Tune in to learn:

• What it’s like to balance creativity and art (4:30)
• Why 4 am can be a game-changer (4:00)
• How to gain the courage to take a bet on yourself (29:00)

This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to https://UPS.com/pivot.

Mission.org is a media studio producing content for world-class clients. Learn more at 

https://mission.org.

Tune in to learn:

• What does it take to learn accountability? (4:00)
• Why you don’t necessarily have to be better, you just have to be different. (5:55)
• How Steve decided to leave the corporate world and dive into entrepreneurship. (7:10)
• When his company was facing hard times, what kept Steve working to save it? (10:50)
• What lessons do you learn when you enter into a leadership role? (14:00)
• Why joining Ware2Go was such an enticing opportunity for Steve. (15:45)
• How to bring unity to an organization. (18:47)

This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to https://UPS.com/pivot.

Mission.org is a media studio producing content for world-class clients. Learn more at 

https://mission.org

Tune in to learn:

• What it’s like to be a risk-averse entrepreneur (3:00) 
• How to create an idea from a problem (4:45) 
• How Emily balanced a day job and side hustle (6:00) 
• The challenges of being a first-time founder (8:00) 
• The importance of “radical transparency” (9:00) 
• The struggle of keeping personal touches while scaling (10:40) 
• What is Tini Lux Looking to Next? (14:00) 

This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

Mission.org is a media studio producing content for world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org

“It was completely the opposite of what we expected, and they ended up filing for bankruptcy within thirteen months of acquiring us,” Pawling said of Richer Poorer’s ill-fated acquisition. “It was just insane. It really taught me to always have a Plan B. Like… if things don’t go how you plan, how are you handling it?” 

So how did she handle it? How did Richer Poorer survive huge obstacles like a failed acquisition, over-complicated marketing tactics, and a major supply-chain stallout? Find out on this episode of The Journey.  

Main Takeaways:

• Sometimes, it’s okay to not run on pure passion: The old saying goes something like this: “Motivation is for amateurs, discipline is for professionals.” There might come a time when a brilliant opportunity presents itself, but it’s not something that completely lights your fire. It’s not your dream. There are times when you might need to look at the bigger picture and think long-term. It might not be the most exciting thing, but maybe it’s the right next step. Successful careers take both passion and smart moves done at the right time.  
• Pay if forward: When Iva was just starting out, she reached out to a lot of her contacts, all of whom were eager to point her in the right direction. That’s because, she explained, that all entrepreneurs have had someone do the same for them when they were just starting out. The business world can be very cutthroat, but it can also be full of camaraderie. Keep an eye out for those moments when you can help someone… it will come back to you, eventually. 
• Vulnerability can be a strength: Every business will face curveballs and moments of uncertainty. Good leaders will turn to their team and ask for help with blind spots instead of pretending to have all the answers. By being vulnerable, you invite your team to find the best solution. 

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

Amy Weisman had her work cut out for her. After she had her first baby, she knew two things: she wanted to use her entrepreneurial prowess to carve out an idea of her own, and she hated the smell and feel of the hand sanitizer she was constantly pouring all over her hands. She had an idea for a sustainably-packaged, germ-killing line of hand care products that people liked using. The only catch? She was launching this business in the middle of a global pandemic “I was confident enough at the time… I knew that if people just tried the product, they’d come back for more. I knew I had a special formula that was different and that stood out.” 

She was right. Amy is the Founder & CEO of Paume, a global hand care brand that is taking the world by storm.

Main Takeaways:

• Learn as much as you can: The idea of starting your own business can be exciting and terrifying – but nothing will compare to actually getting out there and actually doing it. It is important to try, as much as you can, to understand the world you’re jumping into before you do it. In Amy’s case, she worked with a start-up for four years before she decided she wanted to try it for herself, so she knew what she was getting into when things got tough. 
• Keep your eye out for the good idea right in front of you: Always be looking for that next great idea… it might show up where you don’t necessarily expect. Some of the best businesses have come from small, everyday moments where someone was paying attention to how they could make the world a little better. 
• Prepare to stand out: If you’re going to join a crowded market, know what it is about your product that will make it stand apart from the crowd. You’ve got to know what it is your offering that your competitors aren’t, and be ready to talk about it.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

“I was like, what happened, why do you not have water bottles,” Travis Rosbach said. “Because I did rock climbing in college, and I knew plastic water bottles were the way to go – the non-single use kind. And he said they didn't have any because of this stuff called BPA. He said ‘We're not really familiar with what it is or how serious it's going to be, but we pulled all the bottles just as a precautionary measure.’ And so it just came out my mouth: ‘I will do that.’”

Travis isn’t your typical entrepreneur – he’s far more comfortable in a scuba suit and a business suit, but he knows firsthand what it’s like to have a business take on a life of its own. He’s the co-founder of Hydro Flask, the most-used water bottle in the world, which he built by taking an $11,000 investment and turning it into a $210 million dollar household name. And he did it while facing seemingly insurmountable odds. Hear his story on this episode!

Main Takeaways:

• Teach yourself: The best way to learn isn’t always in an expensive MBA program or ivy-league college. Some of the best knowledge you’ll ever encounter can be found in the pages of books. Read, study, and absorb the lessons of those who have made a living doing what you want to do.
• Find the Answers Yourself: If you stop at the first challenge, you’ll never hit paydirt. If people tell you that what you want to do isn’t possible – find a way. Travis was told that there wasn’t a company in the world that could make his innovative new water bottle – so he went to Shanghai and found one himself.
• Find a Reason to Push Through the Hard Stuff: Running a business isn’t easy, but keep your eyes on why you started: why you began this journey in the first place. That reason will help you keep going when there are thousands of reasons to quit.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

“For us, it’s just about showing up… whatever way you want to show up, it’s right,” Herman said. “And you can show up differently every single day, because you are whoever you want to be. And that’s great.” 

Herman cut their teeth in the fashion world, working for innovative brands like NastyGal. When they talked about the issue of binary luxury with friend and business partner David Kien, they discovered a hole in the industry: a place where comfort was non-binary. 

“We had been talking as individuals — or even men — who weren't shopping at Levi's or these kinds of  more rugged, stereotypically-masculine stores,” Herman said. “We thought, ‘It’d be great to have this store with home stuff, but fashion and all sort of other things.’  And then we were [said], ‘Well, let's start with one thing. Let's just think about like candles.’”

The result was Boy Smells, a brand focused on identity, specifically its concept of genderfulness. This idea implores a new kind of consumer — namely the 18-25 set — to harness their power across the gender spectrum and oppose traditional marketing nomenclature like “genderless” or “gender-neutral.” On this episode, Matthe explains what it all means, how he worked to create this concept from his own kitchen, and what it took to ship and scale during a pandemic. 

Main Takeaways:

• Follow the Curiosity: Sometimes, the path to success isn’t as linear as we’d like. It has winding detours and setbacks. But if you find something you’re passionate about – something that makes you excited and curious — you can find yourself at the threshold of opportunities you never would have seen had you played it safe.
• Roll Up Your Sleeves: As we all know very well by now… the world can change in an instant. You might not think you’ll be in charge of certain aspects of a business, but be ready to jump in when you’re needed. Helming an endeavor means being ready to handle things that you never thought you’d be handling, and mastering skills you never thought you’d have to learn.
• Don’t be the smartest person in the room: Great leadership is the leadership that has wise counsel and takes into consideration the thoughts of others. Bring people in. Ask questions. Take advice – your business will be better for it.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

“So I bought some business cards,” Clasen said. “I didn't have a website. I obviously had nothing, but I put some business cards out on the table and at that point was like, ‘Well, if these things are gone at the end of the day, then maybe I'm doing something cool. Maybe someone will hire me.’ That's how it started.” 

Clasen would be the first to tell you that she didn’t expect to wind up as one of the most successful interior designers in California. She just knew two things: she loved design, and she needed to make a living. She followed that inclination and founded Raili CA Design. What happened next and how did Raili learn to go from being not just a designer but an entrepreneur, a business owner, and a leader? Find out on this episode.  

Main Takeaways:

• Be your own advocate: Sometimes, growth will only happen when you speak up for your talent and put your work in front of others. Leave your business cards on the table. Make the calls to see if someone wants to collaborate. Connections don’t just happen, and clients don’t just drop into your inbox. Use the network you have to seek out any and all opportunities.
• Be ready to wear multiple hats: Launching and growing a business means that you’ll be doing more before you can do less. Find ways to be comfortable learning about payroll and customer service – it might be a while before you can delegate those to others.
• Don’t be afraid to go against the flow: Following your path might look different than the process everyone around you is going through. It’s easy to compare other careers against your own journey, but resisting that urge will help you keep your eyes ahead at what’s coming down the pike for you.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

“I started testing with just this one little sample I had purchased on friends and family,” Higney said. “Everybody was getting similar reactions and that's when I'm like, okay, maybe I'm onto something. So I was able to get in touch with the factory. I pitched them my idea. I told them that every mom and everybody that was suffering here needed to know about this product because it's, it was life-changing for me and my family.”

So how did Kelley take a quest to help her daughter and turn it into a powerhouse company with products in 25,000 retailers and 25 different countries? Find out on this week’s episode of The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• Don’t Be Afraid to Start Small: Good ideas rarely explode overnight, and good entrepreneurs know the value of a slower start. Most businesses need to grow and evolve slowly, and it’s an entrepreneur's job to find customers whoever and wherever possible, even if it means pitching and selling at a local market or your child’s school functions.
• Surround Yourself with People Who Can Help You Grow: Regardless of when or if your business takes off, you need to have a network of people to lean on and learn from. Find people you admire — even within your own family — and tap into them for advice, feedback, or support to take your business to the next level.
• Protect Your Product: Good ideas and successful products will always be met with copycats. To ensure that those imitators don’t steal your market share, do your homework and take the steps necessary to protect yourself.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

“Five years ago I was invited to join [the] first board of the company, Feelmore Labs,” Kress said. “Very quickly, we decided that I should run it, as well, because it was a great combination of science, tech, and complicated consumer branding.” 

And Kress is uniquely positioned to be the perfect person to bring all three of those things together. Since taking the helm, Feelmore Labs has been at the forefront of some very exciting scientific breakthroughs. One of its products, Cove, is a device that can positively change the trajectory of your mental health simply by activating the receptors in your skin.  

But how did Kress – a giant in the luxury brand world – wind up taking the helm of a groundbreaking lab? What qualities gave him the unique qualifications to walk Feelmore Labs through the complicated and rigorous process of creating, vetting, and marketing an entirely innovative product? Find out on this week’s episode of The Journey. And, just for Journey listeners, you can use the promo code Mission20 to receive 20% off your order with Feelmore Labs!

