After being an entrepreneur and working with over 1,000 entrepreneurs over 40+ years I would like to draw a distinction between those who invent products or services, those who form legal entities, and those who truly found successful businesses.

An inventor who creates a product that solves a real problem is a successful inventor. That same inventor can form a legal entity from which said inventor could provide the product created. At that point both inventing and forming have taken place. But to truly found a business means someone laid the foundation for a solid business direction with the product(s) or services that were invented. Founding requires inventing and forming to take place, but also requires an understanding of the market opportunity, the ability to build an effective business model and plan around it, and the ability to execute that plan.

Most start-up businesses are formed by entrepreneurs that have solved a problem. And most such start-ups fail to reach their five-year anniversary because inventing and forming are not enough. Those that succeed are those that engage business experience in balance with the opportunity generated. This requires that inventors understand their own strengths and shortcomings, and build the missing components into their team. If they do this, their chances of success are increased. If they fail to do this, their odds of failure increase as well.

I was fortunate to have lived this experience personally with a highly successful business in the 90’s. My partner, whom most called the founder, solved a real-world problem for a single regional business in a manner that allowed him to form a company and generate good initial sales revenue. To his credit, he recognized his own skills and shortcomings and because he and I had worked in a previous business together, where I drove business development, and we had developed mutual respect accordingly, he asked me to engage to develop a clear business model and plan.

Working together we built a highly successful business that developed a strong global brand and today employs well over 200 people. Arguably we “founded” the business together, leaning on each other’s strengths. Without both sets of strengths and related experience the business would never have reached the level of success generated. If you are an inventing “founder,” seek out a business savvy “co-founder” and build success together. Don’t get caught up in terms and titles, get caught up in success. Successful businesses provide opportunity and reward for employees, their families, and their communities and that is the true reward of effective “founding.”

Most businesses are founded without a formal Board of Directors or Board of Managers. Once formed, early boards are typically made up of founders and a few early “angel” investors. Early-stage investors want their investment to grow, and yet many are inexperienced or unwilling to engage in helping secure follow-on capital. As the business proceeds and needs additional capital, the burden falls back to the founders, who are also working tirelessly to grow the business. Raising capital is a full-time job for an inexperienced founder, and leading an early-stage company is more than a full-time job, so by default it is not possible to do both effectively. And yet, this scenario is the norm and non-experienced founders struggle to create real success, some to the point where they are forced to stop trying.

Critical to success is securing board members that will help founders secure the needed go-forward capital. The obligation of a board member is to manage shareholder value, including their own. Shareholder value is increased when the company itself increases in value, and that happens with growth, many times fueled by additional capital. Sitting on a board of a company needing capital and forcing those leading the company to secure such capital on their own, at the expense of driving the business, is irresponsible to the company’s shareholders, and yet this scenario is played out daily.

I have worked with hundreds of early-stage businesses that have raised capital, and I counsel every one of them to build a board of directors that have applicable experience, connections, and a willingness to engage as needed. I also counsel them to continually update those on their boards to fit the needs at hand. If you need to raise profession / institutional capital, you need that kind of talent on your board, either prior to or as a direct result of the raise. That talent can then help with future raises, which will add new talent to the board and the process goes on. To grow from start-up to early-stage to later-stage requires different skills and experiences over that time on both the management team and the board. Failing to make the needed changes in either area inhibits success.

Over the past 20 years I have witnessed an ongoing decline in the basic premise of John Molloy’s 1975 Book, “Dress for Success.” And with that decline has come a commensurate decline in performance and overall business and personal success. Focusing on the business aspect alone, understanding that to earn respect from others the first, and most important thing one must do is respect and value themselves and the image they exhibit. From personal appearance to actions, to become a true leader, one must focus on all things together.

No matter how strong one’s overall leadership actions become, if those actions run contrary to the package from which those actions emanate, the results will be less than optimal. If you are a manager of others, and desiring to excel as a leader, the thing you must ask yourself everyday before you go to work, is the image you are delivering one that matches the results you are trying to achieve. Or is that image actually working against you? The impacts of the pandemic and resulting remote work trend has accelerated the decline in respect and related results. Sit in on a typical company “virtual” meeting and not only do you see people dressed unprofessionally, but you also witness disrespect for the person leading the discussion with cell phones, food, second monitor email, dogs and kids, and other distractions. How can one possibly expect top level goal attainment, for the business and each person involved, if that is the base environment?

So, when you engage in every new day, ask yourself, is the image you are delivering aligned with the goals you are trying to achieve for yourself, your family, your team, and your company?

Around 1988, I was promoted to National Sales Manager at Universal Gym Equipment Company, one of the largest fitness equipment companies in the world at the time. I was immediately the leader of a team of 35 territory sales representatives, nearly all of whom had been hired based upon athletic experience, not sales experience. Working as a product manager, in this organization, for many years prior to my new role, it had become apparent to me the selling organization lacked real selling acumen. Great people with good people skills, but in an industry where competition was increasing annually, their ability to generate sales by establishing a clear winning position for our products was missing.

To improve our ability to compete, using Tom Hopkins (How to Master the Art of Selling) as my mentor, I implemented sales skills training programs across the organization. My thinking was I could simply train our folks to become “better” sales people and that they would willingly absorb and employ the education. I was completely wrong regarding that assumption (major career lesson) and in the process of working on the training learned that many, if not most, of the team didn’t want to change and were not comfortable with the training. One of my team, in a role-playing session, simply froze up when it was his turn, got up from the table, walked out of the hotel, and flew home. Clearly, I was failing, but why? In nearly every case our sales team was not comfortable in real selling situations and did not have the desire or passion to improve. I tried incentive compensation plans, I even tried sending separate bonuses to their spouses every quarter they attained their goals as a way of engaging their families. After a year of trying many things, it was apparent that most of the team were simply not sales people, meaning they did not have the core personality traits that aligned with successful sales people.

With sales revenue slipping to new competition, I started replacing sales personnel, with the goal of hiring people with real sales experience and acumen. This was a difficult process for a new 30-year-old sales manager, to be exiting people much older with many more years of industry experience. As I started, I was able to improve performance in some cases but not in others because I was not able to truly understand the capability of a new hire until I hired them. As such, some hires went really well and some not well at all. This was certainly frustrating because of the time, expense, and lost sales potential.

I was lamenting to a sales consultant I had hired to help with the training saying I wish there was a way for me to better understand a candidates true wiring so I could better predict their ability to be successful in the role. My consultant then asked if I had heard of Caliper? “What’s Caliper,” I said, and he explained it was a company he had recently become aware of that had a personality profile test that could be used to better screen sales candidates. It could tell me whether each candidate possessed the core personality traits that would innately maximize their ability to be successful in a sales role.

I made a call to the company (no internet then) and made arrangements to test a few of my better sales folks to get a feel for the program. I ran the tests and worked with the folks at Caliper to have them explain the results and wow, what you could learn was truly amazing. From that moment forward I decided that I was not going to make any more hires without the Caliper Profile as part of the initial screening process. With this change, our new hires were a remarkably better fit. I believe I ended up replacing 30 of the original 35 people over three years and the quality and revenue generating capabilities of the sales team grew significantly. Unfortunately, so also did the amount of competition. We were, however, able to minimize the competitive impact in a way that would not have been possible without this change.

From that point on, in my team building life, I have used Caliper, now Talogy (www.talogy.com), for every position for which I have hired. I worked closely over the years with my Caliper representative, who I ended up calling Dr. Laura for the incredible teams she was able to help me develop. She helped me understand how to use the tool for every job role, whether it was a new hire or helping existing team members improve. Caliper and Laura helped me find people with the optimal traits for each role and also helped me find people that could work well together, as well as with me personally, generating stronger overall teams. The profile also helped each team member better understand the core traits of other members, minimizing conflict and maximizing collaboration. Success came from building high performing teams that optimally matched their respective roles, had a passionate drive to succeed, and played well together over time.

Also critical was understanding my own profile, my natural strengths and shortcomings, so that I could build teams that shored up my weaknesses while also having common traits that allowed us to win as a team and enjoy it in the process. I credit the many business successes of my life to the teams of people that truly did the work. The ability to succeed as a team came from having the experience, capability, drive and chemistry matched to the goals in front of us and I am forever grateful to each one of them.

As I was breaking down boxes from our family’s annual Christmas gift exchange this year, I was again reminded of how many gifts came in Amazon or another internet vendor packaging. In a few short decades, we have gone from purchasing all of our gifts from area vendors to where, in 2024, two-thirds of buyers will purchase half or more of their gifts on the internet. Traditional local merchant shopping has given way to convenience, discounts and selection. This trend is projected to grow annually, with the end goal of merchants like Amazon, eBay, Costco, Walmart, and Target, that nearly all purchasing of retail hard-goods will be online. I don’t think anyone will argue with the fact that internet purchasing allows a far easier process with a much broader selection of goods. How could this not be optimal?

Dollars spent with locally owned vendors recirculate 2-4 times more than dollars spent on non-locally owned (big box / franchise) businesses. And dollars spent online, unless that vendor is local, do not circulate at all. So, with the continued online purchasing behavior, more and more of local community dollars will continue to leave. And those communities in which the online retailers reside will reap the benefit.

