70: Build a Flexible Vision with Chris DeJong

12/14/21 • 37 min

Chris DeJong is a former US national swimmer and the Founder & President of Big Blue Swim School, one of America's fastest-growing swim school franchises. We talk about how successful entrepreneurs franchise their businesses, what diversity can do for your business, and effective time management tips for entrepreneurs.

Timestamps

[00:34] Chris' journey from swimming into entrepreneurship

[02:59] Chris' experience with management blueprints

[07:48] Why entrepreneurs need to have flexible visions

[08:50] How to become ruthlessly efficient with your time

[11:28] When should a process be an art, not a science?

[16:15] Deep Blue Swim School and what makes it so special

[19:54] How and why you need to continuously solve customer problems

[22:35] Practical frameworks for getting great ideas from your team

[24:49] How Chris successfully franchised his business

[27:10] Why the Big Blue Swim School is such an attractive franchise

[30:01] Diversity as a lever for your business

[32:59] The link between diversity and business success

[37:17] Parting thoughts

Links and Resources

Chris' LinkedIn

Big Blue Swim School Website

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

The Innovation Stack by Jim McKelvey

It's Your Ship by Captain D. Michael Abrashoff

When Should a Process Be Art, Not Science?

Steve Preda's Book: Buyable

Complete the Buyability Assessment for Your Business

https://StevePreda.com

Timestamps

[00:34] Chris' journey from swimming into entrepreneurship

[02:59] Chris' experience with management blueprints

[07:48] Why entrepreneurs need to have flexible visions

[08:50] How to become ruthlessly efficient with your time

[11:28] When should a process be an art, not a science?

[16:15] Deep Blue Swim School and what makes it so special

[19:54] How and why you need to continuously solve customer problems

[22:35] Practical frameworks for getting great ideas from your team

[24:49] How Chris successfully franchised his business

[27:10] Why the Big Blue Swim School is such an attractive franchise

[30:01] Diversity as a lever for your business

[32:59] The link between diversity and business success

[37:17] Parting thoughts

Links and Resources

Chris' LinkedIn

Big Blue Swim School Website

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

The Innovation Stack by Jim McKelvey

It's Your Ship by Captain D. Michael Abrashoff

When Should a Process Be Art, Not Science?

Steve Preda's Book: Buyable

Complete the Buyability Assessment for Your Business

https://StevePreda.com

Previous Episode

82: Build A Custom Operating System with Pramod Raheja

https://youtu.be/3NL8yNLPUTI

Pramod Raheja is the CEO and co-founder of Airgility, a leading designer and manufacturer of autonomous, unmanned aerial systems (UAS). He is also a pilot with 25 years of experience captaining passenger flights with United Airlines. We talk about the unmanned aerial systems industry, the benefits of having a daily/weekly huddle, and the effectiveness of work management systems.

— Build A Custom Operating System with Pramod Raheja

Our guest is Pramod Raheja, CEO and co-founder of Airgility, a leading designer and manufacturer of autonomous unmanned aerial systems or UASs. Their flagship product, the Minotaur, is capable of precision hover and high-speed forward flight and can fly anywhere, including dirty and dangerous environments. Pramod has been captaining passenger flights with United Airlines for 25 years while building and exiting multiple businesses. Pramod, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Steve. Great to be here. Appreciate it.

Well, it’s very intriguing to have an airline pilot who is also a serial entrepreneur. I never knew such a thing existed. How did you get here?

I don’t think that’s a thing necessarily. I think it’s a bit of an anomaly. There’s plenty of airline pilots that have some side gigs or hustles or real estate, but I don’t know. Only but a very few that I can count on my hand, maybe one or two others that sort of treat the entrepreneur, their entrepreneur side as their primary side and not the other way around. So absolutely, it’s an anomaly.

So how does that even work? I mean, an entrepreneur often has to struggle with the urgent matters and burn the midnight oil. And how can you then hop on a plane and fly across the world? It’s difficult for me to imagine how.

Yeah, absolutely. I would say that it really boils down to how you lead and manage. So all those things that you described still happen and they have to be managed. And certainly there’s a lot of juggling involved for sure. I’ve been doing it for a long time. So I’ve been able to figure out how to juggle it really well. But I think it also boils down to how you, you know, how you manage things in your company and how you delegate. And I think we’re gonna get into that a little bit today. So I’ll save that part of it.

Okay, so tell me a little bit about, but first of all, how did you get here to run this company, Agility and to build it? What is your story? And then we can get into more of the how of things.

