Hello, hello.
Okay, I just got asked a really good question and I knew this would be really helpful to
share and it might not be what you want to hear, but I really hope it's what you need
to hear.
One of my clients was just on a call with me and asking me, "Okay, you've been doing
this for a long time.
You've obviously seen a lot of businesses and people in the industry come and go, and
there may be things that you've learned from that.
What do you feel like are the common denominators of the people who quit or fail or just kind
of disappear?"
I truthfully believe this goes for any industry, and I really loved the question because it
made me think about what are those common factors, and there's three.
It wasn't even hard for me to think about it because I've been an entrepreneur for over
a decade.
I have weathered many storms.
I've had a lot of failures.
I've made a ton of mistakes.
But the past six years-ish have been very steady, very consistent, and really peaceful.
That has been my whole goal, and it's my whole goal with you, and why I have this channel,
and why I have the business I have, and helping people create these peaceful, purposeful,
and profitable online education businesses.
I wanted to share what those three things are.
Every single entrepreneur that has quit or failed or disappeared has been victim to one,
if not all three of these things.
The first thing is they focus on stuff that doesn't matter.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with all the different stages of entrepreneurship,
but it's definitely broken into stages.
They're so repeatable and so duplicatable no matter who you are and what business you
have.
How we break them up for our clients is it's test, build, accelerate, and scale.
The testing phase is like when you're first getting started, you're in that startup phase,
you're in the sort of founder phase, and you're trying to figure out what the heck works.
You're throwing spaghetti at the wall, you're testing all these different things, and you're
starting to really learn and see patterns in terms of what works, what doesn't work,
et cetera.
That works in the beginning.
It doesn't work as you grow.
What I most often see is that people get stuck in that phase.
They hit a plateau.
They hit a ceiling.
They get burnt out.
They burn themselves out.
They work themselves into the ground.
They're constantly having shiny object syndrome.
That doesn't allow them to grow past that phase.
Hands down, that's probably the biggest killer of most businesses, and truthfully the sanity
of a lot of entrepreneurs.
It's really understanding that business is not sexy.
I think people think because of social media and because of a lot of influencers out there,
they think, "Oh, I should have this beautiful personal brand and all these vlogs," and blah,
blah, blah.
This shit is not sexy.
On the day to day, it is not cute.
It is fundamentals that helps a business grow and stay stable.
I was actually talking to a friend/mentor of mine who runs a massive company with hundreds
of employees, and he was echoing exactly what I was saying in terms of the minute that I
don't pay attention to data in my business and facts in my business, things go off the
rails.
You need to know that the core of a business is made up of having a good offer.
It is made up of having solid messaging, leads coming in the door.
You don't have leads, you don't have sales.
You don't have sales, you don't have business.
Then from there, your ops, your finance, your team.
That's it.
That is your job as the founder of the business.
Here's the thing.
You cannot grow or scale a business with chaos.
If you are still throwing spaghetti at the wall, and trying to do everything, and trying
to keep up with everybody else, and focusing on vanity metrics, and all this stuff that
does not matter, you cannot build support or a team because your team will hate you,
because you're constantly changing things every other day because of your own insecurities.
That's number one.
Number two is they start to believe their own BS a little too much, aka ego.
As I've heard other people say, "Your ego is not your amigo, my friend."
This happens to the best of us, because it takes kind of a certain level of self-confidence,
which I think ego is great in a lot of ways, but it can really ruin things for you.
I have watched people think they're hot ish as they start to grow their business and they
get so caught up in the external validation and gratification of what they're doing that
they forget about what matters.
It kind of brings you back to point one, but you really need to think about this because
the very things that you'd kind of chase after in the beginning can be your ultimate demise
as you grow.
As you grow, the irony is you have to say no to more things.
You have to be more intentional about your time and what you do because you have a job
to do and you have a purpose to serve.
You cannot do that with focus and work on the things that actually work in your business
and double down on the things that work in your business if you're constantly chasing
after the external validation.
The people who don't have the inner calm, and inner sense of self, and inner sense of
mission, and they lose sight of their North Star, which is what we call it, which your
North Star is your mission in your business, you lose sight of that and you all of a sudden
will watch things start to crumble.
You're going off the track.
You're going like this instead of like this.
You can't grow.
Oftentimes you will just shatter what you've built, which is so brutal to watch, and I've
watched it happen so many times.
It's painful because I'm like, if you just focus on the thing that you're supposed to
focus on, this wouldn't be happening.