Main Takeaways:

• Follow the Passion: Even if you have found success in an industry or throughout your career, it is possible to be unsatisfied. Don’t settle just because you have reached the top of your field and still feel like there is a void. Follow your passion, take risks, and don’t be afraid to try something new, because you may find something that will fulfill you more than you thought possible.Francois never thought that he would wind up heading entire regions of business for the world’s most recognizable luxury brands. He thought he would pursue a career in academia, just like his parents. But when he found that he had talent in an industry that was, at first, foreign to him, he pursued it, and his work ethic and natural talent took him all the way to the top. However, when he found himself experiencing “luxury fatigue”, he found the strength to change his trajectory and return to his first love: science.
• Zoom in and Zoom Out: Francois’s different background is not a weakness – it is a strength. His time working in the luxury world allowed him to assess products on a national and even global scale. On the flip side, his love of science allows him to zoom in on small problems and find solutions. These contrasting views, when combined in a leader, is incredibly powerful. Use all of your experience and tools in your toolbox to zoom in and out on your own challenges, and never stay too focused on one thing that you forsake everything else.
• Be Patient: Francois knows that success doesn’t come overnight. When Feelmore Labs’their innovative product, Cove, was met with skepticism, Kress and his team didn’t give up on it. Instead, they focused on putting the product through even more stringent testing and studies so that he can bring the strongest product to market when it is time.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

“After injuries and rehabilitating physically and kind of mentally from that, it was a real struggle to figure out who I was and who I wanted to be,” Fonseca says. “I spent a lot of time just working jobs to work jobs and I think just trying to figure out, was I an entertainer? Was I an academic? What was I meant to do with the rest of my life?” 

This wasn’t the last time that Nadine came face-to-face with a seemingly impossible question that forced her to change course. At this point, Nadine has changed and pivoted so many times throughout her life and her career that she barely even bats an eye when the world throws a wrench in her plans. But how did she get to that place? And how did her path ultimately lead to Mighty Kind, a kids magazine that puts tough topics front and center? Find out right here on The Journey. 

Main Takeaways:

• Pivoting At The Least Convenient Time: Changing your business plan at any point is inconvenient at best, but sometimes re-doing work is worth a herculean effort. Being objective about what’s going to work for your business long-term and being honest about what you can handle will go a long way in helping you see hard changes to make. 
• Just Because You Can ‘Do it on Your Own’ Doesn’t Mean You Should: Maybe you thought about your business one way, but now, as you get closer to launch, you’re realizing you don’t have the bandwidth, or maybe even the right skill set to do it all on your own. The solution is simple, you need to get help, and there’s no shame in that. The smartest and most successful leaders can identify their blindspots and bring in the talent to fill them, which benefits the entire company.
• Pivoting and Thriving: Those who are the most pliable are the least breakable. At every point, being able to shift the business toward what you can see is going to work better is a good investment. When an opportunity arose out of a crisis, Nadine found that being nimble and shifting the business to digital turned out to be the best move. 

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

“I had a boss who was doing a really important speech, and I knew that he was typically a little bit nervous about speaking in public and he had Propranololl, which is a beta beta blocker and took it and crushed the speech and it was no big deal,” Hilary Coles says. “And it made me think about how many people would never say yes. So few people are given the opportunity to speak, right. And then how many people wouldn't even be able to say yes to that? I think a light bulb really went off then, it was a very impressionable moment for me to think through how you design your life and what capacity, or, or limits you set for yourself based on what you think is possible. What do you choose for yourself when you think that you're not gonna be a good lover in a relationship because you're not in control of your sexual function, what kind of an employee are you gonna be when you have untreated depression and no one to talk to you about and don't feel comfortable sharing that. Like, what are the limits that you set for yourself?”

Coles is the co-founder & SVP Brand & Innovation at hims & hers, a company that is bringing the power of choice back into the world of healthcare. But it’s not just in business that options matter. Throughout Coles’s life, she has found that having options, being given opportunities, and opening up doors is necessary to find success. And when those options aren’t there for you, maybe you just have to create them yourself. This is The Journey.

Key Takeaways:

• The Same, But Different: Every person is unique, but their basic needs are all the same. Businesses are similar. Each company has differentiating factors, but at the end of the day, the goal is to meet the needs of and solve problems for customers. When you recognize what those needs are, you will be able to serve them better.
• Freedom To Choose: Too often, businesses or entire industries put a cap on consumers by limiting the options available to them. Instead, when you open the door to consumers and provide them choices, they feel more empowered and have a better experience, thus making them more loyal.
• Keep Knocking: Your ideas might be bold, and they might push boundaries, and when they do, you’ll likely get shut down again and again. It’s important to have conviction and keep pressing forward, even if it means creating a path for yourself.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

“The brands can't come up with true innovation and a lot of brands don't take the consumer's feedback early enough for it to really make a difference in the end product,” Patricia Santos says. “They would see consumer research reports that say like 90, 95% of women say this helped reduce fine lines and wrinkles and things like that. But by the time they're doing those studies, that formula is done. They never asked anybody before that. That thing is on the manufacturing line and getting boxed up and sent. Millions of them are already millions of them and made so I thought, well, a real way to make a difference is to bring the customer in way before that. You wanna ask her what she thinks of a product before you actually make it, and if she hates it, hey, that's a great way to prevent returns. And that's a great way to prevent failed products and not invest so much money launching a product that people are actually going to not like.”

Santos is the Co-Founder of Volition Beauty. She saw this problem first-hand when she was a newly-minted business school graduate navigating the cut-throat world of venture capital – and it bothered her, because the more she encountered the problem, the more she realized that she might have an answer. 

“Okay, this is definitely a problem that should be solved,” Santos says. “And I want to solve it in some way, shape, or form.”  

Volition Beauty is on a mission to democratize beauty by putting the power back in the hands of those who use it. Seems simple, right? Santos will tell you that it was much harder than it sounds, but what she’s found in return has been greater than anything she could have expected. This is The Journey. 

Main Takeaways:

• If You See Something, Change Something: From where you sit in your office job, in your home, in your own business, or anywhere else, you may ome across a problem or a situation that you think needs to be changed. Don’t assume someone else is working on changing things, put the onus on yourself to formulate a solution and then bring it to light, because that’s the only thing that actually makes change happen.
• Ask The Audience: Your consumers are almost always your best resource. They can be a source of feedback, ideas, and even solutions to problems you have been struggling with — or didn’t even know exist. Tap into the customer base regularly and noot only will your business do better, your customers will feel more empowered and connected to you as well.   
• Stay Open, Stay Ready: Whether it’s adapting your initial business plan or adjusting on the fly to nail a big pitch, you have to keep your eyes and ears open to opportunities and be ready too jump on them when they arise. 

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

Opportunity cost is what businesses use to analyze the potential benefits — and potential costs — of choosing one option over another. But for today’s guest, the discussion of opportunity cost doesn’t start and end in boardroom finance meetings. 

“You should always think about the opportunity cost of not making a decision,” Julian Reis says. “Let’s say, for example, you're working at a bank and you're earning a decent salary. If you quit and try to make it on your own, what's the worst thing that could happen? My view [is that] the worst thing that could happen is you go back to the banking industry and get another job... Once you understand that dynamic, [I think] everyone should be going off and starting their own company and taking that risk [and] it gives you some comfort knowing that there is a protection underneath you.”

For Reis, the CEO and Founder of SuperOrdinary, weighing opportunity costs is a way of life. Understanding the true implications of seizing or passing on an opportunity is how he’s been able to spot macro trends, understand when to make career leaps, as well as when to make business investments.

SuperOrdinary is a worldwide team of experts working with best-in-class beauty and personal care brands to establish their influence globally. From the shops of Spain to LiveStreaming events in the heart of China, SuperOrdinary’s global reach is, well, super. But getting to that point was no easy feat, it took testing and iterating, and, of course, educated leaps of faith. Learn exactly how Julian built SuperOrdinary into the global standout it is today on this episode of The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• Opportunity Costs Matter: Everything has an opportunity cost. Without understanding these costs, you can’t live your life or lead your business with intent. When considering a decision, always entertain what you could be losing by not making that choice.
• Expanding Globally, Means Acting Locally: Developing relationships in countries around the world requires having local teams on the ground. These teams build trust with local communities and businesses, and they help you understand cultural nuances you may otherwise miss.
• When to Go International: Not every brand is designed to go international — in fact, most aren’t. According to Julian, there are several criteria you need to consider before expanding. For example, is your product a good fit for that culture? Do you have the infrastructure to support international distro? Can you afford to burn money before you find your foothold in that new market?

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

“What if we could actually remove the biggest middleman by far in the supply chain (which is the brand)?” Cai states. “Brand offers a lot. I don't think there's going to be a world where we live without brands, but I do think there's a lot that they add that [is] just fluff and you're actually paying for a story versus the actual product.”

Italic says goodbye to the biggest middleman, the brand name. But that’s easier said than done. To achieve his goal of bringing high-quality goods directly to consumers, Jeremy had to tap into his insider’s knowledge about the way that the manufacturing business is structured in China and then get those traditional companies to take a leap of faith with him. They say you have to jump and grow wings on the way down when you take that leap. Jeremy’s wings are still growing, and each new lesson is just another feather helping him soar a little higher. Hear how he’s earning those feathers right here on The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• No Pain No Gain: When you hear successful founders talk about their struggles, it is often with a smile that they recall these difficult times. Why is that? There seems to be something about the need to work hard and experience some level of suffering in order to fully reap the benefits of success. The passionate entrepreneur enjoys a bit of the blood, sweat, and tears involved in building their business. 
• Finding Your Natural Habitat: The sign of someone with an entrepreneurial spirt could be their difficulty falling in line working for someone else. Some people are more naturally bent toward being entrepreneurs. This said, even if you’re not a natural, it is possible to cultivate entrepreneurial traits and empower yourself to make great business decisions. 
• What Excited You?: Maybe you can technically run a company without passion but you won’t do as well as someone who has that fire. Being passionate about the work that you do is a prerequisite for the most meaningful kind of success. It’s okay to bow out of something that’s not feeding your soul anymore in order to pursue something that really matters to you. 

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

Andrew Suzuka, the founder and creator of Otamot Foods, was no stranger to having good ideas and turning them into entrepreneurial successes. In fact, when the idea for Otamot Foods first popped into his head, Andrew was already running his own company. But success in one area didn’t make Andrew any more willing to share the new ideas he had brewing. 

”You have to have a lot of self-confidence, but you also have to have enough self-awareness to know that you don't know everything and you have to pull in people and you have to share your ideas with people,” Suzuka said. “And it's probably, I would say the number one challenge of being an entrepreneur is sharing your idea before it becomes something. And if you can get over that, you're on your way.”

Andrew had to walk a long path to get over that fear. Today, he knows collaboration is the only way forward, but what did it take to get to that realization? Who did he finally lean on, and how did all of this ultimately lead to Otamot landing on the shelves of Whole Foods? Let’s jump into this week’s episode of The Journey. 

Main Takeaways:

• Sharing is Caring: No matter how great of an idea you have for a business, nothing significant will come from it without extreme dedication and investment of time, money and energy. You don’t need to worry about someone “stealing” your idea; the chances that they’ll take it to the finish line are almost nil. The power of sharing a good idea is getting early feedback on what could make it better and what could make it really work well. 
• Be Nimble: Everyone talks about pivoting, but especially in the Consumer Packaged Goods space, being nimble and being able to negotiate with all of the different parties involved in getting your product to market is a useful skill. 
• Your Support Network Should be Multi-Tiered: It’s important too have all sorts of people in your network, including outside mentors, industry advisors, and company board members, all of whom can help you make important decisions about your business. Make sure that you’re still tapping into your original support network as your business scales. Your close friends and family can offer support and perspectives that really help and uplift you.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

In its most basic form, the scientific method follows these steps:

First, you identify the problem or question. Then you hypothesize a solution or outcome. From there, you design and run an experiment to test this prediction. And finally, you analyze the results from your test to see if your hypothesis was correct.

The scientific method is the basis of all scientific thinking, but, even when we don’t recognize it, this process is also the basis of human thinking. Everyday we hypothesize, test our hypotheses, and draw conclusions. 

