What I've Learned In Three Years of Entrepreneurship [Podcast Ep. #3]

Transcribed from the episode audio by AI, so it may contain mistakes.

Ravi0:00I'm recording this podcast almost three years into starting my coaching business. And really what I want to do is share some of the lessons that I've learned in the past three years. Now, I don't regret for one moment leaving my corporate job to travel the world and then eventually start my own business. But it's definitely worked out differently than what I planned. And I think by me sharing what I've learned, it might inspire many of you listening to go ahead and start your own business. perhaps a few of you who are thinking about it might almost think twice when you realize that it hasn't all been sunshine and rainbows.

But either way, I just want to share what I've learned. And the way I'm going to do this is talk about seven lessons I've learned in the past three years of wrapping up my travel and then deciding to start my own business as a coach. Now, I'm an executive and career coach at the end of 2017, I'll have wrapped up three years in business. So I've learned a lot and I don't regret making this choice for a second, but I think these lessons will be very helpful.

They're helpful reminders to me just about what it's really like to start a business and I'm pretty sure they'll be useful for you, particularly if you've thought about leaving a comfortable corporate job, maybe uncomfortable corporate job to start your own business and it'll have you get a sense of what it's really like to do so. So that's what this podcast is going to be about. I'm going to split it up into seven key lessons I've learned. So let's go ahead and get started with lesson one.

Lesson one, if you build it, they may not come. I started my journey to build a coaching business almost three years ago. And for whatever reason, I felt like within six months of me starting my business, I would have a full coaching practice. Now, mind you, I was going into this business not blind. I had worked with coaches before in my career. They made a huge impact on my life. I was convinced of the value that coaching can bring. So I knew there was something real here that can make a different.

that was the first thing. The second thing, I had spent almost 14 years working in corporate America. I worked at Microsoft in a variety of roles. I had a pretty big network there and a reasonable network in tech companies all over the country. And I really felt that because coaching was so desperately needed by so many people that within months of me hanging up my shingle as a coach that I'd have people beating down my door to work with me. And so naively, I felt like, wow, within five, six months, I'll finish my coaching training because I did go through some executive coach training.

Within five, six months, I would quickly be able to find a dozen clients, start working with them long term, and very quickly referrals would kick in, and I'd have a full coaching practice. Now, I couldn't have been further from the truth because the truth was I did find a few clients very quickly. And in fact, even before finishing my coaching training, I had posted some posts on Facebook and LinkedIn saying what I was doing, that I was done traveling, ready to start my business. Instantly, I had a couple of people reach out, some old colleagues, and I had a couple referrals come through through my network.

And very quickly, I had a handful of clients. But then something happened. And I stopped getting people reaching out and saying they're interested in coaching. It was crickets. And several months, almost three months went by and I didn't have a single client. Now I was reaching out the people on LinkedIn. I was going to some networking events. I was writing some blog posts and publishing those. And I would get a few people, sometimes one or two a week, reaching out to me. and I'd have a free conversation with them to see what their needs were, but people just weren't enrolling.

They weren't signing up, They weren't paying me to coach them, And so I had this freak out moment where I was five, six, seven months in and realizing, wow, this is going to take a lot longer than I thought. Now, all this is to say that if you just build something, it turns out they may not come take longer than your thinking. And for me in particular, I realized that I needed to be patient and really work on my own skills as a marketer, my own mindset in having confidence in my coaching ability, and really expect that, if I wanted to grow the business, I needed to be proactive and do some activity to actually grow the business and not expect, just because I had a certain level of success in my corporate career, that that would immediately translate over to my new company.

And that's a very important thing that I learned that it doesn't matter what you did in the past, what network you had, what level or title you had in your old company. If you're starting a new company, in some ways, you're starting with a blank slate. So you really need to approach it with that beginner's mind, with a lot of humility, and think about what you need to do to actually build things up and not expect customers to just automatically beat down your door. So I definitely learned that if I built it, they may not come and they didn't.

But then I learned my second lesson That well, success for me has started to happen here. In year three, it did take three to five times as long as I thought, And that is my second lesson If you're building a business rule of thumb, expected to take three to five times as long as you think. This was a mindset that my former boss, Bill Gates well, he was my boss's boss's boss's boss, actually, but when I worked at Microsoft, he had a famous saying that we always tend to overestimate the change that's going to occur in the next year or two, while we always underestimate what's going to happen over the next 10 years.

