Chris Carlson serves as the executive-in-residence at Progress Partners, a position he has held since March 2023. In this role, Chris Carlson provides strategic guidance on media, advertising, and technology transactions. He has also held managerial roles at various companies, including Digital Trends Media Group, MusicQubed Limited, Caesium Capital, and Deutsche Bank.
In addition to his executive roles, Mr. Carlson is an accomplished author and speaker. He has written articles for Martech Record on topics such as building a commerce media business and affiliate marketing. Mr. Carlson demonstrates his thought leadership by participating in speaking engagements, including a notable webinar on affiliate marketing in August 2023.
Besides his professional pursuits, Mr. Carlson enjoys spending time with his family, writing and listening to music, boxing, and collecting art and rare books. Mr. Carlson also remains deeply involved in philanthropy and supports several organizations, promoting entrepreneurship and aiding entrepreneurs in underserved communities.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
Key parts of my typical day involve:
• Assessing and developing new opportunities and strategies.
• Managing the efficient execution of existing high-priority initiatives.
• Working with teams to solve problems and develop solutions that deliver amazing outcomes.
• Thinking about the people on my team and in my life, how they are doing, how I am supporting them, and how we can do better together.
• Thinking about the highest priorities in my life, or at the business, I am overseeing and ensuring they align with my values or the values of the business.
• Ensuring I make time for my family and self-care.
I ensure each day is productive by creating space to prioritize and ensure the time I am spending is best aligned with the outcomes needed for my business and in my personal life.
How do you bring ideas to life?
No one can bring a big idea to life on their own. So, one of the most important things is to ensure you have the right teammates; teammates who have the skills required and who compliment your strengths and weaknesses and those of the other people on the team.
Then everyone on the team must understand what the team is trying to achieve, why we are trying to achieve it, and what success looks like. This builds alignment and trust. When your team trusts each other, they can take big risks successfully.
Then develop a rigorous execution plan that is both ambitious (see trust above!) and dynamic. Doing things the right way and doing them quickly is critical, but whenever you’re doing something new, you will learn new things and encounter problems you hadn’t predicted, so your plan must account for that and ensure you are able to adapt.
A new idea needs users or customers, so ensuring the idea delivers value to those end users is critical and should form both part of the idea at the beginning (the why) but also be something you revisit constantly as you bring the idea to life. This will ensure the idea delivers the outcomes it was intended to and creates value for all involved.
What’s one trend that excites you?
How AI is making technology development tools accessible to everyone. This will allow innovation at a scale we have never seen before.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
I ensure each day is productive by creating space to prioritize and ensure the time I am spending is best aligned with the outcomes needed for my business and in my personal life.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Be patient. Find something you love and do it well. You can achieve all the wealth you need in America in any line of work, so, first, find something you love, not something that pays the bills.
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you on?
Pineapple pizza.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
Create space and time for oneself to reflect and switch off, even if just for 20 minutes.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
Create space and time for myself to reflect and switch off, even if it is just 20 minutes. This can involve pushing back deadlines (you almost always can, even if you feel like you can’t!) or deprioritizing another task. But I find when I take the space to reflect – which can involve just thinking, mediation, working out, etc. – then not only do my priorities and answers to problems become clear but I can work quickly and make up the time I took.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
Looking for points of operational leverage. What capabilities and strengths does your business have? What capabilities and strengths do your people have? How do those allow you to implement a strategy to grow your business more quickly and with a high degree of confidence?
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
I over-hired to ensure my business was ready for some big contracts my cofounders and I believed were going to be signed and had very tight delivery dates. The contracts weren’t signed, and I had to let a number of good people go.
I managed the business through this period by being very honest with the company about the mistake I had made and what I had learned. We also tightened our belt and owned the mistake with investors.
There was the obvious lesson: never hire for a contract that isn’t signed. And the less obvious lesson: ensure you have time to deliver on a contract, be upfront with your potential client, have the hard conversations and turn them from a negative into a positive service proposition.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
There are too many to list. Excel is a lifelong favorite that I use to manage everything from finances to analysis of projects and opportunities More recently, I have started using Gemini to help manage and respond to emails, improve speeches, and automate small tasks.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast you’ve gotten a ton of value from and why?
Systems Thinking for Business by Rich Jolly. It’s a great overview of how systems thinking can identify opportunities within business, as well as risks that might otherwise not be obvious.
Key learnings
- Prioritization is key to productivity.
- Teamwork and trust bring ideas to life.
- AI is revolutionizing innovation accessibility.
- Taking space to reflect and switch off combats overwhelm and ultimately improves productivity and quality of work.
- Love your work. Be patient. Avoid greed.