Stretch to yourself early and often. As early and often as you can. When I graduated undergraduate a semester early and I could have stayed for the last one, but I already was thinking that and that time is like, okay, well, I have one more semester of time to fail, make failures to learn from things. I stepped out and left a cushy job as an EVP at a 3000 person company in 2022 and took on those interim CMO roles at the startups and what I'll say about that is I learned a lot from it and I'm better because of it. So always just trying to stretch yourself, always just trying to keep learning. Always learning.

Surrounding yourself with smart people is probably always good, whether those are employees or former employers. I think just being really diligent about the relationships you've built wherever you are in your career. Like, if you've got 20 years like me, or you've got two years and your fresh more, you know, the university is more recent than professional experience, leverage those relationships.

Have courage. You can have courage or comfort, but you can't have both at the same time. So I believe if you're going into a startup, there is nothing safe about a startup. There's nothing safe about anything, to be honest with you but with a startup specifically, you really have to have courage. You have to go in every day knowing that things might not work out the way you want them to and so it's easy to choose comfort, it's easy to choose the option where you feel like you're the safest, but courage is what takes you to the next level.

You got to change your mindset. I have a lot of people who, during the past few years that I've started coaching, a lot of people who have come from corporate environments, they've got franchises, and they think, oh, man, I know how to run a business. But they also stop looking at the front end of that business. And so how do you get the sales? How do you continually feed that funnel? Has to be top of mind for your business. So as an entrepreneur, I would say don't necessarily focus on the back end at first. The first thing you got to do is get your name out there. You've got to get people to understand who you are, and what you do. That's got to be a priority for you.

Time and time again, you can always talk about sort of technical you can always talk about sort of other aspects like, hey, you need to figure out how you can scalability do something, or you need to figure out what's the return on value or things like that. I believe all those things are to be true, but I do believe that it's one of the most important things to have people that you truly can actually really work together and cooperate with in a way that actually can be better than the sum of your parts. I know that's a cliched phrase, but really, people, the folks that you work with are some of the most important considerations that you make. I've seen so many times where founders it's crazy too. Like, founders that I know who founded the company together, and they had disagreements about sort of how the equity would be broken up because they didn't have an agreement when they started.

Focus on your sales and your marketing. A lot of people always separate two things product and marketing but they're really intertwined because the feedback you get from your marketing should help you develop your product. And the earlier you focus on going through those feedback loops of marketing and selling and figuring out what people like and cutting out what people don't like, the better your business will be and the faster it will grow.

Coaching. You got to get coaching and the way to do that and the trouble with this, in this day and age that everybody is a coach and you go spend five minutes with somebody on a weekend, it's like, yeah, I'm a certified coach. I would find somebody, In the area that you work in and the area that you want to get great at in your life, I say Google the best person in the world with proven results. Not that somebody that's just doing it overnight, but somebody that's been doing it for a decade or more and has years and years and years and so many testimonials. So they're not just a fluffy type.

If you are starting and know that funds may sometimes be a bit of issue with people. However, if you are able to get yourself either a business coach or marketing mentor, that would really help amazingly.

Focus on the pace of your learning. As long as you are learning a lot and the things that you are learning are aligned with where you ultimately want to go you can't go wrong. So change jobs, take risks, focus on the person you are working for absorb their brain, gain the skills that you need, and then when that moment of serendipity happens you'd be ready to seal it.

Have faith in yourself and in your abilities and the courage to try. If you are confident in yourself and in your abilities and you have a great idea then you gotta step up to place to win the bet to see if you can make something of it.