Matt Bertulli

You can’t win a game you aren’t in. If you think about this another way, our principle job as leaders is to make sure we stay in the damn game. My COO likes to regularly tell me - you need to survive long enough to win. There’s a lot to unpack here. First, are we really talking about luck? I’ve got a weird amount of very successful entrepreneurs in my life, and one thing they all have in common is they’ll tell you they have been very lucky. This runs counter to so much business content on the...

Outside of pure failure, that feeling of being stuck is probably the worst. This has to be one of the more popular negative feelings you get as an entrepreneur. It just…sucks. Which really got me thinking, why don’t we talk about this more? Why do we feel this way? How do you get un-stuck? Is there a playbook for this? How do other people handle it? So. many. questions. Reality is, we don’t talk about being stuck because it isn’t cool. Everyone wants to listen to the edge case winners stories...

Do you know the story of Parmegiano Reggiano? Everyone knows what parmesan cheese is, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Parmegiano Reggiano is the top of the top. It comes from very specific regions in Italy, is made of very specific ingredients, and must pass a quality test at the end of the process to earn the label of Parmesan Reggiano. The result? Only 3% of the parmesan being made every becomes Parmesan Reggiano. What the hell does this have to do with building a company? Product,...

I recently saw this question and thought it was beautiful. What would you change if you knew you were going to run your company for the rest of your life? We live in a society that rewards entrepreneurs for running away from the companies they built. We worship at the altar of the exit. The liquidity event. I love this question because it forces you to think about the total opposite position. If you had a magic wand, what would you change in your business so that you would WANT to keep it...

Happy Saturday! And welcome to another issue of No Competition. Today, we’re talking about management. More specifically, we’re talking about where businesses go wrong when hiring management roles and what you can do to avoid/fix this. Before we get started, I want to clarify something. This email is more about lower levels of management than it is the C-Suite (higher levels). As companies grow, they tend to add additional layers of reporting structure in a business, and this inevitably...

Happy Saturday and welcome to another issue of The Briefing. I’ve been building companies for 15+ years now. I’ve also been coaching founders / CEOs for 10+ years while I’ve been building my own businesses. One of the MOST common set of mistakes I see, especially in the founders I coach/advise is around hiring senior staff. This could be leadership level employees, or just super senior individual contributors. Sometimes even higher-end contractors/vendors. Either way, these are often the...

Today I want to take the opposite side of something I believe in. Wait…what? Why? There’s a lot of nuance to building a business. To doing something difficult and rare. What’s this belief you ask? → I believe that businesses who grow their people the fastest, grow the fastest. You’ll see coaches and talking heads on the internet really focus on this one. There’s tons of wisdom around building teams, buying back your time, and scaling organizations with people. When it comes to building a...