It’s easy to see how this same process can be — and should be — applied to a growing business. And it’s a methodology that today’s guest has leveraged time and time again.

“[In math], you start with a problem and a solution -- it's up to you to figure out the stuff in between in the most efficient way possible. And that is entrepreneurship to the T... and leveraging the scientific method, which is just a hypothesis-based single variant test, is critically important, particularly in the world of software and technology.”

That’s Adam Callinan, the co-founder and President of BottleKeeper, a company producing an innovative insulated bottle designed to keep glass bottles and aluminum cans cold. 

Since its founding, BottleKeeper has skyrocketed; today it is a multi-million dollar company consistently growing dramatically year over year. But it didn’t start that way. Early growth was slow, and it took careful testing and iterating again and again to achieve the success the company has seen. So what tools and mindsets did Adam and his cofounder lean into in those first couple of years that set them on the road to success? And what have they changed since launching that’s continued to allow them to grow far more than they could have imagined? Find out on this week’s episode of The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• Test, Iterate, Test Again: Throughout his entrepreneurial journey, Adam turned to the scientific method as a way to test and verify his business assumptions. But don’t forget to retest those assumptions as the business grows and changes. For example, for years, Adam had built the business with the philosophy that he would never hire anyone else, but he was forced to revisit and retest that assumption as the company grew and new opportunities presented themselves.
• Leverage Video: For many consumers, seeing is believing. Find the best way to communicate how your product works and why the consumer needs it. For Adam, this meant focusing on video. (Bonus Lesson: Don’t wait until you have big marketing dollars to spend on making the perfect materials. Instead, take a page from Adam’s book and write, shoot, and edit those first ads yourself.)
• Get a Patent… and Be Prepared to Enforce It: Copycats will inevitably come to market after they see your success. Be prepared by filing for a provisional patent as soon as possible, and then filing for the actual patent once you can afford it. More in the episode about what this process looks like and why your patent is only as good as your enforcement of it.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

“We did just about anything,” Paul Rathnam says. “I said no to nothing. Like my dad taught me growing up, just say yes to everything and figure it out later. So, I often quoted things like plumbing and stuff. I had no clue how to do it. And then I'd go to the plumbing store and ask them how to do it. And they kind of have somewhat of an idea anyway, the story of my life. 

Rantham is the owner of ModPools, a multi-million dollar company that builds swimming pools out of shipping containers. And, as you can tell, he took saying yes to a whole new level. But while Paul was busy saying yes, throughout his life, he heard a lot of nos. And even though his just-say-yes strategy eventually paid off, saying yes to everything had its pitfalls. We’ll get into all of that on this episode of The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• Exceeds Expectations: Throughout your life, people will place expectations or limits on you. But you should never let what other people think dictate where you wind up. Even if you lack certain skills in one area does not mean you can’t be brilliant somewhere else. Find your passion and let that guide you beyond what anyone else thinks is possible.
• Yes To All: Saying yes to every request is a strategy that many entrepreneurs have tried. When you say yes, you gain business and accounts. But if you say yes, you have to be willing to do all the work necessary to do the job properly, otherwise you’ll be left with not just dissatisfied customers, but a bad reputation as well.
• All It Takes is One: Whether it’s an idea, a design, or a word of encouragement, sometimes all it takes to keep going is one small thing. When you are on the brink or struggling, that one small thing could be right around the corner. Persevere and be open to wherever that one spark could turn into a wildfire.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

The cofounders of Blk & Bold fall into that latter camp, building an online coffee company with zero knowledge of coffee roasting, no experience making a D2C website, and a nearly nonexistent interest in specialty coffee.

They dove into their industry blind, but they saw a market gap ripe with opportunity - an opportunity that could not only drive business value but create meaningful social impact. 

“We knew we wanted to do good,” Rod Johnson says. “We didn't want to just build a business to line our pockets and go sit on a beach and drinking drinks with umbrellas. We want to do something else. We want to make sure that we can have profound impact. We just didn't know profound would manifest into working with Ben and Jerry's and Congresswoman and Corey Bush. That was definitely not on my vision board. And I just want to continue to avail myself to be a servant making black and bold a servant to those opportunities.” 

Johnson is the Co-founder of BLK & Bold. Before founding the company, he admits to preferring tea over coffee, but when his friend — and now co-founder — came to him with an idea for a new kind of coffee company, Rod knew it was a vision he couldn’t ignore. 

So how did Rod and his co-founder break into the 102 billion dollar US coffee market with no knowledge of the industry? How did they make Blk & Bold stand out among competitors? And how have they turned their own experiences growing up into a social good mission that’s impacting the nation? Find out all that and more on today’s episode of The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• Create Synergy with other Do-Good Brands: Serving the community and giving back through your business can result in unforeseen benefits, including the opportunity to work with other great brands that care. There is a lot of synergy behind building a community around doing good, and when you partner with others, your reach is expanded exponentially. 
• Natural Curiosity Can Compensate for Know-How: Even if you’re not an expert in a field that you’re interested in starting a business in, you can still do it! Interest and curiosity will take you down all of the right rabbit holes to fill in your knowledge and become a subject matter expert in your industry. Plus, experimentation will allow you to learn by doing, and maybe even find a way of doing something that no one else in the industry has thought of because they have blinders on.
• Unseen Value of Long-standing Co-founder Relationships: The depth that comes from having a long-standing relationship with your co-founder can really come into play and shine when times are tough. A deeper personal understanding as to how the other person deals with unforeseen circumstances or hiccups can lead to better advice, powerful encouragement, and quicker solutions.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

“Authenticity is not duplicable right?” Chernow says. “No one can take your authenticity away from you and you can't create it. You can't just fabricate it. It either is, or it's not… The business of businesses is storytelling, and also the business of businesses is relationships, two things that I believe wholeheartedly in. If you're not able to tell a story with your business, it's not good. Human beings for hundreds of thousands of years have always sat around a fireplace and told stories and listen to stories and some of the best times in my life, right? Like those moments where you're engaged and, you know, someone's telling a great story and people are laughing and crying and those are the moments in life that really make memories. And so how do you do that with a business?” 

To understand who Michael is, you have to peel back his layers. And with each layer you uncover, you realize that Michael’s unique life experience, his likes, interests, hobbies, and routines, they not only make up who he is, they reveal the throughline that runs across all of Michael’s business ventures. He has woven together not just one story, but many in a way that is authentically Michael. And we’re getting into all the layers right here on The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• Finding Lasting Inspiration to Start a Business: If you have a deep connection with the purpose behind the business that you’re creating, you may have an advantage as you hit the market and launch. When you have personally felt the need for what you’re solving, you can bring a solution to life authentically. The mission or purpose behind your company will shine through the products and marketing tactics and carry you through tough times. 
• Authenticity Matters as a Founder: Founding a business will take everything from you — all your time, energy, and abilities. Approaching all of it with an authentic reason for “why” will give you a strong foundation to build from. When you and your resources are stretched thin — as they often are in a start-up — you can’t fake it or mask your feelings about what you’re doing. IF you are personally connected to the why of the business, you can share that enthusiasm through your work and your team will be more likely to buy in and work through cchallenges. 
• Serial Entrepreneurship vs Founding and Staying: What it takes to found a new business isn’t always what it takes to keep running it. Some people are more drawn to going through the process of getting a new company built, staffed and launched than to sticking with a passion project for your whole life. There’s no right or wrong way to found a company, but know where your skills and passions lie and if you’re hankering for the next start-up project, maybe serial entrepreneurship is for you! 

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

“We had some people involved with the business in the early days where a lot of money went missing,” Hayes said. “There was no way for us to get it back. And it nearly sunk us. We were working out of my lounge room at home, around the dining room table. I stopped paying myself cause the money disappeared out of the account to keep paying the three employees that we had. The bank account literally hit zero twice.

This was a sink or swim situation for Mitchell and Los Sundays. But, frankly, Mitchell was made to swim. He had been finding his way through all kinds of choppy and unfamiliar waters his whole life. Where did that grit and determination come from, and where did it ultimately lead? Let’s find out. Welcome back to The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• Compensate for your Weaknesses: Everyone has strengths and weaknesses and so does every business. Learn first what the demands of the industry are, learn your competition. Then take stock of your own store of goods; what are you especially talented at, what are your strongest skills?  Then think about where you might be able to utilize your skill in an area that your competitors are weak in. This tactic can be enough to toe the line with your competitors. 
• Any Means Necessary: Every business owner comes across trying times and difficult challenges, but sometimes overcoming those things takes superhuman effort. Owning your own business will likely involve a good bit of personal sacrifice and struggle at some, if not many, points. Go into entrepreneurship with the mentality of getting it done by any means possible.
• It’s Okay if Dreams Change: What we start out wanting to do as kids is rarely what we end up having a career in. When you dedicate your entire childhood and younger adult years toward achieving that same goal, the transition to something else can be difficult. Know that changing your dream doesn’t mean that you failed at the first one, you just re-negotiated the terms of your dream. 

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

How can we be left feeling unsatisfied at the end of a 2-hour-long movie, yet be left in tears by a 30-second commercial? What separates the story that resonates and the one that falls flat? 

And what does any of this have to do with business?

“I love brands — I love the stories that they tell,” Johannes Quodt says. “When I was watching TV, I got more excited about the commercials than the rec program.,Particularly what I do remember is how I love these micro stories they told. And I think the storytelling aspect of, of commercials and brands is really an essence. What fascinates me

Johannes is the co-founder and co-CEO of luxury Italian shoe brand Koio. Johannes recognized from a young age that stories have the power to connect with people in a profound way -- a vital skill for still-blooming brands and established goliaths alike. It’s not enough to have a great product, that product - and every component that goes into it - needs a story that connects with the consumer in a way that your competitors’ can’t.

Johannes has found this perfect blend of story and product, and today he shares what that discovery process has been like, how Koio is creating a new category of sustainable luxury, and how he and his cofounder scaled Koio from one “perfect shoe” to an ever expanding collection that is attracting interest from the likes of GQ, Vogue, and even celebrities like Joe Jonas. 

All that and more on The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• Curate the Marketing Story you Tell: When you can tell your consumer a story about the product that you are selling to them, they will be more excited by it and more likely to engage. By authentically curating stories around your brand, you can also build a reputation and earn trust with other great storytellers, opening doors for collaboration. 
• Quality Should be Synonymous with Social and Environmental Sustainability: Industry and factory production revolutionized commerce a long time ago, but many brands are still using unsustainable, irresponsible farming and sourcing practices. Bringing about social and ecological change in business adds a layer of complexity to the work your team does, but building that respect and loyalty as a brand is irreplaceable. 
• Capitalize on your close network: Even if you just have the email addresses of your fellow students in MBA school, you can still start your business by talking to them or leaning on them as a resource, both financially and for support. Being inspired from those you see around you doing new and creative things can lead to great inventions of your own. Surround yourself with greatness and then get going. 

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

Dominika Minarovic, one of the co-founders of BYBI Beauty, knows that choosing the right business partner is like choosing the right life partner: it all starts with a foundation of respect and admiration.

“I was always like equal parts fearful slash pure admiration of Elsie. And I think that's a great combo, obviously not fearful of her anymore, but Elsie has a presence when she walks into a room. Everyone will stop and listen. And I think that's really powerful. I saw someone that I really admire. Elsie and I have really, really been through the wars. Like we've done some hard graft and I don't think at any point, have I ever heard a complaint come out of her mouth? We have carried boxes up like 10 flights of stairs. We've started offices in broom closets.

