I will be building a new company in the next few years, and I know what my biggest competitive advantage will be. It won’t be about compensation, an innovative idea, or even about putting people first, as you might have heard in my talk on the subject. It will be The Human Element, a powerful, simple, and practical approach to help create the authentic, ideal, organization as created by Will Schutz.

The best way to experience and learn this approach is by taking an immersive five day workshop called “The Human Element”. Before I left Code School I brought this workshop to my leadership team, and many of them described it as a life-changing experience. Recently I took a course to become a Licensed Human Element Practitioner so I can teach the workshop myself.

Continue reading

The actual room at Pluralsight in Salt Lake City.

It was a Tuesday in late October 2015 and I was dreading the conversation I was about to have. I was sitting across from Aaron Skonnard (CEO) and Greg Woodward (CFO) of Pluralsight, two people who I had come to admire and respect. Unfortunately, I had to tell them that I wanted to leave the company, Code School, that they had acquired 12 months prior. I felt like I was going to be sick.

Continue reading

There are more than a few ways to use content to drive traffic.  As I’ve built my businesses I’ve discovered a few ways to do this effectively, but I always knew there was more to learn.

A month ago I attended Content Marketing World in Cleveland.  The conference was full of Content Marketing Directors, VPs of Marketing, and Consultants who get paid to take content and use it to drive revenue.  I learned a ton from these people, so put together a talk which I initially gave FLBlogCon.  Enjoy!

Continue reading

In 1997 I was in my first year of college. Instead of the feelings of excitement and anxiety, that were the norm of young students, it was for me a time of loneliness and shame. I felt stigmatized and broken. Little did I know it at the time but these traumatic events would empower me to create the safe and successful culture at Envy Labs and then Code School. I want to show you how one lead to another, with the hope it might help you in your journey.

Continue reading

I’m sure you’ve heard people say that team is everything and ideas are worth nothing. I think this mostly true, though I’ve run into many entrepreneurs who believe that it’s mostly their idea is what will make them successful. They are usually the ones who make you sign an NDA just to give you a glimpse of their project.

If we assume the best way to ensure your success is to put people first, how exactly do we do that? In this talk I go through the most important principles to put people first.

Concepts like:

• Giving Effective Guidance
• When and where to give Guidance
• Dealing with bad habits
• How to deal with bad meetings
• Understanding your human tendencies to make up stories and get defensive
• Resisting defensiveness
• Conflict resolution
• How to be a coach
• Growth vs Fixed mindset
• How to give effective feedback
• Celebrating and appreciating people
• The importance of vision and goal setting

Many of these principles I learned working with Laura and Stephanie from Key Talent Solutions.  If you want to help your team grow in these areas, get in touch with them.

Click here to signup for Part 2 free.

About 8 years ago equity broke my business and severed one of the best friendships I ever had. If we would have set things up more fairly in the beginning this all would have been avoidable. Instead we had to dissolve the business and abandon the brand we both worked so hard to create.

In case you’re not familiar, your “equity” refers to how much you own of a business. In the startup world it’s what I might want to pay you until we start making cash. Equity is kind of like a promise for future cash. If you work for me for equity I’m promising you I’ll try to make it worth a lot some day when we sell the business or some other financial event occurs.

In my opinion the only fair way to do equity is something called the Dynamic Equity Split. Instead of equity being divided up in the beginning (too early) or when investment comes (too late) this method divides up equity as the company is built. Equity is dynamically based on the quantity of resources each person puts in.

Continue reading

If I could beam everything I learned building Code School directly into your head, I truly would (it’s a lot).   Luckily I created 4 Founder’s talk videos over the years which go through my story, the mistakes I made, and lessons I learned the hard way.  I call them “founder’s talks” because that’s what we call them at the tech accelerator I created, Starter Studio.

Continue reading