How can we build brand recognition?
Increase productivity?
Be more successful?
These are the the questions every growing business asks themselves. There aren’t easy answers. There aren’t blanket answers that work for everyone. Questions like these need someone who has been there, done that, and has a natural feel for the life and times of a successful business venture.
Questions like these need a Superman Behind the Curtain, someone who can identify pain points and draw from a wealth of experience to remedy them. Questions like these need Chris Lema.
Small Steps and Startups in Silicon Valley
Chris began as a self-made entrepreneur in the late 90s, founding and then selling or merging several successful startups in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley in California. With the birth of his first child and at the encouragement of his wife Melissa, he moved from the time consuming task of growing startups to developing enterprise software. As time passed the allure of startup work grew stronger and Chris eventually began taking on coaching clients, at first for free and then as as regular work.
What made Chris uniquely successful was his ability to home in and identify the next steps each company he worked with needed to take to drive growth. Product-market fit, forming a product strategy and how to build a product out, pricing models… all the hard questions that a growing company has to ask themselves, but that often needs that Superman Behind the Curtain to get just right.
Fostering the WordPress ecosystem
Chris turned to WordPress in 2005, shortly after it began supporting pages. Recognizing its potential from the beginning, he began using it as a platform to help clients launch their websites. He attended his first WordCamp in 2010, and quickly became hooked on the community surrounding the growing CMS. WordPress became an integral part of his life from that point forward.
Today Chris is the vice president of products for the web hosting service Liquid Web, where he works to identify users’ pain points and develops new products to alleviate them. He continues to coach businesses across the country, even organizing and running the WordPress business conferences BeachPress and CaboPress for fellow entrepreneurs. He also blogs about WordPress and Leadership at chrislema.com and leaders.blog.
How does all of this make Chris Lema a superman?
He knows how to listen to the audience and how to use that information to help them help themselves. He listens to the needs, desires, and even the complaints of the audience. Then he sits down to figure out what the commonalities from all this data are and what core issue can be solved. Even better, he can also show others how to listen to their audience, through data management and product presentation.
Chris has become successful through helping other be successful, and that’s what makes him a giant in the WordPress community and a superman for business after business that he’s helped become more than what they could become alone.
If you are interested in delving more into your website or product and learning what its potential truly is, then you should absolutely look to Chris for any and all inspiration. His blog chrislema.com is a fantastic resource for any and all writers and Chris can be found on Twitter at @ChrisLema.
