How To Craft Your Entrepreneurial Mindset

Welcome to the E Commerce Growth Stories podcast. If you worry about your growth, if the business model isn't working anymore, if you're running out of ways to optimize your E commerce, or if you're looking to get the E commerce fundamentals right, then that's the show for you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new episode of the E Commerce Growth Stories. I'm here with Dennis. Hey, Dennis, how's it going?

Good, Valentin, how are you?

I'm fine as well. Very early here in Bucharest. I don't know how it's there in Costa Rica for you.

It's just past midnight.

Yeah.

But anytime is a good time to make money with our E commerce friends.

Let's do that. All right, so in this episode we're going to address a few topics. One of them is regarding the mindset of the E commerce entrepreneurs and also of the E commerce leaders. I think that that's actually the first thing that should be optimized and we'll go further. If we can address other topics, then we'll do that. So, Dennis, what's your take on how to optimize the mindset of an entrepreneur and what is the goal? Right, because when you optimize, you need to have a goal in mind. What should an entrepreneur optimize his or her mindset for?

A great e commerce entrepreneur is optimizing the mission and the meaning of their business. So if you're, you know, one of them is left brain, the other one is right brain, one is artistic, the other one is numeric. And most people tend to be one way or the other just like they're left handed or right handed. So, for example, me, because I'm math oriented, I want to optimize towards maximizing revenue at a minimum. ROAS or LTV or CAC kind of threshold. Right. Kind of like the profit, the number, the equations, all the different parts of the customer life cycle. Right. But the other side is the heart. And that is why you got into business, why people love you, the why behind your own personal story that really connecting with the customer. You hear a lot of stories about wanting to understand your customer and being customer focused, collecting stories, being a cheerleader, doing a lot of the soft things. So I see there's a balance on the left and the right side of that mindset. And us as entrepreneurs, it's very easy to favor one side or the other. Maybe you favor your right hand over your left hand. So we see a lot of entrepreneurs where. Let me give you an example. So you know, have you Ever had a situation where you're just drinking so fast it went down the wrong pipe. Right. Instead of down to the esophagus and the stomach, it went down to the lungs. Right. And that's because when it comes down your throat there's a, I think it's called the epiglottis or is it the duodenum? One side goes to the stomach and one side it goes lungs. So you breathe. Right. It goes to the lungs and when you drink it goes down to the other side. So your mind should just know which side it goes down. So you never have to. Because you don't have two throats, right? You have one throat and it just decides at the bottom which one to go to. Right?

Yeah.

And I find that a well balanced e commerce entrepreneur is able to think about both of those sides. What do you think?

Yeah, I think it's a great analogy and a great, let's say, approach. On the optimization side, I think there are those two sides also. They have things that can be measured and when you want to optimize your mindset, you have things that you can get a grip on, like measurable things. And you also have things that you can't measure. I mean you can try to measure them, but you can't. So one, one thing that you need to optimize for, I think it's your, your own happiness. Because as an entrepreneur you are feeding the, everyone around you with the joy, with the inspiration, with all the good things. Because nobody comes to work. I mean there are people which are coming to work because that's their mental state, yet they're depressed and they don't feel too well and they can, they are staying into these toxic environments. But I think the and foremost is not to fall in the trap where I have fallen for four years in a row to optimize for external things. Because if you optimize for external numbers and if you postpone the moment when you will feel content about your own life, then you are always running for something and you will attract people which are the same as you are and you will not be able to feed them with the, let's say, enthusiasm and passion and good state of your mind. Right. So mainly what I'm trying to state is that at least for me, the things were changing when I have consciously decided that I'm okay whatever it happens in the business and that my internal state is not going to be that affected anymore about the external state because you need to first be happy and then you'll be successful. It's not the other way around. And the trap is that you say, I'm going to be worried of loving myself and being happy about who am I when I'm going to hit that milestone, when I'll have, I don't know, this number, I'll make this money, I'll have this amount of customers and so on. And the trick here, the thin line is that you need those as well. You need to be in this competitive state with your own self, but you need to have a friendly relationship with your friend with your own, your own self.

