Year: 2020

  • 2020, 24 hours to go…

    I wanna be vaccinated.

    As we’re about to bookend this one, I feel the urge to reflect on and share some of what I have learned in 2020. I also want to include a dash of what I am hopeful for.

    There is no way I could open any commentary on the year with anything but a direct acknowledgment of how impactful and scary COVID and its potential lasting effects continue to be. I watched a handful of people I know contract COVID this year. Thankfully, all recovered. I feel very lucky for this and my heart goes out to so many who have lost someone close or been affected directly.

    Also, most of my business engagements and companies have been nimble enough to navigate their way through 2020’s obstacles. I know I have also been fortunate in this respect when so many in our country have not. Many people and businesses are still in precarious situations and in need of help from individuals and the government. I hope we all keep that top of mind and continue to lend our hands, voices and wallets where we can.

    That said, welcome to the “detailed breakdown” of my personal 2020:

    This year I watched the for-profit B2C companies I’m involved with or invested in brace for a tsunami in March, only to end up surfing the COVID demand wave to record growth and performance to date. From companies at scale like RevZilla and CycleGear (Comoto) to startups like Trade Coffee (which was my lone angel check this year), once they found their footing it has been wild to see teams adapt to remote work and leaders engage to bridge communication and proximity gaps. I have a very much “talent in the building” leadership style so it’s been as impressive as it is uncomfortable to watch some of my friends lead their orgs through all of this remote operational change. They worked with the limited tools at their disposal to ultimately survive and then thrive. My reservations about remote work, at least in the short term, have been nullified. It can be done because it had to be done. Thank god COVID hit in 2020 instead of 1990. I have no idea what happens without digital communication and video tools at the ready. It will also be really interesting to see what a new normal in terms of company ops and consumer preference looks like post-COVID. What’s a step function and what’s cyclical? More on that later.

    As a board memeber of The Skatepark Project (formerly Tony Hawk Foundation), I helped round out a multi-year process to rename, re-strategize and assist with the search for a new Executive Director. All hard things that would have been better finalized during non-COVID peacetime. It reaffirmed my belief, however, that in most cases, thoughtful yet difficult choices typically benefit from being made sooner rather than later, granted the timing doesn’t create existential risk for the organization. I was also so impressed with how genuinely and gracefully the outgoing ED, Miki V, supported the retrenching and leadership transition during this uber stressful time.

    As a first-year trustee of The Franklin Institute, an impressive org that didn’t have a preexisting digital model to ride the post-March COVID wave, I watched strong leadership at the operational and board level have very difficult conversations about team, budget and an ugly list of war-time choices that included reducing the workforce. I did my best to help contribute to a solution to hopefully weather this 100-year storm while also furthering healthy conversations surrounding an evolving biz model and a brand that is about to turn 200 years old. We have a hunch about what a new museum normal may look like, but the timeline is still TBD and sadly tied to externalities. I learned watching diligent leaders make methodical, objective and painful decisions while balancing a stiff upper lip with great empathy. The Institute is in great hands. It will emerge stronger. Larry D and team are doing an excellent job. Ben would be so proud.

    In early March, my close friend David Bookspan and I launched an informal non-profit endeavor called SavePhillyEats to help Philly bars and restaurants generate revenue during the first COVID shutdowns. The project grew into a national-ish org called SaveTheEats, which after a successful run, we sunset in July when establishments were reopening. We had a volunteer team of close to 30, a presence in 8 cities and an impact of roughly $2.5 million in revenue by the end. I also heard from a number of prominent chefs that we helped amplify the early needs of the food landscape in the local media. I even managed to play F-list Jerry Lewis for the live digital telethon called GivePhillyEats we put on jointly with the impressive Fuel the Fight team.

    We validated our thesis that we could be significantly more helpful to our Philly food landscape by donating our time and effort versus just donating financially to a relief fund. The whole project cost around $50,000. I was blown away by the level of support we had from volunteers to part-time talent to chefs willing to contribute to the push, make intro’s and spread the word. What a generous bunch, especially the chefs and restauranteurs, as they were under direct fire and watching their businesses slip but still lent cycles to the greater good. Special shout outs to Chef Jen Carrol & Marc Vetri for their leadership. I still really hope that the federal government can do something to offer direct relief to the national food landscape. To date, too little has been offered at the federal and state level.

