5 Things We Learned The Hard Way So You Don’t Have To – Episode 10
Imagine if you could know what mistakes to avoid in your business that would help you become successful that much faster! The Boss life Podcast dives deep today into exactly how to avoid 5 big mistakes when you are starting to build your business.
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Three Key Boss Points From Today’s Podcast
- Stop listening to the wrong people for advice.
- Start doing personal development yesterday!
- Stop trying to re-invent the wheel and instead model the successful.
- Stop waiting for other people to believe in you.
- Stop spending the money you’re earning, instead of investing it back in your business.
5 Things We Learned The Hard Way So You Don’t Have To
In today’s episode, we’re going to share with you the five things we learned the hard way so you don’t have to.
Now, I know we all want to say we’re perfect. Definitely.
But in reality, I am perfect. I’m kidding. You know what? You know what actually kind of is the closest thing to perfect? Imperfect. I find. It’s funny. But what we want to do today is we want you guys to learn from many of the mistakes that we have made over the last 20, 30 years in order for you to grow an incredible business. And we have five big topics that we want to talk about, so hopefully, you’re ready to take some notes, but let’s dive right in with number one.
One thing I want to say about this is that sometimes we had to learn these lessons more than once. A lot of this is practice. So, if any of you are currently going through these lessons, or have learned these lessons before, I want you guys to understand that it’s a practice to make things better. So if we look at number one, I think when I look at this lesson, it really, really, it took me a long time to learn this one. So the first one I would say is that I listened to the wrong people for advice.
What I mean by that is that I was looking for support, or advice, from people I really loved, and cared about. But never necessarily did what I was trying to accomplish. So I was asking for advice from someone who really had no business giving me advice.
That’s so true. We’ve talked about this a little bit before. It would be like going to, let’s say, your personal trainer and asking them to do your taxes. Ideally, you want to go after advice from people that have been successful where you want to be successful. I mean, that’s how you really change your life. I remember a story back in the day, when I used to work as a computer consultant, I remember the first few years I was a programmer, and I went to a conference and I saw these people speaking on stage, and just motivating people, and getting them excited about technologies. They also saw the car they drove.
[crosstalk] car that motivated you, wasn’t it?
I was like, they clearly are making more money than me. So how does this all work? Back then, I was legitimately going to people that I had around me, like at my level, I was asking people at my level or lower for advice on how to take my life to the next level. Does that make sense?
Hm-mm-hmm (affirmative).
So, what I did, I remember specifically this moment, I remember the guy’s name, I won’t mention him in the podcast, but he may live in Australia now. He’s always been a big cheerleader. If he’s listening, he knows who I’m talking about. But I didn’t ask for permission to use his name, so I won’t. But I went on to him, I said, “Hey, listen, I’m sitting out here learning it from you, how do I do what you do, man? How do I inspire people? I’m shy, I don’t want to speak in front of large crowds.” Basically what I did is I started asking people what they did, and I started learning their rules, and how they did it. I started copying what they did. I started creating user groups in my community. I started taking all their advice of what they were saying in order for me to end up on that stage.
Then, by doing that, by doing what they were telling me to do, I ended up having very similar success to them. So I think a big thing that people mix up in business is they will ask the wrong people for advice, and frankly in life.
Right.
But even in life, no matter where you are in life, if you want to go from point A to point B, don’t ask someone that’s at point minus two on how to get to the top of the mountain, they’re not going to give you good advice. They’re going to give you advice so that you don’t get to the top of the mountain, so you can stay living on their playing field so they have someone to hang out with.
Totally. Totally. So let’s dive into number two. This one is personal and close to me. Just because this was one of the things I did a lot, is that I didn’t start doing enough personal development, or work on myself, until I actually got stuck. I think it’s because I looked at, you know, when I was building a business I’m like, “I don’t really have time for that stuff. All these people, they talk about it, but I’m too busy doing the business.” It wasn’t until … we all have these pre-conceived mindsets about certain issues in our life that we’ve been socialized into, and sometimes we’re not even aware that they’re holding us back. I think the biggest key with this is you have to start with the awareness that there is something that might be holding you back personally in your life, and until you deal with it, you’re going to be stuck.
It’s like, and Miguel was saying, that he’s looking to the next level to talk to someone for advice. You have to also work on yourself to get yourself to the next level.
Yeah, because a lot of people, I mean, we can get stuck. I think sometimes, here’s the thing, can I cut the cat out of the bag?
