Startups
(Video) Business Start Up Advice & Inside Tips From Expert CEOs & Entrepreneurs
Alot of people nowadays have amazing ideas, they have a business plan, a team of great minds and the will, courage and focus to run a Business but they just dont have the money or the seasoned mind set to take off in the right direction. There is enough things out there to worry about when starting a company and by every man and his dogs mix of opinions for you, it may seem like theres a trillion ways things MUST be done and your years away from the platform you need for take off.
We have a video interview here by the team at MASHABLE who spoke to a group of New York-based entrepreneurs and investors, asking them what it’s like to pitch, run and grow a company. Watch the Video after the jump for a little 101 on Business Start Ups!
Business Start Up Advice: Inside Tips From Expert CEOs & Entrepreneurs:
In 2011, I was down and out. I was defeated and felt like I’d never amount to anything.
This story is going to inspire you if you’ve ever faced a similar situation or felt defeated.
I’d finished working at the startup I founded with my brother and things didn’t look good. I had a dream at that time to utilize my digital marketing skills and work for an advertising agency where I could grow my skills.
Every job I applied for I was turned down.
Even though I’d had digital marketing experience and built a multi-million dollar business using that talent, it wasn’t formal learning or advertising agency experience.
So, I ended up taking a job in finance which I also knew nothing about. I took a junior role and a large pay cut and started my career at a bank. For seven years, on the side, I worked on my passion for social media and online marketing.
Two days ago, I was hired to run the digital marketing team for a well-known tech company with 900 staff. Against all the odds, I won the long game.
Here’s what you can learn:
No one can stop you.
Even with all the no’s and people that laughed at me in 2011, I didn’t stop.
I went into hiding for a while and built my skills. I started with blogging, then SEO, then pay per click and eventually landed in social media.
Just because someone won’t hire you today based on your skills, attitude and experience, doesn’t mean they won’t tomorrow.
In fact, without sounding cocky, people now have been bending over backwards to hire me as a consultant to help them with social media and digital marketing.
“The same people that said no to me now want to work with me”
You decide whether you stop based on rejection — nobody else. Keep going no matter the odds.
Be prepared to wait a few years.
Patience was what made the last two days feel incredible. It took seven years to get what I wanted and I had to be damn patient.
The mistake many of you make who are reading this is that you’re not prepared to wait years to get what you want.
When you accept that it takes years to achieve your goals, you work differently. You prepare yourself in a totally different way.
Wanting things too quickly forces you to sacrifice for the short-term and mess up the long-term. Slow down. Relax. You’ve got time.
It’s your attitude that counts.
When no one will hire you, it’s your attitude that counts.
If you walk into an interview or coffee catchup with an attitude problem, then your career dream is going to continue to be a problem.
You see it on those TV talent shows when a guy/girl walks out onto the stage and has been trying for a long time to make it as a musician. They have this sense of entitlement and their bad attitude is written all over their face.
Don’t be one of these people. Fix your attitude.
You’re only entitled to what you earn. Walk into interviews and face opportunities with a sense of humbleness.
Let humbleness be your dominant attitude and eventually you’ll have more opportunities than you could ever hope for.
Nothing lasts forever.
The no’s I got in 2011 lasted a few years.
The point is they didn’t last forever.
Just because you’re getting no’s today and being laughed at, doesn’t mean that will last forever. Nothing lasts forever including you.
“Keep going until the people that said no to you come around and are half-way towards a yes”
No one can deny you forever. People will admire you if you keep going and learn along the way.
Sometimes we can feel like we’ll always be rejected. That’s how I felt in 2011. I thought to myself “I’ve worked five years in digital marketing and built up a pretty successful business and people are still saying no to me. If not now, when?”
Now let me be honest for a second. I didn’t have the intelligence in 2011 to keep going. I was too dumb and too obsessed with myself. It was basically blind faith that kept me going. I wish I’d known back then that nothing lasts forever and believed it.
There were no mentors, advisors or as much self-help advice as there is now to tell me that the way I was thinking was madness.
You have the opportunity to learn from this lesson. Nothing. Lasts. Forever.
Push through.
When every obstacle there is, is standing in your way, sometimes all you need to do is keep pushing.
The way I did this was to keep writing. No one was paying attention to my advice, but that didn’t matter.
The only strategy I had at the time was to keep doing what felt fun to me and I believed I’d figure out the detail later or just never get paid to do what I liked doing.
Pushing through is about continuing to do the work even when the results don’t show.
Eventually, the odds will change if you change.
So what was missing in 2011? Why was I getting rejected even though I had the skills and experience?
I needed to change.
I was an arrogant, selfish, entitled son of a bitch who wouldn’t give a dime out of a dollar to anyone. I had to change myself.
I had to:
- Develop empowering beliefs
- Change my attitude
- Adopt a never say die mindset
- Learn abundance
- Give more to strangers
- Create value for people first via the internet
- Be grateful for what I have instead of always wanting more
Your odds of success won’t change until you change.
“You’re the problem and that’s the hardest advice to swallow”
Final thought.
It’s been a big few days. I’ve waited seven years to get what I want. The hardest thing about getting what you want is that it will feel good for a few weeks, and then you’ll want more.
That’s the crack addiction that comes with personal development.
I’m trying to detox from this addiction and be happy with what I’ve achieved to date.
Maybe no one will hire you today.
Maybe your life sucks right now.
Maybe you’ve dealt with a lot this year.
It’s all okay. Your odds of success will change when you change.
If you want to increase your productivity and learn some more valuable life hacks, then join my private mailing list on timdenning.net
In an entrepreneurial landscape dominated by headlines of unicorn startups and billion-dollar acquisitions, getting a company to $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) may sound like small change. Let’s be real, though, hitting $1 million ARR is an aspirational milestone most young companies can relate to. And it’s not that easy, especially if you’ve secured modest investments or no investment at all.
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) company I work for falls in the latter category. We’ve never raised a single investment dollar, and it took us four years to reach the $1 million ARR threshold. It was a wild four years. Frustrating, fun, scary: you name the emotion, and we’ve felt it.
