David Wagoner of P3 Media: Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup

An Interview With Paul Moss

My story is essentially an embodiment of this lesson. Failure led Aanarav and I to found P3, the company that we absolutely adore running today. We built it from the ashes of a previous company that we’d sunk years of our lives into the building.

Startups have such a glamorous reputation. Companies like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Uber, and Airbnb once started as scrappy startups with huge dreams and huge obstacles.

Yet we of course know that most startups don’t end up as success stories. What does a founder or a founding team need to know to create a highly successful startup?

In this series, called “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup” we are talking to experienced and successful founders and business leaders who can share stories from their experience about what it takes to create a highly successful startup.

I had the pleasure of interviewing David Wagoner. David is a Co-Founder and CMO of P3 Media, a full-service digital marketing and eCommerce agency based in NYC that provides end-to-end solutions and accelerates growth for high-volume businesses and Fortune 500s. His native expertise encompasses so many distinct yet interlocking eCommerce fields (advertising & media buying, creative, web design, web development, email marketing, and digital strategy), where he is able to see, propose, and execute intersectional strategies and solutions for their clients that more siloed agencies simply can’t. His approach enables new online merchants to become profitable faster while removing the common knowledge gaps and roadblocks to revenue generation that less experienced DTC businesses tend to face.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

My entrepreneurial journey began 12 years ago at a party, whereby chance I met my business partner, Aanarav Sareen. He was the lead creative technologist at Wunderman, and we hit it off immediately. We connected over mutual interests for a few years and then ventured out to found our first business together, PaLaCart. PaLaCart was the world’s first “universal” shopping cart, and it allowed customers to check out across an unlimited number of eCommerce stores through a single, seamless transaction. It was a very complex piece of technology and building it involved connecting banks and payment facilitators’ licenses with eCommerce businesses across verticals. Just creating the tech required us to really enlarge our skills within and awareness of the eCommerce space in parallel. PaLaCart was eventually shuttered when the big payment processors changed their regulations to essentially legislate our tech out of existence, but the lessons we’d learned remained.

And so Aanarav and I started doing consulting work in the eCommerce space. And the beauty of consulting was that it revealed the thing that we actually really loved doing and, honestly, the thing that we were really talented at doing: building businesses online. We’d cut our teeth building PaLaCart in a space that was a bit more challenging from a technical standpoint, so consulting was like going from practicing your serve on your knees to standing up and letting rip with your full momentum. We began working for some smaller clients and really built our practice through word of mouth. Slowly but surely, our clients referred us out to more and more people within their networks, and we’ve grown incredibly organically ever since.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

P3 was born as the child of necessity, and so I can’t point to a eureka moment and say “this is how we knew.” I’ve had those kinds of moments in the past with other companies, but over time I’ve realized that good ideas don’t necessarily make for good companies. For instance, timing is absolutely paramount to business success–peddle your product too early or too late and it may not matter how visionary you know it to be. The market just won’t be there.

I can tell you about the moment I knew P3 would be successful though, and that was the moment we got our first customer referral. We started P3 well before the eCommerce boom that we’re all working in now, and in the beginning, we were just a two-person consultancy focused on doing great work for a single client. The moment that client turned around and introduced us to the next, I knew that our work was good enough to speak for itself. And I realized that as long as that remained true, we’d be able to broker new relationships and win new business from a position of trust.

We grew organically through word of mouth for years before establishing our first channel partnership. And internally, we still use customer referrals as our number one metric of success. That’s because we’ve learned that more than knowledge, more than a privilege, more than even money, people tend to protect their relationships. And so when a client is willing to talk about us and refer us out to someone new, that means we’re really doing a good job of serving them. Over the years we’ve forged strategic partnerships with industry leaders like Shopify to build out our non-referral network and grow our business, but we know that the second we stop producing referral-worthy work, all of the brand equity and opportunity we’ve amassed on the quality of our product will begin to evaporate.

Was there somebody in your life who inspired or helped you to start your journey with your business? Can you share a story with us?

