"Winning"

The last two weeks have included 10+ days of travel?—?from Arkansas to shoot enterprise training and biz dev to a pit stop back in LA to the Bay Area for our 2017 STRIVR summit?—?so catching back up here before another week begins on the road.

Last week we had two full days of company meetings, and I wanted to unpack a macro thought a little that I took away from our summit.

How do you define “winning” for your company?

We spent a good chunk of time discussing what that means for us and what that goal looks like.

The first thing we tried to do was set aside the concept of money.

We’re not naive. Money is a primary motivator for many and important to everyone on some level, and there is the carrot of financial success that does hover over entrepreneurial efforts. We all hope to make something at the end of a long journey.

But we tried to set money aside because when studying successful entrepreneurs and companies, you quickly understand that there has to be something more at the forefront of your vision and the center of your work. This is too hard otherwise.

Only 1 out of every 10 startups succeed?—?and “succeed” means stay in business, not get rich. The percentage of the 10 percent that stay in business and then build significant wealth is minuscule. The concept of wealth is a real dream, but it’s still a dream in many regards and therefore has to somehow be pushed down the list of motivators for building a company.

In the moment, the day-t0-day grind of building this thing, money isn’t what powers you through dozens and dozens of flights, nights away from home, weekends spent trying to meet tight deadlines, lessons learned the hard way, embarrassing mistakes, rejections … only your ultimate definition of “winning” can provide the energy and persistence needed for that.

For us, our ultimate definition of winning is fundamentally changing how people and organizations approach performance training.

We are building tools that make people better at what they do, in less time. We are constructing data infrastructure that helps organizations understand their people and businesses better and improve both in innovative and efficient ways. We are designing best practices and processes that allow large groups of people to take those tools and insights and implement them throughout a vast network as efficiently as possible.

Our hope is that these things create so much value, and are so seamless to integrate, for companies that they forget how they ever trained without them and are now able to pass that value on to the people who work for them and the customers they serve. Our hope is that the sum of this creates massive competitive advantages for those who work with STRIVR over a competitor who doesn’t.

That is our definition of “winning” and what we think about when we envision the future of our team. Everything else is a residual of that.

I’ve been in the startup game only a few months and didn’t have to make the sacrifices others did in the first 18 months of STRIVR, which is why I have deep respect for the mission we’re on and what others have done to get it even this far. Part of me wishes I had to bleed with them in the first 18 months so I could really understand what it takes, but I’m glad I get to now and together chase this ambitious goal we’ve set for ourselves. We have so much left to do to “win.”

How do other entrepreneurs define winning for themselves?

I’d be curious to know.

This is a healthy topic to think through and I suspect something that is required for everyone at some point if they want to be successful.

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