But more than anything, it was an instructive four years. We learned so much, and we want to share a few helpful tidbits with our peers out there in the trenches, scratching and clawing your way to your next big milestone.
Here are 10 things we think are most important that you can use in your own start-up journey:
1. Don’t quit
Steve Jobs famously said that the difference between those who make it and those who don’t is perseverance. At one point I remember hearing “Folks, I don’t know if we’re going to be here next month.”
It’s frightening not to know where you’re going to be next month, but you have to continuously figure out how to get a few more customers and extend your runway. You can’t “make it” or succeed if you don’t exist, so you can’t quit.
2. Give your customers everything
At the company I work for, Text Request, we spent hours with our customers. We built whatever they asked for (if it fit with our goals and other customers could use it too). We also gave away a lot of free software.
If you want to grow and gain customers, you have to create a needed product that solves your target customers’ problems. Determine who your target customers are, ask them what they need, and then tailor your solutions for them.
3. Try everything you can think of
The book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares covers 19 sales and marketing channels for startups to test. We tried all of them. We went to events. We advertised. We started a referral program.
For us, cold calls and cold emails worked surprisingly well. We took an industry, looked for companies in a given city, and reached out to set up product demos. Organic search has increasingly helped our sales funnel, too.
Either of those could be the best plan for you, or it could be advertising in a particular channel. Every startup is different and targets a different niche, but you’ll only find successful strategies and channels for growth by testing all your options.
4. Focus on the basics
When you focus on doing the basics, opportunities open up. When you commit to SEO basics, your targets will find you online, and a big fish will occasionally swim by. When you provide fantastic customer service, a few users will leave reviews and tell their friends. When you keep your head down and do the work, eventually you’ll look up and have hit a big milestone.
5. Get the right people on your bus
This is one of the critical lessons from Jim Collins’ Good to Great. Thankfully, our small team had the right people from the beginning. Brian and Jamey Elrod, our husband and wife co-founders, had already started a successful company from scratch (Educational Outfitters). Our third co-founder Rob Reagan has created software for twenty years and published a book last year on building apps for global scale.
Rob brought a couple of top-notch developers with him, and the rest of us showed up determined to figure the business out. If you’re going to take a company from $0 to $1 million, every member of your team has to be dedicated to working together for the long-term benefit of the company over self-interest.
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” – Henry Ford
There’s always something that keeps entrepreneurs up at night, but you can put the questions below to rest:
1. How do you build it fast enough?
In the early days, we worried about losing a customer because we didn’t have [X]. It was stressful knowing that So-and-So would move on to the next option if we couldn’t deliver fast enough, and many times they did. But that doesn’t matter.
Losing one customer isn’t worth pushing out a faulty product. Despite the pervasive Lean Startup mindset, it’s more important to your customers that you create needed features (read: solutions) that work great the first time. They have to trust that you’ll give them the tools they need to accomplish their goals, or they’ll leave.
2. How do you keep customers longer?
Our support is perhaps our #1 competitive advantage. One of the things we’ve learned is that a lower price, and sometimes even new features, won’t keep customers around longer.
To keep your customers from churning, you’ve got to do two things: First, provide a smooth onboarding process that immediately teaches customers how to gain value (solve their problems) with your product. Otherwise, they won’t pick it up, and they’ll eventually leave.
Second, always be there with kind words and helpful content whenever a customer needs help. If you aren’t, they’ll get frustrated and find someone else to help them.
“People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Teddy Roosevelt
3. How do you get people to your website?
Advertising might be a good option, but if targets aren’t already thinking about what you can do for them, they probably won’t care about your ad or purchase. Instead, create content to educate viewers and help them solve their problems.
Focus on growing your organic traffic, becoming a trustworthy source, and honing your brand’s voice before spending lots of money on ads.
4. Do you need investment money?
When you’re floating in the middle of the ocean, you’ll do anything for a ship to pick you up. But sometimes you just need to swim. We chose to swim, and you might want to do the same.
When every dollar spent has to fight to prove its worth, you’re inevitably going to build something more valuable and more sustainable. Plus, bootstrapping gives you more control over what decisions you do make to grow your company.
5. How do you pursue 10X growth?
A growth hack is not going to propel you from 100 customers to 10,000 overnight. It doesn’t take one trick, but lots of little and big things working together to create exponential growth. It also takes time.
Instead of looking for a golden goose, create complete and actionable strategies. Those, and a little patience, will help you achieve exponential growth.
Growing your startup to $1 million ARR is not easy, but it’s possible – even without investors lining up to give you money. Put the 10 lessons above into practice, and, with a little time and a lot of work, you’ll get there.
Is there a business you’d like to start or have started? Share your ideas and suggestions for our readers!
I’ve just left the corporate world. It’s been seven years and I don’t regret a single second of it.
You’d think I would have learned everything there is to know about business in the corporate world. I didn’t.
There were a lot of gaps which I luckily was able to fill in during my entrepreneur days.
Here’s what the corporate world didn’t teach me:
1. How to think for myself
In the corporate world, you’re often told what to do.
If you don’t have the answer then some smart person, in some department will probably have the answer for you. The answer may not be the latest and greatest strategy, but it will be based on some prior knowledge.
As an entrepreneur, none of this was available to me. I’d roll up to the old Milkbar that was our office, and I’d start stacking boxes into the little van we had. More boxes of soft drink and chips meant more gold coins in our vending machines.
Gold coins could be banked at our local branch at the end of the day and that’s how petrol, electricity, uniforms and the occasional Macca’s dinner was paid for. No one told me how to do that.
I either collected the gold coins, or I didn’t. No gold coins meant game over. As an entrepreneur, that meant failure and during your 20’s that’s often the last thing you want.
Thinking for myself wasn’t taught to me it was a survival tactic. I took this tactic with me to the corporate world and people were surprised.
As my former colleague said to me the other day “You don’t overthink Tim youjust get shit done while everybody else is scratching their head.”
2. Time management
The corporate world is full of big companies with lots of resources.
