Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

Ep 238 – Praxis CEO, Isaac Morehouse on How to Make Working With Friends Successful

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SIBP-Blog-NEW-4 Hello Success in Business Podcast listeners! Welcome to Episode 238.

Today Tom Ryan has invited onto our show an incredible entrepreneur, Isaac Morehouse for part 5 of our 5 part interview. Isaac has created a business named Praxis that provides intelligent and talented individuals with apprenticeship positions at startup companies. Praxis is an alternative to a traditional university experience, which is a welcome option for many who are daunted by expensive tuition and an ever-growing, post-graduation unemployment outlook.

Tom and Isaac discuss how to manage a startup with partners, friends and family and they share tips for maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Isaac works with a brother and close friend. Tom asks him how to manage that balance of those to realms of the relationship.

Isaac explains that you want to work with people who you actually like and would hang out with. Especially with a startup. Of course, he was wary of blending a friendship with a coworker relationship, but he came to learn that it was worth the risk. But that’s just his style. He tried to keep the boundaries blurry. He works from home sometimes and his life is very fluid. He’s cautious when he needs to be.

Tom Ryan makes sure to sit down with every new hire to set a good precedent of the friendly yet professional relationship, especially with new hires that are already friends. The friendship or familial relationship needs to come first and that means that if things are getting too tense, the working relationship needs to stop. Isaac Morehouse agrees. He would do whatever it took to keep a friendship secure. Similarly he would do whatever the business needed, even to the tune of stepping down as CEO. If he knew the company would do better with someone else as CEO he wouldn’t shy away from that.

When it comes to work/life balance Tom and Isaac both have experience balancing parenthood and working from home. Isaac takes a midday walk each day and he feels a little guilty stepping away from his desk sometimes, but it is really part of a healthy work day. It’s part of his creative process.

With so many demands on our time Isaac and Tom share one last golden piece of advice and that is to give your best energy to the people for whom you want to be a hero. Thanks for tuning in today. Have a great day!

Learn more about Praxis by clicking here.

To listen to Isaac Morehouse’s Podcast visit IsaacMorehouse.com

Tweet Tom at: @TomRyanAVL

Do you have a question about your business? Tom would love to help you:

Leave a voicemail: (801) 228-0663

E-mail your questions: SuccessInBusinessPodcast@gmail.com

Like this podcast on Facebook

Follow this podcast on Twitter: @TomRyanSIBP

Get every episode free: Subscribe in iTunes

Ep 237 – Praxis CEO, Isaac Morehouse on Selling to Your Very First Customer and How to Maintain Company Culture During Rapid Growth

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SIBP-Blog-NEW-4 Hello Success in Business Podcast listeners! Welcome to Episode 237. We are here for you every Monday to teach you about success in business and today is no different.

Today Tom Ryan has invited onto our show an incredible entrepreneur, Isaac Morehouse. Isaac has created a business named Praxis that provides intelligent and talented individuals with apprenticeship positions at startup companies. Praxis is an alternative to a traditional university experience, which is a welcome option for many who are daunted by expensive tuition and an ever-growing, post-graduation unemployment outlook.

Tom starts off by talking about finding alignment and selling with integrity. The best salespeople identify value for value and create that really strong partnership. There is a certain perception around sales, unfortunately, but sales is a transference of feeling.

With a startup at first, your company culture is just you and 4 other people, but then you have be work to create, or rather, strive to maintain that actual culture for your company.

Isaac shares how he got his very first customer by using real emotion and personal experience. As the business started to grow, they were happy to have new questions to face. For example, how to you scale? For him, building a functional sales funnel is harder than building a brand new product. But, he is sill building new systems and he has learned to find people who loves the parts he doesn’t love and that can be a real shot in the arm to any startup.

The truth is employers want to hire people with initiative and practical experience and in many fields a typical Bachelors degree simply does not mean that graduates are prepared for the workplace. Isaac has been able to see past our present expectations of a normal education and has partnered with many great startups to provide paid apprenticeships to students and give them a concentrated, powerhouse of an education!