This kind of partnership is like any relationship: it has to go both ways. That mutual respect for each other is what you’ll need to remember  and fall back on when crises pop up. But as Dominka’s co-founder, Elsie Rutterford will say, there’s also got to be an equal level of commitment to the work. 

“The word hustle. If you look it up in the dictionary, you will see Dominika Minarovic’s name sat underneath that. So she was a hustler through and through. And I really liked that about her. And I think like the hard working ethic. Yeah. And the way that she applied herself, I was like, definitely somebody that I would want to work with.” 

Respect, trust, and common dreams. These are some of the elements that are sprinkled through the story of how Elsie and Dominika found each other and developed their business together. But what else goes into a good co-founder relationship? And how did Elsie and Dominika find the answer throughout their journey to bring their beauty brand, BYBI, to the world? Find out this week on The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• A Match Made in Heaven: When you have the right co-founder by your side, there are limitless benefits. You can be there to support each other. You can share the burden of the responsibilities and daily tasks of running the business — especially valuable in the early stages. You can also share more empathy for each other, going through life changes and unexpected circumstances. You can share the financial responsibilities and take on less personal risk. But most importantly, by having a co-founder, you share a passion and drive toward a common goal and that can make your business strong enough to last. 
• Disruption Takes Passion and Authenticity: Being passionate about the product or market you’re working in is a huge advantage because it makes you naturally think about what you want to get as a consumer. Having a deep-rooted passion about something that you want to change or dispel in that industry will make you more creative and effective in your work there. 
• A Launching Pad: Your business might not evolve in the way you expect. There are many different ways for a brand to launch, whether that’s through a blog, a social media account, a book deal, or anything in between. No matter how people begging to know you or your brand, the most important thing you can do is recognize the opportunity in front of you and find a way to capitalize on it in a meaningful way.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

And then, of course, Dora The Explorer…

Okay, maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch. But for Ellen Bennett, the founder of multi-million dollar apron company Hedley and Bennett, that children’s character’s can-do adventurous spirit resonates with and lives within her. And she has tapped into those qualities to approach entrepreneurship in a somewhat unique way. 

I definitely feel like I was a bit of a Dora the Explorer. With enough kind of humble enthusiasm, you open a lot of doors. That's what I did. And it worked. And, you know, I don't always land all of my wild adventures, but in this case, it really was the beginning of a whole new journey. And it's so simple as just showing up sometimes up to the place where you're going to meet the people, or have a chance to talk to somebody who will get you into the next door. And then you keep asking and you keep asking and you're just, you gotta be relentless.

The places Ellen was showing up? They were Michelin star restaurants in Los Angeles and she was going around to the back doors to put her product in front of some of the best chefs in the world. Ellen was not well-known. Her product was an apron — something that every restaurant in town already had in bulk. And she was a one-woman operation trying to leapfrog all of the traditional lanes to go straight to the top and find success. 

She didn’t have Dora’s map or her partners in crime to guide her. She was Ellen the explorer and she was out on her own.

Welcome back to The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• Walk Through the Door and Ask: You don’t always need to go through regular channels to get things done. If you have enough confidence and gumption to be aggressive, get in front of the decision-makers, and simply ask for what you want, you just might get it. There is risk and rejection involved in this strategy, but the opportunity is there for the taking if you’re willing to try.
• Don’t Listen to the Haters: Those who don’t see your vision may try to dissuade you at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey. Push through, turn those voices off, and do the work that is in your heart. Along the way, you will have to inspire others through your own passion, and you will need to get creative at times to help your vision come to life.
• Let It Go: Utilize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. Learn when you need to turn off the hustle of doing everything yourself and let someone else whose skill set is more suited take over tasks that you are less apt for. Lean into the assets you have that brought the business to life and delegate those smaller, albeit necessary, tasks.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

But here’s a harder question… What did you do next? Maybe you jotted some things down in a notebook, or even went as far as making a business plan. But again I ask, what did you do next? Did a few weeks roll by and you forgot all about it? Or maybe, like Ju Rhyu, you took a couple steps forward before realizing what a difficult and risky journey it would be. 

“I was doing it by myself. It was very intimidating. I got intimidated by the amount of money that I realized I had to put in for the first PO. So then I stopped, I stopped and I took a job.”

Ju had a vision for a company she called Hero Cosmetics, but there were years between the birth of that idea and actually getting a business off the ground. 

Ideas are plentiful. I’ve had them, and I’m sure you have, too. But what is that missing piece that keeps us and those like us from executing on these ideas and dreams? What was stopping Ju? 

There is so much risk and so much to fear when you’re about to jump off that proverbial ledge into entrepreneurship. Ju felt that fear deep in her bones and it stopped her in her tracks. That’s not unique.

Main Takeaways:

• Reasons to Have a Co-founder: Creating a business can be easier with support from co-founders. Sharing the many responsibilities of running a business — including financial obligations and time investment — can help you get more done quicker and on the road to success faster. Know what you need as a founder to get the project launched. Do you need someone there with you, sharing the burden? What part of the business is the most difficult that could be aided with another person coming on board? When you answer these questions and then act on your decision, you can start to bring your idea to life in real ways.  
• When to Expand: Knowing when to focus your company on a limited number of products and when to expand your offerings is key. You have more limited resources in the beginning stages, so every effort needs to be poured into a select few (or singular) products so that you can make it succeed. At some point you will need to expand if you want to grow, so being strategic when and how you do so is key.   
• Journeys Don’t Have to be Linear: It doesn’t matter what path you start out on, you can still find your way to becoming that successful entrepreneur. Even if you get handed a set of unfortunate circumstances, those can become learning opportunities and blessings in disguise. Learning how to reframe perceived difficulties and how to take the next step when you’re ready are two ways to help navigate an indirect journey. 

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

Popsockets - the little pop out button that attaches to the back of your phone, a simple idea that is now making more than 100 million dollars in profit every year. 

And Tile -  the bluetooth device that lets you find misplaced items, has partnered with Amazon and sold more than 35 million devices.  

What do these three companies have in common?

They all got their start, their first dollar earned, on the crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter. But even with recognizable products and massive success stories like theirs, crowd-funding is still far from the normal way to secure funding, and it is certainly not the ordinary way to secure ALL of your funding year over year for more than a decade. 

Yet for Peter Dering, the founder of Peak Design, crowdfunding was the only business plan he bet on. And it was that bet that would propel him from here:

“I had already run out of money and taken a job at a restaurant to make ends meet. I was a food runner, which is the lowest man on the totem pole.” 

To here:

“I had a profitable business after two days of selling… The Kickstarter community just flocked to this idea. And so that success was pretty immediate and it felt incredible.”

How did launching a Kickstarter get Peter out of odd jobs and place him at the head of a business skyrocketing to success? And how is he carrying on Peak’s crowdfunded origins every year to continue to fund new projects while building unwavering customer loyalty? Find out that and more on today’s episode of The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• Building Customer Loyalty: Crowdfunding built a fiercely loyal customer base early in the company’s life. From there, Peak continued to nurture that relationship by investing in thoughtful, reliable products and honestly addressing complaints if a customer ever ran into any issues. 
• Employee-first Approach: Their company has near-zero turnover and focuses a lot on creating a space where their team can feel fulfilled by their work. Peter hires slowly and intentionally and in so doing has built a time that he trusts to set their own goals, timelines, and budgets.
• A Formula for Success: To this day, Peak is still 100% crowdfunded. Every year, Peter and his team launch a new Kickstarter. They’ve created a winning formula that can be repeated again and again.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

Very few people would answer yes to that question. Russell Aldridge is one of them. 

Russell has been a tinkerer and a builder his whole life, and eventually, that passion led him, like many entrepreneurs, to take a leap of faith.

“I said, ‘I'm thinking about quitting my job and starting a company in the garage,” Russell said when recalling the conversation with his wife. “‘What do you think?’ And she said, ‘Well, what's the worst that could happen?’ And I said, ‘Well, we could lose everything and have to move back to Utah.’ And she said, ‘Well, we don't have anything. And I'd love to move back to Utah. So go ahead.’”

There’s no doubt that the company Russell was starting was a gamble. He called it SISU Cinema Robotics and wanted to build robots that could do … well, pretty much anything. He’d had some practical experience, and yes, as an 11-year-old, Russell was learning the skills he’d apply to this company, but now Russell was a father and a husband. He’d already uprooted his family once to walk into the unknown, and now he was asking them to trust him again. 

What led Russell here? And how has SISU evolved from that roll of the dice idea into a company that is revolutionizing the film and television industry?

Find out on this episode of The Journey.

Main Takeaways:

• Connections Matter: Who you work for and with is important. When you choose a business partner or to take on a company as a client, understand exactly the commitment you are getting into, what is expected, and how you can make each other better along the way. Additionally, try never to burn bridges. A company you once worked for and left might become a customer later on, and you’ll want to be able to fall back on the good impression you left.
• Solve What Needs Solving: There is an endless number of problems in the world, and no matter how good your product is, it won’t be able to solve issues for every person. Narrow down who your customers are and what one big challenge they face that you can solve, then do that exceptionally well. 
• Take The Chance: You hear all the time that you should follow your passion and it’s true. When you do the things you love, the hard times you face become more manageable because you have a “why” behind what you do.

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

Every entrepreneur has a story to tell, and there are lessons for all of us within their journeys. So I hope you’ll tune in, get inspired and take some knowledge with you on your own journey in business and life. 

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This season of the Journey is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by UPS. To learn how UPS can help your small business, go to UPS.com/pivot.

That’s why today’s episode of The Journey is a little bit different. Rather than showcase the success of one small business entrepreneur... you’ll hear from three:

• Kate Perez, Merivis Co-Founder & Executive Director
• Hector Perez, Merivis Founder & Past Board Chair
• And Joe Castro, Merivis Co-Founder & Current Board Chair

Kate, Hector, and Joe are the founding team of Merivis, a nonprofit veteran service organization that trains veterans and military spouses for competitive careers in tech.

The trio has always been determined to build something that makes an impact, but there’s one thing they could have never predicted: That Merivis would be the catalyst for building a community almost as close as family.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

And then, imagine, 2 decades in, leaving behind that “campus,” your career, and the entire community you are familiar with. 

That’s the shocking reality thousands of military families face every year. And while transitioning back into the civilian world can be an exciting time, the stress of finding a new career path is almost unavoidable.

“Traditional sourcing tools were fundamentally not designed for non-traditional talent. They make non-traditional talent invisible. They make people with non-traditional backgrounds confusing to understand because you have to piece together their story.”

That’s Mike Slagh, a Navy veteran and founder and CEO of Shfit.org.

Mike’s all too familiar with the hardships that come with transitioning from military to civilian life... he’s both done it himself and helped hundreds of others find their footing through the process. And it’s because he’s seen it first hand so many times that he knows that that process is long past due for an upgrade.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

"We separate this idea of business and doing good in the world as two things that cannot be compatible with each other, but I think ... they can both exist. They should both exist together. You don't have to separate them. You shouldn't separate them. You can think about them as one. "

That’s Jesse Grothaus, an Army Veteran and the founder and CEO of Cloud Pathfinder Consulting.

Jesse has spent the last three years building a company that brings to life the idea that doing business and doing good do not — and should not — exist apart from one another. 

