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- 3 Must Have Business Skills I Used to Make $100m
Over the course of my marketing career I've generated over 100m in sales
Sometimes people think it's the technical skills that will make or break your successs as an entrepreneur, like running Facebook ads, or being an expert programmer.
But in reality, none of that matters unless you have a foundation of those "soft skills" that determine how good you'll be at everything else in your life.
Without those, you will never be able to launch a successful business, even if you're a techincal expert.
It took me decades to learn and perfect these skills, and sometimes it took horrible mistakes that cost me millions of dollars to learn these skills.
Had I known them earlier I could have avoided some costly blunders and gotten to 100m a lot sooner!
Learn these 3 skills and maybe you can avoid the mistakes I had to make along the way.
Without a boss telling you what to do, it's very hard to hold yourself accountable to get the work done needed to succeed.
Sometimes it can take, 60, 70, 80 hour weeks to build businesses that grow into big profitable enterprises, but when you're the only person who can hold yourself accountable, it can be challenging to actually work those 80 hour weeks.
I've had to develop the discipline to sit down and work those long weeks instead of watching Netflix or relaxing - in the moment it's challenging but in the long run it's very rewarding.
Biting the bullet and working those long weeks actually frees up MORE time in the longrun.
Being able to manage myself, push myself to do the hard things has allowed me to relax and do what I really want to do later down the road .
In managing yourself it's important to build up a level of discipline, so that you're able to push yourself to do the work that needs to be done.
You also need to be persistent.
You will fail, you will get knocked down over and over and over again.
In order to win, you need to be able to take the heat and get right back up again and persist towards victory, even though everything is telling you that it's impossible and you need to quit.
That doesn't mean repeating mistakes and repeating the same failed actions over and over again
It means when you fail, remedy the situation, get up, dust yourself off, FIGURE OUT WHY IT HAPPENED, then organize your life in ways so that it never happens again.
Many make the mistake of not figuring out what happened when they ran into trouble. They just got up, and kept bumping into the wall over and over again without learning from their mistakes.
They're like flies bumping into a window over and over and over again until they die - the tenacity is admirable, but real success takes pivots, realignment, and recalibration when returning from your mistakes.
A mistake can be valuable if you learn from it and use it to help yourself and others make better decisions.
Managing yourself also entails learning how to be bold, not being afraid to take risks.
Fortune favors the bold .
It can be scary launching a brand new thing and going out there without anybody to save you, but it's what it takes to win.
Getting over that fear is paramount to any successful entrepreneur.
To get a thorough understanding on how to actually apply this skill, watch my full YouTube training on the topic:
You've been lied to.
There's no such thing as the "laptop nomad" who works alone and never has to deal with other people.
It's a MYTH that you can find extreme success in business alone - you MUST learn how to manage, communicate with, and work with groups of people to win.
Extreme success requires many hours of work - impossible for one indivdiual.
If you want a construction empire, you can only go so far alone. One person can only lay so many bricks in one day.
If you need 100 hours a day of bricklaying to build your construction empire and you can only do 10, that means you need to hire 9 other bricklayers to hit that 100 hour threshold.
This would be impossible alone.
You must be able to recruit, effectively organize, and retain a team of people if you want any project to go far.
An important part of this skill is vetting people.
Bringing the wrong type of personality into your team can destroy things.
Bringing on social, competent people will reward you immensely.
Getting the ability to assess people and their fit for your team is a must.
You also need the ability to get people invested in your project.
There are an endless amount of work opportunities out there - why YOUR project and not something else?
So why work for your company?
You need to learn how to motivate people to choose you instead of the other 15m opportunities out there, and incentivize them to stay along for the ride.
Effective communication is also a vital part of this skill.
Become an expert at communication and you can manage any group of people.
You must foster an environment of high trust, mutual respect, and authority.
You'll be seeing your team members almost every day for years.
You'll have a very hard time with them if nobody likes being around each other.
Make your environment a hospitable, enjoyable place to work and the rest becomes easier.
To get a thorough understanding on how to actually apply this skill, watch my full YouTube training on the topic:
Persuasion pervades all elements of life, even if you're not an entrepreneur.
Want a good job? Have to convince someone to bring you on board.
For higher salary positions this is almost like high ticket sales.
Want to get into a good school? Gotta convince the admissions team to let you in.
For prestige schools, sometimes the acceptance rate is 5% and lower - you have to convince them why you're better than 95%!
For an entrepreneur... persuasion is everywhere.
Almost omnipresent - persuasion is baked into everything you do it almost becomes unnoticeable, like how a fish might not know he's immersed in water.
You need it to convince talented people to join your team, to solicit investor money, to acquire customers, etc.
Had I not gotten down the foundations of persuasion, I wouldn't have gotten ANYWHERE.
The key here is practice.
This isn't the type of skill you'll develop by just reading a few books.
All the theory in the world couldn't make up for practical experience.
You need to hone this skill by doing it over, and over, and over, and over again until it becomes natural.
It will suck really bad at first, rejection is painful.
But after your first few rejections you'll realize being told "no" won't kill you - and when you really learn that lesson the confidence you get is incredibly powerful.
To get a thorough understanding on how to actually apply this skill, watch my full YouTube training on the topic: