Submit Your Medium Story to The Helm

Today’s top business leaders, in their own words. The Helm is a curated collection of insights from the business frontlines — real leaders talking about the real challenges of starting, scaling and running businesses. Our mission is to move beyond the cliches and success stories and share the struggles and triumphs of leadership and entrepreneurship, with plenty of practical takeaways for readers.

What makes The Helm unique is that everything we publish is written by actual business leaders, not journalists, academics or professional writers. We feature perspectives from people working day in and day out to build businesses who have hard-earned lessons to share with others — on everything from hiring and culture to keeping customers happy and handling setbacks with resilience.

Among our contributors are founders and executives of major enterprises like Hootsuite’s CEO Ryan Holmes, software company Sitecore’s CMO Paige O’Neill and global cleantech leader Terramera’s CEO, Karn Manhas. Importantly, we don’t just feature perspectives from well known or established leaders. Insights from solopreneurs, people leading small businesses and emerging leaders can be just as valuable.

Above all, The Helm stands for the idea that business and leadership skills are best learned in real life, not from a textbook — and that the most powerful advice comes from those who are in the trenches, starting and running businesses of their own.

Our submission guidelines

We publish stories that share real business lessons and that will hopefully have real value for readers, today and in the months and years to come. The best stories draw from personal experience and are filled with real-life examples and practical takeaways from the business frontlines. Our commitment to readers means we have strict editorial standards and will only consider submissions that accord with the guidelines below.

• Follow us first! The best way to understand what The Helm looks for is to actively read the Helm. Make sure you’re following our publication before submitting.
• Real leaders: We post stories from people who are actively running or leading businesses — leaders sharing observations from the frontlines. We don’t want a theoretical explanation of how guerilla marketing works, for example — we want to hear how your guerilla marketing campaign unfolded and what you learned from it.
• 4 core themes: Our stories fall into four main categories. Be sure that your submissions align and are tagged with one or more of these labels.

Entrepreneurship: inspiration on starting and scaling businesses. Example: Embracing Sustainability And Letting Go Of The Past

Leadership: advice and observations on leading and inspiring people at work and getting the most out of your team. Example: How To Lead From Home (Not Just WFH)

Work-life balance: insights into how to juggle work, family, friends and hobbies, while staying healthy and happy. Example: How Work “Interval Training” Can Fast-Track Your Career

Productivity: hacks for getting things done more efficiently, saving time and saving money. Example: 5 Valid Reasons To Quit Any Project, Book Or Relationship

• Be personal and be real: The Helm is a different kind of business publication. We want to hear about the personal challenges of business leadership. It’s important to include anecdotes and real-life examples. Don’t just tell us about the times you succeeded — open up about what went wrong and what you learned from it.
• Entertain and educate: Our readers are busy professionals looking for readable, well-written insights. Make sure your main idea is clearly stated in the introduction. Use headings and subheadings to break up content into digestible chunks. And be sure to share clear takeaways/action steps. It’s helpful to back up your observations with links to reports or stats but don’t try to sound academic or technical — conversational and accessible writing works best.
• Prioritize headlines: The best headlines are relatively short: around 70 characters or less. They’re specific and hook a reader’s attention, but don’t give away too much. Easy hack: include a number (5 ways …), specific fact (Most HR departments say …), or superlative (first, best, only) to enhance interest in your story. On that note, please use serial capitalization in your headlines — i.e. the first letter of every word is capitalized. We reserve the right to update headlines but prefer that contributors supply their own.
• Design and aesthetics matter: Great stories are complemented by great art and imagery. Be sure to include a compelling image before or after your headline. (Unsplash, Pexels, Burst and The Stocks all have high-quality free images.) Medium has great built-in features for block and pull quotes, drop caps and other design tweaks — use them to make your submission stand out. Bonus points for contributors who embed videos, Gifs or additional images in the body of the text.
• Consider becoming a Medium partner: Medium’s Partner Program enables writers to make money off of their work by putting selected stories behind Medium’s paywall. These stories are also more likely to be recommended by Medium’s curators and reach a larger audience. To benefit our writers, we prioritize submissions that are part of the Partner Program.

What to Avoid:

• Already published stories: we give priority to original articles.
• Promotional content: It’s fine to talk about your business when you’re sharing lessons learned. But aggressive calls-to-action or self promotion turn readers off.
• Boring stock photography: Strive to include images that will engage readers and look contemporary, rather than using dated stock photos.

How to submit a story for consideration:

To be considered for publication on The Helm, please fill out this form. Note: We give priority to original drafts that have not been published yet on Medium. If your story aligns with our editorial profile, we’ll be in touch within 48 hours. If you don’t hear back in that time range, please assume it won’t be published.

We reserve the right to edit your story for clarity and readability. The Helm may modify headlines or add subheadings, as well as correct for grammar and style errors.

Our goal is to develop long-term relationships with our contributors. If your submission is accepted into The Helm, we’d love to review and publish future articles from you.