#EntrepreneurshipInsights #BusinessSuccess #BrutalTruths
🤔 What are some unconventional things only people who have actually built a successful business would know? 🚀
Have you ever wondered what it takes to truly make it in the world of entrepreneurship? Here are some insights that might not be commonly discussed, but are crucial for anyone looking to build a successful business:
– The importance of building a strong network and fostering genuine relationships with other entrepreneurs 🤝
– The necessity of being adaptable and willing to pivot your business strategy when needed 🔄
– The reality of facing failure and rejection on your journey to success, and learning how to bounce back stronger 💪
– The significance of continuous learning and self-improvement to stay ahead of the game 📚
– The crucial role of resilience and perseverance in overcoming challenges and obstacles along the way 🧗♂️
What do you think is an unconventional truth about entrepreneurship that isn’t often talked about? Share your thoughts and let’s empower each other with valuable knowledge and insights! 💡
9 out of 10 entrepreneurship advice you read online is bullshit.
Either they are selling you a course/product, marketing effort to drive their share price/products/profile or just pure scam.
Ultimately, doing a business is having a product that people are willing to pay.
It could be a paying customer or investors dumping capital into your business. One is paying for your product and another one is paying for your shares.
Everything else is noise.
Not everything needs to be an app.
In the USA, take legal and contracts very seriously. Use competent lawyers for important things. You won’t be in litigation hardly ever but it’s important to be able to enforce things when push comes to shove.
If you own a highly regulated business, like rental property, the people who give you the most problems are often the people who know the regulatory rules and tenant law like an encyclopedia, for whatever reason. So don’t take the rules lightly, follow all the rules.
Annoying, cheap customers who pester you over little details aren’t worth the headache.
Working hard and all the time won’t necessarily make you a success but it sure helps.
Never go into business with a partner because you crave the emotional support or want a buddy to share the stress. Only have a partner because they bring either skills or assets that you cannot provide. Everything else you can hire out when needed.
Two here. First one is that having the foresight for potential failures in the future can save you a lot of money and headaches. No matter how good or perfect an opportunity is, you should try and validate it, and even if you do validate it could still fail. I knew someone who had 3 million in Series A funding but ran into issues with manufacturing scalability, so it went bust. Designing is not manufacturing, test is not production, etc.
Second one is very specific to software so ignore if you like- but scalable software is not easy or cheap to run. It does not just exist in the air somewhere, applications run on a server and that server costs money on scale. I learned this when I dealt with AWS. I sometimes see no code applications being peddled by YouTubers as a simple way to get going- and don’t get me wrong it’s great for validation- but imagine having your code base somewhere and not owning or understanding the code or understanding the security, the servers it’s hosted on? What happens when you want to go from 1000 customers to 10,000, 100,000, 1 million? You’re essentially at the mercy of whoever actually owns your code, you can’t leave, and now they just quadrupled your monthly cost because they can. That magical AI API you were just using? They’ll wake up one day and charge 200K/year to interface with it now. What are you going to do, leave? Write your own code? You don’t know how, you will be paying up.
Your little no code app goes down and thousands of customers are mad in a number of seconds and leave your platform. Then, migrating your code is a giant headache and you’ll end up shelling out money for developers anyway. Only this time you’ll pay more because it’s more of a headache to learned the code, reverse engineer it and move code and now, bye bye profits! Long story short own your code, and in the long term own your servers too.
People will stay for less money if they enjoy working for you. Like, 40% less.
Quality of life is oftentimes more important than the paycheck.
I have three employees, they’ve been with me 7 years, 5 years, and 2.5 years respectively, and they could all be making 2x what they’re making here. (Which by the way, would be more than I make.)
But they like the work, they love the team around them, and they’re happy. So they don’t leave.
INVEST IN CULTURE AND PEOPLE.
People that talk a lot, know the least.
I think Mark Cuban actually mentioned something similar to this.
once in a while, you see a guy that is trying to sell you something, talks about how amazing it is. But in the end, it’s just talk.
Talking and selling is very different. And people who built successful businesses can smell it from miles away.
That ideas are almost always worth nothing. There is a reason one does not patent an idea: because wishes and fairy dust are not real. Here is an idea: learn what your customers really want or need, and deliver it to them exceptionally well. Wow, thanks! It is just words. Implement and increment that idea into a practice or business and you’ve got something.
Maybe the most unconventional thing I would say is only unconventional **now**. 100% of the time I’ve, or an employee, has ever diligently worked harder and longer on something that something has been improved. In reality we cannot devote 1k hours to a $100 service, but maybe we can devote 1k hours to making that $100 service better and better. Of course, then you need to devote another 1k hours to it because it never ends.
Don’t build a business with the main intent of making money. Build a business that solves a need and money will come to you.
You’re going to fail and make bad choices, a lot. The road to success is honestly a ton of learning to overcome your failures/mistakes and adapting.
a big part of success is only luck
Succesful CEOs and founders are typically in their 40s/50s
If you’re starting your own company in your 20s, especially in tech, there’s a good chance you either a) have rich family members or b) have really good luck
These things aren’t very teachable. But people still flock to young, inexperienced, immature founders because we all watched The Social Network and think a programmer and a hoodie is enough to start a company.
