“How do you find a mentor?” One of you recently approached me with a question that I think is relevant to all of us as entrepreneurs, especially those of you who are in the early phases of your journey. You asked: “How do you find a mentor?” If you’re in a position where you are looking for a mentor, there are 3 STEPS you can follow. If you are in a position to be a mentor to others, you can use these steps to consider how you might take others under your wing. The first step is identifying WHO you want as a mentor! Obvious right? But it’s actually not as easy as you’d think. Choosing who you want to be your mentor is a big decision that you should take seriously, and there are a few things you can think about to help you make the right decision. First, think of who is where you want to be in your career, and who is doing the types of things that you want to do? Often times somebody may appear to be a good mentor but, behind the scenes, they aren’t doing the things that you really want to be doing. For example, early in my career I thought I wanted to go into sports marketing, so I worked for a sports marketing company one summer and quickly found out that was NOT something I wanted to do. Sports and marketing are two of my favourite things, so a combination of the two seemed like the perfect fit. On the surface it looked like a lot of fun, but when I actually got into it I realized that it wasn’t right for me. Because the work itself – the actual tasks involved in the daily life of a sports marketer – were not what I was expecting. The same thing can happen when picking a mentor. A person may seem like they are exactly where you want to be in your career, but until you look further to understand the things that person is actually DOING on a daily basis, you won’t know if they are a person who you truly want to learn from. Next, the most IMPORTANT part of choosing a mentor is identifying a person whose VALUES align with yours. There are a lot of great people who are doing incredible things, but it’s very difficult to learn from somebody if their values don’t align with your values. That is my #1 tip for identifying who you want to be your mentor. The second step in finding a mentor is finding out HOW you can be of service to this person. People often think that you’ve got to have a relationship with somebody before you can approach them to be a mentor. …that’s NOT true. The number one thing that successful people DO NOT have is TIME. If you realize that, you can be of value. Early in my career, I worked for a number of people who I wanted to mentor under. …and I worked for FREE. I was young. I had an abundance of time! Being able to exchange your time for an opportunity to learn is a HUGE advantage you have if you’re looking for a mentor. Think, “What is stressing this person out? How can I add a tonne of value?” and, most importantly, “How can I save this person a tonne of TIME?” Be SPECIFIC in how you can help. I have a lot of people who approach me who want to learn from me, and they say, “If you ever need any help, just let me know.” It doesn’t work like that! The easiest and most effective way to get the attention of a mentor is to give them something very specific that you are willing to do for free in exchange for the opportunity to learn. Another tip is to start SMALL. Don’t make huge promises or proposals that might be too much for your potential mentor to even think about at the time of you approaching them. The third and final step if you want to find a mentor is to OVER-DELIVER on your promises. If you find something specific and small to help with like we talked about in the last step, that door of opportunity has been opened for you. You can capitalize on this opportunity by OVER-DELIVERING on whatever it is you offered to do. Then you can seek other things to help with. The more ways you can think of to save your mentor time, and the more you can over deliver on your promises, the more you will earn their TRUST, and they will send even more work your way. To recap those steps: 1) Figure out WHO you want to be your mentor. Make sure they are actively doing the things you want to be doing. Make sure their values align with yours. 2) Figure out HOW you can help them. Approach them and offer to help with small, specific tasks than can save them time. 3) OVER DELIVER on your promises. Whatever you offered to do, do a great job at it and then look for even more opportunities to help. Okay, your turn. Do you currently have or have you previously had a mentor? How did you get connected with them? Are you a mentor to somebody else? What advice would you give to somebody looking to find a mentor? Looking forward to reading your comments below.
