Ever hear something twenty times before but suddenly on that twenty-first time, it resonates? Well that’s me. Only my twenty-one times has been over the course of 25+ years.
I recall back ’95 when I was rocking to pirated music via Napster, running an unofficial Rage Against the Machine fan, blog, bootleg tape trading site. It was the early days of the web and I decided I would start my own company, a web agency. As an early college student, with no business background other than watching my father run his construction company, this would be a trial and error process for sure.
After one year of part-time attention to the business, I had less than $2k in revenue (that’s for the year), and an awakening to the knowledge needed to run a business. What really appealed to me at that time was the idea of consuming as much information I could about running a business. I wasn’t going to be a business major, but I could figure it out on my own. It wasn’t until a few years later, with a degree under my belt and a fire under my ass that I, and two friends started Imulus. We went on to run that digital agency for nearly 14 years.
In that time I learned what was needed to run a company, yet I was hungry to scale the company. Truthfully it wasn’t all for the right reasons. Primarily I was interested in growing the company so we could venture into near areas of service, perhaps even break off a product focused division. Secondarily, it was for Ego, I wanted to see how big I could go. We implemented Rockefeller Habits (pre Scaling-Up), made a few strategic moves and placed a HUGE gamble on a top client. How huge? Well let’s say that in order to service the proposed work we would have to apply nearly 90% of our team utilization to this one client. I’ll spare the additional details, but for reasons outside my control the client had to freeze all contract work, including ours. It sent Imulus into a downward spiral. The pivot needed wasn’t something my partner and I saw eye-to-eye on, so I sold my shares and he drove on for another year before final collapse.
Uplifting right? I share this because ultimately Imulus was a success for so many years and it was a failure as well. I learned and when the next venture came up I approached it differently. The company I was consulting with hired me to assist with preparing the company for scaling or acquisition. During that time we implemented EOS Traction, got the ship on course and in the process of scaling we were acquired. After my requisite time at the new company, I left. Which brings me to today.
When I look back over those years I see a pattern where I’ve enjoyed creating business systems, values and processes that made teams run better, and could be duplicated. I’ve loved collaborating with my fellow EO members, in forum, discussing business challenges and insights on how to go through or over those challenges. I’ve always loved coaching, it just took me a number of year to hear that calling.
I’ve evaluated several professional coaching systems, and ultimately landed on Scaling-Up because of it’s flexibility as a framework, enthusiastic team of entrepreneurial minded coaches as well as a fantastically successful leader in Verne Harnish. A few other systems were too ridged in their application and methodologies, claiming to be “the system” whereas Scaling-Up isn’t making that claim. It’s a framework, to be adapted and customized to fit each unique client. That approach has a certain humility that appealed to my core values. It has an iterative way collecting the best from the coaching community and eliminating what’s not working.
I’m thrilled to be joining this program with like-minded coaches!
I look forward to the ride.
