Andy started digging ditches with his father at age 14, working construction in a small town in Iowa…learning to value hard work and education early in life.

With lots of trial and error, he built and sold his first company at age 26. Realizing entrepreneurship has the power to change the world, Andy co-founded The Foundation with Dane Maxwell in 2012.

The Foundation teaches entrepreneurs how to start and scale software businesses from scratch, even if they have no experience in software.

The Foundation is a global entrepreneurial education company that has helped entrepreneurs from over 45 countries start businesses from nothing by focusing on the deep inner game of entrepreneurship.

Andy believes the world is a better place with more entrepreneurs in it, and he envisions a world where anyone who wants to start a business, has access to the right tools, resources, and community support to do so.

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Transcript

And it’s a really bad thing to have where if you try and launch something before you have systems and processes dialed in, what ends up happening is you just create a lot of chaos for yourself. And it ends up creating pain for your customers and more problems than solutions even though you get traction quickly. It’s a short term play versus long term.

So one is just having a solid product that you know works that can get results for people. If you don’t have that, you shouldn’t be focused on launching. You should be focusing on how do you deliver a better result to your customers. Make sense, so far?

Yeah, absolutely.

Then two, so say that you have, say, you’ve got the product. If you’re listening right now, and you’re like, we have something that is phenomenal, we just don’t know how to get it in the hands of enough people.

If you have a product, is truly unique and truly special, the next thing to be focusing on is what is the positioning of your product in the market. So if you look at across the market of your competitors, and you see what’s working out there, and what everybody else is doing, what is the positioning for you that is going to be a unique story or angle that’s going to separate you from everything else?

And this is, you know, it’s kind of textbook marketing. But what’s fascinating is that when people don’t do this, they launch and then they become just like everything else and they never escape. They never get out into the ethers, like we talked about and so you just become part of the noise that’s already happening online.

So a positioning done really well, is it kind of half the battle in business I find? Have you ever heard of Richard Koch? The guy who wrote the Star Principle or Simplify?

Personally, no. I haven’t.

So, he wrote this book called The Star Principle. And he made all of his money, he was investor. And he invested in a bunch of different for different companies. And he found that there were five companies that blew all of the other investments out of the way. And what he found was that they were stars. And he has a whole formula for stars, which is based off Boston Consulting Group in the 60s.

But one of the things he said is that their positioning in the market has carried them from the beginning. And he said once you establish positioning, most of the work in business is actually secondary as opposed to having that unique positioning or that unique story.