    Additionally, it was my first stint truly operating since I left RevZilla in early 2017. I learned that I still compartmentalize as poorly as I did during the Zilla years, even as an experienced operator. My assumption was that I might be able to be more balanced in navigating my next leadership role, but I was not. Committing to leading an organization is as addictive, humbling and as all-consuming as it ever was. I was wrong to believe I would lead differently, more efficiently or within a self-imposed 50-hour-a-week constraint. This experience, juxtaposed against the ages of my kids, actually gives me pause about taking another founder or C-suite role in in the next few years. I think my goals for great husband and dad of 5 and great company leader have proved to be mutually exclusive at this stage of my young family’s life.

    I also learned to truly appreciate the differences and unique difficulty in managing and incentivizing a cause-driven org versus a for-profit company. Jim Collins’ Good to Great for the Social Sectors was spot on (not shocking). When the balance sheet is skinny and the financial incentives lighter, different tools are necessary to keep productivity and speed to market maximized in the non-profit space. Team engagement with vision, mission and values is everything. I gained further respect, empathy and appreciation for non-profit leaders I support. (I’m looking at you Miki V, Larry D, Benjamin B, Bill H, Jen M and Tom V)

    When we proudly sunset SaveTheEats in July as restaurants opened again, I was ready to tap back in at home. I had neglected (yeah, it’s the right word) Tara and the kids for almost five months. We all agreed that part of our family’s goal this year was to help others where we could, and donating most of me while Tara single parented for a few months was a huge part of it, but we all really felt it. When I reemerged they were all showing the wear and virtual school was still a train wreck, as well. I tossed up an autoresponder with the plan of being a “quick no” on new consulting, board work and deals while I shifted my primary focus back to family again.

    The interesting thing is that the autoresponder went up in July and now has persisted 5 months later. Being intellectually honest, I have found very few things harder than trying to do appropriate deal diligence or build a new relationship over Zoom – so I have burnered most new inbound. I’m curious if it’s just me and my personality type or if other folks are feeling the same lack of attention span in the current construct. For the first time in my professional career, I’ve paused my network. I have also steering interactions toward casual phone calls versus seeing people on Zoom (while I sit up straight without fidgeting as my LED ring light beams the beginning of a migraine from its tripod behind my monitor). Time will tell for the autoresponder and its potential effect on my post-COVID opportunities.

    One bright spot this year has been the high percentage of my friends and family who showed me they were who I believed they were. I feel lucky that I have not really been shocked during any family or biz interaction, finding out in the moment that someone I care about is a supporter of things I view as fundamentally wrong. Things that undermine our democracy, decency or equal rights. I actively broke connection with a few people in my larger sphere, but there was no surprise there. I long suspected where they stood before 45 (I won’t even say his name) tried to make racism and lying cool and mainstream. My heart goes out to all my family and friends who have had to navigate those tough dynamics with greater numbers of people close to them. It makes me sad that people I care about felt the real grief of losing friends and sometimes family this year – without anyone actually dying.

    Another surprisingly bright spot this year was some of the more formal online learning I opted into. Other than the random Khan Acadamy or YouTube video, I’d never done any formal or paid online learning. I got an email last spring to join Prof. Scott Galloway’s first-ever Digital Strategy Sprint. On a whim, I signed up for the $700 two-week all-digital course. (I wrote about it here.) The course was so good I then followed up with his 3-week course on Brand Strategy in September. Like most things, you get out what you put in and each course took about 13-15 hours of total time, but they felt like a steal. Both subjects have been foundational for most of my career but I’d peg the coursework and concepts at least ~30% net new for me. I always love finding new frameworks and fundamentals to fill in the gaps of my “learned while operating” playbook. It also shuts up the little impostor syndrome head-voice for a time. I’m going to do their first Product Strategy Spring slated for January and I APPLAUD the fact that anyone can apply to these courses. 10% of the enrollments are also given as scholarships to those who might otherwise not be able to afford it.

    A final and surprising side note on the year relates to lifestyle and fitness. Basically, on a dare I committed to 90 days vegetarian on Oct. 25th, 2019. I wrote about it here, but never wrote the follow up post. Now, 14 months later, I am actually still mostly vegetarian, although COVID and the holiday season has made it a bit tougher (Turkey and ham are delicious). I hover at about 95% vegetarian on any given week and am surprised that it’s been so easy to maintain. So many things are so easy to swap. My LDL cholesterol has remained 50 points lower than when I made the switch and I have not seen any part of the 6-8-pound dad-gut that showed up in mid-2019. #yeet

    On top of that, I am 10 weeks into a 23-week training plan for a late March half marathon, which is actually prep for a Mt. Rainier climb in July. I’m not a runner or a climber and I get cold easily. It’s been a learning curve. I blame my friend Tom Vogl, CEO of The Mountaineers, for all of this. “I’ve never climbed a mountain, why not climb the second highest peak in North America? Sure. Sounds great.” Who doesn’t like a good old BHAG every once in a while? (I have posted about this fiasco on IG a few times in more detail including my training plan – posts #1, #2.)

