Surround yourself with really good advisers. I know that's said really well but let's talk more about how to pick advisers. I would say that as a founder to find your philosophy for how you are going to grow your company. How you are going to treat the people you are going to support. Find the advisers who are experienced in the area where you have a gap. Go to accelerated programs. Go to your local co-working space. Go Google spaces if you don't have any in your community and search out people ...
May 05, 2021•32 min•Ep. 212
Just do the research. You know so many people who have an idea get excited, and they automatically turn to marketing. They start spending money on marketing. I would strongly suggest you do the research. Identify if your product or service has competition or is it innovative? Look and see what other people are doing. What niche do you fit into? Where do your customers hang out at? Those are just some small things to really start thinking of before you just automatically start jumping into trying...
May 04, 2021•26 min•Ep. 211
Listen. Find a problem. We were in a hospital once when I broke my back. It was a family and doctor-owned hospital. It was family so, my wife and daughter were there and, my daughter was ten at the time. She said hey I would like a milkshake. They said we don't have any milkshakes. So They called down, and they had a chef at this kitchen. So they made her a milkshake. The next day they had milkshakes on the menu for the kids of the family. They fixed that little problem. I think that it's fixing...
May 03, 2021•24 min•Ep. 210
I am going to steal something that I have never forgotten that I learned 35-40 years ago. People today may not be familiar with it. It's called the entrepreneur credo. One major line in the entrepreneur credo, in fact, it may be the first thing is, never fall in love with your company it is a thing, not a person.
May 01, 2021•31 min•Ep. 209
Never ever trust your family. You are alone in this game. Your family is going to be overcoming themselves when they promise anything. Just because they over emotional, they are not rational. If you do that, then it's going to fire back. My one piece of advice is you are alone in this game. Don't count on anyone. No one is there to help you. If you plan that way, then you will go a long way.
Apr 30, 2021•27 min•Ep. 208
Try it out and experience it for yourself. Really put yourself in the shoes of the next generation of shoppers. I feel that it typically costs a shopper an hour of their day to visit any one store. Even if they decide to go to that store, they have to decide whether or not it's worth the trip.
Apr 29, 2021•27 min•Ep. 29
Start small and measure everything. There are so many people when they are starting a business that gets sort of turned one way or another of how they should be spending their money. If you can't measure it, you don't know what's working.
Apr 28, 2021•26 min•Ep. 207
Look at it as a continuing journey. There is not a start into it. It's something that you learn every day. You get better at it every day. I equate it to sports because I played sports. In business, athletically, you don't have to lose. Your mind can just get sharper and sharper. I know now based on my experience in having made decisions. The decisions I could have made better earlier in my career. There is no way for me to improve on myself if I am not a continuous learner throughout the proces...
Apr 27, 2021•35 min•Ep. 206
The importance of one, getting a team that will support you since this journey will take a lot longer than you think to reach any milestone you have in mind. Any projection you have initially, you might think in terms of days or weeks, or months. It will probably be years and, it will be longer than even your wildest dreams are. Have a team that will stay with you through the end. Those people are the ones that will make the journey worth it. They are also the ones that will keep you there and m...
Apr 26, 2021•25 min•Ep. 205
Scratch an itch. Build something that you are intimately familiar with that has been a real problem for you in real life. The closer you are to the problem, the easier it is going to be to solve it in a way that other people will understand. The people are experiencing the same problem. I will give you two. Be persistent.
Apr 24, 2021•28 min•Ep. 204
I share too much. I tell too much. Maybe it makes people nervous. Maybe they don't need to know that much to do their job. I always thought I wanted to know a lot therefore, I want to share a lot. Learning how to not do that and I am still not very good at it but, I am better than I was. I don't want to fail my people. I don't ever want to be not always thinking of my team first. I know clients are going to come and go. But, keeping a really good solid team and being considerate of them and genu...
Apr 23, 2021•27 min•Ep. 203
Find what people are buying. If their product is fitting that, great. If it's not fitting that, then tweak it until you get there. That's the easiest way to succeed. Find out what people are buying and figure out how to position yourself with someone that sells that. Don't go try and create a new market. Just find what people are buying right now.
Apr 22, 2021•26 min•Ep. 28
Sometimes you have to focus on what you don't need instead of what they are asking you or making you perceive that you need.
Apr 20, 2021•32 min•Ep. 202
Jump into it. Just jump out of the plane and figure out how to rebuild your parachute on the way down. That's really the only advice I can give.
Apr 19, 2021•28 min•Ep. 201
I think as an entrepreneur, one of the real blessings or curses you have is that you have these hunches and ideas that pop into your mind. That is just entrepreneurship. It might not be a business it could be a song your playing around with if you are a songwriter or anything else. Try to tinker with that on the side for a long time before that emerges as its own thing. Otherwise, there might be too much at stake, and the weight of the business and the need to support yourself and your family fo...
Apr 17, 2021•32 min•Ep. 200
Figure out what makes you different. I think the biggest thing that I have seen so far because of all the things I am working on. I am a small-town guy, I don't have a huge network, I am not the smartest guy in the world by far, and even for the things I am working on, they are very small right now. The zap idea I have been working on is just wireframes and a decent pitch deck. My YouTube channel even still only has about 200 subscribers. The company I am working on is only doing about four or f...
