My 3 Biggest Business Regrets Exposed

My 3 biggest business regrets. So I like the saying, it's better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done. And I've done many things, so therefore should in theory have many things to regret. Now, I don't really live in regret, but I get asked this question so many times that I thought I actually would share some content for you on it. My 3 biggest business regrets. And I've considered this carefully. I've thought long and hard about what stopped me starting, what were the greatest bottlenecks, what, um, had I solved this or embraced this would have given me much more viral growth, was there anything I felt I wronged other people or other companies or staff or customers, etc. So I've really considered this carefully, and I've broken down my 3 biggest regrets into 3 things. Number 1: not starting when I had the chance, not starting early enough. I wrote a book called Start Now, Get Perfect Later, and I really believe that you're never fully ready for anything, but I also really believe that You're wildly resourceful as a human being if you allow yourselves to be. And so if you don't start, you don't allow your resourcefulness, your creativity, your innovation, your disruption, your ability to solve problems— you don't allow that to flourish, and you build up resistance and fear, and you lose ground on your competitors. So I had chances to get into business in my teens and early 20s. And didn't properly start a business until really January 2006. So I had chances for probably 10 years before 2006. Now I say this with very much humility, but I, um, do about— this year we're at COVID year, so probably 15 million this year, 21 million best year in training and information. I have tens of millions of pounds worth of a property portfolio. I now have more than a million followers across my social media, and it took me 7 years to build my first half a million and 9 months to build my second half a million. So if I'd have started 10 years ago, I was a deca-millionaire by age 35, so I might have been a deca-millionaire by age 25. I might have been a hundred-millionaire by age 35. I might have a a £500 million or dollar company, and you know, not what it is now. Now, shoulda, woulda, coulda, I can't change the past, but I know I had opportunities to get started, but I was scared, didn't think I was good enough, didn't know what to do. And I now know that you're better to start before you're ready than to try and get perfect before you start. That's why I wrote the book Start Now, Get Perfect Later. So that is business regret number 1. And it goes across the board. It's not just in the business that you start, but it's in the new business that you start, or when you go from local to national or national to global. I should have started my global growth way before the lockdown, and the lockdown forced me to grow globally because I had to grow globally because I couldn't do national events anymore because we were locked down, and I had a physical events business, and that was illegal to run my own business. So I had to pivot into, um, doing, you know, virtual summits and livestream events and Zooms and all that kind of stuff, which I'd done lots of them before but never really globally. And it forced me. So sometimes some disruptions are good for forcing you into decisions you should have made earlier. Okay, number 2 then is I didn't hire quick enough. Now, um, I guess Many of you can relate to this. You know, it costs you money to hire staff, and have you got the time to manage them? Do you even really want to manage people? And can you find good enough staff? Will people do the job well enough? It'll eat into the profit that you've made. It will slow you down. You don't want to be a manager. I don't know, but there could be all these resistance to hiring people. You don't think that there's talent in your location. Well, now you can hire globally and remotely, and you can hire VAs and outsourcers and not just full-time staff members. You can hire part-time or hourly rate, etc. And, um, you know, they say in the self-employed business world, if you want something done properly, do it yourself. But a proper entrepreneur will say, if you want something done properly, give it to someone who's good at it, a specialist. Hire someone. To do the job. You're not going to do all the coding yourself, hire a coder. You're not going to do the editing and the design yourself, hire an editor and a designer. And what an entrepreneur does is become a generalist and then hire and put together a team of specialists. You wouldn't represent yourself, you know, legally in a court, you'd have a lawyer for that. And you wouldn't cut yourself, you'd have a doctor for that. So I didn't hire quick enough, and what happened was I just started drowning in admin. And I almost wore it like a badge of honour.

"Look at me, working 18 hours a day, proper entrepreneur." "You're not a proper entrepreneur unless you're bleeding out of your eyeballs and sweating blood." "And look at me, I work harder than everyone else." "Ain't got time for a girlfriend, ain't got time for any hobbies." "'Cause I'm an entrepreneur working like a motherfucker 24 hours a day, 365 to become an overnight success in 10 fucking years." And then you die of a heart attack.

