My wife was busy on that Saturday afternoon in 2014, so I pulled out my list of my friends in Atlanta and sent a flurry of texts inviting 10-15 of them to grab dinner with me in Virginia Highland. Five or six of them said yes and we ended up grabbing wings and beer at […]
How to Plan a Team Retreat for Your Remote Company
19% of remote workers say that loneliness is their #1 struggle with working remotely according to Buffer and company’s 2019 State of Remote Work report. I can relate. While there are so many strategic advantages to running a remote team, there are also some parts of working remotely that really suck from a personal standpoint. […]
How to Recover from a Mistake as a Leader
March 1, 2018. I won’t forget that date any time soon because it was the day I made my first major mistake as COO… and it had taken less than 6 hours in the role to happen. “We can’t keep letting this happen. We just lost one of our largest customers to a completely avoidable […]
How We Structure the 50-Person Team at ConvertKit
As a team grows from the early stages when everything feels fun and crazy into a more mature phase of predictable growth, team structure has to change to support that growth. When I joined the ConvertKit team in 2016, we had about 20 teammates and $3.5M in annual recurring revenue. Today we have almost 50 […]
Expertise: Why You Need it & How to Get it
Note: This is a post I originally wrote for Fizzle, where they teach aspiring entrepreneurs how to build small businesses that matter. Although you may not be an entrepreneur, the process of building expertise will still be valuable to you. I hope you enjoy. Andy Perdue stands over his desk, looking at 29-years’ worth of paraphernalia […]
Build A Body of Work Worthy of a Lifetime
J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He spent countless hours building the legend of Middle Earth and the history of that world… what he would go on to call his own legendarium. He spent his life cultivating the ability to tell stories in an engaging way. Tolkien might be one of the […]
What is the role of education?
In 1837, at the age of 51, Horace Mann accepted an appointment as the secretary of the Massachussetts Board of Education, becoming the the first secretary of a board of education in the history of the United States. Just one year later, in November 1938, Mann penned the prospectus for The Common School Journal, which would become one […]
What the Boston Tea Party Tells Us About the Importance of Autonomy at Work
In 1772, all tea from the East India Trading Company was required to be delivered to the United Kingdom and sold to traders through the London Tea Auction. Those traders would buy tea at auction and pay an import tax to be able to sell it in the American colonies. The traders would add a […]
How to Plan and Host a Mastermind Group Retreat
If you haven’t heard of the concept of a mastermind group before, it might be best to start with this post on starting and maintaining a mastermind group. I gave Nathan and Caleb big hugs as they loaded their bags into the back of my dad’s F-150. After grabbing dinner with my fiancé and picking […]
How to Have More Meaningful Conversations
I grab a seat at the corner of a large rectangular table. The centerpiece is a mason jar of pencils and an old school pencil sharpener. The table is made of reclaimed wood set on top of antique school lockers. In some ways, the school theme is the perfect setting for a morning of conversation […]