eROI Days Email Agency

At pdx, waiting to catch plane to wash dc for #inc500 conf. This will my fourth straight year at this awesome conference. Great insights.
10:14 PM Sep 29th via TweetDeck

President Bill Clinton addresses @inc500 conf thru video
5:42 AM Oct 1st via TweetDeck

Gary Hirshberg CEO – Stonyfield Yogurt

Should be good! RT @inc5000: Today’s 1st session is starting! Gary Hirshberg, the CE-YO from Stoneyfield at #inc500conferenece!

Stonyfield Yogurt is up to $360 million in sales now. Gary going to go over his philosophy on triple bottom line.
5:47 AM Oct 1st

Churchill quote “success is the ability to move from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”
5:49 AM Oct 1st

If the rest of the world adopted USA energy and total consumption, we’d need 5 Earths to be able to handle it.
5:52 AM Oct 1st

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Guy Kawasaki bootstrapping image

Yesterday, Chanin Ballance (founder/CEO of viaLanguage), Mitch Daugherty (founder of Morange Design), and I (the eROI guy) got together to plan what we’d talk about for a webinar about Bootstrapping and our personal experiences with self-induced starvation and endurance thru the early days.  It was like catching up with old friends after a couple years – the instant bond entrepreneurs share in dredging up old stories that weren’t fun at the time, but are great memories in retrospect.  The OEN Webinar is set for June 17 (registration isn’t live yet, but will be shortly) and we’re going to use a different format than the usual put-your-audience-to-sleep-with-powerpoint.  We are going to try to re-create the casual, round-table discussion among entrepreneurs sharing candid stories.  Some of the topics will include:

– Risk vs Reward – How do you know if it makes sense to bootstrap your idea?
– Keep your Day Job – The stress of self funding with no income can sometimes lead to failure
– Cash Flow – How to get a handle on your most important business aspect
– How to market your business on a shoestring budget
– Why most business models don’t need funding as it can be a big distraction

Guy Kawasaki, in his old-school days before Alltop, delivers some awesome advice on this on his 2006 blog post titled “The Art of Bootstrapping”

How is this for irony? In my review, one of my areas of improvement is to be careful about how transparent I am both internally with employees and externally to customers. I’m committed to improving, so I’ll try to pull out only the appropriate golden nuggets of information to share with you.

I’m not sure if many entrepreneurs/business owners/CEO’s have done a 360 degree, annual review, conducted by another employee to the rest of the company to get constructive feedback, but I really valued the process and the insight. It’s only fair that employees have an opportunity to review me, since I review our managers (and get accross-department feedback from other managers and other employees) and managers do very thorough reviews for employees. So here is what employees thought of me:

Strengths:
–His enthusiasm is infectious. When Ryan gets excited, it’s easy to get excited with him, and he can be a great motivator for the company as a whole.
–He genuinely cares about and considers everyone’s opinions and ideas on how to make eROI a great company to be employed by.
–Good networker and knows how to put eROI on the map.
–Encourages individual growth, from taking classes to focusing on strengthening skill sets.
–Focused leadership.

Areas of Improvement: (undoubtedly more improvements comments than strengths):
–Sometimes perhaps too involved in projects, seen as micro-manager at these times.
–Giving adequate time for internal projects to be fully flushed out. He should ask us what is a reasonable amount of time for us to get things done.
–Can be impatient.
–Very high expectations. Often, unrealistic expectations.
–Needs to let go of some of the marketing side of things and allow new ideas to come through.

Now, that I’ve opened the floodgates. It’s your turn to comment. What’s your feedback on me? Comment below.

Don’t worry, I have a box of tissues on my desk. Looking forward to your feedback, but try to make it as constructive as possible. Thx.