Last night I want to tell you, I had dinner with two entrepreneurs here in Costa Rica. One of them started a company that became a billion dollar company, BMC Software, right? And he had everything, all the cars and the boats and the ships and all that kind of thing. He was 79 years old and he owned most of the town because when you have that kind of money, you can do whatever you want. And he told me that it wasn't until two years ago, after making lots of money for 40 something years, that he realized he wasn't really being true to who he was because he didn't know who he was and what he stood for. And when he was a young 20 something year old, it was all about making as much money as possible, being very successful, having the outward appearance of success, having lots of women, having lots of sex, you know, nothing wrong with that if that's what you wanted to do. But he found that there were things that were deeper than that around happiness. And instead of going for money and losing happiness, there was a way to balance both. The other person I had dinner with was the founder of Voodoo Donut. So for those of you guys in the United States, you guys know this is a very popular donut chain. And the people who buy from Voodoo Donut, they're probably the most fastidious, most earnest, most hardcore fans of all the donut fans. But you could buy a donut anywhere. You go to the grocery store, you could buy a donut, you go to Krispy Kreme or Dunkin Donuts or Winchell's, you could buy a donut. But why would somebody pay $6 for a donut at Voodoo Donut? It's because of what you said. It was the mindset of this founder. I'm not going to show you his picture because he wants to be kept private. And he's already made a lot of money already, exited, hired a new CEO four years ago. So he's basically a majority shareholder without being involved in the operations of the company, even though he founded it. But I think it's what Valentin said, the way this guy. Even though you might think you have nothing to do with selling donuts, just listen to me for this one thing. This guy who started a donut shop and knew nothing about donuts necessarily in Portland, which was all about being weird and being anti authoritarian and doing things that were just zany, he created a donut shop that embodied his values. So there are things he could have done to expand. He could have offered more things. If he hired an e commerce consultant when he started, what is it, 15 or 20 years ago, they would have said, well, in addition to the donuts, you should offer different kinds of coffee and pastries and you should offer catering and you should do all these things to expand. Right? But he didn't do that. He did the things that were exactly true to what he stood for. His customers loved him so much that there were lines two hours long. Like, if you go there today in Portland, there's lines two hours long just to buy a $6 donut. Isn't that crazy? But it's because of what it stands for. So now I want you guys that are listening or watching, think about your business, your product. There's lots of other people that sell something similar to your product, whether you want to admit it or not. But the reason why they buy is something that's kind of intangible. It's hard to put the exact measure on that. But if you look at my friend who started Voodoo Donut, it's that kind of thing and being consistent. And I know this sounds like branding or making sure that you listen to your customer, but that's not what I'm saying. There's something actually even deeper than that. And that's what this gentleman, I mean, I heard of him before, but until I actually spent a whole evening with him yesterday, did I really get the sense of what it was like talking to him across the table and asking him these different questions? And I'm just trying to pass that on to you because I thought, wow. I read about him in the newspapers for many years. I heard about, I've been to this, I've been to the different stores all. If you've been to a voodoo donut in the United States, you know what I'm talking about. The vibe when you walk in there, right? They're like, people are in there. It's like the soup Nazi. Like, what kind of soup do you want? They move people through quickly. Each cash register does something ridiculous like $5,000 a day, or they just move so much volume. So think about how you balance kind of the heart and the soul, the measurable and the not measurable piece. And think like this founder of the donut shop. What did he do to create? It could be anything where someone's passionate. Maybe they're passionate about their Audi R8 versus a Chevrolet or they're passionate about their iPhone versus, like, what, you know, the brands that people are really passionate about, what it is about that. And maybe because they have a figurehead. Right. Maybe you're the figurehead. But I find that people follow increasingly, especially if they're younger, they follow the brand because there's a figurehead and they identify with that particular leader. Yeah. So I feel like your investment and your mindset is of course, for your health and your balance and your happiness, but it's also a signal to everyone else in your community because you set the standard for everyone else.

