Co-founding and co-leading Altitude has been far from textbook and rarely does a day go by where I don’t think about writing the book. About the ups, the downs, the lessons learned, the growth, the characters, the wins, the losses, the stress, the joy, the patterns that repeat themselves, the feeling of freedom and the relentless draining on my limited mindshare …
But – despite being knocked down more than an underdog at an MMA bout – I would do it all over again.
Don’t be afraid to hire people who are smarter than you. Trust they are up to the task. Look for those who have fire in the belly and a commitment to doing excellent work.
As a nine-year-old boy on a Boston Globe delivery route, I was hell bent on getting those papers to my customers’ doorsteps on time – even during the infamous Blizzard of ’78. During that epic snowstorm I remember being so focused on not disappointing my customers who counted on the daily delivery for their news. So I schlepped in waist-high snow through the neighborhood and got each of those 28 papers delivered.
That focus on the customer, I believe, is one of the key reasons that Altitude has done what more than two-thirds of the companies that start out never accomplish – seeing their 10th birthday.
But I never could have done it alone.
Prior to setting out on this risky adventure, my wife Michele and I had the hard conversations. “I’ll give you three years and enough rope to either fly or hang,” I recall her saying. “And when you fly, it will be my turn for three years.”
There wasn’t a trace of doubt in her voice implying I wouldn’t succeed; that gave me the additional boost of confidence I needed.
Michele gave me one-third of the confidence I needed to forge ahead. Another one-third came from that entrepreneurial spirit that lived inside me dating back to 1978. The final third came from my long-time friend and co-founder, Stan Zukowski. He was all-in from the day we hatched this idea in the fall of 2003.
I realized early on that success would not be because of me – but because of team. And that started with building a strong leadership team. Stan and I worked together at both Rodale and Lehigh University. We understood that we were tremendously different people with very different perspectives – and skill sets. Mutual respect and a firm understanding of each other’s areas of expertise enabled us to cut through the crap and get more done than imaginable. We often joked that Stan couldn’t open Excel and I couldn’t open Quark Xpress. Together we had right brain and left brain well covered and an excellent Venn diagram.
We grew slowly, sticking to what we did well and avoided taking on debt. I look back on our original business plan and our mission is still the same as it was when we envisioned it late 2003.
But it wasn’t until we brought Gwen Hoover on board as the third leg of the leadership stool that we took off.
Gwen balanced out Stan and my ego and personality, challenged us and pushed us to excellence. She helped shape our identity as an integrated marketing agency that could do for complicated, technology-oriented companies what few agencies could – or wanted to do. We found our identity and focused on building the right team to bring it to life.
Over the last decade, I’ve learned. A lot. Here are my 7 biggest, most important takeaways:
It’s been a crazy – in the best sense of the word – decade. And I can’t wait to see where the next 10 years takes us.
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