New employees, after a few days will think they know more about your business than you do.
You have to be utterly obsessed with making that one idea a success, especially in the early days. Pretty much every spare moment needs to be spent working. There is no other way.
Obviously that’s not sustainable long term, and you can ease off once it’s working, but that early stage, you need to be a single minded machine, like The Terminator going after John Connor.
I’m a commercial banker who works with middle market companies. I’ve seen a lot of different businesses that never get talked about her. The list is long but I will give you a general idea of some.
– Staffing. Within this niche there are tens of thousands of different companies that need help finding talent. Build a company that places employees and you will be profitable.
– Manufacturing. Seems cliche but this tranche of business in the US is massive. It includes every industry and business not in the services sector.
– Health and Life Sciences. This is a specialty niche where you need to have a background in this field.
– Financial Services. Private credit can start small. Do you think every major finance company started with $10B in equity? There’s factoring, inventory financing, equipment financing, cash flow lending, ABL, etc. There is a long list of companies who finance all kinds of stuff you would never think needed financing. Did you know people borrow money against their pending legal payouts?
– Trading companies.
Again, the list is vast. Go look up NAICS codes and you’ll see just how many different options exist.
This is something that doesn’t get explained to young people when they decide to start a business. Your business partnership is essentially a marriage. You are legally linked to this person or these people…and if you don’t turn out to be a good fit for each other…the only two options are being miserable or getting a divorce!
Don’t make investments (equipment, new office, new team members), until it’s truly killing you trying to operate without these things. It’s unbelievably easy to burn up cash quickly on things you don’t need quite yet, if ever.
If you’re ever choosing a business partner, they absolutely must have this one trait. An entrepreneur is someone who is willing to work for $0 an hour for an extended amount of time for a undefined payoff. If they want to get paid for everything, they just want a job and you can bring them on as an employee.
Just because someone is a hard working employee, doesn’t mean they will be a hard working entrepreneur. It’s different when you aren’t getting paid and the payoff isn’t defined.
You can talk about how long that time frame is to figure out whether or not they can be a good business partner.
Also your business partners issues will impact you. If they aren’t good with money? Well it’s going to impact their ability to do work (because they may have to pick up a job/gigs or something). Business partners are like a marriage. You really need to vet them. Plenty of people are great friends but that doesn’t mean they will be good business partners.
Hiring is the hardest thing about startups and every hiring decision is a mini acquisition.
Nothing happens without action. Brilliant gifted ideas, law of attraction, positive attitude, etc. Unless coupled with action, nothing happens. Conversely, even a shitty idea and a bad attitude, can still be profitable with enough action.
Timing: Timing is crazy important. You can have a crap product or offer, but if your timing is great, you can sell a lot of it.
Luck: Luck is something guys who hit it big won’t talk about. Their ego is so big that they cant let others know how lucky they were. I think I’ve only seen Mark Cuban be open about it. The times I had struck it big with a project and made a bunch of money with it FAST all had luck involved. Like, this person introduced me to this other person…. partnership followed…. then boom. Hockeystick growth.
Leverage: Leverage is one of the first things I look at when I’m doing due diligence on a product market fit. Leverage plays a MAJOR factor. It’s literally why so many people sell High Ticket courses. It’s because it gives you incredible Leverage.
These are the first that came to mind. If I think of more and I get hit with a reminder on this thread then I’ll share more.
The hard reality is that for 99% of people, serious success means serious sacrifice
Success isn’t based on how hard you work. It’s also about timing and luck
1 out of every 5-10 things you try won’t work (depending on your competency), no matter how brilliant the idea sounds and how foolproof your logic appears. This applies at the product + business-model level as well as the marketing-strategy level. Your core objective should therefore be to take as much action, as quickly as possible — because eventually you WILL hit the bullseye.
Business plans are a completely useless waste of time. Again, most of your assumptions will be wrong — no matter how fancy your graphs and spreadsheets are — and you’re far better of simply taking action and quickly learning from the feedback. An entire team of Harvard MBAs creating the most comprehensive exhaustive analyses will lose if going against one single person who focuses all his energy on building something extremely useful and trying to sell it to people.
One of the ONLY ways to actually get very rich very fast is through entrepreneurship, since you fully control the rate at which your income increases and there are no constraints other than those that your actions, decisions + strategies put on you.
Great ideas AND great execution BOTH matter. Focusing on one to the exclusion of the other is like chopping one leg off and trying to run a marathon.
I have worked for very successful people. Never give up and don’t be afraid to take risks. They tend to fall into money.
Discipline is everything
If you just want to make money then get a job.
Take at least one full day every week to go through your money with a fine tooth comb. Every single dime accounted for. If you get too busy to do this, it will cost you A LOT in losses
Things to AVOID:
The CIA created a document called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual”, written in 1944 on how to disrupt organizations from within. Some great stuff: Prolong meetings with irrelevant discussions. Decision-making should be done with large groups to approve things. Insist on strict adherence to all rules and regulations, slowing down workflow. Spread rumors and create misunderstandings to foster discord.
