Roger James Hamilton recounts an early entrepreneurial failure and a pivotal conversation with a mentor who asked about his personal finances. He explains that prioritising his own income (paying himself first, setting personal targets) and structuring businesses to ‘revolve around’ him — rather than being a martyr to the business — transformed his approach, improved hiring and investments, and enabled business growth. The piece is a first-person monologue offering practical mindset and financial advice to entrepreneurs.
Hi, my name is Roger Hamilton, and you can find me on rogerjameshamilton.com so I run an entrepreneurs resort, and also I have a company, Entrepreneurs Institute, which actually supports entrepreneurs. So I am an entrepreneur. And at the same time, all through my life, I've been looking for entrepreneurial lessons, made lots of mistakes. So as an example of a mistake, one which, if it hadn't been corrected, would mean still today I'd be struggling a lot, is something I didn't even know I was making until a mentor of mine when I was about 23 years old, kind of really caught me on it. I was on maybe my third business failure, and I kept on trying to focus at the business as to what I was doing wrong. And when I met with him, hoping he'd help me with my business, he asked me a question which had nothing to my business. He asked me how was my own personal finances. You know, what was going on with my. My own finances? How much was I putting aside? And I was actually negative, like, really badly negative at that point. I wasn't paying myself enough in the business. It was stressing me out. I thought that was what you meant to do. I thought you, you know, you kind of watch all those kind of TV programs and others which are about, like, the daring entrepreneur that goes out and risks everything. So that's what I was doing. But it was creating massive stress because every business problem was a personal problem. And what he said was, until I stopped revolving around my business and I got my business to revolve around me, and I started setting my own personal targets of what I was going to be earning to the extent that if the easiest way for me to earn more is go get a job, then that's what I should do. And only when I actually had a business that could be paying me more should I be doing that. Now, you've all heard this idea of pay yourself first and so on, but this is more than that. This is about your entire identity of being the center of a solar system which allows other planets, other businesses to revolve around you. So you can have multiple businesses, not you kind of like trying to revolve around one or two or three suns and finding yourself going dizzy over it. When I actually made that change and shift and I started actually focusing at what I personally was going to be, actually generating that from my businesses, my business then started growing in ways that I never could have focused at separately. It was my business now, serving me. Instead of me being the master to the business, it's a different mindset shift. It was one that was difficult for me to make, but once I started making it, and then started actually setting bigger and bigger targets for myself personally every year, it allowed me to make sure my business was successful. It forced me to start thinking smarter about the people I hired, and it also allowed me to start thinking about the investment portfolio that I was growing. So it wasn't just about me showing up for the business every day. If it wasn't for that one advice and me correcting that one mistake today, I'd still be there being a martyr to the business. And no matter how successful it was going to be, it would still end up failing again as well. So that's what I'd suggest for anyone who's focusing at the very best you can do for your business is start with yourself.
