Blog

Four Steps to Winterize Your Business

Understand year end financials, connect, set up 2024 for success, plan 2024 calendar. It’s full-fledged fall here in the Midwest, and I’ve been busy running around the house unhooking hoses, cleaning up leaves, and generally getting the house ready for winter. It reminded me that, just like our homes, our business needs to be “winterized” each…

Not the same old marketing

During the first year of leading the Startup Leadership Program, we included the obligatory class on marketing. In the second year, we broke that down into acquiring buyers (entrepreneurial selling) and acquiring users (more akin to traditional marketing). We talked about SEO, retargeting of ads, and virality. It was good stuff, but somehow didn’t seem…

The Business Mentor I Admire Most

As corny as it sounds, I already have my dream business mentor: my father.  He runs a small family business in Rockford, IL. He makes metal parts, which is far from my traditional interests or ambitions. However, there’s commonality that I relish. He doesn’t have a love for formal financial statements; instead, he understands that…

Why I Play the Lotto

As a child, we dream about being astronauts, our backyard tree house becomes an outpost in the Wild West fight between soldiers and Indians, and the only limit to what we can accomplish is chime of mom’s dinner bell (or text message). Somewhere along the way, we start becoming aware of our limitations: our intelligence,…

The Fifth Truth: Defy Gravity

Our private equity partner team signs their emails with four truths: communicate fearlessly, compress time, work tirelessly, and love what you do. These truths have been good to me, helping me achieve success and accomplishment. It’s become apparent that following those truths will lead to good, but not great.  If substantial success, the definition of which…

Best vacation policy ever

Jason Freedman has it right. He wrote a post recently about 42 Floors vacation policy – which consists of a mandatory two weeks of vacation on your first day. Wait, wha????? That’s right, they start paying you and ask you to show up two weeks later. The premise being that we don’t really take vacation…

Do Well

A note to the graduates of the Chicago Startup Leadership Program (SLP) 2013, written March 21, 2013. During grad school, rather than wishing students “good luck” on tests, the faculty at Booth would often print the phrase “do well” next to the honor code. Luck is random; acquiring skills to be in a position to take…