I don’t know, can you?
I don’t know, our cat is pretty crazy, because [inaudible] and he’s basically a psychopath. So here’s the thing. The reality is many people view personal development, counseling, coaching, if they’re not in this realm, they feel like that’s a bad thing. I feel like there’s a real negative-
They feel like if you’re weak, then you have to do that stuff.
Yeah, and it’s quite opposite. Nowadays, when I run into someone, I know like within about one minute if they have done personal development, how many books they’ve read, I know if they’ve gone to conferences, because they are a different breed of people. They’re the ones that are achieving, and just making it happen, and it’s not that bad things haven’t happened to them, it’s that they’re just able to just move past them so quickly, right. I think a big thing for a lot of you, especially if you want to start a business, man, starting a business can be hard, and we’re going to make it easy by telling you that you have to do personal development.
I’m not telling you to go read a book that might bore you. You got to figure out what that is that you want to learn about. Can I dive a little bit deeper into this one specifically?
Yeah, yeah, go right ahead.
Because one of the biggest questions that I get asked is, “Okay, great. I’ll do personal development, what book should I read?” Do people ever ask you that?
All the time. It’s such a loaded question.
It really is. So what I can say to people is usually, “Well, I don’t know. It’s a personal thing.” So what do you, two things, one, you can ask yourself what do you need to work on as an individual that you know is maybe a weakness for you. Or number two is what do you want to have in the future? Those are typically the books that I tend to read. So how I like to do it for example is, if I’m working on, let’s say a podcast, I might go out and buy like five, six, seven podcasting books, courses, because really just so you understand, personal development isn’t just reading a book. You are doing personal development right now by listening to this podcast, right?
Yeah, there’s different types of personal development.
There really is. So for you to grow as a person, chances are you don’t have an expert in podcasting, if you wanted to build a podcast, that lives next door.
Chances are you don’t have a friend that’s a, let’s say, multimillionaire in growing online businesses that you can just call up and ask question to. So where do you get this advice? Chances are you don’t have a neighbor that’s an expert in relationship counseling, so in order to get this advice, a lot of times the best way to go is personal development, which is books, reading, which is maybe going to see somebody. So I really think that for you, one thing that you should do is just sit down and ask yourself what do you want to work on, and where do you want to go, and go on Amazon.
I like going on Amazon, and what I’ll do, I’ll do this exercise with clients that I coach, and we’ll talk about this. Then I’ll say, “Okay, we’re going to work on, let’s say, your relationship with money.” So then we’re going to go in Amazon, and we’re going to type that in, and we’re going to find books, and then I’m going to let them pick the book that they want to buy.
Right, and so if I can dumb this down a little bit more.
Are you saying I made it complicated?
No, you just brought it to another level. I want you guys to ask yourself what do you suck at, what do you suck at? If you suck at something, you want to get better at something, that is what you need to work on.
Wait, hold on, if I suck at something, surrounding myself with more [inaudible] is not going to fix my problem?
No, no. I think that when you admit that you suck at something, it opens you up to learn from people who don’t suck at it. I think that one of the biggest things that people don’t really talk about is all of the stuff that you need to learn to build your business, it’s a skill, and you can learn skills. It’s not like we’re inherently knowledgeable about all this stuff. We’ve learnt it.
It’s true. Back to my other story, when I wanted to go speak on stage, I made that mistake. Once I even got the good advice, at first, what I kept out was I went and ask people that were programmers with me, “How do I learn to speak on stage?” Their answers were like, “Why would I ever want to speak on stage? That’s crazy, this is the best thing ever.” He is an idiot. Luckily I had the personal development, if I’d listened to that, I would’ve been like, “You know what? You’re right. I should just keep doing what I’m doing.”
Yeah, this is going to keep you playing at their level, right?
Each one of these could be a podcast episode, I’m realizing this.
Absolutely. I know. We could dive deep in. But let’s go high level first, and then, you know, based on our feedback from all you guys, we can go deeper into all of these, based on what you guys really love. All right, so let’s talk about number three. I want you to talk about this one, Miguel, because I feel like you are kind of the pioneer with this stuff. But, I think that one of the hard lessons we learned the hard way is we tried to reinvent the wheel instead of just modeling successful people.