As he’s built his business, he has found that his philanthropic mission has helped guide him through many of the problems entrepreneurs typically face — from hiring, to retention, to securing the next contract.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Unless you plan to handcraft every product, your next step is to perfect the design and then find a manufacturer to mass-produce it for you.

But even when you find that “perfect” manufacturing partner, you still might want to hold your breath. All it takes is one bad shipment for you to be out of cash, out of product, and back at the drawing board.

“We went to reorder more product.. and I don't know why they even sent what they sent, but the products were mangled. On the outside, it looked fine, but if you looked inside, the pouches were sideways and upside down [and] completely ridiculously unsellable.”

That’s Robert Patton, an Army veteran and the founder of SHEATH Underwear. 

He has faced one manufacturing misstep after another. And while each stumble was tough to swallow — financially and personally — he’s persevered through the hard times, learned from failure, perfected his processes, and built a business that is growing every day.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“There was doubt of being like, can I handle two products? And if I look back at my life, that was probably one of the best decisions… Listen to the market. What is the market telling you? Because I assure you, whatever you assume is not going to be right in some way, shape, or form.”

That’s Marissa Limsiaco, first the President and Co-Founder of Tenavox, and second the President and Co-Founder of Otso. She’s a West Point graduate and an Army veteran. And now, as an entrepreneur, Marissa has spent years in the weeds of product development, finding market fit, growing sales, and planning for expansion. 

She’s no novice to business and no stranger to hard work. But she will be the first to tell you that there’s absolutely no fighting the market. No amount of work will turn passion into dollars if the business model isn’t there. But on the flip side, when the market is telling you there is a need, your potential success can be limitless.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

"Defining successes is fairly simple for us. The first step of that is number one, we have to operate safely. If we're not operating safely, we will not have customers. ... The next thing we have to do is make sure that people are happy. How do we make sure that people are happy? Listen to them, understand their needs, be compassionate, and empathetic to what's going on in their world, and make sure to be there."

That’s Glenn Gonzales, an Air Force Academy graduate, a Lt Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, and the founder and CEO of Jet It, a hybrid ownership program that provides customers with access to round-the-clock private travel.

In Glenn’s 40 years of aviation experience, he’s learned that finding long-term success isn’t about scaling and scaling fast, it’s about staying true to your core values and focusing on delivering an amazing customer experience, one plane ride at a time.

Season 8 focuses on the stories of veterans-turned-entrepreneurs. We’ll dive into the backgrounds of men and women who chose to dedicate themselves to service to their country, and then took on another difficult role when they re-entered civilian life and became entrepreneurs, business owners, and CEOs. 

Episode 1 of Season 8 drops on Veteran’s Day, November 11, with a new episode releasing every Wednesday thereafter. Subscribe and enjoy!

In Kobie Fuller’s experience, this disconnect between what we see in our day-to-day lives versus what we witness in the antiquated world of business isn’t necessarily due to a lack of desire to bridge the gap – it’s more about the need for a more educated effort.

“There is this prominent corporate VC that I met with who had the aspirations to fund more black founders. And he then would say, ‘I have no idea where to find them.’ … Then I started rattling off names of people … that frankly, given someone whose mission [was to fund more black founders], he should've known. And he was like, ‘I have no idea who those people are.’ Well, the problem is that you're not spending time interacting with the black community and the networks by which you actually tap into these people.”

Kobie is the co-founder of Valence and a General Partner at Upfront Ventures. He’s been involved in venture capital since college, and he regularly comes face-to-face with this problem of “I want to hire black talent, but I don’t know where to look.”

It’s a multi-pronged issue that requires a multi-pronged solution, which is what Kobie is working toward at Valence, a network that he is helping build which connects, showcases, and empowers the global black professional community.

Building this community is not a typical nine-to-five job, though. It’s a massive undertaking that he’s putting on his shoulders while still working as a full-time VC. So how does Kobie do it all –  balance all the work needed to achieve this big vision with his daily responsibilities all the while also prioritizing being a great husband and father? 

As Kobie shares today, it's all about mindset and focus.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

But what separates the dreamers from the doers? What differentiates those who would like to reach their goals and those who do reach their goals?

“At that point I had three children, and staying the course was really me dedicating myself to not going back to work for anyone. … There's nothing about it that makes logical sense, [but] as an entrepreneur, you are always operating with this level of delusion.”

That’s Shelly Bell, the Founder and CEO of Black Girl Ventures.

Over the course of her nontraditional career, Shelly has listened to one playlist on repeat: test, iterate, pivot. And while each pivot seemed like an impulsive decision to her peers, at the heart of every choice was a system. And as Shelly shares today, it's that system which draws the line between those who say and those who do.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

One such institution is our legal and justice system.

Great legal representation, education on the laws and your rights, ease of access to legal advice… all of these things have historically been trapped in the marbled hallways of expensive lawyers’ offices.

Charley Moore is on a mission to change that.

“If you look at the core of how justice is rendered around the world, it's a very in-person, physical process,” says Charley. “It's just completely antiquated. [But our world is] all digital and … everything that can be digitized will be digitized. Most legal services can be digital, so they will be.”

Charley is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lawyer, an online legal tech company making access to legal services easy and affordable.

The legal system has long been due for disruption, and using the power of great customer experience, Charley's building the momentum needed to push that disruption forward. 

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

As entrepreneurs, we like to think that we own our destinies, that we are 100% in charge. But the real world has a habit of reminding us that dreams are just that – dreams – and not everyone will see the same vision that we do.

“I walked in [to SMBA] and I was ready to apply for a loan and made my pitch to score, and the woman said to me, ‘Yeah, I don't think this is going to work. You have three strikes against you: You're a woman, you're in debt, and I don't know any successful black women in financial services, so I think you should do something else.”

That’s Melissa Bradley, the cofounder at Ureeka, a company on a mission to democratize economic opportunity for underrepresented entrepreneurs. 

She has always dreamed big. But it wasn’t until her dreams started to expand beyond what traditional society could offer her that she realized in order to create her personal destiny, she’d have to change reality for everyone else in the process.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“My hair ended up falling [out] because I wasn't really taking care of it. My mom was like, ‘No, you're not going to [perm] you’re hair because you nine. You need to wait.’ And for me, it was an accomplishment if I were to perm my hair because only then I’d feel like I was pretty enough.”

That’s Widline Pyrame, the founder of Fusion Dolls, a company creating diverse and ethnically correct toy dolls. Since she was a child, Widline has given in to fads and lost sight of who she is. Today, she is changing that – not just for herself, but for girls, boys, women, and men everywhere.

Building a business requires connection, but before we can connect with those around us, we first have to connect with and accept ourselves.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

These so-called ‘boxes’ that we fall into shouldn’t play a role in how others see us or how we see ourselves, yet so often we find ourselves trapped by the burden of our labels.

Dionna McPhatter has a different perspective. In her opinion, standing out doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, with the right mindset, it may just be a superpower.

“Everyone has the boxes that they check, but seeing those as a superpower that can allow you to connect dots for people is how I would encourage people to see themselves,” says Dionna. “Maybe I can connect the dots between two disparate rooms and use those things that people see as a difference or a reason to classify me as a point of connection.”

Dionna is the co-founder and CEO of Nacci, a company on a mission to use data to help us all unlock more of our humanity. Over the course of her impressive career, Dionna has learned one thing for sure: that connections matter. 

Sometimes what gets us in the room isn’t always what we want to get us in the room… but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing if you learn to leverage those points of connection for good.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

What will HR, sales, marketing, customer experience, employee experience, or even the foundational business model all look like as the company grows?

The truth is that none of these systems will look exactly how they did when you started. It could be like comparing apples to oranges when you put Iteration 10 up against Iteration 1.

Scale requires doing things that don’t scale and then pivoting.

“Our journey is full of these experiences where we legitimately have survived off major pivots and doing things differently at every point of scale,” shares Ryan Smith.

Ryan is the co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics, a company that he started in his basement with his dad nearly 18 years ago.

During those years, Ryan has faced a number of what he calls ‘success disasters’ – moments when something so great happens that it breaks your current system.

And that’s the problem with scale – if you aren’t thoughtful, it’s the very things that are supposed to grow your business that may very well destroy it.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Going all-in on a new and novel business idea, saying no to the steady paycheck and yes to financial instability, investing your life savings with a co-founder you know well but maybe not well enough… these are common high-risk, high-reward scenarios that entrepreneurs often find themselves in.

To the outsider looking in, these situations are far too risky to be taken seriously – to engage in them is not only irresponsible, but foolish.

Tiffanie Stanard has a different opinion… She believes that risks - big risks - are absolutely necessary for success. 

“You have to put yourself out there. … If you're not happy with what you're doing – if people don't know about what you're doing – then what's the point of doing it?”

Tiffanie is the founder and CEO of Stimulus, a relationship intelligence software suite that helps companies build better relationships.

But before she was leading Stimulus, Tiffanie had to make the leap from having a stable income to being her own boss – a decision that taught her if you aren’t ready to go big… then get ready to go home.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

But, as true as this statement is, it’s also true that building and maintaining good relationships is hard - it takes time, thought, passion, and connection.

And perhaps one of the most challenging business relationships to nurture and keep healthy is the relationship between co-founders.

“Starting a company, no matter how much experience you've had, is always a challenge. And it starts with the founding team... You have to have the same vision. You have to be aligned with what you want to create.”

Kraig Swensrud is the Founder of Qualified.com, and partner to an all-star team of co-founders. 

The commitment of time, money, and mental bandwidth that “going all in” requires is all-consuming to say the least. But doing it with a co-founder - or co-founders - who you trust is the secret ingredient to making it all a bit more manageable, and also making it a lot more fun.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

These are difficult questions, but questions that Cynthia Medina Carson faces head-on every day.

“There was a woman who literally found out her colleague was making 30 K more than her, and she was there longer. [But] she had that information and she sat on it for like two months, just not knowing what to do with it. When we talk about wage transparency and salary transparency, the data is a piece of it, but then what are we doing to transition people to a better space?”

Cynthia is the founder and CEO of WAGER, a company helping create the space for individuals and businesses to have a more open dialogue about pay. 

As an employee, the benefits of salary transparency are pretty straight forward – more transparency equals more fair pay. 

But as an employer, the conversation around pay is an often-avoided one. Cynthia is here to tell you that it shouldn’t be and that for a competitive, growing business, salary and promotion transparency are the way of the future.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

And when you are the company trying to stand out in that haystack, how do you gain the trust of customers to show that you are the real deal? 

“We connect brands to their fans, but also we connect fans to each other. And the way that we do that is not based on any basic metrics. It's not based on how many followers somebody has. It's not about how much they bought from you as a brand… How we have attracted so many fantastic brands is that we bring back this layer of true fans that has possibly been lost in the world of influences and views.”

Amber Atherton is the Founder and CEO of Zyper, a company dedicated to connecting the real users of real products to create a real community.

It’s a process that leverages the oldest marketing tactic in the book – honest word-of-month – and is based entirely on two key values that can define an organization inside and out: transparency and trust.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Things very rarely go according to plan. No matter how meticulously we think ahead, the path toward our goals is always subject to roadblocks and detours. But while the journey might rival Pan’s labyrinth, the BIG dream – your ultimate goal and your vision – lives unmoving at the end.

“When I was 18, I was reading about Y Combinator in Silicon Valley from my house in Barcelona. I would always see it as something that's so out of reach… I would have never imagined that I'd be where I am at today. [I realize now that] you really need to be careful about the dreams you choose because maybe they will come true.”

