The Founder Files
The Year We Made the Most Money and Felt the Worst
Two years after COVID nearly took the legs out from under us, Clermont Partners had its best year. The ESG practice we had bet the farm on was...
Power Move #3 Came from the Worst Call We Ever Had to Make
We were so excited when we found him on LinkedIn. We finally had enough work to hire a junior analyst, someone to take pressure of the partners who were seriously underwater. He was sharp and hungry and the kind of candidate you feel lucky to catch. We...
An Advance Reader Quit at Chapter 4. Why We’re Ecstatic.
Advance copies of Entrepreneur Like a MOTHER went out a few weeks ago. Most of what comes back at that stage is polite. Nice writing. Great stories. Cannot wait to buy one for my sister. Then two notes came in that we have not stopped talking about. The first: "I...
The Email That Sat in Drafts for Six Weeks
Most founders price the risk of asking. Almost nobody prices the risk of staying quiet. Early on, we built a spreadsheet of every person we knew. We exported our LinkedIn contacts, painstakingly scoured our email boxes (pre-AI of course) and added the membership...
The client who changed how we price everything
The call came at 7:45 on a Tuesday night. Just one quick thing. It was a legacy account. One of the first clients we carried over from our old firm when we left to start Clermont, and one of the reasons we had the nerve to leave at all. To get them to sign with an...
How We Chose Our Co-Author (and How to Choose a Business Partner)
The smartest partnership decision we ever made happened at a kitchen table, interrupted every five minutes by shrieking toddlers. We were about to walk away from fat corporate paychecks to start Clermont Partners. Before we jumped, we did something most people skip....