Yeah, I think this is a really big one. I think, for me, personally … okay, some background to me, if you’re wondering some of the stuff that we talk about. Luckily, my dad, when I was eight years old, he took me to Tony Robbins’ events, and real estate investing events, I started my own business when I was 12. In all of these things, one of the big things that they always talked about like growing up was model success, model success. As I grew in my life, I realized that this really worked. As we coach other people, like over the last seven years, we’ve coached thousands and thousands of people. One of the biggest mistakes that they make is they don’t model success. They try and figure it out on their own.
They say, “Okay, I want to start an online business selling products on Amazon.” Great, what’s the first step? Instead of going and finding someone that’s already having incredible success, and basically hacking that out, and figuring out, writing out exactly what they did, trying to figure out if they have a course, learning from them, instead of doing all of that stuff, they go back and just try and figure out on their own.
That’s because they want to put their own spin on it. I totally get that. However-
And you should put your own spin.
You should put your flair on it. But when something’s worked for somebody, there’s a reason. I think that sometimes we’re like, “No, I know better.”
It’s true. So the first one is like pick someone that you want to model. So figure out what business is it that you want to be incredibly successful in, and once you have that figured out, find someone, and I’d say find 10 people, that are successful. Then what I like to do, the exercise I do, is I try and see okay, which of these people are most like me in terms of character, and integrity? Because there’s a million ways to make money, some of those are illegal. So, at the end of the day-
We’re not going to touch upon those.
Yeah, I know. But at the end of the day, you have to try. So once you have those 10 people that are most like you, usually out of those 10 I’ll pick three. These three are similar to what I want to build and what I want to do. The next thing I’ll do is I’ll go, sometimes I’ll go and buy their products, I’ll look at their landing pages, I’ll look at how they’re offering things. I’ll see if they have courses. I’ll buy their courses. Once I’ve learned all that, now I can go and now I like to create my roadmap. This will be a different episode, but the key here is that you got to find someone to model, and you will have very similar results. It’s just like this podcast.
We’ve been listening to podcasts for years, but I found someone that was most similar to us, I modeled their success. I bought their courses. And I podcast came out number one in business.
And I want to make sure that you guys understand we’re not saying go buy someone’s stuff and copy it word for word.
Why don’t you explain that? Because-
That’s illegal.
… I want to make sure they understand what modeling means.
Modeling means looking the technique they’re using, looking how they’re setting up their pages, looking at the colors maybe that they use, looking at, you know, maybe they’re using video and text. Those type of things. Model what works, but you have to still write your own copy. So you have to … don’t copy and paste their stuff, don’t just full out, you know, if something inspires you, you have to put your own spin on things. So just keep that in mind, we’re not telling you to go and find someone who’s successful and rip off their stuff.
The other thing I’ll add just last real quick thing, I’ll try and be quick, is if you have someone like a coach, or a mentor, that is coaching you, and helping you, and giving you advice, and you have the ability to kind of model their success, or piggyback on their parade kind of a thing, be careful not to think you know better. Okay?
You have to be coachable.
Yeah, because those are two different things. One, I found people are like, “Okay, I’m ready to listen. I’m going to model what you’re doing.” That’s great. But then I’ve also found the other group that say that, but then, when it comes to implementing, I go and see what they’re doing, and they’re like, “Yeah, I totally did what you told me to do.” I’m like, “No, [inaudible] you to change that, you did that.” They’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s better.” I’m like, “That was the key thing I mentioned to you.”
To not change.
To not do. And like, “But I did everything else.” And it’s like, “Well, yeah, but that is like.” You got to understand, sometimes in business, how many of you ever felt that you’re so far off, it’s just not working, lift your hands up, as long as you’re not driving. If you are driving, don’t do that. But, here’s the thing, all of us have felt that way. But business success is kind of like a key, if you go and make a copy of a key to your door, they accidentally mess up and they get one of those little pins chiseled the wrong way. That key is and to going to work, you’re going to stick it in that door, you’re going to turn it all you want, it will not open that door, because that one [inaudible] little pin in that door is not getting lifted the right way and that door will not open.
But it doesn’t mean that the entire key is garbage, and that you’ve completely messed up. You’re just a little bit off. If you just chisel that the right way a little bit, then everything else you’ve done unlocks, and then greatness happens. That is a lot of what happens when you model someone’s success, and you’re being coached by someone. When I find people that succeed versus the ones that don’t, the ones that don’t end up missing those few little things, and they think they’re so far off.
If I can give a … this is the last piece, we love this topic apparently. I just wanted to share a personal story from this, is that when I first started my business, five, six years ago, I looked at the successful people in my industry, I was like, “They’re having a lot of success. I really like that post. I’m going to copy that post.” You know what? When I copied it, first of all, it did terribly.
