Startup Savvy: Josiah Grimes Of MovableType AI Shares Their Secrets For Rapid Growth and Success

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion about cultural sensitivity, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

I am a believer that entrepreneurs come from all different walks of life. I was from that weird subsection of entrepreneurs that kind of always knew they wanted to be an entrepreneur from when they were really little. Somewhere between the ages of 4 and 6, I realized I wanted to be an entrepreneur. At first, it was like, I really wanted to be an inventor, someone that builds something, but then ultimately, those dreams evolved into being an entrepreneur. My mom owns a music school and is an entrepreneur so I got to really see what it looks like to run your own business through her example. She always really encouraged me in my entrepreneurial dreams and adventures. We would play Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and stuff like that in the car. Those were kind of my inputs and my encouragement. I was that kid who always wanted to make lemonade stands or snack shops and stuff like that. I sold snacks out of my locker in junior high, until I got shut down by the principal. I just always wanted to do something entrepreneurial. My mom encouraged me in that, and that kind of set me on that trajectory. She really sowed that into me as part of the fabric of my identity and affirmed it in me.

You are a successful individual. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

There was kind of a turning point in my life. I think being willing to work hard, endure pain, and stay positive is really important. Because a lot of times, when pain becomes an obstacle, it’s very easy to come up with some reason why I don’t need this or why I should avoid this. But sometimes pushing through it is where we find our win and where we actually make progress. Where we become sharper, stronger, and better. I would say that hard work is definitely one of the character traits.

The next one that I’d say is probably being willing to surrender. Essentially, surrender to God or a higher power. Coming at life from a position of, it’s not all about me. I don’t have it all figured out. Having the attitude that I am not the big cheese type of dude has served me really well. An example of that would be when I went through a really trying time. I think I was working 65 hours a week, doing 21 credit hours at school and I was making like, nothing. It was about $500 a week or something like that. It was really low. And I was just like, I am trying in all my capacities and I have these grandiose dreams to achieve. When I was 11, I told myself if I’m not a billionaire by 21, I’m a failure. So that was a really stupid thing. But I was also 11 for some context. Then I am 21 and I feel like a failure. I’m working exceptionally hard, but I don’t feel like I’m making any progress. And I’m very much beating myself up and very stressed out. So it was kind of this moment where things kind of clicked for me. It was like, hey, you know, the only person that really knows, the whole world and me perfectly and knows how everything intertwines is God. He’s the only one who knows. And it turns out God’s got a good plan for me. So instead of me wanting my plan and being like this needs to happen. What I should really do is just say, Hey God, I just want your plan, whatever that is, I want your plan for me and I’m gonna pursue that. I would pray in the morning and at night this sort of surrender prayer. Hey, I surrender my goals and dreams of what I think I need to you. It gave me so much peace. Within six months my income tripled and I was made a partner. My boss put a down payment on a new car for me and bought me two suits. Then within another three months, my income tripled again. All of a sudden I was on a rocket ship with my career. So, I would say willingness to surrender.

Second is hard work and pushing through those hard things. When I was first starting my real estate business, KeyGlee, I remember thinking holy crap I’m trying to put one deal under contract and people are screaming and upset. There’s just all types of shenanigans going on and it’s, really, really stressful. When you are helping someone sell their home it’s a huge deal for them. They only do this maybe two or three times in their whole life and it has maybe all of their financial net worth in it. So it’s just this whole big deal. Often the house was an investment deal, so it probably is really beat up. Then you’re parlaying it to a buyer, but there’s a short period of time in order to pull it all off. All this to say, it was really stressful. And I was like, this is super hard. And to top it off the deal falls through. At that point, you’re really low, you’re feeling like you did all this work to try to get this deal to go through and it didn’t happen. I was worn down and pretty stressed out by that. You have to be willing to say — no, that’s not where I’m gonna land, I’m going to keep trying.

Third one. So people always talk about sowing vision, which is hugely important. And most people don’t really know how to do that. People often talk about making sure you run the numbers, do the math, and know that it’s actually gonna work. That’s super good, too. But I think one that a lot of people miss is this concept of sowing peace. Peace doesn’t mean lower standards. There’s certain ways that you can make your culture peaceful and hugely effective. A lot of that has to do with eliminating gossip and helping everyone individually own the culture. At one of the companies I first started I had this really great tech team and they were really happy. And then we hired a new person, and all of a sudden the whole tech team was upset and not happy. And just really cynical. I was like what is going on here? If we would have let that continue and not identified what the cause was, which I definitely stumbled through figuring out, it could have caused serious issues for the business. It was two months of pain and there were all types of funny and interesting things that took place in those two months. To recap, it’s important to be good at sowing peace, instruct and educate your team. That way they understand when they’re sowing peace and when they are sowing discord. This also instills that behavior in the culture. It’s not just talking about how we want to be nice, we don’t want to gossip, but how do you actually instill that? How do you instill that in each individual person and make them feel responsible for it? I think that if you can do that, if you can sow peace like that, you keep from throttling your growth, and putting a ceiling on it. Sometimes people have things that are going really well, but they literally shoot themselves in the foot because they allow their culture and themselves to sow discord, instead of sowing peace. As a leader, you need to sow peace.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview about young entrepreneurs secrets to rapid growth and success. To start, how would you define success?

