Show up everyday ready to work. Work hard because you can only be responsible for the effort. The result will take of its self. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
I think that having someone that you trust and best friend in a business partner. Someone that compliments you in everything you are maybe not as good at is definitely the biggest assets you can have. If at all possible, having a partner by your side that shares the same values, complimentary skill set, and understands that the journey of starting a business, especially in a different country, is something that requires dedication and the absolute will to succeed.
Definitely those profile pictures. You don't want to have one with you in a group where someone is going to look at it and go ok which one is it. You don't want to have one from your high school/all-star years were you are now 35 and 40 and you don't look the same. You definitely want to make sure that it is you. Also your headline. It's that quick snap this is who I am in a nut shell. It does not have to be so robotic though. I see a lot of them that are like, I have my masters degree in this, ...
The first thing you need to do is commit. A lot of people try to figure out things and put the details in place and who is going to do what, where they are going to get the money for this. None of that will happen unless you commit first. The biggest lesson that I learned in my career and starting a business is commitment. That decision has to be made that you are all in. Then everything falls into place after that.
If your just starting out in business there is nothing more valuable, especially in todays market, then to be able to grow your network and be able to find the right people in your network. I think the best piece of advice I have for you is whichever direction you want to be able to go in to, whatever niche you want to go into study that niche. But, give yourself a deadline. Give yourself maybe a couple of weeks, a month max to really get your knowledge up to par were you understand the language...
You need to be really really introspective. I know a lot of CEO's that were really happy as the number two in their previous company. As the COO, or CFO or whatever and they are miserable as CEO's. I have hired a number of folks who will tell you they want to be in start ups, who desperately want this to be the right path for them and they should be working at Bank of America. There is a very different support structure that comes with a big company and if your mind set is how to I extract the g...
We had a lot of people on our rookie roaster and I was leader in charge of the rookie class because I was determined, I believed in myself, and I made it happen. Even in business when I discounted myself sometimes saying oh your just an athlete, oh you don't know much about business, This and that. Just believe in yourself and make things happen. It's literally the truth. If you can tell yourself that you really believe that, not just tell yourself that but really believe it, I think anything is...
The most important thing is to keep learning and be an infinite learner. No one is born an infinite learner or made one over night but you need to practice that. You need to constantly grow yourself as a founder, CEO, or as team member, you constantly need to grow. Growth is the only solution. That would be my advice. Keep learning no matter what. You need to enjoy learning and it will give you are really good results.
Value pricing mean that, where our focus as a business is how can we create more value for our clients? How can we change their lives? How can we make as big difference as possible? Knowing that the more of a difference we make, we can also charge a higher price. We create a win win. We both win from that. The customer gets a better result/solution and we get a better price and make more money. So we need to shift away from this cost plus mentality towards value pricing.
My business partner Jill, she owns several companies and has a parent company that runs them all. Since she owns a portion this company, I now have access to her CFO and all the accounting and book keeping that she does. That is part of her investment. She has a cash investment as well as a sweat equity investment in the form of development resources as well as some financial resources. Financing and accounting resource. She did some cash investment as well as sweat equity, so I was able to off ...
My piece of advice would be to trust yourself. You are going to make mistakes. I am sure there is not an entrepreneur out there, there is not a business owner out there who said oh yah this is a very smooth process and I came up with this idea, I built it and everything worked perfectly just like I thought it would. Everybody goes through these growing pains, struggles and self doubt. Every entrepreneur has these stories of yah we are struggling, things are hard, a lot of night working, trying t...
I would lean into partnerships. One of my partners is really good at board of directors, getting all the structure set up, a phantom stock and all of that advance stuff that I don't fully understand. I do know that something I have learned is that partnerships are great. If you can bring people in, even if it's for a small percentage of your company or even if it is conditionally based I love that idea. It gives people skin of the game and they want to make it work.
Despite everything I went through go after your dreams. Go after what it is your heart tells you that you want to do. For me it's worse to live in the what would have been and regret decisions I didn't make or things I didn't go for versus going and learning. Your going to learn. If you accept that failing is also part of succeeding then that is all part of the big lesson. If I were to sit back and wonder what would have happened if I had actually done that non profit thing, Put a little bit mor...
Do your research and take the time to understand the different segments within your market so that you don't have pointless conversations. Your not talking to the wrong people. Sometimes you have to talk to the wrong people to know that you're building the right thing. You want to keep those wrong conversations to as few as possible.
