facebook-b twitter-b youtube-b pinterest-b instagram-b

Huge Mistakes I Made As An Entrepreneur

Kris Krohn here with Limitless TV. Today, I’m going to talk about the dumbest mistakes I made my first years as an entrepreneur. One of the scariest moments of my life, I had made an investment, I had borrowed a million dollars, I had put it into an investment that wasn’t working and I borrowed the money from a Jewish Iranian which I only found out later was a scary combination because this individual would call me up and they would have these passive-aggressive kind of threatening conversations with me and I know what it feels like to be behind the 8-ball with a large sum of money and scared because the person on the other end of the line was saying these things like, “Kris, you know how important it is for me to get my money, right? You know the kind of things that might happen if I don’t get my money, right?” And that was a period of my life many years ago where I was living in fear and I’ll never forget one day being at my work office and I saw this black suburban pull up that it looked new, it was all tinted windows and these four Middle Eastern men got out in sharp dressed suits, black sunglasses and briefcases and I kid you not, the first thought going through my mind was, “They’re here to kill me. I’m getting knocked off like my life is not worth a million dollars and I haven’t found a way to pay this thing back.” And I was terrified and I remember that they came walking in the building and I was sitting in my office and I saw them, the four of them approached the front desk and I just kind of peeked, literally bending down, crouching low, looking down the hall peeking wondering, were they going to be sent my way? Should I be in this office? Should I run? What should I do? Only to find out that they were there during a lunch break to sell custom-made suits. Oh, man. It was seriously one of the biggest reliefs of my life. I’ve made many mistakes as an entrepreneur and there’s a lot of value that I’ve created for a lot of people and today I want to see if I can share some things with you that can keep you from maybe making some of the common mistakes, certainly mistakes that I’ve made. To me, being an entrepreneur is about sales and numbers and things that you can measure and things that you can really develop, some indicators for to determine whether you’re successful or not and the reality is everybody wants to give you advice and if you open yourself up to listening to everybody, you’re going to make mistakes because there’s a lot of people offering advice that don’t have what you want, don’t know how to get what you want and they’re in process just like you are, falling on their face. So one of my first rules that I just want to share right now is take advice from someone that has the life that you want and take advice from someone that has the results that you want. In fact, the more they have results beyond what you want, the better. This is going to require you to shift your mind from an employee to an entrepreneur because the problem with employees is that, we’re just, we show up at a job, we clock in, check-in, checkout, 9:00 to 5:00, we expect our check and what that employee mindset does is it, instead of being open to advice from the right people, instead of going outside the box, we just become programmed to become yes men and yes women and saying yes to everyone around us and that’s another one of the problems. So we’re getting advice when we’re in the wrong places and we’re not really taking ownership of our life, we’re not taking accountability, make no mistake that when you’re an entrepreneur, you’re responsible for creating your paycheck and you’ve got to do it in a way where you’re creating value for people because if you’re not creating value, then you’re not going to have the money that you want. It’s going to catch up with you if you’re not doing something sustainable which is good and useful and that’s gonna require you to take ownership of your business but more importantly of your life and here’s the freedom, if you figure out, if you can crack the code on this and really figure it out with some of the things I’m going to share with you, that I hope will help you on your journey, you can avoid some of the mistakes that entrepreneurs make and more importantly, you’re going to learn what it takes to be successful because if you figure it out, you can learn to do in a fraction of time, what an employer expects of you. Right now, here’s the common math. If you’re an employee, let’s say you make $10 an hour, your employer, if they’re doing their job right and have hired you correctly, you should be creating $40 of income for the company. An employer typically wants a 4x return, that’s really common to have a good thriving business model. If you’re making $40,000 a year, then you need to be producing $160,000 a year for a company. Make no mistake, if you would cost the company $40,000 a year and you’re only producing $40,000 a year, you’re probably not going to hang out, either because you might get fired or the company goes belly-up because it’s not sustainable. Now by the same virtue, if this is true, this means that if someone can work you over and get four times