“Hustle” and business? “Hustle.” The term gets thrown around a lot in the business world, but where does hustle fit into YOUR business? Some entrepreneurs will tell you that hustling means working longer and harder than your competitors. These entrepreneurs brag about working long hours, pulling all-nighters and never having any time to relax. …I am NOT one of those entrepreneurs. If the only way to be successful is to work more hours, well… that sucks. I don’t know about you, but that’s not why I got into this business. I didn’t start my business to work more. In fact, I built my business so that I’d have more time for the things that matter to me, like spending time with my family. What about you? Are you for hustle or against hustle? Actually, hold that thought. It’s not an either/or decision. We’ll come back to this in a second. In my experience, there are TWO concepts of success. Concept #1 is that hustle = success. Concept #2 is that priorities = success. I believe in Concept #2. In business, you and I have the ability to design our business around our priorities, and this ability increases depending on what stage our business is in. The Survival Stage When we first start our business, we’re doing whatever we can to make a buck. This is what I call the “survival” stage. When I first started my business, I’d been with my girlfriend Amy (who is now my wife… thank GOD!) for a long time, and people would often ask me why I hadn’t asked her to marry me yet. The truth is, I hadn’t asked her yet because of where my business was at that time. Because, honestly, I was okay with surviving off of peanut butter and jam sandwiches but I wanted more for my family. As new entrepreneurs we all start in the survival stage. In this stage, you are closer to the first concept of hustle because your resources are limited so you need to do a lot of the work yourself. You should think about your priorities during this stage, but you might need to make some sacrifices when you’re first getting started. “I was okay with surviving off of peanut butter and jam sandwiches but I wanted more for my family.” The Success Stage The second stage of entrepreneurship is when you start making enough money to cover your living and business expenses. We can call this the “success” stage (financially speaking, anyways). In this middle stage of success, that’s when you and I have a really important decision to make. The success stage is when we can start basing our business decisions around our priorities, so it’s important that we get clear on what our priorities are. The Significance Stage As you gain more success in your business, you become busier. It’s also at this stage that you are working towards the third stage of your entrepreneurial journey, which I call “significance”. The significance stage is when you realize your goal for starting your business in the first place, in terms of the life you want to live and the impact you want to have in the world. It’s getting clear on your priorities that allows you to transition from success to significance, because the significance stage is the embodiment of the priorities you set for yourself when you first started. Here’s a personal example: It’s a story that I’ve told before, the story of the night I decided to sell my business. I was away for the weekend with my family, staying in this cabin in the middle of nowhere. It was pouring down rain and I woke up at 2 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. I couldn’t go outside because it was pouring rain. I couldn’t turn a light on because I didn’t want to wake anybody up. So I just laid there in the darkness with my thoughts, and I started thinking about two books I’d recently read. One was Essentialism by Greg McKeown and the other was The One Thing by Gary Keller, and both books really force you to think about what’s important in business and in life. At the time I was wrestling with coming to terms with what is most important to me. Because the more success you experience, the more opportunities will come your way, and the more opportunities that arise, the more distractions will keep you away from things that matter. And it’s not just about putting in more hours to fight your way through the distractions. It’s about getting clear on your priorities and designing your business around those things so that you can eliminate the distractions altogether. So I remember laying there and wondering, “how do I make decisions in my business? How do I decide what to say yes to? What to say no to?” Here’s what it came down for me: 1) Eliminating Bad Stress We’ve all experienced bad stress, the stuff that keeps you up at night, that makes you anxious and fills you with self doubt and fear of what might happen. Bad stress sucks and i want to do everything I can to eliminate bad stress. 2) Impact My wife and I have a charity where we build schools in Kenya. That’s a big part of our life. But we also want to have an impact on our family, friends, and community. When evaluating a decision, I ask myself: “Will this allow me to add value for my colleagues or community? Will this be a positive experience for my family?” When the answer to either of those questions is yes, I know that it’s probably a good decision. 