With an abundance of anything you always have wastage. The corporate world definitely didn’t tell me how to manage time.
What could have been a five-minute phone conversation often ended up in huge email chains. It was a bit of a game.
“Every email involved another person or persons being cc’d. The ultimate trick was to blind cc people within your company. Like magic, bombs start going off and no one can work out who did what. That’s the power of BCC”
None of this was good for time management though. Lot’s of time was spent trying to communicate with one another. Meetings are a thing in the corporate world.
Every problem that exists must have a meeting. Even if it’s about whether we call the shared folder “Sales” or “Customer Files” a meeting had to be held.
Meetings in the corporate world not only suck up time but are also a fashion parade where all the biggest egos can strut their stuff.
“I’m more important and have a better job title.”
“No, I’m more important!”
This dialogue goes on for days and sometimes months. Understanding the politics is often more critical than understanding the business. Still, none of this is good for time.
The time wasted is used by the tech startup opposition to improve a bug, rethink the customer experience or out-market corporates using social media.
3. A passion for what you love
Passion in the corporate world can often be lacking. Working at a corporate for many is a way to pay the bills rather than do their life’s work.
“Passion can often be traded for money, bonuses and even more impressive job titles — all of which leave you feeling more empty”
It’s not all full of zero passion, though. There are a few people that are insanely passionate and those folk shine through.
The corporate world taught me to put my passion on hold rather than use it to WOW customers with the very thing that sets me apart.
4. What people are really buying
Working at a corporate taught me that it’s all about marketing.
I knew, though, from the startup world that this very idea was wrong.
People are buying you. They’re buying the people they deal with and what those people stand for.
No client in my corporate career ever gave a damn about the commoditized products I was selling. All of my clients gave a damn about my obsession to inspire the world through personal development and entrepreneurship. They were intrigued by my five years as an entrepreneur and what I learned.
This led to customers becoming friends as opposed to people that bought widgets from me and had the money they laid tracked in a CRM as ‘revenue.’
“Not once in my corporate career did I have something to sell that couldn’t be bought from somewhere else, at a lower price or with better product features. The product feature my clients bought was me”
5. The power of an audience
People are often too afraid to be vulnerable in the corporate world.
I never learned the power of an audience during my career working in corporates. All of that was learned between 6 pm and 8 pm every night when I was at home from work posting on LinkedIn.
Social media is not so prominent in the corporate world because it requires you to remove the corporate mask and show your flaws. Fakeness on social channels like LinkedIn just doesn’t work. People don’t engage.
Many people told me that the audience I was building on social media was career suicide. I ignored every one of them and I’m so glad I did.
These same people that warned me to stay off social media are the same ones asking me now to help them with their own social accounts.
With an audience, you can test ideas.
With an audience, you can inspire.
With an audience, you can recruit people to your team.
With an audience, you derive meaning for your life.
6. Doing the important vs. the mediocre
In corporate business, there’s a lot of noise.
Everything looks important. Everything looks like it could become a lawsuit (especially for a corporate). Everything looks like it could become a PR scandal. Everything looks risky to that next job promotion and to the business.
That’s where mediocrity thrives. With so much noise it’s easy to spend your days filing bits of paper or moving widgets from Point A to Point B without having any clue of why you’re doing it or how it contributes to humankind.
I didn’t learn the discipline of doing the important work in corporate life.
Doing the important came out of the entrepreneurial trait of problem-solving through a vision. It came from wanting to see things better than they are.
Doing the important was fuelled by a desire to achieve a goal that everybody said wasn’t possible. It’s a rebellious philosophy that pushes mediocrity the hell out of the way.
7. The way to have a meeting (ideally no meeting)
Running a meeting in corporate life follows a formula.
This formula will put almost all attendees to sleep. It’s why when you walk into a corporate board meeting, most of the execs are looking at their phone rather than paying attention to who’s speaking.
The formula goes like this:
- Introduce everybody in the meeting (most don’t need to be there)
- Pretend there’s an agenda (it will get hijacked…guaranteed)
- Pretend to solve the problem by agreeing to invite more people to a future meeting
- Pass ownership around of the problem whilst ignoring the potential solutions
- Assigning action items which everybody ignores (thus triggering another meeting)
“The best way to have a meeting is not to have a meeting”
Meetings are needed in the corporate world because of a lack of trust and having too many cooks in the kitchen.
Have only the people that can solve the problem in the meeting, make it short and trust in the outcome and vision you’re trying to achieve.
That very philosophy makes meetings for the most part irrelevant.
8. How to make better PowerPoint presentations
You’d think with all the PowerPoints you have to do in the corporate world to educate internal stakeholders, you’d be a freaking expert at doing them.
Quite the opposite is true.
Because of the number of PowerPoint decks you have to do in the corporate world, you get worse at them.
The decks get longer, filled with more words, more acronyms and more promises to take more action.
It’s like for every year in the corporate world you add another acronym to the sentence you’re currently writing.
The belief in the corporate world is that all problems must first begin their life in a PowerPoint.
No problem can be solved without a PowerPoint. I once tried to do a presentation with only one slide. Once I explained the one slide I had prepared with a simple diagram that a four-year-old watching Peppa Pig could understand, I then blacked out the screen.
I wanted the attention on what I was saying instead of some Times New Roman, white slide, with Size 12 Font that nobody could read.
Death by PowerPoint is a real cause of death in the corporate world. It kills dreams, ideas, free speech and the will to live.
9. The way to treat people
The corporate world taught me nothing about how to treat people.
Treating people well came from my eBay days where I learned that if you give someone on eBay the thing they want, and do what you say, you’ll get what you want.
This philosophy didn’t translate into corporate life. I was told to treat people well based on what they could do for me. If they couldn’t do anything for me then what’s the point of knowing them? Right?
Wrong.
The people I treated well who seemed to have no benefit to me ended up becoming the Managers, General Managers and Inspiring Leaders five years down the road.
By not asking for stuff all the time, by treating these future leaders with respect and by being as close to a good human being as I could be, I got all the promotions and all the hard to reach opportunities.
