We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Elijah Johnston. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Elijah below.

Elijah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the best or worst investment you’ve made?

The best investment I’ve made as a business owner is to create leverage by productizing my primary service. Throughout my journey across the spectrum of venture designer, venture capital, software engineering, and product management, I’ve come to two key insights:

1. people don’t pay for products or services, they invest in solutions
2. the only difference between a product and service is automation

At the time, I was offering a concierge $60,000 venture design service to venture-backed companies looking to bring scalable, digital products to market. I was solving a problem for mission-driven founders who had very specific subject matter expertise in the space that they wanted to innovate but lacked the technical and product acumen to prioritize, craft a clear product, and get to market.

I grew a team of 20 people servicing organizations, effectively operating a premium agency. We generated over $2M in gross revenue within 18 months.

Side note, this wasn’t because we were selling the $60,000 sprints like hot-cakes, it was more because we realized that when you do this type of foundational design work for startups, you become an incredible asset on their path moving forward – so there was a lot of follow-up work. I mention this is because it’s key to understanding the investment of productization that I will get to next.

So here are some key learnings through that process that led me to my best investment:

1. I didn’t want to manage a large team.
2. Doing so much follow-up work distracted us from perfecting our core product.
3. Profit trumps revenue all day, every day.

With that context, now I’ll circle back to my starting statement: The best investment I’ve made as a business owner is to create leverage by productizing my primary service.

Taking these learnings what I decided to do was identify what’s at the heart of the work we were doing and create leverage. Now there are 4 primary ways to create leverage (getting the most output for the least input): capital, code, connections, and content. I didn’t want to run a big team, it didn’t align with the lifestyle I’m looking to create – so instead I resorted to code and content to create a leveraged core offering.

I packaged up a $60,000 service into a $10,000 product that allowed me to achieve the same results for clients with a fraction of the effort. I leveraged tools such as Zapier, Circle, Descript, and Notion to design an 8-week journey that brings creators and entrepreneurs to productize their purpose.

So to sum it all up, deciding to focus on creating leverage via automation within my core offering, has been the best investment I’ve made.\

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an unconventional designer in the eyes of most. Why? Because still today, many people think of design as visual when the reality is that design, at its core, is function.

I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life working with organizations of many scales and many geographies to identify and execute on their core innovations. I’ve also during that same time, have been on a profound journey of spiritual awakening and stewarding a more prosperous future for coming generations.

The way I stumbled into this work was deciding to leave my corporate job doing due diligence for private equity firms looking to make investments. After 6 months, I didn’t quite resonate with the monotony and the culture. It was then that I moved over to The Futures Company, which is where I felt like a caged bird who was finally able to fly. This is where I honed the craft of facilitating design thinking within organizations. I was working with human and cultural insights and foresights to identify. opportunity areas and carve novel future-facing product strategies.

To give an example of my range of work, in the earlier days of my career, I’ve helped design the Samsung Galaxy Series 7, somewhere in the middle, I designed software used with across Africa for citizens to collaborate with government on policy, and most recently, I designed a tech venture that is teaching underserved youth foundational literacy skills.

The problem that I solve for clients at its core is not knowing where to focus to get the highest ROI towards their mission. And often, the mission itself needs to be clearly articulated first.

What sets my approach apart is the integration of mind-body connection – working with entrepreneurs to tune into what they are here to create through a combination of practical insight and mindful practices, and focus on creating longevity by finding the sweet spot of their natural gifts and strengths with the needs of the market. So embodying this philosophy that when we feel good, we can truly do our best and most creative work.\

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Skill is how we funded our business.

Utilizing our core skills to provide valuable services that generated the necessary cash flow to invest into building efficiencies. As someone who operates a VC fund, starting off, I didn’t want to pursue external funding for three core reasons:

1. Doing things manually at first, allow for a deep understanding of our offering and our customers
2. Venture capital creates obligation to external stakeholders expecting a return
3. Taking a loan would be premature given the clarity of our strategy

So our business was bootstrapped from the ground up, to now be a profitable product-driven company.

Any advice for managing a team?

It’s important to acknowledge that everyone is an entrepreneurial within their lives, looking to operate the business of their life. The big difference is that some people are more willing to take on risk and feel called to pursue a bigger vision, while others feel totally good operating within an existing container.

But in acknowledging our inherent entrepreneurship, it’s important to create incentive for people to want to wake up everyday and put their precious time and energy into what you’re creating. A great way to do this is to take the time to understand the goals and aspirations in people’s lives, and being proactive about aligning opportunities to serve that path.

Secondly, I’ve found that having a clear strategy increases the ROI of all dollars invested into talent. It ensures that their work is geared towards the goals of the organization, and creates the emotional support of knowing what they’re working towards. In times of unclear strategy, people become uneasy and question stability. So my advice would be, in managing a team, don’t skimp on having a strategy and when you have one, clearly communicate it so that people are included.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.groovewithgaia.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elijah_ade/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elijah-johnston/
• Other: [email protected]