#1: Chelsea Curtis, Founder & Managing Partner | Seaport Consulting

What's covered in this episode:
In this episode, Scott interviews Chelsea Curtis, former LPGA developmental tour golfer turned founder of Seaport Consulting, a successful Salesforce consulting firm headquartered in Boston, MA. Chelsea shares her path to entrepreneurship, discussing the challenges and triumphs she encountered along the way. She highlights the importance of taking risks, building strong client relationships, and sticking to her values. Chelsea also provides valuable insights into the hiring process and the significance of investing in technology for business growth. Whether you're a founder or aspiring entrepreneur, this episode offers valuable lessons and inspiration for building a thriving company.

About Chelsea:
Chelsea is a four-time certified Salesforce professional with over 10 years of experience consulting, implementing, and supporting the Salesforce platform. As Managing Partner, Chelsea oversees all aspects of the business and directly manages the consulting team. Prior to founding Seaport Consulting, Chelsea worked as a technical project manager who successfully led a company-wide Salesforce implementation, and played golf professionally on the LPGA Futures Tour. In addition to leading Seaport, Chelsea sits on the board of Mass Golf, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that is dedicated to advancing golf in Massachusetts, and serves as the chair for their diversity, equity, and inclusion committee.

About Seaport Consulting:
Seaport Consulting is a Boston-based consulting firm who helps companies implement, integrate, and enhance Salesforce. Seaport's approach marries your goals, your people, and your processes with a customized Salesforce solution that's right for you. To learn more, visit seaportconsulting.com.

Creators & Guests

Host

Scott Hollrah

Founder & CEO of Venn Technology

Guest

Chelsea Curtis

Founder, Seaport Consulting

What is In The Thick of It?

Join Scott Hollrah, founder of Venn Technology, as he takes you "In the Thick of It" with the real stories of founders who are actively navigating the challenges and triumphs of running their businesses. This podcast goes beyond the typical entrepreneurial success stories and delves into the messy, gritty, and sometimes chaotic world of building and growing a company. Get inspired, learn from the experiences of others, and gain insights into what it truly means to be in the thick of the entrepreneurial journey.

Welcome to in the thick of it.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

On our first episode of in the Thick of It,

I sit down with my friend Chelsea Curtis, former LPGA

Development Tour golfer turned founder of Seaport Consulting.

We reminisce about our early days of starting our

businesses and the lessons we learned along the way.

We discuss the importance of finding your

values, the challenges of hiring, and the

surprises and milestones of growing a business.

It's an inspiring conversation filled with

wisdom and insights for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Welcome to in the thick of it.

Well, I am so excited to kick off our very

first podcast episode with a dear friend, Chelsea Curtis.

Chelsea and I first met, I don't know, five,

six, seven years ago, just as I was getting

my firm off the ground, and she was kind

of thinking about doing something and Chelsea, we're really

excited to hear your story today.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm really happy to be here, Scott.

Thanks so much.

So just introduce yourself.

So my name is Chelsea Curtis.

I am from Boston, Massachusetts.

I actually grew up on Cape Cod, so nice

summer community, but we were there full time.

And I started a business called Seaport Consulting,

and we are a salesforce consulting firm working

with small to medium sized businesses.

And we implement salesforce and support our

clients who utilize the salesforce platform.

Growing up on Cape Cod, I don't

know, I picture this very idyllic lifestyle.

Everything's just perfect.

And tell me a little bit about your growing up.

It really is.

And I think growing up there and having that be

all, you know, is you take it for granted.

So you grow up in a small town, sleepy, especially

in the winters, restaurants close, stores close, and a lot

of us were just really itching to get out.

And so I ended up going to Georgetown University in DC.

And a few of my other friends, we were like, ready

to hit the big know, get out of this small town.

And we got to our cities and we were like,

wow, we really had it made on Cape Cod.

We were right by the ocean on the

beach, feeling that kind of sea salt breeze.

So a lot of us made it back for the summer,

and we really appreciate it more when we got older.

