Watch this video to learn the top 6 excuses holding you back from building a successful business and living your dream.
My goal in this video is to get you to question all of your go-to excuses of why you can’t do something. We’ve all got them. I’ve got them, you’ve got them, we’ve all got them. They can range everywhere from getting started in the business, to breaking past a million, to reaching ten million.
Everybody’s got them at different places, and we’re all telling ourselves stories about why something can’t be done. Let me run through some examples here that I hear all the time.
One of the top ones is the economy. “Oh, the economy’s not good, or the economy’s bad, or the economy’s good right now, but it’s too good, so I’m pretty sure that soon it’s going to go bad again, so this wouldn’t be a good time.”
I was a partner in a company I didn’t start in the early 2000s, right after the big bubble burst in technology. That company is around today. It’s an 8-figure company and it’s extremely successful. We started that company during a time when the economy had totally fallen apart and it worked. Service Autopilot was started during a time that we were just starting to recover from the 2008 fiasco. I would describe Service Autopilot as successful and becoming very successful.
“Corporations and big companies, they’re too difficult to deal with.” “I don’t like commercial work because they pay on 30-day terms.” Back to the example of the company in the early 2000s. We were dealing with huge, huge companies in the United States, in some cases, public companies. My business partner had a very clever idea to, when it was time to re-negotiate the contract, to say, “Instead of us taking a price increase this year, we will forgo the price increase but you will pay us weekly. You’ll pay us one week in advance, so every week we will get a check from you.” They took it. We ended up getting that deal with several other very large corporations. They historically don’t work that way.
Another one is, and this is a big one right now for those in California, “There just isn’t any water, so there’s nothing I can do. My business is sort of over. I’m out of luck. I’m screwed.” If you’re a business owner, your job is to react and avoid. I feel for you; I get it. Coming into this year in Texas, we were very concerned about what our water situation would be. I’m really fortunate right now that in Dallas, we’re getting a lot of rain. In my mind, I was thinking, “Okay, what are we gonna do? Are we going to diversify in other services this year?” If I had to and I had a smaller company, I’d pick up and move my company.
If that was the thing that I was passionate about, that industry was the one I was passionate about being in and I didn’t have a very big business, I’d move it. If I had a decent-sized business, I’d diversify into other services where they’re not so water-dependent. It’s a nightmare, it’s terrible, it’s hard, it’s painful, but there’s an option. We’ve always got an option. Trust me, I’ve told myself many times that this is going to be a disaster. But there’s always an option.
The other go-to excuse is, “I don’t have any money. I’ll just have to wait til I have more.” I would argue that you’ll probably never have a lot more money, especially if you’re working for somebody or you’re not making some drastic lifestyle change to start saving more money based on the money you’re making now. In that case, I recommend just getting out there and making your first thousand bucks and doing it on the side. Just start. That’s such a common excuse of “I’ll do it next year when I have more money.” That never, ever happens. You wake up one day and you never started your business.
My favorite, which I have uttered many times myself is, “There’s just not any good employees out there. We can’t find anybody good.” To that, I would say, really? There are really a lot of great people out there. Yes, labor is my number one problem in my business. It’s the hardest problem. It’s the biggest bottleneck. It’s the reason we’re not twice as big. It doesn’t mean there’s not good people out there. It doesn’t mean you can’t find them. There are lots of ways to find them. We have found them. I have the exact same struggles here at Service Autopilot to find people as I do at CitiTurf, because finding awesome developers and finding great customer service people, finding great sales guys, it’s really, really hard. They’re not just sitting out there posting on Craigslist or watching Craigslist waiting for me. But they’re out there. You’ve got to just do more, try harder, and be different than everybody else to go find them.
Maybe there’s too much competition. To that one, I would say that I wouldn’t even enter a business that doesn’t have a ton of competition. I wouldn’t go into a market that doesn’t have competition. Competition proves that there’s a hungry crowd of people that want to buy what you’ve got, that want it desperately and they need it. I believe I can come into a market and provide better customer service, do better marketing, implement better technology, and train my team at a different level than everybody else. Competition doesn’t scare me. In fact, I think competition is a sign that I want to be in that market. Don’t let competition scare you, just know that whether you’re growing in a new market or expanding into a new market, or growing in your existing market with a lot of competition, you’ve just got to be better and different. If you are, you can win that game.
The last one I’ll use, “It’s impossible to build a big business. That was possible 10 and 20 years ago, but today, with all the taxes and the political system and the guy in office right now, I don’t like him, and there’s too many laws and too many regulations. Now there’s Obamacare. This is impossible. I can’t build a company in this. It’s just not what it was.” There are a bazillion people all around us building companies. There’s a lot of people being really successful in all kinds of industries, and they just deal with all that stuff. They figure it out, they figure out how to maneuver and succeed and be successful. That’s what our job is as a business owner. Our job is to find the problems and solve them. That’s how we make money, and that’s how we build great companies.
I just made up a couple examples of go-to excuses to get your brain turning. I’ve got them and I still have them. You’ve got them, we’ve all got them, and they’re hindering us at some level. What are they? Find those things and find solutions to them. Get them out of your life. You’ll be all the more successful and I’ll be all the more successful because of it.