In my own business, it took me about 18 months just to get to the point where I was convinced this was going to be a viable enterprise. I thought, within initially, wow, within six months, I'd be making enough money to cover my basic living expenses. Turned out it took me three times as long. And here I am three years, almost, to the point where I started my business, from where I started my business. And guess what? I'm finally in year three, making enough where I'm covering my living expenses, put food on the table, and actually have enough money where I can start saving again after leaving my corporate job.

I thought I'd be in this place after six to 12 months. It's taken me almost three years. So I've definitely witnessed how things generally take longer than planned. However, I've now gotten my business to the point where I'm not very concerned or worried that I'm not going to have more clients coming in the door. I'm confident that as I move through, through the months that people will find me, that referrals will kick in, and they're already starting to kick in, and that surely enough, my business will continue.

I'm not nearly as stressed out as I was initially. But it did take time. So in this lesson, really, I've learned, it's going to take longer, be patient, it's okay to dream big, it's okay to have big revenue profit goals, but just assume at the outset, it's going to take a bit further to get where you need to go, but where you will end up will probably exceed your expectations. And that's what I'm looking forward to over the next couple years. Now that I've reached a certain point where I can have a certain level of financial security, I'm looking forward to the next couple years and just continuing to grow and seeing where this business really heads.

Now my third lesson was about automation, specifically, that the temptation to start out in building a business, particularly for me coming from a tech background, was to think about the systems, the tools and the ways to automate things whereby I wouldn't have to spend as much time handling, you know, reaching out to new clients, advertising and getting traffic to my website, handling my CRM system, sending out emails, even collecting payments. I was really thinking about how I would automate stuff really before I even picked the name to my business.

It's so funny how sometimes we can get really caught up on the tools and techniques and technologies and forget that sometimes getting started is the most important thing. I don't know if you've ever witnessed that. Sometimes even when it comes to health and fitness for myself, I can get caught up really thinking about, hey, what's the best new protocol for lifting weights or what new machines or exercises are out there and forget that. Look, just getting started really is what matters. In fact, I'll go a step further and say, I learned it's actually in your benefit not to automate too much at the beginning.

And that sounds counterintuitive. Wouldn't you want to have things be frictionless, seamless, take less time? Wouldn't you want to have your process for onboarding clients be turnkey? Wouldn't you want to use tools to manage your CRM system? Well, I'll actually say at the beginning of your business, don't automate. In fact, live with the pain, have processes that take five, ten times longer than they should. Air on the side of having more high touch engagements with your customers, doing things manually, maybe emailing back and forth over email to decide on meeting times.

Maybe like I did, push your CRM system to the side for a while and start managing your list of contacts in a spreadsheet. Because here's what happens and here's what I learned. When I stopped wasting time, and really that's what it was, wasting times, trying to pick out the right tools and techniques to automate my business and just started engaging, I really started to learn where automation could really help and where it was just getting in the way. Let me give you an example. When I started my coaching business, I started researching all sorts of CRM systems.

I looked at, you know, coming from a corporate background, I thought there must be tools for solo entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs to manage contacts and guess what there are. I ended up subscribing to several of these tools, trying them out, importing my contact lists. I actually spent probably dozens of hours just exploring various tools, trying them out instead of actually engaging with clients and customers. I then realized that when I finally did pick a CRM system, that the system was actually getting in the way, that in the particular system I would use every day it would highlight a few people that I should reach out to.

It would remind me to follow up with previous clients. All those sound like good features, But I felt like it was just getting in the way of me actually sitting down and thinking about who I should reach out for. Sometimes automating things makes us think less, and early in a business it's important to really be thoughtful about okay, who is my customer, who do I want to reach out to? So I ended up pushing my CRM system to the side. I was paying a monthly contract.

I just stopped paying for it and I decided to use a simple list of spreadsheet and I just had a list of all the people that I had worked with, people they knew, people I had spoken with that didn't enroll in my coaching business. And every day, I'd spend about half an hour looking at the spreadsheet and asking myself, who do I think could really benefit from my coaching? Now, that's not the most efficient way of managing a big list of contacts, but what it did was expose me to all sorts of contacts and people that I'd forgotten about, that could be good clients.