Things you WANT:
Solid “Soft” Infrastructure: Building a resilient and adaptable company culture with nontoxic people. A flexible, motivated B player can often be better than a very toxic A player (some pushback from A players isn’t toxicity)
Pivoting: isn’t just for early-stage tech startups: Market conditions, competitive landscapes, regulatory, and emergencies happen. Having the majority of revenue originating from a single or only a few clients. Pivoting can also just be about taking advantage of serendipity
The Power of Niche Markets: targeting a smaller, niche market can be more lucrative than going broad. Niche markets often have less competition and can offer a more passionate customer base. Just don’t assume the needs of your most fervent core fans reflect the broader reality.
That starting and growing a business can be more demanding than a 9-5 since it’s all on you
I am speaking from observation, not from being a successful business person lol.
But the businesses that succeed are always about doing actual research, knowing their market, and knowing their margin.
99 percent of the ideas that people suggest (” oh man you should do xyz”) won’t actually increase sales or profits.
People love to say how stupid certain businesses are bc they raise their prices etc…. but they know exactly what they are fucking doing.
They’ve done the math and research and know the exact way to price things to maximize profit.
Not saying there can’t be any emotion or heart, but the best business people I’ve seen base things on facts and data, not feelings. And if they are basing it on feelings, those “feelings” or instincts are actually informed by knowing their market and aren’t just random.
Following
If you’re not making money then you don’t have a business
You can’t expect to have a functional team that builds a functional business if all can’t live under the same roof ! Or if the players are all busy barking instead of implementing and testing/trying new ideas to make the business work better ! Too much woof woof surely will scare the clients away and make them go else where where they get more work done rather than headaches
Failure is Inevitable (and Valuable) – just about every successful entrepreneur I know has experienced failure at some point – most multiple failures. What sets them apart is the ability to learn from those setbacks and apply those lessons moving forward – to get up and go again.
Stop wasting so much time on the small stuff in the beginning. It’s much better to just get it done, go to market and deal with the inefficiencies as they come along instead of wasting your time to make sure there are no inefficiencies at all when you launch.
Also, a lot of people are going to doubt you and probably even urge you to give up. Don’t listen to them; if you’re getting that kind of criticism, it’s probably validation that you’re doing at least something right.
It’s business, dealing with the assimilation of failure as a learning curve, checking mental health, and understanding that cash flow is not everything. Relationships mean everything, and at times, resiliency has trumped planning there is no one size fits all approach. Expect the unexpected invest in great people, practice brutal self-honesty, and have a long-haul mentality. These are often overlooked truths about entrepreneurship very raw realities.
No one makes it being too honest. I’m not saying go ahead and break the law, but all successful businesses I know always had some kind of questionable practices at some point in their history.
When you are small, nobody cares about you, so use it to your advantage.
Sacrificing everything that makes life worth living ***can’t*** *be replaced by trying to make life more worth living by working harder.*
Everyone has their limits, and at a certain point putting in that extra hour at 2am is a net negative. In the same breath, doing okay work fast will make you the same amount as doing great work slowly, but you can charge more for the latter and be infinitely less stressed.
There is always a customer, you just have to find (and say yes to) the right ones.
Pricing and actual workload are correlated but not parallel. By targeting wealthier clients, who are willing to pay more for the same amount of work and usually with less fuss, you can significantly increase your revenue.
It’s far from the fair meritocracy people imagine, but it’s true. That’s why even shitty businesses can thrive by doing a good job marketing to people who have money.
A single wealthy client can be worth dozens of middling ones, and a fraction of the work to focus.
Its hard, thats the brutal truth, I’ve seen very few content creators showing the reality, most wave the dream infront of your face and sell you a course to get it. I can really think of only one and he’s a small creator[(link)](https://moneymojo.beehiiv.com)
If they are not concerned about price, they have no intention of paying
Walk away from problem clients
Don’t tell anyone you are successful
Don’t ever discount your services. Once you do, you’ll never get back the full value with that client. Also, if people are asking for discounts, they don’t see the value in your service. Focus on finding the people who do! I believe it’s different when you sell a product, but my experience is in the service industry.
Don’t get into business with family.
You have 2 customers in business that must be satisfied:
1. Customers that give you money.
2. Employees that make you the money.
Most businesses prioritize Customer acquisition/retention and largely disregard Employee acquisition/retention. They usually try to get maximum output from the Employee without regard to the rate at which they burn them out and thus churn.
Ironically the business that prioritizes Employee satisfaction and retention (even if output suffers slightly), will usually have better customer retention and thus a better reputation (which then improves acquisition) than the business that prioritizes Customers at all cost.
Disregard if you’re Amazon….because…..you’re Amazon
You…can’t…get…sick…for at least three years.
Building a successful business teaches you some hard truths that aren’t often talked about. The emotional ups and downs are intense, and it can be incredibly lonely at times. Resilience is key because you’ll face countless setbacks. Plus, the strain on personal relationships is real. It’s not always glamorous, but if you’re passionate and committed, it’s worth it.