My career in the corporate world looked like it was entirely built by luck. It wasn’t. My corporate career was built on respect, honesty and treating people well because it makes sense in the long run.
10. The true meaning of startup buzzwords
Lean startup. Agile. Disruptive. Act like a startup. Minimum viable product.
We hear these words every day in the startup and tech world. Every corporate is trying to adopt them as their own. I didn’t see any of these buzzwords in my corporate career ever be used successfully.
Lean startup meant “Throw seven figures at it and see if it swims. If not, kill it fast!”
Agile meant plan the next five years of a new product, try to deal with every possible situation in the beginning and invite some management consultants.
Act like a startup meant adopt the word but still be a corporate because a sizeable business always knows best.
Minimum viable product meant fix every customer pain point in existence and build the mother of all solutions that’s going to take years to build and leave all competitors for dead. Let’s not fix one thing when we can fix everything thus fixing nothing in the process.
So what can you learn from the corporate world?
It’s not all bad. Park my humor for just one second. You can learn plenty in the corporate world and it’s not all bad.
The corporate world can teach you:
1. Leadership fundamentals
2. Corporate decision-making
3. Community values
4. The rate of technology disruption
The corporate world in some ways shows you what the past looks like so you can build the future. It shows you that size does not necessarily mean better results or more improved solutions.
What I’ve outlined above comes from dealing with hundreds of corporates over the last seven years and the commonalities around how they think.
The grass is not greener.
The corporate world sure has its problems. So does the startup world. So does medium sized business as well.
All business just has a different set of problems to solve.
The way to deal with this conundrum is to become an expert problem solver who enjoys the challenge. It’s not always easy to do.
The business world can get you down and suck the life out of you.
That’s why you need to take a break and get some perspective. Try small, medium and big business for yourself and make your own assessment.
The grass may be longer, shorter or in need of a mow but it’s definitely not greener.
If you want to increase your productivity and learn some more valuable life hacks, then join my private mailing list on timdenning.net
If you are like most people, you probably like to complain from time to time about the economy, about the markets, about how things are changing too fast or how you don’t get enough time. Moan moan moan!
However, moaning doesn’t solve problems. Instead, you can follow the “No BCD” theory and avoid blaming, complaining and defensiveness. This way you will have a totally different outlook, handle situations a lot better, and take control over your destiny. A really practical way to do this is to develop better habits.
What are the bad habits you have?
Everyone has different bad habits, but when it comes to business here are the 4 most common ones:
- Lack of focus: Every single day, there are going to be things you intend to do and then you “run out of time” or succumb to distractions. But if you’re honest, you had the time and there was a way – you just lacked focus.
- You’re too kind: How many times have you taken on a project which wasn’t profitable, because you “felt sorry for them”. Not only does this actually hurt you, but it also in many ways hurts the relationship you have with that client or customer.
- Promising and not delivering: Whether it’s something you said to your team, your clients, or your suppliers, if you’re not matching your words with your actions, over time others will believe you less and less.
- Leaving opportunities on the table: So often people complain in business they don’t have enough (money/sales/support), when actually they do – they just didn’t ask for it. Within your existing network there is probably everything you need, you just have to ask.
“Successful people are simply those with successful habits.” – Brian Tracy
Think about it. You can look at each of these bad habits and replace them with new and better ones. Imagine…
- If you created habits that made you focus better: you’d be more productive, with the same amount of time.
- If you learned good ways to set boundaries: you’d have a better time delivering your services or products, and you’d feel more rewarded.
- If you kept better track of your promises: You’d feel less stressed and overwhelmed.
- If you picked up on more of those opportunities: You’d make more money, and inject welcome energy into those who are ready and willing to work with you. The side effect would be that you could delegate things you don’t love and aren’t good at to others more capable, and replace those activities with the things you love!
Breaking those bad habits
Over the years, I have managed to create more boundaries and space for me to be efficient and effective in my work. There are ways to do that – some habits I have learned from others who have experienced and overcome similar issues, and some are the product of my own experiments. See below!
1. Sprints (for productivity)
I have to say this is so effective. I meet at least one other person at a coffee shop or members club – if it’s not in my office with my fellow team members. We plan to do 30 or 45 minutes of work and do between 3-5 sprints in a session. Blocking out 4 hours together I find works well.
We each say what we will work on and then we get going. No talking allowed, focusing only on the task we talked about. When the timer rings we stop, compare notes on progress, have a mini break and do another one. It’s honestly my most productive time, and it makes you realise how much time we waste on distractions and even moaning about having too much work on!
“A bad habit never disappears miraculously. It’s an undo-it-yourself project.” – Abigail Van Buren
2. A tiny assignment (for motivation to break a bad habit)
I have done this now twice with 2 different friends. We talk about the bad habits we each have, whatever they might be. We give each other a new rule or habit to follow over a two week period. It has to be a “SMART” goal assignment – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.
3. Low hanging fruit (for grabbing opportunities)
You simply make a list of people you already know who:
- Fit into your target market but don’t work with you yet
- Fit into your target market but haven’t worked with you for a while
- Experience problems you know you can solve
- Have their own network of contacts or audience which is very similar to the people you want to talk about
- Have the expertise in things you find challenging, and very likely the answers to your current challenges
Once you have this list, you come up with some drafted initial outreach scripts for either text, email or phone calls and then you work through your list – sending out the requests, hellos, questions, etc. If you draft your communication well, considering the mindset of the people who are receiving these outreach messages, you will find each conversation will be at the very least a learning opportunity and would certainly lead to more “yeses” than if you didn’t do this exercise.
4. The minimum criteria (for setting boundaries)
If you find that your bad habits involve you saying “yes” too often when you should be saying “no” – then this one works great. You just need to write a specific list of criteria to answer the question “Any time I will do this, I need the following things to be true first”.
For example, you only take on a client who pays less than a certain minimum threshold, who has made a written commitment that they will comply with your specific set of guidelines for their responsibilities during the project. There are so many ways you can use the “minimum criteria” technique and you can share your rules with friends and colleagues to hold yourself accountable.
