Robbie Kellman Baxter is the author of The Forever Transaction and The Membership Economy. She is a speaker, and consultant with more than twenty years of experience providing strategic business advice to major organizations including Netflix, Consumer Reports and LinkedIn. Her company Peninsula Strategies has advised over 100 organizations on subscription and growth strategy.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
- Susan Wojcicki CEO of YouTube
- Alan Weiss
When business started difficulties overcame:
“not having an infrastructure and not having colleagues. I had always worked in companies that had IT departments and HR and my desk was cleaned every weekend and if my computer wasn’t working then somebody would replace it. And then suddenly all of that administrivia fell on me. So that was also hard. And then also selling yourself. My kind of entrepreneurship is about selling my expertise. So, I am not selling a widget, I am not saying this is a great whatever it is, a great mug, a great blouse, a great piece of software. I am saying I’m great, I have great ideas. And that is hard ”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t Book by Jeffery Pfeffer
- Free: The Future of a Radical Price book by Chris Anderson
Favourite Quote:
“culture eats strategy for breakfast”
Recommended Online Resources:
Subscription Insider – Learn how to build, market and sell subscription products … and grow a more profitable business. Subscriptions are unique, whether they are your only line-of-revenue or one of many. You’ll find the practical advice of dozens of experts who have ‘been there’ and ‘done that’.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“do it. If you have an idea… Actually, I would even say if you don’t have an idea… If you want to build something from the ground up I think there are a lot of entrepreneurial people or people who wish that they were entrepreneurial but say I don’t have that great idea to start the business, there are plenty of ideas out and that aren’t always great entrepreneurs to help build those businesses. So I would say if you have the bug go and give it a try and I would say, don’t put it off“…[Listen for More]
More About Robbie Kellman Baxter:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” Zig Ziglar
Other Quotes From the Chat with Robbie Kellman Baxter:
- “you can always make more money but you can’t make more time. So having control over the minutes of the day in some ways is the biggest symbol of wealth”
- “sometimes I say my biggest problem is that my boss can be a real jerk… The boss is me”
- “some of the things that I know now it’s kind of like I know it in my gut even though people told it to me in my mind. So, in other words sometimes even if you’ve heard the lesson you have to experience the lesson. It’s like you have to touch the stove to know it’s hot even though your mom tells you not to touch it. So, I don’t know I would have really shortcut it by doing anything differently. I think I would have taken the advice I received more to heart about having an ambitious vision and pushing toward it, being confident and investing more in the growth side of the business earlier on”
- “the secrets to success, one of them is having a thick skin, having confidence in your vision, taking advice from the right people but otherwise not letting everything that everyone else is doing distract you. Taking the path that is yours and remembering that it may not be a path that anyone else has walked on”
- “if you have a clear vision and it makes sense and you’ve thought about it, you’ve got logic, you’ve analysed, you’ve done research and you believe in your course I think it’s really tempting to kind of step off course for every shiny thing that distract your attention. And staying the course can be really important”
- “we all want to have more influence”
- “I think a lot about what is the logical next step? What is the way we are going to get from here to there? And for me to just remember that it’s the human side that often matters the most, it’s the relationships, it’s the norms, it’s people mirroring your behaviour that is going to drive whether or not my good ideas actually have the impact that I hoped for”
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