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Psychological Burdens of Startup Founders with StoryAZ’s Ren Agarwal

This episode, StoryAZ’s CEO Ren Agarwal talks about the different psychological burdens startup founders face, how startup founders can avoid burnout, and the danger of chasing vanity metrics.

Ren Agarwal is an executive, entrepreneur, and strategic advisor who helps companies and clients refine their business value proposition and accelerate growth.
 
Ren has created and executed incisive go-to-market and sales enablement programs at multiple firms that led to successful IPOs, acquisitions, and double-digital growth, and his leadership has led to significant enterprise value appreciation and consistent investor returns. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency:
 
  • The different milestones of a startup.
  • How startup founders can avoid burnout.
  • Different psychological burdens for startup founders.
  • Vanity metrics marketing agencies should avoid chasing.
  • The differences between being a CMO and starting your own agency.
  • The importance of how your client uses your content.
  • The value of sharing metrics across departments.
  • How the media landscape is changing.
  • The different components of messaging and company positioning.
 
Resources:
 
Connecting with Ren Agarwal:
 
Connecting with the host:
 
Quotables:
  • 7:01 – “If they haven’t been entrepreneurs if they don’t have the entrepreneurial mindset it can be very difficult for folks to come in and have to bare additional perhaps responsibilities or work in a very different way than what they’re used to.”
  • 8:35 – “Let’s say you lose a client, which we did. It’s a big client or a client doesn’t renew for whatever reason because they’ve decided to go a different route, that takes a toll on you. How do you share that? The right thing to do as entrepreneurs learn, and I’m learning it on my second venture now is that you have to share that, you have to share the good as my parents would say and you have to share the bad and it relieves that burden.”
  • 13:35 – “As a business person now whose getting seasoned in this area of starting businesses it really is about customer success and customer satisfaction that I’m most focused on and not on revenue not on the number of employees not even on profitability because if you can break even year over year as you get more clients well then you’ll scale and your margins even if they stay at the same percentage will throw off more cash that will allow you to do things like invest or hire more people if you want things like that.”