How To Navigate Business Icebergs

Drs. Todd and Kim Saxton are award-winning professors at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business as well as co-authors of The Titanic Effect. The book is a practical guide to help startup founders, as well as their investors and supporters, successfully navigate the icebergs that often pop up that sink startups in these early stages. They’re going to share their decades of academic and professional experience, business strategy, marketing, venture-funded startups to help you navigate these deck burgs that often sink early startups.

Let me ask you to each tell me your own little story of origin before you became professors, married and all of that stuff. I love to hear one of you start and say, “When I was growing up,” you can go back as far as you want, “my dream was,” and give us a sense of how you became a professor. We’ll get into the story of how you started working together and got married.

Here I thought you were going to do the origin story of how we got together, which was already dialing back many years.

I’m always fascinated, especially people who dedicate their lives to teaching the university level. Did you know in college this is what you wanted to do or did you as a young girl know, “Someday I’m going to be a professor?”

If I say what my real childhood dreams were, honestly, my first dream was to be the president of the United States. I went to MIT because at some point in high school I discovered I was good at math and computers. I worked in a debit processing center at the local junior college and got to play with some of the first personal computers that were coming out. By the time I got to MIT I had realized, that whole be the first American female president was going to be a tough way to go and would be fraught with a lot of icebergs even though I didn’t know that term. I thought, “I’m going to go make money instead. That’ll be a lot more fun.” We both got into consulting directly out of college, helping companies identify what they’re going forward, strategies ought to be as what I did. Todd did something some related. Todd started to want to go back and get a PhD and follow in his dad’s footsteps of being a professor. I pulled out my SAT scores and I discovered that what I told the SAT when I took that exam to get into college was that I wanted to be a professor as well.

I can’t wait to hear. Your dad was modeling for you, Todd, what a professor’s life was like?

The academic connections, it’s funny because Kim and I have both been out six years from college and working in business consulting on the East Coast. Circle back a little bit, I’m a Jersey boy. I grew up selling newspapers on the Jersey shore. My mom bought the lawnmower in exchange for me mowing our own lawn for free, which meant I could use the lawnmower to mow our neighbors’ lawns. That’s my connection back to your network.

I can relate to you both well of Kim talking about early computers. I was at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and we had Plato where you can touch the screen back then. That was totally cutting edge. I don’t know if you’ve ever remembered or heard of those. I also had a paper route, Todd. I would do the entrepreneur thing, knock on the doors, “Do you want to subscribe?” You sell it, you deliver it and you’ve got to go collect it at the end of the month.

If you’re good, you make your money in tips.

Don’t throw it in the bushes.

There are things you throw in the bushes in New Jersey, but it’s not your customer’s newspapers.

Ironically I skipped over that. My early pitching was as a Girl Scout, I went door-to-door. Those times you had to haul the boxes with you. After a little while, you only had one type of cookie left.

You had pushed those. The mints are gone. Now we’re pushing peanut butter or something. I can relate.

You learn how to message pretty quickly so that you don’t have to haul those cookies back to the house.

Let’s hear those story of the origin of how you too wonderful people connected. You can make it as romantic as you want or as academic as you want. The choice is yours.

I’ll share the non-romantic part. Our first jobs out of school were at the same consulting firm in the DC area. Kim was the sixth and I was the seventh person hired. This was a relatively small entrepreneurial consulting firm. For the first few months, we struggled to work together. We did not get along. Kim may ask me to cut this out, for now, just between us, when we started dating and it got serious enough. We were like, “One of us probably has to leave.” Kim went to talk to the founder to say, “I’m moving onto something else. Part of the reason is I’m dating someone here.” He went through every member of the company, including some that were married, the other women, the janitor, the company dog and the only entity left was me. It was like, “It can’t be Todd.”

We got to keep that in. That’s at least likely to be dating. Kim, what’s your version of that story?

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