Garrick’s Entrepreneurship Experience

2022-Present: Startup Mentor to Startup Accelerator Programs

  • Mentored startups in TechStars Farm to Fork, TechStars Minnesota Twins, TechStars Columbus, and ILT Academy‘s accelerator programs, focusing on customer discovery, sales, and pricing.
  • Presenting to Beta.MN Spring 2024 cohort on customer and problem definitions.
  • Coached 12 TechStars Farm to Fork startups in navigating Cargill, aligning their value propositions to Cargill strategies and successfully pitching to senior Cargill leadership for pilots.

2020-2023: Cargill Digital Business Studio Portfolio Advisor

  • Coached and mentored 24 internal entrepreneurs – across United States, Europe, and India – through Lean Startup methodology and securing >$10M of budget.
  • Developed stage-specific innovation accounting metrics to laser-focus venture teams’ resources.
  • Trained 24 internal entrepreneurs from around the globe in Lean Startup methodology including; customer desirability research, experiment definition, business model canvas, financial modeling, pivoting value propositions, and stopping.
  • Facilitated formal stopping process to close out struggling ventures and communicate key learnings to portfolio stakeholders and program managers.

2017-2020: Cargill Digital Advisor

  • Designed and facilitated 12 design thinking workshops generating a 100+ strategically relevant digital innovation opportunities across Cargill businesses.
  • Crafted dozens of business models for disruptive value propositions in the food ingredient and sustainable agriculture industries.
  • Partnered with business leadership, R&D, project sponsors, and cross-functional teams to develop small, contained, focused real-world experiments demonstrating feasibility and validate business value.

2003-2020: Founder, CEO, Working Pathways

  •  Led new business development, engagement scoping, client delivery, and accounts receivable for boutique management consulting firm.
  • Supported business development, thought leadership, and marketing efforts through conference presentations, blog articles, and podcast interviews.
  • Recruited, hired, and managed a team of three; two visual designers and one business analyst to support client delivery and an internally developed new product.
  • Partnered with multiple start-up founders to design and launch the initial prototype version of their idea in most capital-efficient manner.
  • Designed and facilitated design thinking workshops to clarify customer-centric opportunities and identify near term next steps to pivot product and refine value proposition.
  • Conceived of, researched, developed, engineered, marketed, and launched three revenue-generating SaaS products; Cullect, Kernest, and Typerighter.

VOLUNTEER EXPERIENCE

CERTIFICATIONS AND EDUCATION

  • Certified Cicerone®, Cicerone Certification Program
  • BFA Cum Laude, Graphic Design, UW-Stout, 1997
  • Graphic Design, Fachochschule Hildesheim, Hildesheim, Germany, 1996-1997

GARRICK’S WORK HAS BEEN CITED IN:

  • Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan
  • Rebuilding Blocks by Garrick van Buren
  • Enough by Patrick Rhone
  • Twitter Means Business by Julio Ojeda-Zapata
  • Stunning CSS3 by Zoe Mickley Gillenwater
  • EPUB – Straight to the Point by Elizabeth Castro
  • Fluid Web Typography by Jason Cranford Teague
  • Information Architecture for Designers by Peter van Dijk

PRAISE FROM STARTUP FOUNDERS:

“Working with Garrick over the past 5 years has been a pleasure. In this role, Garrick served as a coach for new and growing digital businesses. He has always been a tough and honest mentor who will not shy away from the hard conversations. If you’re looking for someone who will constantly push you to be better, and drive for success, Garrick is the teammate you need.”

– Montana Gordon, Founder in Cargill Digital Business Studio

“Garrick has been a great help in developing my new startup. My absolute favorite thing about him is he isn’t afraid to say “no”. I find after speaking about my plans and developments that I am often going into rabbit holes before I need to. Getting advice from Garrick is like an entire system reset. I always come out of our meetings with a sharpened focus on what issue I really should be spending my time on and an awareness of the unproven ideas I take for granted that need further research.”

– Zakery Karnes, co-Founder Zakobe

“Last year I took the leap from working at other companies to going out on my own with freelance. It was terrifying, but I felt I needed to give it a try. I’ve known Garrick for years, and he reached out and asked if I’d ever just want to talk about the process and how I was thinking about building my business. Our conversations were incredibly useful at just the right time. He understood my struggle, where I needed to go, and what steps lay in front of me.”

– Joshua Wold, HeyFromJosh.com