Aleksander Vitkin Podcast

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After working with hundreds of entrepreneurs, many of whom have great technical skills, we've noticed something incredible...

We can tell you which SKILLS are most in demand right now.

Do you have the right skills to build a business?

Which new skills are needed to go from employee/freelancer to business owner?

Robert closed $146K sale and spent 6 months to deliver the service. Before that Robert had a job as a game designer with a salary of $3K per month. He closed this deal 6 months after he quit his job. 2/3 of the project was outsourced. Robert was responsible for managing the project.

There are a lot of highly skilled designers who have a job and they cannot realize what is possible if you focus on business instead of a job.

Robert went from being an employee and making mid 5 – figure salary to being a business owner having a 6 – figure business.

The biggest change in Robert’s mindset was seeing the business and money in a different way. At the time when Robert was at his job, he felt like he was obligated to work and that was limiting his skills. Being on the path of a business owner shows you how much value you can bring to your clients. Moreover, the amount of freedom you have as a business owner is just mind-blowing.

The most important skills that Robert learned from his participation in the Daily Business Hustle mastermind is sales. There are a number of other skills that are crucial for business success like managing your team.

Client management is a very important part of business. You have to be able to manage the expectations of your clients.

Robert’s plan before he had a job was to become a very good artist with good portfolio. He never thought about starting a business.

Some artists think that they should not work for the money, but for the feelings and emotions. Others are working for the value that they can provide, but they lack of creativity. The reality is that you need to find the right balance between both.

Robert started his business as a freelancer. In the beginning he was overwhelmed with too much work because he needed to do everything. It was very difficult for him to trust others and to find the right people that he can outsource the work.

As soon as Robert notices that there is some form of fear or procrastination in him, he tries to do that particular thing to overcome that fear.

Robert did not have a very clear idea how to deliver the project for $146K. One of the biggest things for Robert’s success is always saying “Yes” and doing it. If he does not know how to deliver, he will just investigate, do research and figure it out.

Everyone should try to start a business at some point in their lives. There is so much growth in business nowadays and the opportunities are getting bigger and bigger.

Robert prefers to run his own business instead of taking a $200K per year job. He wants to take his own path in life which is more fulfilling than a job. He wants to build his own life. Furthermore, he can do whatever he wants to do at any time and nothing is holding him back.

Why business scares me shitless and how I deal with it (including real life example + exercise)

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I’ve found one key thing, that is stopping most potential entrepreneurs from really gaining momentum, and if you continue watching this video, I’ll tell you exactly what it is.

Once you start this journey, and you’ve truly committed, it’s almost inevitable that you will succeed, but only once you’ve made the full commitment. This type of commitment, that I’ve seen every entrepreneur make, that has really succeeded. The commitment drives itself, like a self-driving force that helps you succeed in business.

Before I started business, I had these fears, that I was just a student in college, and that I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was worried no one would take me seriously, because I didn’t have any experience, and I hadn’t done a project before. I hadn’t been outside of a standard job before, and I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was worried I didn’t have the right skill repertoire, etc.

All these fears I had these before starting a business, I even had them after I had started a business, when I did start to get clients. I was worried I wasn’t offering a service as good as companies, who have better resources, can do a better job. I don’t have as many people working for me, and I don’t have the skills that they have, and I was worried I might be offering it to cheaply, or to expensive ( I had all kinds of worries).

Even after I overcame all those fears, I still had the fear that if I fail, if I go bankrupt, If I can’t pay someone, if a project fails, I’ll have to go back, and get a shitty job somewhere. A low qualified job, because I’m not qualified enough to get a better paying one. Even today, after seven years in business, I catch myself talking to someone at a party, to a random person, and I’m thinking to myself about why I’m not working right now, I’m not hustling as hard as someone else, working as hard, delivering the result I promised.

Are you being controlled to do the bidding of your boss at work?

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Are you willing to do anything to get a certain job, a promotion, or to even keep your job? In this article you’re going to find if you’re being boss whipped.

Getting A Job vs. Getting A Customer

I have a friend, and he has a job where he’s making seventeen dollars an hour. It’s an ok salary. It’s partially copywriting, and partially doing other kinds of stuff. We kind of found him a potential client, and the client would pay him the equivalent of thirty dollars an hour. This would be a project, and if he could do the work faster, he would get paid more.

He got the appointment with the client, and the frame he came from, was that this was like a job application, because he got used to applying for a job. He came into a business meeting, feeling like he has to prove himself, like he has to show he can deliver, maybe doing stuff for free. Of course he didn’t get it. If you come into a business meeting like that, it won’t work; you’re not going to get a client like that.

It’s not his fault that he doesn’t know how to deal with this scenario. He hasn’t learnt by the age of twenty four, because he’s been groomed to comply, he’s been boss whipped basically. Anything the boss says, he has to do it. If the boss requests he has to stay later, he’ll do that, if he has to work weekends, then he’ll do it.

