Cheers to new opportunities, kickass ideas, and creative ventures—I’m pumped for 2020 and I’m hoping you are too.

We want to kick off this New Year by sincerely thanking you for being a member of our Foundr family. We love helping you make your entrepreneurial dreams a reality and being a part of your lives. Believe us when we say that helping out this amazing community that has formed over the past six years is what truly drives us.

In fact, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re often the subject of our Slack conversations.

That’s pretty typical chatter for the average workday, and it’s just that kind of heart that makes me love being a part of this team.

In all of our work and daily decisions, we always come back to how we can help. How we can change our readers’ lives for the better. And the feedback and encouragement we hear from you continues to motivate us.

This is why we are SUPER excited for what’s to come in 2020. We are taking things to the next level. Here’s a sneak peek at what we have on the horizon this year, as well as a personal motivational message to help you crush 2020 and achieve your goals.

Sneak Peek at 2020…

As the managing editor of the Foundr blog, I work behind the scenes, so I don’t always get the chance to publicly interact with our community and share my thoughts.

It’s been an absolute honor to serve you (sometimes I pinch myself to see if it’s real :)) and I will do my best to ensure this coming year serves up the very best information possible to help you create and grow your own amazing businesses.

One of my goals this year is to get even more acquainted with you, the Foundr community. We want every blog post, podcast, and video to meet a deep need and spark a big aha! moment, propelling you closer to your personal and business goals.

Our Foundr education team is also poised to absolutely crush it on the course front this year. We’ve got so many new resources in store, and we can’t wait to reveal them to you!

Here’s a sneak peek at what we’ve been working on:

Advanced Ecommerce Course (Release Date: January 2020)

If you’ve been hanging around the Foundr water cooler for a while, you may know about our ecommerce course, Start & Scale. This course teaches entrepreneurs how to start, launch, and grow an online retail store.

Our Start & Scale students are doing such amazing jobs with their stores, that they wanted to learn more advanced tactics to take their businesses to the next level. The Advanced Ecommerce course was born.

This course is taught by five world-class instructors who are all masters of their crafts. It will teach you tactics such as:

• Advanced influencer marketing: Taught by Gretta van Riel, four-time multimillion-dollar ecommerce founder who created SkinnyMeTea, Drop Bottle, The 5th Watches, and Skintox, and now runs an influencer marketing platform called Hey, which manages 8,000+ social media influencers. Gretta’s proven framework for ecommerce branding and marketing has led her to success, time and time again. Gretta also teaches Foundr’s original Start & Scale course, which takes you from idea (or no idea) to six figures in sales, and she’s excited to guide you through the next stage of your ecommerce journey.

• Advanced manufacturing and scaling operations: Taught by Richard Li, founder of BROSA, Australia’s biggest online furniture retailer, which he scaled from zero to $60 million in revenue. Richard is now co-founder of July luggage, which is just raised $11 million in funding. Prior to BROSA and July, Rich built his expertise in business strategy, brand development, and ecommerce, creating and sourcing products from China for retail sale in the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. A Chinese native who moved to Australia at 16, Rich has deep networks across Asia, a mastery of supply chain management, and a finger on the pulse of global consumers.

• Product development strategies and scaling with multiple SKUs: Taught by Rob Ward, co-founder of Annex Products and QuadLock, which sells the world’s most popular iPhone bike mount. Rob and his co-founder successfully bootstrapped Quadlock from 0 to $9 million dollars in four years, and today has sold 3 million units shipping to over 100 countries. QuadLock was also the first successful Kickstarter in Australia, and a winner of the Shopify Build-A-Business Competition. They now have 50+ different SKUs selling to multiple markets and niches, and he’s going to walk you through his Product Success Formula for how to scale your store beyond your flagship product.

• Email marketing to scale your store: Taught by Chase Dimond, co-founder of Boundless Labs, a top ecommerce email marketing agency based in Los Angeles. Chase’s company has helped ecommerce clients send hundreds of millions of emails, directly resulting in over $20 million in revenue. Boundless Labs manages 20+ ecommerce clients including The Chive, IBEX, Original Grain, TUSHY, and Vinyl Me Please.

