Natalyn "Natty" Lewis

Natalyn O. Lewis, or Natty as everyone knows her, is a wife and mother of 4 beautiful children. As a former NCAA Division 1 athlete, she learned quickly the power of the mind on human achievement and has taken her drive and passion for sports and brought it into coaching and the business world. Natty has 25 years of business and entrepreneurial background. She's studied human behavior for years - why people start, but don't finish... what makes a high achieving person successful. What is the difference between someone that seems to have it all together and someone that can’t get out of their own way? After her own personal struggle with anxiety, she became a woman on a mission to understand thoughts, emotions, and their impact on the physical body and ultimately the impact on our lives.

In 2020, Natty partnered with a nonprofit and combined her knowledge and experience and combined it with their 14 years of research, development, science and evidence of human behavior from working with over 10,000 people to create and implement a new approach to emotional intelligence. She's built companies, worked with professionals from every area including athletes, business owners and influencers. With each person she has worked with she discovered the power of raising your EQ. Everything else raises with it- increased revenue, productivity, purpose, better relationships, more intention and In short, a better life.

Summary

Natalyn Lewis emphasizes the importance of having a crystal clear vision when starting a business, arguing that many entrepreneurs begin their journeys with half-baked ideas that lack direction. Drawing from her extensive experience in both the corporate world and entrepreneurship, she illustrates how self-doubt and imposter syndrome can derail founders if they don’t fully understand their passion and purpose. With a background as an NCAA Division 1 athlete and over 25 years in business, Natalyn combines insights from sports and personal challenges to guide startup founders in building successful ventures. She highlights that those who take the time to define their vision can avoid common pitfalls and make sound decisions that align with their ultimate goals. The conversation delves into her personal journey, including her struggles with anxiety and the pivotal moments that led her to become a coach for entrepreneurs seeking growth and clarity.

Takeaways

• Entrepreneurs often start with half-baked ideas, leading to confusion and wasted resources.
• A clear vision is essential for guiding startup decisions and preventing aimless actions.
• Anxiety can severely impact decision-making, causing poor choices in business ventures.
• Imposter syndrome is common among first-time founders, affecting their confidence and performance.
• Identifying your passion and purpose is critical to building a successful startup.
• Instead of focusing on detailed business plans, prioritize understanding the core mission of your venture.

Links

Natty's Ascend EQ: https://ascendeq.com/

Please leave us a review: https://podchaser.com/DesigningSuccessfulStartups

Tech Startup Toolkit (book): https://www.amazon.com/Tech-Startup-Toolkit-launch-strong/dp/1633438422/

Site with all podcasts: https://jothyrosenberg.com/podcast

Jothy’s non-profit: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Chapters

00:04 - Introduction to Natalyn Lewis

00:10 - The Importance of Clarity in Entrepreneurship

00:37 - The Journey of a Former NCAA Athlete

04:58 - Building Successful Companies: Madeline's Experience

18:25 - The Role of Anxiety in Entrepreneurship

26:02 - Understanding Grit and Resilience in Startups

31:19 - The Power of Vision for Entrepreneurs

Hello, I'm Jothy Rosenberg, the host of Designing Successful Startups, where today's guest is Madeline Lewis.

And the reason for that is the number of these entrepreneurs that start their endeavor with an idea that's half baked that they're not entirely sure about.

It's just, it becomes just a passion project or just an idea that doesn't have an end destination.

It's like getting these guys, it's, it's like giving these guys a car.

And they're so excited to drive that they just start driving.

And by the time they're, that now they're down the road, they're halfway out of gas, they've only got a quarter of a tank left, and you're like, well, where are you going?

Well, they're like, Madeline, or Natty, as everyone knows her, is a wife and mother of four beautiful children.

As a former NCAA Division 1 athlete, she learned quickly the power of the mind on human achievement and has taken her drive and passion for sports and brought it into coaching and the business world.

Nadi has 25 years of business and entrepreneurial background.

She studied human behavior for years.

Why people start but don't finish.

What makes a high achieving person successful?

