Succeed by Staying Flexible in Business

We have all learned during the pandemic that anything can happen. So how can entrepreneurs stay alert — and stay ahead — of future problems big and small?

By staying flexible, says Travis Montaque, CEO and founder of Holler, a tech company that integrates with messaging apps and keyboards to make texts, posts, payments and DMs more expressive. In a conversation with Nicole Walters, founder and CEO of Inherit Learning Company and star of USA Network's She's The Boss, Montaque outlined his approach to keeping his team prepared.

"When you are starting a company, you don't have a lot of advantages over your competitors. But you do have one big one, and that is speed," says Montaque. "At my company, Holler, we use that as our superpower. Startups that succeed are the ones that can process information quickly and iterate."

Montaque says that in a world where everything is changing at lightning speed around us — from shopping habits to movements for social justice — it is vital that entrepreneurs pay attention to what is going on around them and be prepared to react and adapt. "At the same time," he notes, "You have to do what is right for you and your business." When the pandemic hit, the general thought in the VC world was that companies should go into sheltering mode: cut their burn, reduce costs and ride out the storm. "But for Holler, I anticipated that demand would only go up, given that the thing that grew consumer messaging in the first place was people being apart," he says, "And our distribution grew 300% during quarantine. That's because we were able to look at what was coming at us, process that information and iterate."