Q4 Retreat: How to Build Your Own Swift Kick
September 18, 2017 set the date for yet another amazing Swift Kick team retreat day for the beginning of Q4! This quarter brought forth even more amazing and crazy memories from the Swift Kick family that I will happily share with you. For this quarterly retreat, the theme that Sabina and Melissa had devised was […]
Guiding Principles – Part 2
The following is the second part of our assumptions, pulled from our “Guiding Principles” Wikipage. Here is Part 1** Assumptions Part 2: These are broad based and not as set as principles. It’s useful to list assumptions, just to be clear on the thought behind the system. Some of these are more controversial than others. […]
Guiding Principles – Part 1
Our Wikispace reminds me of my over stuffed parents’ attic. Among all the “once cool/relevant but now outdated” stuff are gems that got lost in the noise. In the process of updating a few Wiki pages, I stumbled upon our “Guiding Principles” page and, in rereading, realized it’s well worth exposing to the light once […]
Filling the Gumption Tank With Some Help From Friends
Had a great day today. A few quick thoughts: VIDEO FILE NO LONGER AVAILABLE Vid Blog 9/20/2008 from Kevin Prentiss on Vimeo. I feel like McCain’s team: what I meant by “scalability” was: we are trying to hone our app and message to grow faster. I said “Garvee”, but meant @garyvee : )
Cutting the Fat
My fiancee and I (Tom) recently sold our car and signed up for the non-profit car sharing service iGo Cars**. Our reasons for breaking free from the car chains were partly environmental, economical, and practical as we live in downtown Chicago. But three months into the program, I discovered another unexpected reason and it interestingly […]
How to Bankrupt a Startup – A Funny Take From SXSW
No one starts a business with the goal to go bankrupt, but yet somehow 9 out of 10 businesses fail within the first 3 years. Many startups outsource financial aspects of the business to companies like Early Growth, which provide 409a valuations and help with equity management and taxes as well as other things. Obviously, […]
Speaking is Just One Piece
Even though right now, the majority of our income is from our trainings for schools, we’ve always believed that speaking was only a piece of the bigger goal of solving student apathy. We speak, but we aren’t speakers. In fact, we think there are speakers out there like, Dave Coleman, who are hands down better […]
Reviewing our 2007 Goals – Looking Forward to 2008
At the beginning of 2007, we created company goals for the coming year. In 2005 and 2006 we did a similar exercise. This last year we wanted to create more specific, measurable goals that we could follow up on. At our company retreat last month, we reviewed the 07 goals. Below is a list of […]
Turned Down by the MacArthur DML Competition – Staying Sustainable
The Conference on the First-Year Experience was a fantastic event for us because Red Rover** was very popular. The attendees were a mix of student advisors, deans, faculty, and librarians. Each group had a slightly different curiosity for Red Rover, but they all had one question in common and it was probably the most popular […]
Utlizing Facebook Flyers for Marketing Red Rover and Swift Kick
Last November, Facebook updated its semi-useful “Facebook Flyer” advertising system. The biggest updates were better target marketing by keyword and the ability to pay-per-click instead of impressions. This is big news for people who work in the marketing industry, especially for a PPC Agency Los Angeles as what that meant was very little harm in […]