Yeah, great, fucking great. So this was me for probably, thankfully, only about 2 years. Mark and I, my business partner, ended up hiring my mum and his mum, and they helped us out and they gave us a bit of love. And, um, we paid them minimum that we could, and they got us over the precipice of letting go of, um, admin and allowing them to take some responsibility and not trying to control everything. And now I have, what, 80-odd staff in-house and double that in contractors and outsourcers. So probably realistically employ over 200 people, insourced and outsourced. And, you know, I've got brand manager, I've got 2 or 3 PAs, I've got outsourcers, designers, coders, editors, sales, marketing, events, uh, recruitment. And I, I really just see myself as a generalist, the guy who creates the vision and the mission and the energy to move us towards something meaningful. So you can hire much quicker than you used to be able to. Now there's outsourcing websites, you can hire people per hour, not per month, and there's very specific technical people that do very specific technical jobs for not a huge amount of money. And you need to focus on key result areas and income generating tasks. And I— what you do when you get busy is you're doing a load of admin, and half your time is in admin. So half the time can't be in key result area and income generating tasks. So what gets you started and gets you successful starts to self-implode and self-sabotage because you can't do it anymore because you've got too much delivery. As you're doing the sales and then you've got to do the delivery and the admin and the build, and you're doing everything, and then you spread really thin, and then you work more and more and more and more, and then you get stuck in this loop, this time warp. Okay, and then the third biggest business mistake I would say I made is not being consistent enough for long enough with my personal brand, and I am changing that, as many of you see who follow my work. So I used to, um, do a bit of stuff in personal brand in 2007 and '08. I got involved in YouTube and started doing YouTube videos and built a really good following. It would get thousands of views on my YouTube videos the day I posted it. And then I stopped doing that because I stepped back from the companies and we hired an MD and I wanted to bring in trainers and I didn't want to be the face of the brand because I wanted the company to grow and thought it would be too reliant on me if I was the face of the brand. And maybe if we were going to sell it, you know, I needed to be away from the brand, and Progressive needs its own brand. And so for probably 4 or 5 years, I didn't really do anything in developing my personal brand. I wasn't, um, regular with content, you know. I wasn't on all the social channels. I didn't embrace the new channels when they came out. I was slow to Facebook, slow to Instagram. Years I didn't post on LinkedIn, didn't get involved in Snapchat at the start, really slow on TikTok. Yada yada. And I really regret that because I'd have 10 million followers now, no doubt, maybe more, because of the compounded effect of building the personal brand. And people trust you, you know. People don't trust a big cold corporate entity, they trust you. Now you can have a great company brand, but you also need a personal brand. And your personal brand transcends any company brand, you know. Yeah, Apple's got a good brand, but everyone loves Steve Jobs. Tesla's got a good brand, but everyone loves Elon Musk. So I really regret for those few years in the middle not focusing enough on my personal brand. And that's why it took me 7 years to build 500,000 followers, but then only about 9 months to build my next 500,000 followers to go over that million threshold. And I took all the pain of, um, not being consistent enough across all the social channels from years back and decided now when a social media channel is announced, I'm going to try it. So Clubhouse, I found out about that in December, and now I have nearly 300,000 followers. And I got 250,000 followers in 6 months. Wisdom just came out, and I've been— I've done 13 different rooms now, I think, on Wisdom. I'm now doing a lot more TikTok Lives. I now have a TikTok account manager, a Facebook account manager. I do supporters and stars on Facebook. I'm live across multiple channels. I have a podcast now. Well, actually, my money podcast and my disruptive entrepreneur podcast combined now are about 1,000 episodes in. I'm all over all social media channels and I'm going to stay consistent with them, um, forever, unless anything dramatically changes or the world changes or something like the metaverse takes over. So my 3 biggest regrets in business— look, I don't regret mistakes I've made. I don't regret really things I have done. I more regret things I haven't done. So if you notice, my 3 big regrets aren't falling out with individuals or making mistakes or bad decisions, because Actually, you fall out with an individual, you can make up. You make a bad decision, you can right it. I've actually just had a complaint come in today which isn't really my fault, but it's about my company. I'm just going to fix it. I will just fix it somehow. I'll just get it done. Um, so I don't really mind making mistakes because you can fix them. Um, but not starting early enough in business definitely cost me tens of millions. Not hiring quick enough definitely cost me millions and millions and millions. So I don't want you to make these same mistakes. That's why I'm being open and honest about the biggest mistakes I made. Make sure you share this video if you do you do have people that follow you who are interested in business and entrepreneurship and starting and scaling their business. Um, I definitely regret about the personal brand not monetizing it sooner. So I don't really monetize too much in terms of me doing these lives for you, but I do have supporters, I do have stars. I am now starting to run ads and sponsorships. I'm— I've got a big discussion with a big sponsor at the moment, starting to pop some ads on my podcast, starting to pop some ads on my YouTube channel. And look, it's very British not to want to run ads and not want to upset our watchers and listeners, but I've left millions on the table. I mean, it was 500 episodes before I did an ad. I'd have made £3 million more if I'd have just done one respectful ad on every episode of my podcast. We'd have made millions more on our YouTube channel. We just made £17,000 on our last video on YouTube by putting a couple of ads on it, and I never did that before because I'm so British. And I could have made many millions more just from running a few respectful ads on my social media content. So I definitely encourage you to put your personal brand out there more, put more