What is up everyone and welcome back to my channel.
In today's video, I want to share with you guys something that's a little bit more unconventional.
Specifically, I want to share with you guys the skills or things that I picked up from
my old corporate nine to five job that has contributed to my success as an entrepreneur
today.
Now I want to start by saying that last year I posted this video right here about why I
quit my corporate job and a whole year later today I am a six figure online entrepreneur,
which is insane to even say out loud.
That's why I really wanted to create this video because there were some things in my
nine to five that I picked up that contributed to my fast growth and my success, which has
really given me an edge in the entrepreneurial space.
So if you really want to learn some key skills or things that you might be sleeping on in
your nine to five, that's going to help you as an entrepreneur in the future or even now,
then keep on watching.
Okay, so before we dive right in, let me provide you a little bit more context about my background
in my nine to five.
So my old nine to five was at a big fortune 500 company that's internationally known and
I was doing marketing and brand management.
So a lot of the skills that I'm going to be presenting, you guys are very corporate oriented.
However, even if you don't have corporate experience, a lot of these skills are very
much so applicable to entrepreneurship.
So definitely stay until the end because you're going to pick up a lot of things along the
way that will help you on your journey.
That being said, the very first thing that is fundamental that I learned in my corporate
job is market research.
So the one thing that you really need to know when you're working in a corporate job is
that everything is mostly based on facts.
You're not allowed to make decisions just out of thin air.
It has to be backed up by data and especially when you are presenting a lot of things to
upper management.
Upper management needs to know that you've actually made a calculated decision based
on previous research or based on previous numbers that actually prove your point.
A mistake that I see a lot of entrepreneurs and even content creators make is we do things
without really thinking it through without really actually having something else to support
our decision.
That's why for me, I am a huge market research nerd meaning that I'm always hopping on Instagram
stories, asking people for feedback, asking my audience what they want, doing market research
surveys to understand the pain points, the desires of the people who watch my videos
are of the people who are in my community and what you'll notice is that even for something
as simple as content and I have with video right here where I talk about how I find content
ideas.
In that video, I'm showing you guys the research tools that I use to make sure that I'm creating
videos based on what people are actually typing in the search bar based on keywords because
I want to make sure that I'm maximizing my success, that I know that this is validated
in the market before I even create it.
And that is all thanks to my experience working my corporate job, understanding the importance
of market research.
And another big reason why market research is so important is because it's going to save
you time and money.
As an entrepreneur, your time and your money are incredibly valuable and you want to make
sure that you're maximizing it by ensuring that you're testing things, learning from
them, and then creating and then spending that time and money and effort to actually
produce on a mass level.
So let me give you an example.
Before I even consider creating a product that I'm selling, I'm actually testing the
waters on youtube or on Instagram first.
For example, I have a program called the boss Graham Academy, which teaches people how to
leverage Instagram in order to generate leads into their business.
Well, before I even created this program, I was testing the concept by creating videos
on youtube all about Instagram to at least gauge the demand.
Do people actually want a course about Instagram?
And through developing that content I realized, yes, the market has validated this idea and
then I built the course.
Now imagine if I didn't do market research, I would have spent all that time creating
a course that I don't even know will sell and then selling it and then hearing crickets.
I would've wasted a lot of time and money in developing that course and I could have
spent it elsewhere.
That's why market research is one of the most important things that I feel not enough people
are truly taking seriously in their business.
Now, the second thing that I picked up from working in my corporate nine to five job is
working with third parties and outsourcing.
When I was working in corporate, I was managing multiple projects at the same time and therefore
I had to outsource a lot of the different tasks.
For example, graphic design.
This skill has really helped me communicate effectively when I'm working with others.
For example, many of you have watched my video right here where I talk all about how I actually
create a lot of content in one month just for Instagram and in that video I show you
guys a very specific brief that I mock up for my photographer in order for her to understand
exactly what I want and truth be told.
I learned this skill from working in corporate because I worked with so many different people.
I understand that every mistake that we make is going to cost me time and it's going to
cost me money and therefore it's going to delay my projects.
That's why I am a briefing queen.
Even for my video editor.
Every time I do a video, I'm briefing her on exactly what goes in, which clip, what
texts that I want, what's the copy, what's the animation, so on and so forth.
Because I understand that if she doesn't understand what I want, it's going to delay my videos
being posted.
This is the exact same thing that I encourage you to implement when you're working with
other people within your business.
It's truly going to save you a lot of headache if you are very clear with your expectations
right from the Gecko.
The third thing that I picked up while working at my corporate nine to five is brand management.
Specifically within brand management, I understood the importance of protecting my brand first.
What this means is you could have a product that maybe costs you $10 but because you have
a strong brand, you're able to charge 1005001000 dollars for that product.
For example, Tiffany, they're charging thousands for a paperclip, and why can they do that?
It's because they have a very strong brand backing them.
That's why you need to understand as an entrepreneur, your brand is one of the most important things
that you need to protect within your business, and because I understand that brand equity
is super important.
This is why I'm very picky with my collaborations.
I'm very picky about sponsorships.
I'm very picky about the things that I recommend to my audience because at the end of the day,
I value myself more than I value anything else.
So my advice to you, especially as a new entrepreneur or as a new content creator, really think
throughly about who you're letting into your space, who you're recommending, who you're
working with, because at the end of the day, you don't want to lose that trust that you
have with your audience.
It's very important that you protect this.
Now, the fourth thing that I learned from working in corporate is understanding the
opportunity costs of money.
Something that I did very often when I was working in corporate was doing budget cuts.
