Lessons I Have Learned as a Young Entrepreneur – You Have To Surround Yourself Well

In order to become a successful entrepreneur, you have to excel in a number of areas.  As far as I see it, you really only have two options:

1.  Become an expert in everything
2.  Surround yourself with experts that will help you grow your business

Which of those sounds more appealing?  Which one do you think will give you the time, energy, focus and resources necessary to grow your business?  In order to become a successful entrepreneur the fastest and easiest way possible, you MUST surround yourself with quality individuals that have a high level of  integrity, share in your vision for the business and are experts at what they do.  Building this team around you will let you work on your business, not be  an employee in your own business.  Here are some of the amazing people that I have on my team:

- CPA
- Mentors
- Business Coach
- SEO Expert
- Social Networking Expert
- Family & Friends
- Printing Expert
- Referall Marketing Expert
- Marketing Coach
- Grammar & Editing Expert
- Professional Partners with High Levels of Integrity
- Any many others….

This doesn’t even include all of the people that I invest in through books, audio programs, home-study courses and seminars.  Those individuals have also been instrumental in my business and don’t even know it!  Surrounding yourself with these people will make your road to success and a business owner so much easier and exponentially increase your chances for success.  Surrounding yourself with these people will also teach you incredible lessons and learning as  much as possible is a huge key to your success as an entrepreneur.

Lessons I Have Learned as a Young Entrepreneur – This Has To Be Your Passion

If you truly want to be a successful entrepreneur, then you must love what you do and have a passion for it.  You can be rich and famous while hating what you do or not loving it, but you cannot be successful.  Being a successful entrepreneur is loving every second of the time you spend in your business and being willing to do it for free if you had to.  For 99.9% of the entrepreneurs out there, you will have to work incredibly long hours, face huge obstacles, take substantial risks and live/breathe/eat/sleep your business for years and years.  Do you really want to do all of that for something you don’t love to do?

I say this a lot during my keynote talks – imagine how much happier and more successful everyone in the world would be if we all did what we were passionate about.  Imagine all of the lawyers who would be much happier owning a restaraunt or the accountants that would rather have a landscaping company and work in jeans everyday.  Unfortunately, most people disqualify themselves from doing what they are passionate about, with such thoughts as:

- “I’m not smart enough…”
- “I don’t know how to start a business…”
- “I’ll never make any money doing…”
- “If I started this business, people would think that I…”

If you are going to start your own business, you need to do what you are passionate about.  For those of you willing to take the risk and put in the effort necessary to build a successful business, then you absolutely have to start something that you will enjoy doing for the rest of your life.  Owning a business is already difficult enough; by combining it with something you don’t have a passion to do you will almost certainly fail.  Even if you do succeed you won’t love it, so whats the point?  Make it your passion and give it your absolute best!!

Lessons I Have Learned as a Young Entrepreneur – You Have To Persevere

I hate to say it but I believe its best to always be honest – if you plan on starting a business, it is extremely likely that more people will doubt you than will believe in you.  It is also very likely that you are going to face critiscm, a lack of capital, major setbacks, poor decisions and a whole host of other negative occurences with your business.  How you handle these will be a huge factor in the ultimate fate of your business – this is why perseverance is critical for entrepreneurs.  Here are just a few examples of the obstactles I personally have faced and how I persevered through it:

A professional editor and family friend reviewed my book manuscript and told me to take it and put it in my top desk drawrer for at least 3 years so that I could “gain perspective” and then maybe take another shot at the book idea.

How I Persevered – After about 15 minutes of being angry/sad/depressed/furious/doubtful and every other negative emotion you can image, I re-read the letter and came across one sentence that made this letter mean absolutely nothing – the person that wrote this letter to me had a book idea but never had the courage to have it published.  I thought to myself “Why in the world would I ever take advice from an editor that didn’t have the courage to get their own book published?!?!”.  I put the letter, not the manuscript, in my desk drawrer and got back to work publishing my frist book within 3 months of receiving that letter.

A mentor tells me that I’m making a huge mistake by starting my business

How I Persevered – I told him that I respected his opinion and appreciated him looking out for me but that I believed in my heart that I had a message and a business that would ultimately reach millions of people and I wasn’t willing to keep it bottled up inside of me because of the “risks” involved with it.

I have many others as well, some of which were much harder to deal with, that I will share at some point in the future.  Who knows, maybe I’ll write an entire book about some of the world’s most successful people and who they proved wrong on thier road to success.  Do you think anyone ever told Michael Jordan that he should quit basketball?  You betcha someone did!

I used the above examples to show you how I personally persevered through these difficult situations.  I want to use them as an example of the difficulties you could potentially face on your road to becoming a successful entrepreneur.  By no means were these easy situations and I’d by lying if I said they were simply to handle, but I ultimately found it within myself to persevere through the because I knew in my heart that what I had to offer needed to be shared with the world.  I expect you to do the same and believe in yourself no matter what obstacles are in your way of your vision of success.

Lessons I Have Learned as a Young Entrepreneur – You Must Have A Vision

If you want to be successful as an entrepreneur, you have to have a vision.  I call it a “vision of success” in my book – you have to know what your successful future looks like and feels like.  You have to be able to visualize the people around you, the family that you have built, the house you live in, the car your drive, the city you reside, the community service you provide, the timeline for growth of your business and every other detail that it will take for you to feel successful.  Most people have NO CLUE what their vision of success is – walk about to 100 people at the mall and ask them what they want to accomplish in life and what they need to do in order to feel successful.  I bet you at least 95 of them look at your with a blank stare and are speechless; if the number was 99 I wouldn’t be shocked.

So why do you need to have this vision?  Because it is going to guide you to where you want to be in life.  You are inevitably going to face challenges, doubters, obstacles and significant roadblocks that could potentially derail you.  People will tell you that you are insane for starting a business, you might run out of startup money or nobody may be interested in your product/service initially.  Your vision and being well aware of what your future success is going to look like and feel like is what will guide you through these difficult times.  What do I think about when I’m having a tough day?  I just close my eyes and picture myself as a NY Times bestselling author with a powerful message that is able to affect millions of people throughout the world.  I also see myelf surrounded by an incredible family and amazing friends who support me and add an incredible amount of satisfaction to my life.  Once I picture that and everthing else that is in my vision of success I instantly feel motivated and recharged, ready to continue to journey towards my vision.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you must have a clear vision of success.  Business plans, financial forecasts, market analysis and all of that other stuff is wonderful and necessary, but at the end of the day you have to be able to close your eyes and clearly see what your successful future looks like and how it feels to have reached it.