3) Profitability I’m spoiled because I’ve always been involved with selling software or information products, which both have huge profit margins. I’ve been tempted to join ventures in other markets, but the fact is software and information products interest me, I have years of experience with them and they offer great profitability, so that’s what I stick with. As I laid there in the cabin and worked through my priorities, I finally felt good about myself because I knew how they would apply to some big decisions I had to make. When my wife woke up I turned to her and said, “Amy, I think I’m going to sell WishList,” which was my software company at the time. WishList was our sole source of revenue, so this was a big deal, but I was confident that I could find profitability in a new venture that would be more aligned with my priorities. Ultimately, that was the first step that ended up helping me make some major changes in my life and career that I’m now grateful for. And it’s nothing against WishList or the product or the team, because they’re all amazing, but I just knew in my heart that WishList wasn’t the vehicle that would allow me to have the impact I wanted to have. How this relates to the discussion about hustle: Once you get clear on your priorities, you can take a step back and start being intentional while designing your business and your life, so it’s not just about hustle. It’s about hustling for the things that matter and eliminating the things that don’t. I like spending time with my family, so working long hours just isn’t an option. It works against my priorities and gives me stress. That’s why I don’t travel very often. That’s why I dedicate my time to working on tasks that utilize my core skills and expertise, and I find other talented people to help with the tasks that don’t. That’s why I have restrictions on the amount of time I spend coaching and consulting, and I honour those restrictions even if more work is available. It’s why I limit the number of promotions I do per year and the amount of time I spend selling. And that’s not always easy because saying no to speaking and coaching engagements, saying no to promotions, that’s a lot of potential revenue that you are saying “no” to. But what that does is it motivates me to work much harder on the things that I do agree to, and that’s really where hustle comes into the equation for me. To summarize: Define what your priorities are and base your life and business around them, and when it comes time to do the work that you KNOW is important because you’ve chosen for yourself… HUSTLE! It’s that simple. What about you? Why do you do what you do? If you can’t answer that easily, you need to think carefully about it. Let me know in the comments what your priorities are and what hustle means to you.
“How do I choose which market to enter?” “How do I choose which market to enter?” Someone recently asked me this question, and it’s a GREAT question. This person already has an audience in one market, but it’s not a market that they are especially passionate about. On the other hand, they are extremely passionate about a different market, but they aren’t yet established in that market. Which market should this person choose? The one that they have authority in? Or the one that excites them? This is what I told them (click to watch the video, or read the summary below): When I’m evaluating markets that I would personally like to enter, there are FOUR main things that I consider: 1) Is this a market that I would actually enjoy working with? Is this a subject that lights me up? Is this a topic that I want to spend a lot of time dealing with? Will this market energize me? Am I really passionate about this? It might not always feel this way, but there are SO many ways out there to make money. With the amount of time and energy you need to put into your business, it honestly doesn’t make sense to put all of that effort into something that doesn’t ignite your interest. This is the most important thing that I consider. If the answer is YES, I move on to the next question. If the answer is NO, I stop right here. 2) Does this market have a clear problem or challenge? If they don’t, they probably aren’t seeking a solution. And you and I are in the problem solving business, so if it’s not clear that the market has a challenge or a problem that they are looking to overcome, it will be difficult to offer a product or a service that this market will be interested in. Is there a gap between where this market is and where it wants to be? Can you help them bridge that gap? It’s a lot more work to first educate a market about the problem they supposedly need to solve before showing them your solution. If the answer to this question is NO, once again, I stop right here. If this answer is YES, I move on to question 3. 3) Am I positioned to help serve this market? Do I have knowledge, authority or experience in this market? If the answer is no, I ask myself, is there somebody who I can work with that IS positioned to serve this market? Could I connect and partner with somebody who is positioned to serve this market? This can be a matter of relationships, research, and outreach. If the answer to both of these questions is NO, I stop here. If the answer to at least one of these questions is YES, I move on. 4) Is there enough market potential? Does this market have room for growth? Is there space to build and scale a business in this market? We’re not always trying to build a HUGE business. Sometimes a small business can be the best fit for you and your market. For example, my charity World Teacher Aid has a very small team, only 4 members… and we know all of our donors