Now, with all this insight I hope you feel more motivated and you can’t even remember your excuses anymore!
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When you’re going through tough times, all you need is sympathy. You just need someone to tell you how strong you are and how you can cope with the situation. Essentially, you’re waiting for a soothing voice that can calm your inner storm and genuinely help with your troubles. (more…)
In 2011, I was down and out. I was defeated and felt like I’d never amount to anything.
This story is going to inspire you if you’ve ever faced a similar situation or felt defeated.
I’d finished working at the startup I founded with my brother and things didn’t look good. I had a dream at that time to utilize my digital marketing skills and work for an advertising agency where I could grow my skills.
Every job I applied for I was turned down.
Even though I’d had digital marketing experience and built a multi-million dollar business using that talent, it wasn’t formal learning or advertising agency experience.
So, I ended up taking a job in finance which I also knew nothing about. I took a junior role and a large pay cut and started my career at a bank. For seven years, on the side, I worked on my passion for social media and online marketing.
Two days ago, I was hired to run the digital marketing team for a well-known tech company with 900 staff. Against all the odds, I won the long game.
Here’s what you can learn:
No one can stop you.
Even with all the no’s and people that laughed at me in 2011, I didn’t stop.
I went into hiding for a while and built my skills. I started with blogging, then SEO, then pay per click and eventually landed in social media.
Just because someone won’t hire you today based on your skills, attitude and experience, doesn’t mean they won’t tomorrow.
In fact, without sounding cocky, people now have been bending over backwards to hire me as a consultant to help them with social media and digital marketing.
“The same people that said no to me now want to work with me”
You decide whether you stop based on rejection — nobody else. Keep going no matter the odds.
Be prepared to wait a few years.
Patience was what made the last two days feel incredible. It took seven years to get what I wanted and I had to be damn patient.
The mistake many of you make who are reading this is that you’re not prepared to wait years to get what you want.
When you accept that it takes years to achieve your goals, you work differently. You prepare yourself in a totally different way.
Wanting things too quickly forces you to sacrifice for the short-term and mess up the long-term. Slow down. Relax. You’ve got time.
It’s your attitude that counts.
When no one will hire you, it’s your attitude that counts.
If you walk into an interview or coffee catchup with an attitude problem, then your career dream is going to continue to be a problem.
You see it on those TV talent shows when a guy/girl walks out onto the stage and has been trying for a long time to make it as a musician. They have this sense of entitlement and their bad attitude is written all over their face.
Don’t be one of these people. Fix your attitude.
You’re only entitled to what you earn. Walk into interviews and face opportunities with a sense of humbleness.
Let humbleness be your dominant attitude and eventually you’ll have more opportunities than you could ever hope for.
Nothing lasts forever.
The no’s I got in 2011 lasted a few years.
The point is they didn’t last forever.
Just because you’re getting no’s today and being laughed at, doesn’t mean that will last forever. Nothing lasts forever including you.
“Keep going until the people that said no to you come around and are half-way towards a yes”
No one can deny you forever. People will admire you if you keep going and learn along the way.
Sometimes we can feel like we’ll always be rejected. That’s how I felt in 2011. I thought to myself “I’ve worked five years in digital marketing and built up a pretty successful business and people are still saying no to me. If not now, when?”
Now let me be honest for a second. I didn’t have the intelligence in 2011 to keep going. I was too dumb and too obsessed with myself. It was basically blind faith that kept me going. I wish I’d known back then that nothing lasts forever and believed it.
There were no mentors, advisors or as much self-help advice as there is now to tell me that the way I was thinking was madness.
You have the opportunity to learn from this lesson. Nothing. Lasts. Forever.
Push through.
When every obstacle there is, is standing in your way, sometimes all you need to do is keep pushing.
The way I did this was to keep writing. No one was paying attention to my advice, but that didn’t matter.
The only strategy I had at the time was to keep doing what felt fun to me and I believed I’d figure out the detail later or just never get paid to do what I liked doing.
Pushing through is about continuing to do the work even when the results don’t show.
Eventually, the odds will change if you change.
So what was missing in 2011? Why was I getting rejected even though I had the skills and experience?
I needed to change.
I was an arrogant, selfish, entitled son of a bitch who wouldn’t give a dime out of a dollar to anyone. I had to change myself.
I had to:
- Develop empowering beliefs
- Change my attitude
- Adopt a never say die mindset
- Learn abundance
- Give more to strangers
- Create value for people first via the internet
- Be grateful for what I have instead of always wanting more
Your odds of success won’t change until you change.
“You’re the problem and that’s the hardest advice to swallow”
Final thought.
It’s been a big few days. I’ve waited seven years to get what I want. The hardest thing about getting what you want is that it will feel good for a few weeks, and then you’ll want more.
That’s the crack addiction that comes with personal development.
I’m trying to detox from this addiction and be happy with what I’ve achieved to date.
Maybe no one will hire you today.
Maybe your life sucks right now.
Maybe you’ve dealt with a lot this year.
It’s all okay. Your odds of success will change when you change.
If you want to increase your productivity and learn some more valuable life hacks, then join my private mailing list on timdenning.net
In an entrepreneurial landscape dominated by headlines of unicorn startups and billion-dollar acquisitions, getting a company to $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) may sound like small change. Let’s be real, though, hitting $1 million ARR is an aspirational milestone most young companies can relate to. And it’s not that easy, especially if you’ve secured modest investments or no investment at all.
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) company I work for falls in the latter category. We’ve never raised a single investment dollar, and it took us four years to reach the $1 million ARR threshold. It was a wild four years. Frustrating, fun, scary: you name the emotion, and we’ve felt it.
But more than anything, it was an instructive four years. We learned so much, and we want to share a few helpful tidbits with our peers out there in the trenches, scratching and clawing your way to your next big milestone.
