MBA870 The One Skill Every Entrepreneur Must Have

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that gives you what you need to make your business better with our deep dive lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA and webinar Ninja. And in today's episode you will learn the one skill every entrepreneur needs to have. I've been working on the concept of this episode for some time now because I've really been asking myself the question, if there's one skill somebody needs to cultivate in order to be a great entrepreneur, what would it be? And I looked at everything from marketing to sales to creativity to ingenuity, all that stuff I wanted to nail. What is the one skill that would make you a better entrepreneur to improve your business? And today I share it with you. I share with you that skill, how to cultivate it and how to prepare yourself to be a master at this. And really it's one word, and that word is problems. Every business starts with a problem, every entrepreneur deals with problems. But even when you just start a business, it starts off by solving a problem. There's a pain, there's an issue, there's something out there that needs solving. And that's the entrepreneur's job, is to solve problems for people Every entrepreneur, when they wake up in the morning, from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg to you, when we wake up in the morning, we have a set of problems we have to solve. There's problems waiting for us. Now, they may not be huge problems, but some of them are small and some of them are big. And it's your job as a leader of the company to get up and attack these problems. If this is intimidating you, like, wow, am I going to have all these problems? I'm going to have to deal with problems as an entrepreneur, the answer is yes. But it's all about your mindset. It's how you actually set up your mindset to be able to solve these problems. And the best entrepreneurs are great at this, whether they're solving a problem so they can create a great product, or they're solving problems as they're creating the product or as they're serving that customer or as they're innovating in that product. So that's what we're going to discuss in today's episode. How to do this, how to be a great problem solver. Because that's the skill that boils down to. That's what I've come up with really, is that you have to be a great problem solver to be a great entrepreneur. Everything else you can learn, you can learn communication skills, you can learn sales, you can learn negotiation. You get the point. But you have to have the right mindset and attitude and work ethic to be a great problem solver. So let's learn how to do this together in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to begin today's lesson with the idea of forming a problem solving mindset. See, when you focus on the problem part of problem solving, it doesn't feel so good. And who wants to deal with problems? Oh, problems, they give you headaches, all that kind of stuff, right? But if you focus on the solving part, it gets exciting. For me, solving problems is rewarding, it's motivating, it's fulfilling, really, because there's a problem, there's a roadblock, there's an obstacle. And then if you solve that, if you remove those obstacles and you make people's life easier, how rewarding is that? It feels like a huge accomplishment, right? So you gotta approach problem solving in that way. Wow, I'm going to crack this code. Wow, I'm going to make things better. This is a problem that exists and no one has solved it. I'm Going to solve it. And that's where great products and services come from. If you look at any great product or service, they solve a problem. No matter how big or small that problem is or how subtle that problem is, they're solving problems. Recently, I had to get some gardening done in my backyard. My lawn was a mess. My hedges needed trimming. So I started to Google gardeners, and I started Googling gardeners and finding them online, calling them up to get some estimates. I took some pictures. You know, I took some pictures of my backyard, and even my front yard needed some work. And I was getting some huge estimates, like $500, $600. Now, mind you, it's going to be like two to three hours of work. But still, I was like, that's a lot of money. I wasn't expecting to pay so much. And I was asking myself, is there a better way? Is there a better way to do this? Is there a more economical way to do this? So I held off from making any appointments with any gardeners. And then later that evening, we went with some friends, and they asked us, how was your day? What you do today? And I said, hey. I called up a whole bunch of gardeners trying to. Trying to get some estimates, and they stopped me in my tracks and said, hey, you should use something called Airtasker. I'm like, airtasker? What's that? And they're like, it's an app. And you put out odd jobs on this app, and there's plenty of people that are happy to do those jobs for a reasonable price. I was like, really?

Like, what?