personally! And yet we’re able to achieve all of our goals and more every year, so growing our team could actually become an obstacle in the way of doing what we’re doing now. If the market is just too small or too niche to give you room to grow, you need to think about this: can you leverage the momentum from your entry point to grow into something bigger? For example, the entrepreneurial market is very crowded and competitive, so when I started at the beginning of this year to build my personal brand in this market, I followed a simple rule: become known for something specific. In my case, it’s helping experts transform their businesses using the membership model. Becoming known for something specific is the fastest way to grow when you are new in a market, and it gives you the potential to leverage that momentum later when you want to expand your market presence. Once again, here are the four questions I ask myself to determine if a market is a good fit: 1) Personal interest – am I really passionate about this? 2) Does the market have a defined problem or challenge, or something specific they would like to accomplish? 3) Is there a market fit? Do I have the expertise to serve this market? Do I know somebody who I can partner with that does? 4) Is there room for growth? Is there enough potential in this market to support my business? Once you get clear on how you define these things, it becomes much easier to decide which opportunities are the right ones for you. Where entrepreneurs get stuck is when they don’t know how to move forward, because they don’t have a clearly defined criterion for deciding what they want, both personally and in their business. Oftentimes we get conflicted, like there’s this market over here with a tonne of potential and we could make a lot of money serving that market, but we’re not passionate about it. And then there’s this other market that lights us up, but it’s small and we’re not sure if we could make money doing it. I’m telling you from experience, 99% of the time the small market that interests you is the one that will work. I’ve known so many people running outstanding business in tiny, obscure niches because they are passionate about what they do. And when you commit this much time to your business, it matters. Your turn: What factors do you consider when deciding to enter a market? How do you decide if a business opportunity is a good fit for you?
A Recent MISTAKE That Nearly Cost Me Millions It was crunch time. We were less than a week away from the biggest promotion we had ever done… … and we realized we had made a FATAL mistake. Picture this: We have nearly 100 people ready to promote. We’re talking about the biggest names in our industry. They had all blocked off their calendars to promote our course. Hundreds of thousands of people would be seeing our promotion. Thousands ready to buy. And yet, we wouldn’t be able to make any sales. Why? The short story is, we needed to use Stripe to process our sales. And the mistake we made was thinking that the big name shopping cart we were using could integrate with Stripe. It didn’t. And that meant we were scrambling. My stomach was flipping. To make matters worse, it was too late to get another merchant account that would work with our old shopping cart (especially one that could process the volume of sales we were anticipating). I was sweating over this… bad. There was SO much on the line. Over a year of planning. TONS of anticipation. All of our partners were ready to go. And now, one FATAL assumption could bring the whole thing down before it even got going. I was feeling so stupid and embarrassed. I mean, it sounds so obvious to double check probably the most important thing of all… that you can actually process the sales. But I made the rookie mistake of assuming everything would integrate. It wasn’t good. And, with everything scheduled to start in less than a week, we needed a solution FAST. We also needed something that would be EASY to set up because we had a million other things to get ready for the promotion. So what did we use? This: https://samcart.com/jv/vid1a/988193 In no time at all, we had our account set up and our checkout page ready to go. (I’m talking within the hour) And everything integrated so easily with Stripe (which is what we were using to process the sales). So our biggest headache ended up becoming the easiest part of the whole process… … THANKS to SamCart. Here’s the happy ending to this story… The promotion was a massive hit. In fact, we far exceeded our goals and welcomed thousands of students into our new TRIBE course. And, because of the way the checkout page was set up (thanks to SamCart’s optimized process), I know for certain that our conversions were higher too. So less stress and more money. That’s a GREAT combo! The crazy part was, the whole thing was nearly a total disaster. We’re lucky we had SamCart. My advice, make your life easy. Go watch this this video. A last minute scramble is never fun. Trust me, it would have been a LOT easier to just start things off the right way. Take care. Stu P.S. If you’re just starting out, this is exactly what I’d use. If you’re a seasoned pro, you definitely want to check this out because there are a few subtle tweaks to the checkout process that are getting massive results. It’s worth a look: https://samcart.com/jv/vid1/988193 Your turn: What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your business? How did you recover?
