Joel Trammell is a pioneer in the field of CEO education as the CEO and Founder of Khorus Systems, a business management system that empowers CEOs to lead high-performance organizations. He’s also the owner of Texas CEO Magazine and currently serves as the CEO and Chairman at iGrafx.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
None specific
When business started difficulties overcame:
“when you start a business of course you think everything… You have this grand plan and you think everything is going to go wonderfully. And I really had very limited business experience when I started my first business. I had an engineering degree and I’d spent four years teaching nuclear power at the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-power school. So, my business experience was a couple of jobs selling fireworks when I was in high school that was about the extent of my business experience… We didn’t have a lot of capital unfortunately. I married a woman who had saved more money than I had so we had a little bit of capital to start with, that was helpful. But we ran into all of the issues of not knowing what we were doing but you learn by your failure”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Book by Ben HorowitzFavourite Quote:
“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
Recommended Online Resources:
Twitter – It’s what’s happening. From breaking news and entertainment to sports and politics, get the full story with all the live commentary.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“understand it’s a difficult journey, be prepared just like if you are going to run a marathon you know it’s going to be hard, you know mile 21 or 22 it’s going to be very difficult so you mentally prepare for that. I think assuming that an entrepreneurial journey is going to be easy and everything is going to go right will leave you set up for failure. So, understand it is a journey, it’s a marathon, it’s a long run, it’s not easy, there are going to be many times when you feel like you are facing a brick wall and you’ve got to figure out a way around, up, over, under that brick wall. And I think going in with that idea of persistence and understanding that if you don’t enjoy that journey, that part of it maybe you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur is critical to success”…[Listen for More]
More About Joel Trammell:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” Ayn Rand
Other Quotes From the Chat with Joel Trammell:
- “so, people talk about failures and I really look at it as is it a failure because you attacked one way when the wind was blowing that way at that time but now it’s changed and how fast can you adjust. So, I don’t really think of them as failures what I really judge is how quickly did I just back? Did I recognise that I was now sailing in the wrong direction and make an adjustment? ”
- “It’s interesting when you do multiple entrepreneurial endeavours…The challenge is you do new endeavours is because it’s not new and interesting sometimes you try to shortcut. And actually, you have to go through the journey. And so, I think that is the hardest part of doing the second and third one is you do try to shortcut. You know how the story goes and you just want to get through to the success part but you have to go through sometimes that years of trial and error to get to that success part. And so really, it’s really a case to me of not trying to shortcut per se, I don’t think you can in a lot of these endeavours, they can only happen so quickly but you have got to be patient with them”
- “to be a successful CEO the two big things I’ve observed. People that are very successful in the CEO role learn very quickly and can absorb a lot of data and act on it. So not just learning from an academic sense but they can integrate it into their business. And the second characteristic that I look for in great CEOs is a high level of self-awareness. They understand their strengths and weaknesses, they understand how they impact others, how when they say something is perceived by others, they understand that everybody is not the same as they are and that everyone needs to be treated the way they want to be treated…”
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