Learn more about Praxis by clicking here.

To listen to Isaac Morehouse’s Podcast visit IsaacMorehouse.com

Tweet Tom at: @TomRyanAVL

Do you have a question about your business? Tom would love to help you:

Leave a voicemail: (801) 228-0663

E-mail your questions: SuccessInBusinessPodcast@gmail.com

Like this podcast on Facebook

Follow this podcast on Twitter: @TomRyanSIBP

Get every episode free: Subscribe in iTunes

Ep 236 – Praxis CEO, Isaac Morehouse on Career Exploration

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SIBP-Blog-NEW-4 Hello Success in Business Podcast listeners! Welcome to Episode 236. We are here for you every Monday to teach you about success in business and today is no different.

Today Tom Ryan has invited onto our show an incredible entrepreneur, Isaac Morehouse. Isaac has created a business named Praxis that provides intelligent and talented individuals with apprenticeship positions at startup companies. Praxis is an alternative to a traditional university experience, which is a welcome option for many who are daunted by expensive tuition and an ever-growing, post-graduation unemployment outlook.

When Isaac talks to parents about their children doing a Praxis apprenticeship he still picks up on the reluctance of that generation to miss out on college, even though they know full well that graduates aren’t getting hired. He reminds them that it’s not about pro-college or anti-college; it’s about pro-your child succeeding.

He compares it to a pick-up truck. In some cases pick-up trucks are a good investment and in some cases they aren’t. It depends on your situation. If you are planning to become a doctor or a lawyer, then you are still going to need credentials and licenses and college, frankly. But, if you are looking into marketing, sales or programing and you can do the work, then Praxis can get you there.

People are more likely to be interested in design and marketing than they are to interested in sales. Not many people say that they want to go into sales. Yet, many jobs in marketing look a lot like number crunching all day.

Growing up, kids think that their career choices are pretty much astronaut, fire fighter, business person. So many people end up in sales! And even if they wouldn’t officially consider themselves a salesperson, they are better at what they do because of their background in sales.

The truth is employers want to hire people with initiative and practical experience and in many fields a typical Bachelors degree simply does not mean that graduates are prepared for the workplace. Isaac has been able to see past our present expectations of a normal education and has partnered with many great startups to provide paid apprenticeships to students and give them a concentrated, powerhouse of an education!

Learn more about Praxis by clicking here.

To listen to Isaac Morehouse’s Podcast visit IsaacMorehouse.com

Tweet Tom at: @TomRyanAVL

Do you have a question about your business? Tom would love to help you:

Leave a voicemail: (801) 228-0663

E-mail your questions: SuccessInBusinessPodcast@gmail.com

Like this podcast on Facebook

Follow this podcast on Twitter: @TomRyanSIBP

Get every episode free: Subscribe in iTunes

Ep 235 – Praxis CEO Isaac Morehouse on Finding the Crucial Pivot to get From Pre Product/Market fit and Post Product/Market fit

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SIBP-Blog-NEW-4 Hello Success in Business Podcast listeners! Welcome to Episode 235. We are here for you every Monday to teach you about succeeding in business and today is no different.

Today Tom Ryan continues his interview with an incredible entrepreneur, Isaac Morehouse. Isaac has created a business named Praxis that provides intelligent and talented individuals with apprenticeship positions at startup companies. Praxis is an alternative to a traditional university experience, which is a welcome option for many who are daunted by expensive tuition and an ever-growing, post-graduation unemployment outlook.

With reference to entrepreneurship, every startup has two phases: Pre-product market fit and post-product market fit. And once you get to phase two everything goes from push to pull. For the first two years with Praxis, it was so much work to get rolling. Then a crucial pivot gave them real momentum.

What did they do? They shifted the structure of the model to include a three-month-long bootcamp when students come into the program, before the six-month-long apprenticeship. They also added a guarantee that the participants would get hired upon graduation. He knew that the students would perform better if they had that confidence going in.

