Terry Blackburn, award winning entrepreneur and author of his new book Be A Lion provides 5 ways to have an unstoppable mindset when it comes to setting up a business:
With everything in life, I believe you should enjoy what you’re doing. What do they say: work is two-thirds of your life or something crazy? Work is a huge part of your life – you can’t escape that. So why not do something that you enjoy? If you don’t, then change it!
I strongly disagree with all these online training companies saying, “Leave your job and start a business.” It’s not a one size fits all. You can’t say that for everybody. Yes, for some people it might be right, but for some people it’s definitely wrong. So, therefore, I feel it’s bad advice to tell you to leave your job without weighing up the pros and cons first and assessing if this is right for you.
Although the lion mindset is to have no limits, no fear, and be confident in yourself and your ability, that does not mean being reckless and foolish. You can still be calculated when you do this – don’t put yourself and your family at risk by making a rash decision. Timing in most areas of life is very important.
Here are 5 ways to have an unstoppable mindset when it comes to setting up a business:
1. Find your passion
Do you know what your passions are? I know some people are 40 to 50 years old and they still don’t know what their true passion is. They still haven’t found out what they truly enjoy or what sets them on fire. I think that’s sad. You should never do anything for money alone, because you can only get so far by just doing something for money without any passion.
A good example of someone fired up with passion is Alfie Best who I recently interviewed for my podcast. Alfie owns Wyldecrest Parks: a hundred mobile home sites with 16,000 tenants and £750 million in property assets. He told me his business only got so far when he was just focusing on money. The second he shifted his focus from money to providing a great quality service for people who want to live in mobile homes, his business really flourished. Alfie was brought up as a gypsy and lived in a caravan growing up which makes his achievements even more impressive. He is passionate about providing a good quality service and mobile homes for people to live in and have holidays in. It’s because of his passion that his business has flourished. He became a billionaire within 20 years.
2. Remember there is no overnight success
It’s important to realise that there is no such thing as “overnight success” in business. People often look on Instagram and Facebook and see these amazing lives that people are leading – often, there are years and years and years of hard work going on in the background to get to where they are today. If it’s happened “overnight” I’d question if it is actually real – unfortunately, there are a lot of bluffers and blaggers online, so don’t believe most of what you see.
Of course, everybody wants success yesterday, for free. They don’t want to pay the price or even half the price that the people have paid who are achieving these things. Sometimes, it’s ruined relationships, health, friendships, or multiple parts of their life to get to where they are. Often, they’ve sacrificed a lot of things, even if it’s just nights out with their friends, meals with a partner, seeing their children growing up.
Everybody wants the rewards, but they don’t necessarily want to pay the price.
Don’t think by setting up a business you’re going to be a millionaire next year and you’re going to breeze through it. There are still going to be no problems and challenges. If you want it all, there is more often than not a huge price to pay upfront.
3.Focus on sales
In every single business, there will be sales or selling. It’s the biggest part of the business as this is what brings in all the money. So you need to get your head around the fact that having your own business is going to involve some sales and selling.
You might have to sell yourself as owner of your business. You might have to sell your proposition and how good you are at what you do and your vision to get investors to start it up. You might have to sell yourself to a manufacturer to make your product as cheaply as possible. You might have to sell yourself to a PR firm so that you can promote your product. It is all about selling.
Salespeople have a bad image because of some car salesmen and double-glazing salesmen. We tend to think of dodgy salesmen with pinstripe suits and coffee breath; that they’ll rip you off, make false promises and they’re just after your money. This is the stereotype that most people think of. As a result, they tend to look down on sales and not want to be associated with it.
Obviously, this might be the case for some of salespeople, but not all of them are like that. If they were, then most businesses wouldn’t last five minutes. Think about it: without sales, you will have no business as no money will be coming in. Without sales, it’s game over.
4. Don’t fear failure
A lot of our fear of failure usually comes from our upbringing. If you’re taught that you can’t do something a lot when you’re growing up, you can do one of two things: you can either believe it or you can choose to prove it wrong.
If you allow yourself to believe it and then instil that as a belief, you will carry that all through your adulthood. It can still be changed, but some people will never get out of that and will always doubt themselves and lack confidence. Then, typically they won’t go on to achieve as much if they’re always doubting themselves.
The opposite of that is people who use failure or criticism as fuel – like I did – to prove it wrong. They use it as motivation. We are all products of our environment to a degree. It could have been your schoolteachers, parents, work colleagues or your friends putting you down, saying you’re terrible at something. If you’re no good at sports and everyone mocks you because you’re the worst at football, you’ll think that you can’t play. A lot of our beliefs are instilled at a young age. You can’t change what happened when you were a child. But you can reframe it and change how you react to it when you’re older. You can even use it as rocket fuel!
5. No such thing as perfect
At the end of the day there’s no magic way to set up a business, there’s no perfect industry, there’s no perfect method. But people think there is. So they watch and they wait. That’s why people buy courses. They want the magic ingredient or the special pill that they can take and suddenly they’re a millionaire.
That does not exist. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you will realise, If I’m going to do this, it’s up to me. I’m not going to get gifted it. It’s not going to be easy. I just have to work my arse off to get to where I want to be and perfect it. I’m going to make mistakes but I’ve just got to get on with it.
I think too many people are stalling on chasing the dream and the passion because they think, But I need to know everything about this industry before I do it. Then, before you know it, five years has passed and you feel like it’s too late.
You’ve got to sometimes just bite the bullet or jump in at the deep end and that’s how you learn how to swim. Forget about the armbands or wanting a life jacket. Forget about worrying if there are any sharks in the water. Just jump in and swim.
Terry Blackburn is an award winning entrepreneur and author of Be A Lion out now, priced £14.99 available on Amazon.