It is estimated that for our local Cedar Rapids community (roughly 250,000 population), residents will spend over $1 billion online in 2025. That is money that will leave the community for good, with that number continuing to grow every year. The faster money leaves a community, the more money a community must bring in to (a) balance it, or optimally (b) grow its overall vitality.

So how do you increase the local money supply? Local manufacturing operations, for example, that produce a product sold broadly will create jobs and payroll paid for by buyers from other communities. The more of these types of jobs, the greater the inflow of dollars. This model has been at the core of business recruitment economic development for decades. In our community think Nordstroms, Red Star Yeast, Sub Zero, etc. If you want to ratchet up the inflow to a much greater level, locate the home office of that manufacturing operation in your community. Then, besides the manufacturing jobs you will also get the higher paying senior management jobs, you will get retainment of local legal, accounting, marketing and recruiting services, you will get financial support of your local charities, you will get philanthropic engagement in local community needs, you will get local community leadership talent, and you will get generational wealth and family-based dedication to your community.

At the heart of strong growing communities are home-office based interstate-commerce businesses that attract money and talent on an ongoing basis and provide strong local community leadership. If you strip away the home offices and keep just the jobs, you keep some of the money but you lose the wealth, philanthropy, community leadership, and the retention of your local service providers. This is not a condemnation of recruitment economic development, but rather a challenge to make sure that the inflow of both talent and dollars exceeds the outflow. And with the increasing amount of dollars flowing out to a “Buy Now” button, jobs-only economic development is unlikely to keep up.

There has been a lot of conversation since the pandemic on the merits of working from home versus working remotely or working in a hybrid situation. From a leadership standpoint, it’s become even more difficult to navigate the hiring process while, at the same time, building a high performing team that ultimately drives optimal business performance. Having built multiple such teams I remain a strong advocate for in-person work environments and see the following as important aspects to consider:

• The social component of team building is as important as the skill component
• Remote work is not suitable for all jobs or personalities types
• Many people need away from home time for life balance
• Work environments that encourage interpersonal investment creates maximum reward for
  both the team and the business

The difference between highly successful businesses, and those that are not, always comes down to leadership. Creating environments where people see their work and teammates as an enjoyable part of their life, and invest in that team with the same intensity with which they engage outside the workplace, will ultimately be rewarded with the best life balance.

Over the past two years, traditional face to face sales organizations were first forced, and then lulled into the use of technology as the accepted medium for selling. No planes, no cars, no hotels, more presentations per day, and home for dinner. Why would someone ever go back to travel?

The key to successful selling is to match up a defined need with an applicable solution – from commodity to complexity. And in each case, purchases take place when the need, and related value of the solution equate. As the complexity and price rise, the ability to create matching value increases in difficulty, and that is where virtual selling comes up short.

Say you a selling a SaaS product that will require an investment of $50,000 per year for your prospective customer, and will involve multiple departments across the customers organization with each department involved in the purchase process. And due to the depth of your products capabilities, it will take on average 45 minutes to one hour to effectively demonstrate. You set up a virtual meeting, get everyone on screen, do introductions and begin your demo.

Because you have been doing this for the past couple of years, you have learned how to multi-task to a point where even during your demo, your eyes continually glance over to your email on a second monitor. And if you watch closely, you will see the eyes of each one of your prospects doing exactly the same. So now all of you are paying partial attention to a demonstration that is intended to help you determine critical needs as well as lock in solid interest from your prospect. During the demo there are random comments and questions and, in the end, you feel like it went really well, only to find out, over the coming weeks, that you are not progressing at the pace you envisioned.

Imagine any meeting where the attendees and the presenter are both multitasking and not giving 100% attention to each other – what would your expectations be regarding the outcome? If you have the opportunity to be selling in person and you are not doing so you are shorting yourself, your future customers, and your employer. It is easy to jump on “the new way of working” train and convince yourself that it’s better – but in the end, sales decisions get made by real people based upon clear knowledge transfer and related value propositions. Those that take the time to show up and engage will generally win over those that do not.

A personal brand is a mind impression someone gets when they see or hear you or your name. That impression is set by all of the input received by that person regarding you. Throughout your life, you build your personal brand by all things you do and say as well as things other say about you. In cases where people have truly grown to know you, your brand is well defined by consistent actions over time. In cases where relationships are more distant or casual, your brand is defined by perception and small points of reality. And in cases where your brand is established in people who have never actually had direct interactions with you, you brand is set by others impressions rather than by any reality. So, it is clearly possible to have multiple brands by which others see you – some strong and rooted in facts, and some weak and rooted in conjecture and perception. But in all cases, each person believes the brand impression they have is real.

