23 Important Entrepreneurial Lessons I Learned From My Mentors

The biggest investment in your life is in yourself. So the more you invest in yourself, the more that compounds to make you more money and to get a better life in the future. Hello ladies and gentlemen, James Blackwell here. And in today's video I'm going to be sharing my thoughts on mindset and personal development. So as you can see in the background here, I actually live in Dubai now, so I'm blessed to have such amazing views that I wake up to every morning. And I wasn't always that way. So like it took me a long time to get to where I have got to today. But one of the biggest things was mentors and I realized probably early on in my recruitment journey. So I've run my recruitment agency. For those of you that don't know, I run a seven figure agency in the UK called Ronald James. We specialize in digital and technology recruitment. And what I realized was what gets you from A to B will never get you from B to C. So for those of you that have running a recruitment agency or looking to start one, your skill set in recruitment will get you from A to B and it might get you 200k, 300k in the first year, but then to move it and progress it on from that and you want to get more freedom and you want to actually build a proper business, it takes a different skill set, a different mindset, so you need to upgrade your mindset as well. So one of the things that I did early on was actually upgrading my mindset and that's around your beliefs, your daily habits, your rituals. And one of the most important things, you are the average of the five people you hang around with most, as one of my old mentors, Jim Rohn used to say. And you get stuck in that cycle if you don't move out of the environment that you're in into the right type of environment that you're going to attract what you want in life. It's going to be very hard to become unstuck. So yeah, one of the biggest things I did was learn from mentors and that was by starting off by reading books. So I always read like a book a week and that resonated with me quite early on. And then from there that transpired into like podcasts, YouTube and then starting to invest in actual mentors. People that have walked the path and been and said and done it. And that really was the bit that the catalyst was. Information will get you so far, but actually having someone that can help you get to the next level and really grow your agency in A different way for me. So like I know I knew that I didn't want to have a recruitment agency that was your typical bums on seats, one to two deals per month per recruiter. I knew there was a different way to sort of not automate, make the process as such, but a better way to attract talent inbound into your agency but also to attract the right type of clients that you want to work with. And I call that platinum clients. In the program Recruiter Accelerator that I've helped Mentor over 220 recruitment business owners successfully to six and seven figures. And in there I reversed engineered every single step that I did in my agency, Ronald James, to get it to where it is now. We'll be doing just shy of like running about $2 million by the end of this year and that's without me. So it's self managing agency. So there's tons of agencies that maybe be doing 5, 10 million a year. But a lot of those business owners don't actually have the freedom, they don't have the freedom to live out here in Dubai whilst running your business. From my mobile phone and desktop and a couple of zoom meetings each day and I am really blessed to get there. But that was all about building obviously the right team eventually. But you need to build the foundations and the foundations are a consistent way to get clients. And how once you get that client lead in, do you have a consistent way of how you win them? Exclusive and overturned because you need time to make sure that you can deliver the candidate piece. So it's very important that you have a process to win platinum clients that you're going to come back to time and time again and they're going to help build your business. So when I look back over some of the clients that we've been lucky to work with over the last six years, these were clients that I won four or five years ago and now some of the clients have won, generated over a million 2 million in revenue just with one client. Because that brings me on to another piece which maybe I've got time to go into today. But building out a dream 100, building out a strategy of clients that you truly want to work with that you can build long term partnerships with and increase the revenue per client. So yeah, some mentors has been a big thing for me and I've had over 23 mentors in my lifetime so far and some have been more impactful than others, don't get me wrong. But I learned from every single mentor and even now this year I was just calculating how much I've actually spent in terms of mentors, masterminds and programs to keep learning the knowledge to get me to the next level and the next level. And I've invested over $200,000 this year alone in mentors, masterminds and programs, which to some of you might seem absolutely crazy. But if that's going to help me make another 2,3 million next year, I'm more than happy to invest in myself. And one of my old mentors, Grant Cardone, used to say that and it really resonated with me and it's actually a clip on Instagram that I, I picked out was it's really surprising how many people buy a house so that they're not in the job that they want or the business is not where they want to be and they're investing in a house and renovating it and spending 40, $50,000 or pounds in renovating that house, buying a car that's spending 5, 500, a thousand pound a month to but they can't even afford to pay £500 or £1,000 to get a mentor or program that's going to help them make an extra million, 2 million in revenue. It's absolutely crazy. And one of the biggest things that resonated with me was you've got the biggest investment in your life is in yourself because you will have that skill set for life. You're not going to have just a couple of hacks that's going to make you a little bit more money here and there this year it's, it's over a 5, 10 year period and it compounds. So the more you invest in yourself the more that compounds to make you more money and to get a better life in the future. So yeah, I thought I would share that video. I hope you enjoyed maybe a bit of the Dubai view. Hope it doesn't make me too jealous but I know some of you that are watching this video, it might be winter time elsewhere and yeah, if you like this video just like and subscribe as I'm going to be doing a little bit more in the series out here in Dubai about how to grow your recruitment agency and if you are interested about working with me a little bit more closely and helping you either grow your agency from a one one person solopreneur business to a boutique agency of like 5 to 10 remote employees or in the office employees and still have a three day or four day work week whilst also creating financial freedom, then click the link below, booking a call with one of my team and we'll see what it looks like working together and take things from there. So. Yeah, so if you could like and subscribe the channel, that would be much appreciated and I'll catch you soon.