Yes, 1000%–my business partner, Aanarav Sareen. They say people in your life add, subtract, multiply, or divide, and Aanarav is my secret force multiplier. He’s been a constant source of inspiration to me, and P3 wouldn’t be anything close to what it is today if I’d tried to build it as a solopreneur. We’ve ridden some incredibly high highs together, and weathered some unbelievably low lows–I mean the sorts of lows where your bank balance is just a bleeding red number. To grow and learn from each setback, it’s been essential to work alongside someone who inspires me and shares his passions so generously. I’ve traveled to dozens of countries with Aanarav and seen quite a bit of the world as we’ve worked. We’ve learned a lot about ourselves together. We’ve grown up quite a bit together. We’ve built a thriving business together. I can’t tell you what it means to know that when one of us is down, the other will be there to offer motivation and wisdom. Most business success stories pivot around the luck of circumstance: We’ve all read about how Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had access to the first computers in town, or about how Phil Knight was in the right place to unlock Nike’s manufacturing edge. For me, the pivotal moment was meeting the right business partner. The sheer luck involved in finding someone who shares your passion for business thinks in ways that align with your philosophy and complements your skills is staggering. And I’m thankful to be so lucky every day.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

I open every new client relationship with a conversation about honesty and transparency. It baffles me that I find myself having this conversation year after year, but I have to because our philosophical approach to business is unique. In eCommerce, it’s easy to think in terms of numbers: If we’re growing our clients’ business by leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, naturally we’re going to grow, too. But the thing that’s going to keep us thriving for the next 50 years is how we approach and treat people. The truth is that we’re most effective when we work with clients who treat us as partners, treat us as internal members of their teams, treat us like family in some cases. People tend to be more motivated, trusting, and flexible when operating within open, honest relationships, and that’s why it’s in our organizational DNA to promote and maintain real partnerships among our client base.

Last year for instance, when the pandemic created so much initial uncertainty around retail, fulfillment, demand, everything really–my partner Aanarav and I were on the phone every single night with anxious clients helping them work through challenges and stress-testing solutions. We helped businesses pivot to masks, we helped businesses pivot to DTC, we helped long-term clients keep their lights on and grow their eCommerce businesses 2, 3, 10X to stanch their brick & mortar losses. But none of that would have been possible if we’d adhered to some draconian SOW, or if we’d clocked out every day at 6 PM, or if we hadn’t already invested so much time and energy into earning equity with our clients and establishing open lines of communication. For us, honesty and transparency aren’t buzzwords, they’re the lifeblood of trust. And trust is how you build collaborative success–in fat times, in lean times, and in times of great upheaval.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Using our success to benefit the communities where we work has become a priority for P3 in recent years, and we’ve worked on several initiatives that I’m proud of. For instance, when the Coronavirus hit, it became clear that brick-and-mortar businesses were going to be uniquely vulnerable for the foreseeable future. We specialize in growing businesses online, so for us, the natural question to ask was, how do we use our expertise to help people whose livelihoods are now at risk? We decided the most impactful intervention we could make was to offer free web development services to small businesses. Our goal was to help brick & mortars facing closure continue to generate revenue by moving their products and service offerings online quickly. Through our outreach, we helped a number of local SMBs begin selling online for the first time within a few weeks and set them up to offer simple cash-generating programs like digital gift cards. It was a drop in the bucket, but the businesses we worked with were able to grow new revenue channels, and Shopify later reported that their platform merchants had been able to recoup 95% of lost in-person sales through eCommerce. We’re proud to have played a small part in the massive mobilization to digital that helped lots of local businesses stay afloat during the most uncertain days of the pandemic.

Another pivotal moment for us was the murder of George Floyd last May. Aanarav and I realized that in order to make P3 the safe, inclusive workplace we envision it to be, we had to empower our most important stakeholders to contribute to their vision for the future of society. So we created annual giving stipends for all full-time staff and encouraged them to support the social causes and organizations they care about most. The program is in its first year and we don’t want to make the mistake of viewing it as a comprehensive solution, but we do believe it’s an essential step that will help us forge a direct link between the good work we do for our clients, and the good work we want to achieve in our respective communities.

Now more broadly speaking, what do we do to help bring goodness to the world? I think we promote goodness every day within our company. At P3, the thing I think about most is how a company can help its stakeholders self-actualize–can help a person find a part of themself that’s maybe hidden or underutilized, or find a skill that they didn’t know they had. That’s the key to finding happiness and passion in the work that we do every day.

