December 04, 2019

Four Top Challenges of Leadership and Business Growth

December 04, 2019/ Matt Karminski

As a business grows, its leaders face new challenges, often in strategy, organizational development, and values and culture. They may be faced with complicated decisions regarding capital, partnerships or corporate structure. In November, we hosted our Fall Leadership Retreat where Trajectify coaches were joined by CEOs and business owners from a variety of industries. In focused, mastermind-style discussions, each leader took turns sharing business challenges they are facing. The group got a chance to provide feedback and offer outside-in perspectives to their peers.

October 23, 2019

Leadership Lessons from My Mother's Death

October 23, 2019/ Mike Krupit

My mother died earlier this month. It wasn't something we were expecting. She had been successfully fighting breast cancer. Complications from treatment led to a series of cascading medical issues over several weeks until her heart was no longer able to take it. I woke up early the day after her death and my mind was racing, so I grabbed a pen and paper to slow down my thoughts. Some of what I wrote ended up being about observations and feelings that I could connect to leadership.

October 14, 2019

Three Pillars of Effective Leadership: Insights From Experienced CEOs

October 14, 2019/ Matt Karminski

Being a leader means always having your fingers on the pulse of your business. It means juggling responsibilities, putting out fires, and claiming responsibility. You are responsible for the vision, agenda, and strategy of your entire team. While sitting in the driver's seat can be exhilarating, it can also be exhausting and lonely. But what if it doesn’t have to be? Learn some of the basic pillars of leadership: strategic planning, building a healthy you and a healthy team, and getting outside-in perspectives.

January 16, 2019

What If You’re the Problem with Your Team?

January 16, 2019/ Chuck Hall

“Sometimes I’m trying to finish the project you gave me earlier in the week, and I’m nearly done. But you tell me to drop it, that it’s not as important as some new thing you want the team to start on. I like your ideas – and you have a lot of them – but I wish you would let us finish what we start before you tell us to do the new thing. It gets kind of frustrating because I feel like you don’t appreciate that we’re trying to do the things you want, but it’s always changing.” Have you been there before with a team like this? No matter what you might put in your strategic business plan, you will not succeed unless people can learn to work together effectively.

January 03, 2019

All the Videos from Trajectify’s Business Growth Conference

January 03, 2019/ Jamie Walsh

2018 brought Trajectify’s inaugural live business growth conference which brought together dozens of leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals. We held Trajectify Live on September 13, 2018 at the Science History Institute in Old City, Philadelphia, featuring four Trajectify coaches plus a line-up of guest speakers and presenters while filled the day with insights, lessons and experiences

If you missed the opportunity to join us in September, we’ve got you covered. Here are videos we took of ten presentations from the conference. If you’re interested to attend the next Trajectify Live, please sign up here to be notified about the next Trajectify Live.

December 05, 2018

Leadership and Lure of Email

December 05, 2018/ Jamie Walsh

How often do you spend in your email each day, sifting through your inbox, reading, reviewing and responding, attempting to reach that glorified empty inbox by the end of the day?

The fact is - the majority of CEO and leadership work does not happen on email - it happens face-to-face. According to a Harvard Business Review study, only about 15% of a CEO’s time is spent on email. How do you compare?

At the 2018 Trajectify Leadership Retreat, we heard that dealing with the time-consuming and dreaded sea of emails was a common complaint regarding the stresses of a leader.

November 07, 2018

10 Tips from Leaders to Increase Effectiveness

November 07, 2018/ Jamie Walsh

Owning or leading a business comes with a lot of responsibilities and stress that even the most prepared can struggle to handle. Leaders set the vision, agenda and strategy, often while juggling accountabilities for major initiatives and decisions that affect performance for both finances and people. They have to serve many constituencies. No one takes on the role of CEO with the idea of it being low-stress. Learning to maintain structure and balance could help alleviate pressure and lead to great effectiveness.

October 24, 2018

Six Practices of Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs

October 24, 2018/ Jamie Walsh

Starting or building a business is exciting, though comes with challenges and roadblocks that can even scare veteran entrepreneurs. You're not alone. It is rare that the difficult challenges that an entrepreneur may face have not been previously encountered by others. That’s where the Bootstrappers Breakfasts step in - to facilitate entrepreneurs working together to exchange learning and information that grow the skills and confidence it takes to build a successful business.

October 10, 2018

Interview with Sean Darras of LUXTECH, Making Millions with Social Impact

October 10, 2018/ Amy Scheel

Sean Darras, a Trajectify client and CEO of LUXTECH, a young, innovative LED lighting company in Old City, sat down for an interview with Mike Krupit during Trajectify Live. Sean founded the company in 2012 and over the last 6 years he has filled the company with people who care about the good of the company, the environment, and each person the products touch. The company has had impressive growth, and each quarter brings a new series of challenges for the team to learn from and conquer. In the Trajectify Live interview, Sean and Mike walked through some of the lessons learned in each phase.

September 19, 2018

Overcoming Challenges to create 100+ Jobs and a Multi-Million Dollar Business

September 19, 2018/ Jamie Walsh

Growing a multi-million dollar company rarely comes easy. The path to success is certainly different for each hungry entrepreneur. Lisa Robinson was one of the keynote speakers with a heart-warming story that opened our eyes to a new perspectives. Her story to success was unconventional. She didn’t start out as the leader that we see today taking over the stage or the owner that the U.S. SBA recently named Eastern Pennsylvania District Minority-Owned Small Business of the Year.