And it also helped me really and reminded me just how many people I knew in many different places, many different industries. And if someone were to watch me managing this big spreadsheet with 3,000 rows, tracking who I had spoken with, dates and notes and all that stuff, they would probably pull their hair out thinking, wow, this is an inefficient way of doing this. But to me, having the friction in the system helped. I ended up learning. more about who is in my network. I was more thoughtful about who I should reach out to.

And now I still learned that I don't need a CRM system, that just spending 30 to 40 minutes, couple times a week, running through a spreadsheet, looking at my LinkedIn profile and contacts is enough to help me really figure out who I need to reach out to. And so I've learned that I actually don't need a CRM system. That's just one example. But the same applies to everything. If you're starting out of business, don't go right to thinking about the most efficient way of doing things.

Embrace a little bit of friction, a little bit of pain. It's going to help you learn where you really can use software processes to help and where you really don't need them. It's going to save you a lot of time. And also starting out, especially if you don't have money to pay for various tools and services, you know, if you do have some free time, you know, using your free time is free. So don't automate much of the beginning. Over time, learn where you can automate and then put your investments in those few areas.

So that's the third lesson I've learned in my business over the past couple years. Now let's talk about the fourth thing I learned. And it really is all about mindset. No surprise as a coach talking about mindset is a big thing. But I want to share a crisis moment I face six months into my business and how I got through it. by seeing that it wasn't my strategies or my tools or how I was coaching that was the problem. It was my own mindset and how I thought about my business.

So now let's talk about the specifics of what I went through. Six months into the coaching business, I had a crisis. Clients stopped enrolling. Money stopped coming in. I was really, really nervous. My first gut reaction was, well, it's summer here in the U.S. At the time summer had started, I thought, wow, people are not. not thinking about their careers. They're thinking about enjoying their summer vacations. So I just decided to be patient. Another month or so rolled by still crickets. People were finding me. I was having conversations with them about their career challenges, about what they wanted to achieve in their careers and lifestyles, but they weren't actually enrolling.

Now, serendipitously, I realized through meeting someone who would become my coach that it wasn't about people not thinking about their career. It wasn't about summer vacation. And it wasn't that I wasn't a good coach because I was a very good coach. It was that my mindset and my overthinking things was really, really getting in the way. So I found my coach. I ran into him in Boulder, Colorado at an event for technology entrepreneurs, a startup event. And he was sitting on a panel. and it struck me how he was engaging with people in the audience through a series of questions and answers.

He was the one coach on the panel, the rest were entrepreneurs, and I found that when people were asking him questions, he wasn't giving them answers, but he was actually spot coaching them and helping them really see things differently and realize their own answers that they had within themselves just by asking some really smart questions. So after the event, I went up to him and we had a conversation, and I ended up working with Andrew for quite a while. In fact, he still coaches me on.

What I've learned in working with Andrew was two primary things. The first was I might have been a great coach, but I had a lot to learn when it came to sales and marketing. Yes, I was having conversations with people, but I wasn't actually making clear offers. and when I found people that I knew I could help, I would wait for them to ask me or inquire with me, hey, how can we work together? I wasn't making clear offers, and I wasn't confidently putting myself out there and saying that I could help people if I knew they could really be helped by what I had to offer.

And now looking back, I realize that for anyone with a business, if you're confident that someone can benefit from what it is you offer, why wouldn't you offer your service to those people? But my mindset was very much different. Again, I just had a limited perspective. And Andrew helped me realize that if I believe that coaching is powerful and I did, and I believed I was a great coach, which I did, then I would be more clear and more forthright in offering my service to people, making offers, and really putting myself out there.

And the other interesting thing about working with Andrew and really any really, really high-quality coach is that you have a built-in accountability tool. I mean, when in life do you have someone that really cares about nothing else but helping you live your best life, build your best business? And so in working with Andrew, I was able to identify that, you know, when I was doing the things that I knew I needed to do to grow my business or when I was really not taking care of what I needed to.

So for me, mindset was a big deal. Accountability was a big deal. And my whole lesson was, if you care about building something, be it a business or anything else, find someone who's going to help you see things differently, provide you some honest feedback, and also help you stay accountable. Now, I'm a coach, so I'm biased, but I believe that everyone should find someone to coach them, not all the time, but at certain key points in their life. When they're at inflection points, when they're deciding on career direction, when they're maybe thinking about growing a business or ready to take things to the next level, at those key points, find someone who you can work with to help you really be your best self.

