John Schroeder of Nova Foresight, a company that helps clients bring innovative ideas to market, including the most challenging business issues that are mission critical to their success

John Schroeder of Nova Foresight - Podcast Transcript

Scott:	Hey, it’s Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting, and welcome to another episode of Founders and Friends. Before we start the podcast, let’s give a quick shout out to Rippling. Rippling is the new, cool payroll tool that we see a lot of startups using. Rippling is great for your traditional HR and payroll. They integrate very nicely. But guess what? They did another thing. They integrate into your IT infrastructure. They make it really easy for when you hire someone to spin up all the web services and their computer. Which sounds like not a huge deal, but actually, we did the study at Kruze. We spent $420 on average just getting a new employee’s computer up and running and their web servers up and running. It’s actually a really big deal. It saves a lot of money, and the dogs are eating the dog food. We see a lot of startups coming in to Kruze now using Rippling, so please check out Rippling. Great service. We love it. I think we have a podcast with Parker Conrad. You can hear it from his own words, but we’re seeing them take market share, so shout out to Rippling. Now to another awesome podcast at Kruze Consulting’s Founders and Friends. Thanks.
Singer:	(singing) It’s Kruze Consulting Founders and Friends, with your host Scotty Orn.
Scott:	Welcome to Founders and Friends podcast with Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting. Today, my very special guest is John Schroeder of Nova Foresight. Welcome, John.
John:	Hey, thanks so much, Scott. It’s a real pleasure to be here. I meant to tell you how much I enjoy your podcast. I’ve been listening to the last couple episodes, and when you talked about [Squadcast] and [Clockwise 00:00:01:39]. There’re so many great products out there that we should be learning about, and you do just a great job of explaining the products and the story behind them.
Scott:	My pleasure. Thank you so much, that means a lot. It’s just fun. I know you work with a lot of startups too, so when you work with startups, you can’t help but be intoxicated by the passion and how they’re going to change the world, and so I love promoting them and helping people find out about them. So, thank you. Maybe just to start off, you can retrace your career a little bit and how you had the idea for Nova Foresight.
John:	Yeah. Well, let me take you back to the very beginning. So, I grew up in Illinois about an hour out of Chicago. At the time, the town had 6,466 people as a population, the sign said, surrounded by cornfields, but it’s grown a lot since then. But I was listening to one of your other guests the other day, and she said that she was the first in her family to go to college, and I’m [crosstalk] the exact opposite. I was the fifth in my family to go to a private school. So, we had Brown and Haverford and Swarthmore and Stanford, and I was kind of the reject only making into Northwestern.
Scott:	As a North westerner, that hurts a little bit for you to say that.
John:	I love Northwestern, in spite of or despite the football team. So, my introduction to entrepreneurship happened in a way I wasn’t really hoping it to happen. So, I get to school, and two years in my dad lost his job. What I didn’t know at the time was that in the process of putting five kids through private school, my parents’ savings had been pretty depleted. So, I had to find a way to make a lot of money really fast, and what I ended up doing was a very low tech entrepreneurship project, but I started a window washing business, and it turns out that no one likes to wash businesses. So, it was a wide open market, but it’s a great opportunity to learn about pricing and positioning, marketing, all that kind of stuff. And it ended up-
Scott:	Probably fulfillment too. Just getting either you or the folks you needed to help you wash all the windows, just managing those people must’ve been really intense as a young man.
John:	Yeah. It was awesome. It was challenging. It was one of those jobs where you come home and you’re soaky sweaty, but it was, as you said, it was really nice. It’s great to look back at our house and see the clean windows and all the lessons that came with it. So fast forward. My career took me to the big four. I then spent a lot of my career at Nielsen. I worked in the innovation division, led up one of the global groups, and I remember there was a time when I was asked by the CEO to start up a new division. So, at that point, my wife had just quit her job. She was taking a two- or three-year break to raise our young kids. So, I went from my stable job at Nielsen, where I had a lot of clients and a good revenue stream, to this new division where I had exactly $0 coming in. As I thought about that, I started to think maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea to do that at the point where my wife had just quit her job. So, I go to the first big client, and this is a well-known international CPG company. I tell them about the product that we’re going to bring to market. And the guy says in a very nice way, said, “Hey, we love your company. We know you do good work. It will never work in our industry.” I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience, but I just had the cold rush of blood running through me, and I couldn’t-
Scott:	Well, those were those moments though were either you’re really onto something, because it’s not obvious to even some of the people in the industry, or it’s very scary because it turns out that person was right and you realize that two years later.