Yeah, that's right. And I have to add something here, Dennis. I think this mindset optimization of the entrepreneur, we're going to speak about professionals as well, and experts and employees. I think the mindset of an entrepreneur should be polished every time. I mean, it's not like you said it and forget it and then being hypnotized about the operations. I think the story that you tell to yourself, the character that you're crafting within, is something that you need to optimize over and over again. So the story that you tell to yourself needs to be improved. And you need to look around, you need to get feedback, but you need to stay true to yourself. Because let me tell you my story. So I've been an export kid from Bucharest, Romania. My mom took me to a butcher store, and during the summers, I was playing football all day long. And she said, you got to stay here. You got to learn how it is to work. And I got there. It was that smell, you know, of meat, raw meat everywhere. There were these people which were filthy of blood and whatever. When they got to smoke a cigarette outside, I ran out and I got out, but that memory stick to my head, and that's not the story that I want to have in my life. And it was somehow shocking. And then I've rewrote the story within. So I've said, I want to sell something. I want to be able to sell. And I managed to do that. I want to sell insurance because it's paying well, and I was very poor. And then I made some money out of it. And then I said, no, I got to finish the school, I got to finish the university. I got to do this, I got to do that. Eventually I've started to say, I want to build a company, I want to sell the company. I sold the company. Then I've over and over again I got from this making more money to being happy. And it took me a lot of years to get out of the fear that I'm going to be poor again. So it took me like 15 years I had money and I got into this game of making more and more and more and more money just because of the fear not to experience again those moments when I couldn't buy a pretzel at, in the high school. So. But this story continues. So you're the character and you need to tell to yourself, in those bad moments when, I don't know, the things are not going as you want it to go, you need to tell to yourself what, what's the story? What's the bright future that you're after? And then you need to, let's say, convince yourself that you will make it, because that's going to change your mindset. That's going to make you attract the right people. And another thing is you need to go out there and to talk with other entrepreneurs, other people that made it. You need to surround yourself and you need to, let's say, get out of this your own mind, right? You need to open up to others, you need to, to speak to others, because that's going to allow you to connect to, let's say, different consciousness, right? And for me, it helped a lot to talk with mentors, to get advisors and so on. So the story, it's the thing that you need to tell to yourself. And another aspect, which I think it's crucially important, is once you've told your story to yourself, you need to craft it so that it makes sense for the others. And I think one of the jobs that you can't outsource to anyone as an entrepreneur is your vision. The vision that you're having. So the story and then the vision that it makes sense for your colleagues, for your future employees, for your future clients, for the media, for everyone. That's something that you need to write and you need to articulate. And then with this point of view, you can inform everybody that's going to help your marketing, that's going to help everyone because they will need, they will relate to the vision is like having the blueprint for what kind of company you want to build. And that's something that also need to be optimized every, every now and then. And for me it helped dramatically because we were in a crowded space in the CRO space. There were a lot of competitors. Google Optimize got to the, that got to offer. I mean imagine this. The you buy from, from a company which is charging you that doesn't have a brand. So sounding as Google or you get a free tool from Google and guess what we needed to go get out of this, of that red ocean. And we crafted, we identified what's the opportunity, what the customers need and where is our space. And that's how we crafted the CVO space. And now we have a lot of customers, a lot of agencies coming to us to teach them on this methodology and using our tools. But it all started with the mindset. I could think that we're beaten up and let's, let's do something else. Or we tweaked what we were doing and we've said, okay, what's the next level? How can we include what we already do, like conversion rate optimization and what's the next step? And the next step was kind of easy when I've asked myself the right question. What's the value that it's undeniable to our customers and that we can offer, starting with what we've built so far. Yeah.

Amen. And that's the only the founder, only the business owner can start with that mindset. And I've talked to a lot of e commerce business owners and you know internally what the number one frustration is I hear from them. Tell me it's that the quality of their people, because their people are employees and they're afraid of taking risks and they think of it in terms of getting their paycheck every couple weeks. And therefore if they're spending money on marketing or if they're doing campaigns, it's all about hitting the budget instead of maximizing profit. And I see this with, I talked to a lot of E Comm folks and the number one frustration is always around the people and trying to get the people. I see this in our company, I see this in your company. I see that anyone who doesn't want to admit this, they're lying, right. Is getting the people to think like us as business owners to take risks that may result in mistakes, but maximize like a worthwhile, not a random risk, like a hazardous risk, but like a smart risk. Right, A smart campaign. Something that could work. Because if you don't, and if you guys are hiring agencies, for example, that spend money, then what they're going to do is they're going to say this is a sign that it's a failure. They ask you what the budget is. So let's say the budget is $50,000 a month. Well, if the campaigns are doing well, they should say, I want to spend $70,000 a month. I want to spend whatever maximizes profit. But the campaigns are doing poorly and they've spent 30,000 and the budget's 50. They'll spend another 20 just because they want to say that, oh, we spent the budget. We don't want to be under the budget.

