Before we jump in:
Ranking your business at the top of Google search can make all of the difference between your phone ringing with new customers and you struggling to grow.
My team at Bold SEO has cracked the code for local service businesses to do just that.
They’re offering a complimentary on-page SEO refresh (valued at $2,000) to the first 10 people that respond to this email and buy a link/content package with them.
If you’d like an intro to the team at Bold SEO, just reply and I’ll make one.
Note: alongside being a happy customer, I am also an investor in the business.
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Also, are you running a business? I am hosting four live workshops soon on Monday, August 5th.
- How to get found on Google with Barrett O’Neill
- How to grow via paid ads with Anil Yasyerli
- Real estate taxes 101 with Mitchell Baldridge
- How to hire and delegate with Sieva Kozinksy
These are all free to attend. If you RSVP, I will send you a copy of the recording 1-2 weeks after we go live.
I hope to see you there.
Want to be successful? Here are the 3 things that you absolutely need:
If you can build these in order, you will do phenomenally well in life.
- Skills:
The first thing that you need are tangible skills.
And the truth is, most folks don’t have them. You need to become a generalist and get good at the foundations of company building.
In other words, you need to know how to get shit done.
And that’s because building a company that’s profitable and pays you good money each month is hard work. It requires a ton of skills. It requires a certain mindset. It requires knowing how to do a lot of things like sales, hiring, management, delegation, decision making, marketing, ops, etc.
Without experience or practice, you don’t have any of these skills.
Remember, no one is born with the skill of sales or the skill of leading other people. No one is born with the skill of hiring, delegation, or decision making when it comes to business. They all suck at it when they start. But if you have skills that nobody else has, then you are hard to replace and people NEED your expertise. Tangible skills are what the market pays you for. It’s crucial that you build these early on.
So how do you get these skills?
You go out and practice. All of the important skills in life are just like muscles. If you wanted to build muscle like a bodybuilder, what would you do?
Would you just read about muscles and sit at home watching videos of others working out while you think about getting strong?
No. You’d go to the gym and lift weights every day for three hours a day for 3 years straight. It’s the same for business.
At first, if you don’t have any skills, you probably need to get a job and work for someone who does. You need to learn the ropes and figure out which tactics and strategies perform and which don’t by learning from someone who has done it before.
At a job, you can learn about being a manager (or being managed) and how you’d do it differently if it was your own firm.
You can learn about marketing or sales, or decision making or what actually drives revenue and makes money for the company.
You also need to make some mistakes and reflect on those mistakes to get better over time.
In other words, you need to go to the gym and workout!
If you want to acquire skills by building a business, you should start small with low risk and high odds of success. I did that with my first lawn care business in high school.
From that business, I learned about sales, times management, hiring and delegation, collections, marketing, hard work, consistency, etc. These were the foundations for everything I’d do next.
I didn’t get rich from it but I made enough money to avoid working at Subway and I learned a ton of skills that would help me later on.
2. Capital:
The next thing that you need is capital.
Capital lets you hire people, make investments, and, most importantly, take risks.
You will never be an expert operator unless you have cash coming in the door to support investment, risk, and growth.
At the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, you have little to no capital, but from the moment you do, the race is on to build a great company.
You can typically get capital in 3 ways:
- You can make money from a job and save.
- You can start a business and make money from customers.
- You can raise capital from friends, family, or professional investors.
The best way to do it is #2 where you build a business that is customer funded.
If you jump the gun and try to raise money before you’ve built a business, you will have skipped some important steps.
Building something that is customer funded will help you get the skills and the capital for your next at bat.
It’s better than a job because when you are the owner of a business, your upside is still uncapped.
Yes, you could take an $80-100K/yr role to learn the ropes. Or you could build a small business and be pleasantly surprised when it nets you $250K/year after 2-3 years of operating with an enterprise value above $1M.
The best operators play business on easy mode because they have the skills and capital to do so. They have practiced and are GOOD at doing what needs to be done to make money and so they grow.
3. Network:
And as you build up your skills and capital, another funny thing happens. Your network starts to explode.
If you do good work for others, they will tell their friends. If you stay in the game for 5+ years, a lot of folks will know what you do.
Soon, folks will want to hire you or refer you or they’ll want to invest with you as you grow.
And here’s where your network really starts to expand.
The opportunities get bigger and the pay gets better because of the options that your network provide.
Hiring, fundraising, sales, and collaboration all get easier as your network grows.
Eventually, if you know people who know how to run companies you can pay them to run your companies for you.
If you know people with money, you can convince them to invest with you when you want to buy a property or an asset.
If you know people who can work for your companies, they can recruit others to join them. All of it takes a network and you can’t succeed alone.
And lastly:
Your first business isn’t about becoming mega successful. It isn’t about changing the world. You should take “scale” out of your vocabulary.
Start small and make your first business about building up your operational skills, capital, and network.
Start a company that is low-risk. One where you can study companies that do exactly what you want to do. One where you don’t need 1000 customers to win. You just need a small piece of the pie.
One where you can make low-stakes decisions and practice. One where you can make mistakes and survive.
One where you can improve your skills and build up your ability, bank account, and network for bigger opportunities later on.
Then once you have these three things, the world is your oyster for whatever you want to do or build next.
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A few tweets from this week:
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P.S. I’m an investor in a web development firm called WebRun.
They built this amazing investor landing page for my real estate firm and I’m very impressed by their work.
If you need a website overhaul, new website or landing page schedule a call with the team at WebRun to get a free proposal this week.
Onward and upward,
Nick Huber