How you were trained in college, or high school, was to go into a job interview to talk about your strengths and your weaknesses, and basically to comply. You were told to sell yourself, and agree with the salary they propose, or maybe ask for a little bit more.

An entrepreneur I know freaked out when he got his second sale and nearly quit. Here's what happened...

I’ve found that when people get into business they’re usually very motivated and often even excited. Everything is so new, exciting and great. But at a certain point, every person who gets into business, and every person who becomes an entrepreneur, hits a wall. It’s like a plateau. When you’re learning, and you’re reaching mastery, you’re going to hit these plateaus where it seems like you can’t move forward. This can happen even if it seems like you’re doing the right thing.

My First Client: My First Pain

Back in the day, I actually got my first client. This was many years ago, and it was a client for some video work. The client was awesome, and I was super excited. I felt like I was finally an entrepreneur and everything was going to work out. Here’s what happened though. It turned out that it was actually a lot of work. I undercharged for the project and I had to do everything myself. At the time, I didn’t know how to delegate or how to partner up with someone. For a very small amount of money, I had to do everything myself.

So I hit a roadblock, and I thought wow, is this really it? Maybe it’s not as good as having a job. Maybe it’s even harder and the rewards are smaller. Because I was brand new I had all these doubts. I didn’t have any proof yet and I didn’t know anyone else who was successful with what I was doing.

Learning To Outsource The Work

Now I have clients who I teach how to build a business. I see that it happens to them sometimes. Some people will get a project, they’ll get their first or their second sale, and then they will realize that it’s actually a lot of work. They’re doing it all themselves and they end up feeling very stressed about it. I have to talk them out of quitting because they didn’t realize that it was going to be so difficult.

There is a common misconception from people who are used to having a job, that you have to suffer through this yourself. You have to somehow manage your own time and figure it out. As an entrepreneur, there is a much better solution to this. When you get your first sale, you don’t have to sit there and figure out every little part of the project all by yourself, if you can outsource it. If you can pass some of the work along to another person for $4 an hour, then there is no reason to stress yourself out about it.

In this podcast you’re going to find out how to effectively go to a marketing event, with lots of successful people, and meet and introduce yourself to them. Not only that, but you’ll find out how to build connections with them that are actually valuable. You can meet millionaires, billionaires, and lots of successful business owners, and leave a lasting good impression with all of them.

First of all, when I go to events, I don’t just go to them to experience good emotions. I’m not there to shakes hands, check out who’s there and just look at them from a distance. I’m going there with a very specific purpose. For example, I may be looking for more clients. Or I may be looking to learn very specific things, from industry experts, that I’ll be able to apply to my business. Or I may even just want to introduce people to each other.

When done correctly, this will benefit other people and it will also increase my own social standing. I do this by leveraging people I know. I introduce them to other people, which always ends up in me meeting more people than I would otherwise. In the future, I may need these relationships. For example, a certain relationship might be useful for a course that I’m creating or maybe I’m looking for a very specific type of client. The trick is that all of that is in the future.

The main thing that you need to remember is to begin creating this network before you actually need it. If you start after you need it, then you’ll go to the event and you’ll have very needy behavior. You’ll feel like you have to establish some new relationships that day. At the event you might say things like:

“Please, let me work for you for free.”

Or

“Please, let me be your friend.”

Obviously this is not a good way to go about networking. People are going to have a kneejerk reaction against this and you’re hardly going to get anywhere. Perhaps some people will take pity on you and offer you a job. As a rule though, you don’t want to go to these events with this kind of frame. It’s much better to go to these events with a frame of: I just want to establish relationships, introduce people with each other, build up my network and give value.

I want to talk about what happened when I was sixteen and seventeen years old. Back then I had a couple of different jobs as a student. But if I would have told my parents that I’m actually starting a business, going into entrepreneurship and giving up school, they would have gone crazy. They probably would have disowned me, evicted me and all sorts of things like that.

Back then there was a lot less entrepreneurship amongst young people. So let’s talk about what I’m seeing right now. Today, I can look around at all the entrepreneurs that I’m talking to and I can see them doing all sorts of crazy shit. They’re doing stuff like going on Upwork and finding people that they can outsource too. They’re getting a high quality product online and then they’re selling it locally for a large markup. They end up making a huge profit margin off of this.

Some of these people are building a business from scratch in half a year. Sometimes even in less time, like three months or even one month. I’ve seen people who have made a profit in that short amount of time. The crazy thing about this is that some of these guys are seventeen years old. That’s an age where my parents would have said you’re completely insane and a lunatic. Now, people are just doing that as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.

