This is a talk I gave at the Entrepreneur 360 Conference.
Before I started my company, I had zero experience with leadership. I’d never even managed a single person. So, it was a long journey filled with lots of mistakes. I learned leadership the hard way.
Today, I’m going to share with you the biggest secret I learned about leadership.
Leadership has nothing to do with what you see in the movies. I don’t know about you, but I am no Jon Snow. In real life, leadership is about three things. First, you need to have the courage to sit in a room by yourself and make tough decisions. Second, you need to be well prepared to achieve your desired outcome. Lastly, you must have the determination to follow through on those decisions.
So, leadership is really about decisiveness, preparation and determination. Once you decide on a path and have a relentless determination to follow it, something magical happens; people rally around you. You become a leader.
Let me tell you a story where leadership made a big difference for us.
Last year, one of our major competitors, a multi-billion dollar Silicon Valley goliath, announced that they were retiring their popular online form creation product. When they made their announcement, they gave their users only six months to find another solution. That may sound like a lot of time, but many of their customers had used them to create hundreds of online forms, and received thousands of form responses. Re-creating that many forms in only six months would require effort and resources that many small businesses simply couldn’t afford.
Over the following weekend, I thought about the problem, and I made a decision. Instead of going about business as usual, we were…