsourcing.
There are many reasons for outsourcing to a virtual assistant, but it can be difficult to determine if the benefits outweigh the negatives. Here are some pros and cons of insourcing versus virtual outsourcing to consider before you decide if a virtual service is right for you.
Lower Cost: With all of the expenses that go into hiring an in-house employee, such as recruiting costs, healthcare and other benefits, parking, office space, and supplies, outso...
Getting ready to audit your site’s SEO? Congratulations! You’re about to embark towards improving your overall SEO footprint while also finding every single potential wart that your website may have.
The bad news is every site will have things wrong with it – yours included. The good news is that each new issue that you find represents an opportunity to improve. As an SEO, the point of auditing your site is to find areas to squeeze more juice out of.
In my previous article entitled, SEO for Beginners, I outlined how there are both things occurring on page, as well as off page, that can impact your site’s SEO performance. Foundational to a good SEO strategy to the point of almost being a prerequisite is technical and content optimization.
B...
1984. A novel that probably most folks were forced to read begrudgingly at some point or another while attending english class (also begrudgingly). As a millennial, I can see among my peers that there’s an undercurrent attitude of irreverence towards the old ways of doing things. It’s like we have some weird anti-establishment angst that we just never grew out of and carry with us wherever we go.
A lot of it is just mob mentality — out with the old, in with the new! Down with bureaucracy! Big brother is evil! Overthrow the tyrannical parents!
Attitudes like that, coupled with the enormous success of the irreverent celebrities of our time (think Zuckerberg with his refusal to wear suits) makes us want to do things differently, even if diffe...
What if I told you that you and your startup have all the time in the world to do what you need to do?
Perhaps you'd exclaim "Heretic! How dare you question the gods of startup urgency and scale!"
Yes, yes, I know. Time is our enemy and it's slipping through our fingers by the second. If we don't get done by this date, we're all doomed. But is that actually true?
What if instead of assuming that time is running out and killing ourselves to beat the clock we tested those assumptions to determine how much time we actually have? What if we actually had a ton of time?
"Good hell, I'm almost 30! If I don't get this startup scaled and sold, what will possibly become of my life?" No matter what stage we're at in our life, we a...
In 2008, the world got a new music streaming service named Spotify. It was developed in Stockholm, Sweden, and provided digital rights management-protected content from record labels and media companies. It may have started out as a local thing, but the freemium service quickly expanded. Today, Spotify has more than 140 million monthly active users and over 50 million paying subscribers.
I had the pleasure of meeting up with Andreas Ehn, who was Spotify’s first employee and CTO. Andreas was responsible for the product and platform architecture as well as hiring a world-class engineering team, of which many have gone on to become successful entrepreneurs on their own.
After Spotify, Andreas founded Wrapp — a mobile online-to-offline customer...
The first article in this 3-part series (How to Design a Killer Sales Compensation Model) introduced the concept of behavioural theory and how it affects sales compensation design. This second article discusses how compensation packages suit different stages of company and product evolution.
The main challenge with designing a sales compensation program is the primary sales role constantly evolves as the company grows and the market matures. The following diagram, courtesy of The Alexander Group, explains the four phases of growth and how this impacts the business.
In the Startup phase, brand awareness is low, and companies strive for a foothold in the market. The salesperson must have an entrepreneurial drive ...
Founders don't get the luxury of sharing openly — at least not without consequences.
Unfortunately, we learn this lesson the hard way, from acting and sharing like we used to do as an employee, only to find out that Founders don't get the same "safe space" we once enjoyed as employees.
Our startups are now a complex web of relationships, responsibilities and again, consequences that we need to understand and respect every time we're about to open our mouths about, well, anything.
When we were in our last job as an employee, we didn't really understand consequences the way we do now. If we got really pissed about something a co-worker did, we could hop on a Slack chat or if we were really clueless about this stuff,...