John:	Well, I’ll tell you what. If it was really obvious, it wasn’t really obvious to me. So then I learned, this is the first time I learned about pivoting. So, I ended up switching this discussion around with him and I said, “Okay, well just then tell me, what are the problems that you’re trying to solve? How are you doing it? What’s working and what’s not working, and in an ideal world, what would you have?” So, I spoke with a bunch of other leaders in that particular industry, and I went through that same pitch and I told them, “Hey, this is not a sales call. I’m trying to learn, and what I’m going to do as a result of all this learning is to write this up and come back and present that to you. So, you’re going to get these great new insights.” But just to make a long story short, I’ve gotten very smart about their particular industry, about their need, and I got all the information I needed in order to pivot the service that we were offering. And we became a really successful, so that was nice.
Scott:	That’s awesome.
John:	Yeah, yeah. So that was my introduction to pivoting. So how I got to Nova Foresight is on my journey at Nielsen. One of the stops I had was to work with small size companies, small mid-size companies, and Scott, I know you’ve worked in professional service. You guys probably didn’t have this issue, but with a larger company like Nielsen, oftentimes the mid-cap companies were training grounds, so they were where the young people went on their first assignment who weren’t particularly well-trained. They would typically go on and off, and the teams would rotate, and the service levels for these guys was just not very good. But at the same time, when I was working with the smaller companies, I found them just absolutely fascinating. I mean, typically the issues were much more dynamic. They were more into taking risks, more into looking at big new markets, rather than having the 37th flavor of vodka, which is not the most [crosstalk] in the world. So, I was really hooked on working with smaller companies, and I decided to jump off and start Nova Foresight to do just that. But instead of bringing junior level people to work on these engagements, what we would do is only bring senior level people. So, it’s worked out really well. What I found over the last couple of years is I’ve been approached by a number of fairly well funded startups to help them in this same journey, and I thoroughly enjoyed the kind of work that we’ve done with those guys.
Scott:	That’s really amazing. You probably were able to deliver a really great service to them because you focused on them. That’s something we do quite a bit. When you really, because Nielsen probably wasn’t focused on the mid cap type of clients, but when you made that commitment both business-wise and emotionally, you were ready to help them and serve them. That’s a really, really cool story.
John:	Yeah. It works out really well. I think like you, we’re virtual, so we don’t have the overhead that companies with an office over 5th Avenue would have. So, we’re able to go to the market at just a different price point that’s much more reasonable for these kinds of companies.
Scott:	Yeah. That’s like the Kruze Consulting playbook here. We’re companies from another mother or something like that. Well, and I also think it’s really cool that you, in that project or in that timeframe, demystified the quote unquote pivot, because it can be really intimidating for a few people. That’s why I thought it would be a really great conversation to have on the podcast, because it can be scary, and you don’t know what you’re getting into and you don’t know how to do it. The thing that I thought was really cool about you is not only have you been through it, but you have a playbook for how to tackle that situation. So, I want to just talk about that.
John:	That’s great. A couple of areas we could start thinking about is the first area, which is, when do you want to do a pivot?
Scott:	Yeah, exactly. Or knowing the right time, you know? Yeah.
John:	So just to preface this whole conversation, and as you say, it can be a scary prospect. So, one of my clients, Zapata Computing, they create software for the quantum computing market. I have never worked with as intelligent a group of people. I mean, literally this was Harvard’s quantum computer unit, and they left out and they started up this little startup. It’s the smartest people you’ve ever seen in your life. So, when I was helping them on this process, they were just as mystified as anyone else was. So, of all the founders out there who are looking at the idea of pivoting and saying, “Oh my goodness, this is a hard thing,” just take comfort in knowing that you’re not alone.
Scott:	Also, just a lot of the best companies end up having gone through an early stage pivot. Twitter was actually a company called Odeo, a podcasting company that didn’t make it, and then they pivoted to Twitter and became a $30 billion company. That’s one of hundreds and hundreds of examples. There shouldn’t be any kind of stigma with it. It’s more about living the reality of hey, if you’re going to build a successful company, you need to have traction. If you’re not getting traction doing what you’re doing, let’s figure it out and go a different direction.