Isn't that funny?

You take things for granted when you're there, and then

when you go away, you realize how good it was.

This has been 18 plus years now.

My wife and I have been married for 18 years,

and we did our honeymoon in Maui, and I can

still remember driving from the airport to the hotel.

It was late at night, I say late,

it was ten or 11:00 at night.

And we're looking out over the ocean and

we saw what looked like a rainbow at

night, and we were just perplexed at this.

And we get into the hotel, and we ask the person

at the front desk, what was that that we saw?

And they go, oh, yeah, it's called a moon bow.

Like, no big deal.

I'm like, Are you kidding me?

How is this not a big deal?

But when you live in it every day,

it just kind of becomes old hat.

So I get it.

Well, so you've been in Boston for how long now?

Ten years.

I moved back to Boston in 2011, 2012.

So you've been there a while.

I imagine like most major metro areas, you've

seen a lot of growth and change there.

It's unbelievable the amount Boston has grown,

the construction, the buildings going up.

Our company named Seaport is an area in Boston, and it

used to be just rickety old docks, and then you had

a legal seafood and harpoon brewery, and you could see the

ocean very expansive, and now it buildings everywhere.

It looks like the new kind

of almost like financial district.

So it's incredible.

I think we met for drinks down there somewhere

a while back when I was in town, and

that is a booming, hip, thriving town.

It's a fun area.

I feel very lucky to have gotten

Seaportconsulting.com the domain, seriously for that area.

Yeah, it's been great. I would have thought you'd had

to arm wrestle somebody for that.

So an interesting fact that I think

people would want to know about you.

You were a collegiate and professional athlete.

Tell us a little bit about that. Yes.

So I started playing golf when I was seven years old.

My parents threw me in a golf camp, and that was it.

It was kind of love at first sight.

And I started playing in tournaments locally, and

then statewide, and then regionally and nationally.

And I was lucky enough to get recruited by different

schools and ended up going to Georgetown and played.

I actually I graduated around

the time of the recession. Great.

You know, not a lot of job opportunities, and

I was at the peak of my golf game.

I had just come off a really great tournament

with a lot of big names, so I decided

to give it a shot, and I qualified for

what at the time was called the Futures Tour.

It is now the Epson Tour, which

is the developmental tour underneath the LPGA.

It was an amazing experience.

I played on it for two years.

My first year, was able to get to the 16th on

the money list, made it to final stage LPGA Q School.

I'm playing with all these LPGA ladies and a

little bit starstruck and eventually decided to come back

to Boston and get a real job.

But it was an awesome experience.

I'm just so impressed that people like

you go out and actually try it.

I mean, there's so many people that aren't

willing to take that risk, and you did.

And maybe that's why you're

a successful business owner today.

That you got some comfort with some risk like that.

When I was thinking about this podcast and coming on,

that's exactly what I thought about was how much golf

has given me the tools to be a founder in

a business and to start my own business.

The game is just it's an individual sport.

There's a lot of exposure of yourself.

You're personally putting yourself out there

to either succeed or see fail.

And there's a lot of failures in golf.

There's a lot of things that

it's not a game of perfect.

And I've learned a lot through golf

that has really helped me in business.

We have a couple of collegiate athletes

at my firm and they're superstars.

I think that playing at that level,

it develops a certain mental toughness.

And I was talking we have a fractional CFO

outside CFO, and we were talking about hiring and

the kinds of candidates that they are looking for.

And he said something really interesting to me.

He said, Man, I think you need to go out

and find a former college baseball player because they are

used to winning about 30% of the time and they

keep going after it and they make great salespeople.

And when he said that, something really clicked.

And so anyway, I think that there's a lot to be

said for how sports prepares you for life and business.

So talk to me about that transition know,

traveling around the country, playing the most beautiful

golf courses that America has to offer to,

as you put it, a real job.

What was that first job?

The first job was sales and marketing

associate at Schernicker Property Services, SPS.

And they're a construction management

firm just outside of Boston.