    So with all that in the rearview (deep breath), here’s what I’m hoping for in 2021.

    I hope that ’21 brings a political quieting to some degree. I hope the White House can be reasonable over the next 4 years and keep the tweets to a minimum. I’m exhausted. The car wrecks have to stop and traffic needs to start moving again – even with the expectations of less-than-perfect results, lower TV ratings (gasp) and a boring presidency. I hope that a constructive and unifying voice can make moderate decisions that become less polarizing for both sides of the aisle. If I want reality TV I should be watching Bravo, not CNN. I hope we can find more moderation and compromise as a country moving forward. I hope that the racists, sexists, and supremacists are all marginalized, ignored by the mainstream media and sent back to their dark corners.

    I hope organizations find a remote work balance post COVID. Maximizing the benefits but avoiding the potential pitfalls. Many people got back the time they’d spent on long commutes and found a better quality of life and family as a result. I hope they get to keep most of that benefit. Companies also found new access to and seamless integration of distributed talent, which could reside anywhere geographically. Most companies also realized that remote management at scale now puts some previously untouchable expense structure up for debate. I won’t be shocked if some companies that realized certain functions don’t need to be physically present begin to further arbitrage those functions from distributed U.S. teams to much cheaper remote international functions. I also won’t be surprised if some companies, under the flag of “remote first” as a proposed benefit, begin to aggressively eliminate offices and other community-related costs, which over the long term provide temples to teamwork, culture and brand along with a social benefit to employees at certain stages of life. My biggest concern is that the allure of time-efficient remote work will eliminate the moments where teams build trust, solidarity and engagement by actually getting to know one another – in person.

    As I noted earlier, virtual work has felt very transactional for me. It’s been limiting in terms of developing new relationships beyond the immediate “topic of discussion” or explicit need. When team members don’t know each other, how will they trust each other? How will they react in moments of uncertainty? How will they efficiently resolve conflict? How will companies create a cultural fabric that keeps people engaged, feeling part of a larger cause and preventing key talent from leaving for the next company that offers them the same bedroom office but with a 15% raise? Like so many things in life, the best approach will probably be some hybrid of the middle, but I fear that some companies will shed talent, productivity and overall strength in the medium to long term by attempting to maximize the potential short-term savings of the virtual construct, even when the COVID crisis ends.

    I hope that small businesses, including restaurants, get a bailout or something along those lines. So many big businesses have gotten bailouts during my adult life. At this moment, even in the face of potential inflation and further national debt, I’m a vote for a small biz bailout over a loan program. Recently people have asked me, “Can you bring back SavePhillyEats” and sadly my belief is that it won’t move the needle. At this stage, it’s bringing a knife to a gunfight. Small biz and restaurants just need more. I’m not in favor of big government nor am I in favor of adding to our already mounting national debt in perpetuity, but I hope something can be done in Washington to offer financial relief directly to the businesses that have been forced to close or operate at a greatly reduced capacity to stop the spread of the virus. They are doing their part. We need to protect them. My front-row seat to the restaurant industry this year has been heartbreaking. This is an industry fueled by passion and love with already thin margins. We all need to keep eating out and ordering takeout (without using DoorDash or UberEats if possible), but my hunch is that’s not enough to get the bulk of restaurants and small biz through the next six months, either.

    Lastly, I hope more Americans buy into putting the safety of others ahead of their own immediate personal desires. At many other moments since 1776, it’s been a theme dramatically more embraced than we see today. We all need to protect ourselves, but we also must be making sure we’re not helping spread the virus. Even if you think you or your family are not in danger, wear a mask, social distance, don’t dine indoors with people who don’t live with you. The same thing goes for the vaccine. Don’t wait and see how it goes when you become eligible. Go get it. Show your patriotism by being first in line in protecting your fellow Americans and set that example. The number of people I have heard say, “What are you gonna do?” or “I have to live my life” relating to the holidays, vacations or other non-work choices makes me sad.