That’s Anna Piñol, the CMO and co-founder of grocery-delivery service Jupiter. Anna’s dreams have required her to leave her home, travel around the world, settle into a new country, learn to fight off self-doubt, AND dive deep into entrepreneurship.

It was – and still is – a challenging journey. But in Anna’s opinion, it’s actually the initial process of defining your dreams that might just be scarier than the path it takes to reach them.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

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Interested in commerce? Check out our newest podcast, Up Next in Commerce, at mission.org/upnextincommerce.

For Warren Schaeffer, one of those moments meant coming face to face with the darker side of entrepreneurship at a young age.

“When I was 12 years old, my father's business totally failed. He went bankrupt and I ended up living with another family when I was 13.”

In Warren’s opinion, there are two ways that businesses die. Number one, they run out of money – like what he witnessed up close and personal as a preteen. 

Or, number two, the founder quits. 

Ensuring your company is making money – and not losing it – is the most basic operation of a business, one every founder, investor, and startup employee is constantly taking a pulse on.

But quitting, giving up, moving on from the project you began... That’s a less discussed, yet very real, founder struggle. 

And the key that helps not only prevent these negative outcomes, but gives a company the traction to find massive success… is having the light of a North Star to guide them.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“A month or two into my role as a platoon leader, I'm brand new leading a tank platoon with 15 soldiers and I had to fire my platoon sergeant. And the platoon sergeant is the key guy who is driving the organization. As a 22-year-old kid, that's probably the hardest decision I ever made.”

Chris Hsu is an Army vet, business vet, and current entrepreneur. Cultivating strong teams and successful leadership models has been Chris’s MO since his first job in the military.

The list of reasons a start-up can fail is endless, but leadership is at the heart of many of the issues young businesses face. And no matter how brilliant your product or business is, with poor leadership, success will be hard to come by… and even more difficult to hold on to.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

But tapping into those supply chains and actually getting your idea from prototype to production line to store shelves is hardly an easy feat.

“My dad always says, ‘It's easy to sell [a product]. It's hard to buy it and produce it. That's where you make a business successful.’”

Bill Gamber is the founder of Big Agnes, a company that designs cutting-edge outdoor gear for even the most seasoned backcountry explorers. Coming up with an innovative tent or sleeping bag design is one thing, but actually finding someone who can produce them? That is a totally different beast…

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

And just like in life, in business, a huge part of the struggle is trying to find where you fit. Who is the perfect customer? What is the right way to reach them? Who are the right employees for the job? And what’s the right culture to build for those great customers and employees?

“We have such an amazing team. In a lot of ways, we hired people that we really enjoy being around and that's what is such a great part of what we created is that we genuinely love being together, working together, spending time together… It’s an unbelievable feeling as a founder.”

Vishal Sunak, is the co-founder and CEO of LinkSquares, and he is thankful every day for his amazing team and their growing network of all-star customers. But before he built that, Vishal was just a guy with a great idea but no customers and no employees to help turn that idea into a reality.

Building that framework of the right people is as complicated as designing the architecture of a skyscraper in a big city. But as Vishal puts it, that network means everything.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

There are underlying themes, common lessons, similar key takeaways… but there is no formula for entrepreneurship; no step 1, step 2, step 10.

And that truth is scary... but it can also be a massive comfort, especially when your story starts a little like this:

“When I was between the ages of 21 and 23, I did a lot of crazy stuff, and it all was rooted in a love to party. I liked to do everything to the extreme, and that was a huge issue. When we sold our company, I had 19 cents [in the bank].”

That’s Sam Parr, now the Founder and CEO of The Hustle, a media company well known for their daily tech and business newsletter.

Before he was sending his thoughts and ideas out to more than a million of people, Sam was stuck in a destructive cycle of alcoholism and rebellion – a cycle that left him out of a job, broke, and nearly homeless.

But that’s the thing about entrepreneurship, it doesn’t matter where or how you start, every decision is an opportunity to not just build your business... but to rebuild yourself.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

And as multi-time entrepreneur Sean Chou will explain, it’s easy to tell the story of your company after it has seen success. The arch is clear, the hero’s journey obvious. It’s when you are stuck in the trenches, riding the ups and downs with your team, that you’re haunted by the big question of “What’s next?”

“We were constantly being forced to innovate along multiple dimensions. And I say in retrospect that we were innovating, but at the time it felt a whole lot like we were just making stuff up as we went along, which is of course what we were doing.”

Today, Sean is the CEO and Co-Founder of Catalytic, a company transforming how people work. But before he was helping other business leaders fine-tune their operations, communications, and accountability systems, he spent two decades identifying what works for him and his teams.

And as Sean shares today, it’s investing in the creation of that fine-tuned business machine that makes it easier to not only enjoy the good times but to survive the more ‘innovative’ ones as well.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

What if, just maybe, you’re a little bit of all those things?

Nick Mehta has gone from self-described wallflower to the CEO of Gainsight and he’s on a never-ending mission to learn and grow into the most authentic CEO possible.

“For some tech CEOs, I think leadership is the necessary evil. They love the product or the technology or whatever. I love the product and the technology. What I really love is leading people… To summarize my philosophy on leadership, probably one of the core things is embracing a style of leadership that's authentic to who I am."

But how do you learn your leadership style and how do you grow into an emotionally composed captain of your company’s ship?

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Sometimes these developments barely affect the business and how it operates. 

Other times, they lead to massive renovation. 

And it’s during those extreme transformations when you learn a lot about yourself, what you bring to the table, and where you thrive...

“A number of the companies that I have been a part of in the past have been acquired by larger ones. What I found was that when I'm in that sort of environment, the number of moving parts and the ability to move fast becomes something that's really hard to solve. And so I find that my skill set of iterating and iterating fast is much harder in a place where you're trying to keep multiple trains on the track.”

That’s David Chang, the former CEO of Gradifi, former COO of Paypal, former Entrepreneur in Residence at Harvard, and current angel investor and entrepreneur. Over the course of his sprawling career, David has shaped startups at the earliest stages and helped lead established businesses in their later ones. 

Through trial and error, he has learned to recognize where he adds the most value. And it’s understanding what you mean by value and your role in shaping it that dictates how and where you’ll land when your business finds itself facing new challenges or changes.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Now flip the question.

Has there ever been a time when you heard something second hand and it was more upsetting than if the person had directly told you?

Communication is hard and having honest conversations isn’t easy. But most of the time it’s not circumstances that get in the way of being open... it’s our internal machinations – our assumptions and emotions – that stop us.

"The missing conversations are the most costly in marriages and companies… When you say nothing about issues, the issues will never resolve. So... whatever your circumstances are, it's so much more costly to not have the conversation."

That’s Stacey Engle, President of Fierce Conversations. Stacey’s job is to help business leaders have honest dialogues between themselves, their colleagues, and their employees - and it’s something she practices every day within Fierce.

Every operation that goes into building a business matters… but they all start with one thing: a conversation. And as Stacey shares today, its conversations - especially the ones you aren’t having - that matter most.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

But in Ben Hindman’s case, that wake up call came from the person you least want to hear it from… his boss.

“I think they were torn whether or not I was the right person for the job. After about two years working there it became clear that I was not, and that was really hard for me… The people who I worked for and worked with were very clear that I was not performing well.”

Ben is now the co-founder and CEO of an event marketing software company called Splash. But before he became his own boss, he was an employee. And as Ben will share today, sometimes it’s the lessons you learn as an employee that set you up best for success when you become a founder.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Whether it was gradually or all at once, one thing is true no matter how you learned: Eventually, you just had to jump in.

“I instructed skydiving and… what I learned is that you really pack your own parachute, meaning that you prepare it, you focus on attention to detail, and you execute. And, just as in skydiving, in entrepreneurship, you can prepare as much as possible but at some point, you just have to jump.”

Dyan Gibbens is the President and CEO of Trumbull Unmanned, and jumping into things - or out of things, for that matter - is Dyan’s specialty. As a skydiving instructor and pilot in the military, turned entrepreneur in the civilian world, she knows what it means to be prepared for the inevitable leap.

And as she’ll tell you, in business as in life, preparation is the difference between barely keeping your head above water and being able to swim laps around your peers.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Many of our greatest moments are these moments of serendipity – meeting your partner, discovering your passion, having that ‘aha’ moment while building a business. These are the kind of moments that in a lot of ways define what it means to be human.

And if there’s one thing you can definitely find in every success story, it’s serendipity.

“I wrote a 400-page book, and I joke, ‘I sold 10 copies of that book.’ But one of those copies was to a gentleman who was one of the founders of HGTV, who called me up and said, ‘Hey, I've got your book and we'd like to license it.’”

For Tara-Nicholle Nelson, now founder of SoulTour and of Transformational Consumer Insights, the journey to success started after her lightly-circulated, self-published book found its way into the right hands.

It was that moment of serendipity that transformed Tara’s life and career. And it’s that type of pivotal moment that can change not just your life, but also change the lives of your customers.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“There's nothing like doing. Before jumping into an adventure, there's fear. You go around asking questions, but there's nothing like selling to the first customer. That's the ultimate validation.”

Eugenio Pace is the founder and CEO of Auth0. For Eugenio, it was never a question of if his product was needed – he knew it was. Rather it was a question of if the right customer would be willing to pay for it.

And finding that ‘perfect first customer’ isn’t just an important part of Eugenio’s story, it’s a crucial step for any new business owner.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

The goals of the sales department didn’t quite match the goals over in marketing. The hiring and firing process seemed to change a little every time. The values that the managers encouraged in their teams didn’t really align with the ones they held themselves. No matter the department, the team, or the process, everything seemed to operate apart from each other instead of in unison.

It wasn’t a sales problem. It wasn’t a product problem. It wasn’t a YOU problem… It was a mission problem.

“One piece of advice that someone shared with us early on that we really took to heart is if you're going to build a company, have a mission… Humans, especially today, want to be part of something.”

That’s Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and COO of Cloudflare. In just nine years, Michelle has helped build the company from user number one to user number 2 million. But it’s not something she or her two co-founders could have ever done without a mission to bind them, their customers, and their growing staff together.

Everybody wants to be part of something bigger - in life or in business. We all want to understand our role in the greater machine. And as an entrepreneur or business owner, you are in a unique position to provide that understanding for your team - not just so your business thrives, but so that your people can thrive with it.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

Maybe it was at your wedding, or during the birth of your first child, or when you happened upon that ‘revolutionary’ business idea.

It’s that moment when your mind and heart fall into sync and something just clicks - you know without a doubt what you need to do and who you need to be.

It’s this spectacular moment of clarity… that leaves you completely unprepared to face reality.

Marriage is hard, parenting even harder, and building a business is a struggle every step of the way.

It’s easy to be excited about the start of something new. But as Joel MacIntosh will tell you, there’s a BIG difference between starting something and following through.

“When we hire new people, I still take them through the training and ask them, ‘Hey, have you ever lived paycheck? Because this business at one point lived payroll to payroll.’”

Joel is the founder and CEO of WolfNet. He’s ridden the rollercoaster of entrepreneurship and knows that while there are countless paths to success, all of them are built on passion, focus, and a fierce drive to follow through.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

And while they may be cliche, admit it… we all love a good underdog story.

“I weighed 85 pounds in high school, and no one ever saw me coming. It used to really annoy me, and then I began to realize that that was kind of a superpower being consistently under underestimated.”

Laurel Taylor is the Founder and CEO of FutureFuel.io. She learned to embrace being underestimated and treated that rejection as a catalyst for something more.

