It’s widely known in our little community that we attended #INBOUND15 this past week in Boston.
To say it was an amazing week would be a big understatement. It was effin awesome. (sorry had to drop an F bomb there…PG style).
But seriously, it was. What I expected from the conference was to have a better understanding on what I wanted to do as a company when it came to our own INBOUND strategy. What I came away with was much more.
Our marketing coordinator did focus on the more tactical side of our inbound strategy, while I spent a ton of time in the Executive Track learning new skills on growth and development. I loved it!
This is a big one for me since I have always preached to not let your vision get in the way of making money. I have seen many companies fail because they are so married to their vision that they don’t see that the actual business model is broken.
So for me, now that I am the business, I am looking at my own business model. I learned that if your vision and revenue opportunity are in line, you shouldn’t let much get in your way. For us, our vision is to be a leader in high quality content, to be humans, not robots who help you get amazing content over and over again. If my vision wasn’t going to make money, I would probably revisit that vision. In our case, it does, so we are committing to it 100%.
This may have been my favorite take-away. I heard Brene Brown say this in her TED talk a while ago and was really happy when she made a little reference to it at INBOUND15. What this line means to me is profound. I am lucky, I have mostly supportive people in my circle. I think that is by design, I know that I have created a circle of supporters, but every now and again, a jerk slips past me. It was to those individuals that I really wanted to say, “Keep your shit to yourself”. If you aren’t out there killing it every day and hustling your ass off to make something happen, do not tell me how I should do things. I always welcome ideas, don’t get me wrong, but ideas are not a contract between me and the one giving the idea. I can hear it, but for me to really trust someone’s idea, I need some proof that they get “it”. They have done it and are still doing it.
This is the one that will totally change the course for how we build our team moving forward. I have worked in some mid-sized agencies in my day. There is always one individual who is a cultural cancer…always! The challenge is to know who that person is and to get rid of them, fast. Cameron Herald did the session on growing a World Class Company. It truly changed my mindset on how I am going to keep doing this. He referenced a video that showed one man on the lawn at a concert dancing…the Coles notes on it was that eventually, he had all the other people dancing with him…I think the number he threw out was 45,000(not totally sure on that one- but it was a lot of people!). So what does that mean? It means that the team you have or the team you build has to “buy in”. You need to be able to get them all dancing. If they don’t, they need to leave and find something they do buy into. They will be happier and so will your company.
I loved my time at INBOUND15, so much so that, we are going to be sponsoring a booth next year. We believe in what Hubspot is about. What a great opportunity we have ahead!
Until next time,
Cara
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