Welcome to Stateshift

Hey, this is Jono.

So, today is a pretty exciting day as we are rebranding the Community Leadership Core to Stateshift, and the pathway that led us here has been a little, well, unusual...so I wanted to share a little bit about why we are making this change.

So, when I started this company a few years ago, I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about consultants.

You see, we had spent 7 years consulting with hundreds of different companies, from multi-national corporations to early-stage startups, and I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the consulting model.

It struck me that when you hire a consultant, you are really paying for wisdom and experience from that consultant...and that that wisdom is primarily delivered with words and powerpoint decks.

But...to me there was a giant elephant in the room that most consultants tended to avoid eye contact with, which was...are words of wisdom really enough to result in actual change in the customer?

A different approach

My hypothesis was that they weren't...and that the only way to get real, tangible results is that to to ride shotgun with customers...connecting together more regularly...and performing lots of small iterative steps focused on real work as opposed to purely strategic vision.

Now, in parallel with these concerns about the consulting model, I was also, just kinda hankering for us to work with more companies...back then we could only ever take on 3 to 5 companies...but, I thought...could we work with 30 companies...and...could we fix the consulting model with a more iterative way of working AND charge less for it...because consultants are often prohibitively expensive, especially for earlier stage companies.

So, this all became the mandate for the Community Leadership Core.

So then, like any startup, we launched, brought on our first 10 customers...who were so awesome to work with...and we started going through rapid optimizations of our engagement model based on their feedback.

Now, like any founder, this was a humbling process. Many of the ideas that I thought were so critical when we got started...well, our customers couldn’t give a crap about.

Throughout this process we really learned how to differentiate between what mattered to us and what actually mattered to our customers...and through lots of trial and error, and some amazing insight and guidance from our customers...we landed on our current engagement model which I am really happy with.

This journey also somewhat validated my hypothesis that more regular engagement and iteration with our customers...riding shotgun if you will...had a bigger impact....and we have now worked a load of companies, from huge companies like IBM, Comcast, Pfizer, Okta...all the way through to earlier-stage companies such as Dagger, Dragonfly, Okteto, Zed, Umbraco, and many others.

What's in a name?

...but throughout this journey I saw something kinda interesting, but a little concerning.

While we called our company the Community Leadership Core...the word “community” actually ended up somewhat constricting the work we were doing.

You see, for many people they view a “community” as a Discord or a Slack or a discussion forum that looks like a throwback from the nineties...and they see a “community” as the activities that happen in those specific platforms.

But we see it differently. Fundamentally, what we do is help companies build ecosystems of users and developers that are weaved together using all the tools of a modern company...content, social media, video, online events, in-person events, incentives, gamification, ambassadors...and all built on a really strong foundation that is laser-focused on clear target audiences with a distinctive, but differentiated, brand position.

So, I had a hypothesis that the “community” in Community Leadership Core was not actually aligned with the sheer breadth of work that we do...which is way more than discord and Slack...and is fundamentally helping people build ecosystems of users and developers across many different channels and use cases.

OK, then, let's do this

So...this was good and bad news. Good news...we were better understanding our customers, how to serve them, and how to always deliver as much value as possible. Bad news, now we needed to do a bloody rebrand...which is about as fun as jamming a hot poker into your ears.

But when we sat down and really...truly thought about what we do...is that we help move our customers from one state to another.

We help early-stage companies get clear on their audience and brand, hire good people, build engagement with limited resources, and enable their early adopters to help them find that elusive product market fit.

We help growth-stage companies scale up the impact but not get sucker punched by being everywhere all at once...and help them to grow but with efficiency, and with all the challenges of building a team and culture to make this happen.

And we help large corporations get out there and compete, in often fast-moving markets where startups filled by 20 somethings can eat their lunch...enabling these big companies t move quickly despite the contraints of the large enterprise.

...when we thought about it...the unifying pattern here is that we help all these different companies to shift from one state to another...hence our new company name...Stateshift.

You know, this has been a hell of a journey...but our ambitions here are clear: we are going to build the most impactful and engaging coaching company in the world, and I am proud of our progress so far, but we are only just getting going.

So, thanks everyone for your amazing support throughout this journey, thanks to our amazing customers for riding shotgun with us, and welcome to Stateshift. Peace out.

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