John:	Yeah. And I think traction, that’s the key word. So, when I work with clients to understand when to pivot, I think of three different things. One is the obvious loss of traction, which typically manifests itself in terms of revenues, customers, or what have you. Two, when there’s a clear change in the environment, and we’re all living through one right now with COVID-19. And then three is when there’s an unexpected opportunity just handed in your lap. So, to just give you a couple of examples of each one of these. For the loss of traction, so I was working with a company in the workforce platform industry. So, think of Upwork or GLG or [Katalon] or those kinds of guys. So, these guys had done reasonably well. Their particular niche in that marketplace was AI and blockchain talent. So really, really high-end tech talent, very hard to find. But at the same time, they were just not growing at the level that they had hoped to grow, and one of their funders was Peter Diamandis, so I think he had ideas that they would grow maybe a little bit faster than they were growing. So, enter one of their new clients, which was one of the big four. So, what their challenge was, the big four client, they needed to get access to this high-end talent, the AI and the blockchain. But when they sold a consulting project, they needed to have those people literally in two days up and running and staffed.
Scott:	That’s not a very long timeframe to get it staffed.
John:	Yeah. That’s basically pretty close to impossible, unless what you’ve done is to take this whole group of high-end talent and then pre-vet them. So, the pre-vetting means they would go through whatever governmental checks need to be done for a particular client, the client specific tests, tests that a consulting firm might run them through. So, if you take them through that whole process, which will take a couple of weeks, then suddenly you have this cloud of people who are ready to go at a moment’s notice in the most hard to fill specialties. In the HR world, that’s called a talent cloud. So, they produced a talent cloud for one particular, very large client, and it was absolutely, phenomenally successful. So, they realized, okay, well maybe instead of trying to be this broad generic platform that people come to on a transactional basis, they’ll create clouds specifically for high-end tech firms, for firms that are engaging in major digital transformation, which is an awful lot of firms in the economy today, and used that as their entree. So that’s where I came in and helped them out. So that example is just the loss of traction. Another example is just a clear change in the environment. So obviously virtually anyone you talk to today about their businesses talk about COVID-19 and how that’s impacting them. One of the companies I’ve been working with is called Curiada. They are a small alcohol beverage startup, and I’ll explain that in a second, but they’re headed up by a guy named Adam Caplan, who I worked with at Nielsen, who is a partner at Kantar and who’s absolutely a brilliant guy, in addition to being the nicest guy you’d ever meet. So, they found a problem in the marketplace, and that was that in the alcoholic beverage category, the custom high-end spirits, the craft spirits market was growing at about 30% a year. So, it’s by far the fastest growing market in that entire industry.
Scott:	One of my good buddies was early, there’s an early distributor in that space, in the Bay area, and his business [inaudible] so fast. It was surprising to me, but I think it was like people just didn’t want to go with the big brands anymore. They just felt like it was handcrafted, or what was the trend there?
John:	Yeah. Well, it’s just the same trend that we’re seeing across the entire economy and across the CPG world. It’s all about authenticity. It’s about having real brands, not fake brands like Smirnoff or whatever that were made up. But the problem that your friends had, and a lot of the small distributors or small manufacturers have, is that it’s very, very difficult to break into a new market. So, for example, if you want to, just at a high level, figure out getting into Chicago or New York, what would be the cost of entry? So, you’ve got the cost of an FTE, selling in. You’ve got the cost of advertising. You’ve caught the cost of doing these tastings. Rough guess, it’s about 100,000. So, you pay this 100,000 dollars to get into a new market and you have no guarantee of success. So, the business idea that Adam had was to match supply and demand. So, he created an online platform of a community of folks who love craft liquor.
Scott:	Oh my God, smart. So smart.
John:	And so, he could get, in a particular geography, commitments from folks for a particular craft brand to bring them in so that they didn’t have to do the 100,000 worth of advertising, and the distributor on their side didn’t have to worry about whether this brand was going to flame out or not, so they weren’t wasting their time. So, all of that was a brilliant idea, with one exception.
Scott:	It’s almost like a Kickstarter, or like a crowd funding or crowd customers. Generating customers through the cloud like pre-selling. That’s really, really smart.
John:	Yeah, right. I mean, and really, if you think about that, that would have applicability across a lot of different industries. Until the COVID-19 hit, and then-
Scott:	Fat chance. I forgot about that. Yeah.
John:	Didn’t work out so well. So, the change in the environment there was that they just didn’t have a market anymore. But at the same time, you’ve probably noticed in driving around, if you look at a liquor store, the parking lots are always full.
