10 Things I’ve Learned in 10 Years
This November, the company I founded, Collabry (formerly Blu Pagoda), celebrates 10 years in business. At a recent NAWBO event, I mentioned to a couple of friends that in some ways, 10 years feels like starting all over again. It is a major milestone and an inflection point. And points can be sharp sometimes.
When the company hit the three-year milestone, I wrote about the questions I was most asked by other potential founders. A lot of the guidance I offered then is still true now (get a great accountant, set boundaries and operating rules, be clear on your target client, etc.), and yet I have learned so much more in the last seven years — including that the use of the word “tribe” in that original blogpost is cultural appropriation. I do maintain that you can’t do it alone, as you will see below.
In honor of our 10th anniversary, here are 10 things I’ve learned. There are more, but one of the things I’ve learned is to focus!
Follow your instincts — they’re usually right. There have certainly been times over the last 10 years when I didn’t go with my gut. Whether it was a Spidey sense that a project engagement wasn’t quite 100% the right fit for us, or a new hire was not quite whom they had represented themselves to be, there were times that I didn’t listen to that inner voice because I thought I was being helpful or kind instead. Had I stuck with my instincts in the first place, it would have avoided extra work, time, and energy. Fortunately, my first hire (and husband) Tom reminds me of this when he thinks I might be ignoring my intuition.
Build a team and community filled with diverse humans. When you come from one community, you end up with a limited set of experiences and points of view. When you are deliberate about diversity, you collectively create better outcomes for the team, for the clients, and for the community at large. With a diverse team, there are new ideas, new perspectives, new voices, and opportunities to learn and grow as a human being.
Age demographics are a thing. I’m 54 today, and several of the folks on our team are Gen-Xers. In the last few years, we have been taking care of elderly family members or mourning the loss of parents. We have also been sending our kids off to college, or those kids have been returning home because the American dream is not quite what it was made out to be. This has presented new ways in which we show up with compassion for one another in the workplace. We also expect the need for potential career breaks and a focused prioritization on what is truly most important.
Coaching. For a small business like ours, I’m a big fan of the fractional expert approach. It has been so important to our growth and sustainability. A few years ago, we brought on a company business coach, Becky Mollenkamp. I had engaged Becky for personal coaching to help me step into my role of CEO. Like many of us, I was dealing with imposter syndrome. With Becky’s coaching, I continued to grow personally and as a leader. Of course I wanted our team to benefit too, so we introduced a coaching stipend to our team.
Know your numbers. About three years ago, we started working with Amber Pert at Wellspring for financial analysis. I wanted to know exactly how healthy our business was each quarter and what our expansion (or contraction) trajectory looked like. Amber and her team created dashboards and modeling calculators that helped us really understand our numbers and how to keep the business financially fit. Our quarterly check-ins with Amber are part of making sure we’re still following our path to sustainable success.
“Sales” doesn’t have to be icky. Once we had a clear picture of our financial health, we engaged with Allison Davis, who in my opinion is the leading sales consultant and trainer for founders. Allison helped us develop a plan for strategic growth and a playbook to activate on the plan in a way that mirrors our values as an organization — through relationship-building and wanting to be of service.
Declutter and renew focus. Over 10 years, we collected a lot of apps, platforms, and workflows. We were beginning to get bogged down in all of the “stuff.” This year we started working with a fractional COO, Susan Boles at Beyond Margins. Susan has been helping us to achieve a major transformation of our systems, processes, and workflows that will, again, be a key part of our scalability and sustainability into the future. Without so much stuff, we were able to refocus, aided by Charlie Gilkey at Productive Flourishing. Charlie facilitated an incredible one-day offsite for our executive team to help us get clear on our goals, objectives, and road map to the future. It was reenergizing too!
Rest. Confession time. I have a hard time just being. Correction — I used to have a hard time just being. The culture I grew up in was all about production and being productive. And guess what, as a teenager I developed anxiety and panic attacks. And by the age of 29, I had an acute case of depression. I know I’m not alone in either diagnosis. Only in the last few years have I developed a real understanding of the need for rest — for taking a break from work, from volunteer commitments, and from the overwhelm of connectivity. It’s better for ourselves and everyone around us if we can truly get some rest — and for us to create a rest-forward culture where everyone gets the rest they need. H/T to Tricia Hersey and her work at The Nap Ministry.
Be willing to walk away. There have been two times over the last few years that we’ve walked away from something we started. The first was a decision to migrate our accounting system from one platform provider to another. The platform we were using since Day One of the business had started to limit our ability to scale, so Tom and I started a project with a third-party reseller to move to a new platform. It was a mistake. It got extremely complicated quickly, and we felt like “just a number” — case in point, when we were not able to make a design session because of my dad’s sudden passing, the reseller told Tom we would still be charged. And with that, we paid what was due at the time and then walked away. The reseller had crossed a line with us. And silver lining, our original accounting platform introduced all kinds of updates that satisfied our scale needs anyway. The second time was when I was sold on buying a big-time CRM platform. This new platform was supposed to be easy and ready to use “out of the box.” It wasn’t. So instead of then hiring a third party to fix everything, train us, and need a retainer to keep the system relevant, we again paid what was due and changed course. Was I kicking myself a bit after both of these forks in the road? Yes. But the pain went away pretty quickly.
Read, listen, view, etc.! This one is easy. Continuing to learn is part of our secret sauce. I created a syllabus for my 2024 reading (H/T to Tara McMullin), and it has kept my reading focused and on purpose. I’m not so great at listening to podcasts, but I know many of my team members do, and we share what we learn. We also love peer mentoring and workshopping. In fact, we started to offer community workshops over Zoom almost a year ago and hold a mentoring circle several times a year. This is in addition to the Courageous Conversations series we do at Collabry — truly one of the most impactful hours in any given month.
I hope these ideas and resources have been helpful. They underline why our tagline is not just a catchy quip; we really are good together. I could not be more thrilled to celebrate this 10-year anniversary, and I am excited to continue the journey with our team!