Lesson 14 - My Lecture to the World

In business there are five very, very important lessons you need to do.  There is no specific order to these points and they will change during the course of your entrepreneurship, but you need to memorize and internalize these lessons.

            One, follow your passion.  Know what you want to do and follow your passion. It doesn’t matter if you don’t make enough money or it is hard or it is abnormal or weird. Follow your passion and it will lead you to where you want to go. Your passion is your God given or basic animal desire that you were meant to be and do. It is you and if you ignore it you will ignore yourself and you will burn yourself out.

            Two, get help from the experts. You might have the passion and desire, but there are experts out there that know how to do Facebook, excel, data warehousing, piloting and insurance. Use them, no reason why you need to waste time, energy and resources on learning something that can be outsourced to an expert that is doing their passion.

            Three, work on your business and not in your business. What you dream now will not come true if you are working in the business. You need to remove yourself from your business and work on it, as if the business itself is the product. If you are opening the restaurant at 5am, making all the food, preparing for tomorrow, taking the payments, closing at 10pm and then cleaning the restaurant, when are you going to have time to fix the business processes? You need to make business processes that remove you from the business and allow others to work in the business. Once you have yourself removed you can perfect the business and make it a working product/machine that will give you what you want.

            Four, it is the small and simple things that accomplish great things. All experts and professionals started with nothing other than a desire to do and compounded over years became what they are now. Michael Jordon was not born playing basketball, Beethoven was not born composing songs, and Steve Jobs didn’t know anything about fonts until he was in college. Experts use compound interest to become. By doing the same things over and over and over again for years will eventually make you the best. Work and create your business a little at a time, every day and eventually you will be what you want to be and have what you want. If you work on your business 30 minutes or an hour a day; in no time you will have the knowledge and the capability to create your business. And when you finally have the business you want continue to work on it by small and simple things to make it perfect.

            Five, just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Do not let fear, family members, friends, money or time get in the way of you doing it. Launch that website. Put a post on Facebook. Try the product. Let someone else try the product. Most dreams are stopped by fear. By just do it, you will remove that fear and will overcome the barriers that will suddenly appear to stop you. Just do it and things will work out for you. Just do your passion by small, simple tasks and ask for help from the experts when you need it.

Lesson 13

The best lesson that I have learned this week is the continuous lesson of work on your business instead of in your business. It is very important that I do this because what I ultimately want out of a business will not be achieved unless I work on it.  To quote one of the reading this week, “most of all, if you will devote adequate quality time to working on the strategic elements of your business, then you can reap the tremendous benefits of business growth and income growth.” That is what I want and the only way that a business will give that to me is if I let it go. A business will be like a child, I am going to have to let it learn how to stand and walk on its own two feet and not rely upon me to work constantly.  Tim Ferris talks about this in his book, The 4-Hour Work Week, and says there was a time when he literally couldn’t have an interview because he had to be in every decision. He then gave his company a $400 credit threshold in which the agent had to decide what the credit was worth. This reduced his call volume to less and a few calls a day.

The presentation this week for my $100 Challenge business I felt was good but bad at the same time. It was short and very to the point, which is what investors want. At the same time I feel like I need to talk a lot or go into greater depth of the business. It is an internal conflict, short and to the point or talk a lot to make sure I covered everything.  I try to prefer the short and to the point because investors have a lot of interviews. 

Lesson 12

This week Action Hero, Erick Slabaugh, said a many great things that are perfect for new and old entrepreneurs.  I believe the most important lesson that we can all take from his interview about being an entrepreneur is that we need to focus on our core business only! So many times us as entrepreneurs get side tracked by the new and flashy options, improvements or add-ons that we forget what we are doing and why.  If we always focus on our core and ask ourselves if what we are doing will significantly improve our business then yes we can pursue that option, otherwise we leave it alone.

This week for our $100 Challenge we are asked to make a power point presentation of our business.  This has led me to reflex a lot on how my small business achieves its $100 sales.  At first my business plan was an elaborate, massive website and tracking system.  I was going to create three profiles and adds on website, Facebook, Craigslist and Etsy; then I was going to have Google Analytics track the Search Engine Optimization Tracking (SEOT) so I can see where my customers were coming in from and how they were leaving and if they were buying. It was a great idea, but I was too smart for this project.  My calligraphy artist took over the marketing part and just put a post and page on Facebook (not being on Facebook I didn’t even know how to do this) and sold over $100 within an hour. My lesson I learned from this experience is not to make a small and simple task a hard and difficult one.