That's the KPI Spending managers. That's how I call them. Those marketing managers are spending managers, actually.

Yeah, in the same way. So they're optimizing to what they believe is safe, which is the budget or a CPC or one particular metric. That's very, very easy. But I find deeper than that is the mindset to get your people to really care so much. So the softer things that we talked about, about what the company stands for, I know an office space to make fun of it, because they say it's 25 pieces of flair. Right? But it's not an arbitrary thing like that. It's about you being such a strong visionary that you inspire the other people to take action. You know, when I was@yahoo. 20 some years ago, we had the dominant mail program, Yahoo Mail. Did you ever use Yahoo Mail? Right. My buddy Barath was the one who built the infrastructure behind it, and we had a great mail team. My friend Yayoi did the marketing on Yahoo Mail. I did the analytics on it. We grew this thing. It was just five or ten of us that grew Yahoo Mail, which is back then was the original free email. And then Google came along and they created their mail. And one guy, Paul Buchheit, wrote Gmail. Did you know that? One guy? And he took the initiative. It wasn't a project that Eric Schmidt or Sergey Brin gave him. He just decided, you know what it was at a hackathon on his own time. He came up with the idea, you know, what if we made something using Ajax and it had threaded email? So put everything into one thread and a couple other features, right? So you would load in the background while you were composing messages so it appeared to be faster. Right? And this one guy took the initiative because Google had still that entrepreneurial, let's go for it, collegial kind of atmosphere. And us at Yahoo, we became so corporate that there was a disincentive to want to take a risk because it would be like, oh, you'd be made fun of. Everyone else would say that was a bad idea. You'd have to create a PowerPoint deck 50 pages thick to present the idea. It would just not be worth your time. But Google gave out free food. We still had to pay. I had to pay $1.75 every morning for my breakfast, which was pancakes with bananas and bacon mixed in. They knew exactly what I wanted. It was a big breakfast, but I still had to pay $1.75. I could get full off of it. You definitely would get full off of that. This big breakfast they would make for me. But at Google, the breakfast was free, right? The lunch and dinner was free. And because of that culture, because of what they stood for, what do you think Gmail is worth? Was it worth it for all the free daycare, free dry cleaning, the gym, all these different things? And they inspire their employees to create things like Gmail. Because this guy could have made his own company, but instead he gave it to Google. And. Right. I mean, do you use Gmail? Right. So many of us, we use Gmail, yeah.

Yeah, a lot of us, yeah. And let's talk a bit about the mindset of the employee, Dennis, because now we have all this, the great resignation. We have all these trends. It's much more easier to switch jobs. It's much more easier to work into a company which is not in your country anymore. So mainly we are seeing this happening. And what I think it's definitely important for an employee willing to have a fulfilled life, because at the end, this life is going to end. And that's for sure for all of us, no matter what kind of role we're going to take in this big game of life, what I think an employee should optimize is to. To leave something behind him, to stand for something which is worthy. Because I've been an employee myself. When I left that company, I worked for them for three and a half years. I got from being an intern to leading a division of training and sales and training for that company in the optics thing. And I had so much appreciation for the entrepreneur there, which was fantastic. And she made me realize that we are humans no matter what kind of roles we have. And I gave them a notice letter of three months so that she can find someone to replace me. My company was doing very well at that moment. My startup was already making a lot of money. But what I've learned is that as an employee, you want to go for the. The manager that will make you reach your true potential. So if you want to optimize your life as an employee, don't look too much for the company, rather for the manager. And if you are going to switch jobs, if you look for the external things, if you optimize for the small things, you can get trapped by very large companies which they have all these huge systems like Oracle and whatever you might find. I'm not saying that you can't find incredible people over there. What I'm stating is that you can't make such a big difference in a large company. So you need to tweak for how much of a difference can I make and how much I can reach my potential. And you can do a matrix of two by two, right? And you can look at what difference can I make, how big is the difference that I can make? Because making a difference is what, what's going to fulfill you and that's going to stick to your head. I mean those moments, those victories, those wins are going to make you build your self confidence and you reach another stand and another state and another thing and you look behind and you'll say, wow, I made that. So mainly that's how I think the mindset of an employee willing to have a fulfilled life should be. What's your take, Dennis, on this aspect?

I think the employee that you were that was always trying to grow and help your manager do well is very rare because that's the kind of employee that is so valuable that companies like ours will have a hard time holding onto you because we've got to give you challenges, we've got to give you a boss that's going to help nurture your talents and we have to be able to reward you and compensate you according to the value that you have. So what I would encourage, and this is a change that we just made in the last year. Instead of having people kind of like employees where they're being paid salary, they're being paid by the hour, we want to turn them into intrapreneurs. Right? You've heard of intrapreneur. So for us, we want everyone in the company to adopt a particular project. It could be a set of customers, it could be a tool that we use, it could be a course that we have. And we want them to have the benefit of being the safety of being an employee and the upside of being an entrepreneur. Because when that product or that course or that client does well, then we pay a bonus and we want them to write a report on how is they nurture their baby. This is their baby. How is your baby doing what does your baby need? You know, what are things that you need? Like you're managing your own little business. And we're here to support all these micro business owners. So we made a shift in the last year to say everyone in the company, even though technically it's not their company, they're what we call P and L profit and loss owner. So each of them has revenue associated to what they're doing and cost associated what they're doing. So then they present their plan. And so I want to treat everyone like they're mini CEOs. And I think that kind of shift where people take ownership is the key to go from like you being the boss, the eye of Zoron that has to watch everything. And there's no way you as the boss can watch everything because sometimes you know the cat is looking over here and the mice are over here playing, right? The employees are not. They know the boss is not watching. He's on vacation or. Now the great resignation. You know, we have people in all these different countries so hard to watch what's going on because we're not in one office. But I find that when you make it clear that you want to reward people, so what I'll do, like some of our people have done some crazy, amazing things in the last couple months and we will pay out these big bonuses and we want everyone to know that we paid out these big bonuses because we want to encourage people who are willing to step up and take that kind of risk because that will flush out the people who are not performing and it will attract more people. Just in the last three months we've hired three more people that are in charge of these different businesses. So I'm not even in charge of any of these businesses. I'm here to support each of these CEOs and I love seeing that. My friend Jonathan Pantales who owns the chocolate factory, he did the same thing. He hired a COO to manage the company, the day to day operations and she basically runs the whole company and she has an equity share and a profit share and then she's allocating. Now they're a mid size E commerce company. They're allocating profits to different people that are in charge of different product lines or different parts of production or customer service. Right. So each of them has a piece of ownership and these different goals that are measurable roll all the way up into the overall company success. And I think that's the best thing. And otherwise if you don't do that, then the employees will just mindlessly do the functional things that they're doing. And it's not because the employees are dumb, it's because they weren't incentivized, they weren't respected. People leave not because they're not paid well enough. They leave because they had a bad boss. Right. They weren't treated well.

Exactly. Yeah. Anyways, what I think we should be also doing is to, to help the audience and the employees here to decide to have a decision system. And I think few people are having, let's say, a conscious approach towards change because people are struggling with toxic environments, bosses which don't care about them, or they simply reach the plateau and they are not aware about what's fulfilling them. They don't have this kind of decision criteria. So they are making. What I think is the main difference between an employee and an entrepreneur is that the entrepreneur is taking many risks and making many decisions. And it's not that an entrepreneur has an IQ of 200 and an employee one of 100. It's not that. It's the, let's say, openness to take some risks and taking some risks allows you to make decisions. And you're going to do a lot of decisions which are bad, but you're going to learn from them. And I think what is important is the number of decisions that you can take per time unit. And as an employee, you don't have too many decisions per time unit against an entrepreneur. So the idea is to have, let's say Instead of making three, four decisions per week, if you have 30, 40 decisions per week, you will learn way more, faster. And if you're here to learn, if you realize that what you need to optimize in order to get get to have a better job, a better car, a better house, to have more independence. It's how fast you will be able to learn. And in order to do so, you need. When you are making changes, when you are switching jobs, when you are getting to another place, the idea is to do this decision criteria. So besides the basics, let's say how well you are going to be paid and so on, how much can you learn? And to ask yourself these questions regarding who am I, right? Where am I going? Because is that saying, which for me it was very impactful, you can't find what you are looking for because you're settled with what you find on your path and that's sidetracking you. And your dreams are not going to be fulfilled because of that. So that's one thing. And another thing is to identify if you're driven out of fear or if you're driven out of passion. So people which are staying at places which are not fulfilling them, I think they are not doing this because of their lack of passion. And the fear is higher than the passion and the desire and that keeps them over there. And what they are trading for this fear, they are trading their life. Because at the end of the day, time is the thing that you can't replace.