Generation X watched their parents graduate from college and achieve more than their grandparents were able to achieve. Millennials seem to have had a different experience. They have watched as people around them have graduated from college and then had to move back into their parents’ basement. So, Millennials aren’t as married to the idea of going to college.

Praxis has a net zero cost. What you earn at your apprenticeship covers your tuition. More and more people are starting to realize that the traditional educational paradigm is broken. It is 100 years old and it was designed for more of a manufacturing scenario. There has been no real substantial innovation.

He compares this to his experience working in government and how seeing what goes on behind the scenes is less than great. Politics is not the leading edge of change but rather, the lagging indicator. He wants to make a real improvement in education.

With Praxis, Isaac didn’t want it to be a not-for-profit model because he wants his apprentices to be able to tell them what they want and need to get out of the program. Look at healthcare. The person paying is not the person receiving the service, so there is no accountability.

Tom and Isaac discuss the cultural conditioning surrounding a college degree and the inherent failures of that construct. They analyze the pros and cons of a standard college education and a Praxis apprenticeship.

The truth is employers want to hire people with initiative and practical experience and in many fields a typical Bachelors degree simply does not mean that graduates are prepared for the workplace. Isaac has been able to see past our present expectations of a normal education and has partnered with many great startups to provide paid apprenticeships to students and give them a concentrated, powerhouse of an education!

Learn more about Praxis by clicking here.

To listen to Isaac Morehouse’s Podcast visit IsaacMorehouse.com

Tweet Tom at: @TomRyanAVL

Do you have a question about your business? Tom would love to help you:

Leave a voicemail: (801) 228-0663

E-mail your questions: SuccessInBusinessPodcast@gmail.com

Like this podcast on Facebook

Follow this podcast on Twitter: @TomRyanSIBP

Get every episode free: Subscribe in iTunes

Ep 234 – Praxis CEO, Isaac Morehouse on Apprenticeship: Going From Student to Startup in Nine Months

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SIBP-Blog-NEW-4 Hello Success in Business Podcast listeners! Today we are bringing you episode 234. We are here for you every Monday to teach you about success in business and today is no different.

Today Tom Ryan has invited onto our show an incredible entrepreneur, Isaac Morehouse. Isaac has created a business named Praxis that provides students with apprenticeship positions at startup companies. Praxis is an alternative to a traditional university experience, which is a welcome option for many who are daunted by expensive tuition and an ever-growing, post-graduation unemployment outlook.

The philosophy that has guided Isaac through his career is wanting to help people come alive and be free from whatever is holding them back, whether that is internal or external.

For a decade he focused on career mentorship and then he became very successful doing fundraising. As often happens for entrepreneurs, he became anxious to try something new. Isaac started to develop his new idea which as bridging the connectivity gap. He noticed there were lots of unemployed people with a degree and significant debt, and there were also lots of companies who want to hire but can’t find good talent.

Students sit in class for years and just hoping that what they learn will be what some company is looking for. He thought, “Why not do an apprenticeship?” He wanted to help students develop their personal brand.

It seemed crazy to try to turn his idea into a business at that time. He was accustomed to making a comfortable living at that time, so it was a lifestyle change and a sacrifice to engage in a startup at that point. But, he was passionate about his idea to help people go from student to startup in 9 months.

Aside from solving the connectivity gap, he noticed other problems with a traditional college degree. There are some missing skills that needed to be taught in order for graduates be prepared to enter the workplace.

At Praxis they teach skills, sure, but they also teach students to think, “How can I create value at this company?” They de-school their apprentices from a permission-seeking-mindset or a rule-following-mindset to a value-creating-mindset.

In the computer programing world, for example, the degree doesn’t matter very much. The startup-mindset way of hiring is the way the world is going. Think of yourself as a business: “me-inc.” See yourself as your own product and be in the startup context to see what that means so you don’t get stuck thinking that you just work a job.

