1. Got more clients before I was ready for them.
Something I’m very good at is gaining clients.
Strangely enough, being very good at gaining clients doesn’t do you much good when you’re not so good at keeping clients. Having too many clients drove one of my startups straight into the ground.
What I learned was two-fold.
First, take special care of your first few customers. This is especially true when you’re running a service business. If you have to sacrifice short term growth in order to keep your first customer, then it’s not a bad move to make. It will pay off down the road.
Second, spend those early days creating processes. Processes make your customer’s experience more consistent. Once you have the processes down, then you’re in a great position to go and grab more customers.
2. Focused too much on info products.
When I wanted to become an entrepreneur, I went straight to Google.
When I went to Google, I asked, “how to become an entrepreneur.”
When the search results came back, they all had to do with creating info products and a personal brand to go with it. And usually, they were selling a course that could help me create the info products.
While there’s money in creating info products like ebooks and courses, there are a thousand other business models you can explore.
3. Did more passive learning than active learning.
Learning is crucial to any type of success, but not as crucial as taking action on what you’ve learned.
I spent too much time reading authors who claimed that the only way to be successful was to read more. Ironically, the more I read, the more I learned about entrepreneurs who spent very little time reading books.
While books are still my go-to resources for leisure and learning about new industries, I don’t bank on the info inside them.
Personally, I felt the exact same when I finished a book versus when I closed a sale.
However, only one of those activities made me money.
The vast majority of what I’ve learned about business came from doing business.
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Photo: Flickr/▓▒░ TORLEY ░▒▓