MBA1996 How Long Does It Take To Be a Successful Entrepreneur?

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Sure you've heard that entrepreneurship is a journey and it's a rollercoaster ride and it takes sacrifice and takes time and all that kind of stuff. But if you're like me, you like specifics, you're like, that's very vague. I want to know how much time am I going to have to sacrifice to see success on, on the entrepreneurial journey. And of course you're going to hear people saying, oh, it depends your experience, how much time you invest, how much you want it. Yes, these factors come into play. But I'm going to simplify things a little bit today. Okay? I don't want to give you a generic answer. I want to give you an answer that you can work with. So to start with, let me just share a little bit about my journey, my experience of doing business or being an entrepreneur. First started back in 2002, 20 years ago. Okay. Now I was in a full time job, I an educator, I was a teacher, but I was building small online businesses on the side. In fact, at the start I'd probably consider them more like experiments and not full fledged businesses. I wasn't even sure what entrepreneurship was at the time or really even familiar with the word or what it means to be a business. Builder or business owner. I was just learning. I was reading books, I was reading blog posts, I was, I was taking courses and I was trying to implement what I learned in my little projects online. I had an ebay store, I had an e commerce store. I did arbitrage, I sold services, I built websites. I did a whole bunch of stuff as I was getting started. And I side hustled and built those little projects and businesses on the side during my career as an educator, as a teacher for over 13 years. So for 13 years I side hustled. Then I made the leap into full time entrepreneurship. And it was rough at the start because I really needed to replace my income. I had to make sure that I kept my expenses low. I needed to make sure I'm bringing in clients. I had to reinvent who I am in my business. It was not easy, but I figured it out and I'm here today, happy to say that I'm still alive and I'm still an entrepreneur. But the question today is all about how long does it take to be successful as an entrepreneur? And this is where we're going to start. Start success. What does that mean to you? And this is your first task. Your first task is to define what is success to you. You need to define that. You need to actually define what it means to win. What does winning look like to you? For example, success to me at the start of my journey was that my business, my entrepreneurial activity, would earn me enough revenue and profit for me to replace my income as a teacher. To replace my salary as a teacher. Actually, scratch that. Now that I think about it, as I'm saying it, it wasn't actually to replace my income and my salary as a teacher. It was just enough to pay all my expenses. And there's a difference here because my expenses could be much less than my salary. And my expenses can be lowered, right? I can chop down my expenses as much as possible and adjust how much I actually need to meet my expenses. And to me, as long as I was making enough, I was taking home enough to meet my expenses. I considered that success. It meant I could live on whatever I was making, doing what I love, taking on the challenge of entrepreneurship, being my own boss and creating my own thing. And that was my definition of success. You need to define what success means to you. It could be something totally different, it could be something similar. But the point here is that it's. You need to define the rules, okay? Because if you don't, you're asking for trouble. Trust me. Okay? If you don't have a clear vision, you don't have a clear goal, and you don't know what you're going after. You're never going to feel like you're winning. You're never going to feel successful because in the back of your mind, you're comparing yourself to what you see on Instagram or what you read on blogs or on Twitter. But the point here is that set your goal now, define success at the start. It doesn't mean you don't have to change that later. You don't change that later because my definition of success changed over the years. But the point here is that you need to score that goal first before you move the goalpost. So once I was able to get to that point where I was able to earn enough profit to pay for my expenses, okay, I. I hit success, right? I hit my definition of success. Now I want to challenge myself and redefine success, but I don't do that until I hit that success mark. So that next level might be something like, okay, I want to make $100,000 in revenue, or I want to make $100,000 in profit, even better. Or I want to make a million dollars in revenue, or I want to have a $10 million business, meaning that it's worth $10 million. Or, or it could be something totally different. It could be, I want to be able to have a business that earns $100,000 in profit, and I only work 200 days out of the year. The beauty of entrepreneurship is that you get to set the goals. You get to set what success means. This is where things get fun. This is where you can be creative. This is where you get to decide what your life is going to look like. To me, entrepreneurship is a tool. It's a vehicle to get what you want out of life. And that includes fulfillment, giving back, helping others, creating something special, and yes, living the lifestyle you want, spending your wakeful hours, doing things that give you joy. So never forget that. That's really the goal of anybody who wants to start their own thing. So your timeline to success is going to vary based on what success means to you. But I'm going to give you some indication of where you can really base your reality on, where you can base your timeline on. Okay, so there are a few factors here. Number one is how much time do you have? How much time do you have to dedicate to your entrepreneurial journey? Are you doing part time work? Working on a side hustle? Are you doing this full time? This is what you do all day, all night. Does this have your full attention? Do you have other obligations? All that factors in. But let me give you something to work with. Anybody who's successful at anything and is a true professional and is confident in their skills, where they can do what they need to do to produce the work that is required to get the result that is required. Any field of work. It takes about a decade. It takes about 10 years to be pretty damn good at something. Okay? Whether you're going to be a doctor. Think about it takes you four years of undergrad, medical school rotations and, you know, some experience. In about 10 years you're going to feel pretty confident. Hey, as a doctor, I can help people in my area of expertise. I can reproduce that, I can do that. I am pretty confident in my abilities. It takes about a decade. Same thing with an engineer, a carpenter, even an entertainer, an athlete, a musician. If you look at the biographies of some of those types of people that you admire, it took them about 10 years for them to really be able to monetize and be able to use that talent professionally. Now I'm not telling you that it's going to take you 10 years of full time effort to earn $1 as an entrepreneur. No. In the process of those 10 years, you're going to earn your first dollar, you're going to earn your first customer, you're going to build your first business. Maybe you're going to build a few businesses, but the point is that if you ask any entrepreneur that's been doing it for 10 years full time, if for any reason they had to start all over, they probably would feel confident they can do it because now they have the skills, they are that valuable to the marketplace because of their skills that they can produce great value and create a great business. Now why am saying this to you? Well, I want to give you some perspective to allow you to see the long term view of entrepreneurship that don't be so hard on yourself if you don't understand everything. If you are having a hard time, if things are feeling like a slog, that things are getting challenges, you're having a lot of challenges. Those first 10 years are basically training, right? It's getting you up to speed to become super competent. And along that journey you're going to have successes, you should be hitting some milestones, you should be enduring some challenges and struggles. But those really teach you the lessons along the way. And what I found in my own experience is that my first three years of full time entrepreneurship was really just kicking up dust, making Just enough to be able to have my head above water. And I was building my voice and my identity and what kind of entrepreneur I wanted to be and all that kind of stuff. And then the next three years was a bit of prosperity, a bit of growth. I grew probably the most in those three years and my business started to go from survival to thriving a little bit. Right. The next three to four years is all about scale and how do you remove yourself in the business, how do you automate things, how do you delegate, how do you make sure that your business is autonomous and you're starting to think a little higher level. And it's not all just about being frugal and trying to make every dollar count. It's more like how can I make sure my business can run without me and continue to grow and see my business as an investor rather than an operator. And on all these three levels, I found that there are successes, there are wins. And like I mentioned, you need to find those successes along the way. I redefine success every three years to keep myself going. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood. What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Tuxt and data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile.