• Scaling your online store with Facebook Ads: Taught by Nick Shackelford, a serial founder and six-year veteran in the paid media space. All in, Nick has spent upwards of $85 million in Facebook Ads across 150+ direct-to-consumer brands, and counting. He also popularized the fidget spinner through his paid media techniques. His sweet spot is helping companies between $10 million and $50 million annual revenue, and the strategies and execution needed to get them to that point.

Finance for Founders (Release Date: Feb 2020)

This step-by-step online course is taught by esteemed founder and managing Partner of Inspired Capital, founder of LearnVest, and author of the New York Times bestseller Financially Fearless and Financially Forward, Alexa von Tobel. Entrepreneurs will learn financially sound ways to set up a business and then take it to new heights, all while avoiding risk and money mistakes that so many entrepreneurs make.

She breaks down her experience into an actionable framework that you can apply right away to achieve financial fitness for your business—and get yourself on a clear path to scaling up.

Key lessons include:

• Key mistakes to look out for when structuring your business and accounts
• Creating your three-year business plan and budget
• “The 9-Grid Checklist” that all of Alexa’s companies have used for rapid, year-over-year growth
• Tips and hacks for creating your financial plan
• The finances of scaling, hiring, and growth
• And even a series of bonus lessons on how to raise venture capital and pitch to investors, from an experienced practitioner who runs a VC firm herself!

Additional Courses for 2020

But, that’s not all. We’ve got a lot more in store! The next four courses in the Foundr lineup focus on these topics:

• Systems and processes for scaling your business
• Sales funnels and mastering the customer journey
• Mental mastery, mindset, overcoming self-doubt, and goal setting
• Accelerated learning

We’re aiming to produce between 10 and 15 additional courses in 2020!

A Personal Message for Encouragement: What’s Holding You Back From Succeeding in 2020?

I’ve had some personal ups and downs this year but one of the biggest lessons I learned was the power of consistent effort and refusing to give up.

I’ve always had a problem with procrastination, mostly because I deal with perfectionism. So I would give up if I thought that what I was working on wouldn’t be perfect enough or live up to my unrealistic standards. To be blunt, I finally realized this is bullcrap :).

If you haven’t experienced the success you dream of, consider that maybe you’ve given up too easily. Consistent effort, no matter how small or seemingly imperfect, is a step in the right direction, even if it doesn’t manifest in immediate leads/sales/revenue.

So did your 2019 suck? Or was it just not quite up to your standards? Get up and start again. This is what I love about new beginnings. You can do them over and over again. It’s never too late to start over.

Need a little help? Answer this one question with as much specificity as possible.

Where do you want to be at the end of 2020?

Get out a pen and paper, or your laptop (I prefer holding a pen, I’m over four decades old), and write down exactly what your business life looks like in December 2020. Like, get really specific.

How much money are you earning?

How many employees do you have?

What is the status of your products?

What does your presence look like online?

Now get even more specific, what does it feel like? Are you interacting with hundreds of customers online chatting about your products? Are you creating designs and taking product shots? Get immersed in the experience so you can imagine yourself there already. Write all of this down, even the feeling you experienced.

When you feel like giving up, come back to this sheet. It will give you motivation to keep moving forward.

You are never out of the game as long as you don’t give up. Every action you take is a great accomplishment because it either produces results or teaches you a lesson, and both are valuable.

This may not be as in depth as the articles you’ve surely read on productivity and goal-setting. But I find that a lot of people (including myself) get too caught up in the mechanics of trying instead of using that energy to apply consistent effort toward a goal. It’s not as difficult as it seems (I know from first-hand experience).

So give yourself a good kick in the arse and let’s make 2020 the best year yet. The Foundr team is stoked to make this an epic year for you!

From the bottom of our hearts, we sincerely thank you for letting us be a part of your goals and dreams.

Let’s make it happen together! Cheers!