You know, your money or your life. And what we want. You were talking before about authority versus responsibility, right? So if, if you have the responsibility of the P and L or a product or you sign up and say, hey boss, you know, here's some. I would really like to, I have some ideas on how we can really improve things to increase revenue, to launch a new product, a new campaign to take care of customers. And I think it's going to increase things, you know, if. Will you let me have, you know, 1% of revenue if I'm able to achieve this goal? Will you let you give me a $10,000 bonus if I can make $100,000 off of this particular campaign or some kind of challenge like that? Yeah, if you're an employee, you absolutely can negotiate things like that, right? Even in big companies, I negotiated things like that. Even at American Airlines, right, And Yahoo, which were both billion dollar companies, I was able to negotiate. I got in trouble with the CFO because I negotiated like equity with some of the companies that we did business with and things like that. But you'd be surprised, number one, if you try to, if you venture out there and say, hey, you know what, I've got a great idea. Because most employees, they're the risk averse, they just want to leave at 5 o' clock every day or whatever it is. And you will get noticed. And even if you fail, people will respect you for having stepped out there on the other side. If you're a manager, if you're an owner and you have employees, a question that you should ask. And this is not, this is not my idea. I learned this from my boss who was the CEO of American Airlines. He said, there's two questions I like to ask my employees all the time. One, what is things? What are things that I have not been doing that you would like me to start doing? Number two is what are things that I'm doing that you don't want me to do anymore? And between those two, they will cover all the things that. Because maybe there's certain skill sets that employee has, there's certain projects they like. Or they don't like. Or they don't like being micromanaged, or they would really like to learn this other skill. Like, that's the best way to uncover where someone might not be in the right position, or they're struggling, but they don't know how to ask that question, or they don't feel like they have permission to ask. So if you get the authority, so you as the employee, if you're able to get the authority because you're willing to sign up for a goal or take a risk or, you know, implement a campaign, then you have the responsibility, Right? The authority means I'm in charge of one thing. The responsibility is, therefore I'm going to make all these different decisions. But if you say I want to make all these different kinds of decisions, but you do it without the authority, then there's no justification because there has.

To be a goal.

Right? Here's the difference I think that we can make. And therefore I'm going to make these kinds of decisions. And that's what a boss, that's what a business owner is always looking for. The last thing they want is some employee who's going to recklessly go out and do all these different things and get into trouble just because they think that they're a better boss. Then there's no framework in which to measure them. So whether you're the boss or a manager or an employee, think about that, right? The two questions, what can I be doing that I should be, you know, have not been doing? And what should I stop doing? And then what are the. What are the goals I can sign up for? And then what decisions and things do I need to do? Do I need to budget? Do I need to hire people? Do I need permission to do certain things or talk to somebody to be able to achieve this goal? It's like a mini business plan. So we call that being an intrapreneur. And I love seeing intrapreneurs inside our company and other companies out there. I find that it's no longer the Steve Jobs that is telling everyone, here's what the big vision is.

Yeah. And I think.

And there still can be a visionary, but the most successful companies have lots of other people that are delegating down, making these decisions. And I love seeing that. The last two years, I think, has accelerated that decision making.

Yeah. And I think you've touched a very important aspect, because if you're an employee, you have these four phases of autonomy. First of all, you just wait for things to happen and you wait for someone to Tell you what to do. Then you ask, you ask what should be done. You know, you take up, take your courage and ask what should I do? Right. Because I know some horrid stories from multinationals where you have people going there and spending two weeks without getting their laptop and they needed to stay there, you know, to stay for eight hours and whatever. And the next step is to propose, right? To propose solutions, to come up with solutions. And the last level of autonomy as an employee is to actually do stuff and just inform your boss, hey, we had these issues and I fix it. And I think the faster you go to the last phase, the more chances you have to be living a happy life as an employee. So you don't need to take all these risk. And there are secretly every entrepreneur wants a lot of entrepreneurs. Secretly we all want some co architects. I mean I know few entrepreneurs which are so stubborn that they want to do everything, they want to keep everything for themselves and they want to be the king that is deciding over the little things. Now we have more open minded entrepreneurs which are actually inviting their people to co found the company, to craft further the company. And I think the outcomes for doing these are fantastic because you don't have to expose yourself, you don't have to take the risk of creating everything as an entrepreneur and you have the safety net of building where someone is taking the risks for you.