content out there, and build and develop this personal brand, and you become an asset. And if you'd love to learn how to do that specifically and exactly and tactically, and you'd love to build multiple streams of recurring income from your content as an asset, from digital real estate, then you need to join right now, uh, the Recurring Income Summit. So I have a special gift for you. I want to thank you for following my work. Thank you for following my lives and being a supporter of mine. I really appreciate you. And as a special gift for you coming up quite soon, so you'll need to be quick, I have an event called the Recurring Income Summit. Now I'm going to put the link here in the comments. The link is robmoore.events. So if you go to R-O-B-M-O-O-R-E events. Go there right now, uh, and you can grab yourself a ticket subsidized by me to the Recurring Income Summit. So let me say that again: robmoore.events is the URL. Now, I don't usually give free tickets to my events away, a premium ticket for for this event is many hundreds of dollars. It's live streamed virtually. It's coming up in a few days' time. We do have a second date choice if you can't make it. Um, and get this, I've just agreed to interview the founder of Netflix. The founder of Netflix! I've also interviewed and got the recording of it for the Recurring Income Summit, the ex-global head of Disney. And Disney have masses of recurring income on their digital content. Um, I'll teach you the 4 main, um, digital assets that you can set up that are fast and cost virtually nothing. Like, for example, subscription revenue is one of them. I know 4 subscription sites that you could set up within an hour that don't cost you anything to set up, and you could be getting recurring income through subscriptions. So we'll teach you that at the Recurring Income Summit. I'll teach you the 19 different digital assets that you could set up, and you'll pick the right ones for you. You'll learn all of this, um, on an exclusive 2-day livestream event called the Recurring Income Summit. So if you go to robmoore.events, R-O-B-M-O-O-R-E dot E-V-E-N-T-S— I can see Martina there, she said she's just registered. Go there right now, it's first come first serve. Now, I spoke at an event with 50,000 people registered. Before me was Robin Sharma, and after me was Deepak Chopra. I was in a spiritual sandwich, and there's Rob in the middle. But this event's going to be much smaller because I don't like it when you turn the comments off and you can't engage with all the audience. You can see I like to engage with you here. I can see Adam there in Dubai. I can see Martinez just registered there for my event. So I like engaging with you and getting to know you and treating you like a human being. So in order to be able to run a business effectively to do that and an event where it's interactive, I reckon 300, 350 people max could attend. Otherwise it's just— what does it— we say in England, clusterfuck, flustercluck. So, um, it'd be first 300, 350 on max, and then it's shut. And basically what I'll do is I'll allow you to register, and then I'll just do first come first serve once it's opened up. So if you go to robmoore.events, R-O-B-M-O-O-R-E then I will give you a ticket to that Recurring Income Summit. I'll upgrade you to premium, which means we've got some special gifts. Also, there's a special bonus mastermind session for just premium ticket holders on the morning of the second day. Excuse me. No recordings, no replays, two date choices, one coming up soon but in enough time. And, um, look, right now we're in a bit of limbo in the UK where there's a lot of people getting COVID and maybe there's going to be a circuit breaker lockdown and maybe businesses are going to be really hurt. Inflation's high, cost of living is high, supply chain is hurt, taxes are going to go up. The only way to have ultimate freedom and control is by having digital assets that create recurring income, assets that are low and no cost to set up, that can be set up really quickly You know, cryptos, NFTs, web domains, web traffic, social media, partnerships, collaborations, etc. I can see Amy. Amy's just registered there. Excuse me, I've been ill this week. So go right now to robmoore.events if you want full control of your financial future, if you want low and no-cost digital assets and create multiple streams of recurring relentless income from your personal brand, from your content, from your knowledge. Turn your information into income, your content into cash flow. I can see there, Becoming Unfiltered has just registered as well. Hazel's missed the link, it's robmoore.events. Rob Moore events. Stan has just registered there as well. So go and do that right now because I'm going to end the— this video now. And it's first come, first serve. I've run probably 5,000 events, something like that. We were doing 850 events a year before the lockdown, and I would argue this is in the top 3 events I've ever done. Why? One, because you can access it anywhere on the globe. Two, because it gives you up-to-date strategies of building your digital real estate portfolio. Three, we model strategies that the kids are using— the podcasters, the YouTubers, the modern-day influencers the TikTokers, the people who go live. Collaboration over competition, digital real estate over physical real estate, um, speed over friction. So it's a very innovative event of the modern times. So finally, the link—

I gotta go—

uh, the link is robmoore.events. Jennifer's in. Thank you very much, Jennifer. Please hit the share button and let as many people know about this as possible. My 3 big regrets in business are not starting early enough, not hiring quick enough, and not doing enough or being as consistent with my personal brand. And now I've been consistent with my personal brand this year. It took me 7 years to build half a million followers and 9 months to build my next half a million followers because this year I went all in and was consistent with my personal brand. I haven't done 8 hours a day on my personal brand 1 hour, sometimes 2 hours, sometimes, sometimes a little bit more, but consistent and regular and relentless and persistent and trying all the new channels regardless of if I figured them out or not, or if they're, you know, going viral or not. And, you know, playing a numbers game. Sometimes I go viral, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I have lots of followers, sometimes I don't. Sometimes lots of people watch my life, sometimes not many. So what? I don't care. I'm prepared to look stupid and be consistent and try stuff and fail, and fail publicly. And I can help you with all of that. So make sure you register for the Recurring Income Summit at robmoore.events. Rob Moore events. So hit the share button right now.