And that’s the difference between an underdog-soon-to-be-top-dog and everyone else; they take the pain in life, the rejection of the critics, the questioning of those close to you… and turn it into a fuel that’s unstoppable.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

But for Gregarious Narain, year one is something he is all too familiar with….

“The way I usually describe myself when people ask me my role is I'm an ideal year one guy. I love that first year when everything is in flux and we're really trying to coordinate all of these moving forces to try and bottle the wind. And that's what I love the most about a startup.”

Take a peek at Greg’s LinkedIn profile and you will see him listed as the founder or co-founder of more than ten businesses… That’s ten startups, ten new ideas, ten different teams, and ten year ones.

And if there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s that the experience is different... Every. Single. Time.

But for Joe Chura, CEO of Dealer Inspire, “living in the moment” is deeper than just being in the moment. For him, it’s about taking action in every moment.

“Nothing great is easy. Whether that's losing weight or trying to complete a marathon or building a business. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. And it's these little bits of iteration over time, these little chunks of energy, and all of a sudden you can cash in.”

Your life and your career present you with moments. And as you’ll learn with Joe, these moments have the potential to be game-changers… but only if you choose to embrace them.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

The truth?

A lot of the times, that isn’t the whole picture.

In fact, we’d argue that most of the time, there’s an army of supporting friends, family, mentors, colleagues, and customers behind each and every small business story.

“It's been a personal struggle over the years dealing with all of the complexes that you develop around trying to be a great founder and trying to be a great mother, partner, and friend… And I have unapologetically relied on this village of people around me.”

Sonali Lamba, co-founder of Brideside, knows what it means to be an entrepreneur - the time and emotional commitments required to build a successful business. But she’ll also be the first to admit she can’t do it all... and she definitely can’t do it all alone.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

Well, that’s kind of where our story starts today.

“I used to travel every summer with my dad. He put me in this little tux or some goofy oversized suit and I'd sit in and listen to him in boardrooms with manufacturers and reps and resellers and everybody in between.”

That’s Scott Kitun, preteen business tycoon-turned-CEO of entrepreneurial network, Technori. And as you might have guessed, Scott’s business journey started a lot earlier than most.

Over the years, he’s learned a lot about what to do - how to find investors, how to build a network, how to chase your dream. But through it all, he’s also learned a lot about what not to do, when to keep dreaming, and when to move on.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

But these challenging, I-don’t-know-if-I-will-survive situations, present us with the opportunity to learn our most enduring lessons.

And for Ian Morris, CEO of Market Leader, one of those lessons hit hard in 2008, at the peak of the Great Recession.

“After years of success, I was driving layoffs and took a company down. We took it up from nothing to almost 600 people. After the real estate market collapsed, we took it to a low of 140 people… It was miserable.”

It was a scary time. There were layoffs and long, restless nights. Ian wondered if he was in the right position to lead the company.

But, Ian, now CEO of Likewise, learned something through that tumultuous period with Market Leader: He had to trust his instincts.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

When you picture an entry-level job for a recent college grad, what do you see?

Maybe an intern making coffee or filing an endless stream of paperwork? An assistant doing repetitive computer tasks and taking office calls. On a good day, maybe this intern or assistant has an opportunity to join a team meeting or chime in on small business decisions.

Sounds like a fairly relaxed, even boring, entry into the world of work - and it’s an entry most of us are familiar with. But this ‘pay your dues, put in the time, and slowly earn your way up the corporate ladder’ mindset isn’t for everyone… and it certainly wasn’t the path for Liz Wiseman.

Liz is the founder and CEO of the management research company, The Wiseman Group.

But long before she founded her namesake firm, Liz got her start as a technical trainer with Oracle, which was then just a medium-sized startup.

That experience taught her a valuable lesson about why the ‘perfect fit,’ may not always be the ‘right fit.’

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

Your name is called and you walk up to accept your diploma. You shake the principal's hand, wave to the crowd, and head back to your seat. It’s over in what feels like the blink of an eye.

But after the buzz dies down, a big question hits you: What does the future hold? Maybe you’re planning on college? Maybe a job? If you’re lucky, maybe you’ve saved up and have a year in Europe in mind.

But for Brian Scudamore, the next step was very off the beaten path… and into a beaten old pickup.

“I have built a company that started with one truck back in 1989 and 30 years later we're… a $370 million business in Canada, the United States, and Australia… By 2022, we will be a billion dollar business. This year, we’re at $444 million.”

Brian is the entrepreneur behind 1-800-GOT-JUNK?.

Brian saw opportunity where others saw drudgery. From that unglamorous beginning, he’s built an empire by always seeing the opportunity in every circumstance, even in the midst of his own mistakes.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

Today’s episode is a special changeup from our usual format. Recently, Mission co-founder Ian Faison was at Dreamforce, the annual gathering of Salesforce customers, partners, and developers to share and learn how to better create and capture value in their business. While there, Ian moderated a discussion with Ali Sabeti, CEO of ZeroCater, and Meggie Palmer, founder of PepTalkHer; you may remember Meggie from Season 3 of The Journey, and we’re exited to talk with her again in Season 4.

Without further delay, enjoy this live recording from Dreamforce 2019!

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

But even if you feel like you don’t belong somewhere, there may still be good reason for you to be there, to stay there, and to make a place for yourself. That’s what Amy Nelson did in her life as a lawyer on Wall Street. She asserted herself and made sure others noticed her presence and value.

“What I learned pretty quickly is that if you choose to belong somewhere, you will belong. I think the bigger thing for me was to figure out how to take up space, to kind of square my shoulders and be very present and use my voice.”

Amy learned to use her voice, and today, people are listening. She launched The Riveter in 2016 as a home and community for women in business. We all want to find our tribe. And for everyone, especially entrepreneurs, creating a network of people you can lean on may be the difference between building something that lasts — whether it’s a business, a team, a life — and one that crumbles.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

But he’s also never shied away from his shortcomings and learning from setbacks. He had to learn the mechanics of teamwork by losing a great job. In leading his own startups, he’s learned the value of delegation and relying on other people. 

In short, he learned that genius alone wasn’t enough. 

"I don't look at failure and success as separates. I think that it's a yin and yang — that failure is success in its early stages."

Today at Jammber, Marcus relies on that team ethos to build a great company. He’s focused on growing headcount while preserving and improving company culture. And for their customers, they’re making teamwork easier by simplifying the notoriously complex world of music royalties.

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

But for a lot of new products and services, this mindset of launch quick and iterate in real-time is a necessary one. Amanda Bradford would agree, and it’s a philosophy she’s embraced in her company since day one.

 “I believe that perfection is the enemy of progression. Just getting something out the door is super inspiring to then start polishing it.” 

Amanda is the Founder and CEO of The League, a dating app built for overly ambitious people looking to find their long term partner. In just six months, Amanda conceptualized, then launched, then iterated, and then found funding for the app. Pay attention, because that order of execution matters... and it may just be the difference between a successful product and one that never even hits the shelves. 

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Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

Looking back, most entrepreneurial journeys look more like a roller coaster than a well marked trail, and it’s only over when you decide it’s over.

“For me, in the early days of both my startups, and on some level in everything I’ve done, I refused to fail. It was just not acceptable to fail.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

Today she leads Halogen Ventures aimed directly at investing in female-founded startups. She’s learned there’s no shortage of incredible talent in the field. And despite incredible deal-flow and work to be done, it’s essential for her and the founders she works with to decompress and take care of themselves along the way.

“That was an interesting moment for me where I realized that, oh yeah, I have to make sure I feed myself and hydrate, like very basic things for a human. And I think that's something for everyone to remember. We get caught up in work and life and you forget to look up and take care of yourself.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“When I worked in the corporate world, I was so busy and I was so disconnected from what my gut and my intuition were saying. And a bunch of people I talk to are like this. That's such a common entrepreneurial mistake. They just stay stuck in their head and they're over analyzing everything and there's just no amount of analysis that's going to get you to make certain decisions.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“I loved every moment of working in Silicon Valley and with Facebook. The only thing that I did not love was pretty much being the only woman in every room that I was in for a decade. And that was something that I started to really question and think about. How is it that we're building these global companies, but everyone in the room looks identical?”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“You have to learn a new language. Learn a new culture. Build a network from scratch without having had one already. You're more likely to figure out how to navigate the confusing environment where these bigger company executives are making deals to exclude startups. But you're okay with that, because you already have been in a place where people are excluding you and you found the way in.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“What I have found is that people relate to stories. And people want to share their stories. Often we focus on the negatives. We focus on the deal we didn't close, the typo, you know, the mistake you made having a tough conversation. But I’ve really shifted into a more positive mindset, which has allowed me to think more clearly, and more abundantly.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

Over the last year, we've had some amazing conversations and shared some fascinating stories on The Journey. From CEOs and industry titans like Marissa Mayer and Bret Taylor, to authors like A.J. Jacobs and Gretchen Rubin, to small business owners who are in the trenches every day, just like you.

But that was just the beginning. Season 03 of The Journey is our best yet.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“The thing that I want to come back to is just the optimism around the opportunities that technology affords. I think that's why it's so fun to be an entrepreneur, because every time you think all the good ideas have been taken, another technology shift happens and an incredible new businesses get created. And so, I think it's always a good time to think about new opportunities to start businesses, and innovate where other people haven't.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“You have some days where you feel like you're on cloud nine, and other days where it feels like you're in a deep ditch, And so, really in those moments of doubt, it's reminding myself of what the mission is and what the vision is. That's what keeps me going.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“The company that I left was probably the best company I had ever worked for. I was extremely happy there. And so you might think, well why would you leave? And there were times when I thought that. But really it prepared me and equipped me. I know in my bones that absolutely it was the right thing to do.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“My recommendation for other entrepreneurs on that journey would be figuring out how to become a learning machine. Maybe it's reading one book a month, maybe it's going to one conference a quarter, maybe it's reading 50 blog posts a week. Whatever it is, develop a process around continuous learning, and then obviously a bunch of great things come out of that.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

Imagine you’ve started a business, and spent a year and a half giving it everything you’ve got, but have nothing to show for it. In fact, not only is your business failing, but you know it will never succeed. You don’t just have one or two things wrong... the whole business model is off.

That might seem like a really bad place to be. But if you ask Christine, it might actually be a good place to start. Christine learned through trial and error that some ideas aren’t ever going to work. But if you’re willing to pivot, and keep taking action no matter what, eventually you will find your way.

“The number one thing is just one foot in front of the other as fast as possible and go for it. You're going to hit walls, you're going to pivot, you're going to change, but you just have to get going. And just manage your expectations that it's never going to be a linear path.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“If you had asked me when I was ten years old, what do you want to be when you grow up, my answer was always the same, and that was “alive”. I still remember my mom saying to me, you're going to be dead or in prison by the time you're 18. And, so for me, I had this running joke for a long time, I just want to make it to be an old man. I feel like that would be a success for me. And, even today I fight towards that.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“I think what is loneliest in the founder journey is the feeling like you have to do everything alone, and that it's all on you. And while that's kind of true in some ways, I think the process doesn't have to be as lonely. I think you can loop other people into it. Even if they're just sitting there with you, I think that's a big thing.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“You're not in charge of the plan. You can plan, but what do they say? Planning is everything, but the plan is worthless. And the plan gets thrown out the door sometimes.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“We've never been better positioned to be able to tackle the world's big problems. We think that's the most important and under-explored story of our time. The things that people might do today and tomorrow could change the course of human history for the better, so we want to tell that story.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“When you look at the world, the world doesn't need sustainability at this point. It needs to get better. And so we want to be a part of helping the world thrive.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

"The whole idea of judo, in theory, is designed around the idea of asymmetric forces, so not competing strength against strength but using your strength against your opponent's weakness. In the startup world, if you try to compete strength for strength against an established player, it's kind of a fool's errand. You're just playing the game that they want you to play."

