Age Old Proof That Business Failure Encourages Success
June 13, 2007
There’s no doubt that business failure encourages success. According to Brian Tracy, the average millionaire goes bankrupt 3.2 times before he becomes successful.
It’s never too late to stop trying either. Adam Khoo’s blog has a fantastic post about a businessman who went bankrupt at the age of seventy two. Instead of resigning himself to failure, he went on to build another business, selling it at the age of 82 for $4.2 million. Now, that’s determination for you.
Building a successful business is a hard game to learn, and often, the only way you can learn is by your own mistakes. The problem is, many books which teach you about business success are written by those who’ve never ran a business themselves, so they don’t bother to tell you about the potentially huge mistakes you might make along the way.
Personally, I’ve made some massive mistakes, and often I’ve been hanging on by the skin of my teeth. For example, at one point, I got carried away trying to generate new business, without the staff in place to cope with all the work coming in. We were up to our eyeballs in work, and far too busy to chase debts. At one point, I was owed £250,000 (almost half a million dollars). Naturally, by then, I was struggling, as there was no cash in the bank to pay for the resources we needed to carry out all the work coming in.
This was a bad situation to be in, but you can bet your life that I won’t make the same mistake again. This is why business failure encourages success, because many business people screw up so badly along the way, that they’re determined not to make the same mistakes again.
Looking for a Business Mentor?
June 12, 2007
I’m often astonished by the number of posts I see on forums, by those who are looking for a business mentor. Most of the posters have not even started a business just yet, because they’re waiting for the right business mentor to come along. If this sounds like you, you need to get real. Successful business people tend to value time more than anything else. Time is what helped them to become so successful to begin with. Without time, they would have been unable to build a successful business.
Nobody minds giving up a little bit of time, and a snippet of advice here and there to help a really enthusiastic business start up. But, tell someone you want them to be your business mentor, before you even start your business, and they will more than likely run a mile.
In the past, I’ve wasted ridiculous amounts of time helping friends who want to learn how to build a website, start a business, put together a business plan or brainstorm for ideas. Here’s why I don’t do it anymore. In every single case, when I followed up a couple of weeks later, not one single one of those people had taken further action. A few months, even a year later, they just hadn’t got round to it, or didn’t have the time. Can you imagine how frustrating it can be to give up your time to help others, then they can’t be bothered to follow through?
So, if you’re waiting round for a business mentor - don’t waste your time or theirs. Launch your business, read and learn as much as you can about it. Surround yourself with other successful business people, network with them, socialise in the same places. And when an entrepreneur does something wonderful, write and tell them you think they’re great. Do all these things, and when people see that you’re passionate and enthusiastic about what you’re doing, they’ll usually be more than happy to offer snippets of advice, and stories of their experience.Â
Just don’t go looking for someone to do all the hard work for you. It doesn’t work like that and you shouldn’t expect it to.
If You Are Reading This You Are Lucky
June 11, 2007
If you’re considering starting a business, you may be wondering whether your success will depend upon luck or the chances you take. Consider this. Everything you will encounter in life is half luck and half chance.Â
The place you are born is down to luck. If you’re lucky enough to be reading this now, the chances are, you were born in a reasonably developed country, with adequate food, water and warmth to sustain your basic needs. What you do now is down to chance. You’ve been lucky so far, so what do you have to lose?
F… website design - you need traffic
June 10, 2007
If you’re searching for the perfect website design, get your head out of the sand, and concentrate on finding ideas for driving traffic to a website.
You may long to have a website that’s as aesthetically pleasing as the Sistine Chapel, but just like the Sistine Chapel, if nobody knew how get there, it wouldn’t matter how great your site was. Also, Michaelangelo took over four years to paint the ceiling of the chapel.  I’m assuming you don’t want to spend four years designing your website, so do yourself a favour, and improve the design as you go, but concentrate on driving traffic to your website right now.
You may have some vague idea of how to drive traffic to your site, or you may even have implemented quite a few ideas that are working ok. The bottom line is, if you’re not ranking on the first page of google for your main keywords, then you need some additional help.
I’ve tried plenty of tricks tips, gadgets and gizmos for driving traffic to my websites, and I highly recommend Aaron Wall’s SEO book before anything else, for these reasons:
SEO book is packed with 331 pages of useful info; the writer knows what he’s talking about and it shows through in the content; Aaron doesn’t just tell you what to do, he explains why and how things work; he also tells you what not to do and why; the book comes with free updates, the book ranks on the first page of Google for SEO - I’ve seen a heap of SEO tools that don’t even rank on page 3 or 4. If they can’t even get a decent ranking for their own search terms, how on earth can they help yours.
You could waste hundreds of hours searching forums for SEO information, then trying to decipher what is useful and what is garbage, or you could get SEO book now. Whatever you decide to do, stop f…… about with your website design now, and concentrate on driving traffic there.
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