Here are 10 things we think are most important that you can use in your own start-up journey:
1. Don’t quit
Steve Jobs famously said that the difference between those who make it and those who don’t is perseverance. At one point I remember hearing “Folks, I don’t know if we’re going to be here next month.”
It’s frightening not to know where you’re going to be next month, but you have to continuously figure out how to get a few more customers and extend your runway. You can’t “make it” or succeed if you don’t exist, so you can’t quit.
2. Give your customers everything
At the company I work for, Text Request, we spent hours with our customers. We built whatever they asked for (if it fit with our goals and other customers could use it too). We also gave away a lot of free software.
If you want to grow and gain customers, you have to create a needed product that solves your target customers’ problems. Determine who your target customers are, ask them what they need, and then tailor your solutions for them.
3. Try everything you can think of
The book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares covers 19 sales and marketing channels for startups to test. We tried all of them. We went to events. We advertised. We started a referral program.
For us, cold calls and cold emails worked surprisingly well. We took an industry, looked for companies in a given city, and reached out to set up product demos. Organic search has increasingly helped our sales funnel, too.
Either of those could be the best plan for you, or it could be advertising in a particular channel. Every startup is different and targets a different niche, but you’ll only find successful strategies and channels for growth by testing all your options.
4. Focus on the basics
When you focus on doing the basics, opportunities open up. When you commit to SEO basics, your targets will find you online, and a big fish will occasionally swim by. When you provide fantastic customer service, a few users will leave reviews and tell their friends. When you keep your head down and do the work, eventually you’ll look up and have hit a big milestone.
5. Get the right people on your bus
This is one of the critical lessons from Jim Collins’ Good to Great. Thankfully, our small team had the right people from the beginning. Brian and Jamey Elrod, our husband and wife co-founders, had already started a successful company from scratch (Educational Outfitters). Our third co-founder Rob Reagan has created software for twenty years and published a book last year on building apps for global scale.
Rob brought a couple of top-notch developers with him, and the rest of us showed up determined to figure the business out. If you’re going to take a company from $0 to $1 million, every member of your team has to be dedicated to working together for the long-term benefit of the company over self-interest.
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” – Henry Ford
There’s always something that keeps entrepreneurs up at night, but you can put the questions below to rest:
1. How do you build it fast enough?
In the early days, we worried about losing a customer because we didn’t have [X]. It was stressful knowing that So-and-So would move on to the next option if we couldn’t deliver fast enough, and many times they did. But that doesn’t matter.
Losing one customer isn’t worth pushing out a faulty product. Despite the pervasive Lean Startup mindset, it’s more important to your customers that you create needed features (read: solutions) that work great the first time. They have to trust that you’ll give them the tools they need to accomplish their goals, or they’ll leave.
2. How do you keep customers longer?
Our support is perhaps our #1 competitive advantage. One of the things we’ve learned is that a lower price, and sometimes even new features, won’t keep customers around longer.
To keep your customers from churning, you’ve got to do two things: First, provide a smooth onboarding process that immediately teaches customers how to gain value (solve their problems) with your product. Otherwise, they won’t pick it up, and they’ll eventually leave.
Second, always be there with kind words and helpful content whenever a customer needs help. If you aren’t, they’ll get frustrated and find someone else to help them.
“People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Teddy Roosevelt
3. How do you get people to your website?
Advertising might be a good option, but if targets aren’t already thinking about what you can do for them, they probably won’t care about your ad or purchase. Instead, create content to educate viewers and help them solve their problems.
Focus on growing your organic traffic, becoming a trustworthy source, and honing your brand’s voice before spending lots of money on ads.
4. Do you need investment money?
When you’re floating in the middle of the ocean, you’ll do anything for a ship to pick you up. But sometimes you just need to swim. We chose to swim, and you might want to do the same.
When every dollar spent has to fight to prove its worth, you’re inevitably going to build something more valuable and more sustainable. Plus, bootstrapping gives you more control over what decisions you do make to grow your company.
5. How do you pursue 10X growth?
A growth hack is not going to propel you from 100 customers to 10,000 overnight. It doesn’t take one trick, but lots of little and big things working together to create exponential growth. It also takes time.
Instead of looking for a golden goose, create complete and actionable strategies. Those, and a little patience, will help you achieve exponential growth.
Growing your startup to $1 million ARR is not easy, but it’s possible – even without investors lining up to give you money. Put the 10 lessons above into practice, and, with a little time and a lot of work, you’ll get there.
Is there a business you’d like to start or have started? Share your ideas and suggestions for our readers!
I’ve just left the corporate world. It’s been seven years and I don’t regret a single second of it.
You’d think I would have learned everything there is to know about business in the corporate world. I didn’t.
There were a lot of gaps which I luckily was able to fill in during my entrepreneur days.
Here’s what the corporate world didn’t teach me:
1. How to think for myself
In the corporate world, you’re often told what to do.
If you don’t have the answer then some smart person, in some department will probably have the answer for you. The answer may not be the latest and greatest strategy, but it will be based on some prior knowledge.
As an entrepreneur, none of this was available to me. I’d roll up to the old Milkbar that was our office, and I’d start stacking boxes into the little van we had. More boxes of soft drink and chips meant more gold coins in our vending machines.
Gold coins could be banked at our local branch at the end of the day and that’s how petrol, electricity, uniforms and the occasional Macca’s dinner was paid for. No one told me how to do that.
I either collected the gold coins, or I didn’t. No gold coins meant game over. As an entrepreneur, that meant failure and during your 20’s that’s often the last thing you want.
Thinking for myself wasn’t taught to me it was a survival tactic. I took this tactic with me to the corporate world and people were surprised.
As my former colleague said to me the other day “You don’t overthink Tim youjust get shit done while everybody else is scratching their head.”
2. Time management
The corporate world is full of big companies with lots of resources.
With an abundance of anything you always have wastage. The corporate world definitely didn’t tell me how to manage time.
What could have been a five-minute phone conversation often ended up in huge email chains. It was a bit of a game.
