Kind Folks Finish First

Chapter 6Listen Closely, Act Quickly

This chapter is about things you need to understand to build a business. We go a little deep on the order of operations, the power of marketing, and how to think about growing a company. This book, after all, is a combination of principles you employ as a professional to access your objectives and succeed, and it's also about the steps I took embodying other principles in business design.

As we'll see, the core of both being a great professional and building a company are often the same. And it begins with listening closely.

With a two‐person HQ team, Revenue Collective continued to grow in 2019, using email as the primary communication tool. People would email questions and get answers with everyone on the chain.

This was, and still is, a pretty standard format for a community, and many communities employ different versions of this simple idea.

But as membership steadily grew around the world, we pivoted from email to Slack—and saw our growth explode. Nowadays, Slack is a very common community management tool, but back in 2019, it was a relatively new interface.

Where did this idea come from? Well, from our Members, of course. One of our longtime Members, and a good friend of mine, was a huge foodie and had worked with some of the best restaurant minds out there. He also happened to be a forward‐thinking technology enthusiast (his current role combines these two loves). He kept calling me and basically yelled at me to move Revenue Collective ...