3 Mindset Changes Every Entrepreneur Needs

Why do some entrepreneurs seemingly seem to make it, and in doing so, they also make it look so easy and effortless? Whereas for the vast number of small business owners out there and entrepreneurs, it seems like you're walking through treacle, pushing jelly up a hill, and it's incredibly hard from one day to the next to make your business a success. So in this video, I'm gonna be sharing 3 very simple ideas around why I believe I've been able to create a successful business as an entrepreneur for myself, and how you potentially can too. I'm gonna kick this off by telling a short story from when I was about 2 years into my coaching journey. And you have to remember as well, for context, I ran a marketing agency for the best part of 12 years before I turned to coaching. So around the time when this story that I'm about to tell you happened, I'm already about 13, 14 years into my journey as a small business owner, and I'd done various side hustles even before that. So I've got plenty of experience and anecdotes to share around all of the different things which I've done throughout the career, but there was this one particular moment which really stood out during the first couple of years of my coaching. And essentially this is it. Somebody came into my office. I used to have a small office in the local town where I delivered my coaching sessions. And she sat down in front of me during this consultation, and one of the first things which she said to me was, Robin, I think you're a better coach than I am, but I don't understand why you've been so much more successful than I've been. So there was a bit of a red flag there, and it did irk me a little bit when she said those words. However, I was like, right, I'm a coach. Don't make this about yourself. Push your ego to one side. Let's see if we can figure out what's going on. Why would she say something like this? So I asked her, I said, well, tell me about your level of activity recently. How many consultations have you done, for example, recently? And I remember she started counting on one hand. She's going, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. She said, 4 or 5 consultations. I said, oh, well, that's not bad. 4 or 5 consultations in the last week. I mean, you should be really, you know, going great guns. And she said, no, no, Robin, that's 4 or 5 consultations in the past year. And I was like, well, there's your problem immediately. I said, The last 12 months, for me, sounded a little bit like this. I did 125 consultations. I did 44 podcast interviews. I did close to 40 speaking engagements. I wasn't getting enough speaking engagements, so I set up my own networking meeting, which I ran 12 events where 600 people came along to it. I even booked out the Aerospace Museum down in Bristol and held an event to 200 people underneath the wing of a Concorde. And so I just listed off all of this huge volume of activity which I'd undertaken during the first 12 months of my coaching practice. And you could see her eyes slowly getting bigger and bigger and bigger as she realised that the reason she was struggling so much is that she tried to grow this online coaching business hidden behind screens, doing social media and setting up her website and doing personal branding. But the thing that she wasn't doing is taking specific action geared around creating this impact. And ultimately, that's what I believe becoming a successful entrepreneur is based on. It's about taking action, but there are certain biases towards certain type of actions which you need to pay more attention to. And I'm gonna just go through quickly 3 different things which you can hopefully take away from this video and implement straight away as an entrepreneur, because they're not tactical, practical things that you can go and like do social media or build a website or things like that. These are ideologies, they are mindset techniques which you can Literally, so long as you understand them and you get some insights from them, you can start practicing these today. And I can guarantee that over time it will make a massive difference to your business and your journey as an entrepreneur. There's a fantastic book called The Slight Edge. I forget who the author is, but in The Slight Edge it talks about these small daily actions which we need to do as entrepreneurs— and well, people, not just entrepreneurs or business owners— that over time they start to compound, and then eventually you end up having this enormous You have many years of struggle and it feels like it's hard work before all of a sudden you get hit that inflection point and it starts to feel easier. It also works in reverse. There can be negative traits or habits which you've picked up, which you're doing, which gradually compound over time and then have a negative impact. So all of a sudden you— the inflection point looks more like burnout or catastrophes happening, or maybe you have to give up being an entrepreneur because it's just not working out for you. And I use this as an example often, which is one small thing which I do each and every day when I start my day is I make my bed. And I take great pride in making my bed when I get up every morning because it means that I've ticked off one task. I've done it with pride and I've done a great job of it. And I can be really proud of that and I can take that positive energy into the next activities of my day. It could be then, you know, letting the dogs out. It could be getting the girls ready for school. It could be having my morning coffee and making my plan for the day. But if I take that same positive approach to all of my actions, it does make a big difference. So the first thing I've got for you is something called survivorship bias. And this is— if you look at a majority of the businesses out there, the best-known statistic is that only 5% of businesses make it to the 10-year mark. Now, I've run 2 