The 5 Biggest Mistakes I've Made in Business (and how I fixed them)

If you're in business long enough, you're gonna screw up. It's just part of the game. It's inevitable. And if you haven't made any big mistakes yet, you're just not deep enough in the game. Or maybe you haven't pushed yourself enough. Regardless, today I want to share with you the five biggest mistakes I've made in business, and more importantly, how I fix them. Mistake number one, following your passion. Instead of the marketplace, this one is a romantic one. You hear this advice constantly online. Follow your passion and you can't go wrong. This is horrible advice, in my experience, horrible advice. Why? Because I've tried that. I've followed what I've loved. But the truth is the market doesn't care about what you love, what your passion is. It cares about the problems that need solving. That's it. I launched things that I was excited about, all kinds of businesses, but no one wanted to buy them or the business model was not sustainable. Now when I look at starting anything, a business, an idea, a marketing strategy, I look for pain. What are people already frustrated by? What are they paying to solve? And how can I solve it better? Now I say, don't follow your passion. Follow problems. That's where the money lives. Mistake number two, following the market without asking, do I want to do this? This is kind of the opposite of the first mistake, which is interesting. It's like overcorrecting, right? Just because people want something, just because there's a need in the market, doesn't mean you should be the one to build it. A successful business requires a daily effort. You better enjoy that grind. You better enjoy that journey, because you're going to need to enjoy it to be able to sustain that journey, to be able to outlast your competition. Mistake number three, trying to be a solopreneur hero. This take might be quite controversial. This one might sting you a little bit. Teams be solopreneurs every day of the week and twice on Sunday. How do I fix this? How did I remedy this? I changed my mindset. I changed one key question. I went from, how can I do this? And I changed that to who can help me do do this? When I start any new project now, I ask myself, what team do I need to build to make this wildly successful? Listen, you don't need a huge team, but you need to start thinking in terms of a team, even if it's just one. Hire a va, a contractor, a partner, anything to multiply your time, your skills, and your output. Mistake number four, building. Before validating this one's a classic. This one's as old as time, right? And so many entrepreneurs make this mistake. I made this mistake myself. I built something called the DIY webinar guide. But I never validated this idea right, but I just really believed in it. I was like, this is gonna be great. I just know it. I didn't pre sell it, I didn't test it, I did nothing. Right? And we launched two Crickets. Basically, we had two sales, okay? First one was a chargeback, actually, which means it was fraud and we had to return the money. The second one was a sympathy sale from a friend of mine who was just curious on what I was doing, but it was a wake up call. And it was that moment that Ben Horowitz talks about in his book the Hard Thing About Hard Things. Sometimes you gotta create a bad product to create a great one. So instead of repeating this mistake, we validated that people actually wanted webinar ninja first. We created a quick landing page. We designed some mockups, we put some to copy together in a video together, and that's how we validated it. We sold out all 250 spots in like 72 hours. That was my green light. That, okay, validation, here we go. Just the promise of solving this problem got people excited. And anytime I start any kind of project, I do this because it taught me a tough lesson, but a good lesson, that money talks louder than any survey, than any responses, in my opinion. So make sure people are willing to part with their dollars for this mistake. Number five, Ignoring the numbers. This one, Woo. This one took me some time to really understand. But once I did, it became a way of life. Okay. Early in business, I just thought, just keep creating, just keep growing and the money will follow. But I didn't know the ins and outs of my numbers. I didn't track my cash flow, my profit margins, my expenses, my ltv, which is lifetime value of our customer. I was flying blind. No dashboard to see if I'm going in the right direction, right? Then I had a wake up call, right? I was generating six figures in revenue, but barely seeing any profit. How did I fix it? Actually, I hired a fractional cfo, a chief financial officer, to help me build a great, easy to use P and L sheet. I reviewed my monthly reports. I tracked all my key metrics like MRR and CAC and LTV and net margins and all that kind of stuff. And all of a sudden, guess what? When you focus on something, everything got clear. I can make better decisions. I could cut what wasn't working, I could scale with confidence. I knew that I could afford to make that higher or take my team on a team retreat. If you don't know numbers, you don't know your business. That's just the bottom line. Okay, so quick recap of my five big mistakes that I share with you today. Following passion without market validation, horrible idea. But you what you should do is follow the pain. Okay? Number two, chasing the market without asking what I want. What will make me happy, what will I enjoy doing day to day. Number three, doing it all myself. Being a solopreneur. I know that's controversial, but building a team makes you a superhero, right? Makes your your business exponentially more successful. Number four, building before validating. Right now you got to make sure you validate pre sell if you can. And number five, ignoring the numbers. Manage cash flow like it's oxygen. Because it is. Okay? So make sure you you avoid all five. Here are some things I want to leave you with. You don't have to make every mistake yourself. If you can learn from others, you shortcut the path to success. Business again is not about perfection. It's about course correction. So if you're making one of these mistakes today that I just shared with you right now, it's okay. What matters is what you do next, right? How you remedy it. Don't ignore it. Now if you want to go deeper and build your business with me, I have something free for you. It's called my three Things newsletter. Every week I send you three things to help you improve. One, something to build a better mindset so you're building within yourself and getting better as an entrepreneur. Number two, something to do. So you're taking action every single week. And number three is something to learn. So you're skilling up and becoming better than you were yesterday. My way to coach you from afar. It's absolutely free. Just go to 100 MBA NET sign up for any of our freebies like our templates. If you want our P and L sheet, just go to 100 MBA net templates. When you sign up for the templates or anything else, you get added to our newsletter automatically. Thanks for making it this far in the episode. You're my kind of person means that you care. You want to build, you want to grow, you want to become something of yourself. You're competitive with yourself, which I love that you don't let yourself off the hook. You. You make sure you complete the episode. That's amazing. And I'll see you on the next one. Okay? So I hope you have a great rest of your week and have a wonderful day ahead. Keep moving forward. I got your back. See you on the next one. Take care.