But my journey to get there was it

took me some months after the tour.

I felt a little lost as to what do I want to do next?

And I started applying for jobs.

And it was the first time where I was

feeling rejection from other people that I didn't have

the experience or the skill sets that they wanted

because they're looking at my resume and saying, well,

that's great, you played golf, that's cool, but I

need someone who can jump in and start working.

So it was eye opening and I landed

at SPS and it was an amazing experience.

That's where I fell into salesforce.

They were looking and evaluating salesforce back in 2011, 2012,

and that's when they asked me, they said, do you

want to take this on if we do this?

And I said, yeah, let's do it.

What is salesforce?

And back in 2012, that

was before lightning even existed.

It was before Trailhead was rolled out.

I decided to go look this up because

I remember telling my parents, I was like,

this company has something to it.

I think maybe you should look at their stock.

And the stock price back in 2012, January was $26, and

it's in the mid 100s but it's been as high as,

I don't know, high 200 in the last years.

Yeah, crazy.

We committed to Salesforce and I helped

implement Salesforce with a partner and we

really came out of it incredibly happy.

We were able to see key metrics

data in an instant, whereas before we

had separate systems that were integrated.

We integrated the accounting from

a construction management standpoint.

Resource management is so important in being able

to forecast so sales and pipeline, but then

also those closed one opportunities, being able to

see gross and net profit against it.

So having that accounting data come in and

see that information was incredible at the time.

How big of a company were they when you were there?

So we had about 60 full time employees, plus they

had subcontractors and that was a huge part of what

we ended up tracking in salesforce too, was being able

to manage those subcontractors and they were doing about, I

want to say, 25 million in revenue.

And we exploded to 40, 50 in just

a matter of years after we got Salesforce.

That's amazing.

So from there, is that the company that you left

to start Seaport or were you someplace in between?

Yes, I was at SPS and once we

got through several different iterations of implementing Salesforce,

integrating it with different tools, that's when I

said, I really like this, I want to

keep doing this with other businesses.

And I went off on my own

and that's when I met you, Scott.

And you were one of the first people

I worked with going out on my own.

And the way that we were connected, I think

it was serendipity I think it was something that

was really good for both of us.

I was at a point of growth in my business

where I didn't want to keep working nights and weekends.

And you were at a point that you were thinking about

kind of branching out and we got connected by a random

mutual associate and here we are all these years later.

So I know for me, I can very easily pinpoint that moment

when it was like, okay, I think I'm going to do this.

Do you have that crystal clear point

in time that it was like, yes.

This was that turning point that made you

say, I'm going to make the jump.

I would say that I really love solving

business problems and utilizing the Salesforce platform.

And that was my initial jump into, let's

try this, let's be an independent contractor.

Let's go work and see that.

The real AHA moment for me was as I

was getting into the consulting world, as I was

working with these various partners and companies, I started

to realize how important communication was.

And while there was an incredible amount of technical ability

in what people were doing, it was actually amazing to

me how much technology was secondary to people.

And the more you can actually really make

those connections with your clients and be that

bridge between technology and your client, have that

really clear communication with them.

That was the piece to success.

That's where I saw the most

successful implementations and the best engagements.

And that was my AHA, moment of saying I

can do this, I can build a business around

this, around great client experience and quality.

I think that we share a very similar mentality.

Technology by itself is worthless.

We have to implement technology where people and

where business process converge with the systems.

If we just go throw some software out there

into the wild, it's never really going to be

a benefit to anybody starting a business.

You went from playing golf to having a steady paycheck.

When you start a business, you typically

don't start with tons of revenue.

Day one.

Was that a scary transition?

It was scary and especially living in

Boston and having more expensive city.

It's an expensive city, especially when

you like oysters and old fashioned.

I'm okay on the oysters, but I

do love a good old fashioned.

That's another thing that we really connected

on Scott WhistlePig was you were the

first one who introduced me to WhistlePig.

Oh, it's so good.

But it was incredibly scary.

But I do go back to golf and think

about I was not getting a consistent paycheck.