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

When I started Boomi, I was 24 years old and I really didn't know what I was doing at all, to be honest… There was no Lean Startup, there wasn't any of that stuff. I think we hoped we'd build a cool big meaningful business… But a lot of naïvity, to be totally honest.

After parting ways with his co-founders, Rick rebuilt his company with a new team, a new sense of purpose, and a new trajectory. Boomi was reborn in 2005. They took a big bet on cloud integration — a technology that wasn’t yet proven — and it paid off. Boomi was acquired by Dell in 2010, 10 years after its founding. The acquisition provided Rick an opportunity that would soon be the focus of his next venture, Guru, which he is building today with all the lessons learned during the past decade.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney

“I think the first 10 years of your professional life, I think should be about self-discovery. And that if you're willing to be honest with yourself about what your strengths and weaknesses are, I think it's that's the wind at your back. I mean, you are able to kind of zero in on what you ought to be doing, what you can do best.”

By being brutally honest with himself, Jerry was able to ascertain his true strengths and weaknesses. From there, reinvented himself as a science-fiction writer. This path has not only led to further success, but to true fulfillment.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“When I got depressed at Harvard, the turning point was when I moved away from trying to solve this individually to opening up to my friends, my eight closest friends and family, and telling them, ‘I've been depressed for two years. I really need your help. I don't know if I can overcome this.’ The groundswell of support is amazing.”

Going through that experience colored how Shawn went about his work, built a business and created a career that was meaningful for him and all those who work with him.  

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“Health, wellness, and sports nutrition were always kind of a big focus of mine. But I never thought I would build a business around them. That was not my intention at all.”

Tero took his passion and the knowledge he had that set him apart and he built Four Sigmatic. The path was unconventional for sure, but Tero’s journey teaches us that sometimes the things that make us different are actually what set us up for success.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“I do believe your network is your greatest asset over the life of your career and that you have no idea when and where that network might serve you.”

Today Elizabeth is President of Alice, the AI-driven business advisor for entrepreneurs. Her startup is helping those outside centers of power build their own amazing networks, by catering resources for people of marginalized gender, ethnicity, sexual identity, and more. As she sees it, traits that are often seen as disadvantages can actually be incredible strengths and untapped opportunities.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

I've heard so many horror stories of close friends, best friends whose relationships had been torn apart by failed business ventures or sometimes actually torn apart by successful business ventures. Jaspar and I have had our fair share of challenges because we are both hyper competitive, and while we love each other's company, we also both want to be in the spotlight. And, when you're co-founders and you're two people who are in the business, that can be a really big challenge.

Bryce and Jaspar failed in their initial attempt at business. And when they took a second shot at business ownership together, they had to do hard, humbling work to learn how to communicate effectively. The end result was a successful business, TaskUs, and many lessons learned including that communication is the core of any true partnership.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

The market value of Silicon Valley Bank was only 50 million dollars. Publicly traded, 50 million dollars. Today we're about $55B AUM so back then, if I'd probably known as much as I should have known, I probably wouldn't have joined them.

So how did he help transform a shrinking real estate bank to one of the most important financial institutions in the world? By taking initiative. Divine discontent. He always pushed for change and pursued new opportunities and on this episode of The Journey, you’ll learn that sometimes, it’s not about building something completely new or unexpected. It’s about doing what you can with what you have, making smart choices, taking key risks and working hard to make sure they pay off.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“If you've ever had dreams of starting a business whether, even if it's not starting a business or just taking a risk, you know, just do it. Like life is short….if I have to look back on my career and where I started in corporate, in banking, in venture capital, and all these turns and angles that I took, I wouldn't trade the last six years for anything because I've grown so much as a person. I've met so many challenges that I never thought I'd even encounter. It's changed my perspective on life.”

Rahul took a long road to the entrepreneur’s life, but when he finally found his path and started MakeSpace, his destiny became clear. This is his journey and from it, you’ll learn the decision to commit to action is the most important decision you can make.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“The whole year was like this up and down year where we would have one month that was a really good month, and one month that was a bad month. I was like, "What is happening?" I felt really out of control and I started having very illogical panic attacks, where I couldn't sleep at night. I wasn't eating and I would call my husband and I was like, ‘Alex, I think I'm going to be an ice cream truck driver.’”

Adi had to push through panic attacks, doubts, and tough business problems to keep her company, Teami, alive. But in doing so, she became a stronger person and leader and learned some valuable lessons about what it means to run a small business.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

In this episode, you’ll learn about Gina’s company, Mighty Networks, and how she has been able to do what she loves all by using the skills she’s learned along the way.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

It was a big mess to be perfectly honest. We didn't know what we were doing, and we had no grand plan. We didn't have a strategic plan, we didn't have anything, and we definitely did not have a plan that this would expand beyond our own small community.

But changing the way children learn is not an easy task, and the style of learning is not for everyone.  And so, despite wanting to change the world for everyone, Laura had to do what all small business owners do — find the right market, learn to identify who to target, and who to let go of, accept rejection and grow slowly and steadily in order to make a lasting impact.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Y’vonne Ormond (Twitter, LinkedIn) spent many years working in the corporate world where she learned the ins and outs of business. But at a certain point, the corporate world became unfulfilling on a personal level. Y’vonne decided to go out on her own, and in doing so create a work-life balance that worked for her.

But the journey wasn't easy. And along the way Y’vonne had to deal with personal hardships while learning how to juggle the many tasks small business owners are required to take on.

“The thing about being a small business owner is, I’m the CEO, the COO, CFO, the project manager and HR… There's no “off”. That's the other challenge — I feel like I have 200 bosses because it's my role to serve my employees, to serve my children, and to serve my clients.”

Being a small business owner and a single mom all at the same time is a lot of work and it’s not a path many people can handle. But for those like Y’vonne, who work hard and figure it out along the way, the benefits and rewards are worth all the sacrifice.

In the end, she realized that by preparing herself, leaning on others and taking failure off the table as an option, she could mitigate the risks that had scared her before and succeed in ways she was never expecting.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“What allowed me to take the risk was really... an amazing coalescence I guess of happenings in the universe.”

In the end, she realized that by preparing herself, leaning on others and taking failure off the table as an option, she could mitigate the risks that had scared her before and succeed in ways she was never expecting.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“If I were ever under any illusions previously about what I was good and not good at, well, then in that moment they were entirely shattered.”

It turns out that the way you communicate is deeply important, and learning to do so effectively — including how to give and receive feedback — is paramount in scaling a company. Sander learned this lesson the hard way, and his journey provides helpful lessons to anyone trying to navigate their way through building a healthy company culture and strong leadership team.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

"I made a six-figure mistake… I made a huge mistake. I didn't do enough diligence. I didn't know what that even meant. So, it was really hard.”

Through Tonio's story, we learn that even when we think we can’t fail, we will. There will always be challenges to overcome. The question is, will you keep getting back up, or let those challenges keep you from accomplishing your dreams?

Listen to Tonio's journey and learn how he turned his initial failures into a major comeback.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

But the journey to get there wasn’t easy. Finding the right market, building a solid team, and learning how to listen to his customers, are just some of the struggles he faced — struggles every business owner has to face and overcome.

“Entrepreneurs are very eager and rightfully so. But you have to remember as an entrepreneur to under promise and over deliver — it's always going to work out better for you. We did not follow that lesson.”

Everyone dreams of success — of building something from scratch. Of having an impact. But building a successful company takes a lot of hard work, and there will always be setbacks along the way. You have to be willing to learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Listen to Frederic’s journey and learn how he overcame his struggles, and grew a business from nothing to a $1.5 billion IPO, and beyond.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Rob Forman (Twitter, LinkedIn) is the President and COO of SalesLoft. But before that, he founded a company called HireIQ, which is still in business today. Why isn’t Rob still with HireIQ? The short answer is because, despite the fact that he had built it himself, Rob did not feel aligned with the company, its employees or its mission. He failed as a leader because he wasn’t able to build a company culture that worked for him.

“I was really perplexed that I, as a co-founder, created an environment that eventually I really didn’t enjoy.”

After that failure, it would have been easy for Rob to put his head down and go work for some other company somewhere else. Instead, he threw his hat into the startup ring again, this time with the lessons he learned from his past mistakes leading him toward a brighter and more fulfilling future.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Gretchen Rubin (Twitter, LinkedIn) is the author of more than seven books, including biographies of Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy, as well as The Happiness Project, a No. 1 bestseller that has sold more than 3.5 million copies. She’s also the host of the Happier podcast, which has been downloaded more than 70 million times.

“At a certain point I thought, you know I would rather fail as a writer than succeed as a lawyer. And I knew that I was at the point in my career where I was like, this is the time to take the risk. This is the time to try. I need to try.”

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“I wanna do what I was called to do, essentially. So the big setback was not having that confidence initially.”  

Listening to Marcus’ journey, you’ll learn how he overcame his circumstances and found the confidence within himself to not just survive in business, but thrive, all while trying to give back to others.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

“My why has never changed what I will say, what has changed is me actually defining it and putting it to into words. So I've always known that my outcome has always been to serve the underserved.”

Listening to Karen’s journey you’ll learn that there are times in life when you might not realize what your true path is, and it can sometimes be hard to make a leap into a new venture. But having courage and truly understanding what drives you can help you build something that has meaning to you and maybe even a larger community as well.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

"We started Lambda School to solve the problem of how to get a high-quality job-enabling education to folks who otherwise couldn’t afford it.”

Listening to Austen’s journey, you’ll learn why you can’t let a lack of “credentials” stop you from building and growing your business, how to figure out the real problem you’re customers are facing, and simple strategies you can use to find solutions to your biggest business challenges.

Learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Most recently, she co-founded Lumi Labs, an early-stage technology studio focused on building consumer applications enabled by artificial intelligence.

"There's a lot of successful companies in the world, and then there are the ones that really touch people's lives and change how they think and how they conduct their day, and we really hope that Lumi Labs does something like that."

You can learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

Today, he’s a New York Times Bestselling Author, and writes for many publications, such as Esquire Magazine, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York magazine. He’s also appeared on television shows such as Oprah and Good Morning America.

His latest book is It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree.

You can learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.

A single spark of an idea... the uncovering of an opportunity that everyone else missed... a breakthrough innovation that will change the course of history…

These realizations happen in an instant, but the journey from idea to reality unfolds over a lifetime.

The Journey is a new podcast by Mission.org. In it, we share the human struggles behind the creation of today’s leading businesses.

These are the true stories that went into building some of the world’s biggest, most well-known, and most revolutionary businesses, as well as stories from up-and-coming entrepreneurs who may be the game-changers of the future.

The Journey shares the accounts of how revered innovators, industry-defining companies, and visionary entrepreneurs built businesses that last generations… or failed trying.

We believe that there are lessons in either outcome. By learning their rocky journeys to success, you will be primed with the tools and knowledge to navigate your own journey.

Start your journey. Subscribe today.

You can learn more about The Journey at mission.org/thejourney.

The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy. See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.