Terribly, because even though it did well for them, it did well for them because they were speaking their voice, they were speaking their truth, they wrote how they wanted to write. So, if any of you have ever done that before, or you’re doing it now, and you’re like, “Why isn’t that working for me?” It’s not working for you because it’s not you. Model success, but you have to make sure that your personality is injected into it.
Exactly. Let’s go on to the next one here, I’ll get Erin talk about it. Because sometimes I think you have a dream, right, you got this dream in your life, and you want to make it a reality. You go to people, you tell them your dream, and they’re not fired up. How do people deal with that? Talk a little bit about this.
You know what? I think that, for me in particular, because I feel like I was an accidental entrepreneur, I wasn’t super sold on my business at the very beginning, because I was like, “Am I meant to do this?” I had a lot of limiting beliefs when I started building my business. So I went to other people, kind of touched upon the first one, I went to the wrong people for advice, and I was looking for them to be really excited. I poured my heart and soul into maybe a post, and I was waiting on Facebook, I’m like, “Who’s going to hit like? Is anyone going to hit like?”
I remember the first time, I kind of made a business e-type post, and I shut my laptop and walked away, because I was so stressed out that people weren’t going to be supportive. This was one of the biggest things-
But you know who will always support?
My mom.
The mom. [crosstalk] her heart.
My mom. If anyone follows my stuff on social media, my mom comments on anything.
I did an Instagram post yesterday, you can go check it out, I think it’s @miguelmindset [crosstalk 00:17:26].
Yeah.
But what did I say? I said, “When no one believes in you, there will be your mom still supporting you.”
Right?
It’s a [inaudible] picture of a mom sitting in the audience-
By herself, right.
… by herself.
But I think it’s true, because we look at our dreams, and we get excited about it, and maybe we get excited about it because we’re at a certain place in our life, or it really speaks to our soul. When we’re speaking to somebody else, and we’re so excited, and you just get that, have you ever had that deer in the headlights looks, that like someone gives you back, and they’re like, “Blink, blink, good for you.” And [inaudible] pat on the back type thing.
Or worse. That’s stupid.
That’s actually probably more common.
You do that, you’re going to be broke. You’re going to have nothing. You’re going to lose everything.
Don’t leave your job. If you have a pension, all that stuff, I hear it a lot from our clients-
And we’re not suggesting that you do [crosstalk 00:18:15].
No, no, no, no. No. But I hear it a lot from our clients when they are explaining to maybe their family members that they’re super passionate about this entrepreneurial idea, and maybe their family members never have had their own business, it’s a really hard leap for them.
Yeah, like when I first left the company that I had before this, where I was working, I was afraid, for sure, Erin said, “Do it, but it’s all on you.”
Yeah, that’s kind of what I said.
But, at the end of the day, you got to do what’s right for you. Some people might have a side hustle forever, and still work a full-time job, and that’s great.
Totally.
That’s awesome. It’s funny, because I was talking, I just got back from the United Kingdom, which is awesome, I was meeting with a coach there, and they’re a police officer. Right now, their wages are all frozen. Yeah, they’re frozen. I think-
That’s tough.
… they get a 1% increase every year basically. But then once you get to a certain, I guess, cap level, you can’t make anymore. Then that’s your pension, and that’s it, right. So for them to make more money, as an example there, she’s like, “I got to build this side hustle. I got to make this happen, because there’s other things I want to do in my life besides just do this.” It’s all personal, all depends, some people want to build a multimillion dollar business, some people want to make an extra 10,000 a month, it kind of just depends on what it may be, right?
Right. We’re not saying you have to build it a certain way, or have a certain desire to do either one. There’s a place for every single type of person.
Okay, so let’s jump into the last one, which is spending the money that you earn instead of investing it back in your business. Erin, why don’t you talk about this one?
I think that a lot of times the people that we work with, they’re so excited, and a lot of times the reason you’re starting a side hustle is because you need the extra money. A lot of the times we have people that we work with, they’re like, “Yeah, I need to earn an extra $1,000 a month just to kind of make it through with my bills, with my mortgage, or my car payment.” At first, it’s super exciting. When your business takes off, you’re super pumped that I’m like, “Yay. It’s finally working.” And maybe your spouse is like, “This, thing is finally working.”