I had to go perform to get paid.

And so it was a familiar feeling.

Golf is all about controlling what you can control and you have

to let go of the things you can't control and you have

to focus on the here and now in the process.

And it's tough not to think about outcomes

at the time, but that's how you succeed.

And so I really took, again, a lot

of my learnings from golf and put that

into the business when I was getting started.

And if I remember correctly, tell me if I'm wrong

here, but when you were playing golf, you definitely weren't

flying around on private jets sponsored by Nike.

And I don't even think you were flying around at all.

I'm pretty sure you were like literally driving

your car from city to city across the

country each week to get to your yes. Yeah.

So being on that tour just below

the LPGA, it was not glamorous.

We would pack up our cars and I had a Honda Cr

V, I put the seats in the back down and I organized

it was basically a closet and then some golf clubs.

And we would drive around the country from about

March or April all the way until September.

And the way they had the tour structured, you'd

start in Florida and then you drive down the

south to Texas, and then you go back up

into the Midwest to Iowa, Michigan, Indiana, and then

you start driving back east through Kentucky, Ohio, over

to the Northeast and then back down to Florida.

So is eastern half of the country.

You didn't make it out to the Pacific at the time.

The Tour did not make it past kind of that Texas line.

But I believe they have some tournaments out there now.

Once you've been to Texas, I mean, you

really don't need to go anywhere else anymore.

Barbecue, beer, bourbon.

All I need.

All good stuff.

So what fears did you have going into it?

And did any of those fears actually come to pass?

Did any of those things that you were

scared of or worried about actually happen?

Even though I was comfortable in that unknown,

I still had that fear of failure.

It feels just more personal because

you are starting the business.

If you don't make it, it's your

fault or you did something wrong.

And so there was that fear of

failure as we were getting started.

The fear of not knowing what was going

to happen or what to do next.

A lot of it was really learning on

the fly, which I loved, but it's scary.

And as far as coming to pass, I bring it

back to kind of the AHA moment of communication and

you realize the importance of it and starting out, seeing

some of those trouble projects or seeing things that happen

and really learning from where can you be better?

Clear and simple.

Just because you say something to

a client doesn't mean they understand.

Same with an employee.

Just because you say something to anyone doesn't

mean that they're going to understand or that

they understand the way you are trying to

communicate it to them, that's for sure.

Have any of those things led to

significant hurdles or problems in the business?

A hurdle for us has been hiring.

I think one thing is that I think I

could have been more aggressive with our growth plan.

But at the same time, hiring has

been a huge hurdle for us.

Finding the right people, finding people with

the same values as obviously the skill

sets and people who are passionate about

working in salesforce and helping our clients.

So it's been, I think, more challenging and more

time consuming than I even expected for that piece.

So you talked about hiring being a challenge,

and you're not hiring if you're not growing.

So talk to us about your kind of growth trajectory.

You don't have to give specific numbers or anything like

that, but kind of what has the growth been like?

So we're going to double our

headcount and revenue from last year.

So we're on track to do that

for 2022, which is pretty incredible.

That is awesome.

How did you all fare during the height of the pandemic?

It was a really interesting time.

I would say initially when the pandemic first hit,

there was a clear pause that a lot of

people took and said, what's going to happen?

How is this going to shake out?

We're not going to commit or spend money.

But it didn't take long for people to

realize, oh no, we are working remotely now,

and working on paper and spreadsheets on a

server is not going to work moving forward.

And being that my background is in construction management,

from my previous job, we found a nice little

niche of construction, manufacturing, industrials, and we saw a

huge increase in interest and need for salesforce, a

cloud platform to be able to work.

And so that actually has really

pushed us forward through the Pandemic.

Also, we're working with companies across the country, and

initially we had a real focus to the Northeast.

We're based in Boston, but people are more open

to working with us because everyone's remote anyway.

And so we have clients all over the country now,

and some of them we've never met in person before.

Isn't that crazy?