Sure. So, you know, I would say that, you know, this, the way that we started this company was very much the best analogy I could give you is an arranged marriage. So, we spun our company, our initial intellectual property out of the University of Maryland. And the way that that happened is my co-founder and partner was developing technology and some IP, nothing that had been commercialized, but he had aspirations to commercialize. And so I was introduced through the Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Maryland at that time, Glenn Hellman, who introduced me to Evandro.

And we got to know each other and after a few months decided to start a company together. And even at that time, you know, it was still in the very early days of unmanned systems, which was four and a half years ago. And we really didn’t know exactly what the landscape looked like and what the business model should be, nor did we have any working technology, but we had a lot of faith in each other and that we knew that we were going to make something of it. And here we are four and a half years later with some very cutting edge technology that is really at the forefront of what’s possible.

So definitely I have some questions about that, but you also had another business, according to LinkedIn beforehand, which was more of a franchise. You were a franchisee or some kind of office services, and you successfully developed multiple locations. So how did that come about?

So that was a company that is called Intelligent Office, and it is a franchise based in Boulder, Colorado. And many, many years ago, this is probably now, we’re going back, dating myself back to 2003 timeframe. And I have always, even though I wanted to be a pilot right out of, you know, right from a young age, I also was very, very interested in businesses and starting businesses. And even though that’s not what I studied in school, I studied engineering in school, I just had this sort of knack and desire to want to sell things and make thin...

Next Episode

83: Position Your Business with Saleema Vellani

https://youtu.be/c3tjtSVUn2g

Saleema Vellani is an award-winning innovation strategist, serial entrepreneur, professor, and author of the book Innovation Starts With ‘I.’ She is also the Founder and CEO of Ripple Impact, an accelerator and community that helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses. We talk about innovation in today’s business environment, how to future-proof your business, and the benefits of adopting a hybrid-preneurship lifestyle.

— Position Your Business with Saleema Vellani

Our guest is Saleema Vellani, the founder and CEO of Ripple Impact, an accelerator and community that helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses and platforms. Saleema is a serial entrepreneur, a joint professor of social entrepreneurship at the Johns Hopkins University, and the best-selling author of Innovation Starts With I. Saleema, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here.

Well, it’s great to have you, and I’m glad you made it back from your trip to the Middle East just in time for our podcast recording. So as always, my first question is about about your entrepreneurial journey. So, how did you become one yourself and what has been your journey to ripple impact?

The full story is in the book. So if you want to know all the details, it’s all in the book. But how I got into entrepreneurship was complete lack of awareness that I was becoming an entrepreneur. I wasn’t trying at all to become an entrepreneur. And I don’t know if I should say it was totally by accident, but it was essentially out of necessity. It was when I had graduated during the financial crisis in 2009, I graduated from McGill University, I’m Canadian. I couldn’t get a job in North America. I tried my best and I realized, you know, maybe I need to just go get some international experience, go live abroad some more.

I had already lived in the Dominican Republic, but I wanted to learn a new language. So I went to Brazil where I could learn Portuguese and decided to do some work at a volunteer at an orphanage. And when I got to Brazil, the founder of the orphanage was like, well, why don’t you start a language school in Rio de Janeiro to help finance us at the orphanage, because we’re having some serious challenges. And I was like, whoa, I thought I was going to work with kids. And now I’m being sent to start a school in such a complex country where you don’t even speak the language. But I took on the challenge and got a team together, volunteers.

We started building the school from the ground up, teaching all these different languages because we were volunteering, a bunch of volunteers from different parts of Europe. And yeah, it was interesting, but we were failing pretty quickly when we realized that a lot of our classes for Brazilians were either, they were pretty much group classes, but they were private lessons because only one student would show up at most. And so we realized very quickly we had to change our business model and realize that the interest was more, the demand was more, you know, the foreign students interested in learning Portuguese and we hired some Portuguese teachers to test that out.

And that was very successful because those students, the foreigners, were coming from, you know, from other countries. They were interested in doing something with social, like social impact in Brazil and contributing to a good cause while learning Portuguese. And we would take them to the orphanage and build a community, take them to samba classes or capoeira. And that was very successful. Today, it’s one of the top rated schools in Brazil. And many other schools and organizations have sort of replicated this model of social innovation. And that’s how I got started, was really co-founding something.

I was pretty much an intrapreneur first, really innovating with some direction, with the resources and all of this. But it was that experience that gave me the skills, the resilience, the experience on how to really start something and all the, you know, going through a pivot and all the different things that a new business does that I was able to then move to Italy from Brazil. There’s a whole love story in there, that’s in my book. But essentially, you know, same thing, crisis, Euro crisis, couldn’t get a job in the South of Italy in Reggio di Calabria across from Sicily. I didn’t speak British English. I was cooking Italian-American food that didn’t meet the expectations there in Italy.

So I ended up doing some translation work online and quickly realized the ...