The truth is that employers want to hire people with initiative and practical experience and in many fields a typical Bachelors degree simply does not mean that graduates are prepared for the workplace. Isaac has been able to see past our present expectations of a normal education and has partnered with many great startups to provide paid apprenticeships to students and give them a concentrated, powerhouse of an education!

Learn more about Praxis by clicking here.

To listen to Isaac Morehouse’s Podcast visit IsaacMorehouse.com

Tweet Tom at: @TomRyanAVL

Do you have a question about your business? Tom would love to help you:

Leave a voicemail: (801) 228-0663

E-mail your questions: SuccessInBusinessPodcast@gmail.com

Like this podcast on Facebook

Follow this podcast on Twitter: @TomRyanSIBP

Get every episode free: Subscribe in iTunes

Ep. 225 – Keeping Up With Your Company’s Growth With Levi Morehouse

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SIBP-Blog-NEW-4 Welcome to Episode 225 of the Success in Business Podcast, your host Tom Ryan and producer Jason Pyles pick up where they left off with part 3 of 3 of their conversation with guest Levi Morehouse founder and CEO of Ceterus. Ceterus an Inc. 5,000 Fastest Growing Company. You build your business. They’ll do your books.

Levi shares how he has turned his bookkeeping company into an incredible business consultant service, too because they can advice their clients so well, knowing their industry and market on a deeper level. When they acquire and begin to specialize in a new niche it takes a little bit of time for Ceterus to ramp up and that is how they can truly claim that they are proficient in that space. When the customers are really engaged, the process can be accelerated. Smart operators in that business can provide insights into the true drivers of the business and the financial markers that matter.

Ceterus has found a few niches in working with quick service and full service restaurants; health, wellness and beauty franchises like Massage Envy. They choose to stick strictly to their niches so they can only offer services that are truly the best services available.

46% of small business failure is due to are due to mismanaged book keeping or not understanding financial reporting. The biggest mistake that business owners make is that they do not have a current understanding of their financial health.

Thanks for listening!

You can hear more from Roy Morejon by checking out his podcast:The Art of the Kickstart.

Tweet Tom at: @TomRyanAVL

Do you have a question about your business? Tom would love to help you:

Leave a voicemail: (801) 228-0663

E-mail your questions: SuccessInBusinessPodcast@gmail.com

Like this podcast on Facebook

Follow this podcast on Twitter: @TomRyanSIBP

Get every episode free: Subscribe in iTunes

Ep. 224 – The Challenge of Letting Good Customers Go With Levi Morehouse

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SIBP-Blog-NEW-4 Welcome to Episode 224 of the Success in Business Podcast, today your host Tom Ryan and producer Jason Pyles pick up where they left off with part 2 of 3 of their conversation with guest Levi Morehouse founder and CEO of Ceterus. Ceterus an Inc. 5,000 Fastest Growing Company. You build your business. They’ll do your books.

Levi shares how he has turned his bookkeeping company into an incredible business consultant service, too because they can advice their clients so well, knowing their industry and market on a deeper level. When they acquire and begin to specialize in a new niche it takes a little bit of time for Ceterus to ramp up and that is how they can truly claim that they are proficient in that space. When the customers are really engaged, the process can be accelerated. Smart operators in that business can provide insights into the true drivers of the business and the financial markers that matter.

Ceterus has found a few niches in working with quick service and full service restaurants; health, wellness and beauty franchises like Massage Envy. They choose to stick strictly to their niches so they can only offer services that are truly the best services available.

46% of small business failure is due to are due to mismanaged book keeping or not understanding financial reporting. The biggest mistake that business owners make is that they do not have a current understanding of their financial health.

Thanks for listening!

You can watch some testimonials from Ceterus customers here.

You can follow Ceterus on Facebook here.

You can follow Ceterus on Twitter here.

You can catch up with Ceterus on LinkedIn here.