The fifth lesson I've learned in being an entrepreneur is not to let your dreams crush your goals. This is something I've written a blog post about and gone in much more depth than I will in this podcast episode. But there's a tension that we need to have in building a business, which is, one, is having a dream, something we really care about, a big, ambitious goal. But that tension has to be created by actually doing the work and really putting the blinders on and thinking about what needs to happen today, tomorrow, this week, this month.

Now, if you were to imagine two scenarios, two people, and they both have the same capabilities and dream with building a business, but one is spending their time on the tactics, maybe finding their next customer. And the other is spending their time on, well, strategy and vision. Who's going to be more successful? Well, I know the answer. It's going to be the person who's actually doing things. And the truth is, a lot of businesses die because they never get started. And particularly with my background, my entire career was built in the tech space around helping teams figure out big vision for their products.

Who are we serving? What's the vision? What's the three-year plan? What's the big goal, big dream? That was a big part of what my job was. and so when I started my own business, I quickly realized that that type of thinking was all great and I loved to do it, but it wasn't going to get me off the ground. And a lot of the big strategic thinking, it feels good in the same way that, you know, taking a warm bath feels good, but after a certain period of time, you got to get out of the bath and go do the work.

And tactics are, you know, much more clear, much more near-term focus. but ultimately in those initial months and a couple years of a business, that's what's going to give you the compound effect of growing. You know, just the law of compound return shows that if you want to double a business in, say, three years, all you have to do is grow 2% per month will double a business in three years. If you want to double a business in one year, 6% per month will double a business.

So what I really learned is it's fun to dream big. You know, I love going to even conferences where people think about vision, mission, all that good stuff. I think it's great, just like a warm bath is great. But I spend much more of my time thinking much more pragmatically tactically about what I can do today tomorrow this week and this month to help move things forward, to serve my customers, to find new customers, to create content that's going to be evergreen that's going to help.

you know, grow my business down the road, but it's much more near-term. And for me, that tends to help me stay focused on the things that are really going to matter and give me near-term feedback on what's working, what's not working, so I can course correct as I go. So lesson number five for me was not to let my dreams crush my goals. So dream big, spend more time on near-term goals and practical things I can do to move things forward. Now, I just have two more lessons, and I know this podcast is maybe, hopefully you don't feel like it's going too long, but I'm covering a lot of ground, but I want to make sure I really get all these seven lessons out to you now while they're top of mine for me.

So I have two more lessons I want to share with you, and I'll make them quick. Lesson number six is really to let the market teach you. There's a saying that no plan, no business plan or no plan really survives a battle. with reality. I don't know who came up with that, but it's absolutely true. And this doesn't mean you shouldn't plan at all. It actually relates to the idea of not letting your dreams crush your goals. It just means that you should listen to the signals the market is sending you.

Now, when I first started my business, I had a specific idea of who I was going to serve And if you go and read business books, they're going to tell you particularly entrepreneurship books. They're going to tell you to niche down, pick a niche, specific customer, get really clear on what they need and serve them really. Niche down until it almost feels uncomfortable, so serve a very specific segment of the market. Well, what I found was I didn't really know who my niche was. I mean, I thought I did.

I thought my ideal client was a midlevel manager at a startup company, maybe an owner midlevel manager who was looking for higher performance, more, more productivity, creativity, that kind of thing. Now, that's who I thought I'd be serving. In fact, I thought most of my clients would come from the city where I had moved to, because in starting my business, I moved from Seattle to the Denver area. And it turned out it was really wrong. I had all these ideas on how I was going to position and market myself and who my clients were going to be and what they needed.

And it turned out that most of my clients, and to this day, most are not coming from startups, though increasingly recently I've been getting more and more clients from startups. But initially it grew based on people working in big companies, not small companies. People who weren't necessarily looking for higher performance in their job, they were looking to figure out career path and in some cases find their next job or leave their company. And instead of being, you know, C-level senior executives, they were mostly middle managers.

So a lot of who I thought my target market was going to be was very different. You know, even how I wrote things on my website, the marketing copy, my emails and such, really changed as I learned what my clients really needed. In fact, in my first year of coaching, I ended up coaching people beyond who I thought my target would be. I thought I'd coach people mostly in the tech industry. I ended up coaching a medical doctor. I ended up coaching a variety of people that were running all kinds of different businesses that were not in tech.