    I hope people wake up and realize it’s not about them. It’s bigger than them. It’s about our fellow countrymen and women who are at risk and it’s about collectively making a reasonable effort to be part of the solution to help protect them and arrive at the finish line sooner. We can’t be that selfish. If you are in a position of influence, I implore you to set a good example and be vocal. If you are in a position to help others, please extend your hand. It matters. That is what makes America great.

    So Goodbye 2020! even if it’s because all the other words I wrote before I arrived at goodbye were profane.

    The optimist in me says that 2021 has to be better.

  • Forgotten ZLA Gems on ADVRider Live

    Back when we started RevZilla, there was one super-enthusiast motorcycle forum to rule them all.

    It was (and still is) called ADVRider and the founder was a serial start-up guy named Chris McCaskill, aka Baldy.

    I actually think our only interaction ever was me asking him to unban me for violating posting rules in the forum’s vendor area in 2010. I’m sure he doesn’t remember it.

    Recently, Chris and his team pinged me to do a live Skype interview to talk about the how and the why of RevZilla, along with marketing, scaling and leadership lessons from the ride.

    They are doing a series called “Baldy Interviews” and I actually found that he was the best-prepared interviewer I’d ever encountered. I’m used to answering the same questions about RevZilla but I’m not used to people knowing about the more obscure stories from inside our walls. He had great intel. There has to be a mole.

    Here is the interview. Note the “steeple hands” in the video screen cap. #nailedit

    I should have put on a nicer shirt and had better lighting (#nexttime), but what a fun opportunity he gave me to relive some of the most challenging and fulfilling times of my life. I hadn’t recounted a few of those stories in about a decade.

    They also managed to dig up this gem. Over roughly 9 years and 6,000 product videos, me, motorcycle gear nuts and an extra-medium blurple shirt had one hell of a bromance. Watch this and let it melt your brain.

    Thanks, Chris and the ADVRider community for the opportunity to share the tales. You collectively gave me and RevZilla so much support over the years, even back when we were noobs.

  • 22 Days of #SavePhillyEats

    Well, it’s technically 27 days, if you count the 5 days pre-launch. Ask my wife how many days I have been missing from helping her homeschool our five kids. She knows 🙁

    …. but the social impact startup SavePhillyEats.com continues. Full throttle.

    I forgot what it was like to operate at this clip and with so much changing daily. I’ve also never worked like this with a remote team. So many Zooooooooms… (stop making your backgrounds Joe Exotic. I get it. It’s funny and timely, but it’s time to move on. RIP Travis.)

    I skipped a week 2 update because things have been bonkers and I had no time to write anything. I have also at this point completely absolved myself of creating any new video updates for SPE moving forward. There are better ways to push things forward and I have a half a mullet.

    In case you don’t live in Philly, here’s a quick snapshot of the last 14 days, since the last update. (If you want to help, skip to the end for current needs)

    We teamed up with Fuel The Fight Philly to raise money, awareness and deliver 3,500 Chef-prepared gourmet meals to the medical front lines of seven area hospitals on Easter Sunday. We called it #GivePhillyEats and live broadcasted the hour-long “show” featuring some of Philly’s most legendary and generous culinary artists.

    Special thanks to Top Chef Jen Carroll and her husband Chef Billy Riddle for being linchpins in helping recruit such amazing Chef talent to the cause. Another nod goes to superstar media production and editorial maven Dustin Carpio, who essentially produced the entire live show on his own in 3 days.

    I can now add “local telethon host” to my resume right below former D-list YouTube video guy. Here is the live broadcast. I’m still amazed we put this all together in less than 96 hours.

    SavePhillyEats has more than doubled our list of restaurant and bar partners in the last two weeks and offers on the site regularly sell out.

    There also are now 17 volunteers, including me, along with five contractors working on this as we plan to evolve our presence in Philly and roll out new beachheads of local impact in DC, NYC, LA, Baltimore and the Twin Cities shortly. None of those numbers include the countless chefs and owners who have helped create so much connectivity along the way. (Marc Vetri, Jen Carroll, Chris Morgan, Ange Branca, Lonny Sweet, Andrew Zimmern etc)

    Were calling the macro effort #SaveTheEats. (no website yet)

    Next we’ll begin incorporating giving in Philly. We should also start curating the best offers in local takeout. We will all have to keep finding reasons to give restaurants money if we want them to have a chance of making it. Ordering out is an easy win as often as it can be afforded.

    Lastly, SPE has Logo Merch! You know you love the merch. Go buy a tee. All profit goes to Fuel The Fight, which uses the money to buy meals from restaurants to be delivered to the medical front lines. It’s a virtuous cycle that feeds and funds. Everyone can use the help.

    Current Needs:

    What I need now is what I needed two weeks ago. More helping hands in more places. Can we amplify our impact beyond Philly? We’re going to try. Help us connect.

    I need “get stuff done people” who potentially want to take our tools and playbook to their city and run with them. Is it you? We have the Chef network, we’ll you up. We have a killer PR network. We’ll link you. Send us a note if you want to be the Founder of your city or connect us with someone who might.

    I’m grateful for the amazing people who have stepped up, tapped in and answered the call.

    I think we’re doing our best to help save the restaurants and bars that make Philly, Philly – and we’re not done.

    We want to help more people save the restaurants and bars that make their city, their city.

  • 7 days of #SavePhillyEats

    I just posted the following passage to the News and Updates section on SavePhillyEats.com. We turned a week old today.

    The concept is working ($100k+ sales in the first few days) and we want to expand rapidly into other cities. Restaurants typically have 3 weeks of cash on hand. They need our help now.

    I need team captains (operators) to pair with our national chef network to spin things up in new places.

    They don’t need to be a CEOs (although former founders would be great), they just need to care about their foods, cultures and cities enough to spend time pushing this. They need to be digitally savvy and be able to manage a small team, marshall resources and execute.

    If anyone immediately comes to mind, please send them my way.


    Hello culinary world!

    This site is a week old and off to a running start. What a blur, like being shot out of a cannon.

    We have had over 20,000 sessions, have begun to amass a following of thousands of supporters and most importantly we estimate we have generated between $100,000 and $150,000 in revenue for the establishments we’re trying to support.

    We even had one Chef tell us, “You generated $36,000 for my currently closed restaurant, in the first 5 days”. Whoa…

    To all the Philadelphians who have supported the effort and spread the word, thank you.

    To the 46 different bars and restaurants who have tapped in, we got your back and we look forward to helping your compatriots.

    To the 8 SPE teammates, I have the pleasure of working with daily, exhale. The work matters and it’s having an impact… but I can’t promise you won’t keep getting calls and emails from me from 8am to midnight.

    So what’s next?

    • Scale our impact
    • Scale our geographic footprint
    • Scale our ability to delight our visitors into helping our expanded list of restaurant partners
    • Scale our ability to digest all of your feedback and rapidly improve

    What do we need?

    • The next 50 great partners on the site
    • Tell your friends and buy what you can
    • Strong Team Captains for other cities

    We’ve only just begun…

  • #SavePhillyEats

    My wife, Tara, is awesome.

    Our five(!) kids have been home for about 14 days, and she supported me in spending about 12+ hours a day for the last 10 days in my office building and launching SavePhillyEats.com. She’s equally supporting the project by supporting me while surviving a daily outnumbered-parent home-school rodeo.

    That said, the site is a simple digital hub to aggregate all of the unique culinary experiences and offers that Philadelphia restaurants and bars are doing to generate revenue while they are closed due to the coronavirus. (Learn more.)

    My close friend David and I brainstormed that if we could pull together some big Philly food names for a unique and localized site, we could potentially help a much broader swath of the culinary landscape in town.

    You can visit SavePhillyEats and see all the current offers and experiences. You can follow us for updates. If you dig it, please share it on social with #SavePhillyEats and tell your friends. You might even catch me in a video or two, looking all tired, shaggy and pale. #somuchdistancing

    It’s late and my eyes are blurry because we hard launched today after standing it up on Friday.

    What a wonderful startup kind of tired, the kind of tired that lets you know you redlined for a while – but believe people may find value in what you helped create.

    It also feels amazing that we did something to help our friends in the food and bev’ space who really need it right now. #helperhigh

    We all have different abilities. We have to continue to seek out the people who can be benefitted the most right now. We all have to lend our hands, help and lead.

    Special thanks to the #SavePhillyEats seal team who absolutely got sick of my voice on Zoom, but helped knock this out of the park in literally a week:

    … and don’t forget my lovely wife, Tara.

  • Personal Growth and Prof’ Galloway’s Strategy Sprint

    After leaving RevZilla, there were many things I thought I might miss: My team, the problem-solving, even my routine, to name a few. In truth, I did miss them all, but the last 36 months have taught me that the one thing I can’t live without is personal growth. (If you have read any of my previous posts, this theme is not new.)

    Sure, there were some early days I sat around and frittered away time in sweatpants like George Costanza would have. I needed the break, but I also let the tide go out too far in those moments. It always left me feeling less than unfulfilled.

