The Last 12 Months

The last twelve months have been really tough.

For five years straight, I’ve written a lessons learned as an entrepreneur post. This year, our sixth, I just couldn’t.

1 — We spent a lot of money in 2016, expecting growth. But I made the wrong hires, and we hit the advertising market at a challenging time. Suddenly the company was running out of money.

2 — To survive, we ended up having to let go almost half our team, our coworkers and our friends. It was painful and felt like a huge step backward.

3 — Then, some terrible personal tragedies struck, including in my own family. One sucker punch after another.

4 — And after all that, one of our beloved, key team members, Lyle, passed away. That was as big a hit as it gets.

For a while it seemed like a total knockout. We had done so much right and built the audience and brand we always intended to in the right way. But, always the planner, I hadn’t planned for this.

But Lyle’s motto was “keep going,” and so we have.

We let people go in time to offer notice and a reasonable package, and cut deep enough to buy our team time to get it right.

We’ve had the time to grieve and, though our losses will never fade, we’ve started pushing forward together.

And I hired two senior executives that have never lost faith and instead transformed our business.

So things are looking up.

1 — We’ve doubled our total revenue this year. We’ve got a full sales team with the right leadership, more in pipeline for 2018 already than we’ve ever had before, and no one’s delivering better engagement and performance to our partners than we are in our space. I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but it’s working.

2 — With a need for special people, we’ve been able to hire some of the best team members yet. And, internally, we’ve seen people step up and become stars.

3 — We’ve grown as individuals, but we’ve also grown together. When a startup has six people, it’s easier to create a special culture. When it has 30, it takes shared struggle and a shared mission to bring people together. We’re closer as a team now than ever before.

4 — And after years of big ambitions beyond just media, we’re actually starting to realize that vision. We’re launching our first paid mobile app around short-term support groups for health goals before the end of the year. I’ve been working towards this for many, many years — now we’re doing it and I couldn’t be more excited.

Of course we haven’t figured it all out.

I’m just grateful to everyone who believed in us and, most importantly, believed in our mission.

And I think our recent Healthy for Every Body campaign is the perfect example of how what we’re doing has never been more important. More than six years after I started this business, we’re still working to get the world to think about health in a healthier way. And there’s still a long way to go.

It’s not easy to bounce back from a year like this, but we’ve come a long way and survived so we can thrive. And thrive we will.

I think Lyle would be proud of where we are today and agree that, actually, we’re just getting started.

Here’s to a strong end to 2017 (good riddance) and one hell of a 2018.