Because I remember with out last business, when we finally started to see some revenue from it, I was like, “This thing actually does work.” But if I look at what I wanted to do wit the money versus what Miguel wanted to do with the money, he had the right mindset, right? When he was looking at, “Okay, I earned X, Y, Z dollars this week, now I’m going to invest it in going to an event.” I was like, “What are you doing? We just made money. We’ve been losing money for the last six months, what are you doing?” So why don’t you talk a little bit more about that mindset?
Yeah, sure. I mean, basically what it boils down to is how badly do you want this to work for you. Do you want to build a business or do you want to have a one hit wonder where you make a little bit of money and then it all kind of vanishes and goes away? That’s why you see a lot of people say the businesses fail a lot, and they do, 97% of all businesses fail, but that’s not to say that you’re going to fail too, that just means that I really believe if you listen to this podcast, and listen to all of our episodes, you’re going to learn the reason why 97% fail, then hopefully you won’t fail.
So a big one is this one. Because you work really hard for those initial few sales, and then you get them, and the first thing you want to do is spend it. Let me be clear here, if you want to reward yourself with something in the beginning, I get it, go for it, but you got to look at your situation. If you’re really trying to get this off the ground, and you finally made $200, understand like, think to yourself, what could you do with that money for your business first in order to make that before $100. When you think of it that way, it becomes way easier to make the right decision. $200, I could go buy a really nice bottle of champagne, we could go out for dinner. Or $200, I could spend $100 over a week on Facebook ads, add 200 new people to our following on Facebook and Instagram, I could take the other $100 and buy a course that would teach me how to learn more confidence in my life to take my business to the next level.
There are so many other things I could do. Once I think of those things, it’s like, “Okay, if I do those things instead, now maybe in a few weeks that 200 is going to turn into 300.” There’s a lot of decisions that you’re going to make as you grow your business, especially as the money grows, it never stops. Let’s say now, two, three years down the road, I don’t know, you’re making, let’s say, 100,000 profit a year in your business. You have the ability to take that money and either take it and spend it on things that make you happy, or you could take it and spend it on equipment, like for example, this podcast. We didn’t have all this equipment until years down the road. But we have really, really good equipment, because we’ve invested into our business as we go.
We have the best computers. We have the best sound studios. We have all of the best stuff. Because we didn’t … I really believe that if in the first year of growing one of our businesses, we had spent that money on just going to Disney World, or going on vacations, and all these things, we would have nothing right now, because we wouldn’t have reinvested in our business. Especially, I’ll say this last thing, especially entrepreneurs that are getting started online, because if you take a look at like a franchise model, or if you take a look at like a brick and mortar model, many of those businesses takes five, 10 years to start making a profit. And you’re investing half a million dollars to get started in your business.
But at the end of the day, when you’re building an online business, many people they feel like they haven’t really invested too much other than their time. Because of that, they don’t understand, then some money comes in, and they spend it right away. Whereas, if you’ve invested half a million dollars, you understand that if you start making $100,000, well, that’s just going right back into the business, that’s paying off some loans, that’s paying salaries and things like that.
So you really have to understand, especially as someone that’s just getting started online, that please, I’m begging you, when that money starts coming in, spend it, put it back in your business. It’s like the best investment that you can make.
Totally. Totally.
All right. So, with that, let’s go on to the challenge of the day. Erin, why don’t you give these bosses the challenge?
I think with this particular topic, I want your challenge to be an awareness. What I mean by that is that each of these points, I want you to look at your life and have a real heart to heart with yourself, and ask yourself where am I at in my business? Are you listening to the wrong people for advice? And be honest with yourself. Are you doing any personal development or the right personal development and having awareness with that? Are you investing in your personal development? Have you tried to reinvent the wheel? And maybe that’s why you’re not having the success that you want.
I challenge you to take a look at what Miguel said, the 10 people in your industry who are having the success that you want, and look at are you modeling the way they’re having success? I want you to have an awareness of those people that you’re waiting to believe in you in order for you to really crush in your business, I want you to have that awareness right now that no one is going to jump in as much as you are into this business, because it’s your dream and not theirs.
They will, once you’re really successful.
They want to come for the ride.
Can you take me to a cool [inaudible] again? I’m in.
Take me on vacation. The last point where we just talked a lot about is I want you to make sure, and be really honest with yourself, are you investing back into your business? That is going to be the key part in all of this to success.
You do these five things, and you’re conscious of them, you are going to see some massive changes in your business. So we hope you’re excited.