What is the difference between someone that seems to have it all together and someone that can't get out of their own way?

After her own personal struggle with anxiety, she became a woman on a mission to understand thoughts, emotions, and their impact on the physical body and ultimately the impact on our lives.

From working with over 10,000 people to create and implement a new approach to emotional intelligence.

And here is Nadi.

How are you?

I'm doing very well.

Thanks for having me on.

Oh, I've been looking forward to this.

I'm excited to have you on.

You know what I like to do first is to just get sort of a little bit of context and by asking you where are you originally from and where do you live now?

I'm originally from Idaho and I now live in Utah, just south of Salt Lake City, which we're really excited about hosting the Olympics next, if you're wanting, if anybody's looking for context of where that is.

And that's where I live now.

And I've actually lived here now longer than Idaho, which is a big deal for me.

I still claim Idaho roots, though.

Very important.

One of the things that I know about you is that you were an NCAA Division 1 athlete, but I don't know what sport that was.

Yes, well, I played women's soccer.

I played.

I played basketball my freshman year.

A little bit of red shirting to see.

I loved basketball.

It was my first love.

But soccer took over when it came to college.

So I played primarily soccer in college and got to play at the Division 1 level for Brigham Young University.

So it was a wonderful experience.

So you'd already moved to Utah to go to school?

Yep.

And once.

Once I got here, I just got sucked in.

Right.

I graduated, got an internship at a company here and started my career, and things kind of launched from here.

I've moved around a little bit in between, but keep finding my way back.

And have you been a skier for a long time?

Oh, we do love to ski.

Yeah.

I snowboarded for a while.

I was one of those people who skied and then chunked out the middle part of my ski career for snowboarding.

And now I'm back to skiing because the catching an edge is just too much when you get older.

I've decided it just hurts more.

Yes, I can imagine.

And so from the south, from south of Salt Lake, what's the best?

Park City.

Park City has some beautiful resorts, especially if you're a skier.

Like, Deer Valley is one of my favorite places to go.

They don't allow snowboarders, so it's just beautiful snow.

It's just skiers.

And they do an amazing job keeping.

Keeping up the hill, so that's one of our favorites.

But we live.

We live just 10 minutes from Sundance.

So if you've ever heard of Sundance Film Festival, we live just 10 minutes from Sundance.

So season passes to Sundance, because we can just go for an hour or two whenever we'd like.

But when we go for a weekend, we would go up to Park City.

So I went to.

For 35 years, I never missed a year going to Alta, and I was a ski bum there when I was 19.

But Alta has been getting harder and harder on my knee.

They have some, you know, and I can't avoid the really challenging stuff, so.

Because it's just.

I know it so well.

So I had to basically stop going to Alton.

I've switched to Deer Valley.

So, you know, I might coordinate with you when I'm coming out because maybe.

Maybe we could take in a few runs at Deer Valley.

That would be excellent.

Tell me a little bit also about your history of companies that you've started to up to this point.

Yeah, so I had a really interesting career.

I started in corporate America and was there for about 14 years.

And when I left there, I started my first company, which was a consulting agency.

And then I realized they all.

All the companies I was going to all had the same problem.

And so I started a tech company and started developing technological solutions to solve the problems of my clients and started building a service model on the consulting side and a SaaS model on the.

On the technology side and found that I could build a really nice residual income base coming from the SaaS side.

I would do a work with a client, implement our software, leave the software, and have that managed by my tech team while I moved on to the next client and kind of had two companies going simultaneously there and over time have started three additional technology companies and.

And have just had a.

I've had a great opportunity and great success in my career and had the opportunity to build these companies up and done some mergers, done some sales, had some failures.

Right.

I think I've experienced.

Out of the seven companies that I've started, I think I've experienced a little bit of everything in the entrepreneurial journey, so really have had a fortuitous career with a lot of experiences and a lot of great opportunities in my life.

Did you fund them organically by starting the services and then using that to grow the company, or have you ever had to raise money for investors?

Yep, I've done both.