They're like, anything, like, moving, like, gardening, like, handyman work. I was like, oh, cool. So I downloaded Airtasker. I put up my job. I said, hey, I need my lawn taken care of as well as my front yard. Here's some pictures. And I got a great gardener who freelances, no big company, no big estimates, to do it for $150. And he did a fantastic job. Airtasker solved my problem. I was like, wow, there's gotta be other people that could do this for less money or, you know, it's not as official, it's not as a big deal. I don't need a landscaper who's gonna create, you know, swans out of my bushes. I just needed it to be tidied up. But the point is, is that I was on the receiving end of that problem being solved. And it felt so good. I was like, wow, what a brilliant idea. What a brilliant service. And just a little way, my Life got better, it got a little bit easier. Now you as the entrepreneur are doing this with the world, with your clients, with your customers. You're solving problems, you're making their life better. And when you flip it like this, you realize, wow, this is great. Solving problems is fun and it's rewarding. Now, no one said that solving problems is going to be easy. It's going to be challenging. Sometimes it's going to take a while to solve problems. For example, in our business, Webinar Ninja, the number of hosts we have are starting to grow. Well over 10,000 hosts. And their webinars are getting really large. So relying on some other service to provide for our video streaming is just not going to cut it anymore. I mean, we were using a pretty big telecom company to provide us with video streaming services for our actual app. So I'm racking my brain, how do I solve this problem? I want better quality service. I want to cater for growth. I want to make sure that we, our customers have better service than any other provider, any other webinar software out there. I want it to be HD quality with zero delay. No one's offering this. What do I do now? I could have folded my hands and said, you know what, that's how it is. That's where the technology is. That's what I could do. But I want to go beyond that. I want to go beyond that mindset. And because I've developed this problem solving mindset, I spent the time to do some research and we're talking about months hiring experts just to get their advice. People that work in telecom, people that work in video broadcasting, people that people that work in WebRTC technology. I mean, these people, they gave me their advice and I've worked with them and I interviewed them and I paid them for their time. And a lot of times they didn't give me an answer I needed. But finally I found a great engineer that can help me solve my problem. Throughout this process, I'm trying to figure out how much will this problem cost me, how much will it cost the customers? Will I have to raise prices in order for them to get a revolutionary type of experience with their video broadcasting? But finally, after months of research and working with experts, I worked with the engineer, Alex. Alex is our engine who works at Webinar Ninja, and we're building our own media server infrastructure. We're basically creating our own service provider so we can serve ourselves. And because we're doing it ourselves, we can cater it to our needs and what we need to do. And what kind of quality we want for our customers, as well as some of the fun features we're going to be implementing with the new update 5.0. The point here is that it took me a while to crack this nut to solve this problem. And day after day, every time I woke up, I was like, I got to solve this problem along with the other problems that I'm solving throughout the day. But. But this was a big one. I was like, I gotta solve this problem. How can I solve this problem? And sometimes it's not gonna happen instantly, and that's okay. The bigger the problem, the bigger the payoff, the more significant the solution is. And let's get real here. You know, I run a business. It's significant in the world, but there are people that solve bigger problems. Like I mentioned Elon Musk, you know, he had bigger problems trying to get a rocket to space and back. And his problems were expensive, right? If he didn't solve that problem, and he didn't a few times, more than a few times, it cost him millions and millions of dollars. So think about that for a moment. Your problems don't cost that much or solving that problem doesn't cost that much. So I think I spent enough time kind of emphasizing the mindset of being a problem solver. The next thing we want to cover is that your whole job as a business owner is to solve a problem. Your product, your service, solves a problem, even if it's entertainment, you're solving boredom. You could point at any business, whether it's McDonald's solving people's problem of hunger on a budget to Merced, People want to drive a status symbol. They want to solve the problem of being significant. You get the point. Zero in on what problem you're solving. You need to know this like the back of your hand. Why? Because you need to make sure the customer understands what problem you're solving so you resonate with the right customer. So when they hit your sales page or landing page, your website, they see, okay, this product solves this problem. Do I have this problem? Yes, I do. This product's for me, or no, I don't have this problem. This is not really something that I am struggling with or something that I really need. And therefore, you don't want that customer. That customer is going to be a headache. That's gonna be a real problem for you. So, for example, our business webinar Ninja, we make your webinars better with no worries. You wanna improve your webinars, and you don't have to worry about the tech. You don't have to worry about it going wrong. You don't have to worry about things crashing or anything like that. If you've run webinars before, you know exactly what I'm talking about and you're looking for a solution like that. And that's how we resonate with the right people, because we get specific about what problem we're solving. If you sell sugar free muffins that taste great, you're solving the problem. People that maybe are diabetic that love muffins, but you know they haven't eaten one in a while