Steve Larosiliere

Top 10 Lessons Learned From Planning a Benefit

Fri, 18 May 2012 16:38:02 -0400

Stoked had a pretty awesome fundraiser the other day. It was a big departure from the other events that we do. We really focused on who was there and switched up the type of venue.

Although it wasn’t as financially successful as previous fundraisers, I always look for the “seed of equivalent benefit” like my boy Napoleon Hill says.

Here are the top 10 things I learned from this event:

Always be myself
Do what feels natural
Meet new people and treat them like they’re an important family member
Trust your gut
Speak from your heart
Do the hardest things first
What you think is useless others find valuable
Ignore the haters even if you’re one of them
Learn and adapt quickly
There’s no such thing as an unprofitable experience

The Spirit of Entrepreneurship

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:19:00 -0400

What do you do when you have 30 minutes of a millionaire entrepreneur’s time?

You ask him mad questions! That’s precisely what happened last week.

I’ve been looking for a mentor for a while. I haven’t had one in 6 years!

AND I’m in the business of mentoring!

It all came down because a new foundation for Stoked has a program where they match their board members with their grantee’s director. Someone like me.

They happened to match me up with the one skier on their board. He’s a fairly young CEO for a major development company.

For a guy who does deals in in the US and China, he got 26 days of skiing!! Insane. When I first met him he had just come back from a heli trip.

I digress.

He’s definitely one of the more successful people that I’ve been in touch with. So at my first meeting I wanted to ask him htf he makes it happen, how he spends his time, what are his motivational tips.

Here’s what I learned from him:

Pick good people and train them.
Sometimes it takes employees a while to find their grove.
He focuses and executes on his strengths. Ie. He’s a deal maker type of person. He’s not the management CEO.
His job is to grow business, build products, get financing, structure deals.

He ended up giving me a worksheet that will figure out what to do with the extra profits he brings in. He gave me a template.

In all, my first mentoring session was good. I have to work on my assignment that he gave me with the worksheet.

One of my questions that I had for him was “What if you don’t have all financing in place to make deals happen?” His response basically was, “I’ll always make things happen, so deals will get done.”

Glad to see my thinking was validated.

The above picture is that of the Freedom Tower. I love how amazing it looks and is an example of the spirit of business and entrepreneurs.

Knock, Knock! Who's There? Opportunity...

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:02:50 -0400

Do you ever hear opportunity knocking and you’re hesitant to open the door?

Maybe it’s a job
A relationship
A chance to travel
Starting a business
Doing freelance / side projects

I’m not talking about any ole opportunity. I’m talking about genuine opportunity that could change your life trajectory.

Of course there are reasons not take advantage of an opportunity. Maybe it’s too expensive. Perhaps you say, “I need to do something first.”

For me, I fall into a trap of saying “there is always next year.” I’m never ready receive an opportunity this year.

Whenever opportunity presents itself and we shy away from it, our brain tells us that we’re not ready.

We’re actually scared and are fearful of what it means. You might tell yourself, “I ain’t scared of no opportunity!”

Actually YES, you are.

There is fear of the unknown. There’s fear of failure. Fear of being exposed.

To overcome the fear associated with opportunity, we need to assess certain things. Here’s a checklist that I recently went through.

Who am I and what are my long term goals?
Is this opportunity in line with the answer to question #1?
What will I gain/lose by taking on or passing up the opportunity?

I came up with this process when I was evaluating signing a lease to a new office for Stoked.

I knew I wanted to get a new office this year and get a space to call our own.

We’ve been subtenants of other companies for 7 years!

I’ve been looking at office spaces for the past few months, but they were either in a bad location or crappy condition.

But I found a space and fell completely in love with when I first saw it. It was a little bit bigger than our space now, but not as big as I wanted. It is the same price as our current space.

Quite frankly a place like this comes very rarely. I debated for so long. One night I couldn’t sleep, because I was evaluating it so hard. I came back to the questions above.

These are my answers:

1. As the founder of Stoked, I want to surround myself with highly motivated community of creative individuals who want more out of life and mentor the next generation of youth to succeed.

2. Yes, because, I seek a space in which myself and my team are inspired to create daily.

3. What we gain: A new office in which we are the sole tenants; We can build it out to our needs; We can eliminate the need for outside storage; a neighborhood of creative people. What we lose: leaving the neighborhood in which Stoked was founded; the security of being a subtenant; It’s just scary to leave familiar surroundings.