In our business, we started some projects that have

turned into huge ongoing relationships and engagements with certain

customers, and a lot of them have spent a

lot of money with our firm.

And until six months ago, I had never met them.

And something about that just didn't feel right.

Like, you've paid us a lot of money and I

haven't had a chance to actually shake your hand or

sit down and have a cup of coffee with you.

And so thankfully, the world has started opening back up

and people have been receptive and we've been getting on

planes and going to visit people wherever we can.

And I don't know about you, but

that's been really refreshing for us.

There's something about the human connection of being

there with someone that you just can't replace.

And I don't think we'll ever go away.

People during the Pandemic, I think,

thought, well, does this mean conferences

don't need to happen ever again?

And I think we've come to the answer of no.

If I have to sit through another virtual conference, I don't

know what I will do, but it won't be pretty.

It's not sustainable.

When you start a small business, at least in

the early days, most people have to do everything.

And I think in doing everything, you quickly figure

out what are the things that you like doing

and what are the things that you loathe doing.

What are the parts that you like the most?

And what are the parts that you like the least?

Great question.

So it is true, I was doing everything.

I was the accountant, I was HR, I was working

on projects, I was managing consultants, I was sales.

I love working with clients, solving problems,

being able to show business outcomes.

KPIs reports Dashboards being able to see

clients touch something that we help build

every day and it becomes the backbone

of their organization is just so rewarding.

So that's what I love from a client perspective.

And then with our people, with our team, we work with

such great people who care so much and work so hard,

and you go back to the sports and athletes.

There's a level of grit that

I think is necessary with consultants.

To be able to do this job and being able to

give them the space to learn and grow has been awesome.

And so the things that take me away from

those two things are the things that some of

them are tedious I might loathe, some of them

I'm okay doing, but I don't like that.

It's taking me away from things, having to learn accounting,

having to learn all the tax filings and things that

a business needs to know, insurance, all of that.

It's quite the black hole of things

that is just expansive in its knowledge.

You mentioned having to learn accounting.

What was your degree in college?

I was a biology major.

Yeah, because salesforce consulting and accounting,

they're so close to biology.

Yeah, exactly.

I've not used my degree once, I will say that.

But I think the sciences you think very logically.

Lots of problem solving, which has been great.

But man, the first time I got into my QuickBooks,

I was like, I don't know what this is.

Yeah, debits and credits, journal entries.

Don't I have a card for that? Yeah.

You talked about you're going to double this year.

What do you attribute your success to?

What has caused that straight

up curve in your business?

So going back to our values, our

guiding light of great communication, great client

experience, quality, we've done an amazing job

of retaining clients and working with them.

After our initial project or implementation, 70% of

our business is recurring clients, existing clients.

And so having that base to then just grow upon

with new business is really what has accelerated our growth.

We really love working long term

with clients and being there.

So you work on a project we maintain

with managed services support and then we figure

out what that next project is.

That's a huge part of it.

Outside of hiring, what do you see as

hurdles to that continued level of growth?

That is a great question.

It's also the people organization of It and

having individuals grow into managers to be able

to hire those people underneath them.

So a lot, because we are a

small business is still on me.

So being able to have people move up to be

able to manage others and start to grow, that.

But another piece, and I'm very proud of

this is we've been able to grow the

business organically without taking any investment money, taking

on any debt or any loans.

I've not taken a single loan and it's been amazing.

I mean, that gives me the power to say we

are going to make decisions based on quality versus having

to think about growth in the way that a tech

company who's taking VC money would have to.

But that does mean cash flow constraints.

And do we continue on that path or do

we eventually take money to help grow faster.

That's something that a lot of small business owners are

going to have to grapple with at some point.

Like you, we've been able to

grow organically without taking outside money.

And you do get to a certain point where

when you get to a certain critical mass, one

or two off months can be really difficult.

But you also look out and you go, hey,

I know that this is just a season and

we've got to maintain our staffing levels.

We've got to maintain these other things, and we've

got to make it through this lean period because

we know there's something great on the other side.