You actually had to evaluate how much money you're planning to spend and put it against
how the business is actually doing.
If business isn't doing well, you're going to need to make necessary cuts or allocate
your dollars elsewhere in order to protect your business.
By doing this, I really understood the opportunity cost of money.
If I don't spend money here, where else can I put it?
If I spend money on this, what am I missing out on?
And this is really important to learn as an entrepreneur because I feel a lot of us, when
we see our first dollar, we assume that we can just spend it without really thinking
about the future of our business.
That's why from doing those constant budget cuts, I now understand the value of a dollar
and really allocating those dollars to things that will truly move the needle in my business
versus spending on a frivolous things that really don't matter.
For example, logo design, I don't need a good logo.
What I need is good software or spending money on a purse.
I don't need a new purse.
I need to spend money on my VA.
There's so many different things that you can spend on in your business, but you as
the entrepreneur, you need to decide on what truly matters.
Because business is not always going to be like this.
It's like this.
When you are in entrepreneurship, you never know how much money you're gonna make month
to month.
So you need to make sure that you have financial due diligence within your business and you're
not being reckless with your money.
The fifth thing that I picked up when working in corporate is understanding optimization.
What this means is that within my corporate job, every time I did a campaign, every time
I had a product launch, I would always have to draft up a post mortem, meaning that I'd
actually have to reevaluate how the campaign went, what could I have done better, what
worked, what didn't work, and by doing this in corporate, I now apply in my own business.
I'm always looking at my analytics.
I'm always looking at how things performed, what I could've done better, and I actually
created a document that will remind me of the things that I need to improve for the
future.
I'm constantly optimizing in my business and that's all thanks to my experience working
in corporate and learning this as a best practice because what you need to realize as an entrepreneur,
you need to take a step back and constantly reevaluate the landscape of your business,
at least on a quarterly basis.
You also want to track everything that's happening.
For example, tracking how you're doing on Youtube, tracking how you're doing on Instagram,
tracking how your campaign went, even tracking how your VA or how the people on your team
are performing so that you can constantly put tabs in order to optimize in the future.
Always strengthen the things that are working and developing those, but also be quick to
ditch the things that aren't.
And unless you're taking a step back and doing it, you're always going to plateau like this.
So I highly recommend that you learn to make it a habit to truly optimize your business
every so often so that you can have accelerated growth like this.
The sixth thing that I learned in working corporate is being resourceful.
Now, this really depends on the type of company you work for.
Some companies will baby you and we'll put you in a box and therefore you're not going
to have the opportunity to think on your own feet.
Whereas other companies, they just throw you into the water and expect you to swim even
though you have no idea how to swim.
So my company was the latter and I really had to learn to become super resourceful in
business.
In my situation, I was like a 2123 year old on a very small team managing the marketing
for national products, national campaigns, and it was insane.
There were so many times where I was like crying my eyes out because I had no idea what
the heck I was doing and therefore ads put it on myself to become super resourceful and
prove myself in the company.
What this means is that if I didn't know how to do something, I would have to put the ownership
on myself to hunt down whoever was the expert in that company even if I didn't know them
and go up to them and ask for help.
What this also meant was when I was in a meeting with people that were clearly smarter than
me and that raising my hand and asking the question because I would lost.
Another thing is making sure that I was asking for feedback constantly from my manager to
make sure that I was truly on the right track and that I was checking off the right boxes
before that performance review and making sure that I'm doing my due diligence, everything
that I can to secure my success.
Because what I realized when working in corporate, you are the one that's going to be successful
if you choose to be and you need to be able to take that ownership on yourself to become
successful.
No one is going to do it for you and that's what separates the losers from the winners.
And that's the thing that I learned from my corporate job that has helped me become the
entrepreneur that I am today.
And another thing that I realized that I really took from my corporate experience is when
you work in corporate, it's generally a pretty cutthroat environment.
Only very few people are going to get the promotions.
Very few people are going to make it to the top of the ladder.
And it's kind of similar with entrepreneurship.
Even though I'm not someone who's super competitive, what I do realize and recognize is that very
few people are actually going to make it to the top, meaning very few people are actually
going to make up that 1% of that 1% of entrepreneurs who are truly successful and putting out a
lot of value in the world.
And in order to actually make up that 1% of entrepreneurs, you need to make sure that
you are truly successful and taking 100% responsibility and ownership on your ability to be successful
in the first place.
So what this means as an entrepreneur like yourself is you need to learn to be humble.
Actually understand that you might not know everything right now and that's why it's important
that you surround yourself with people who do seek mentorship, seek guidance by courses,
read books, really take 100% ownership of your success as an entrepreneur and not just
rely on people to feed you a golden spoon.
You need to actually work.
You need to actually learn things for yourself.
That's how you're going to maximize your success on this journey.
Not only this, understand that there will be roadblocks on this journey and that there
are going to be hard times, but it's how you react to these times that truly make a difference.
Are you going to hit a roadblock and then give up?
No, you're going to hit a roadblock and then you're going to figure out how to solve that
problem.
At the end of the day, what you need to become is a problem solver, a solution hunter.
Okay, so those are the things that I've learned in my corporate job that have truly helped
me become a six figure entrepreneurs in less than a year.
Now, if you enjoy today's video and you want me to talk more about topics like this, make
sure you leave a comment below and tell me what you want me to talk about in my next
upcoming videos.
I would really appreciate it.
That being said, if you want to learn more about business, social media, or just life
in general, also check out these two videos that I have right here.
As always, guys, I appreciate you.
I hope you guys have a great day, a great week, and a great life, and I'll see you in
the next one.
Bye guys.