Techstars Startup Week and Artup Week Fort Collins 2020

I grew my business from a shared office space in the basement of an office building to a full natural health center with 6+ employees and 10 renters. Knowing which risks to take and then tweaking instead of freaking to make them work for you is what scaling up is all about.

Round Canoe Syndrome is a metaphor for a very serious condition that every organization has, or will have.  My favorite version happens when the sales leader, marketing leader, and product leader all get in a round canoe, grab a paddle, and start rowing.

Not addressed, Round Canoe Syndrome will be deadly to your company.

The presentation I give mimics content on WebMD.  It goes through symptoms of Round Canoe Syndrome, describes consequences of it going untreated, provides a self-diagnostic tool to know if you have it, and has prescriptions for curing it - before it's too late.

A few of the common symptoms:

• Low quality or low quantity deals
• Underwhelming product reception
• Stagnant revenue
• Too many meetings

You KNOW this is a serious issue and you've experienced it in your world - maybe even in your current company.  It needs to be addressed!  Come learn how.

This session is part of our ScaleUp program, with sessions focused on helping your business grow.

You can’t drive a ‘69 VW bug 300 miles per hour. It’s simply not designed for that kind of performance.
Is your business in a similar situation? Is it designed in a way that makes it possible to scale past $10M in annual revenue? Does it have the resources, capital, mission and talent to be able to sustain that growth? What needs to change in your business model, offerings, market positioning to achieve true scale? Are you creating enterprise value that will ultimately achieve your exit goals?

In this fireside chat, Silencia Cox, CEO of MotherLove and Allison Seabeck, former president of ProSci will talk about what they needed to do to position their businesses for scale.

Key takeaways from this session:

• Understand how to position your business for growth
• Evaluate the capacity of your current resources, capital, mission and talent
• Determine what remodeling will be needed to attain sustainable growth
• Ascertain the scalability of your idea and offering

This session is part of the ScaleUp program, with sessions designed to help your business grow.

Discipline across the organization is a foundational requirement for scale. If you can build a “franchise-able business” then you can establish the capacity for nearly unlimited growth. This is not to say that you need to establish franchises. It’s about having the operational maturity to build repeatable, reliable processes. This is not something that culture takes care of. If you don’t have discipline in your organization, it won’t achieve sustainable scale. Growth will be sporadic and inconsistent.

In this fireside chat, Michael Stus from Canidium and Betsy Craig from MenuTrinfo discuss how they established operational discipline in their organizations.

Key takeaways from this session:

• How to build reliable and repeatable processes.
• Establishing operational policies, procedures, measurement and feedback processes
• Making sure that your employees understand the requirements and can perform reliably

This session is part of our ScaleUp program, with sessions focused on helping your business grow.

The people side of your venture is more important than your product, strategy or funding. In fact, if you have the right team, you can overcome just about any other problem with your business model. But problems with team culture can jeopardize the best business idea, no matter how well it's positioned or funded.

So how do you recruit the right team from the very beginning, and how do you establish a high performance culture? What are the signs that you have a problem, and how do you fix it? When a company is in launch mode, everyone sprints. But as it grows and scales, the team has to learn to run a marathon. How do you build endurance into the team and culture to play the long game necessary for sustainable growth?

In this fireside chat, Candyce is joined by Julie Dubin, co-founder of No Barriers, Dan Holt, Co-Founder and CEO of BillGO and Larry Dolgin who founded and led The Feet, Inc. for 22 years before a successful exit in 2016. We'll talk about how these successful entrepreneurs built their teams and established a culture that enabled their businesses to scale past the first $1M and continue growing.

Key takeaways from this session:

• How to avoid having your growth limited by the capacity of the founders
• Finding employees and stakeholders who can endure the growth journey
• Why building a diverse team with the right mix of people can enable long term growth
• How to establish a high performance culture that also builds in safety and trust 
• Approaches for eliminating "group-think" and encouraging team contributions

This session is part of our ScaleUp program, with sessions focused on helping your business grow.

Chronic inconsistency in forecasting accuracy is a key reason why businesses fail. When you miss forecasts, you risk running through your capital without results. Of the firms TrueSpace followed in their research, 90% consistently over-estimated, over-projected, and failed to achieve sustained growth. To build a predictable business that can sustain consistent growth, you have to establish key performance indicators across the business and constantly test and improve the quality of your assumptions. If you build a measurement culture, you will increase the value of your company.

In this fireside chat, Mike Freeman, CEO of Innosphere, and JB Kellogg, Co-CEO of Madwire talk about the types of KPIs they track, how they used these to report on progress, and the impact on their businesses.

Key takeaways from this session:

• How to build a measurement culture
• Establishing key objectives for each aspect of the business
• Using feedback to improve the quality of your assumptions and the accuracy of forecasts

This session is part of our ScaleUp program, with sessions focused on helping your business grow.

One of the trickiest parts of scaling a business is managing cash flow and capital. More than 60% of business failures were actually profitable — they failed because they ran out of cash. Managing your working capital and cash flow is absolutely essential to your business survival. Cash flow management is necessary to avoid cash crunches that prevent you from paying suppliers, buying materials and paying salaries. The problems come when your revenue comes in after your payouts are due. So cash flow management is all about delaying outflows of cash as long as possible while encouraging customers to pay as quickly as possible.

In this fireside chat, we’ll hear from Zubaida Bai, CEO of Ayzh and Matt Bryson, CFO of MadWire, and Mike Blazes, CFO of BillGO, about challenges they’ve encountered and how they’ve learned to effectively manage their capital and cash flow.

Key takeaways for this session:

• Figure out the amount of working capital you need to fund operations
• Identify capital risks and prepare in advance
• Types of financing available to shore up shortfalls
• How to speed up receivables and delay payables

We'll use our LoCo Think Tank FLOATS (see acronym below) assessment as a workshop where people rank themselves 1-5 in each category during the 1st half of the session, followed by an expert panel for second half the session for active Q & A from attendees.  

This workshop and panel will help current business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs take a high level audit of their business standing, and help them pin point what areas to take action on. To get focused, actionable advice, we're bringing a panel of experts to answer questions attendees have identified.  This Q&A panel will be available to cover questions for each FLOATS category.

FLOATS is an acronym for:  

F: Financial performance & tracking systems
L: Leadership & team development
O: Opportunities & obsolescence
A: Administration & documented processes
T: Technology integration & risk mitigation
S: Sales, marketing systems & development

Scaling your business with a variety of funding sources

During this panel, you will hear about debt and equity financing options from both sides of the table. Our experts will drive an engaging discussion on how to leverage various funding options to scale your business at any stage. They will give you a clearer understanding of the types of financing options available and how to best navigate what type of financing is the best fit for you, while considering the stage of your business.

Panelists Include:
- Denny Otsuga, Director of Venture Community Development Fort Collins, Rockies Venture Club
- Mike O'Donnell, Executive Director, Colorado Lending Source