My very first company, we did it organically where we grew small and then we infused it with our own capital.

So we took a pretty big risk.

I called it skydiving without a parachute.

Right.

I left my.

I left my corporate job, started my consulting agency and my tech company at the same time, funded it myself with all of the savings we had in the account and rolled the dice.

And that was a big.

It was a big move, a scary move.

Right.

And also, I don't know that it's any more scary than going out and raising a million and a half dollars from other people who want to put their pressure on.

And they want to see their return on investment and they want to push hard and they want you to push timelines even when you don't feel like those timelines should be pushed.

So I don't know if which one of them is hard.

You just have to choose your hard.

They're both hard.

And when you raise money, were you able to find investors locally in.

Around.

In and around Salt Lake?

Yep, we had both.

So we found both local investors, and a couple of our local investors connected us to additional investors that were not local.

We brought in A capital raise round and had about four different investors involved in our capital raise.

And now you're part of, it's called Ascend EQ and.

Yeah, tell us about that and what that company does.

Yeah, so I started that company that was a bootstrap company because I had already sold my previous company.

So I self funded Ascend EQ and started that out and built a company where we design where we are clearly and like functionally designed to do one thing really, really well.

And that is to work with business owners, whether they're startup entrepreneurs or whether they're CEOs of multibillion dollar corporations, working with, working with those running businesses and their executive teams to actually create an environment and a culture and an opportunity for growth.

And really we dig in and get involved when it's time to scale and grow and move the needle.

And it's been a really, really rewarding business to be a part of.

Is part of what you do at Ascend EQ working with founders a lot?

Yeah, as opposed to the bigger companies.

So I work with, it's about 50, 50 I would say half of my clients are startups and the other half are large corporations.

So I have, I have companies that range anywhere from just getting started in the very beginnings of their business and they haven't even launched their product yet, all the way up to a billion, like 2.7 billion I think is my largest company that I work with right now.

So anywhere in the mix, we work with them because principally based, the principles of success for the executive management team or for founders of companies or for owners of companies principally based, you have to show up the same.

Whether you're, whether you're starting your company or running a billion dollar enterprise, you have to show up the same.

And that's where we really focus our energy.

And what do you end up doing for, you know, a typical startup founder?

I mean in my experience you're going to run into most, most of the time you're going to find startup founders who don't have a lot of experience, may never have done it before.

Very true.

And we run into that, we do run into that a lot.

And those people are dealing a lot with self doubt and a little bit of imposter syndrome and a little bit of everybody else knows how to do it and I have to follow everybody else syndrome and, and that's really not the way we, we and we get involved with entrepreneurs and really build from their base foundation of what their passion is, their idea, the roots of their business are founded in in who they are.

And we make sure that they dial in first to who they are and then what they're ready to do.

And we dial into that because so many people want to go start a business and when they go to start the business, they spend so much time looking around them at what everybody else is doing and building the initial part of their business out of fear.

And that's when they make their big mistakes.

The passion, the enthusiasm, the excitement, the idea, the creativity that has to be nurtured and leaned into and with some safety, with some boundaries involved so that they can actually make good, sound decisions.

But people are ready to do this more than they give themselves credit for.

And they get hesitant, they get scared, and then they make really stupid decisions out of fear.

And that's usually where we see people start to have their downfall in their businesses.

And when we can catch it right there, we can solve some real problems and save them from some disaster.

Imposter syndrome is a, is a real thing for the first time founder and one of the things that I have personal experience with is first time CEO raising some money.

And I had come out of a technical background which a lot of founders of tech companies are in that same kind of model and they don't feel ready to do sales and marketing, which they assume is really important and is going to be a near fatal gap in their experience base.

And so they, this is where they, they back away.

And, and I didn't have somebody early enough telling me, no, no, no, actually you're exactly the person that needs to do this because you're not going to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff in the first, you know, six months, you, 12 months.

You're, you're, you're, you've, you've got to just, somebody's gotta show the passion and the knowledge about what the company is going to do in terms of solving, you know, a big problem.

Yeah.