Now, working in eCommerce tends to demand certain kinds of growth because, in eCommerce, mastery is an endlessly iterative pursuit. Technology evolves every single day, and so to maintain your expertise, you’ve got to be learning constantly. But we’ve established an environment at P3 where we’re all looking to bring the very best out of one another. And we’ve built a really strong, committed, cohesive team by giving our people access to the resources they need to become the best versions of themselves: All of our staff members receive unlimited vacation, can work remotely and asynchronously, and receive self-directed professional development budgets.

Ultimately, these cultural elements give our team the kind of control over their work-life balance and professional growth that manifests in better work for our clients, more fulfilled colleagues, and more growth for P3. I think when you’ve got people that are happy and digging into big, challenging problems, they’re going to give the best versions of themselves. Whether people work for us for a year or for a lifetime, I want them to look back and say ‘that was a great experience. I became a better person doing that. I made lifelong relationships. I met one of my good friends. I met a spouse,’ whatever it may be. I think we can all find out more about ourselves through our work, but only in an environment that intentionally prioritizes and celebrates self-discovery.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

• Really, my number one is focus. In my experience, focus is the key to achieving entrepreneurial success. In my view, focus is to business what compound interest is to investing: a simple, generative force whose immense power is largely overlooked by the short-sighted. That’s because much like compounding interest, focus doesn’t yield linear results. Instead, it pays out larger dividends the longer you remain invested. That means that in the short term, your focus may produce relatively unimpressive results. But over years and decades, focus can help you build generational organizations, solve global challenges, and change lives. Without focus, most people overestimate what they can do in a short period of time and underestimate what they can do over a long period of time. Focus has taught me that there is no special trick to getting what you want. I’ve landed some of my dream clients by pitching them persistently and creatively for years, and I’ve retained them by focusing relentlessly on delivering a product that exceeds their expectations in every way.
• The second is intentional honesty and transparency. Honesty and transparency are key to building commercial relationships on a foundation of trust, and to growing a strong corporate culture of personal and collective accountability. But it’s not always easy to be upfront with people you want to please, or whose business you want to win. To truly understand the value of honesty and transparency to your professional practice, you have to broaden your focus beyond first-order concerns like where the next check is coming from and start to focus on second-order concerns, like how you can deliver the kind of value that those around you will truly appreciate over the long term. In that vein, my ultimate reason for cultivating transparency is really very simple: we want to be in business for the next hundred years. And to build the kind of brand equity required to achieve that goal, you simply can’t mistreat people or view them transactionally. Ultimately, businesses are really just a collection of people working to solve a problem. We may measure our success in terms of outputs–by the revenue that we generate for our clients and the ROI on media spend and growth multiples and on and on. But the input is all human labor and human love. And to grow our team and maintain a high talent density–especially as a remote work company–we have to continually choose an honest, open, transparent, communal, humanistic approach.
• The last core tenet that’s contributed to my success is “maximum ownership.” When something goes wrong on your watch (and something always will), you can either blame someone else or take ownership in order to learn from your mistakes. The core question I ask myself whenever I experience a setback is what could I have done better in that situation? Even if the situation is largely out of your hands, you can almost always identify an input somewhere within how you communicated, how you planned the project, in the tools that you chose to use, in the contract that you wrote, or in how you ultimately executed the work that impacted that project in some way. And the only question you can ask that will protect you from finding yourself in a similar situation down the road, is: how do I improve so this same issue doesn’t arise in the future?

Personally, I’ve benefited from this form of self-reflection the most when it comes to team building. Hiring the right people for our work and our culture is one of my essential responsibilities, and on the occasion when I miss, it’s essential for me to take full ownership. After all, if someone’s work style doesn’t fit at P3, the responsibility really rests on my shoulders. I didn’t ask the right questions in the interview. I didn’t administer the right tests from a development or design standpoint. I didn’t do the things that needed to be done to pick the right person. If you don’t take maximum ownership right away in that supremely uncomfortable situation, you’ll undermine your company by stocking it with the wrong talent, and you’ll almost certainly repeat your mistakes in the future because you never critiqued your processes to try to achieve better results. That’s why in my view, the only real mistake people can make at P3 is to not take ownership when we fall short. When you decline to own your actions, you signal to those around you that you aren’t serious about your own growth. And if you’re not sincerely serious about growing, why should anyone trust you with their money, with their time, with their future?

Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?

I’m going to answer this one in a way that’s less about any direct advice I’ve received and more about the pitfalls of learning implicitly by watching others lead. Early in my career, I worked for a company that shall remain unnamed, and the owner of this company had such a vicious leadership style that Demanded ownership of others and really treated employees as tools rather than as partners, teammates rowing in the same direction to solve a collective challenge. I worked there for a significant amount of time, but it was only after I left that I slowly began to realize how much the culture around you rubs off, for better or for worse. Great cultures can elevate people, while abusive cultures can break them down, create depression, lower standards around delivery, create all kinds of issues that can ultimately sink a business. Early in my entrepreneurial days, I took a lot of management and leadership cues from the terrible culture that I’d worked in, despite the fact that it wasn’t the culture I wanted to create, and that my old boss’s company wasn’t the kind of organization I wanted to build. It happened because I allowed myself to passively rely on the models I had experience with, like that teen in those anti-smoking ads from the ’90s who screams, “I learned it from you, dad!” when his father asks him where he learned to smoke. You can learn amazing lessons from entrepreneurs who’ve gone through it before you, and to this day I believe in the power of finding a great mentor. But you can also pick up some terrible habits just by working with people who don’t treat you with respect. In truth, it took me some time to actually shake that old culture. It stuck to me like a barnacle until I began to prioritize developing myself into a leader whose business values matched my interpersonal values. If you happen to be working within a broken culture, get out as fast as you can. It’ll save you a lot of time and soul searching, but most importantly, it’ll save you from becoming someone who you don’t respect.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

Actually, P3 was founded in the midst of the hardest time I’ve ever faced as an entrepreneur. Aanarav and I had founded a previous company, PaLaCart with the dream of building the world’s first universal online shopping cart. We raised a bit of capital but we were also largely self-funded. In starting that company, we hit a point where we weren’t able to raise any more money, and so we started putting our business expenses on credit cards. By the time PaLaCart was finally done in by new payment provider regulations, I was in over $100,000 of credit card debt. And I mean the highest interest credit card debt–I swear, the cards I was using at that point should’ve come with a Surgeon General’s warning. Aanarav and I had less than no money, and no product to show for our efforts. It felt like an insurmountable hole to dig myself out of.

I remember the day I put my resume together. I’d been working for myself–towards this dream–for a few years, but it seemed like I had no choice but to start all over working for someone else. I felt sick. I printed the thing out, gave it a once over, shredded it, and threw it in the trash.

And I decided I wasn’t done. I decided that I had to figure out what the next thing would be. Aanarav had a similar reckoning, and we both spent a few weeks really digging deep about whether we could keep pushing on. At that point, we surfaced an opportunity to take on a consulting client. They started out paying us a few hundred dollars a month, and it was just enough to pay our credit card minimums and cover rent and eat the worst meal possible a few times a day.

But they also gave us a little light. Landing our first client showed us that it was possible to keep pursuing our dream to build a company we were proud of. And so we threw ourselves into it. We didn’t sleep. We designed top-quality work. And we taught ourselves new skills every day that we could bring to the job to outcompete any other consultant or agency out there. Our only edge was to try to be so good that nobody could ignore us. And slowly but surely, people started noticing. We were referred more clients. and grew by word of mouth. We started hiring talented folks from our network, rented a proper office, and began working toward channel partnerships to stabilize our inbound. Now we’re one of the fastest-growing digital agencies in North America with offices in New York and Montreal, and I’m happy to say my debts have been paid in full for many years. P3 rose from the ashes of a bleak time, to say the least, but with our optimism, focus, and grit in the face of failure, we were able to turn our biggest failure into our greatest success. It’s a lesson I’ll never forget, and one I hope to never have to learn again.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

I think to be an entrepreneur, you’ve almost got to be a bit naive. I remember talking to Alex Iskold, who was the managing director of Techstars New York at one point, and he would always say, “If you just want to make money, there are a lot easier ways to make money out there. Being an entrepreneur, being a startup founder, is not the fast way to cash. The majority of people in this program are going to fail.” And he was right on every count. You’ve got to love what you’re doing to be an entrepreneur. It is not a fast way to cash. In fact, if making money is your north star and you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably doing the wrong thing. Certainly, profit’s important, but if you live and die by your numbers, you’ll never make it through the lean times. To succeed, you need a sense of belief in the future that belies the conditions of the present and belies the statistics.

