Today I am going over the hardest thing you can do! Tune in to find out what it is!
My “aha” moment finally came today. I had one of those just massive “aha” moments. I’ve always thought that I could help people start their businesses. I felt like, you know, I’ve started so many companies, and what I realized just hit me like a brick wall: I can give you pillars to build your business on. I can tell you what you probably shouldn’t do, things to look out for, but I am officially telling you today, I can’t help you start your business.
I really thought about it. If you look at how many of them fail, you have a better chance of enrolling in medical school and graduating as a doctor than you have a better chance than starting a business. Ninety-percent of businesses do not make it. They don’t make it. I don’t think 50% of MIT students drop out after the first year, but nearly 50% of startups are gone in the first year.
It hit me. I have this massive epiphany that I’m helping the wrong person. I could guide you, give you advice…but this is how I kind of frame it. Tell me if this makes sense to you.
If my son said he wanted to join the Marines, what could I do for him? I could say, you know, “Hey listen, you’ll make sure you want to do that. Are you prepared for it? Why do you want to do that? You want to get in a really good shape before you go out to boot camp”. I could give him a lot of really good advice, but I can’t do boot camp for him.
That’s what hit me. The start-up is your boot camp, and if you can’t get through boot camp, I can’t make you a soldier. I can’t make you an officer. The military has figured that out. They realize that there has to be a testing period and I have come to the conclusion that to start a business, that’s your boot camp. I look on Instagram and everybody asks me: is this a good idea? I want to make money. Great. Go through boot camp. You’re going to have to do something. And nobody else can do it for you. That’s it. Here’s your sign. Somebody could give you some advice. Some people can give you things that might make it a little easier for you, but nobody can do it for you, and I’m here to finally tell you is that I can’t. Nobody can do the start-up phase for you. It’s on you. People can give you advice, people can encourage you, people can motivate you, but nobody can do it for you. I’ve seen it because I’ve created little courses where I try to help people and they give up five days in. They give up because they find out they actually have to do something and that it’s not easy to start a business.
And so from this day forward, I’m preaching the doctrine of it’s extremely hard to start a business, which nobody wants to say. It’s not for everybody. Half of you will fail. That’s it.
I Can’t Fix Your Bad Ideas
See, if you have a bad idea, I can’t fix it. I realize that we have people send me ideas all time and 9 out of 10 times, it’s a bad idea, and I gotta spend all this time telling them they have a bad idea. Well, guess what? That’s not my job. That’s why you do a business plan, that’s why you vet your ideas, that’s what you pay to test it. But I can tell you this if you have a bad idea, Tony Robins can’t fix it. I can’t fix it. Gary Vee can’t fix it. We may help it survive a little longer than normal, but we can’t fix it. Bad ideas are still bad ideas
I Can’t Fix Your Bad Location, Industry, or Competition
If you start a business in a bad location or a bad industry saturated with competition, I can’t fix that. You can want to be an entrepreneur and you could even have a good idea, but you put it in a bad location, a saturated area, I can’t fix it. I cannot fix that. So I don’t want to be responsible for it.
I Can’t Fix Your Laziness
If you are lazy, I can’t fix it. I don’t know what you’re going to do when you wake up in the morning. I don’t know when you’re going to get started in the morning, or if people don’t like you, so they’re never going to want to come work for you. I can’t fix that. You’re probably going to fail. If you have no focus and every month you’re grabbing on to the next new shiny object, guess what? I can’t fix that. I can give you advice, I can tell you what not to do. I can give you the basic strategies, but business is kind of simple.
Here, et me give it to you. You have to find a product and/or service that people want and will pay for.
There you go. Oh, that’s heavy. That’s deep. No, you have to have a product or service that people want and we’ll pay for and pay enough to where there’s a margin that makes it worth your time.
You don’t need to go to Harvard for what I just told you. That’s business. Now you can decide what level you want that to be, but let’s reverse engineer what I just said. If you have a product or service that nobody wants. I can’t fix it. If you have a product or service that you sell. And when you sell it, you don’t make a profit. You’re going to be out of business. I can’t fix that, I can’t fix that. So these are the basics. These are the basics, and then you can decide. I see there are five levels and owning a business.
And I’m probably good, if I may be totally transparent, I’m probably good for the first three levels. I always say, don’t take advice from somebody who hasn’t. I’ve never had a $100 million business, but I can take you through three levels pretty well. Maybe there’s somebody else that it can take you to the final two.
The first level is $100k only. That’s your first level as a business owner. That’s when you have a pulse. Your business works and you have a proof of this. Clearly, you have customers that want what you have and you’re doing something right. This gives you some confidence.
When your company brings in $1 million, you have security. You have personal security at that point. Then you get to $10 million. This is where the lifestyle change happens. Your lifestyle changes when your business gets closer to $10 million. Your house is bigger. Your cars are nice. Your vacations change. You’re not worrying about retirement and possibly you can put away a little bit of money so that your kids live well after you, but that’s it. That’s your $10 million. You don’t have a lot of problems because most problems at $10 million you can solve with money. I always say If you got money, it’s not a problem, it’s an inconvenience.
Then you have the 100 million company. Well, now you’re getting into generational wealth. Because if you sell that company, it’s going to leave a great deal behind. I’m able to get you there. Just gotta do a few things. You have to have a bigger market and greater demand.
then you have a billion-dollar business, this is where everything changes. Everything changes when you have a billion-dollar business, and I’ve told you, realistically, how likely that is. Use the illustration, take pennies and run them from Miami all the way to Seattle. Mark one of them with a Sharpie pen. Close your eyes, spin around three times. Pick one up. If you pick the one up with the Sharpie marker on it, that’s your odds of getting a billion-dollar business. But if you do everything changes.
Look at Mark Cuban when he sold his business for $5.7B. It was Broadcast.com, something of that nature. He bought a sports team. Everything changes, everything changes.
So the epiphany today was, I can’t start your business for you.
I can encourage you, I can advise you, but the heavy lifting is on you. You gotta go through boot camp. You gotta stop blaming other people. This one’s on you.
When you get through boot camp and you’ve got a company off the ground and it’s breathing a little bit, it’s off the ground. It exists. It’s a breathing company. That’s where I can really help you.
And that’s where other people can help you, not just me. That’s where other people can help you, but you’ve gotta do the heavy lifting and you gotta stop blaming other people. And that was my “aha” moment.