“Every email involved another person or persons being cc’d. The ultimate trick was to blind cc people within your company. Like magic, bombs start going off and no one can work out who did what. That’s the power of BCC”
None of this was good for time management though. Lot’s of time was spent trying to communicate with one another. Meetings are a thing in the corporate world.
Every problem that exists must have a meeting. Even if it’s about whether we call the shared folder “Sales” or “Customer Files” a meeting had to be held.
Meetings in the corporate world not only suck up time but are also a fashion parade where all the biggest egos can strut their stuff.
“I’m more important and have a better job title.”
“No, I’m more important!”
This dialogue goes on for days and sometimes months. Understanding the politics is often more critical than understanding the business. Still, none of this is good for time.
The time wasted is used by the tech startup opposition to improve a bug, rethink the customer experience or out-market corporates using social media.
3. A passion for what you love
Passion in the corporate world can often be lacking. Working at a corporate for many is a way to pay the bills rather than do their life’s work.
“Passion can often be traded for money, bonuses and even more impressive job titles — all of which leave you feeling more empty”
It’s not all full of zero passion, though. There are a few people that are insanely passionate and those folk shine through.
The corporate world taught me to put my passion on hold rather than use it to WOW customers with the very thing that sets me apart.
4. What people are really buying
Working at a corporate taught me that it’s all about marketing.
I knew, though, from the startup world that this very idea was wrong.
People are buying you. They’re buying the people they deal with and what those people stand for.
No client in my corporate career ever gave a damn about the commoditized products I was selling. All of my clients gave a damn about my obsession to inspire the world through personal development and entrepreneurship. They were intrigued by my five years as an entrepreneur and what I learned.
This led to customers becoming friends as opposed to people that bought widgets from me and had the money they laid tracked in a CRM as ‘revenue.’
“Not once in my corporate career did I have something to sell that couldn’t be bought from somewhere else, at a lower price or with better product features. The product feature my clients bought was me”
5. The power of an audience
People are often too afraid to be vulnerable in the corporate world.
I never learned the power of an audience during my career working in corporates. All of that was learned between 6 pm and 8 pm every night when I was at home from work posting on LinkedIn.
Social media is not so prominent in the corporate world because it requires you to remove the corporate mask and show your flaws. Fakeness on social channels like LinkedIn just doesn’t work. People don’t engage.
Many people told me that the audience I was building on social media was career suicide. I ignored every one of them and I’m so glad I did.
These same people that warned me to stay off social media are the same ones asking me now to help them with their own social accounts.
With an audience, you can test ideas.
With an audience, you can inspire.
With an audience, you can recruit people to your team.
With an audience, you derive meaning for your life.
6. Doing the important vs. the mediocre
In corporate business, there’s a lot of noise.
Everything looks important. Everything looks like it could become a lawsuit (especially for a corporate). Everything looks like it could become a PR scandal. Everything looks risky to that next job promotion and to the business.
That’s where mediocrity thrives. With so much noise it’s easy to spend your days filing bits of paper or moving widgets from Point A to Point B without having any clue of why you’re doing it or how it contributes to humankind.
I didn’t learn the discipline of doing the important work in corporate life.
Doing the important came out of the entrepreneurial trait of problem-solving through a vision. It came from wanting to see things better than they are.
Doing the important was fuelled by a desire to achieve a goal that everybody said wasn’t possible. It’s a rebellious philosophy that pushes mediocrity the hell out of the way.
7. The way to have a meeting (ideally no meeting)
Running a meeting in corporate life follows a formula.
This formula will put almost all attendees to sleep. It’s why when you walk into a corporate board meeting, most of the execs are looking at their phone rather than paying attention to who’s speaking.
The formula goes like this:
- Introduce everybody in the meeting (most don’t need to be there)
- Pretend there’s an agenda (it will get hijacked…guaranteed)
- Pretend to solve the problem by agreeing to invite more people to a future meeting
- Pass ownership around of the problem whilst ignoring the potential solutions
- Assigning action items which everybody ignores (thus triggering another meeting)
“The best way to have a meeting is not to have a meeting”
Meetings are needed in the corporate world because of a lack of trust and having too many cooks in the kitchen.
Have only the people that can solve the problem in the meeting, make it short and trust in the outcome and vision you’re trying to achieve.
That very philosophy makes meetings for the most part irrelevant.
8. How to make better PowerPoint presentations
You’d think with all the PowerPoints you have to do in the corporate world to educate internal stakeholders, you’d be a freaking expert at doing them.
Quite the opposite is true.
Because of the number of PowerPoint decks you have to do in the corporate world, you get worse at them.
The decks get longer, filled with more words, more acronyms and more promises to take more action.
It’s like for every year in the corporate world you add another acronym to the sentence you’re currently writing.
The belief in the corporate world is that all problems must first begin their life in a PowerPoint.
No problem can be solved without a PowerPoint. I once tried to do a presentation with only one slide. Once I explained the one slide I had prepared with a simple diagram that a four-year-old watching Peppa Pig could understand, I then blacked out the screen.
I wanted the attention on what I was saying instead of some Times New Roman, white slide, with Size 12 Font that nobody could read.
Death by PowerPoint is a real cause of death in the corporate world. It kills dreams, ideas, free speech and the will to live.
9. The way to treat people
The corporate world taught me nothing about how to treat people.
Treating people well came from my eBay days where I learned that if you give someone on eBay the thing they want, and do what you say, you’ll get what you want.
This philosophy didn’t translate into corporate life. I was told to treat people well based on what they could do for me. If they couldn’t do anything for me then what’s the point of knowing them? Right?
Wrong.
The people I treated well who seemed to have no benefit to me ended up becoming the Managers, General Managers and Inspiring Leaders five years down the road.
By not asking for stuff all the time, by treating these future leaders with respect and by being as close to a good human being as I could be, I got all the promotions and all the hard to reach opportunities.
My career in the corporate world looked like it was entirely built by luck. It wasn’t. My corporate career was built on respect, honesty and treating people well because it makes sense in the long run.
10. The true meaning of startup buzzwords
Lean startup. Agile. Disruptive. Act like a startup. Minimum viable product.