businesses which are pretty much a decade old. My coaching practice is coming up for 9 years. My marketing agency, which I ran for 12 years. I can't see myself doing anything other than coaching, but one of the reasons I see myself as being an excellent coach is because I have just There's no plan B for me. When I started coaching and realised how much I loved it, I just decided that there would be no— failure would not be an option. There would be no plan B, and that I would make this business work irrespective of anything that, you know, the universe threw at me. And Simon Sinek talks about this a lot. He's got a great book called The Infinite Game, which I would thoroughly recommend reading. And in that, the long story short is that he talks about this concept of too many business owners get really stuck playing these short games for wins and losses, whereas actually the goal of business is to stay in business for as long as you possibly can do. So if you're of the mindset of just playing these short-term, you know, wins and losses, these short-term games, you're not going to get anywhere with your business. You're constantly going to be worrying about the next failure and what happens if I put my price up and everybody leaves and all of these things, whereas business actually is— if you look at it and distill it down, it's just about numbers. If you know the numbers in your business and economically set it up for success, you're going to be absolutely fine and you'll have a sustainable business. sustainable and profitable business. If you can do things like increase your financial future financial security by saving a rainy day fund so that you've got 6 months worth of your operating expenses, all of a sudden these short-term wins and losses become less meaningful in the business setting because you're going to be okay irrespective of what happens because you've got this rainy day fund. So really survivorship bias is about surviving everything that comes at you, having no plan B, and just Making this one pledge to stay in business for as long as you possibly can do, no matter how tough it appears to be at particular points in your career. And that's what's got me through both of my businesses. I had no plan B. Whether you call it stubbornness, stupidity, or whatever it was, I was like, I am gonna make this business work come hell or high water, irrespective of what's going on around me. And it's served me well. Granted, there's been some tough times, but after a 20-year career in business across these 2 careers, I've now learned that it's going to work out irrespective, and I can wake up every day without fear, without worry, without stress over what may or may not go wrong today, because I know that inevitably there are some things that are going to go wrong. It's just about your approach to how you deal with it. So if your goal is just to survive in business, you will then learn how to thrive through that survivor bias. The second thing which I wanted to share with you is something called action bias. There are lots of people who procrastinate over their business and their ideas and spend lots of time planning and writing things down on paper. But the one thing which they're not doing is going and speaking to prospective clients, doing market research, asking people whether they would actually buy your products or services from you. I.e., getting out there and actually selling something. And I've seen people, very sadly, where they've got into this lack of action, where they're just in this planning procrastination phase for months, if not years. And then they're scratching their heads wondering why the business isn't actually working. For them. Most of the time, this bias towards lack of action or bias towards inaction is because there are fears, which is perfectly natural. It could be maybe you're afraid of what your family or friends might think of you starting out this new business idea, this new venture which you've been thinking about for a long period of time. You might feel that they're going to judge you or take the mickey out of you or whatever it might be. You might— there might be some fear of failure. You might think that you're going to put all this time, energy, and effort into this business and then maybe it doesn't work. For me personally, I've never been afraid of things not working because In my view, that if you've taken some action and it doesn't work, well, at least you know. And in my mind, I couldn't deal with the frustration of not knowing whether it's gonna work or not. I have to try something, and if it doesn't work, great, at least I know and I can move on to the next thing. And I haven't got, you know, hours wasted or days, weeks, months wasted, like, procrastinating over this idea. So I have this natural action towards bias. There are sometimes, though, periods in my life where I slow down that action. And for example, one thing, and I'm happy to share this, I've really struggled with my creativity. It's great that I'm here able to do these videos for my YouTube channel. We turn these into podcasts and we write blog articles and things like that about them. But I am an author. I've written several books, and probably for the last 3 or 4 years I've not released a new book. I've really struggled to take action towards writing the books, and part of that is knowing exactly what it is that I should focus on, which is going to be the 3rd tip which I'll be sharing with you shortly. But one of the things that I realized was I just had too much stuff going on in my my life to really pay close attention to what was important, i.e., writing books. Books have always served me really well in my business, and to put author on my LinkedIn profile, I feel it to be congruent with that. I need to actually be writing books and releasing them. But for some reason, I stopped doing that. And so because I have had this natural bias towards action in the past, immediately