🎙 Inventive Journey | Real Stories From the Startup Survival Club

In my view, resilience is the most crucial factor in achieving success. It's vital not to give up, especially if you're passionate about what you're building. A closely related aspect is having a supportive team, which can help you stay resilient through both good times and bad. Therefore, it's crucial to build a strong team and culture that will stand with you through thick and th...

In today's world, building strong relationships and honing your interpersonal skills is essential. Despite this, many people rely solely on technology-driven solutions such as the Google Machine, PPC, and digital ads to generate leads, often investing large sums of money into these systems. While they may work in the short term, such systems are designed to keep you dependent on them, as your...

Consider identifying the individuals you want to collaborate with, as virtual events offer the flexibility to connect with a wide range of people. While it may seem like virtual events can be suitable for anyone, it's crucial to determine who your ideal audience is. Who would benefit the most from your expertise and offerings? Coaches, digital course creators, and others may be able to conduct...

When starting a business, my advice would be to avoid seeking partners. Those two individuals were capable of starting the business without me, so they did not necessarily need me. However, I did write the business plan. Therefore, if you do choose to have partners, it's important to understand the value that each partner brings to the business, particularly when starting out.

I would say that dreaming big is important, but starting small and considering what sets you apart from others is crucial. To begin, focus on building something small that incorporates the core elements of your idea, launch it in the market, receive feedback, and evaluate its performance before seeking additional investment. It's also possible to generate revenue with smaller products before g...

Developing a network of relationships built on motivation, inspiration, and integrity is crucial, as these connections can prove invaluable in the future, even if they don't fulfill an immediate need. My own connection with you came about through Mike at Freefuse, who hosts my learning product. Thanks to my professional relationship with Mike, he had no hesitation in recommending that I get in...

Listening to clients is crucial, so my advice would be to prioritize it. It's important to understand their needs and figure out what you can excel at. Once you've identified your niche, focus on it and keep listening to your clients along the way.

I think the biggest thing for me is to not go it alone. Co-founders, even if they're not co-founders, advisory board members, just advisors, or just people that you can consistently check in with are crucial. The key point is consistency. Put something on the calendar for every week, every quarter, to get that third-party, unbiased feedback or even just to bounce ideas off of. Because someone...

As you're starting out, why are you showing up in the morning and thinking about dentistry? If you're super excited about doing that perfect, majestic filling on a tooth, there's nothing wrong with that. If you want your clinical excellence to be your big thing, and that's how you're going to market yourself, then that's great. You will attract technician-minded people who...

The advice would basically be the opposite of the mistake that I made. You have to get the strategy right. Just be very honest about your skills, knowledge, and the industry that you're passionate about. You have to get everything organized well. It's okay if you have a few components that don't fit in well, but the major ones must be correct. If they're not, don't move forward...

The lesson I had to learn was that I needed my own product and my own say in things. I just have that independent spirit. I'm not against franchises, like you said; they can be really good. I bought a Roof Max franchise with my son last year, or about a year and a half ago. So that's great because he doesn't have that desire to build his own product and create everything. But he wanted...

Patience. You've got to have patience. It's not necessary to take every client that comes your way. There are such things as bad fits. As a small business owner and operator, it needs to be a good fit on both sides. And too often, you see people forcing square pegs into round holes. It just leads to pain, discomfort, and bad reviews online. Don't do it. Don't take it just for the s...

It's about getting paid to learn. So, what I mean by that is, when I was starting Cove, I had done other businesses before that. For instance, I worked for my parents. I didn't get paid to go door-to-door selling potatoes or lettuce or that kind of stuff. It would be great to get paid, but the concept is that there are many companies willing to pay you to learn things. As you get paid to l...

Taking that to an entrepreneur who's starting a business, understanding and having awareness of yourself and the people around you - your partners you're working with, the clients you want to serve - having that sense of awareness and a keen understanding of people will take you really far. Being honest and authentic and really thinking about who you're talking to, what their needs are...

One piece of advice that I would give is to take time to really strategize. Where are you going? And what are the checkboxes along the way? Because there are things that you might wish you had known. When you take the time to find a mentor to talk with about what they wish they had learned so that you can avoid making the same mistakes, it can be really helpful. Let me use the example of SEO. SEO...

Be relentless in all aspects of what you're doing, and I think that I'm really testing this right now for myself with this tech company because three years in, we just went revenue positive with our MVP, a couple of months ago. I can't even tell you how many times I wanted to quit, and I was on the floor in a ball crying, thinking, 'I can't do this. What was I thinking? Who the...

I recommend thoroughly going and speaking to as many business owners as possible, especially experienced ones. If you can, try to find a mentor or coach who can support you, because otherwise, it can be a struggle. I had a great business in web design, and while we eventually became successful, it took us seven or eight years of struggle to get there. If I had sought out books to read, spoken to m...

My piece of advice would be to stay balanced and don't let your highs get too high or your lows get too low.

It's about determining how you're going to provide value, whether that's value to your clients once you actually get them, or how you're going to provide value to your audience and build your influence. There is so much money to be made when you build your influence, and part of creating that trust in the marketplace is providing value and showing them who you are and that you intimately understan...

This really helps me when I stumbled across this insight in my entrepreneurial journey. So what it boils down to is that you dramatically overestimate how much you can accomplish in any single given day, but you also dramatically underestimate how much you can accomplish over a period of time. Simply you by showing up each day and giving it your own.

Get yourself a CRM. You don't need to have a million people come into your business to be successful. You just need a small share of influence, maybe 200 people in your pipeline, 250 people in your pipeline, and serve them very well. The more people you serve and help to become better, they're going to want to do business with you. They're going to want to spread the word about your business. So,...

It's all about the mission. It's all about the passion. And it's all about being a 360-degree leader. You can't do it alone; you must rely on other people. You are bigger, better, and stronger with other people. Being an entrepreneur is not about being number one. Being a leader is not about having everybody listen to you. Both of those things require that you listen to everybody else and work for...

Do it. I've never met one that says, man, I wish I didn't become an entrepreneur or launch that business, or, I wish I would have waited for five years or ten years longer to launch that business. Most of the time, the answer is, man, I wish I would have done it soon, sooner. So there's no better time than the present. Obviously, you want to do it smartly. Make sure you have your ducks in a row. Y...

Surround yourself with like-minded people, not really like-minded, but ones that can challenge you. It's a very lonely game. Ultimately, no one else knows what you're going through besides you and your co-founder. So if you don't have a cofounder and you're going at it yourself, surround yourself with some advisors, with some people who know your industry, especially if you don't know your industr...

I've been talking about this with quite a few people lately because it's a similar thread to some of the conversations. Learn when to fire yourself. It would be the advice I would give you and you're not going to be able to fire yourself for a while when you're a solopreneur and you're just starting and maybe you have one or two employees, right? But you are going to have to figure out along the p...