We hear these words every day in the startup and tech world. Every corporate is trying to adopt them as their own. I didn’t see any of these buzzwords in my corporate career ever be used successfully.
Lean startup meant “Throw seven figures at it and see if it swims. If not, kill it fast!”
Agile meant plan the next five years of a new product, try to deal with every possible situation in the beginning and invite some management consultants.
Act like a startup meant adopt the word but still be a corporate because a sizeable business always knows best.
Minimum viable product meant fix every customer pain point in existence and build the mother of all solutions that’s going to take years to build and leave all competitors for dead. Let’s not fix one thing when we can fix everything thus fixing nothing in the process.
So what can you learn from the corporate world?
It’s not all bad. Park my humor for just one second. You can learn plenty in the corporate world and it’s not all bad.
The corporate world can teach you:
1. Leadership fundamentals
2. Corporate decision-making
3. Community values
4. The rate of technology disruption
The corporate world in some ways shows you what the past looks like so you can build the future. It shows you that size does not necessarily mean better results or more improved solutions.
What I’ve outlined above comes from dealing with hundreds of corporates over the last seven years and the commonalities around how they think.
The grass is not greener.
The corporate world sure has its problems. So does the startup world. So does medium sized business as well.
All business just has a different set of problems to solve.
The way to deal with this conundrum is to become an expert problem solver who enjoys the challenge. It’s not always easy to do.
The business world can get you down and suck the life out of you.
That’s why you need to take a break and get some perspective. Try small, medium and big business for yourself and make your own assessment.
The grass may be longer, shorter or in need of a mow but it’s definitely not greener.
If you want to increase your productivity and learn some more valuable life hacks, then join my private mailing list on timdenning.net
If you are like most people, you probably like to complain from time to time about the economy, about the markets, about how things are changing too fast or how you don’t get enough time. Moan moan moan!
However, moaning doesn’t solve problems. Instead, you can follow the “No BCD” theory and avoid blaming, complaining and defensiveness. This way you will have a totally different outlook, handle situations a lot better, and take control over your destiny. A really practical way to do this is to develop better habits.
What are the bad habits you have?
Everyone has different bad habits, but when it comes to business here are the 4 most common ones:
- Lack of focus: Every single day, there are going to be things you intend to do and then you “run out of time” or succumb to distractions. But if you’re honest, you had the time and there was a way – you just lacked focus.
- You’re too kind: How many times have you taken on a project which wasn’t profitable, because you “felt sorry for them”. Not only does this actually hurt you, but it also in many ways hurts the relationship you have with that client or customer.
- Promising and not delivering: Whether it’s something you said to your team, your clients, or your suppliers, if you’re not matching your words with your actions, over time others will believe you less and less.
- Leaving opportunities on the table: So often people complain in business they don’t have enough (money/sales/support), when actually they do – they just didn’t ask for it. Within your existing network there is probably everything you need, you just have to ask.
“Successful people are simply those with successful habits.” – Brian Tracy
Think about it. You can look at each of these bad habits and replace them with new and better ones. Imagine…
- If you created habits that made you focus better: you’d be more productive, with the same amount of time.
- If you learned good ways to set boundaries: you’d have a better time delivering your services or products, and you’d feel more rewarded.
- If you kept better track of your promises: You’d feel less stressed and overwhelmed.
- If you picked up on more of those opportunities: You’d make more money, and inject welcome energy into those who are ready and willing to work with you. The side effect would be that you could delegate things you don’t love and aren’t good at to others more capable, and replace those activities with the things you love!
Breaking those bad habits
Over the years, I have managed to create more boundaries and space for me to be efficient and effective in my work. There are ways to do that – some habits I have learned from others who have experienced and overcome similar issues, and some are the product of my own experiments. See below!
1. Sprints (for productivity)
I have to say this is so effective. I meet at least one other person at a coffee shop or members club – if it’s not in my office with my fellow team members. We plan to do 30 or 45 minutes of work and do between 3-5 sprints in a session. Blocking out 4 hours together I find works well.
We each say what we will work on and then we get going. No talking allowed, focusing only on the task we talked about. When the timer rings we stop, compare notes on progress, have a mini break and do another one. It’s honestly my most productive time, and it makes you realise how much time we waste on distractions and even moaning about having too much work on!
“A bad habit never disappears miraculously. It’s an undo-it-yourself project.” – Abigail Van Buren
2. A tiny assignment (for motivation to break a bad habit)
I have done this now twice with 2 different friends. We talk about the bad habits we each have, whatever they might be. We give each other a new rule or habit to follow over a two week period. It has to be a “SMART” goal assignment – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.
3. Low hanging fruit (for grabbing opportunities)
You simply make a list of people you already know who:
- Fit into your target market but don’t work with you yet
- Fit into your target market but haven’t worked with you for a while
- Experience problems you know you can solve
- Have their own network of contacts or audience which is very similar to the people you want to talk about
- Have the expertise in things you find challenging, and very likely the answers to your current challenges
Once you have this list, you come up with some drafted initial outreach scripts for either text, email or phone calls and then you work through your list – sending out the requests, hellos, questions, etc. If you draft your communication well, considering the mindset of the people who are receiving these outreach messages, you will find each conversation will be at the very least a learning opportunity and would certainly lead to more “yeses” than if you didn’t do this exercise.
4. The minimum criteria (for setting boundaries)
If you find that your bad habits involve you saying “yes” too often when you should be saying “no” – then this one works great. You just need to write a specific list of criteria to answer the question “Any time I will do this, I need the following things to be true first”.
For example, you only take on a client who pays less than a certain minimum threshold, who has made a written commitment that they will comply with your specific set of guidelines for their responsibilities during the project. There are so many ways you can use the “minimum criteria” technique and you can share your rules with friends and colleagues to hold yourself accountable.
Now, with all this insight I hope you feel more motivated and you can’t even remember your excuses anymore!
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William Ha
Sep 3, 2013 at 1:51 pm
Sorry, i cannot catch up with their speaking speed. Can you summarize the main ideas, please