    Since then, I’ve been focused on growth as the input for the most fulfilled output.

    I spend the bulk of my time focused on learning and gaining perspective both personally and professionally. It’s a bonus when I get to do it with amazing teams or companies. Sometimes I get paid for it, as it coincides with helping a team. Sometimes I don’t (THF| TFI). It’s always worth it, though.

    In the last few years, I have toyed with the idea of going back to school, business school to be more specific. I know I have a defacto Thornton Mellon MBA, but I’m always curious about what I don’t know I don’t know. For now, I am not sold the time / value equation is worth it, so I look for ways to dive deeper via smaller bites, especially in areas like strategy, finance and marketing.

    Recently, NYU Professor Scott Galloway, one of my favorite thinkers in consumer, tech and leadership, announced he and his team would be doing a 2-week online “Strategy Sprint” related to consumer-facing business strategy in the digital age.

    The online course under the new Section4 brand spanned 15 days and consisted of video case studies, a couple of 90-minute live Zoom classes and a final project focused on applying what we learned. It cost $500.

    My first encounter with Prof G was 900 seconds and 90 slides at DLD15. Since then there have been more DLD conference Videos, the L2 Winners and Losers series on YouTube and now a weekly podcast with Kara Swisher called Pivot. So my baseline of Scottisms and principles was pretty strong coming in.

    The course concluded a few days ago.

    Here is my quick Section4 Strategy Sprint Review:

    Time Commitment – The whole course was about 12.5 hours (I tracked it). 3 hours were live Zoom classes, 4-5 hours were doing my final project and the rest were lessons broken up into video case studies. Scott’s team was on the ball, responded quickly and the Slack channels and community were on point.

    Coursework – Even with my strong baseline for the material coming in, 40% was net-new and the rest was a deeper and more organized dive into the familiar Galloway principles that he calls the T-Algorithm. These are the strategies used by B2C companies to, in his words, “potentially achieve trillion-dollar market cap trajectories”. If you listen to Scott or have read The Four, this will be familiar, but much more in-depth.

    Final Project – The final was to perform a strategic analysis on a company and sector you know, and apply the T-Algorithm to ultimately inform a business case for the chosen company. I used Comoto / RevZilla and found it super helpful in crystallizing my thinking around suggestions I have made and will continue to make at a board and advisory level. It’s nice to have more concrete cases of value creation and impact at my disposal. Great artists steal…

    Strategic Process – On the strategy front, the process followed a familiar framework of creating a “value curve” to graph potential strategic differentiators. The graph was a mix of Galloway’s T-Algorithm elements coupled with relevant domain-specific items of our own addition.

    We then prioritized the potential strategies we charted for maximum value creation and differentiation with an eye toward variance across the competitive set. I found this to be a Galloway-specific version of the framework I was first exposed to when I read Blue Ocean Strategy about a decade ago. After reading Blue Ocean, I used to quip, “RevZilla will be Cirque du Soleil while the rest of the industry is trying to be the best Barnum and Bailey.” Essentially, how can we invest in places that our competitors or customers are not even thinking about yet. That’s the foundation of Blue Ocean. That framing held up.

    If asked I would probably define business strategy something like, “The ‘above the shoulders’ work that focuses on prioritizing tradeoffs for creating value or mitigating risk. Intentionally choosing what to do is just as important as choosing what not to do.”

    In the last live class, Scott succinctly offered, “Strategy is a plan of action that produces an aim. In business, the aim’s goal is the greatest ROI utilizing a finite amount of resources.” Much simpler. Great bookend on the course. Great framework moving forward.

    Conclusion – At 40 bucks an hour, this was a no-brainer for me, even considering my experience level and longtime exposure to some of the material. I wish I could have taken a class like this a decade ago. It also moved fast and was never boring. Prof G was as WYSIWYG as he always is.

    For anyone earlier in their career, this would be invaluable on both what it takes for companies to win and be durable in the digital age as well as what it takes to think like an executive with regard to how you approach marshaling resources and your plan of attack.

    I’d recommend this course to anyone in B2C and I’m going to tee it up for other leaders in the B2C companies I’m currently working with or have invested in.

    Lastly, bridging all the way back to the beginning of this long post, I’m obviously feeling very content at the conclusion of the coursework. I was challenged to learn new things, elevate my thinking and apply what I learned. Thanks Prof G.

    If you want to sign up or check out a future class visit the Section4 site.

    Now, on to figuring out what today’s lesson will be…

Back to top button