I came to that belief through great distress. When PaLaCart failed, I simply realized that for me, there was no plan b. I’ve known I wanted to be an entrepreneur since before I knew what the word meant, and I simply couldn’t picture myself dedicating my energy to anything other than building my vision. Once I discovered that I felt released from many of the worries that had been standing in my way, and the future began to open up for me as a series of possibilities.

What strategies or techniques did you use to help overcome those challenges?

I’ve had a lot of good lessons over the years, and most of them point toward the notion that it’s best to approach business through a humanist lens. I’ve seen a lot of people run businesses in ways that I didn’t agree with in terms of how they treated their employees. I’ve worked for bad bosses, bad business owners–people who run highly profitable businesses, but who make everyone around them miserable. I’ve always tried to take those experiences and flip them in terms of the company I wanted to build and the core tenants I wanted to promote through my work. And it’s worked.

Taking a really humanistic approach to business has helped us overcome quite a bit from the very start, and it’s simply because there are so many companies out there that don’t. We tend to see a lot of people in our industry who have bad habits–from a billing standpoint, from a client management standpoint–people are trained into treating their clients and colleagues transactionally. We’re looking to forge lifelong relationships with our clients, and when you’re thinking for the long term, you tend to think more ethically. You tend to think about what is best for your clients–not just today, but tomorrow, a year from now, 10 years from now. By establishing a guiding principle based on respect instead of remuneration, you improve your decision-making by leaps and bounds. That’s not just pap, it’s an edge. At P3, we’ve learned to harness that edge to enrich our clients and grow our practice.

The journey of an entrepreneur is never easy, and is filled with challenges, failures, setbacks, as well as joys, thrills and celebrations. Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder”?

Absolutely. Being an entrepreneur is like riding a roller coaster, and to stay on track for any consistent period of time, you’ve got to find techniques to help you maintain emotional stability. For me personally, the foundation that’s kept me focused and positive over the years is exercise. I exercise a minimum of five days a week, and I treat it like therapy. It helps me work out a lot of nervous, jittery, anxious energy, particularly after sitting in front of a computer for 10 to 16 hours a day. There’s quite a bit of science pointing to the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of taking regular exercise, and for me, it’s also been the gateway to leading a more holistically healthy life. Lifting in my younger years led me to yoga, which led me to meditation. I’ve learned a lot about how what you put in your body influences your mood and performance, and so I tend to eat very healthily during the week so that I can stay feeling my best.

Beyond the physical though, finding your work-life balance is key. I know most entrepreneurs find this to be particularly challenging, but if you don’t make intentional time to be with your loved ones and to experience life away from work, you’re ultimately not working toward very much. Years ago, someone gave me the great advice to make sure to carve out at least an hour a day to dedicate to family. That means putting your phone and your computer aside and giving them your undivided attention. It may not sound like much, but try it today. You’ll probably find that it’s been longer than you’d care to admit since you devoted that kind of time to your personal relationships. You’ll definitely learn something new about someone you probably already know very well. These are the moments that make the work worthwhile. If you don’t cultivate them, you’ll become an empty suit.

Let’s imagine that a young founder comes to you and asks your advice about whether venture capital or bootstrapping is best for them? What would you advise them? Can you kindly share a few things a founder should look at to determine if fundraising or bootstrapping is the right choice?

There are really two elements to this answer. On the one hand, it’s a personal question that has to do with ownership. Generally speaking, I’d rather have more intelligent people in the room and have a little less ownership. I think that the more enthusiastic, intelligent, expert stakeholders that you can bring in, the more quickly your pathway to success reveals itself. That being said, it also really depends on the type of product that you’re launching. Service businesses, for example, really tend to not need or warrant venture capital investments. There aren’t many cases in which a VC firm is going to add a ton of value to a service business because the core input there is human capital, which is not particularly scalable.