I think God has a plan and a purpose for each individual person. So they’re going to feel like a natural calling to that purpose which a lot of times will be reflected in their goals. I think sometimes we have superficial goals, but a lot of times when we really dig in and start peeling them back like an onion, we start to understand, Oh, these are the desires of my heart. This is what I’m seeking. This is what I enjoy, and I enjoy this naturally. So I think to self-actualize what that plan or purpose is and what that ultimate goal is that you feel called to. I think that is success. For an organization. I think it’s similar. You set up the organization with a mission and a vision. And you want to actualize that vision by accomplishing the mission. So that’s how I would define success for a person and an organization.

What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly contributed to your startup’s growth, and why do you think it was so effective?

I think in general there are ways to quicken and or move things faster from a technological standpoint. Sometimes we do things that are really old school. In some of these instances there are ways we can pound for pound do something faster by utilizing some piece of tech. And it doesn’t always have to be very complex at all. There’s a lot of no code, low code solutions out there that allow you to iterate on your product way faster than if you were to hard code it. And even with less technical ability, but have an ultimately better product. So I think that maybe an unconventional strategy, from an overarching strategic perspective, is to look for where the shortcuts are. Ask yourself, how can I do this more efficiently? I don’t have to do this the hard way, how can I do this smarter? You see examples of this with a lot of people that you know. Instead of doing cold calls, they friend people on LinkedIn and DM them.

The response rate is better than cold calls, so why not just do that it’s easier, it’s less friction, gets your message across, they can see your profile, and you’re more likely to close that person or get on a phone call and close them later. Whereas if you’re just looking for high friction and coming from the mindset of I gotta figure out how to do this. I gotta talk to a bunch of people. I’m gonna hit a power dialer and just call everyone. It’s like, okay, well, why take the high-friction path when you can take the low-friction one? I think you can cascade that strategy across every component of your business. What’s great, too, is a lot of the shortcuts end up being improvements. There’s no downside to taking the efficient route. It’s just that it gets done faster and can oftentimes yield better results.

Can you share a critical pivot point in your startup’s journey and how you navigated the decision-making process?

I think one thing is that when you have some powerful technology, it’s super exciting. It’s super fun, but you can take it a lot of different ways. It’s not always necessarily potent when you can just run with it in a million directions. It’s way more potent and effective if you can channel that all in one focus area. Then you can really go deep in that area and make a lot of progress before you take the boil the ocean approach and add in other things.

We had a choice early on in our startup, Movable Ai, to either focus more on a marketing services type of setup, which would have been really effective or to focus more specifically on authorship, and on giving people the ability to be authors. We decided to take the, in some ways narrower approach, but I think it really has helped align us around providing the best possible experience for that particular type of client. So we have to exclude some people that this would have benefited, which isn’t fun, but we really get to serve the community that we’ve selected to serve. As far as how to make the decision on which path to take. It’s really based on what’s your capacity? And what level of service do you want to provide based on your capacity? What scope are we able to consume and still accomplish that?

How do you balance the need for rapid growth with maintaining a sustainable and healthy company culture?

So I think there’s lots of things here. The biggest thing is you need to spend a lot of time sowing vision as I referenced earlier. And you need to know how to actually sow vision effectively. Sometimes people aren’t really sure what vision is. What does that mean? It really means painting the picture — like when you read a book you can see the world in your mind’s eye, right? That’s what you’re doing. You’re painting the picture of what the company is going to look like in the future so that they can see it in their mind’s eye. That may look like, what does the office building look like? How many people are there? How many people are impacted? What does the community of authors sharing their new books look like? How excited are they? What does it look like when you change the publishing industry? When will you have this many publishing clients? When are you going to publish X amount of books? What does it look like when you’re doing a deal with Amazon? This is all vision because you’re actually giving them physical things to envision. It’s not sharing just over and over again your mission which is also very important for people to know and to share. But specifically sharing vision I think is huge because it’s what people are looking at and working towards. It gives them an idea of what they’re trying to build,

The other thing is spending time training on cultural tenants. So there’s core values, and then there’s cultural tenants. I think the difference between the two core values is integrity. A cultural tenant might teach you how to live with integrity and give examples of what that looks like. So the question is how do we actually train that? What does that look like day to day? How do I apply that? How do I hold myself responsible for that core value? You really need to spend time training on the cultural tenants and having people own those. Have other employees trade-off with who is doing the training, and get everyone involved.