So this led me to create Techspeak for entrepreneurs which is a program where I teach a ten step process that I personally use to mange developers, help entrepreneurs with communication to be able to understand all the tech speak and all the jargon around how to build a start up. Then learn the entire process so they can gain their confidence back and be able to mange and lead with confidence and get the team aligned with what needs to be done so that you can minimize mistakes, spot the read fla...
There are so many places, so many pain point and struggles that no one is touching. I think what you want to look for is a pain point that seems obvious to you that should be solved that no one else really is interested in. If you find that then there's a lot of opportunity there for you. Too many people are trying to create either a copy cat product or something similar, Its not particularly unique. Its one of the reasons I wanted to get out of my original business. I just did not feel like I c...
Care for your relationships. This is the most important thing. You can not achieve profit without the help of others. We can not achieve profit without the help of employees. They care for our company and pursue our mission.
Do a little everyday. This is based on a concept I have for my show called the wheel of momentum. If you have ever seen a large engine they have what's called a fly wheel on them. It's to help keep the momentum of the engine going. You see them on big old machines, sometimes they have monstrous fly wheels, 20 feet in diameter. My advice to folks would be give a little push at minimum everyday. I don't take days off anymore. Sunday, Saturday, during the week, whatever it might be, I don't take a ...
I think that you have to realize if you're going to start a company it takes time and effort. It's the comment you made before that big hit that was all the ten years in the making. I mean you have to stick to it. You have to adapt to it and change to the things that come to you cause it's not going to be easy. Stick to it and realize it takes time.
I'm big on next steps. Take a step. There is something out there that they need to go to the next level. I was thinking about it this morning while I was driving in my truck, it's dark out still. Some people are laying in bed, some people are being lazy, some people are not giving it one hundred percent. For me it's always everybody I see that wants to do what I do or wants to do what you do, they have to take their very first step and it has to continue every day. Taking a step every day toward...
The most important thing to figure out is a plan. Develop a plan and a strategy so you can really understand your product or service and where it fits in the market. You do some business modeling and some financial modeling, Figure out where your break even point is and then do some development in marketing strategy. Then in general really stick with it and be consistent.
Establish boundaries around your time, And make sure you schedule your self-care time first. We can fill our calendars up with work. Not a problem, it's easily done. But when we try to squeeze in self-care its harder to find time. You put that on your calendar first and don't move it. Don't worry, the work is going to find the open slots, it won't be a problem. Schedule your self-care first and color code it too. This is what I do with my calendar, I use my favorite color to demonstrate self-car...
For Entrepreneurs is you better build your team. You can not name a successful person, a world changer without identifying his or her team.
Be very open-minded. Go in with a vision and have a direction. You have to know what you want. But the way to get there, there is a million plus one ways. So the more open-minded you are the better you adapt because the journey to were we are now has been through four or five of pivots and like very hard pivots from one industry to another. Through image analysis to text analysis, so just keep that in mind. As long as you have a vison as to where you want to go but, you keep an open mind then yo...
The bar to what is a good first step to take a start up is too high. So people have to high of expectations. So they start thinking about ideas and talk themselves out of doing things. The bar to get started is really low you just have to take a step. So just go. In our case we want to refinance our loans, what does that mean? We need to talk to people who have an auto loan, so talk to them. The second you start hesitating saying yah I talked to them, I don't know what to offer because I don't h...
As much as you should take some advice from experts, I really believe that most of the answers that you're looking for you have within you. Some people can guide you with stuff like IP Law. Yes, you need to talk to Devin for that stuff. But there is other stuff like how are you going to market? How are you going to advertise? How are you going to do outreach? Everyone does it differently and you have to figure out how you do it for yourself. How do you want to work? How do you want to be paid to...
Remain Curious. I think it gets so easy to pack a ton of one piece of advice for someone starting. Curiosity to your point with your story with the pitch year one year two it was your curiosity from year one that got you back to your year two. So just stay curious and follow almost like Scooby-Doo follow your nose as to where those next clues go even if the door is closed.
Create content and just put it out there. Write about what you like, do podcasts, do videos, write books, put everything for free out there. Then if you show expertise and if what you say makes sense then the clients will come to you automatically.
Focus on lessons learned. This is the biggest lesson I have learned. When you focus on learning, not only do you grow yourself you also grow your team and then that will eventually grow the business.
Try solving problems that exist right now. And always make sure that someone is going to pay you to solve that problem, or else you don't have a business. Right? So solving problems is what I do, naturally, but I can only do that if someone is gonna to pay me to do that. That's how I measure that I have a business idea that actually has legs or not. Join us and Afifa Siddiqui from Canadian Payroll Services ( www.canadianpayrollservices.com )...