Tweet Tom at: @TomRyanAVL

Do you have a question about your business? Tom would love to help you:

Leave a voicemail: (801) 228-0663

E-mail your questions: SuccessInBusinessPodcast@gmail.com

Like this podcast on Facebook

Follow this podcast on Twitter: @TomRyanSIBP

Get every episode free: Subscribe in iTunes

Ep. 221 – Maintaining a Strong Company Culture With Jason Diediker of Business Promotion

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Welcome to Episode 221 of the Success in Business Podcast. In this two-part show, your host Tom Ryan is joined by producer Jason Pyles and the general manager of the producer’s day job, Jason Diediker of Business Promotion, an Inc. 5000 digital marketing company.

In this episode, Jason D. provides a brief history of Business Promotion, which launched during the precarious economy of 2008. Jason explains his background in business and his climb up through the ranks at Business Promotion. Tom asks Jason to describe how his company weathered the storm of the Recession during BP’s early years as a brand new startup. Jason also explains how running his own business has informed his role as the general manager of Business Promotion. Tom asks Jason to discuss some of the more challenging aspects of his day-to-day duties and striking the balance between the company’s “promise-makers” (Sales) and its “promise-keepers” (Fulfillment). You can hear part 2 of this interview next week. Thanks for listening!

Watch the Business Promotion intro video. Continue reading →

Ep. 203 – What You Must Know Before You Work With a Startup, Part 2

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SIBP-Blog-NEW-3By their very nature, startups are risky. For every handful that succeed, breaking out on their own terms or surviving until an exit deal, dozens will run out of cash and go under. When you’re thinking about leaving a steady, reliable corporate job for a position in the high-risk, high-reward startup world, you need to know exactly what you’re getting into. That means turning the tables during the job interview, and getting some hard facts about how the company is doing financially.

In this week’s episode, host and business coach Tom talks about the important questions about finances and company culture that every startup job candidate needs to be ready to ask. As always, Tom is joined by co-host and producer Jason Pyles.

• Show opening, and recap of the last show

• When startups pull talent from the corporate world (1:30)

• Recap of steps for determining startup fit (4:00)

• Financial security in early-stage companies is never guaranteed (7:00)

• Questions for determining the startup’s fit for your needs (9:00)

  • Are you cash-flow positive today?
  • How long have you been cash-flow positive?
  • How will my compensation effect your cash flow?
  • How much funding have you raised, and who did it come from?
  • How much cash do you have on hand today?
  • What is your current cash burn?
  • What are yours plans for managing a financial dry spell?

• Why these questions matter, why they feel uncomfortable, and why it’s absolutely vital to get a real answer to them from the startup (23:30)

• “If you’re really uncomfortable asking any of these questions … don’t do this, because it’s going to tear you up.” (26:30)

• The real risks of leaving an established company for a startup (27:30)

• Why financial questions are fair-game questions to ask (28:30)

• Other big questions to ask the startup (30:00)

  1. What are the opportunities for compensation and financial gain beyond salary? (Stock options, earned equity)
  2. How high of a priority do you place on providing freedom and flexibility to employees?
  3. How do you keep your teams intellectually and professionally challenged?

• Putting it all together, and determining your fit with the startup (32:00)

• Looking for the obvious mis-alignments (33:00)

• Why good startups want to be asked thoughtful questions by job candidates (34:30)

• Sign off, and how to contact the show

• Call for horror-story hiring questions from listeners

Ep. 202 – What You Must Know Before You Work With a Startup, Part 1

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SIBP-Blog-NEW-2Working at a big corporation is always a tradeoff. A large company can do more than simply provide a stable paycheck, it can promise a degree of security and consistency. When the opportunity comes along to roll the dice with your career and take a job with a startup, it’s not always easy to see the tradeoffs.The freedom, flexibility and opportunities that come with working for a smaller, leaner company come with an inherent risk of pivoting, layoffs, long-hours, endless stress and complete failure should things go badly for the business.

In this week’s episode, host and business coach Tom talks about a recent experience guiding his corporate lifestyle-loving friend through the promise and perils of taking a job with a startup. As always, Tom is joined by co-host and producer Jason Pyles. Continue reading →