On the other side of things, if we’re looking at technology–particularly scalable tech with big markets, where there is an opportunity to carve out a meaningful market position–those are great cases for venture capital because VCs will accelerate your timetable and extend the reach of your major play in the same way that pouring gasoline on a fire intensifies the burn. The other species of a tech startup that should proceed directly to venture capital is the kind that’s building world-changing technology. These are moonshot pieces of tech that take astronomical amounts of capital to realize. Think space mining, sustainable energy, etc. Again, great use cases for venture capital because the capital requirements to build a company that can achieve these goals are too great for one individual budget to be able to bootstrap.

If on the other hand, you’re building tech in a more niche market–say, for instance, you’re developing a Shopify app that simplifies product merchandising in the fashion space–while you may have a great and valuable SaaS tool for eCommerce brands, you may not have a great venture-backed business. It’s likelier something that a CTO and a head of sales can work on together to build, market, start using to generate predictable MRR, and grow more organically through reinvestment in the company. If you’re building your business around less scalable tech in smaller markets, keep working on your product and save the capital campaign for a point in the future when you’re ready to launch new, more scalable product lines.

All of which is to say that the first thing one needs to do is sit down and figure out what type of business they’re trying to run. Will your product will scale with extra capital? Is it something that can be built organically through word of mouth or through hiring a few key people? Answer those questions, and you’ll have a much clearer idea of how to proceed profitably.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Many startups are not successful, and some are very successful. From your experience or perspective, what are the main factors that distinguish successful startups from unsuccessful ones? What are your “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

1. The first thing you need is to understand your individual limitations as a human and as a leader. The reason it’s so important to be self-aware is that if you don’t know what you’re not good at, you can’t fill those gaps. It’s incredibly rare to find a great technologist who also can design, who also can sell, who also can run a business operationally, who also can hire people. In fact, I’ve never met that person. But if you’re running a tech startup, these are all competencies that you’re going to need to run a successful organization. And so as you’re growing your business, understanding where your deficiencies lie versus where your own natural expertise lies is absolutely essential. One of the key reasons that Aanarav and I have been able to build sustained success over the years is that we’re good at different things, and we trust one another to deliver in areas where one of us might personally fall short. There’s no shame in not being an expert in all aspects of your field–after all, what is a field if not an accumulation of collaborative knowledge? But to succeed, you have to be insightful enough to build a team that turns your relative weaknesses into organizational strengths, and that starts with honest self-interrogation.
2. That brings me to the second thing you need to create a successful startup: incredibly high talent density. Having built several companies, I can’t stress this enough: Don’t make sacrifices when you’re hiring folks. It is incredibly tempting to hire someone because they’re less expensive, or because it’s convenient, or because someone referred them to you. But these are potentially catastrophic mistakes. People can infiltrate an organization and change the culture unbeknownst to you. One person with a questionable work ethic, with subpar skills, or with a bad attitude can change the culture of your company and bring your team down to their level. So when you’re in the hiring phase, whether it be your first hire or your thousandth, you need to be incredibly clear about the kinds of people you want to bring on and build processes to ensure that you choose candidates who align with your values, your ethics, and the level of product expertise that you need. Because ultimately, your company is the team you put together. I’ve hired people for all the wrongheaded reasons I just rattled off, and I’ve always come to regret it down the line. But when you’re just starting to build a company, you’ll come to regret misaligned hires that much faster.
3. The third thing you need is to find a mentor or a trusted advisor outside of your company. Founders wear a lot of hats, and it’s very easy to get lost in the management details of your day-to-day–of product or winning business, launching new products, building new units, hiring folks. And so to have someone that you can bounce ideas off of, again, whether it be someone that’s been in your space, have some domain expertise, some general operational expertise, or people at channel partners that can broaden your horizons–these people are an invaluable resource to you. Personally, I’ve been lucky to connect with experienced leaders at Shopify in particular who’ve helped me refine my ideas over the years and continue to help me separate the forest from the trees. What makes them a great resource for us is that their broader eCom expertise: Where we’re really focused on launching sites and mounting successful media campaigns, they see our entire ecosystem from 30,000 feet. Having a mentor who may not know the nuances of your business, but who understands the landscape you’re trying to traverse, is a critical advantage for any business operator.
4. The fourth thing you need is the bravery to chase failure. Failure is the best learning tool in business, and as an entrepreneur, you should always be looking for your next opportunity to fail. That doesn’t mean you should fail intentionally, it means that you mustn’t let the possibility that you’ll fail to prevent you from giving your chosen endeavor absolutely everything. I’m sure you’re familiar with the adage that those who are afraid to fail or are afraid to succeed. To launch a business unit, a company, a new product, to hire a new person–these are all risky endeavors that can ultimately end in failure. And the bolder your vision, the higher the odds you won’t succeed the first time around. But if you don’t try, you’ll never learn what’s required to achieve the success you envision for yourself. And that’s because, for most of us, those requirements are only revealed on the other side of failure. My story is essentially an embodiment of this lesson. Failure led Aanarav and I to found P3, the company that we absolutely adore running today. We built it from the ashes of a previous company that we’d sunk years of our lives into the building. But you know, ashes make for great fertilizer, and it was only through the learnings we carried away from that failure that we were able to grow a company with amazing core values, and an amazing team of women and men who really dedicate themselves to helping our clients achieve their goals and their dreams. So for anyone out there reading this who’s afraid to take that step that’s going to make them vulnerable, know that failure is not a loss. It’s an invaluable lesson.
5. The last thing you need is to find your “greater why,” the underlying motivation for operating your business that will keep you focused and fulfilled over the long haul. If you’re starting a business just to make money, it’s probably going to fizzle. You’ll make more shortsighted choices, you’ll get discouraged by early returns, and you’ll find it difficult to immerse yourself enough to become the expert you need to be–talk to any side hustle drop shipper. There are lots of easier ways to make money than building a business. There are more direct pathways to financial success than becoming an entrepreneur. So before you get into business, ask yourself: Is this something you can see yourself doing for 18 hours a day for the next 10 years, for the next 20 years? Is there a greater why that will sustain you when times get tough? Can you hang your hat on the problem you’re solving through your product or through your interaction with other people?

