Personnel people in the NFL know that people that score above this have more likely to succeed, and the ones that don’t have. And they’ve gone back and looked over the NFL and they’ve looked at all the drafts, and they find that there’s a score that if you want to draft a person, they’d better be in it.
And I think that’s true with entrepreneurs, there are certain people. I remember when I wrote my first book and I was speaking at hotels and people would come up to me and go, I’m really thinking about starting the business, and I would just quickly go through a thing, I go, I don’t think you should. The person had no energy, no energy, they couldn’t have sold. They couldn’t have sold heat to an Eskimo and they couldn’t have given away water in a desert to a action. I don’t think you should, they be all disappointed, but I’m excited about. I think I go, Well, this is what I can tell you. You’re gonna have to be the best sales person in your company based on what you’re doing for the first two years, you’re ready to do that. Okay, you gonna have to hire a team, can you. kind of went through the things you have to do as an entrepreneur, everybody thinks they’re gonna lose their job, take us. What if you lose your job? Can I tell you what to do? Get another job. Then start a business. But get a job first, if at all possible, if you’ve lost your job, get another job, then start a business again, I’d say the 168 hours in a week.
but let me give you what I believe are the seven characteristics of great entrepreneurs and yes, I do think you better have a boat load of these if you want to be a successful entrepreneur.
Number one, you take action without delay, you execute on ideas, you don’t just get ideas, you execute. You take action on them. And
This is the key thing take action without delay. Do you need to be motivated? I joke sometimes about hiring coaches and different things, and I don’t need a coach to tell me. To motivate me, I need a coach to tell me what to do, give me a better strategy or help me in a weakness, but you don’t have to tell me, you may tell me what needs to be done, but you’re not gonna have to remind me to do it, you’re not gonna have to tell me every day to do something because I will take action without delay, it’s just one of them. It’s in my DNA. I tell my business partners, I will do what you ask me to do better than you asked me to do it, faster than you’re expecting.
I repeat that phrase all the time. It
Forces me to do it. so you need to be able to take action without the way, if you’re a procrastinator, I don’t see going to the next level, number two is they’re visionaries, they see opportunities before others, and that just means that they’re not. So we don’t need a ton of data. Okay. We get a vision. We really think it’s gonna work. We start putting together the pieces. Yeah, I’ve met my ideas, but we’re visionaries, we naturally go into with this great optimism, we work back from optimism, we don’t just jump off the cliff, but we’re kind of. We’re looking around corners, we understand that not everything is going to be obvious, great businesses take a leap of faith, and that’s being a visionary that’s seeing further than everybody else sees, and I think you have to have that. Number three, you’re driven. Okay, again, I don’t need to be motivated. I know why I wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place, and it motivates me every single day, I wanted to have my own schedule.
I wanted to build a break up what I needed to do over seven days, if I could do it in the morning, and then get my kids off the bus, go to sports, I went to play golf, I went whatever I wanted to do, I wanted to go, the scheduling was critical to me. Okay. Having control over my income was critical, like Today, I went and looked at by my mom a brand new vehicle, I love that I can do that, effortlessly do that like effortlessly, just. I can do that if I want to.
I am driven, I don’t need you to motivate me, so yes, I think you have to have something that absolutely drives you and you need to be relentlessly driven, you have to be a team builder. I’ve been working my tail off. Do they hire new staff? And I love it. I get so excited about staffing, unfortunately, we’re in a season right now, we’re losing some key people for different various reasons, it happens moving away and different things, but I tell every one of my partners and they’re kind of texting me, just a chance for us to have a better staff, I go ahead. That’s exactly how I think.
But great entrepreneurs know they can’t do it by themselves, look at Mark Zuckerberg, he gets shot in Sandburg to come on the was 23 years old, getting ready to go into a dinner party, must have been a pretty fancy dinner party if he was there, and Sharon Sandberg was there, and she was like the VP, Global Sumter other for Google. Super high position at Google. Let’s leave it at that. She was also the chief of staff for golly, Secretary of Treasurer for the Clinton administration of RA Larry. I’m running a blank, but extremely smart person. We could even at that. And you know how you. Larry Summers, I think it was. Okay, she was her. His chief of staff, we’re talking about a really smart person, but
0:06:58.3 S2: He realizes that he’s lacking something massive in Facebook, they weren’t making money, and he pitched her for months and got her to come on board, that was a game-changing higher. Team deters. You look at Bill Gates, okay, you have to be able to hire really. He brought on Steve bomber, got him out of me, he was at Stanford Business School and got dropped out, paid them 50000 a year in 1980 to be his personal assistant. The average salary in 1980 was 12000 a year. Why their team. Does they know they can’t do it by themselves? Team builders. Why does Warren Buffet 20 years after? It’s basically established as the world’s Grace investor, it’s 1978. He brings on a partner after being in business nearly 20 years, Charlie Munger, team builders, they know they can’t do it themselves, they have this a massive vision, and they need to bring people on to help them, so I think you need to be a team builder. next, they’re great communicators. It doesn’t mean you can give every speech, but you communicate in such a way that people believe your vision and they want to join you with it, and.
Or you have the ability to sell. Again, Bill Gates sell into Xerox. I apologize, I was actually IBM, they sold to IBM and they got them to do where they did the licensing deal, so every time Windows was in a computer instead of just selling out, right. You get all those companies a little mixed up, all right. But you have to be a great communicator. I mean, again, you’re probably gonna be the top salesperson in your company for the first 1 million dollars of revenue.
so great communicator for that, selling an. Or casting a vision. next problem-solving. I share this with my team. I get paid the big money because I solve the biggest problems, so many people, they get stuck. There’s a problem. And they get stuck and they can’t get out of their own way. They just shut down. Hideous-ness, partner, literally, you used to get the runs for three days, we can come in the office, you just wait for me to solve the problem. But you need to be a problem solver. I think team building, solving problems and protecting, ferociously protecting our brand is what I do more so than anything right now. Okay, but you need to be a problem solver. And there has to be a level of confidence. And there’s a difference between arrogance and confidence, confidence, other people can tell arrogance turns people off. Confidence means they want, you know what, I want to run with this person, I’m confident and they’re gonna accomplish this vision. I asked early people that invested in. When I did, I did a direct mail magazine, I had it in 23 cities, and I went back and asked my original advertisers, I walked around with this little pamphlet and I had nothing, and I got Domino’s, Pizza chicken.
Everybody sign on and I went back and asked him, What made you do it? They go, I just knew you were gonna be successful. Think I just knew that if I didn’t do it, you were gonna have my competitor in there. You just had that confidence. I’ve asked people why they joined me on a start-up venture partners, they said, I was just confident you were gonna do it. I was just. Can you just gave that confidence. Again, I can’t explain it, but you know it when you see it, and when you’ve been around somebody with no confidence. You know it when you see it. what I shared with you today was, I said, I believe there are seven. We can argue there’s a lot more and that’s fine, but I know there are seven characteristics that I believe great entrepreneurs have, and I just didn’t want to give you like 10 or 12. Let me just tell you what they were. They take action without the way, they don’t procrastinate to get stuff done, their visionaries, I see opportunities before others, they have a faith and an idea that nobody else might see, they’re driven, they know why they want to succeed, they don’t have to be motivated.
They’re team builders because they know they can’t do it themselves, they’re great communicators, whether it’s selling or casting the vision, they communicate in such a way that sales get made and people join forces with them, they solve problems. They don’t get stuck. And they’re confident. Their confidence, they have a confidence, they believe in themselves and