And I'm trying to figure out how do you get to them at this point because this is just, you know, two or three or four people that are starting it.

They're the founders, they know something really big.

And then how do you find these people or them find you?

Yeah, most of the time they find me is the truth.

And usually they find me because they have been told by a mentor or somebody else, like invest right now, like don't go blow your first shot and your big idea.

Invest now in having this type of support and coaching as you go through this early part of your business and it will pay huge Dividends down the road.

So I've had, I had one, one CEO and his executive management team that they're running, they're running about a 200 plus million dollar company right now.

And his executive team have sent me probably my last 12 clients in a row because they are a venture capital firm and every time one of their clients comes to them, now they're coming back to them and saying we're not, if you don't go through this process, we don't, we don't bring in RVC to your organization just because they've learned the power of how important it is for these guys to be making sound choices from a place where, where they can capitalize.

We, we don't realize, we use a lot of, we use a lot of science in terms of how the brain actually operates to help these guys understand that when they get scared and when they start making decisions out of fear and out of I'm not good enough and I have imposter syndrome and this isn't my expertise and this isn't where I was going to go and I just had a great tech idea.

They start to minimize the value they're bringing to the table and they start to make fearful choices and that is when they will make their big mistakes.

These, especially in technology.

And you know this because you've done technology.

I mean, good heavens, if you're a founder of a tech company and you can bring your passion, enthusiasm to solve the problem that you're trying to solve to one person who wants that problem solved, even working with that one client for a minute to actually fine tune your offering that one client, one opportunity, one, one in, one introduction into the marketplace done correctly can establish a foundation for growth that is exponential.

But too often there's a, there's a comparison.

You know, we talk about imposter syndrome.

Where the heck does that come from?

1, it comes from comparing themselves because they read some article in Forbes magazine where this guy launched a tech company and, and it, it spun off and instantaneously and had a hundred million downloads and they sold for a billion dollars.

And now this guy's trying to figure out why they can't get one client or I gotta go build a huge sales organization cause I gotta go get my million downloads.

No, you need one download if you get one.

And that goes really well.

You have a foundation for established exponential growth because you're actually solving a problem in the marketplace.

Like there's that, that imposter syndrome comes from comparison and then it comes from them not remembering who the heck they are in the first place that brought this idea to the table.

Like the passion came because they had an idea and not an idea that necessarily already existed, but a new idea.

So then by the time they get the fear involved, they start adjusting and morphing their own product and their own tech and their own solution back to something that already exists in the marketplace.

And then they're just a new product in the market that's not even as good as the existing product in the market.

And I've watched technology companies diminish their value like this over and over and over again out of just pure fear and imposter syndrome.

You know, having the investors be a channel for you sounds ideal.

So have you, have you made an effort to get the word out to lots and lots of investors in your area?

Not yet.

Right now I have, I am, I'm pretty full.

Like I take on new clients but like for example, for the next, probably rolling out the calendar for the next six months, I have room for one additional client right now.

That's it.

And so I haven't, I haven't attempted to do more.

The listeners, the listeners better pay attention and jump on that.

Yeah, no, I, I love working with, with all sizes.

Right.

And I love working with startups because the, it's super fulfilling and rewarding for me because the, the impact is felt and noticeable immediately.

I, when you, I can walk into a giant sized organization and we can move the needle and it's, it's huge, it's massive.

And the difference of 20 million dollars to a 2 billion dollar company, as you know, is a little bit of a drop in the bucket, which sounds bizarre and it's true, but when you take a startup company and you can actually get them to their first million and that, that's, it's life changing.

And so there's a level of fulfillment in what I get to do that I just, that I love and I love working with the early entrepreneurs because of that.

Hi.

The podcast you are listening to is a companion to my recent book Tech Startup Toolkit how to Launch Strong and Exit Big.

This is the book I wish I'd had as I was founding and running eight startups over 35 years.

It's like a memoir of my entrepreneurial journey.

I tell the unvarnished truth about what went right and especially about what went wrong.

It's for the founder, the CEO and wannabe founders of tech and non tech startups.