April 11, 2018

Mike's Insights on Leadership Communication as He Pushes Himself (and you) To Do More Video

April 11, 2018/ Darby Dupre

In a recent video, Mike shared three basic and effective essentials to achieve greater leadership communications. (1) Feel It. You are your company's evangelist, you need to show that passion. (2) Speak It. You need to talk loud and clear. (3) Communicate It. Your words and meaning must be coherent, so write them in advance and practice-practice-practice.

September 18, 2017

Peer Groups are more than just Words With Friends

September 18, 2017/ Mike Krupit

Peer groups are not a new concept. One of the notable first suggestions of the benefits of business peers working together was by Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich (1937). In his huge best seller (some say as many as 20 million copies), he wrote about a “master mind alliance… with one or more persons who will encourage one to follow through with both plan and purpose.” In a later book, Master Key to Riches. Hill writes “every mind needs friendly contact with other minds, for food of expansion and growth.”

Why a peer group is the most powerful business and leadership development tool.

March 17, 2017

An Experienced Startup Founder Learns Some New Lessons

March 17, 2017/ Mike Krupit

On the surface, the business didn't succeed inthe first two iterations of IntroNet for the same reason that 90% of tech startups fail: we did not find a product-market fit before the end of our cash. It’s a math equation that is pretty deterministic. Why didn’t we find product-market fit? Perhaps we were solving for a pain (e.g., LinkedIn sucks) instead of a real problem (e.g., I can’t find expertise)? Did we try to change user behavior in a way that wasn’t tractable? Yes, probably all of that. There must already be thousands of blog posts on these very topics of startup road bumps and failures. Search for "reasons why startups don’t succeed" and get many perspectives on the same few themes. I want to share something more insightful.

The fact is that both Martin and I are experienced in startups, entrepreneurship and tech. We built a really good team. With the money and talent we had, the business didn't succeed after two attempts. So what is unique about our IntroNet experience that can serve as lessons for the future?

March 13, 2017

Good Leadership is a Prerequisite for Good Business (#1 of 8 Lessons Growing 8 Companies)

March 13, 2017/ Mike Krupit

The first lesson came from my time at KnowledgeSet Corp in the late 1980’s. KnowledgeSet (KSC) was a pioneer in the early PC days, one of the first to put data on a CD-ROM, before CD readers were standard on PC’s or windowed operating systems were the interface to your computer. The company was founded by Gary Kildall and Tom Rolander. It was a company of about 15 geeks - and I mean that with every connotation of the term.

July 01, 2015

Passion and Emotion May Be Destroying Your Business

July 01, 2015/ Mike Krupit

I do think it’s important to be able to feel passion. I have a lot in my life for which I am passionate. I just don’t let passion run my business. That’s a revelation that has come to me over the past couple of years, mostly as I’ve been building Trajectify and able to look at many companies from the outside-in and work with dozens of entrepreneurs. Two years ago, I was likely quoted as saying that passion is the first thing I look at when evaluating an entrepreneur’s business. I was wrong. The way to grow a business is through being practical, measurable, and grounded, not by being “barely controllable.”

May 26, 2015

Leave the Office and Make Millions

May 26, 2015/ Mike Krupit

We spend a lot of time in the office - working with our team, on our projects, with our money (investments, revenues). We see our business through the eyes of those who know us well - employees, investors, family. It’s a very narrow perspective that we get when we only interact a typically homogeneous and friendly population. Every week, I drag entrepreneurs out of the office nearly kicking and screaming - they say they have too much work to do! - in order to me to help them view their business by talking with customers, competitors, partners and their market. Here are three stories to show how some of my clients and I did millions of dollars in deals by following an outside in approach.

April 12, 2015

An Entrepreneur Makes Their Own Luck (Looking from the Outside-in)

April 12, 2015/ Mike Krupit

Luck, serendipity, and random collisions are often credited in helping entrepreneurs become successful. Being in the right place at the right time can make all the difference. I used to hope that such luck would strike us at one of our startups. Then, someone really smart told me to stop waiting, that luck doesn’t usually happen, that we must make our own luck. I wasn’t sure that I completely believed that luck wasn’t random. And then I met Bianca Thompson.

February 22, 2015

Core Values through our Behaviors (and how not to be a Rob McCord)

February 22, 2015/ Mike Krupit

Whether you're looking for a job or building company, you need to look beyond culture to assess - or establish - core values. The US National Park Service has a good and simple definition for core values: "The values underlie our work, how we interact with each other, and which strategies we employ to fulfill our mission." It's not easy to establish and communicate values. Lots of companies study and publish their values, and many don't do it very well. How many companies think "Integrity" is a core value? Too many. The problem is that Integrity is a high level concept and doesn't necessarily make it clear how we should or will behave.

February 09, 2015

It's Never Too Late for Me, BoJack Horseman, or You

February 09, 2015/ Mike Krupit

Entrepreneurship favors youth. I coach entrepreneurs of all ages and meet a lot who are 35 and older and appear to be discouraged by the ageism they feel and see. It's part of my coaching to help break limiting mindsets and not let obstacles - real or perceived - get in the way of achieving goals. If you're an entrepreneur that's starting later in your career, or beginning to consider it, I want you to know that there are ways it give you advantage over your more youthful peers. Here are five reasons how your stage of life makes you a different entrepreneur.

January 25, 2015

The Difference Between Coaches, Mentors, Advisors, and Consultants

January 25, 2015/ Mike Krupit

Too often I hear the terms mentors and coaches interchangeably. I'm sure of you search for definitions, you'll easily find ones that support how you've been using the terms. For me, clarity is important. When I built Trajectify, I wanted it to be clear what it is that I am doing - for my clients and myself. If I could put clarity around the definitions, I could better understand the problem and build my business to serve the greatest need. I looked at four roles - Coach, Mentor, Consultant, and Advisor - and tried to simply describe the nature of the relationship:

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