The common denominator of all CEO's

The past three years have been a wild ride.

I left my job running organic growth at Webflow to build my dream media company, Marketer Milk. We now reach over 100,000 marketers every month and teach them the strategies to become powerful, ethical marketers.

But I still think about my time at Webflow a lot. It was a beautiful company (and still is), and my time there was so special. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime job opportunities where I got to join a seed-stage startup and watch it rocket ship into a $4.2 billion company.

I was always inspired by the original CEO and co-founder, Vlad. Webflow was his dream idea that he tried to launch multiple times for over a decade, until he found the right founding team and they officially started the company in 2013.

It was one of the only companies I worked at where everyone wanted to be there, at least in the early days. No one was there just to collect a paycheck. They believed in the vision of allowing everyone to learn how to build for the web. It was an idea Vlad was so passionate about, and he was the right person to create a company around it.

Since then, I've had the honor to consult and freelance with a bunch of different companies, ranging from seven-figure startups to nine-figure growing empires. Through that process, I've gotten close with many of the founders of those companies.

I kept wondering: why these people? Was there something in common that all of these founders had?

I would come up with theories. Maybe they were all passionate about their ideas. But then I would meet founders running successful companies who never actually deeply cared about the product — they just wanted to build a company for their egos.

Then I would come up with another idea: maybe they're all just crazy psychopaths because it takes a lot more effort than most people think to build something from nothing. But even that didn't fully align.

It wasn't until last week that it just hit me. I found a common denominator that I'm certain is the reason why some become extremely successful (at least financially speaking).

The common denominator? They have a strong relationship with risk.

Risk is their best friend.

Whether it was someone like Vlad who quit his high-paying job and went into credit card debt (with a family and kids) to realize his dream, or the founder who dropped out of college to build something big — all of these people have a very high risk tolerance.

It's no wonder there's the cliché "high risk, high reward."

If everyone is walking right, and you decide to just turn around and go left, that is extremely risky. You risk your finances, your sanity, and maybe even your life.

But the other thing I realized is these people also have a strong relationship with God.

Combine that faith with the courage to take massive risks, and it yields the type of person who is willing to do whatever it takes to realize their dreams. It's a deadly combination.

Without these two elements, I simply can't see how you would be able to keep moving forward when times get tough, because they will.

If you want big things to happen in your life, you need to take calculated risks and have faith that things will turn in your favor. It's not a nice-to-have. It's a necessity.