A few years back I had the privilege of hanging out with Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and Square, while we were on a speaking tour in Canada. This guy is a machine. He’s running 2 x Billion dollar businesses with a combined employee count of over 5000… at the same time. So I figured a guy with a net worth of $5.7 Billion (yes… billion) might know a thing or two about leadership for scaling businesses. ...I was

As a high-performing founder, you’re confronted with TWO seemingly opposing forces. You need to travel (a lot) Your health and fitness are a vital part of your capacity to show up and do your best work So how do you reconcile this? How do you stay razor sharp (and fit) while sitting long hours on planes and scavenging for food in a place you’ve never been before?

Imagine this… Your SaaS company lands a massive account almost right out of the gates. They start using it. They have feedback… lots of it… almost too much of it. Your team takes it as gospel. Jotting it all down - committing on the spot - holding meetings about those new feature requests -- making plans to push them forward. Before you know it, they’re pretty much writing your entire roadmap for you. “All good” you say. They are, after

No matter how great your product is, at some point the success of your SaaS company is gonna be DIRECTLY linked to your personal productivity as a founder. Talk about pressure, right? I can totally relate. I built clarity.fm during an insane 11 month stretch where Renee was starting an agency of her own AND we brought two little humans into the world.

300K/year. That’s the magic revenue number that a super high-performing expert or entrepreneur can expect to reach on their own before they smash their head against the glass ceiling. Doesn’t matter if you have your alarm set at 4:30am. Doesn’t matter if you grind it out through nights and weekends. Doesn’t matter if you throw down a bunch of brain drugs with bad names while looping binaural beats through your headphones.

I’ll never forget this one employee I had just hired at clarity.fm His first few hours went super smooth. But then at exactly 4:59pm… the guy BOLTED. Laptop packed. Door shut. Making a beeline straight to the front door. My jaw literally dropped. Here was this guy I had just hired… someone who was still getting onboarded to our team, our clients, and our company…

Tell them what to do.   Check that’s been done. Tell them what to do next. Leadership 101 right there. A fine recipe if you want to run a mediocre company with eight or  ten B level players that constantly tap into your managerial bandwidth and cripple your capacity to achieve accelerated growth. An outdated paradigm for any SaaS founder with more ambitious plans to scale. For that SaaS founder, I offer a major upgrade from the “transactional leadership” approach.

We’ve all suffered through it. The end-of-year Zoom call where the fearless founder, likely fueled by a few craft beers, starts riffing off bold projections for the upcoming year. “We’re gonna crush it”   “We’re gonna change the game” “2x… 5x… 10x” You get the idea ;-) I’m all for setting ambitious goals, and have crazy amounts of respect for any founder audacious enough to pursue them.

You can have the best product in the world. The best plan in the world. And the best team in the world. But if *this* entrepreneurial beast rears its head in your life and business -- you’ll still risk having the entire thing burn to the ground with little to no warning. We’re talking about entrepreneurial burnout and overwhelm.

“How’s your company doing?” It’s a simple question. Yet one that freezes so many SaaS founders in their tracks. Why? They have no freakin’ clue how to answer it. Do you mean churn? Do you mean new leads? Do you mean expansion revenue?