Scott:	I feel like I’ve heard anecdotally that liquor companies are doing really well in COVID, because everyone’s at home and bored and nothing else to do but to drink.
John:	Yeah. Well, I can say from firsthand experience, as a sample of one, that’s true. But the other thing that you’re probably not seeing is that online liquor sales are taking off. When I say taking off, they’ve grown year over year by 400%. So, a huge new market for them, and so they just pivoted. So, they took that change in the environment, made a change to the business model, and it’s just taking off.
Scott:	Maybe this is, and I don’t want to jump forward too fast, bu did you consult with him and help him? Did you guys have a moment where you just stared each other in the eye over Zoom and said, “Hey, this is it. We got to do it. We got to pull the trigger on this pivot.”
John:	On this particular one, no, but I’ve had that exact moment on others.
Scott:	Yeah. I’m sorry, I cut you off there, interrupted.
John:	No, that’s okay. So, in terms of when, the third big area would be unexpected opportunities. So, I’ll give you an example of a company that I work with. Now, this is very low tech, and this is in the mosquito abatement arena. So, as you know, our summers are getting warmer, which means more mosquitoes, more Zika, more West Nile, and people are getting very concerned. Even Alaska has mosquitoes now. So, my client was building a franchise in that area, and it’s worked out very well. But unfortunately, the large guys in that market, being Terminix and Orkin, decided to enter specifically in the mosquito niche. So, they were at the point of possibly getting squashed on. But what they found, what the franchise organization found, is that a couple of their franchisees were offering broader pest services. Without getting into the specifics, they had a unique approach that was particularly valuable in the marketplace. So they recognized this as an opportunity to grow their business. We did all the research to flesh out what that offering should look like. Did the concept product fit, and they have grown from when I started working with them, they were valued at 1.5 million, and I believe this week, cross your fingers, I believe they’re going to sell for 30 million. So, it was just-
Scott:	Oh my gosh. Amazing. That’s incredible.
John:	Yeah. It was tremendously successful.
Scott:	Hey, it’s Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting, and before we get back to the podcast, quick shout out to ChartHop. ChartHop is one of my favorite new SaaS tools on the market, and basically what ChartHop does is it puts your org chart in the cloud, and I always like to say it brings transparency to your organization. So, everyone in your organization can see who they report to. They can see the full order of the company and how their group relates to other groups. It also has a lot of information on the individuals in the company. So, you can click on the chart out profile and just get where people live, their experience, Slack handles, all this kind of stuff, and it’s just a really great tool. The other thing is ChartHop has started doing some cool stuff around compensation and budgeting planning, and so you can actually start seeing what the cost structure of the company looked like during certain kind of scenarios. So, I’m loving ChartHop. Check it out, charthop.com. We use it at Kruze. We really like it, and I can’t recommend it enough. All right, back to the podcast. So, there’s three different types of pivot, and when you make that decision, there’s obviously some stakes. So, there’s a couple of things we just go over, but how do you communicate that to the stakeholders like, “Hey.” Because you [inaudible] to get buy-in right? What’s the preferred method?
John:	So, here’s what I would say. In my experience as a consultant, the single most important thing to go from having a good idea that our consultant hands you in a report to having something that actually lives and breathes within your organization is to involve the key stakeholders throughout the whole process. So, if your guys who are coming up with this pivot just do so in isolation, and then they tell the rest of the company, “Hey, we’re going to move,” I don’t think that’s going to be particularly successful. But I’ve also found, in at least in the cases that I’ve been involved in, typically the heads of the different functional areas are involved in the research project. By them buying in and being part of the process, it’s just so much more likely to be successful, and then the whole issue of communication almost goes away because the heads of the areas know what’s going on, so they communicate their folks. So, it tends to work out very, very well. On the investor side, I can only speak to cases where consultants are involved, because of course I’m a consultant, and so I don’t know what happens when consultants aren’t involved. But in those cases that I’ve been involved with, the investors tend to like facts. They like numbers, figures, and credibility. Or you can go back to them and show the rigor. For example, with this workforce platform I talked about, we talked to the CHRO of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and a number of other pretty large companies in that particular space, and when we could say with authority that we had spoken with them, we’re reflecting their thinking into this new NVP, then it just gave us so much more credibility.
Scott:	Yeah. That’s a great point, though, because you are like a subject matter expert, and so that’s one of the reasons to bring you into the equation there. Because also, the board may sit there and say like, “Well, does the CEO have a, do they really know what they’re doing or have they really thought through this?” And your point about actually doing real research, putting together real numbers, and having a board ready packet to convey what you’re seeing in the market and why it’s so important, I think is really, really valuable.