Along with a few other questions that I answered, I decided to pull the trigger and sign the lease! We move in May 1. I’m Stoked! The picture above is the door to the actual office.

Is there an opportunity in front of you that you’re fearful of? Can answering a few questions make a difference? Let me know!

Found under the Brooklyn bridge. (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:08:13 -0400

Found under the Brooklyn bridge. (Taken with instagram)

This is pretty much me.

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 06:02:04 -0500

This is pretty much me.

Nike's Cure for the Lazy Ass

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 09:37:00 -0500

You see the stairs, but your lazy ass waits for the elevator. It’s ONLY 3 floors….

but, yet you STILL wait.

Exercise is part of your thing this year, right?

Maybe you started off with a bang, VOWING to be consistent with exercise, but you didn’t keep it up. You got LAZY!

You’re not the only one :)

It’s March and you’ve slowly crept back with your old habits. Now there are more excuses NOT to exercise.

“There’s too much work to do…”

”It’s too cold!”

”My neck hurts..”

Those Nike people came up with a bit of technology called the FuelBand, that could help with your lazyassdom and to get back on track with your fitness goals.

Nike+ FuelBand basically monitors your walking distance, steps, calories and converts it to Fuel.

I got hooked up one with one last week from a friend at Nike.

It’s a little black band that you wear around your wrist.

With the FuelBand everything “counts” toward increasing your Fuel amount.

So that means: walking to your car, running, dancing, walking up stairs, jumping jacks. ALL DAT COUNTS!

Once you get the band, you login to the Nike+ website, set your goal, wear the band then, BOOM, that’s it.

The black band not only feels futuristic but is totally unobtrusive.

Your goal with it is to meet your goal everyday. I set my goal for 4000 Fuel points a day.

I’m SURE you’re a goal oriented person, so am I….

Since getting the FuelBand, I’ve been much more aware of my body, activity level, and how much I eat.

I’m more willing to walk the dog longer, run a little faster, walk down 11 flights of stairs and yes, play with my son much more harder and longer.

EVERYONE in my life wins. Me, My Family, My Work..

If you read any professional development book or dive deep into the bio of a hyper successful person, exercise and metrics are some of the keys to success.

It’s made a difference in my life so far. I’m more diligent about exercising and staying active on an EVERYDAY basis.

I have the genes of overweight caribbean people with high blood pressure in my family. I’m working my butt so that I don’t become a lazy ass as I get older.

What about you? What are your fitness goals?

Check out the Nike FuelBand it’s only $150 and I’m pretty sure, you’ll be much more active.

Here are some pics with my first week of the Fuel

"Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve."

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 05:38:31 -0500

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.”

- Napoleon Hill

Your future is bright. Adopt a definite major purpose and begin...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:51:20 -0500

Your future is bright. Adopt a definite major purpose and begin at once to attain it.

My Jewish Mother

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:22:45 -0500

When I was younger, my Haitian born mother told me to always be friends with Jewish people. “They’re good people!” she would say. Weird statement. Well you see as an immigrant woman coming to the United States in the 1960s, I can only gather that since she was judged for being different that it became only natural for her to view people by their race or ethnicity. This was reinforced throughout the years as she worked under a number of Jewish people.

So little did I know that in 2004 when I was on the Ocean Beach section of Fire island dreaming of starting a snowboard mentoring program that I would not only be close to a Jewish person but I would also get a second mother figure. One morning, I was heading to the beach to watch the sunrise and I saw this woman sitting in the same bench that I’d been sitting at. Little did I know that it was her spot for over 40 years! After trading pleasantries, she asked me what I did for a living. I told her I was starting a snowboarding non profit. She got excited and told me she was on the board of a non profit in Boston. She then walked me to her house to give me a non profit book. Mind you, all I had was an idea for a non profit. I had no money, no donors, no organization. Nothing.

Come to find out, Meg had children that were my age, she was divorced, and she was a former wall street executive. Originally from the Bronx, she is a hard core, no nonsense New Yorker who has a heart of gold. She later introduced me to a non profit consultant who mentored me on how to form Stoked and walked me through fundraising all the way to launching the program. She would also set up coffee dates with non profit executives for me in addition to giving me loads of advice. Meg eventually became one of Stoked’s largest supporters, volunteers, and a few years ago we honored her with the Stoked Appreciation award. She is one of my biggest supporters.