Apr 16, 2021•35 min•Ep. 199
Choose an SMB renderer that will do a holistic view. You can say that I just want to start with email or ads or web analytics. That's fine but choose a renderer that will have all of those so you can expand in the future. As my business grows, can this support me? Can this support use cases as my business grows? I chose one renderer that just does analytics. Now I have to choose another one that does email. You don't want to be in that situation. Try to see who will help you grow. As you grow, c...
Apr 15, 2021•29 min•Ep. 27
What most entrepreneurs who are launching do is they take easy to use and they build what they think is easy to use. Then they put it out into the market place and it does not get the result they want. So the second question that you ask is, what has to happen? How do you know that it is easy to use? What happens is the buyer gives you what I call their buyer blueprint. They are going to say I want it to be mobile. I use an IOS on android. I want to pay for it once, not every month. They will gi...
Apr 14, 2021•30 min•Ep. 198
First, I will tell them to get your marketing right. When I say marketing, that encompasses everything. If you get that right, I believe strongly that what makes a business successful or fails is the business model. Get your pricing right is extremely important. Because of what we do, we are working with more than sixty different industries. So we tend to see this a lot. Business entrepreneurs start to have ideas and, the next thing they want to do is go and start without sitting down and get yo...
Apr 13, 2021•19 min•Ep. 197
Take walks. I do thought walks every single day. It feeds the soul but, it also feeds the mind. Sometimes if you try to think about the problem all the time, you are actually getting farther away from the solution. Whereas if you just take a walk you notice something in nature and it sparks the idea you have been looking for. That has really fed my soul. It's helped me get my steps in every day. That is probably the most productive thing I do every day are my thought walks.
Apr 12, 2021•26 min•Ep. 196
Streamline. Laser focus. It's amazing that advice is out there and it's so important. Try to figure out that one small thing that you can do better than anyone else and then strip that down even more and try to really nail that one thing. especially in software. Keep it really simple.
Apr 10, 2021•30 min•Ep. 195
Really understand whether you've got the passion to stick with it. Really understanding yourself and what you want out of it. Really make sure you have a good, pure intention. These things are very challenging and take a very long time. In general, they are marathon journeys. The ones that have the grit to stick with it, have a lot of creative ability to connect, and bring in the right people are successful but, most aren't. Most are not very successful when it comes to building and growing high...
Apr 09, 2021•31 min•Ep. 194
Just go for it. Don't overanalyze everything too much. Put your feelers out and see what your audience is. See what kind of options you have. It's very easy to get caught up in the planning and, by the time you know it, it has been five years and, you still have not launched a company. That's my big advice is to just take it by the reins and see what you can do with it.
Apr 08, 2021•27 min•Ep. 26
When you are inventing, there is a concept and, I forget the name of the designer who came up with this concept, He an amazing guy from the nineteen fifties. The concept is called MAYA, which is most advanced yet acceptable. The struggle is that if you make something too advanced, you are going to have a difficult time getting people to adopt the product. So there needs to be effort put into making something, whether it's the interface or some aspect of it acceptable to the general public so the...
Apr 07, 2021•31 min•Ep. 193
There are going to be difficult times ahead when you start something. You're going to sometimes want to throw in the towel. Lots of financial hardships that I went through and a lot of discouragement from people around you. The only way you are going to be able to make it through is to really know your why and to recognize that if other people are out there discouraging you, it does not mean that they don't believe in you it just means they don't believe enough in themselves. If they don't belie...
Apr 06, 2021•35 min•Ep. 192
When we first started out we said you know what we know how to make this. We have made a few of them here are there. We will just get the money that we require to set up the factory to make it so we can go from the lab to commercialization. And then we will make it in mass production. But then once we started looking at things and speaking with potential investors and potential customers we realized that everyone wanted to see what we had made. They were like ok so you say you can make it now we...
Apr 05, 2021•22 min•Ep. 191
Reflect on it really carefully. If you don't love it. If you are not willing to put in ten years of your effort at forty to eighty hours a week, getting paid nothing in addition to earning your living income. If you are not willing to do that, you're probably not determined enough to make it. Some people win in a year but, the reality is most people, most millionaires, most self-made people are in their fifties before they develop the sort of self-discipline and determination.
Apr 03, 2021•28 min•Ep. 190
Keep a flexible mindset and don't be married to strategies. Don't be married to a specific belief and set deadlines and tripwires. Go forward and be open to reassessing your strategies at different points.
Apr 02, 2021•33 min•Ep. 189
Everybody thinks that the only thing you need to watch out for on email is to get out of the spam box. But, there are actually several steps to having an email gets delivered to the person that you are trying to reach before that system even decides to put it in the spam box or not. That process is called deliverability. Deliverability has a number of factors in it. Some of them can be related to your domain or whether you're on a blacklist, do you have the correct thing set up in your DNS setti...
Apr 01, 2021•39 min•Ep. 25
The first thing you should do is read the book "Start With Why" by Simon Sinek. I truly, believe that if you know your why things will be easier. You will be on a good path. Know why you are doing something because that is going to dictate how things move forward. That has helped me tremendously; knowing why I made it, knowing why I want to work with the community that I am working with sets everything down a great path for me. You will also learn why you don't want to do something. But for me, ...
Mar 31, 2021•41 min•Ep. 188