Sometimes people have to learn this for themselves.
Sometimes it's a version of self-sabotage, which weirdly, it's like as an entrepreneur
sometimes you're getting into this to prove something to everybody else.
Then at a certain point, once you've proven what you're doing and it's working, you don't
need to prove anything to anyone else and you really just have to be okay and at peace
with the direction you're going in and the mission that you have.
You can't constantly be seeking out the applause, and the gratification, and the way-to-gos,
and other people cheering you on.
You got to be your own cheerleader, because If you're constantly seeking that out, you're
going to get distracted by it and lose sight of the main thing.
If your offer starts to slip, if your product starts to slip, if your social proof starts
to slip, it is not a fun ride and it inevitably will catch up with you and your business.
That's the next piece.
I get a little heated about this, and I really hope that this is going to save you in a lot
of ways, because it's just so common.
We do busy work because it's a double-edged sword.
You wouldn't be in the position you are, you wouldn't be as successful as you are if you
didn't know how to work hard.
But at a certain point, you got to work smarter.
The final piece of this is really knowing ultimately what the purpose of your business
is and sticking to it, which again goes back to being the unsexy part of it.
When people start to focus on trying to build a bunch of other things, this is one of the
biggest things as well, they start to try and build other products or services or offers
before the one thing is actually proven.
It's like they start to scale horizontally, so they go outwards, and they need more time,
resources, energy, and effort that they don't have instead of scaling upwards with the one
thing that's really working.
I always say this.
Double down on what works because trying to do too much at once and scaling like this,
it makes everything chaotic.
Think about it in the sense like your team then ultimately has to fulfill these other
things you're creating with no proven game plan of it, no proof behind it.
They don't even have belief in it.
It makes it really, really difficult for you to do that.
Ultimately, this is so important to understand because I see people do this to themselves
all the time, and it's self-sabotage at its finest.
It is rooted, this is what you need to know, it is rooted in scarcity because there's a
part of you that's like, "Holy crap, I have something that works.
I've done the thing.
Can't be this easy.
It can't be this easy.
I can't have this much space.
I can't have this much free time."
Although, ironically, that's the thing that you're trying to achieve when you start a
business.
You're trying to have freedom, you're trying to have space, and then you get it because
you have a business that actually works where you only need to focus on the fundamentals
and you're like, "Let me just mess with this.
Let me make more things.
Let me focus on the wrong things.
Let me just screw myself over, and screw the business over, and screw everybody who works
with me over, and all of the things."
I hope that gave you a deep breath like it gave me a deep breath.
It was such an interesting conversation.
I thought it would be helpful to share here.
I'm telling you, when I really think about it, in a decade, over a decade of being an
entrepreneur and watching a lot of businesses come and go, and businesses that you would
be like, "That person's going to be around forever," this short-term thinking, if I sum
it up in one word, a couple words, short-term thinking kills businesses.
That's why we harp so much on legacy thinking.
When we hire somebody, we go, could we work with this person for life?
We won't hire them if we won't.
Could we work with this client for life?
If we couldn't, we won't invite them into our program.
Is our purpose clear and are we all aligned towards the same thing, and that legacy of,
"If I'm gone, will this legacy live on without me?"
That's the whole reason I started this business.
It's the whole reason that I help my clients create legacy businesses because I want the
ripple effects to last long after we're gone.
As morbid as that sounds, that's the rooted mission that keeps me focused.
It's also why I don't give a crap.
I do not care about all of the things I used to put so much weight into.
I used to be like, "Please like me.
Please tell me you think I'm good at what I do."
I really could care less at this point because I have nothing left to prove.
I've been doing this a long time.
If you're out there and you think I have something to prove, then maybe watch some more content.
I'm just saying, I've been doing this a long, long, long, long time.
I've got a lot of proof behind me and behind the business, behind my incredible team.
That is what I have to focus on to keep things sustainable and avoid those mistakes which
are so easy to make.
This is not me passing judgment.
It's so easy to make these mistakes.
I have fallen into these traps myself.
It's really easy for me to talk about it now because I've been there, done that, and made
those mistakes and corrected.
Anyways, I hope this was helpful.
If it was, let me know in the comments and let me know what your takeaways were.
Hopefully, maybe this video helped one person and saved one person from making those mistakes
and sabotaging something that they built.
I say all of this with so much love.
Talk to you soon.
Bye.