This new adventure at Career Like A BOSS continues to be more and more exciting. So many people have reached out with words of encouragement and have signed up to the newsletter, it’s been very humbling to say the least.

Something else that has been humbling is all the stuff that I just don’t know about starting a new business from scratch – whether it’s legal or accounting, or the fact that even though there’s a ton of great tools out there that make creating a website much easier than it was waaaay back when I was a programmer – I’m still no good at it myself.

That’s when I remembered that you should always stack the deck in your favor. Give yourself the most opportunities succeed. Sometimes this means you must try a bunch of things until you find the one that works. Sometimes it means you just have to put yourself out there more often to drum up more opportunities. Almost always it means that you need to surround yourself with people who are likely to help you succeed. This includes the company you work for, your manager, your peers, cultivating a strong and diverse set of mentors and advisors, and if you’re privileged enough to manage people, then it also means hiring the right people and empowering them to work together, to solve problems and be a mentor and coach to that team of high-performers while also being a good team member to your boss and your peers.

Early in this journey, the thing I was most worried about was doing it all myself and not having the resources of a giant company at my disposal – something I had gotten pretty used to over the last 30 years. I’ll admit it is absolutely very different at this scale, and I’m learning (and also un-learning) more and more every day. But I realized I didn’t have to go it alone. For one there is so much great information readily available. But also, if you leverage your network it's almost always the case that you know someone who either knows how to do the thing, or can put you in touch with someone else who does.

A simple example is the website for www.CareerLikeABOSS.com – it’s still a work in progress, and I probably could have eventually cobbled together something myself. But a close friend of mine introduced me to a very reasonably priced web designer and marketing firm. They are doing a much better job than I ever could have, and we’re having fun learning from each other on our virtual team as we go along.

Another way I stacked the deck was in creating the course content for our flagship course – Lead Like A BOSS – 7 Essentials for Every Leader at Every Level. In working with my network, I was delighted to find that so many people were willing to help out. As a result the course is coming together a hundred times better than it would have if it were just me. The course now has more than 5 hours of content created and delivered by NINE DIFFERENT CEOs, public company officers and other EVP & VP level executives including Mark Templeton, R. Scott Herren , Janae Bennett , Steve Munford , Rob Taylor , Hector Lima , Al Monserrat and Tom Eacobacci.