because they can't and they don't want to eat the other ones that just taste gross because there's no sugar in them. So maybe you have a solution. You have a great tasting muffin that's sugar free. You have to be very intimate with the problem. You got to know it inside and out. You have to have actually experienced that problem so you can understand the pain it causes. You got to express that pain on your sales page, in your sales videos. We at Webinar Ninja know people are sick of using webinar software that's unattractive, that's outdated, that's unreliable, that's clunky, that's not user friendly. So we make sure people know that these problems that you experience, we're solving them. Webinar Ninja solves these problems. We're not that it's important to know who you are, but it's more important to know what you're not. So you have the mindset of being a problem solver. And then two, you understand your whole business is about solving a problem. Now you might be saying, well, my product or service solves more than one problem. Okay, that's true. You might solve little problems within a problem, and that's true with our business. But there is one problem, one umbrella problem, one overarching problem that you need to focus on. And then you can go into detail later on in your sales copy about how it also solves this, this, this and this. But immediately when I hit your page on your headline, I need to know exactly what problem you solve, what singular problem you solve. Alright, so we got mindset, we got your whole business is solving a problem. Let's talk about the day to day. Every morning I wake up, I wake up knowing I have to solve problems. There will be problems waiting for me. There'll be problems that will be coming up throughout the day. And my job as the leader of the company is to solve these problems. Now I Could solve them in different ways. And this is not putting out fires. This is not the right way to do it. I might get a problem and realize, you know what? We need a procedure for that so I don't have to deal with that problem again. That's how you do it. There might be a decision that needs to be made in terms of an exception. Or maybe you need to make a decision on price, or you need to make a decision on a problem that a customer had with your service or product. The reason why I'm bringing this up, this third aspect of problem solving is that you need to expect this. You can't say, oh, man, every day I gotta solve problems. Every day there's problems. You're not gonna make it. If you have that attitude. You have to wake up in the morning and say, what problems am I gonna solve today? What exciting challenges am I gonna take on today? And imagine you woke up every morning and there was nothing to solve. There's nothing to do. Things are just going on, and that's going to be boring. You want new challenges and challenges. Improve your business, improve your company, improve the experience for your customers. I mean, you heard the expression, more money, more problems. I think it should be flipped. More problems, more money. Because the more problems you have, the more chances you have to solve them, the more money you're going to make. Because you're solving problems. You're a problem solver. As corny as that sounds, it's true. So. So when you wake up every morning to work on your business, even if you're doing this part time, like on the weekends, or you're doing this part time after work, and you're fixing problems and you're solving problems, don't see this as a burden. Gotta see this as. This is just how it is. This is how entrepreneurs live. If you're not facing challenges every day, then you're not pushing yourself hard enough. You're not pushing yourself to the limit. You're not trying to expand beyond where you are. That's how you grow. You're not shooting high enough. I mean, as I record this episode right now, and I look back a year ago at our business at Webinar Ninja, and if I presented to myself a year ago, hey, this is what your business looks like, this is what the business looks like in a year, I would be pretty impressed. I'd be like, wow, I did that. It's so far beyond where I was a year ago. Right? And I think the reason why that happened is because we pushed ourselves to Go further to grow. And yes, it was scary. Yes, it was hard to be that ambitious and say, hey, you know what? We can do better. We can innovate more. Let's think bigger, let's think better. And when you do that, sometimes it's scary because you're like, I don't know how I'm gonna pull this off. I don't know how I'm gonna, you know, solve this problem or actually fulfill this idea. But that's great. That's where innovation happens. That's where businesses get made. Where you're in that space where like, oh, I'm not sure if I can do this or I can do this or pull this off. Worst case scenario, you miss the mark, you miss the goal by a couple inches, but you're still a lot further ahead than if you just had a small goal and didn't stretch yourself and didn't face those challenges and problems and say, I got this. I'm going to figure this out. And like I said, it's really motivational to hear the stories of other entrepreneurs that had bigger problems than you. And I mentioned Shoe dog, Phil Knight's autobiography, the founder of Nike. I mean, for 20 years, they're on the verge of bankruptcy, trying to grow, trying to build. I mentioned Elon Musk a lot on the show, but his biography by Ashlee Vance is very, very motivational because he deals with problems, huge problems, day after day. If you read Arnold Schwarzenegger's autobiography, Total Recall, he mentions challenges after challenges he has throughout his life. He grows up as a poor boy in Austria, no running water. And about 15 years later, he's one of the most successful bodybuilders of all time and one of the highest paying actors of all time. Pretty incredible, right? But the bigger the problem you try to solve, the bigger the challenge, the more rewarding it's going to be. So when you wake up every morning and you got problems waiting for, you see that as an opportunity. This is an opportunity for me to grow, to be a skilled problem solver and to feel that sense of, you know, wow, I've solved problems for people. I've helped people. It's really rewarding.

