Yep, I’m talking to you. The “idea stealer” and “company copier”.
Let’s be honest. You haven’t had an original idea since 2016.
You constantly look to others for inspiration.
You copy. You steal. You iterate on other innovations.
You are a Non-Visionary CEO.
You’re not Elon. You’re not Gates. You’re definitely not Jobs.
And that’s perfectly okay.
Hi, I’m Jim and I am a Non-Visionary CEO.
I hate being called CEO. I feel like a fraud.
But, that’s the title I have because I copied it from everyone else that also started a business. Remember . . . I’m a non-visionary CEO with no original ideas.
My entire business model and strategy is stolen from others.
I’ll even give credit to them.
How I Found My Market: Following a Movement
As a non-technical person working with startups, I saw the role of “Growth Hacker” start to trend (thanks Sean Ellis and Andrew Chen) and went deep into learning more. Then I turned that momentum from others into a consultancy.
How I Run My Business: I Steal, I Copy, and I Remix
My entire operation is based on what other consultancies have done. Seriously, my operation is run by using OKRs and the book Scaling Up. Then I got the agency playbook from GrowthComet. Copy. Paste. Go.
How I Position My Company: Not Better, Just Different
Instead of trying to be better, I decided to be different by going super niche and focused. Specializing in on-site growth experiments for high growth startups that do ecommerce, SaaS and lead gen companies. We help optimize their funnel so they can grow. It’s called CRO (conversion rate optimization) and it’s not new. We just do it for high-growth companies and layer in our knowledge of growth marketing. Not new. Just different.
How I Plan Our Future: Yup, I Stole that!
At Growthhit, we’re building a startup lab where we incubate ideas and then put our growth team on them to validate if there is a business there. This is innovative, right? No, because I saw Andrew Wilkerson doing that at Meta Labs. And we stole the idea of product validation from the team at Pioneer Square Labs. Yup, still not innovating.
TLDR: No original ideas.
But, that’s okay. The not-so-glamorous truth about running a company is that it’s not about a grand vision. You can steal that. (See above.) It’s about execution.
Vision won’t break you but not executing will.
To be great at execution, it requires relentless focus on getting sh*t done. No matter what’s in your way.
An innovative strategy alone won’t help you avoid failure but not executing will guarantee it. So while I am not a visionary CEO, I lean in the camp of the relentless CEO.
The Relentless CEO
The relentless CEO isn’t in the headlines. The relentless CEO gets the bottom line and they show up every single day. It’s not sexy. Actually, it’s hard and boring at times. But, that’s what’s necessary when trying to create something out of nothing.
This is the leader that embraces accountability and sweats the small sh*t that matters. The one that’ll make the cross country flight to close a client or drops everything to overhaul an issue in the warehouse.
So just because you have the self appointed title of CEO doesn’t mean you should put on a turtleneck and talk about changing the world.
You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room.
You just need to be the most relentless one.