Founder & CEO training for life and business
Even when business is going well, it’s often at the cost of a neglected personal life or imperilled health.
And the turbulence can quickly turn to feelings of doubt…
“Am I doing enough? Am I doing the right thing?”
“Am I tired or lazy, or just crazy for thinking I could ever pull this off?”
“Am I wasting my time? Should I just pack it in and get a job?”
If feels like there’s always just so much going on.
“When do I get a break?!”
“Am I working for myself? Or a slave to my business?"
And those feelings of doubt are only compounded by others…
“We won’t be investing.”
“We’re pulling out.”
“It’s just not for us.”
Unsure we’re on the right path, we can’t help but compare our results to others.
We never quite feel good enough…
And before long, the financial fears kick in:
“How will I pay my team? How will I pay my rent?”
And just like that, we’re back in survival mode.
Ambitions turn compulsive.
“I want to make this work” becomes “I NEED to make this work”
If my business fails, I’m a failure. Our entire self-worth, contingent upon whether the next investor says yes, or next quarter’s revenue meets expectations.
(Startup Snapshot, 2023, n = 404)
A More Human Way To Do Business
by Soheil Ahmadzadeh
Co-founder at ReHumanity
Hello hello, I’m Soheil, and over the last 25 years, I’ve been fortunate enough to work around the world - leading impact projects in Africa; undertaking ventures in agriculture and healthcare; and later co-founding funds to invest in developing nations.
But what I’ve always been most passionate about is people.
It’s always fascinated me to see that, regardless of whether I’m speaking to a President or his driver, it’s the same basket of human emotions & challenges. The same stresses, the same difficulties balancing work and life, the same frustrations, same insecurities, same imposter syndrome, same fears of letting others down…
I’ve had partners of mine who were literal billionaires, but still felt inwardly insecure and as panicked over finances as a single mother struggling to make rent.
I remember staying up late with a Chinese businessman to close a $500m deal, while he apologised to his wife for missing dinner; no different to his driver waiting downstairs, both struggling to find balance.
And I’ve seen even the most technically talented teams hit failure because they can’t trust each other, or feel pushed around by a dogmatic leader. Same as a little league team, squabbling over who should be captain.
But the world of business forgets this human side, focussing instead on surface level solutions, but never the root human causes.
According to Harvard Business Review (2021), the top 3 reasons why startups fail are:
No product-market fit
Co-founder disputes
Ineffective management
But each of these has a very human root:
Missing product-market fit is a symptom of a lack of understanding & empathy for customers.
Co-founder disputes are derivative of breakdowns in communication & trust.
And ineffective management the consequence of missing respect for leadership, or lacking belief in one’s team.
If the human fundamentals are not in place, very little else matters:
You can have all the funding in the world, but if you still feel like an undeserving imposter, your leadership and decision-making …
You can have the most advanced productivity softwares, but it won’t help if you’re burnt out inside.
You can have the brightest minds on your team, but nothing will get built if everyone’s out for their own, driven by ego or misaligned.
ReStart - by ReHumanity - is a more human way to do business.
We take a holistic approach, working with founders & startups to tackle both the human and business challenges of running a company.
What we’ve seen, time and again, is once those internal human challenges are resolved, many complex business difficulties straighten out into to common-sense, actionable solutions.
How We Can Help
We take a holistic approach to you and your team as human beings. Our approach is completely unique to every founder or company we work with, but here’s what you can typically expect:
Founder Mapping
Free-flow sessions to get a holistic sense of who you are as a founder; where you are, what you want to get out of your work.
Personal Blueprint
As we learn more about you, we’ll co-synthesise our insights into your very own Personal Blueprint - an instructional manual to you; your triggers, state-shifters, cognitive biases, inner & outer voices.
Consciousness Training
Techniques & exercises to build your conscious awareness of repeating psychological patterns that might be holding you back, so you can break them moving forward.
Company Mapping
Free-flow sessions to map out your business; where you’re at, the technical challenges; and what lies beneath the surface of those technical challenges.
Business Blueprint
As we map out your company, we’ll work together to create a business blueprint - an aerial overview of your company, its goals, its team, its processes and more - for clarity on how everything fits together.
Teamwork Facilitation
Your team knows a lot, but often has little space to speak up. Conversations can be reserved and “awkward”. We can mediate dialogue to get a clearer sense of what’s going inside your company’s day-to-day operations.
Emotional Support & Accountability
It can be lonely at the top, and difficult to share your truest feelings with your team when they rely on you for confident leadership. We can help you work through emotional challenges, and keep you accountable to the changes you want to make in your life.
Intellectual Sounding Board
Drawing from decades of experience, we can bounce ideas, sense-check important decisions and work together to develop exciting new projects & strategies.
Finding Clarity
Building a business is messy. We can help cut through the noise, and boil things down to the subset of actions that really matter to you and your business.
Practically, our support might typically involve 2 x 2-hour calls per week, frequent support over WhatsApp, email & shorter calls in between, and additional sessions to work with the rest of your team.
But again, it really depends on you and your company, and the precise details of how we might work together can be explored in our first mapping session.
The Team
Work with an experienced team who've now built, advised & trained over 200 startups, blending real experience and applied psychology.
Managed $2bn in investments
Former VC executive
World champion lyricist
ICF-certified executive coach
Founded an 8-figure startup
Launched a startup incubator
Cooked dinner for Boris Johnson
Former CTO, coding since 12!
Ex-McKinsey
Speaks French & loves dance
ICF-certified executive coach
Testimonials
We've worked with leading accelerators, VCs and startups to help their founders get their sanity back and scale their impact.
Presenting knowledge-intensive topics to an audience that does not know the field is a difficult task in itself. But you did very well! The topics included in the presentation were excitingly structured, being one of the most popular discussion groups at the Startup Day event. The feedback from the working groups was that you know how to enrich difficult topics with good humour, life circumstances, and plenty of facts. Thank you!
ELIS TOOTSMAN
Amir is one of our top trainers specialising in transformation within technical teams. His deep, calm manner reaching every participant. A talent most trainers do not possess. His recent spearheading of an internal transformation for an AI manufacturing company was outstanding. We're looking forward to working together on more projects!
Robin Rudolph
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