My Startup Journey: SDG Strategy
The last couple of days I’ve shared about Altimeter and VisuALS, two startups we launched at Oklahoma Christian University. Those were the most prominent and consuming opportunities I had to work with startups and entrepreneurs, but not the only ones.
Before I even arrived in Oklahoma City, a friend connected me with Tommy Yi, who was co-founder of a co-working space and had been an organizer of a recent Startup Weekend. Tommy helped me get connected into the local 1 Million Cups. In time I became one of the local 1MC organizers and eventually became the lead organizer. I made lots of great connections through the 1 Million Cups community and had many opportunities to provide informal mentoring and coaching.
One of the startups I spent a fair amount of time with was Mobile tAppestry. These men had developed technology that could make mobile development accessible to a much broader audience. I became a strategic advisor and sounding board as they pursued various paths trying to successfully market their technology.
One of the first people I met at 1MC was Gunnar Hood. Gunnar is very well connected in the OKC community, among other things serving as chairman of the board for the Oklahoma Public School Career Academies program.
Gunnar recruited me to serve on the board of the Entrepreneurship Academy which was at Emerson, the alternative high school for the city. It was a joy to see these kids work together to launch a business. I believe for many of them it was a life-changing experience.
I helped get the Academy board, teachers, and students involved in i2E’s “Who Wants to be an Entrepreneur” program. Through the Academy, I also met Jo Wise through whom I got involved in Junior Achievement’s Investor Challenge program.
You get the picture. There’s a lot going on in Oklahoma City.
But there’s also a lot going on up the road in Tulsa. You may remember that my startup journey began in Tulsa, but it was a bit of a surprise to me how active the city’s startup community has become.
When Weston Bergmann wanted to expand BetaBlox beyond Kansas City, Tulsa became the next destination for the accelerator/incubator. Wes was looking for a few more mentor/consultant/owners to work with the startups in the program, so he reached out to me. At least once a month I would drive up the Turner Turnpike to spend 4 hours with energized teams working on exciting new concepts.
In the Fall of 2018 we moved back to the Kansas City area. I’m still involved with BetaBlox, working now with KC-based startups, but for the next year or so I focused on pulling together content and stories into a book on strategy development. I was working with an old friend and mentor to polish and complete the book.
When COVID-19 hit early in 2020, we talked about what to do. As one article described it, every organization is now a startup. Everyone needs to throw out their existing business plan and start over. That’s hard and scary for most business leaders. They don’t know how to do a startup and they don’t know how to do strategic planning from scratch.
The good news is that we know how to do that and had even been putting together all the content to help leaders in this position. The bad news was that it would take months to get a book published and in this crisis mode, leaders really didn’t have time to read a book anyway.
So, we agreed that I would re-launch SDG Strategy to focus on helping leaders develop sound strategies. I would leverage the content we had developed, repackaged to be more quickly and easily consumed, to help as many leaders as I could. I would also reinvigorate the strategic catalyst model to be able to help leaders develop sound strategies as quickly and affordably as possible.
Or at least that’s the hypothesis. I’m back in startup mode, testing, learning, and refining, as I work hard to create value for as many leaders as I can.
Thanks for taking this journey with me. Let me know how I can help you!
