This has been frequently requested of me ever since my earlier post about ‘The Six Month Conversation’ resonated with so many people. This follow up is about the framework Alexis and I devised with hopes of guiding our life journey together independently and as a couple. I know this post is arriving several years late, after tons of requests, so thanks everybody for your patience!
Here’s the structure of this post:
Background on why I did this
Defining a midsize company
Who are the people I spoke with
Common challenges during transition (from small to mid size)
Common challenges at midsize
Tips to their younger selves
So let’s get started!
Around 2015, it started to become apparent to me that there is abundant resources/expertise available for large global enterprise companies and small local/hobby businesses. They are thus very well served for nearly all of their business needs by available in-house talent and professional services. But what about those companies in between? Those mid-size/mid-market companies you her about? How does one journey from being small business to becoming a global enterprise?
This question niggled at me for a long time, until finally in the spring of 2016 when I couldn’t take it anymore. Folks I’ve mentored will smirk at this next bit. Yes, I followed my own advice that I’ve given to every one of you that you’re tired of hearing: I hustled to arrange 100 deliberate conversations with people who understand this better than me and I learned from them.
Thus, I set out to learn more about the challenges of companies in this growth/transition phase. Maybe I would discover there’s already a solid solution available on the market (spoiler: there wasn’t) or gather enough insight to be able to propose a solution for this market segment.
But before we move on…
Here we know there’s this glaring gap in available resources/expertise to serve the segment of mid-size / mid-market companies, but what exactly are they?
It’s been three years since I put this Blog into the public sphere. A lot has happened.
Here’s how I’m currently thinking of my relationship with the content published here.:
Categories - the types of content on this
Tags - short descriptions about the quality of content, so I can revisit it at a later date
Categories
You Asked For It - brief posts on topics people frequently ask about
On My Mind - stuff I’m thinking about
Examples: Venture Studio Attempt 1, The Burden of Leadership
Community Involvement - related to community service initiatives
Personal Development - advice to my past and future self
Joshua’s Curated Content - things I consider important to reference
Miscellaneous - anything that doesn’t fit well into the above categories :P
Examples: Holiday Hat 2016
Through this post, I want to:
Stay accountable to improving my Holistic Fitness pillar (currently my #1 investment area) by publicizing my efforts
Analyze the state of my Holistic Fitness: where it currently is, what got it here, why it is as it is, and how to hack it better
Document a progression so I can revisit this in the future if/when relevant
This (now very public) post is an exceedingly scary thing for me.
It pains me to so openly admit what I perceive to be a weakness and character flaw (working on this), but this is important and I’m committed to being better…
Note for any readers: this is written to myself for future reference.
While going through the exercise of year-end cleaning, the process includes checking bookmarks for what will be highly relevant going forward. These are a few I’ve kept throughout 2018, which are now lower priority but which I may like to reference again in the future.
Frameworks and Tools:
Having recently attended a number of events this autumn to speak with university students, young professionals, and small business owners, I’ve fielded many questions about what reading I would recommend to them.
While I’ve previously shared my thoughts on this topic, my journey has taken me down many paths and through many hoops in the three years since then. I have a few more thoughts to share.
The big one is that everybody should learn Sales. > Cue groans <
Listen, I get it: ‘selling’ is thought of as something dirty… but that’s such an outdated notion. The reality is that we are all selling, all of the time. Selling is the art and science of…
I was recently in Las Vegas for DEF CON, the world's largest Hacking Conference (Site, Wikipedia). For four days, 20,000+ nerds descended upon Vegas and put security professionals on edge. It was my first time participating in DEF CON, and it won't be my last.
Over the course of my week in Las Vegas, I caught up with old friends, met new people, learned about the Hacker world, was exposed to novel ideas, had fascinating and thoughtful discussions, lived it up Vegas-style, explored the famous city's culture, and ate too much unhealthy food (*cough* Typical West Coast).
I've been left with a lot to ponder since coming home from DEF CON…
As I've been pushing hard on pursuing new opportunities lately and working through a handful of challenging projects, I've been pondering the question, "What is truly worth striving for?" in considering how to allocate my limited resources of time and energy.
This is the list of things I keep circling back to:
Excellence
Integrity…
This is a Shitty First Draft post that I never got around to completing. Coming back to it now cause I've been having mentoring calls every week for a while now. Same things KEEP coming up. So, here I am, writing a post about it so I can point to it.
Are you doing what you do to meet your personal expectations, or the expectations of your parents/society/tribe? It's your life, dude. Live it as you see fit.
It's great to be excited ("passionate") about a particular industry, but how much do you really know about it? I hear far too many people who were sold on the 'sexy' of a particular field of work, where the majority of their understanding came from marketing efforts by industry associations or people who've themselves been sold on an idea…
Ever since I went to university, I've been thinking about writing more in a public manner. Finally pulled the trigger in 2016 after years of deliberating. Here's a post I found that I'd written an entire draft for back in August of 2013.
I enjoyed reading this because it offered me an interesting look into how I've developed concepts and workflows since then. Sharing this in all of its original glory because it's rather funny and still pretty relevant!
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This post is an ongoing attempt to create a universal checklist for the preparation of presentations. Note that I am assuming that the presentation deck and demo product are already complete after considering objective, available time, time of day, audience, and so on. This checklist is a combination of actions and reminders with some definitions included after the checklist...