You could get it from all the usual booksellers and also from the publisher@manning.com I hope you like it.

It's a true labor of love.

Now back to the show.

What we've been talking about is it may be in the general category of anxiety.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

And we.

We run into that all the time.

And what people don't realize is that the anxiety that they're feeling, if they don't understand it and they don't understand what to do about it, it will lead them to make poor choices.

Because of the way our brain actually operates, there is a layer there where once our prefrontal cortex is actually consumed by concern and anxiety, there's a literal disengagement.

And that right there makes it so that your.

Your logic, your reason, your wisdom, your.

Is not what's driving the bus.

It's your emotional reaction and the need to create safety for yourself that starts driving the bus at that point.

And that is where we make the biggest difference, because we can come into these young entrepreneurs and.

Or large organizations, whatever the case might be.

Anyone running a company experiences this, and your thoughts are laden with concern.

And just to give you an example of how this works, it starts with one thought and then it squirrels.

And I want you to think of how many times you've done this.

So we get a young entrepreneur who says, oh, my gosh, I don't.

I need a sales and marketing team.

Because if I don't have a marketing team, I'm not going to sell anything.

I don't sell anything.

I'm going to be doing all this work.

I've worked for two years, and I need income, and my wife's not going to let me keep doing this much longer.

And I got a kid on the way, and oh my gosh, we got to pay the bills, and I'm running out of money in the bank, and I got to either go find an investor, I got to sell this thing.

Oh, my gosh, you're going to sell this thing.

I got to find a sales and marketing team.

And this plays on a loop like a really bad 80s mixtape, right?

And just keeps going and going and going.

And they don't have one concern or two concerns or ten concerns.

Now they have ten times the thousand times they've heard it, and we got 10,000 concerns.

And they start showing up in their own company completely overwhelmed, totally fearful and anxious as I'll get out about building this business.

Because now it has to succeed.

It has to sell, it has to go, and it has to go right now.

And that anxiety leads them to make poor, poor choices.

And so that is the spot that we engage and help them understand how to process the concerns that they are having, how to actually understand what they're actually thinking through, and how to actually take those concerns and organize them, understand them, and then actively engage with them from a point of control.

What they have control over in alignment with where they ultimately want to go, not.

Not where you think you have to go right now to get safety.

Where do you ultimately want to go?

What do you have control over?

Let's make decisions in alignment with that and let's settle things back down, calm the anxieties, bring our brain cells back to the table, and let's go build something beautiful from that place, that place of knowledge and wisdom, not that place of fear and anxiety.

So do you have personal experience with anxiety?

Oh, I do.

Massive.

I.

I had.

After coming out of my athletic career and starting in the corporate world, I, I had a few good years, and then I started feeling tremendous anxiety.

I was on a fast track in my corporate role in a leadership position.

They didn't have a lot of female leadership in the company that I was in.

And I kind of got cherry picked as, like, we're going to fast track you into leadership because you've got some skills.

And.

And I really, to be completely honest, feel like they had to have some female leadership in the world where I'm, you got, you can't have all men running a company.

It just doesn't look right for investors.

Right.

That is what it is.

And I, I say that as a female coming on and saying that very often that causes problems.

I'm not a huge, like, give the job to the woman because she's a woman.

Like, if she's skilled and talented and deserves the job, give her the job.

And that, I believe, is anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender.

But in this situation, I believe I got fast tracked because I was, in fact, a woman.

And I do believe I was qualified, and I do believe I got a leg up because I was a woman.

But I, I felt a lot of pressure for that.

And as I started entering into these leadership positions, I didn't have a role model or a mentor.

And there was only a couple of other women in this organization at the time.

I didn't love the way they came across.

I didn't.

I didn't love it.

And if you look at the only examples women have in leadership positions in, in our society, they're their movies like the Devil Wears Prada or these.

I mean, they're terrifying women that carry these leadership roles.

And I Had this identity crisis of like, that's not who I am and that's who I have to become.

And I didn't even like it.