I know that there's a problem there. So when I started to ask myself a simple question, which was, why are you not writing books, Robin? There was fear involved with it because I've had several books. They've been very successful. They've done wonders for my coaching business, but for some reason I'm wondering if, well, what if my— I'm afraid. What if my next book isn't as good as the other books? What if it's not as well received? What if I go through the launch process and there's a challenge, a problem with that which I can't overcome? What if I don't get as many positive reviews? What if people don't like the book or don't like me? So there's all these natural fears which came up which have prevented me from taking action, but the great thing is I know that I can reassure myself because I've written books successfully and they've worked. I've had 1-star reviews in the past and I'm still here. It hasn't killed me. You know, and that generally my work is well received 'cause I've got a far bigger audience than I had when I first started writing 10 years ago. So these are again biases towards action, which hopefully if I can remove some of that fear, I'm able to kind of lean into that, write a book, and now my larger community that I've created will, you know, hopefully lean in and support me when my new book comes live, hopefully later on this year. I suppose one of the things to read if you're interested to know more about this would be The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, where he talks about this notion of creating a minimum viable product. Rather than developing this, you know, complete idea with everything in it that you want to have created, he says, well, build what's the minimum viable version of that product that you could take to market in the shortest possible period of time so that you can gather some feedback and then make some improvements based on that. So you get into this idea of this action towards bias is actually do something, take imperfect action, maybe it fails, maybe it does really well, but get feedback, you know, improve on that product or service, and then keep iterating on that. And you can make a far better product in a shorter period of time by constantly iterating, launching, getting feedback, improving, and doing that time and time and time again. The final bias I've got for you is something called Kairos bias, which comes from the Greek philosophy around time, where the Greek people used to compare Kronos against Kairos when it came to So Chronos is this notion that time is always marching forward and you have to pack as much stuff as you possibly can do and fill your time with all of these different actions and activities in order to make the most out of it. Whereas Kairos, or the notion of Kairos, is based around this concept of doing far fewer actions but making sure they are far better in terms of their quality. So in a lot of my videos you hear me talk about the 80/20 rule, Pareto's principle. And you can take that one step further. There's something called the 4% rule, which is the 20% of the 20%. And essentially, my version of the Kairos bias is applying the 4% rule to any of the activities which you do in your business. There are a million and one different things you could be doing in your business, like, from on a day-to-day basis, for anything from like checking your emails to doing content marketing to writing blogs and podcast interviews to going to networking events. To doing your finance and admin, to messing around with your calendar and getting diary entries booked in there, to building landing pages. And the list is absolutely endless. But what I've learned over the last 20 years is that there are a very small number of activities or inputs which contribute to a very large number of outputs and impacts within your business. Therefore, your goal is to remove as many of the inputs which aren't terribly productive as you possibly can do out of your business. Or pay somebody else to do that if you can afford to do it, and focus on the just few activities that you do repetitively which create the, the greatest impact. So to quantify this, I'll give you an example, and I'll also share one of my other videos where I talk about this as well around partnerships. So I did one podcast interview a couple of years ago— yeah, it's a couple of years ago now, coming up for 18 months— with a guy called Ali Abdaal. Now that one single podcast interview led to me getting 3,000 leads for my small, humble coaching practice, and about £250,000 worth of new business in terms of clients that then came and worked with me through the Fearless Business Accelerator. And just to put this into context, to get 3,000 names and email addresses into Email Octopus, the tool I use for my email marketing, probably would have taken me somewhere close to 4 years in order to create 3, you know, to generate 3,000 leads for my coaching practice. So this one interview that was a trip down to London, a 2.5-hour conversation with Ali Abdaal, created a massive amount of noise and impact, helped loads of people in their businesses who tune in to watch Ali's podcast. But it had the same impact as like 4 years' worth of work prior to that. And it absolutely like blew my mind. I couldn't believe like that this one action could just create such a massive positive impact in my business. And so now what I've done is I've stopped doing a lot of the other social media activity that you know, I'd spent 4 years doing, generating those 3,000 leads prior to that, which mostly revolved around sort of social media and various other activities like that one, you know, online digital marketing. A lot of the stuff which you hear a lot of the gurus and experts talk about these days. And now instead I focus on finding other opportunities, other partnerships with people similar to Ali Abdaal. And I have a short list of those people who I'm very intentional about