My greater why is all about self-actualization: I believe that we can become better people through our work. I think we can learn more about ourselves. I think we can create greater connections with one another. Most of all, I believe we can help others achieve their dreams in the pursuit of our own. The money is a lovely benefit when things work out well, but things won’t always work out well. In those instances, only a greater why will help illuminate what you’ve gained from your experience, what you’ve learned, how you’ve become stronger, who you’ve helped. Really tackle the question of why you’re committing before you begin because I can promise you that if it’s all about the money, even when you find success, you won’t find lasting fulfillment.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

Well personally, the biggest mistake that I made as a young entrepreneur was not seeking out a mentor, not cultivating a close relationship with someone who had domain expertise and who was willing to pull apart my ideas with me. The major advantage of aligning with a mentor, a board of directors, folks within your community who are in a position to give you advice, is that they’re ahead of you–in their business journey, in their life journey, and certainly in their level of expertise. And they can use their experience to help you head off a lot of the mistakes that you’re probably speeding towards right now.

When I was just getting into this business there were lots of people I respected who could and would have helped me. The issue for me was that I wasn’t self-aware enough to know what I didn’t know, and that made me less receptive and less willing to seek advice. That sounds like a simple enough issue to fix–check your ego, be humble, respect the success of others who’ve done it before you. We’ve all heard these admonishments since we were kids. But when you’re inexperienced especially, it can be tricky to balance the crazy entrepreneurial confidence it takes to build something that’s never existed before against the voices of those who tell you that your vision needs work. You have to figure out who to trust, and then, you have to submit to that trust. That’s hard, but in the end, it will save you from making stupid mistakes and accelerate your progress toward success as much as any VC.

Startup founders often work extremely long hours and it’s easy to burn the candle at both ends. What would you recommend to founders about how to best take care of their physical and mental wellness when starting a company?