In addition to being one of the only people to be absolutely real with me, she is an amazing listener, objective advice giver, and a generous human. She also has high expectations and is demanding. Her demands overall have made drastic improvements to our organization and she’s always looking out for our best interests. There were a few times in the past 7 years where she threatened to leave Stoked if I didn’t get health insurance or we didn’t hire our own additional life guards at the ocean for the surf program.

Every now and then, I’ll complain that I don’t have enough mentors around then I realize they often don’t come in the form of what you perceive as the stereotypical mentor. Sometimes they’re a short, cute Jewish mother from the Bronx.

Dominate everything. #motivation

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:17:22 -0500

Dominate everything. #motivation

I saw this in one of our schools today. At first I was thinking...

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:59:19 -0500

I saw this in one of our schools today. At first I was thinking how cruel it is to have that poster hanging in a high school math classroom. Then I said to myself how true this statement is. Why hold back and let 15 year olds think that life is easy and it doesn’t take mad work to make your dreams come true? It goes for adults too. You think it’s going to be easy getting the things you want in life? Life is mad work. This doesn’t mean it has to be boring or miserable. Go out there and get it.

Ways to live Ratchet: 1) Raise your game 2) Act like you know 3)...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:20:01 -0500

Ways to live Ratchet:
1) Raise your game
2) Act like you know
3) Defy and Act

“Real men do what they want, (others) do what they can” -Tupac

"Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment."

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:06:56 -0500

“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.”

- Jim Rohn

Screw Business as Usual

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:27:06 -0500

I just finished Screw Business as Usual by Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group. Every now and then there’s book that speaks to where your head is right now and Screw Business As Usual definitely does.

At the root of Branson’s book is an idea called Capitalism 24902. 24902 miles is the circumference of the earth and this idea states that capitalism should be beneficial to everyone on this planet. The book is filled with lots of inspiring stories and case studies on extraordinary businesses and individuals that embody the ideal that you can be successful by running a business that is good for the planet earth. The old way of doing business is just about creating a profit or having shareholder value. Capitalism 24902 creates a profit, is sustainable, saves resources, creates jobs, and much, much more. You’re only limited by your thinking when it comes to this idea.

Branson isn’t just talking about Capitalism 24902, he’s living it. Every one of his companies has social responsibility ingrained in its culture. At the core of his Virgin businesses is its foundation called Virgin Unite. Virgin Unite has been able to launch some credible initiatives that range from peacemaking to social entrepreneurship in South Africa to helping youth homelessness, and, of course, restoring the environment.

I mentioned this book to one of our major funders and his eyes lit up because he was reading it at the same time. We’ve been talking for months about how the foundation can shift their funding strategy to empower their grantees. Essentially viewing their grants as investments and not donations. The book didn’t just give me ideas such as income generating businesses, but reaffirmed my belief that you can earn money while doing good for your constituents. Housing Works is a perfect example of this. I definitely recommend this book if you’re a wannabe entrepreneur or a successful business person. I also recommend this to anyone who’s looking for an alternative way to work and live in the world.

My top three lessons that I learned from this book are:

I love social entrepreneurship. There’s unlimited possibilities for change.
For us to progress and change as a world, the business community is vital to making that happen.
You’re only limited by the scope of your thinking. The bigger your thinking the more likely there is a community of people out there that you can tap into.

"It makes me feel guilty that anybody should have such a good time doing what they are supposed to..."

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:30:36 -0500

“It makes me feel guilty that anybody should have such a good time doing what they are supposed to do.”

- Charles Eames

This photo represents my life’s work. Sounds weird, right?...

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 10:07:00 -0500

This photo represents my life’s work. Sounds weird, right? This is a picture from our Snow Mentor NY program’s first day headed up to the mountain. When I had my idea to start a snowboard mentoring program 7 years ago this seemed impossible to accomplish. When I kept hearing ‘no’ or that I didn’t have the money, the bus, the kids, the mountain, the only thing that kept me going was the image of bus full of kids leaving the city to snowboard with a community of positive adults who want to see them succeed. To manifest the image took hard work, resilience, and determination. Making this program happen led to me getting everything that I have in my life right now. Lesson of the day, what ever you want in life form a mental image and don’t let it go. Don’t be attached to how you get there. That’s the fun part.

LA Family Holiday Dinner at Mao’s. (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:48:51 -0500

LA Family Holiday Dinner at Mao’s. (Taken with instagram)

Photo

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:17:17 -0500

Reflection

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:41:33 -0500

Reflection

Word (Taken with Instagram at Epaulet)

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:37:26 -0500

Word (Taken with Instagram at Epaulet)