You spent years becoming an expert: research, publications, grant writing, institutional credibility. Then you tried to start a business and realized none of that prepared you for sales, pricing, or telling someone "no."

This workshop is for academics and researchers who've founded companies (or are thinking about it). You'll hear real lessons from building Community Expert Solutions from the ground up—starting in 2017 with nearly $1M in revenue generated to date. You'll learn what worked, what nearly broke the business, and what you need to unlearn from academia to succeed as an entrepreneur.

What you'll learn

• The 3 biggest mindset shifts: from being right (academia) to being useful (business); from publishing insights to selling solutions; from proving value to capturing value

• How to translate academic credibility into business credibility—and how to know when your research background is an asset vs. a liability in the market

• The financial and operational skills nobody teaches in grad school: pricing strategy, runway management, hiring the right people, and saying no to opportunities that don't align with your vision—with real examples from scaling CES

Who it's for: Academics and researchers who've founded or are founding companies; PhD holders thinking about entrepreneurship; people caught between the "publish or perish" world and the "ship or die" world of startups