Lastly or maybe even firstly — one of the biggest things is hiring good people. Hiring a good team is hugely important. It’s easy to misstep and hire someone who seems great, but they didn’t vet them culturally. There’s a handful of questions and exercises I like to do that help me understand how they are going to perform culturally. I think there’s an art and very much a science to doing that. If you can vet your hires well it really helps you ensure you’re bringing in good team members. Which is a phenomenal way to jumpstart and maintain culture.

It’s important that culture is not just something that we train and read about, but something we put action behind. We have to be intentional about it. It could be as simple as you looking around the room in the morning and saying, Hey, how can I bless that person or that person doesn’t seem very happy, but I know what their favorite coffee is so I’m gonna go get them a coffee to make their day better. Putting emphasis around the importance of looking after one another. If each individual person feels that it’s their responsibility to do that, your culture is going to be amazing.

In what ways has your personal definition of success evolved since the inception of your startup?

So we talked a little bit about my definition of success, which I think is probably still similar today. One big realization I have had is how different everyone’s individual goals are and understanding how God made everyone different. Everyone’s got different passions and desires. They’re starkly different. I have had instances where I would see someone doing something and think, I would never put myself in that seat and feel that it’s my favorite seat to be in. But that person is loving it. And vice versa, they look at what I’m doing and they’re like, I would never want to be doing that. I think that it’s really cool to understand how we’re all uniquely built and how we all have unique gifts and callings in our lives. So just seeing how starkly different that is, I think has been really interesting and helped me relate better to others.

Based on your experience and research, can you please share “5 Things You Need to Succeed as a Young Person in Business?”

The first one is that your time is the most valuable when you’re young. So get after it. Take action and get to work. Know that you can accomplish your goals. Work hard for it, and do everything you can to accomplish it. Seek out good instruction or advice, not just general instruction.

1 . First thing is you have to understand as a young person that your hours in that moment are the most valuable that they will ever be. When you’re young those hours are priceless because our lives are finite. If you invest an hour now its return is going to compound for the rest of your life. It’s the same thing with money. So the stuff that you invest in when you’re young really matters. Let’s say you invest $100 when you’re 65. You will have about $110 when you’re 66, but if you invested $100 when you were 15 and now you’re 65 that can literally turn into $1000’s. It’s useful to apply that same principle to your work life when you are young. Basically, what I’m saying is your early adult years are hugely important to your development as a professional. The more you can invest in that timeframe, the better your career will go.

2 . Second, you have to have hope. There are so many different types of successful people. So don’t tell yourself, ’Oh, I didn’t get good enough grades, I probably won’t be successful’ because that’s not true. There are lots of really successful people that got bad grades. Or some people will say, ‘Oh, I’m not disciplined enough’ to be successful. Give yourself some grace, and have some hope.

Another one I hear is well, I came from humble beginnings and that’s the story of a lot of really successful entrepreneurs who held on to hope. You have to believe you can do it. I think that’s hugely important for a young person, they need to believe they can do it. If they’ve got a calling for it, God will make a path. Seek it out and pursue it.

3 . This next one is in the same vein as above. Once you identify your calling you have to surround yourself with good instruction. Not just any instruction, but good instruction from helpful sources. When we’re looking for business instruction it’s important to get instruction from successful business people. Generally, that is going to be someone who is advanced in years beyond you and people who have had more success than you. So that doesn’t necessarily mean your colleague that just made it big doing something, that probably means someone who is older than you who can share their life experiences and wisdom. You can get different types of instruction from different people. Maybe you can get advice on a strategy from your buddy, but in order to get a perspective full of wisdom you probably want to talk to a business leader who has been around for a while and is still going strong after 40 years. Especially for things like if you’re trying to figure out how to long term invest for stability and things like that. I’ve seen a good chunk of people listen to their friends for wisdom or what they think about the world and it doesn’t typically serve them well. I wouldn’t let someone cut my hair that’s not a hairstylist. I wouldn’t take advice from someone on what to wear that isn’t stylish. Same thing in business. If they’re not successful business people, I’m not going to have them tell me or teach me about business.