And I got into this battle of not even liking myself, which by the way, is what entrepreneurs land in all the time because they can't figure out who they are in this, in this pursuit of what they're trying to accomplish.

And I.

Anxiety started to run me and I found myself, I woke up one morning in a closet, literally just in the fetal position and I couldn't move my hands, I couldn't move my legs.

I ended up hospitalized for a full panic attack.

And that's when I started taking the concept of anxiety and how it affects ourselves and our lives much more seriously and engaged in a really deep study of that and started engaging with a nonprofit organization that had 14 years of research and development on, on these topics, working with them, developed a curriculum, a program, a framework, if you will, for actually educating and working with people.

And then I took that specialization into the business world to work with people just like me who had no idea that this type of pressure or stress or anxiety could cause health problems, relationship problems, and quite frankly lead you to make really poor choices in your business and cause you business problems.

And I have watched personally people lose millions of dollars because of anxiety and because of fear and because of imposter syndrome.

Did you already have your, your family when you had that full on panic attack?

I did, yep.

I had, I had four kids and I had four kids.

I was at that point then starting to venture into do I want to run my own companies?

And that's when I really.

Three of my four children, excuse me.

And then that is when I, that is when I decided to actually take the leap and I just decided, I'm not going to stay here, I'm not going to stay in a corporate career, I'm going to go build my own thing.

And that's exactly what I did.

Tell us, what are the ages of your kids?

So I have 22 years old ranging down to 11.

So I have a 22 year old, an 18 year old, a 16 year old and an 11 year old.

So one girl at the top and three boys down at the bottom.

And are they all sports, you know, fanatics?

You know, my daughter, she played soccer for a little bit, but she was a theater just.

She loves the stage and she loves to sing, she loves to dance, she loves to act.

My two boys were wrestlers in the middle and my youngest son has not decided if he likes sports or not.

But right now he loves the violin.

So we're, we're on that right now.

Wow.

You've got a lot of, there's a lot of diversity in that family.

Yes, well, and honestly, with kids, just like I tell entrepreneurs, like, you pick your passion, you don't try to fit in a box.

You don't try to, you don't try to be what everybody else wants you to be or thinks you should be.

You find your passion, your space and you own that space and that's where you get your unique and competitive advantage.

And I believe that with kids too, that when they find their space, that's when they'll have the most fruitful lives because they get to, they get to be passionate and unique about who they are.

So you've worked with a lot of startup people and you yourself have done some startups.

Do you, do you actually talk to any of this, the startup people about grit?

Is that something you kind of work into your discussions?

Yeah, I mean, we don't always call it grit, but it absolutely is the definition of grit.

At the end of the day, like when you're going to start a company and you're going to be in the new part of company company, like there has to be a realization that the journey, the journey is not going to be easy.

And we often say like you'll my.

One of my most common phrases as I talk to entrepreneurs is choose your hard.

It's hard to self fund and it's hard to raise money.

It's hard to work for yourself and it's hard to work for somebody else for your entire life.

It's hard to build something successful and it's hard to know that you can't.

It's hard to engage in the startup company that, that you have to really, you know, wear all the hats and it's hard to have a mundane life where you get to wear one hat that you don't even like.

So choose your heart and that takes grit.

And what about you?

What about where, where did your grit come from?

I think it came a lot from athletics and, and growing up.

I was the youngest of six kids and my father got, had cancer and was sick when I was very young.

And I had this realization when I was very young that if I wanted to get something, it was going to come from me.

My family did not have the financial means to take care of anything like that.

So I started companies.

So I started working and mowing lawns when I was 7.

By the time I was 16 years old, we were mowing about 75 to 80 lawns a week.

And I sold my company at the start of my senior year of high school.

And then I built up a new company and built it back up to about 45 to 50 lawns and sold that before I left high school.

So I sold both of those companies before I left high school and was able to, through the sell of both of those, able to actually buy my own car, buy my first home.

I had a full scholarship with soccer, so I didn't have to pay for my schooling.

And I used all of the additional funding that I got in additional scholarships that I applied for anyways to also help me just buy my first home.