forging those partnerships with. Now I don't know when the payoff is going to come. I don't know whether those partnerships are going to lead to anything. I don't know If, you know, I'm gonna get another opportunity to be on a podcast like I got with Ali Abdaal. Hopefully I will do at some point. And this is the hard part about this philosophy around the, the Kairos bias is these things happen far less. Think of it this way: when you post something on social media and you get a few likes or a comment or a share or something like that, or even a video here on YouTube, it's a similar sort of thing, and you get a few views, it's like Pavlov's dog. You know, the bell rings, you get that little reward each time you get a like or a comment. Or a share. But from my experience, it's really rare actually that, you know, you get all of that noise which then leads on to actually somebody leaning in and you're getting a client from it. It does happen, by the way, but there's a heck of a lot of input which goes in and not much output. Whereas what I noticed is that— and this is what a lot of small business owners and entrepreneurs feed off— these little Pavlov's dog, the bell constantly ringing, the likes, the comments, the shares, the things which kind of pay into our ego on a regular basis. And they get very impatient. They don't want to wait months, if not years, to get an Ali Abdaal-style podcast and 3,000 leads. Because what they need is that little reward now, right now, for putting out a piece of content. And they need lots of those. And they need those to happen every day. I used to be exactly like that. And yes, I still like the plaudits and the accolades. I like people reaching out to me on social media when I push out a piece— a nice piece of content that they found valuable. Valuable. I do get some reward from that, but the way I see it is a bit like— imagine that you, if you want to get wealthy, they recommend you have multiple streams of income. If you want to get wealthy as an entrepreneur in terms of being able to generate leads and interest within your business, you need to have multiple streams of leads and inquiries coming into your business. So having these short-term fixes, rewards like Pavlov's dog, but alongside that also forging these deep and meaningful partnerships that create a much larger impact for a much smaller overall input. Like I said, a train journey down to London, 2 and a half hours of chatting to a friend of mine, and then it goes out as a podcast interview and it creates this huge amount of noise and impact. And I think every entrepreneur or business owner is capable of creating these kinds of opportunities for themselves. It's just that what's not happening is they're not giving themselves, or you're not giving yourself, The time and the opportunity to sit and look at all of how you're spending your time and then the positive impact that those actions are having with that time that you've got. You're not diagnosing enough. You're not spending time just like— you're just busy doing all the stuff that everybody else tells you to do and you think you should be doing. And if you got a little bit more savvy and look for the things with like, you know, rather than the 1,000 pieces of input or action which you take that only lead to 1,000 outputs. What is the one thing that you could do, one input you can do that leads to those 1,000 outputs? And if you can figure out what those are, I mean, look, it's stark, the statistics. I went from probably spending 20, 30+ hours a week doing social media and all of the things all of the experts tell you to do. Now with my partnerships, I invest maybe 2 to 3, maybe 4 hours a week, if that. So a tenth of the time I spend on partnerships and I get far greater results. Imagine if you could have that impact in your business. So there you go, the 3 things. So survivorship bias— stay in business for as long as you possibly can do and make sure you don't have a plan B. Action bias, which is making sure that you are just taking action. Don't procrastinate. If you've got an idea for something, do it. Actually do something. And then finally, Kairos bias, which is where you're making sure that you're using your time wisely, making sure that you're doing far fewer things but which have a far greater impact or output on the other end of it. And that, to me, you do those 3 things and you do that for the next decade, 2 decades, 3 years, you will be such an incredibly successful entrepreneur, you won't know what to do with yourself. It's worked for me. You know, I'm not like a multimillionaire or anything like that. I don't ever profess to have this shiny business with Lambos and expensive watches and things like that. But I see a successful business, the one which I run, has given me time to spend with my family. It's fun because I get to work with incredible people. Yes, I do get well compensated for the work which I get to do. I get to travel. I get to spend Tuesday morning at 10 o'clock walking my dogs or whatever I want to do with my time, spend more time with my family, my children, and things like that. And there are certain sacrifices which you have to make, but these 3 things which I've listed off, you do those and nothing else, you'll have masses of success. And look, if you've got an idea or something that's burning away in you and you do have a genuine fear that you're aware of that's stopping you from achieving that, please, please, please reach out to me. It's called Fearless Business for a reason. My job is to help you fear those things ever so slightly less that are stopping you from achieving your goals. And I do a free 30-minute consultation if you're interested. You can go and find the link in the description below. Jump on, let's have a conversation, let's see what— where those fears are, and let's see if we can start to unlock some of this inactivity that's maybe preventing you from being a successful entrepreneur.