Developing a Business

It’s really a revolution that’s going on right now in the world. With this information, there are really two things that you can do. The first is to say something like:

“Well, they’re taking our jobs (they took ‘er jobs).” Like in that episode of Southpark where the foreigners are taking the jobs. You can be like that, and believe that the foreigners are to blame.

The second option is to join the party and make a very nice profit for yourself. The profit margins are high, the business opportunity is very real, and it’s actually valuable. People actually want to pay for this stuff, especially if you offer something really valuable. If you ask your audience:

“What do you actually want?” You can take that answer and provide it to your clients, and you can be very successful and make a lot of money.

In this podcast you’re going to find out how you can actually get the sale, and how you can close the sale. When most people are at the part of the sales conversation when they have to ask for the money and get the contract signed, they say something like:

“Well, are you ready to proceed?”

Or

“Hey, so what do you think?

Guess what, that’s going to cause you to lose a lot of sales. A client told me today that after a seventy minute sales call he said the following:

“Well, what do you think?” And the customer responded:

“Well, I think that that’s 2,000 Euros.”

After all that work he didn’t get the sale. Why didn’t he get the sale? Because it’s an ineffective way to close, and has a low probability of actually working. He could have still recovered, but he’s not very experienced and still has a lot to learn.

The Benefit of Closing

First of all, what does closing actually mean? Closing means that you’re helping a prospect reach a decision that is beneficial for him in the short term and the long term. If it’s not mutually beneficial, it’s actually a scam. That means you’re scamming someone, you’re not selling him something. If you want to scam someone, please don’t apply what I’m teaching here. This is only for people who are interested in building mutually beneficial relationships with potential clients.

So starting from the point of view that it’s mutually beneficial, who actually loses out if you fail to close a sale? It’s not just you who loses out, the client loses out as well. If the client doesn’t get what’s good for his business, if the client doesn’t get that thing that is going to make him money, then he suffers as well. His personal life can also be affected, as his family will lose out as well.

How to plan, commit and execute in business.

If you can’t plan, commit and execute in business, then this podcast is for you. I experience this from time to time as well, it’s perfectly normal.

Every time that happens, every time I don’t execute, I just think to myself: what are all the opportunities that I sacrificed to be here? What are all the jobs, and pretty damn good jobs, that I had to give up to be here? What about all the millionaire and billionaire clients that I can’t work with now? I gave up all the opportunities I had before me and choose instead to sit at home, work on my business and make this happen.

Thankfully, I can use all of that to motivate myself. I think about all the mentors that taught me and pushed me for all those years. I think about all the stuff that I promised myself I was going to do. All the businesses that I was going to start and all the people that I’m going to help.

So when I think about it, I know that if I’m not executing right now, I’m literally shitting on those dreams. That pain, it becomes much stronger than the pain of execution. I can tell you, once you get started, it’s a lot easier. Getting started is just the initial hurdle that you need to overcome. After that, it becomes a lot easier to do consistent work. If you can build up that momentum, and keep building that momentum over and over and over in your business, you can grow your business to almost any level.

1) Planning

When I was just starting out, I wrote everything down on a to-do list and adding things to my alarm clock. At the time, I wasn’t using a calendar or anything like that. Instead, I had recurring tasks and one day tasks that my alarm clock would remind me of.

Here are some of my favorite techniques that I use in sales to improve my close rate.

In this podcast I want to talk about closing sales. I’ve heard that a lot of people follow a very specific structure when they make a sales call. Step one, step two, step three, and so on. What I’ve seen is that when they talk about sales, they break it up into many different pieces.

This works and it’s a good way to learn sales. However, if you want to develop the correct mindset and get to an advanced level of selling, you need to change the way you think about making a sale. What I do is that I tend to look at the entire sale as being a close. In fact, every single step of the sales process is just a way for me to get to the close. I never feel like I’m at a different stage in the sale, it always just feels like I’m in a stage of closing the sale and getting the money from the client.

What happens if you look at it as “Oh my god, I’m going to go for the close! It’s almost there and it’s going to be the big finale” is that you psyche yourself out. You end up getting nervous, you tense up, your voice tonality changes and then you end up getting rejected. That’s because you end up getting objections that you potentially can’t even handle. These come at the wrong time, and in most cases are not necessary at all. The person was ready to buy, but the tone of your voice changes, you’re shaky and you lose the sale.

Dealing With Objections

This actually happened to me the other week. It was the last few sales that I needed and I was thinking, well let’s just get it over with. I wasn’t on point, I wasn’t as focused and I wasn’t as present as I could have been.

What happened is that I got all of these objections that I hadn’t gotten in weeks and weeks. From experience I know that this happened just because I wasn’t doing the right thing. I wasn’t just going for the close. I wasn’t deciding that this is a sale and this is happening no matter what.

Got any questions?

Ask me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/aleksander.vi...

Check out my free business training: www.vitkin.net

Want to connect on Instagram? @AleksVitkin