93: Creating a Plan for Your Business, Career and Life with MIT Teacher Mark Herschberg

BiggerPockets Business Podcast

An author, a CTO, and a champion ballroom dancer walk into a podcast...it’s Mark Herschberg! Mark is a man of many talents, graduating from MIT, becoming a champion in ballroom dancing, and later becoming a COO and CTO for multiple startups. How does someone do it all, and do it all so well?

After college, Mark was working in computer science and began having to hire new team members on board for the companies he worked at. He realized that many new hires had technical skills, but didn’t have skills that correlated to becoming better leaders or teammates. Mark saw that there was a whole realm of soft skills that weren’t being taught to graduates coming into the workforce. So he partnered up with MIT to develop a course on acquiring these skills and became a lecturer. He’s been teaching this material for the past two decades!

As the classes went on, Mark decided to write some notes that every student would be able to use throughout the class. After writing close to 100 pages, Mark realized that this wasn’t just a set of notes, this was a full-on book. This became The Career Toolkit and taught Mark not only how to write, but the challenges of publishing and marketing a book.

If you’re a solo entrepreneur, a CEO of a startup, regular employee, or still looking for career opportunities, Mark advises that you create a career plan, outlining what your life, career, and future will look like. How can you accomplish the goals you’ve set and what do you have to do to put yourself in a beneficial position?

Maybe you’re shy or introverted and find it hard to talk to partners, maybe you want to know how to network in a post-COVID world, or maybe you want to know how to manage teams and lead a company to optimum efficiency and employee satisfaction. Mark does a fantastic job of answering these questions and more in a succinct and relatable way.

In This Episode We Cover:

• Developing your soft skills like leadership and teamwork
• The skills all entrepreneurial endeavors require
• Why you need to stop treating your 1000th customer like your 1st customer
• Creating a career plan (regardless of if you work in corporate or work for yourself)
• Building your network and creating reciprocal benefits
• Networking in a digital age and why you should always have business cards on you
• And So Much More!

Links from the Show

• Cognosco Media Resources
• LinkedIn

Check the full show notes here: http://biggerpockets.com/bizshow93

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