And that's a difficult thing

when there is money available. Do you do it?

Do you do it or do you not do it?

And then that's one of the challenges of being a

business owner is we're not given the right answer.

We don't know what that right answer is

until we get to the other side.

And so you really have to look at all the

information provided and make that decision and commit to it.

That's a great segue into another question that I have.

You said you don't know the right answer

until you get to the other side.

You've been at this for several years.

If you could go back and talk to yourself right

as you were starting Seaport, what would you tell yourself?

I would say that it's okay to really just jump

in and go for it and that it's really important

to find what your value is and stick to it,

and again, use that as your guiding light to be

able to make decisions based on that.

It makes it really simple to

say, is this the right decision?

If our goal is to have great client experience

and quality, and we have walked away from projects

that we didn't think we could execute on 100%.

And we've walked away from clients who we didn't think had

the same values as us, that had the right expectations in

mind, who didn't see us as a valued partner and a

mutual respect and more of like, a client vendor.

And that's what we're always looking for, is that

partnership with our clients and that mutual respect.

It's refreshing to hear other people say

that because we're the exact same way.

There are times that we have walked away from huge projects

and I have slept better at night knowing that that money

wasn't going to hit the bank, but also that I wasn't

going to have to guide my people through what was going

to be a difficult project or a difficult client.

And I think that what that speaks to is how

much you, Chelsea, value your team and you want to

create a great atmosphere and a great environment that they

want to get up and work hard for each day.

And that's really hard when you've got that

client that just doesn't have realistic expectations.

Totally agree.

What surprises have you had along the way?

Is there something that Was Like I

just never really thought of that.

I think the big surprise, and I kind of already

mentioned this, one of the biggest surprises for Me was

the fact that I could grow this without taking money.

I really did think that even to get it off the ground,

we would need some sort of funding to make this work.

But we've been able to bring on people and

have the benefits and everything that we need for

people to feel like they have security to do

this job and work with us on our team.

That's really been the biggest surprise so far.

Where Do You see the Company in three to five years?

I see us continuing to grow and continuing our

mission and our values of being able to work

with great clients, continuing that process, of being able

to bring on new clients and Work with them

long term on their entire plan.

With Salesforce as the platform, we've worked with

so many other applications and systems because Salesforce

integrates so nicely with other tools.

So we're learning a lot of tools as well.

What Tools outside of Salesforce do y'all use

internally that you are at a point now

that you just couldn't live without?

We use Conga right now for DocGen as

well as Esign, although we also have PandaDoc

working, and then we use Form Assembly for

different forms and time Tracking as well.

And we're evaluating DevOps tools at the

moment, so we're looking towards getting something

that will really help us save Time.

Most of my focus right now is on acquiring

tools that can really create Efficiencies with our consultants,

just because that is finite our time.

And so the more we can save people's time, the better.

I think it's important, even in a small

Business, to really invest in technology and systems

that can help you grow and scale.

And I think that a lot of small businesses

tend to overlook that in the early days, and

they find themselves having to invest more by doing

things manually than if they would put the money

into tools that would automate things.

So, one of my favorite podcasts,

it highlights businesses that have typically

grown into these massive, massive companies.

They've been bought out or gone public,

and almost every one of those stories

has a nearly catastrophic moment.

Have you had any of those at Seaport

or have you been able to escape that?

We have not had a moment like that yet, and I say yet.

So we can chat in a few years and see what happens.

Fair Enough.

Well, if somebody came to you, and in

fact, I imagine that people have come to

you that were thinking about starting their own

businesses, what advice would you give them?

I think this is something that people say a lot, but

it's so true, is you can't be afraid to fail. You got.

To put yourself out there.

You have to be vulnerable.

It's just part of what you need

to do, really, to start that business.

And you have to go all in if you want to be successful.

And it goes back to finding that value, what's going

to be your guiding light to really make those decisions,

focus on that and push forward that's sound advice.

So looking back in your years of doing

this, what has been the absolute pinnacle, the

absolute highest high that you have experienced?