And I bought a duplex and rented out one side and lived in the other and, and just started to build, build savings and build wealth and build an opportunity to have the kind of financial life I wanted to have.

And I just realized young that if I didn't, that I could do that.

Like, I could do that.

I could find ways to do that.

And that's, that's one of the things that I like to tell people, like, nobody's journey is the same.

Nobody's.

Nobody's journey is the same.

Nobody's ideas are the same.

Nobody's business is the same.

No one's business grows the same, sells the same, or lives the scales the same.

And that's perfectly okay because it's yours and it's not anybody else's.

And if you'll let it do your way, amazing how it turns out to be good for you.

It's amazing because I always talk about grit with everyone that comes on this podcast, and it's a really consistent thing that it's some sort of life challenge that people point to as the source of grit or, or it's a very strong example, like from a parent that, that, you know, I've seen sort of that, that theme.

So did.

Did your.

Did your father end up passing away when you were still young?

He did, Yep.

He passed away during my freshman year of college.

Well, right at the start of my sophomore year of college.

So he, he made it through my high school years and then he passed away when I was 20, so that he was.

He was young.

He was only 54 years old when he passed away, so not, not a big, full life for him.

My mom is definitely example of grit for me.

She's been, you know, they were married as.

I think she got married to him when she was 21 years old, so married for 30, 30 plus years.

And then she's Been single ever since.

She's now 83 years old and a spitfire.

You cannot stop that woman.

We need to stop her from driving sometimes, but she can't.

You can't stop her.

She won't sit down.

She's got plenty to do, and she makes sure you know about it.

So he's.

She's definitely an example of grit in my life, of somebody who just took life as a came and just kept on building.

Wow.

A single mother of six kids.

Yeah.

She had her work cut out for her.

That's a good example of grit, for sure.

When you think about the audience of this podcast being people that are early on in their startup journey, or maybe they haven't yet started it, but they're thinking about it, they want to do it.

Is there any theme that you've seen that you would like to paint a picture, you would like to paint for the listeners about how they should think about this startup?

And you've said part of it, which is, you know, if you've got the passion, go with that.

But beyond that, What.

What would you say?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Passion's just the.

The.

It's like the lighter.

Right?

And what are we starting on fire here?

So the first thing I tell all entrepreneurs that I work with is that I need you to paint vision, and I need it to be crystal clear.

And by vision, I don't mean goals, and I don't mean dreams, and I don't mean some aspirational thing.

And I'm not looking for Q1 statistics.

And I don't want a business plan.

I just want to know what are you creating and why?

Like, what is the passion?

What is the fulfillment?

What is the purpose?

What is the mission?

What is the vision of what you want to create?

At the end of the day, when somebody uses your technology, why is their life better and why do you care?

Why are you trying to make that part of their life better?

What does it do for you?

Where's your fulfillment come from?

If you're building a piece of software for a corporation, why?

What does it do?

Why does it benefit the organization?

What are they getting out of it?

What do you get out of it?

When they get that out of it, why do you care?

Because if we can cast that vision first and not just cast it as a casual idea, but down to the nuanced details of what you really, really want in that space and write about it, if they will do that and get a clear picture in their head, we will solve about 20 of their first mistakes.

Before they make them.

And the reason for that is the number of these entrepreneurs that start their endeavor with an idea that's half baked that they're not entirely sure about.

It's just a.

It becomes just a passion project or just an idea that doesn't have an end destination.

It's like getting these guys, it's.

It's like giving these guys a car.

And they're so excited to drive that they just start driving.

And by the time they're.

That now they're down the road, they're halfway out of gas, they've only got a quarter of a tank left.

And you're like, well, where are you going?

Well, they're like, well, I.

I want to go to the mountains.

You're like, really?

Because there's mountains on the east, west, south, and north sides of us.

Where.

Which mountains are you going to?

Well, I want the kind with lakes and.

And hills.

Okay, well, there's mountains on east, west, north, south side of us.

Which mountains with hills?

Which mountains with waterfalls.

