🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

My piece of advice would be to stay balanced and don't let your highs get too high or your lows get too low.

It's about determining how you're going to provide value, whether that's value to your clients once you actually get them, or how you're going to provide value to your audience and build your influence. There is so much money to be made when you build your influence, and part of creating that trust in the marketplace is providing value and showing them who you are and that you intimately understand their problems and have a well-thought-out solution. So, how are you going to provide value, and how are you going to communicate that value? It's one of the biggest missing links to success.

This really helps me when I stumbled across this insight in my entrepreneurial journey. So what it boils down to is that you dramatically overestimate how much you can accomplish in any single given day, but you also dramatically underestimate how much you can accomplish over a period of time. Simply you by showing up each day and giving it your own.

Get yourself a CRM. You don't need to have a million people come into your business to be successful. You just need a small share of influence, maybe 200 people in your pipeline, 250 people in your pipeline, and serve them very well. The more people you serve and help to become better, they're going to want to do business with you. They're going to want to spread the word about your business. So, all you need to do is take care of those 250 people who are in your sphere of influence, have a CRM, and just talk to them and have those touchpoints. You don't even have to sell. You just have to be a human being with them. That's it. Just be a human being, talk to them, help them out, and you will see your business grow and do very well, in my opinion.

It's all about the mission. It's all about the passion. And it's all about being a 360-degree leader. You can't do it alone; you must rely on other people. You are bigger, better, and stronger with other people. Being an entrepreneur is not about being number one. Being a leader is not about having everybody listen to you. Both of those things require that you listen to everybody else and work for your people. They don't work for you. You work for the people because you know what they're working for. They're working for the mission of that company, of that startup.

Do it. I've never met one that says, man, I wish I didn't become an entrepreneur or launch that business, or, I wish I would have waited for five years or ten years longer to launch that business. Most of the time, the answer is, man, I wish I would have done it soon, sooner. So there's no better time than the present. Obviously, you want to do it smartly. Make sure you have your ducks in a row. You're prepared. You prepare yourself for taking that entrepreneurial leap and being financially, mentally, and physically healthy in line to do that. Don't wait, get it done, Start today. The only regret I have is I wish I would have started a little bit earlier.

Surround yourself with like-minded people, not really like-minded, but ones that can challenge you. It's a very lonely game. Ultimately, no one else knows what you're going through besides you and your co-founder. So if you don't have a cofounder and you're going at it yourself, surround yourself with some advisors, with some people who know your industry, especially if you don't know your industry. Surround yourself with people who are complimentary to you. I don't have a marketing backbone, but I've brought on advisors to my company who do have that, and who can help advise me where I lack.

I've been talking about this with quite a few people lately because it's a similar thread to some of the conversations. Learn when to fire yourself. It would be the advice I would give you and you're not going to be able to fire yourself for a while when you're a solopreneur and you're just starting and maybe you have one or two employees, right? But you are going to have to figure out along the path when it's time to let go of certain things. You should look at it as like, I'm firing myself from being the Director of marketing, I'm the CEO, I can't be responsible for putting out all of the tweets and running the paid search program and all these kinds of things that might come up.

Make sure you're aligned with the vision of the founder, because if you have conflicts you know, I think one thing is to be a contrarian, right? To kind of present all sides and all views to see what is possible, but also to make sure that you're aligned to the vision of any founder that you're working for because at the end of the day, what I always tell people, rather bluntly is it's their company and they had the idea, and they got the backing for it. So your job is to execute and grow the business and do it in a responsible way. So I've seen people who have clashed and butted heads with founders. There's no sense in that. It's certainly something that you can be the contrarian and you can be somebody who gives up good advice, but if you're foundationally opposed to something and you think you want to do it your way, there are certainly other opportunities to do that.

Focus. Focus, Focus. I serve on the advisory board of a number of different startups, and the one thing I remind them of is sticking to their core competency. You can't be all things to all people. You need to think every single day when you wake up, it's the number one thing I have to do to survive, thrive and grow. Anything else that does not directly contribute to that quantitative value that you have placed in your measurement needs to go away. So, the bottom line is the focus.