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T Mobile in the past 180 days.

To wrap up today's lesson, I need to state some truths that are just unavoidable. This is just how things are in business. There are a few factors that will control the speed of your success and you should be mindful of that. Number one, the market you're in. Some markets are just growing, they're trending. And just by being in that market, your business, your service, your product, you're going to get traction. Some markets are just not moving that fast. They might be growing and moving in the right direction, but but just not as rapidly as other markets and therefore it's going to affect how fast you grow. Two, the customers you serve, the customer base you serve has a lot to do with how fast you grow because if these customers talk to each other, they actually are part of a community. This is where viral marketing happens. People talk, people refer. Your business, your product to other people. Word of mouth marketing really, really is a thing. Your marketing abilities Now I'm just talking about your willingness to be able to talk about your business, whether that is going to conferences, whether that is writing blog posts, doing a podcast, doing videos, doing interviews. Your ability to market your business will greatly affect the growth because many people forget the fact that you can have a great product, but if nobody knows about it, if nobody understands it, then it really doesn't exist in the marketplace. This is why big, big companies will dump millions, if not billions of dollars in advertising, because they know the power of marketing. An inferior product will win over a better product because of its marketing. That's just the world, unfortunately. Now you don't need billions of dollars to start with to market your business, but you need to be willing to market your business to do anything you can with content marketing, like I mentioned, to push your business forward. And lastly, your willingness to grow and to learn. One of the ways that you can seriously rapidly grow your business is to grow yourself. And if you're listening to this podcast, I don't need to convince you of that because you are hungry to grow and learn. I can't tell you how much I have found that by just merely pushing myself to learn, to read, to improve myself on a daily basis has improved my business and helped it get to the next level every day. And also when I slack off on that a little bit or not do it as much, I see the effect. So your willingness to invest in yourself is going to have a major role on how fast you can hit those success milestones. That wraps up today's lesson. I hope you found it helpful. Guys, I just tried to give it to you straight, give you my raw, honest opinion on these topics. When it comes to your journey in entrepreneurship, I hope it's helpful. If it is, leave me a rating and review on your favorite podcast app. I'd love to hear what you think of the show that wraps up today's episode. Don't forget to hit, subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss a beat. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I find it fascinating that people are so impatient with entrepreneurship, yet so patient with their career or their job. They will work at their job year in and year out. Be patient, wait for that promotion, continue to do what they have to do and grind it out. But when it comes to entrepreneurship, they're like, hey, I've been doing this for three months. What's going on? Where's my million bucks. No, you gotta be patient. You gotta push yourself. You gotta keep on going. Gotta have some perseverance and grit. Because at the end of the day, if it was easy, everybody would do it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in. Tomorrow's episode Free art Friday. I'll see you then. Take care. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood. What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Tuxt and data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling.

Only at Metro by T Mobile Just bring your number. $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available if with Metro T Mobile in the past 180 days.