3 Key Learnings from Building a Business with Andrea Rice

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I am here today with Andrea Rice. Andrea was the president and co- founder of a business called CareerCore. She is Managing Director of one of Bolsters membership partners, an organization called MLT, Management and Leadership for Tomorrow. She's also on The Bolster's board of directors. So, she's my boss. Andrea, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Andrea Rice: Thanks for having me, Matt. Good to see you and looking forward to it.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. So one of the things that I really appreciated about you from the first time that you and I met, a couple of years ago now, was that you had started a business that was in and around people like we're doing at Bolster, and that you were one of the people that ran it for almost a dozen years. And when we talk about our mission at Bolster, it's around helping entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses. And anyone that's been in a business for 10-12 years has learned lots of lessons along the way. So the question that I had for you today is, by the time you finished your 10-11 years at CareerCore, what were a few of the things that you knew then that you wish you had known when you started it?

Andrea Rice: That is a very good question. It was a long time running CareerCore so there were lots of lessons learned along the way and enough success that we could last as long as we did. But a couple of things that jump out to me. So one is to embrace the fact that you will need to pivot. No matter how thorough your research and modeling and planning was for your original business, you'll be wrong.

Matt Blumberg: The only thing you know is that it's wrong.

Andrea Rice: Yeah, exactly. Like way wrong. And we needed to make major pivots multiple times. It's easy to stick with your original concept for longer than you should because that concept makes sense. It made sense to us. It seemed like it should work. We started as a B2C, and we eventually realized our better opportunity was B2B, and that was just one of multiple major pivots that we needed to make.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Number one, embrace the pivot.

Andrea Rice: Embrace the pivot.

Matt Blumberg: Pre- embrace the pivot.

Andrea Rice: Yes, pre- embrace. Just recognize it. And that gets me to my second point, which is like, " How do you know if you're on the right track?" And we were constantly asking ourselves this question because everyone knows that if you're going to fail, you want to fail quickly, so that you have more runway to pivot, right?

Matt Blumberg: Right.

Andrea Rice: So the second point is to really be intentional about defining success. You can spend a lot of time, burn through a lot of cash in this gray area where you're having some success, but not enough to definitively or comfortably prove the model or product is right. So how do you figure out when you're in that gray area? And so, for us, what we eventually figured out we really needed to do is to be really disciplined, despite the fact that as an entrepreneur you're wearing multiple hats every day, especially in those early and growth stages. It's critically important to be super intentional about what would justify continuing on the same course or merit a change. And not just for the major variables like your business model or who's your customer, but for smaller things too, like how you talk about your business or how much information you have on a page. You have to be clear at all times with the experiments that you're running about what signals stay the course versus make big or small adjustments. So being really clear about, " What are we looking for?" And if we hit that, " Okay, we've proven something." And if not, you need to make a change.

Matt Blumberg: Number one is pre- embrace the pivot because you're going to have one. Number two is make sure you set out some markers so that you know when you need to do a pivot and, I'm sensing a theme here, what's number three?

Andrea Rice: Well, so number three is a little bit of a different direction, and I think we kind of got this one right, but I really realized it later on, is to not make big bets on marketing or development, website development in our case, until you have some confidence about what you need. We ended up outsourcing our development to a group in Ukraine, actually, and it was a lot less expensive than doing it in the US, but in those early days, we were still learning and we needed to figure out what did that experience need to look like, what kind of functionality did we really need? And so, we were able to learn inexpensively and ultimately able to trust this group to build out the more mature platform. But it would've been very easy to have burned through a lot of money really early on with something that wasn't going to work. So sometimes you get what you pay for, but you need to know what you need and where it makes sense to spend your dollars.

Matt Blumberg: It's a great point, and particularly around marketing. As they always say, " Nothing kills a great..." What is it? Nothing kills a bad product like great marketing or something like that. If you're not ready for it will really, really injure you.

Andrea Rice: Right.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Three great points around lessons learned in scaling a business. Andrea Rice from MLT. Thank you so much.

Andrea Rice: Thanks Matt.