John:	Yeah. It tends to work out very well, and in those cases where companies don’t do that due diligence is where they’re going to have problems, which VCs tend to be very quantitative people. I mean, you were in that space, so you know well if they want to see numbers. If you’re just pulling something out because you read comments on Twitter, it’s not going to be as well received.
Scott:	Yeah. The third stage of this is, for lack of a better word, how do you do it?
John:	Yeah. Right, right. That’s a topic that could fill up a podcast or a whole series of podcasts. But let me outline a really simple approach that I think a lot of your listeners could take and could be effective for them.
Scott:	Awesome.
John:	So, I was reading actually, this morning, a question on Reddit and that was from a startup. Their title was, “How do you do market research?” Which, kind of a big topic. But then when you read his comment, he said, “Well, I’m in a business to business market. I want to change my pricing and some of my offering components. So how do I really think about this?” Some of the replies said, “Oh, just do a SurveyMonkey survey or do some usability testing.” Well, that’s not going to work when you’re at the point where you need to pivot, because the problem is you don’t know what you don’t know. So, the playbook that I would outline would start with one, doing interviews, in depth interviews with either existing customers or potential customers. Those interviews would look something like starting off by saying, “Hey, when we work with you or when you buy a product like ours, what is the problem that you’re trying to solve with that, and to what extent are you actually solving the problem? Where are you happy and where are you really not happy?” So, this will give them a good idea as to where they fit within their customer’s mind space. The second thing that we would normally do in these discussions is have them review a one-page NPV. So, you don’t have to build anything, but you can write out your service as best as you know, in a single page or two pages, and just have them react to it. What parts of this resonate with you? What parts don’t make sense? What things would you want to see that we’re not offering? That can help you think through your NVP in real time. And by the way, as you go through these discussions, just change your NVP to reflect what you’ve learned.
Scott:	Do you ever do different variations of the NVP as you’re trying to tease out the key insights, or is it better just to put your energy into writing a really good document, getting in front of the potential customer, and then pivoting later? Instead of multiple questions, just putting one question in front of them, I guess. Does that make sense?
John:	It does, yeah. So, the way I think about that is I try to do a couple of interviews before making any changes to the NVP. But once you’ve done two or three with a diverse set of folks, you get a pretty good idea as to what’s working or what’s not working with, with your paper and pencil MVP. So, I tend to iterate it that way. Again, this is just in the early in-depth discussion phases. So just to continue on with that. So, you’ve understood from them what their base problems are. You’ve gotten some feedback on your NVP, and the third part is to figure out roughly about pricing. This can be a hard question to ask, and you certainly can’t just ask someone, “Hey, how much would you pay for this?” But what you can do is say, “Well, look, when you’ve gotten services similar to this in the past, how much have they typically charged?” By framing it in that way, you’re going to tend to get much better, much more quality answers. So if you take that approach, and let’s say you do 10 of these interviews, I think you’re going to put yourself in a really good spot in terms of being much smarter about what your product and service should be.
Scott:	I love it. That’s a really great methodology. I love how you started with the interviews at first, because I think you said this, but you don’t necessarily know what questions to ask right away. So, there’s that nice little discovery process, and you can just be more agile and throw more things out to the person you’re interviewing, rather than starting with a document from nowhere. I think that’s a really good way of doing it. It’s probably really important for, I mean, this is I think one of the ways you probably help startups quite a bit, in that you’re like a professional listener and you really know what people. You probably are really good at seeing, listening, and hearing what people are saying, even if they’re not quite saying it explicitly, where I find that most founders, most people, that’s an acquired skill. So unless you’re really good at that, naturally, you’re not, I think hiring a professional like you to assist in the practice and in the effort makes a lot of sense. Because I know, I think I’m a pretty good listener, but I just don’t have years of market research and of experience in just parsing out what people people really mean by what they’re saying. Does that make sense?
