What do you wish you had known 10 years ago?
Literally that it's going to take 10 years to build a truly successful business! When we started we thought we were ‘in it’ for 2-3 years and then would be able to retire by the pool. Overnight success is a myth.
What personal habit or behavior helped you accelerate your personal growth?
Reflecting on my mistakes or missteps - talking about them, reading and learning new strategies. If you are prepared to accept you are fallible, and model change, you will have a more resilient team when things get tough.
What motivated you to become an entrepreneur?
To turn a successful product into a successful business and company. Everything flowed from customers using and loving our product. We want to achieve financial freedom by building our own business.
What should leaders understand about their own role and responsibility?
Leadership is about showing the way for others to thrive - taking responsibility and accountability when things are going wrong, giving the team the credit when everything goes well.
If you bring ‘ego’ into leadership and make it about you, then you are building a cult, not a business.
What's a skill that we should pay more attention to in the workplace?
Decision making. It’s often mistaken for ‘opinions’ or ‘feedback’ or ‘collaboration’ but try to encourage your team to make good decisions (i.e. not just a mishmash of compromises).
What do you do to maintain balance in your life?
I am pretty ruthless about notifications on all my devices turned off - which means I am responding in ‘real time’ when I’m looking or checking, but I wont be interrupted if I focussed on something else. I think you have to be a good compartmentalizer generally - good boundaries!
What books do you recommend the most?
"Radical Candor", "Turn the Ship Around," and "Traction."
What’s an important belief / a guiding principle that informs the way you build and run your business?
Define your values (‘culture deck’) and reinforce it often - create rituals and statements that sum up your values and remind everyone why they are important. If people understand and trust how / why you run your business they are going to stay motivated.
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Here’s More, From Other Founders Around the World
What’s an important guiding principle that informs the way you build and run your business?
One of our core values is experimentation. Rather than get stuck in arguing about what solution may best solve a problem or play to our ego, we focus on the smallest step we could possibly take to learn whether that’s true. It moves our minds away from thinking too big without sweating the small stuff and from getting stuck in discussions rather than actually doing something to understand the possible solutions better.
What should leaders understand about their own role and responsibility?
Your own time and energy is the most precious resource you have. Use it wisely, and learn what gives you energy, and what saps you. In the early years of building something, you need to throw a huge amount of time at it - and do many things you perhaps don’t like doing. But as you scale, it’s vital to take a step back and build a business that can grow rapidly beyond the time you put into it.
What shift in perspective has allowed you to see things differently?
It may sound simple, but realizing and truly understanding that we are all different and driven by different things has made a significant impact on me. This insight has changed the way I approach relationships and leadership.
What’s a guiding principle that informs the way you build and run your business?
One of our core values at Cozero is radical candor. It is the idea that the willingness to repeatedly enter uncomfortable situations to speak the truth benefits everyone in the long run. We believe that in order to grow and improve as an organization, we need to create an environment where our team is not afraid to challenge processes and decisions. Making this a core value guides us in difficult situations when it’s not clear which road to take.