4 Business Lessons from Learning to Surf

I began writing this post as my “2023 year in review” with just business learnings, but realized I’ve learned a ton this year outside of my professional life, and the two are highly connected. Plus, I love analogies – ask the Seismic marketing team about my presentation pairing newly launched products with wines.

For me, 2023 was a year of taking measured risks. I teamed up with my former colleague, Rob Stella, to found Industry GTM. While the business was still ramping up, I used my free time to learn how to surf in Costa Rica. 

So here are 4 of my 2023 business learnings told through the lens of surfing.

Take Time to Read the Ocean

It takes years to become an experienced surfer. They can look out over the water and tell you:

• When the waves are coming
• Which ones are worth chasing
• How to position yourself to catch one at it’s peak

Without these skills, a surfer spends too much energy chasing a wave they can’t catch. This only needed to happen to me once before I quickly learned the importance of reading the ocean.

When Rob and I started Industry GTM, we misread the ocean, pivoted, and ultimately caught the right wave.

The first “wave” we saw and decided to chase was educating people on how to run a successful industry go-to-market motion. We started by posting a short guide on the topic on Linkedin.

The post drove hundreds of people to our hastily set up landing page, and almost 100 people traded their email addresses for access to our guide. We were blown away! We took away that people wanted to learn how to run an industry go-to-market strategy, which lead us to believe sharing our expertise via a course was the “wave” to position ourselves towards. This looked like a great wave.

We picked a date, a price, structure, and started promoting the course – we posted on LinkedIn, cold DMed people, sent it out to all the people who downloaded our guide, and….crickets. We didn’t get a single sign-up. Why?

Most of these people barely knew us! They weren’t ready to request budget to join a course…yet. 

Around this time, another wave appeared on the horizon. I was talking to Jam Khan from 6sense, and he said his team could use some hands-on help with their Financial Services GTM. This looked like a wave we could catch. We scoped out a project that met his needs and BOOM, Industry GTM had our first client – and we’re still working with them today.

Successfully Riding a Wave Requires Multiple, Unique Skills

The mechanics of paddling, a pop-up, turning, and riding the wave are all very different skills, but all important and required to successfully ride a wave.

Likewise, operating a business demands versatility; you need to handle sales, marketing, customer success, finance, and product to be successful.

Rob and I are both knowledgeable about SaaS Marketing, but now (on a small scale), we have to handle all the functions of our business. Here are just a few mistakes and learnings I made in my new roles.

• Delayed revenue collection because I didn’t set the appropriate terms in the contract or understand the client’s payment processes.
• Spent way too much time chasing opportunities that never turned into business
• Allowed significant scope creep on projects
• Hardly did any marketing (e.g. LinkedIn posts, emails to our community, creating assets to help our community)

Just like with surfing, I’ve improved each of these a bit, and am excited to double down on all of them this year.

Pick Your Waves Wisely

If you go for every wave, you’ll have some bad ones and tire yourself out. If you’re strategic, you’ll be able to stay out on the water longer and have a more enjoyable session.

Due to the nature of our business, within reason, we get to be a little choosy about who we work with. I’ve been fortunate to work with some of my absolute favorite former colleagues and friends – people I didn’t think I’d get to work with again. 

We’ve also brought in a few external consultants onto projects (also former colleagues) that, again, allow us to choose who we work with. 

By working with people we respect and like, the job is more enjoyable and we learn way more. 

It’s not worth chasing every opportunity. Work with people that help you learn and give you energy.

It’s a Falling Sport – There’s Always More to Learn

In surfing, no matter what, you always fall…more spectacularly if you’re just learning like me. You learn by doing and recalibrate for your next wave. 

I fell a lot in 2023 both in surfing and in my business life, but some of that falling (and some of the successes) spurred ideas for how to improve the overall business. So for 2024, here are the waves we’re going after.

1. Keep doing the consulting work we love: helping B2B SaaS companies like 6sense, Clari, and Responsive build and hone their Financial Services GTM strategy. I feel like we’re hitting our stride in terms of repeatable projects, consistent execution process, and ability to deliver value for our clients. Early on, we thought we’d want to move into new business lines faster, but we’ve realized how much we learn from each project. 

2. Productize some offerings. To date, every project has been a scoped out statement of work or retainer. It takes (unpaid) time to scope these out, and inevitably a project will be mis-scoped. We believe there are a few areas where we can productize the offering. For example, we’re building multiple Financial Services Sales Playbooks – some managed in Seismic – for customers, and plan to standardize this offering.

3. Offer training and education directly to individual sales people. We’re usually hired by a marketing or enablement team, but in instances where individual industry-focused sellers want to up their game, we should be able to help  though 1:1 sessions, industry overview courses, or maybe something else. We’re going to start by building an audience of these folks and piloting products for them. If you’re interested, reach out!

More on Industry GTM

If you’ve read this far and gotten through my surfing analogies, you may be interested in how the business is doing. Especially if you’re considering starting a business like this, here’s more on the story of how we got here and how we’re doing.

In January 2023, Rob and I started Industry GTM with a hypothesis: B2B SaaS companies are increasingly running industry- or vertical-focused go-to-market motions, especially in Financial Services, but don’t have the domain expertise or resources to be successful.

We also knew that our former employer, Seismic, is well known for successfully building a stellar business in Financial Services. We’re both fortunate to have played a small role in that success. 

We believed our experience at Seismic, knowledge of Financial Services, and skills from working at multiple startups made us uniquely qualified to help other companies break into the Financial Services industry.

And now, we ended the year with 5 consistent clients, over 100 people in our community, hundreds of thousands of dollars in pipeline influenced for our clients, and plenty of ideas for where we can take this business in 2024!