I think I'm in it right now.

The fact that we're going to double in both headcount

and revenue this year based off of our projections.

I mean, even if you look at just the first half

of this year, it is more than double last year.

So I'm in it right now.

We have ahead of operations, we have

ahead of sales, and we have consultants.

And it really feels like the team is

coming together and we're ready to just continuing

to grow and grow and grow.

That's awesome.

Is there anything that you have tried

that you expected to work that didn't?

And I guess conversely, is there something that you

have kind of taken a risk on that has

turned out better than you expected it to?

Something that I tried and didn't work.

Let me start with the other question.

So I think our managed services has done really well,

and it's something that I wasn't sure if that was

going to work, but I think we're going into a

new era where systems are becoming a lot more challenging

to maintain day to day, and it feels like there's

a lot of need for sales ops, rev ops.

Those are becoming incredibly important roles, but maybe not

necessarily a lot of people who have been in

those roles as we start to expand that.

And so we've been able to take a

chance there on trying to figure out how

to manage that and sell that business.

It's worked really well.

Something that hasn't worked, I'm blanking.

Anything come to mind for you, Scott?

I can think of a couple things that we probably

rushed into that probably should have taken a little bit

more time and due diligence to work through.

We've implemented some systems internally that on the surface

looked great, pulled the trigger a little too quickly,

and we get partway through our own implementation of

an expense management tool, for example.

And it was very clear very quickly

that it was not going to work.

There have been a couple of product

partnerships that we have stepped into.

And to your point earlier about, like you said,

you really have to jump in with both feet.

You can't really kind of hover on

the surface or dabble in something.

You've really got to commit.

And there's a number of these partnerships that I've

gone into probably with unrealistic expectations about, yeah, we're

going to join this partner program and things are

just going to magically take off.

And I've got people internally that are reminding me that

we really do have to jump in with both feet.

We can't dabble and expect things to

really take off and be successful.

And when I look at the parts of our

business that have been successful, it is because we

have just fully, fully thrown ourselves at those things.

That makes a lot of sense.

And you did make me think of one thing

that we've been struggling to do, which is implement

a really great way of tracking time against projects.

I think as consultants, that is something

that is important and is a challenge.

And so as much as we make recommendations to our

clients, sometimes it's hard to practice what you preach.

And we're still a small business just trying to

keep our head above water and we're still working

through our own internal operations as well.

Well, Chelsea, thanks so much for being our

first guest and so proud of you.

It has been awesome to get to see

you grow your business over these years.

I love our check ins periodically and

wish you just nothing but continued success.

Scott, I feel so honored that you would even think of

me for your podcast and you have been an amazing sounding

board, someone who I really respect and look up to.

I think Venn is an amazing organization and

we would be so lucky know follow in

your footsteps of what you've been.

And actually that's a great point to make

for future founders is find your mentors.

It's so important to find mentors and to have people

who can give you that advice and listen to them

because they've made those mistakes and they can give you

the inside tips on how to not do that and

move forward and learn from what other people have done.

Thank you so much for those kind words.

And B, I just want to second that.

And when it comes to mentors, mentorship

doesn't have to be anything formal.

I have dozens of people who I would consider to

be mentors, which I meet with with regularity others.

It's infrequent, sometimes it's circumstantial and it's, oh my

gosh, what do I do about the situation?

I'm going to call this person.

But it is absolutely crucial as a

business owner, as a founder, to surround

yourself with other like minded individuals.

You talked earlier so much about values and how you

want to work with customers that share your values.

You want to hire employees who share your values

and I think the same is true in terms

of finding mentors who share your values.

So well said.

Totally agree.

Well, Chelsea, thank you so much for joining us

and we'll check in again down the road. Sounds great.

Thanks, Scott.

That was Chelsea Curtis, founder of Seaport Consulting.

To learn more, go to seaportconsulting.com.

If you or a founder you know would like to

be a guest on in the thick of it.

Email us at intro at founderstory us, man close.