Meet Lorne Noble | Founder of Simple Startup

We had the good fortune of connecting with Lorne Noble and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Lorne, is there something that you feel is most responsible for your success?
Everyone at Simple Startup has a genuine interest in their clients and is genuinely happy at their position. Every year we measure our net promote score (NPS), which measures our employees’ experience. The score goes from -100 to +100, and ours is “world-class territory”, which is in excess of 70. Our team is telling us they’re happy. This is absolutely paramount to delivering great service to our happy clients. We have a very rigorous hiring process, we ask a lot of our applicants to ensure they will be a right fit at Simple Startup. One of the core items I believe in is happy people create happy customers, which creates profitable business. If we don’t have happy employees, we can’t serve our clients.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
Early on in my career as a financial analyst, I crunched numbers and made decisions on billion-Euro purchases. However, my real passion lay in creating things, so when the financial crisis hit in 2009, I decided to make a big change and took the plunge to get my MBA with a focus on entrepreneurship at the IE Business School in Madrid, Spain. My MBA helped me combine my love and ease with numbers and my penchant for creativity, leading me down the true serial entrepreneur’s path.
I launched a series of technology platforms – Career Mentor Me, Help More, and My Healthier Body – that each aimed to use technology to solve everyday problems like a quarter-life crisis, getting resources to the homeless, and aggregating grocery and fitness services. My initial experiences as a founder led me to the realization that what I loved about each of my companies was their analytics. Thus, Simple Startup was born, a subscription service-based company where analytics are the core of the business offering, and I’m happy as a clam, knee-deep in Excel helping other entrepreneurs to make sense of their numbers, so they can lead their businesses more effectively and make more informed business decisions.

As a numbers guy, being analytical shouldn’t come as a surprise. I always use data to inform my decisions and feel the most important tool for any company, whatever its size, is a financial model. Financial models are essentially a roadmap for success because they enable entrepreneurs to forecast where they’re heading, then measure where they’ve been against those plans. I spend a lot of time testing scenarios (using my analytical skills) so I can make informed decisions for my business and those my business supports.

I like to live what I preach. I preach to all my customers and entrepreneurs really that financial modeling is THE key to building a sustainable and successful business. Here I am six odd years out from starting Simple Startup, and I’m still iterating and scenario planning based on the very first financial model I built for my company.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
As a former professional skier, we would absolutely go skiing at a Colorado ski resort – Copper if we were trying to stay local or Aspen/Snowmass, if we had more time on your hands. I love how European it feels, especially Cloud 9 Alpine Bistro, where we would get lunch.

Back in Boulder, we would cycle around and make food stops at Bartaco, Centro Mexican Kitchen’s rooftop for margaritas and Rosetta Food Hall. If kids were coming, we’d take a trip to the Butterfly Pavilion.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Both Tony Robbins and Richard Branson have been huge inspirations to me.

Not that long ago, when the world was open, I had the pleasure of standing only a few feet away from Tony Robbins at one of his conferences. He has a phenomenal and commanding presence, and really draws you in to his speaking engagements as if you were in a one-on-one conversation. Part of his charm is that he presents himself as very genuine and is vulnerable in the way he speaks, building a lot of trust with his audience quickly and allowing him to get to the root of challenges attending business owners are facing.

Richard Branson is a man who oddly enough reminds me very much of my wife’s father, also an entrepreneur. Richard Branson is very skillful at finding the right people and engaging them in their work. He’s not necessarily an academic, and got his start in sales and built his empire on passion and adventure, which is how he reminds me of my father-in-law. Similar to Tony Robbins he is genuine and vulnerable in his interactions which inspires passion, innovation and engagement from his team.

Website: https://simplestartup.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/simple-startup/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimpleStartup

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/simplestartupfinance

Other: https://simplestartup.com/blog/

Image Credits
5280 Productions