Week 4: My Fear

“Heav'n has no rage like love to hatred turn'd / Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd."

- The Mourning Bride by William Congreve.   

It is true that I am afraid of my wife scorn and this week I learned that it is because of the fear of that scorn that I am afraid to jump off the cliff and pursue my entrepreneurial dreams. I am afraid that by starting a business, selling our house for income, or anything that my wife doesn’t want, it will cause greater marriage difficulties. It funny that I literally don’t care about what anyone else thinks, my father, my mother, my brother, my friends, ect… but she, I do care and am afraid.        My current wife is amazing and I love her, so I wonder if this wrath that I portray upon her is from my first wife because in that relationship it was verbally and emotional abusive.

            Because of the exercise this week called “Deconstructing your fears” I have come to realize why I don’t move, why I don’t climb over the brick walls and why I haven’t succeeded sooner at my entrepreneurial dreams and why I keep making businesses that aren’t my life’s calling or life dream.

            It is time that I learn how to overcome this root fear and what my wife and I can do to come together and do both of our dreams together.

Week 3: the Ministry of Business

This week I started reading “The Ministry of Business” by Steven A. Hitz. It is a book about combing spirituality with business. It is a good book and helped realize that in my business pursuits that I have not talked to the Lord about my endeavors. Although I am only chapter 8, I have learned that once again trust is the biggest attribute that will help me in my business life.

Chapter 7 was also a really good chapter about defining who you are currently, who you want to become and then what steps you need to do to obtain who you want to be. Once you have these steps you will be able to meet the long term goals you have. I will be reviewing this chapter and doing it over again once I have finished the book.

Chapter 6 also had a good description on what we should do for our finances. I also like T Harv Eker’s financial plan. I will be comparing these against each other and find out which one works best for my life. I know that I want to become a better steward of my money and need to start working on that right away.

This week I also created my 2017 resolutions and have added James Ritchie’s The Formula of 1. Get Up Early 2. Work Hard 3. Get Your Education 4. Find Oil 5. Make Your Mark & 6. Prepare to Serve/Give Back. I am tired of working for someone else and not having my dreams fulfilled. This year will be different and I plan on making it different by implementing this formula into my life.

Week 2: What I have learned

It is amazing that this course is in my life right now. I know that every semester I ask why did I take this specific course but then by the end of the semester I know why the Lord guided me to take the course then. This course is no different now. Being fired last week from my job has left me with no income or insurance after this month and I feel like I am at a cross roads in my life. One I can find another job and do the same thing I have been doing the last 10 years of my life or I can pursue my dreams, become an entrepreneur that makes money, lives life and is happy. I have literally been unhappy the last three years of my life. This course each thing I read, watch and study pain my heart because I know this stuff, I have been reading entrepreneurial books since 2004 yet I still don’t do it. I keep coming to the “brick wall” as Randy Pausch says, I climb a little and then stop and eventually get back on the ground. Why?

I am looking forward from this course to help me achieve my dreams of being an entrepreneur and making money that will allow me to live and be happy. I am looking forward to gaining just a little more knowledge that will help my scale the “brick wall.”

I believe Randy Pausch was able to achieve his childhood dreams because he didn’t have to learn how to be creative because it was fostered in his home (spent less time of adulthood figuring that part of success out.) I also believe that he is a man that tenacity of not letting go, keep pushing and never stop. He saw that “brick wall” and probably thought it was fun to climb.

I do feel that dreams are important. My wife has no dreams, and she doesn’t feel like she knows how she is or where she is going in life. Dreams allow us to become free from the mundane and monotonous life. Dreams allow us to want to become better and allow us to become more in tuned with Heavenly Father. I believe that Heavenly Father has given each person a dream, whether or not we remember that dream and pursue it is another story.

One of my childhood dreams is to fly. This dream has slowly incorporated another aspect of my life I didn’t realize until I took a BYUI class, and that is that I like to build; building things are part of my life. Now my childhood dream is to build ultralight aircraft airplanes and sell them on the internet. I believe I can accomplish this dream, I just need to realize that there will be a lot of “brick walls” and I need to have an amazing support group to help me accomplish this dream.

Week 1: Looking forward

     I feel that coming to the course of Introduction into Entrepreneuring as a junior, almost senior, in College is like being the old person in a freshman course.  The amazing part about it is that this year I will be buying into a local small business that is dying in the Treasure Valley of Idaho and I feel that Heavenly Father has put this course into my life at this time because it is the best time to take it. Although I feel that I know a lot about businesses, processes, systems, philosophies and more, entrepreneuring is always about going back to the basics of what you love and doing what you love.  I am looking forward to taking this course because it will bring me back to my roots of being an entrepreneur and help me to take the small business that I am buying into off the ground and help it become successful.

     I like all the videos and reading that my class requires me to participate in because it shows that Heavenly Father is there and willing to help everyone in both spiritual and worldly matters, such as owning a business or operating in a business. I look forward to adding more talks and lesson to my vault of knowledge of how to become the best son of God and business owner.

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.