Being an entrepreneur is like riding a roller coaster, and to stay on track for any consistent period of time, you’ve got to find techniques to help you maintain emotional stability. For me personally, the foundation that’s kept me focused and positive over the years is exercise. I exercise a minimum of five days a week, and I treat it like therapy. It helps me work out a lot of nervous, jittery, anxious energy, particularly after sitting in front of a computer for 10 to 16 hours a day. There’s quite a bit of science pointing to the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of taking regular exercise, and for me, it’s also been the gateway to leading a more holistically healthy life. Lifting in my younger years led me to yoga, which led me to meditation. I’ve learned a lot about how what you put in your body influences your mood and performance, and so I tend to eat very healthily during the week so that I can stay feeling my best.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Broadly speaking, I think business has the power to scale solutions to certain social challenges that a lot of nonprofit service organizations don’t, and that comes down to the fact that business is fueled by profit, whereas nonprofits are generally fueled by donations. For example, Toms can donate more shoes on a 1 for 1 model than a nonprofit set up to donate shoes ever could, because Toms leverages its customer base to scale their giving program as they grow. A nonprofit’s capacity is capped by the limits of its donor base. I want to see more high-purpose companies founded with the goal of helping service-oriented non-profits fill the gaps that scalability is good for. But I think it’s often difficult for businesses with a Friedmanian outlook to justify investing profits in “non-business” activities, so let’s talk numbers.

Last year a number of our clients asked us whether and how they could use their platforms to support the Black Lives Matter movement. As a Black American, I counseled them to take action only if those actions amounted to sustainable, sincere commitments. But as a business owner and a fiduciary to my clients, I needed data to understand the effect that taking a stance on social issues can have on a business’s bottom line. So I asked our research team to conduct a study and answer the question: Is being a good actor good for business or bad for business? To my great satisfaction and relief, it turns out that in most cases, yes, being a good actor is actually great for business. In fact, high-purpose companies whose business models call for sustained action on social issues make more money, create more loyal customers, and have seen over twice the growth of low-purpose brands over the last decade.

Once you understand that being a good social actor will make your business more resilient across essentially every key metric, the next question is how to get involved. We’ve written about this extensively on the P3 blog, but the fact is that companies that sell in eCommerce have lots of easy ways at their disposal to connect with customers in more meaningful ways, to help the environment, and to help the communities they’re a part of. For instance, you might add a tool like EcoCart to your checkout, which allows customers to make their purchases carbon neutral from both a manufacturing and shipping standpoint. If you’re in apparel, you could hook up with Fashion Makes Change and give your customers the ability to empower women across the globe just by rounding up their order total to the nearest dollar. Moving beyond social justice apps, you can draft and adopt more inclusive hiring practices to bring a broader diversity of ideas and experience into your organization. You can stand up for social issues that align with the values of your stakeholders and the community where you do business. A client of ours, SeaVees, does a great job at this. They’re all about the California lifestyle, and so they partner with a vetted, ready-made corporate social responsibility program called 1% For The Planet that takes 1% of participants’ profits, and uses them to fund grassroots environmental organizations having a real impact on local habitats. Ultimately these are commitments that make the world an incrementally better place, while also manifesting positive effects on your business.

Business owners and entrepreneurs tend to be problem solvers, and I think we all have this mutually beneficial opportunity to contribute something to society that’s much more than a disposable product. It’s sitting there right in front of us, but more of us need to be brave enough to take the first step. If I could start a movement aimed at helping the most people, I’d start there for sure.

We are blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Can I pick two? I feel like I have to pick two, because my first choice is Oprah, and frankly, she’s probably everyone’s first choice if they’re honest with themselves. Oprah is maybe the most developed communicator on the planet, and I don’t think anyone in my lifetime has ever managed to project as much genuine compassion over as broad a platform. If even one iota of Oprah’s talent for connection were ever to rub off on me, it would be a dream come true.

My second choice is Arianna Huffington, and that’s because years ago on a podcast appearance (very possibly the Oprah podcast, in fact), she dropped one amazingly powerful maxim that has shaped my entire life since: “live life as though it’s rigged in your favor.” For context, that doesn’t mean you should embrace your privilege and float through your days with an ugly sense of entitlement. It means that if you use the power of optimism to visualize your own success, you’ll stop being afraid of your goals and start owning them. I’ve tried to live as though life is rigged in my favor every day since catching that interview, whether things are up or down. And I’ve found that my confidence is infectious, enables me to remove fear from my decision-making, creates more professional and personal opportunities, and leads me to the results that I desire. I would love to have an opportunity to thank Arianna Huffington for changing my life, and to learn firsthand about how she’s used her outlook to build such incredible success.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

We publish long-form thought pieces and industry insights on our blog at pthreemedia.com. Curious readers can find content about our work and clients on YouTube at the P3 Media channel, and our company Instagram handle is @p3medianyc. My personal handle is @davidawagoner.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!