Starting a Business | The 7 BIGGEST Mistakes I Made and How You Can Avoid Them!

The top 7 things not to do when starting a business. So I got a great question from one of my YouTube viewers, Emil, love you guys, who wrote in to say, "Evan, I've been watching your videos for a while now. Hope you enjoyed your trip to Asia." I did, it was awesome. You can watch the videos. "I've searched on YouTube and Google and I always get videos, articles about what to do. I believe knowing what not to do is equally important." Usually all I get is generic tips such as "don't grow too fast," but there are no concrete case studies. But when it comes to successful stories, there are specific examples we can learn from. I was thinking if maybe you can have videos or articles analyzing and explaining how businesses failed, especially startups. It would be great if you can use your influence to encourage entrepreneurs who have failed to share their stories with you. That way the mistake will only be made once because we all will have learned from it. Hopefully you'll consider my suggestion. Emil. So Emil, this is for you. The top 7 things not to do when starting a business. Number 1 is pick the wrong business. A lot of companies fail, right? 80%+ of companies fail in 5 years. A lot of it's because you picked the wrong business. Your business is just trying to make money, and if money is your only goal, you're not going to be successful. You look at any entrepreneur who starts off just trying to make money, they rarely do. Where if you look at the most successful entrepreneurs of all time, the big names, the people who you would recognize, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, whoever it is, look at why they got started. Look at the early days of the reason for starting their business. The number one is never to make money, okay? They want to have a positive impact. They want to change the way something is done. They want to mean something, but it's not just to make money. Now, making money is important, okay? I'm not saying start a charity. You got to make money. You got to be able to support yourself, your family, your community, live the lifestyle you want. Money is going to be important. We're not throwing it away. But it's not the number one reason for starting this business. You have to be passionate about what you're doing, and too many entrepreneurs pick the wrong business. Number 2 is make the perfect plan. So many entrepreneurs, before they get started, they want to have the perfect plan, right? You got to have it all lined out, it's got to be 100% perfect, know exactly what you're going to do before you launch, and that holds you back. And this was me, okay? My first real business, Redesoft, the biotech software company I had, I spent a whole summer making my plan, right? Here's how we're gonna grow, here's exactly what we're gonna do. And as soon as we launched, everything changed because my plan was wrong, my assumptions were wrong. And so, too many entrepreneurs get focused on making the perfect plan that they don't start, that they hold themselves back. The best thing you can do is plan a little and start, right? When you get feedback and reaction and customers telling you what they like and don't like, You'll have to adapt anyway, so get that feedback as soon as possible. Don't worry about making the perfect plan, and don't wait until you have that perfect plan, because so many people wait so long that they don't actually take any action at all. They give up on it 'cause they can't figure out the perfect plan. You will never have the perfect plan at the start, so start. Number 3 is spend money. So many entrepreneurs have great ways on how to spend money, right? If I gave you $1 million, you could find a million different ways to spend it. Not many entrepreneurs are great at making money. And so stop trying to think about how to spend money, okay? You do not need a website. You do not need an office. You do not need a car. You don't need business cards. You don't need anything. You need you and your hustle to get out there and start talking to customers. Stop trying to figure out ways to spend money. You do not need money to make money. You need to work. You need to hustle. You gotta get out there and start talking to people. It takes your time. You gotta invest your time, but don't start investing your money. Stop spending money until you're making some money. Number 4 is try to do it alone. You can't do this alone. You cannot do this just on your own. You need people to help you, and whether that's having volunteers or interns that I had when I started my first business, whether it's having people who are working for you part-time. The first guy I hired was for 1 hour a day to relieve some of the work off of me, right? Whether that's having a mastermind group of people that you connect with. I have one that I run here in Toronto where we meet every month to talk about our businesses and help each other out. You can't do this alone. You need to be able to talk to people, have people help you, and we're not spending money at the start, right? Back to the last point, we're not spending money on these people at the start, but you can attract people to you. You can meet up with the mastermind group once a month. You can have volunteers or student interns helping you out. Hey, if you're standing for something important, you're gonna have people coming to you. I can't tell you how many people want to volunteer at my business because I'm trying to do something big and important. You could start that way, but don't try to do everything yourself because running a business is a lot harder than one person can manage. And if you want to do something big, you want to have a big impact, you want to change the world, you want to have a huge, you know, meaning and also make a lot of money in the process, you need to be able to reach out and not do everything yourself. Number 5 is jump into the wrong partnership. So many entrepreneurs jump into partnerships. Maybe you met somebody at a hackathon over the weekend, you have this great business