Businesses are changing all the time. From company-wide layoffs, to acquisitions or exits, to new investors or leadership, to unexpected crises… the list of ways a company can change goes on and on.

Sometimes these developments barely affect the business and how it operates.

Other times, they lead to massive renovation.

And it’s during those extreme transformations when you learn a lot about yourself, what you bring to the table, and where you thrive…

“A number of the companies that I have been a part of in the past have been acquired by larger ones. What I found was that when I’m in that sort of environment, the number of moving parts and the ability to move fast becomes something that’s really hard to solve. And so I find that my skill set of iterating and iterating fast is much harder in a place where you’re trying to keep multiple trains on the track.”

That’s David Chang, the former CEO of Gradifi, former COO of Paypal, former Entrepreneur in Residence at Harvard, and current angel investor and entrepreneur. Over the course of his sprawling career, David has shaped startups at the earliest stages and helped lead established businesses in their later ones.

Through trial and error, he has learned to recognize where he adds the most value. And it’s understanding what you mean by value and your role in shaping it that dictates how and where you’ll land when your business finds itself facing new challenges or changes.

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The Journey is sponsored by our friends at Salesforce Essentials. We use Salesforce Essentials every day and it’s part of our own business journey. Essentials combines sales and service tools in a single app to help small businesses win customers and keep them happy.

See how Salesforce Essentials can help you be your best business at salesforce.com/thejourney.