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To wrap up today's lesson, I want you to put this image in your head. Entrepreneur equals problem solver. This is who you are. You're gonna solve problems from here until your last days. That's your job. And it's a noble cause. It's a noble job because, hey, you're making people's life better. You're relieving them of pain. You're making people say, wow, what a great idea. This is a great solution. And you're doing this in a big way with your big ideas in your business, but also doing it in a little way when you're solving small problems every single day with your team, improving your product, improving your service. Or maybe you're dealing with a small crisis, like maybe somebody didn't get their order because there was some bad weather and the shipment got lost. Customer's angry. So solving that problem is going to make their life better, and it's an opportunity for you to show them your customer service skills. I say you, but really, it's your team and it's your chance to say, hey, we're really sorry this happened. Sympathize with them and show them how you're going to solve the problem and make their life better. Even if that problem that happened, it's not your fault. You can't control the weather, but you control the experience that the customer has when things like this happen. So take ownership of it. Be proud of it. Be proud to be a problem solver, because that's what's going to make you a great entrepreneur. That's what's going to make your business incredible. It's what's going to make your business a winner and better than your competition. People that shy away from problems, people that say, oh, whatever, these guys are complaining, I'm just going to ignore them. It's going to catch up with them. The best businesses and business owners are the best problem solvers. So embrace it. I know that when I've embraced it, I felt so much better about the whole thing. I didn't see it as a, oh, I gotta. All these problems I gotta solve today. Oh, my gosh, when is it going to end? No, when you embrace and say, you know what? Awesome. These are great challenges. Which one am I gonna do first? I'm gonna do that one first. Great. Then this, then this, then it's all done. Oh, cool. Man, I just solved all these problems. I wonder what tomorrow will bring me. Being positive and having the right mindset can make all the difference. Alright, guys, that wraps up today's lesson. I hope you loved it. If you did, let me know in an itunes rating and review. I'd love to hear from you. Just go to iTunes, search the $100 NBA show and leave us a review. If you want full Instructions, just go to100nba.net show all our instructions on how to give us a review as well as all the information about this show is right there. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. Here's something I've learned. As you grow as an entrepreneur and as your business grows, the more sophisticated and the more challenging your problems are going to become. At the start, you know, your biggest problem is you don't have enough traffic to your website or you don't have enough customers. But then you start getting some customers, and these customers are not happy for certain reasons. And you got to solve those problems. Then you realize your product is not good enough to really compete. So you got to improve your product and solve that problem. And then when that's done, you realize that your team can't support all the new customers you're getting because your product's so awesome. So you got to hire the right people, and that's a problem you got to solve. And it goes on and on and on and on. You get it. And that's a good thing because it allows you to grow. You're not hit with huge problems from day one. It allows you to practice on the smaller problems and build that resilience and build that positive outlook to being a problem solver. All right, I'll check you in the next episode. Thanks for listening. Take care.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.