Week 3 - Ascend your Startup

 Having a solid, logical business plan when moving product to market is an essential piece of the pie chart of success.  As it has with other preparatory actions, Ascend your Startup maps an approach to such a problem set.  It’s absolutely critical to nail product roll-out, since attracting consumers or clients is the core source of revenue in any business.  Both the initial startup and operational growth present friction points that new businesses need to be prepared to deal with.



A central theme of chapter 3 revolves around how your startup needs to leverage sector experience when executing these activities.  Industry veterans have the “on-the-job” know how that can’t be fully expressed through academia.  Establishing a strong support network that can critically evaluate strategy and decisions can pay dividends and can spell the difference between a successful startup and another lesson in failure.


The book describes four types of leaders you absolutely need to incorporate into your product-market strategy: the thought leader, the challenger, collaborator, and the operator.  While this is a bit different than other leadership theories I’ve studied (think authoritarian, participative, delegative, etc), this series is much more correlative to business culture.  Mind you, these types of leaders aren’t exclusive – someone can be both a thought leader and a challenger.  The point is, you need a great, collaborative and honest team that is genuinely interested in contributing to success.  Your organization’s leadership needs to stay flexible and be creative/innovative (thought), involve all specialties in the decision-making processes, have deliberate execution plans, and critically evaluate every step and every plan.

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