So my lesson was don't go into a new business thinking that you know exactly who your customer is going to be. Find customers who are going to hire you. Learn along the way and then perhaps over time you will eventually land on. the sweet spot in your market, but be open to the fact that you are probably wrong at the start with who you think your customer is going to be. Now, where I've gone in three years is realize that about half my clients come to me because they're actively looking for new jobs, and half are looking for higher performance.

And about 80% are in a tech-oriented career, software engineering, product management, or perhaps even a sales-oriented role, are tech focused. And then I have a few that are in a variety of different industries. So I'm starting now over several years to finally realize who my market is, but I was definitely not as spot on with that prediction when I first started. So be more open. If you have a certain segment you really want to serve, fine. You can go start with that, but be open to the fact that you might be wrong.

with who the market is. So let the market teach you lesson six. And now we're going to talk about the last thing I learned, which is all about leveraging your talent stack. And I'll talk a little bit about what that actually means. Talent Stack is a term that was popularized by Scott Adams. Scott Adams is the dude who created the Dilbert comic. So I'm a big fan of the comic. It turns out he actually has some interesting opinions on career success as well. And so Scott came up with this term talent stack.

What does it mean? Well, what a talent stack is is that if you think about what you do, it's important to be really good at what you do. In fact, you can even say be world class. Some people like Malcolm Gladwell, Andrews Erickson, say, 10,000 hour rule, you know, to being world class in your area. but for many of us, we struggle with figuring out, okay, what are we world-class in? But what Scott Adams says is we all have a talent stack, which is if you take two, three, four, five different things that you do, interests, capabilities, skills, and you layer them, you stack them, you may not be world-class in any one of those, but when you stack them together, you are the best at the combination.

Now, let me give you an example. When I started coaching, I felt like I cared about it. I thought it was a good coach. But clearly, I was new to the space. And there were many coaches that were, you know, arguably better, could get better results. I wasn't top of the world in coaching. And from where I was starting out, it felt like, well, it might be years before I become world class as a coach. but I realized that I had some other skills. I did have a talent stack.

I had background in the tech industry. Now, most coaches came from HR or even counseling backgrounds. I did not. I came from being an operator in a tech company. So that's a unique thing. When I layer the two together, I have a certain unique skill that sort of elevates what I can offer. But then I also had this other talent area, which is a big part of my life has been dedicated to the study of mindfulness, meditation, and yoga. In fact, for many years, I was a yoga teacher.

So when I layer those things, experience in tech, experience in, you know, healthy body, healthy mind through yoga, and experience as a coach, all of a sudden I have this talent stack that really does not only differentiate me, but elevate my capability. in being really unique and really, I don't know, best in the world, if I could say that, but really unique. And so the thing I've learned in the past couple years as an entrepreneur is, as I coach people, I'm coaching people not just with coaching skill, but based on all the skills I have.

And I realize that I can bring to bear multiple different domains where I have skill, combine them together, and really offer people something that's special, unique, and world class. And that's what I've seen as talent stack and something that I've been able to uncover as I coach and integrate more of my experience into my coaching. Now, for you and your business, we all have talent stacks. So part of it is just being curious about how you do what you do and where your unique talents in different areas combine to make you really best in the world, world class at whatever it is you're offering.

So that's the last thing I learned. and I learned it just through running my business and experiencing how I can draw in different parts of my history and skill set to really help people get a result. So there you have it. Those are seven key lessons I've learned in the past year of running a business. In no way, shape, or form do I believe that I've made it, right? Running a business is a constant, it's not a struggle, but it's a thing that I need to keep putting care and attention into.

I don't know where my next, you know, clients are going to come from, but I know they will show up. I don't know what shape my business is going to take a year or two for now, but I know it's going to grow in some way. And so I hope these seven lessons that I've learned in my past three years is helpful for you if you're either starting out in your business or even thinking of running a business. I do highly recommend no matter what kind of career you have that you experiment with starting a business, whether it becomes a side business or eventually a full-time business or just a muse that you do in your free time.

I think there's a lot you can learn from figuring out where your talent stack is, where you have something to offer, and putting it out into the world and figuring out how to make all that work. So I hope this was helpful for you. If it was, please let me know, share it out on social media. And of course, if you have any feedback you'd be interested in sharing, feel free to write a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to this podcast. It would mean a lot to me and your reviews, no matter what they are, whether they're terrible or whether they're five-star.

I hope they're five-star, but whatever it is, your reviews actually help other people find this podcast. So have a great day and I'll talk to you soon.