The scary thing about personal brands is that they are difficult if not impossible to manage. If you were able to see a list of what everyone that hears or see your name thinks is your brand, you would probably be mortified and start a campaign to “fix” the misconceptions. In todays’ digital world the number of misconceptions that can be generated far exceeds those generated by those that truly know you, and as such it is possible for the majority to carry an improper brand impression of you on a day-to-day basis. Just think about how many times over the past two years you have developed a brand impression of people in the news – people you have never meet and yet because of what was reported, you yourself stamped a brand on them. This is not good or bad and certainly not something you can fix. It is however something you can consciously manage by taking the time to really know people and check facts before jumping to conclusions and by challenging others to support perceptions with reality. 

As workers are seeking more and more “flexibility” from employers, while at the same time demanding greater compensation and in many cases lower overall productivity requirements, one has to wonder – how does that work? Lower productivity and higher cost? Equal productivity and higher cost? In the end, that additional cost is passed directly back to the worker in the costs of goods and services they consume and no gain is made. I would argue that businesses and workers are looking at the equation from the wrong perspective.

It is critical to understand that if one see’s themselves as a “worker,” they will automatically think about wages and flexibility. Working to live being at the core of their wants and needs. If, on the other hand, that same person was to see themselves as part of exciting team of creative people, generating value in the form of products or services in which they believe. And if they saw this activity as fun, challenging, and something to look forward to every day (like a sport), then what would their priorities be? Wage and flexibility? Or inclusion, challenge, growth and winning? Loving to work being a balanced component of their wants and needs; ultimately enjoying all 24 hours of their day.

And if employers think about new hires as “workers,” they will focus on cost and productivity rather than creating engaging life experiences. Creating the right environment, building the right culture, and focusing on the team rather than cost creates maximum engagement and generates the best outcomes for all parties.

I get that it was my generation (baby boomers) who coined the “live to work” mentality, many times creating a work/life imbalance in pursuit of status or material things. But that said, I have been part of creating high-performance teams that were truly an assembly of people that played together to win, never considering it “work” or themselves a “worker.” And based upon their passion and desire to win, these same people invested significant hours and created incredible value (productivity). They were free to come and go as flexibly as they liked, but in reality, they worked through breaks and lunch hours, came to work early and stayed late. They didn’t do it for the money, they did it for the win. They also did it while maintaining a quality work / life balance, partially because we included their families in many activities, but mostly because the job itself made them a happier person. I saw to it that the compensation attracted the right talent and provided the right reward for the win, but comp was never the ultimate goal.

Decades ago, I was interviewed regarding such teams and was quoted as saying I always looked forward to Monday morning and “getting” to go to work and I wanted others to feel the same. I have always seen business as a team sport. One that is played to win and played for enjoyment. If employers focused on creating that type of culture and environment so their team members felt the same way, the rhetoric would change. Personal satisfaction and productivity would increase without increasing overall cost. And in the end, more satisfied employees would gain a higher quality of life. Feels like this is a better solution.

If you are a company of more than 100 employees and have a workforce that is, in any significant part, unlikely to get vaccinated, you need to start contingency planning now. Most likely to be impacted are skilled and unskilled jobs in the rural manufacturing space, where vaccination rates are the lowest. But no matter where you are, actions to consider immediately include:

• First and foremost is communication. Every one of your employees knows about the mandate and they are certainly wondering and discussing what they think you are going to do about it. The longer you wait to communicate the more spin gets added to the dialog. You can be sure that there are already employees looking for jobs at smaller employers that will not have to comply.
• Determine the most employee friendly process for weekly testing. Is it possible to hire a nurse practitioner to administer tests at your business? This way, employees who will not, or cannot get vaccinated do not have to drive to another facility, mitigating frustration and non-compliance.
• Determine to what extent you are at risk with your workforce. Who and how many people are unlikely to get vaccinated that are not exempt? This goes for your senior management team all the way down the chain. Don’t assume your leadership will automatically comply, and if some leadership will not, you will need to plan around the resulting impact on the team(s) they lead.
• Are you going to use positive incentives to get more folks vaccinated? I have seen leadership announce bonuses to incent their general workforce to get vaccinated, but how about senior leaders? Larger bonuses? And no matter the amount offered, will you pay the bonus to everyone who got vaccinated since the start of the pandemic? Figure out the dollar numbers that will work and get it budgeted and announced.
• Pay attention to the mandate guidelines daily, watching for any change in compliance guidance to ensure that you do not get surprised.

These are indeed crazy times, but like all times, flexibility and accommodation are required to generate the best outcomes, and if you lead through this period proactively you will be one of the businesses least impacted.