I was very fortunate in life to have taken a progressive route towards success. I climbed my way up the corporate ladder and was then forced into creating a 7 and 8-figure business for myself, only to feel compelled to take on entrepreneurship as a way to facilitate change around me and find more fulfillment in my life. As a result of such a progressive twelve year journey, I had the chance to meet many incredible people along the way; three of who gave me solid pieces of advice that I used to fuel my belief and create laser sharp focus on my entrepreneurial journey.
In 2012, Timothy Sykes, the millionaire penny stock trader, had lunch with me and shared an incredible lesson about disconnecting your emotions from your marketing. As entrepreneurs, we are always very attached to the products we create and represent. Many sleepless months and many endless nights of sweat equity have been invested, making us very emotional towards our product.
While this may be the case and quite ok, it is also the reason we often miss the opportunity to really get the world to accept and get to know our products. Our unilateral vision towards our product prevents us from thinking about marketing from all angles, and instead we expect the world to find the same value we see in our own product without being pushed to buy it.
The reality is that no matter how great your product is, without the correct marketing (even if it’s very far off from your idea of how to market it) no one will ever get to know its awesome effect or use. Learning to disconnect my emotions from how I market my product and instead look for every single way to get every single consumer I wanted to buy it was an eye opener, and the reason I was able to get my book Third Circle Theory to one of the top 100 business books on Amazon.
In 2013, I met with a good friend named Louis Spagnuolo, the chairman of Tiger 21, the Wealth group that Forbes named one of the most powerful and wealthiest on earth in 2014. Louis taught me in about 25 minutes that it’s not about simply creating more revenue, but rather about looking at an existing revenue channel and seeing it from another perspective.
He shared with me how creating seven new revenue streams holds more weight than creating seven sources of income. We are all trained in the conventional idea that revenue streams are always related to a new way to earn a client or a new way to monetize a client. Learning to look at revenue that is potentially unrelated to a client, and instead focusing on data or infrastructure can show you how the very same business you do today could be worth three times its current value. By taking in this information, I was able to reorganize my concierge service, VIP Motoring to go from $2M in revenue to $19M in a short 16-month period.
Finally in 2014, I was reminded of something by my good friend Andy Frisella, CEO of 1st Phorm (a supplement company with a nine-figure revenue), and I say reminded because I had already lived through this myself. Entrepreneurship is about innovation, facilitation, and introducing a new idea, a new way of doing business, or driving change in how people think and act, no matter how good your product, service, or idea. Anything new requires additional time for the market to adapt.
While many people don’t see growth that is significant or seem sustainable in their first three years, or often met with massive resistance, the reality is that it is not a sign that no one is interested. Rather, the world hasn’t accepted it yet, and requires more time to get used to it. When my team and I built Secret Entourage, we struggled for three years with an insane amount of work, no revenue to support our growth, and even negativity from close friends.
Two more years passed and not only are we a 7-figure company that is growing 200% year after year, but we are also a brand recognized for what we originally intended. The goals or objectives never changed, but the market finally accepted that we were a brand that is here to stay.
Hopefully, these three pieces of advice will resonate with you as much as they did for me and will help you on your path to earning your title of entrepreneur.