idea, and there's 6 of you starting up. Don't jump in the bed with the wrong partner. And I get why you do it, right? You want to surround yourself with like-minded people who have complementary skill sets. You're on board, here's our big vision, here's where we're going. Rah, rah, rah, here we go. And then when things get tough, that's when the partnership starts to crumble. That's when a lot of fights start to happen. Being in a business partnership is just as important as being in a marriage, right? You got to think about these people as, I'm gonna get married to this person. Can I live with that, right? You're seeing them how many hours of the day, right? You're seeing them probably more than you're gonna see your husband or wife. During the week. So it has to be somebody who has the same values as you, and the best way to try that out is to start working together on small projects. Before jumping together into this partnership, work on one small project together. See if you guys get along, see if you work well together, see if you share that same vision, see if you share the same values. It's so much more than just having complementary skill sets, right? If you're the business guy, you need a coder, you don't just bring on any coder who can, who can program what you need, right, and give them shares in your business. It has to be somebody who you can get married to and work with for the rest of your life potentially, right? It's got to be that important. So don't just jump into the wrong partnerships. Number 6 is operate in a bubble. So many entrepreneurs, and myself included, we try to figure everything out ourselves. And I wasn't investing in myself, I wasn't learning to try to get better. I remember with my first business, I was earning $300 a month and surviving on beans and struggling and trying to put up a good face for my friends because I was supposed to be the guy making it big and doing well. But meanwhile, I tried everything that I knew. I was failing. I couldn't afford anything. I couldn't afford a night out to have beer with my friends. And the strategy that saved me was modeling success and looking from the strategies of Bill Gates and how he started Microsoft, applying that to my company, and that helped me start to grow. And if I never looked at what made Bill Gates successful, I probably wouldn't have been able to make my company be successful because I actually told my partner that I quit. Like, I was so stressed out, I was so tired of not making any money that I wanted to quit and do something that I felt would be meaningful and I would feel valued in. So I was operating in a bubble, and you can't operate in a bubble. You have to bust through, right? Whatever your comfort zone is, you gotta be able to bust through that to become the entrepreneur that you can truly become. So if that's modeling success, learning from others, watching videos, reading books, stretching your comfort zone, stretching your knowledge zone, stretching the, the safe environment that you have for yourself to become a better entrepreneur. And every single big break I've had in my business career has been because I've taken my limiting beliefs and smashed it and expanded them a little bit more and expanded them and expanded them and believed that I could do more and learn from others to accomplish those things and model strategies and model success. So stop operating in a bubble. And number 7 is start a product. This is a bit of a controversial one, but I'm not a big fan of product startups. The main reason comes back to the money issue, right? I want you to get profitable as soon as possible. I want cash in your hand as soon as possible. And the problem with product companies are you spend a lot of money at the start, right? You have to invest into product, into inventory, and so So many companies, entrepreneurs start up, invest a lot, you know, they put a lot on the line. They may, you know, take out another mortgage on their house, they may pull out money from their retirement savings to launch into this product, and then they end up with all of this inventory sitting in their garage, sitting in their basement that they can't sell. And so many product companies fail because they picked the wrong product, and it's so much easier to start in a service-based business. Because you're not investing anything except your time. You don't need to invest any money into a service-based business except your time. And what that does is allows you to get close to your customers, allows you to refine your message, allows you to refine your service because the service you go in thinking you're going to do is not the service that you end up actually doing. It will change, right? Go back to the point about planning. It will change and it's so much easier to be flexible in a service-based business to figure out what your offering is going to be and then launch into a product, right? Get some cash flow coming in. Get that mortgage bill and that electricity bill paid off from your service-based business. It's harder to scale a service. It's much easier to scale a product. That's why it's so attractive, right? You don't want to trade time for money. You want to build a huge empire. That's why building a product. But start with a service to get the cash flow coming in, to get you close to the customers, to get you understanding what it is that people want. You have a base of people to then sell your product to, you have an income stream coming in to support you, then launch your product and dominate the world. So I'm not a fan of starting with a product. So in summary, the top 7 things not to do when starting a business: Number 1, pick the wrong business. Number 2, make the perfect plan. Number 3, spend money. Number 4, try to do it alone. Number 5, jump into the wrong partnership. Number 6: Operate in the bubble. Number 7: Start a product and believe. You guys like this video? You want to see more? You can subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you soon. Hi, I'm Thor Afsland from timemanagementchef.com. Evan Carmichael's newsletter? Epic! Subscribe!