John:	It makes sense, and of course, I’m say gosh, making my ego feel bigger. But look, the truth is a lot of your listeners aren’t going to want to spend the kind of money to hire me or some research firm. I think they can do a really good job on this process if you just follow that rough playbook. Let me just add one other thing that will make this a lot easier. So, people might be thinking, “Well, great. I’m going to talk to 10 people. I’m going to take an hour of their time. There’s no way they’re going to say yes to me.” Well, here’s a trick you can use that will get 50% or more to say yes. Tell them that you’re doing research, and that you’re speaking with people like them and their peers, and based on this, you’re going to write a report. or you’re going to write out a blog post, or you’re going to publish an article somewhere, but then you’ll come back to them and you’ll provide them all this information and talk them through it. So, for whatever reason, when people hear that their input is being used for a published article, they tend to be really interested. Also, all these guys, their time is so valuable. The one thing that is a good trade-off for their time is something they can learn. So, this gives you something they can learn and something that’s really interesting to them, and it provides you a natural method to go back to them and say, “Hey, look, here’s what I learned. Let me talk you through this.” And then there’s maybe a good chance that they’ll become one of your customers. Here I’m focusing on B2B, but the same can be true with consumer.
Scott:	John, I think that’s such creative advice, because when they’re answering your questions, they don’t know if they’re the person with off the wall ideas or they’re part of a greater collective that has the same problems. So, by giving them that report of that project, you’re totally right. You’ve validated the time they’ve spent, you give them a bunch of competitive or market data that they wouldn’t have been able to get, and so it’s actually exceptionally good trade for them, and you’re right. You’ve started to build a relationship so that when you go back to them and you actually built the product you’re talking about, you have a really captive person who’s interested and probably feels a little bit emotionally vested in your success and wants to help and is probably more likely to try it out.
John:	Right. I think I would 100% agree with everything, Scott.
Scott:	That’s really cool. That’s super cool. I love the playbook. There’s one final thing in the pivot, which I don’t want too much time on, but how do you know when it’s time to give up on the pivot and do something else? That’s something I see sometimes where people, founders will grind themselves into the ground when their initial idea didn’t work and then the pivot doesn’t work. What do you do, and how do you know it’s time?
John:	Yeah. That’s a hard question to answer. The way I would think about it, though, is twofold. One, you’re generally going to fall into one of two categories when you’re doing a pivot. The first would be it’s kind of a zero or a one situation. When you make the pivot, you’ve trashed your old business model and you can’t go back. So, I gave you the example of Curiada. Well, in theory, they could go back from selling direct to the consumer to going through distributors. It’s such a different model that by switching, it’s just going to be really difficult for them to go back. So, if they’re going to do that, the burden of proof in terms of this new idea of being a good idea is a lot higher before they make the switch, and once they’ve made the switch, I don’t know that there is a going back.
Scott:	It’s like a burn the boats mentality. We’re just going to make this work no matter what kind of thing.
John:	Yeah, exactly. And then the second category, though, is like this workforce platform that we’ve been talking about. By going to this talent cloud approach, they’re not really burning their boats. They’re just saying, “Okay, there’s this new market that we could go after.” So, in that case, obviously you can be a lot laxer about how long you’re going to give this thing to succeed. I would certainly put a time limit on it, and given that this is a B2B type of project, I would say, well, let’s make sure we’ve got some business wins within the next six months that validates this, otherwise we’ve got to go in a different direction.
Scott:	Yep, yep. Yeah, like some KPIs or some business goals, and if you’re not meeting business goals, that makes perfect sense. Well, John, this has been really awesome. You are such an expert in this and you’ve been through it. I think all this advice will be really, really helpful to our clients, just the startup community at large. Maybe spend just a minute telling everyone where they can find you, and just reiterating Nova’s value prop for customers.
John:	Yeah. Well, thanks so much. Sure. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, John Schroeder at Nova Foresight. You can also email me at john@novaforesight.com. Just a quick thumbnail through what we do is we help companies create sustainable growth. That’s what excites me. That’s what makes working with startups so fun. And three basic areas, one is building your brands and your NVPs and figuring out how to pivot if you need to. Two, creating completely new products and services, and then three identifying market opportunities or growth expansion opportunities. So those are the big things that we’re working on.
Scott:	I love it. Well, John, thanks so much. It’s been great getting to know you, and I look forward to seeing you when I come back from my Northwestern, probably three years from now, a reunion. So, looking forward to meeting you in person, and thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it on behalf of the Kruze Consulting community.
John:	Well, thank you so much, Scott. It’s been a true pleasure.
Scott:	Awesome. Thanks man.
John:	Bye-bye.
Singer:	(singing) It’s Kruze Consulting Founders and Friends, with your host Scotty Orn.

John Schroeder of Nova Foresight, a company that helps clients bring innovative ideas to market, including the most challenging business issues that are mission critical to their success

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