John Bradberry, M.A.
What drives venture performance?
In 2007, I set out to answer this question. I gave up my large corporate clients to work exclusively with early-stage companies in which I took an ownership stake. I had solid experience to draw upon—having launched my own successful consulting business; having helped a favorite client turn a blank sheet of paper into a $100 million company; and having worked to improve the performance of scores of management teams and a thousand business leaders over two decades.
For several years, I immersed myself in the world of early-phase ventures. I developed a model for venture success and committed to write a book on the subject. Along the way, I conducted 55 hours of interviews, reviewed 51 books, absorbed 83 research papers, and inhaled over 500 online blogs, websites, and magazines—all while investing in, and advising, new founding teams in a real-time learning laboratory.
As I observed and studied the entrepreneurial process, I noticed that the “secrets” of startup success were not so secret, and not very hard to grasp. The fundamentals that distinguish healthy ventures—principles such as prepare yourself as a founder, understand your market, know your numbers, and execute with focus and flexibility—are well understood by business owners all over the world. But for some reason, new founders often overlook one or more of the basics, severely undercutting their odds of success.
In time, I came to understand that the legendary passion that drives and energizes so many founders is the very thing that also leads many of them astray. Complicating the challenge of launching a new business is the widespread clutter and noise that aspiring entrepreneurs find in the entrepreneurial media — hype-driven books, web sites, blogs, magazines and motivational speakers — all proclaiming you can do it, do it this way, and do it now!
So, the purpose of this blog — and our broader research and consulting work at Ready Founder Services — is to provide aspiring and early-stage entrepreneurs with objective information and ideas on which to build a rock-solid foundation for their new venture. Our goal is to radically improve venture success rates, and this blog is designed as an ongoing learning hub to promote the achievement of that goal.
John Bradberry: Full Bio