Yeah. Amen. And that's the whole balance. Everything is about people and people are the most valuable thing. I know it sounds corny, but we know this not just in E Comm, in any, any other business owner that we talk to. It's always about creating the framework to have the best quality people. But the funny thing is that sometimes we get so optimized in the math of what's on the balance sheet and the cost of acquisition and how much we spent and the margins and all this that we forget the most valuable thing is not measurable. It's our people. And the advantage, the competitive advantage I see in other companies is it's always in the quality of the people. And the quality of people is dictated by the founder. Because anybody who's going to join a company is going to look at that founder, it's going to look at that manager and say, is that the kind of company I want to work at? I know for me the reason why I worked at American Airlines is my first job coming out of college was the CEO was a mentor, right? I would have gotten to Goldman Sachs or I was going to go to McKinsey because management consulting and banking were a really cool thing to do. But just to your point before, this is something I also learned from some other mentors. So this is not my wisdom. But like you said before, when you tie yourself to a good manager and a good mentor, when they'll change companies and they'll bring you along with them, right? Companies come and go, bad managers come and go. But when you find a good manager, do everything you can to help them get promoted and they will bring you along, right? You see this happen all the time. I think that is a shortcut to success is do everything to make your manager successful. Do everything you can to honor your mentors and they can pull strings that you would, they can open doors that you would never even realize.

That's right. So, Dennis, I think we're towards the end, we're ending this session today. We've, we've addressed the mindset, how to change the mindset. As an entrepreneur. The idea is that you have the numerical parts and you also have the invisible parts, right? The hard parts. You need to craft your vision. You need to understand how to do your story, how to say your story to yourself and then to the others. We've also touched the fact that an employee has numerous ways to go up in his career by adding more value, by asking himself, how can I add more value to the company? We talked about the decision criteria of an employee and I guess it was a great session. What do you want to say at the end of this session for our audience? And then I'm going to speak about what's next in our story, in our E commerce growth stories.

Guys, it's important to be focusing on the mindset even though it is something that appears soft and fuzzy. There's so many other people talking about mindset and some people may even put this in the bucket of like Tony Robbins and motivation and abundance and the secret and eliminating self limiting beliefs. Right? You guys have heard about that. But I find in particular for us in E Com where we make money off of selling things digitally, the mindset piece is actually more important because digital is a multiplier more in our industries than any other industry. Because our personal brand gets reflected in our workforce and in our marketing and in our eventual products and services. So I want you guys to think about the things that Valentyn and I were talking about and if you have things that you think we missed, I want to hear about it, right? If you have certain things like oh yeah, that happened to me or this one story happened, we want to Hear what happened with you guys because we have this E commerce growth stories show for you guys. Right? We want to hear what you guys are up to.

Great. I want to share one last thing with you. Back in 2016, we got funded. We invested heavily into go to market. I've bet on the wrong managers to execute the strategy. I got into a place where I thought that everything was falling apart. And I was meditating about how I got here so fast. You know, I've been working so much for this dream and it's all falling apart. And I realized at this moment, moment, at that particular moment, that it's how I decide from now onwards to look at things. And the things were actually great. We had and we still had a lot of money in the bank. I could operate all the decisions because I'm the entrepreneur, I'm the movie director of my own movie. So when you are in these moments where things look like they are not going to work anymore, you just need to go back a few steps, get out of that energy, stop your mind, which is saying that things are falling apart and look at the puzzles and then the pieces of the puzzle and rebuild it. Because it's not over if you don't decide it's over. So you have this power to reborn. You have the power to do the next phase, to get to the next phase of your business. And after that, it all went fantastic. So when I look behind it was that decision that I make that I'm not going to give up then that built my resilience, that made me go out there. And the signal that I sent to my, to my team at that moment was that we're gonna make it. It was hard. We got into this downward spiral, but we're up. And that's what you need to do to look at how you think. For. For myself, it works very well to do journaling. Right. And to look at how my mind is distorting things and to optimize the red line towards the goal that I'm looking for. Work.

Amen. Love it.

Excellent. So that was it for today. Dennis, thanks a lot for joining me and everyone for watching us and for listening to us and we'll see each other at the next episode.