4 . Next one is reflection. A lot of the times you’re going to be your own worst enemy. You need to be able to look at yourself in a clear mirror which means you need to recognize the fact that a lot of people make up excuses that make themselves feel good. For example — oh, I didn’t do calls today because I’m a family man and I chose to spend more time with my family. Or I get that a lot of people can make sales calls at night, but I didn’t do it because I’m actually a family man. The hard truth is I didn’t most likely do it because I was being lazy. You’re making an excuse that makes you feel good. And that slows you down. It’s way harder to get rid of an excuse that makes you also feel good. So you need to be able to look at yourself in the mirror clearly and say no, that’s a lie. And just own it. Hey, you didn’t make the calls. It’s all good. Recommit today that I’m gonna make those calls tomorrow, I’m gonna get after it.

So if you are able to see yourself in a clear mirror you can set aside your ego and that fake ideal, or that fake fear of pain. If you just admit to yourself it’s gonna be painful and you admit to yourself the reality of your situation you will feel empowered. You need to take time to think and reflect often. That’s what’s going to help you make the right decisions. Be honest with yourself when you mess up a conversation and say, Hey, God, forgive me for screwing that up, help me do better next time. Then replay in your mind how to do it better. That way we start to engrain the types of behavior we want. That’s part of reflection. In my experience this can be a hugely amazing amplifying tool and help you to not integrate excuses into your daily life. Because if you integrate those excuses they will be strongholds in your life. You won’t ever work past them. But if you can be real with yourself and root them out, then you can move, you can go forward infinitely. So that’s reflection

5 . Last one is pray. You got to know that it’s not all dependent on you. You need to put those stresses and all that other stuff in the hands of God. Some people like to meditate. That’s super cool. If you know God, you should pray. Hand it to him and say hey, this is where I’m at and what I am struggling with, but I’m putting this in your hands. I think that that’s hugely empowering and freeing. It lets you feel that you’re going to be okay and allows you to build a relationship with God. So I think that’s huge.

What is one piece of advice you would give to an aspiring entrepreneur that you wish someone had given you at the start of your journey?

I would say one piece of advice is anytime you have an opportunity to do something that seems hard or makes you nervous, know that it’s growing you. You’re gonna learn to smile at those moments and be like, Heck, yes, I got through that and it was exactly what I was looking for. So that first time that you get invited to speak on live television or on a stage in front of 3,000 people or whatever and your heart sinks, remember that this is your moment. This challenge is a gift from God. It’s an opportunity to step up and grow. So don’t miss those.

I have a really good friend who is a phenomenal songwriter, guitarist, and singer. Really he could be a huge star from a skill set perspective. He’s charismatic and his music is just incredible. So why isn’t he famous? What is interesting is there was an instance where he had an invitation to lead. The invitation was to lead worship at this church that had around 1,000+ people attending. This was early — we were in high school, but regardless of our youth he had all the skillset to do it, but he turned it down. He said, “Well, I just kind of like to be the guy that’s in the background, I don’t want all the stress that comes with leading, and what if I mess up.” I reference this because it’s an example of allowing your fear to take over. If you make decisions based on fear, you’re never going to be on a big stage. We see this all the time for entrepreneurship. It just looks different. So when you get that invite to a launch with a particular person or when they open it up to the team and ask if anyone can call these leads and you’re nervous to call them. These are those moments, it’s your moment to step through that doorway and grow yourself and become a better person and get closer to your goals. Where there’s nervousness, there’s also growth. Smile when it happens because you should be wicked excited that you get the opportunity to grow.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I am a firm believer we should put God in schools. If I had to think about the thing that would be the most impactful, I would put God back in schools. What I mean by putting God back in schools is people should understand that they are inherently valuable. So when we look at what our current secular literature looks like, there’s a lot of stuff in there that you know is really interesting, really neat, some that there’s good evidence for, some that there’s not. But it doesn’t change the fact that when you understand that your a God-created being you feel endowed with purpose. You feel endowed with value because you are valuable. Kids need to know that. They need to be told that. Where they came from, who they are, why they’re here — they need answers to those questions. Science doesn’t always answer those as accurately or as usefully as they could. Whereas if you bring in the concept of them being created, them being endowed with purpose, and a moral dialogue. All of those are answered and handled in a very useful way. So, if we bring that back into schools you will see an uptick in hope, self-value and self-confidence in our youth. As well as more of a moral fiber and backbone to our youth that I think will serve them their whole lives.

How can our readers further follow you online?

LinkedIn — Josiah Grimes. https://www.linkedin.com/in/josiahgrimes/

Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!