Do you want it to be cold or hot?

Like, where are you going?

And it.

And they get in the car, they start driving, and with all of this passion, enthusiasm, and by the time they've got, you know, one tiny little gallon of gas left in the tank, is the first time they stop and say, huh, Now I'm out in the middle of nowhere, and I don't actually know where I'm going.

I'm just trying to get to the mountains.

And if you don't know your end avatar, your end customer, your end purpose, like, what do they get out of it?

Who are you going towards?

Where are you moving towards?

Then when you start to make every decision, what is your litmus test about whether A or B is the right decision in that setting?

When you're going to build out your technical technological suite, are you going.

Are you building with A or B as your user interface?

Like, what is the ultimate experience?

Where are you going?

If you don't know, you'll do a whole lot of driving, burn a whole tank of gas, and end up in the middle of nowhere with mountains on that northeast, west, south of you.

And you don't know which ones you're driving to.

And by the way, you can't get to any of them now with them with the gas you've got in the tank.

And now we have a problem.

We got to fill up again, and that hurts.

And so vision, like, real, crystal clear vision about what you're creating.

Spend more time on that and less time on Your business plan.

Because your business plan that you lay out that goes from A to Z, that you're pretty confident is going to work, you'll go from A to B and that whole business plan will be blown to bits.

And you and I both know that you've built businesses.

You start your business and you get two steps in and you're like, oh, that's not going to go as I thought.

I would rather have them spend more time on vision first, crystal clear on what they're trying to accomplish and then establish the plan and make sure the plan is established based on what the right next step is.

Always with that litmus test of destination on our minds so that when we get to a fork in the road, we know whether we're turning right or left.

And we can do so with intention and not just right.

Seems easier right now because that's what I, that's what I witness in these entrepreneurs, is their, their journey doesn't go from here to here, right?

Their journey goes from here to here, to here, to here, to here, to here, to here, to here, to here, to here, to here, to here, to here to here.

Because they didn't know where they were going.

They just had an idea.

So vision, like crystal clear vision.

Spend the time on it, dream about it, visualize about it, write about it, do what you need to do to know exactly where you're going and what you're building.

And I don't give a rip if you don't know how to do that.

Matter of fact, I don't want them to know how.

I always say the how is none of your damn business.

Get out of the way and allow your vision to take some roots so that we know what we're building.

Because if all of the great.

If everybody in the world were to build a business based on knowing how to get from point A to point Z before they ever started, we wouldn't have any of the, of the technological advances we have.

People didn't, they didn't know how exactly.

They just had the dream or the vision, the purpose, the intention and the point of that and the fulfillment of that was so compelling that they had to keep taking the right next step as they got there.

And ultimately they found their, they found the how.

So I tell people, spend more time on vision than your business plan to start with and make sure you know where the heck you're going and what you're building with crystal clear clarity before you start spending the money, before you start writing code, before you start hiring people, before you start selling it.

I had an entrepreneur I worked with that was selling his project and I would ask him questions.

He's like, well, we haven't made that decision yet.

I'm like, stop selling.

Stop selling a pipe dream and air.

You're going to put egg all over your face and ruin your company before you ever start.

Like, what are you selling?

What are you building?

What do you.

What are you doing?

Know it.

Really know it.

And don't get so overly anxious about starting your company that you start acting without direction.

That's.

That's what I see hurts people the most.

And that's my number one piece of advice for entrepreneurs as they start their company.

Don't get so anxious to do before you know what you're, what you're building, the doing and what to do next.

And the right next step will show up for you if you're crystal clear on where you're going.

Very well said.

That was such good advice.

I have experienced that I've done that wrong, which is why I know all about the tank of gas in the middle of nowhere south.

Oh, I do too.

I do too.

Yep.

Actually experiencing it to a certain extent on this current one.

Yeah.

Well, I'm going to call that a good conversation.

Okay, well, thank you very much.

That's a wrap.

Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of the Designing Successful Startups podcast.

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This is Jothi Rosenberg saying TTFN Tata for now.