out of you, then that means that you can work you over and get four times out of you, which means that every one of us, no matter the amount of money, if you’re making a hundred grand here, then someone else has likely cracked the code on how to extract $400,000 from you by employing you. That means that it’s possible for you to produce four times the income if you can figure this entrepreneur stuff out which is why it’s so important to learn from the most common mistakes and I want to dive into that right now but just remember these first couple, only take advice from the people that have what you want, are successful the way you want, have produced the results that you want and the other one is to abandon the employee mindset of waiting for someone to give you a sale, waiting for someone to tell you what to do, waiting waiting waiting. Entrepreneurship is definitely for you if you want to take charge of your life and I’m going to throw out a caution real quick here, there’s a lot of people that love the dream of being independently wealthy or successful by their own measures or leading a team or growing a company but if those are your only reasons, then you may not be cut out for it. You really need to be ready to step up and if you want to make four times the money, you might have to think four times faster, you might have to make four times or 10 times the decisions, you might have to be four times bolder, you might have to take four times the initiative and so if you’re ready for that, then let’s dive into the common mistakes that people make in the world of entrepreneurship. So I’m going to share the three biggest mistakes that I ever made as an entrepreneur and I’m really grateful for the things that I learned from them and one of the first actually comes from someone questioning one of my mentors. He had actually hit rock bottom and lost everything and and then he lost everything again after making millions of dollars and then lost it all again and I remember someone asked me and said, “Why are you learning from this individual?” It’s pretty apparent that they failed or that they’ve messed up or made mistakes and want to ask you a question, do you want to learn from someone who has only ever experienced success or from someone that has experienced both success and failure? There’s amazing things that happen from people that have gone bankrupt or people that have learned lessons from having lost at all. You know, for me, I look at some of my rock-bottom times and the best thing that ever happened to me is I hit rock bottom in a number of different times and places in ways with my business. Rock bottom is a very powerful way to clean up your market place, to clean up your mistakes and for you to evaluate and get feedback on what didn’t go that well. Now a mistake when you’re on bottom is to spend your time doing shame and guilt and self-judgment and how I messed up. There’s lessons to be learned and that’s the real value, the second thing that I’ve learned as far as making big mistakes as an entrepreneur, is there’s a time what I thought I knew everything. Naturally I’ve got a lot of natural knowledge and there’s a lot of natural guidance that surfaces inside of me that says, “Well I know a way” but I interpret it as “I know the way” and the reality is, I only know what I know and what I don’t know is the most dangerous information as I’ve shared with you in the past, so believing that you know the way and that you got it figured out is one of the massive stumbling blocks that’s going to lead to downfall every single time or at least getting less than was possible. The third mistake I wanted to share today is, you got to hold yourself accountable and if you’re just being reckless and making decisions, when something goes wrong, if you don’t pause to actually find out what went wrong, if you don’t learn a lesson, then you’re going to repeat it and that’s a huge mistake a lot of entrepreneurs unfortunately, become serial failures because they don’t pause to ask what they’ve learned. Now I don’t care if you mess up a hundred times in a row, as long as you learn a hundred lessons, hopefully more. I think every failure, it comes equipped with a number of things to learn but if you don’t learn the lesson, you can become sour, you can give up, you can decide that you’re a failure and a lot of this happens far too often, far too prematurely. In fact, you might be watching this thinking, “Oh yeah, Kris, I’ve judged myself, I’ve been hard on myself. I’ve given myself the third degree.” When you do that, I’m not saying that it’s a wrong thing to do or that you can’t do it, what I am saying is, that I hope you move past that part and get to the valuable part. So I guess the three biggest things that I want to share today is, learn from your mistakes. Number two is, learn from your mistakes and probably the third one would be learn from your mistakes and if you’re doing that then you’re acquiring the knowledge of what it really takes to get where you want to go. If you’re comfortable sharing your mistakes, go ahead and comment below. I mean seriously, I laid it all out there but share the things that you’ve learned along the way because I think that’s going to help everyone watching this video. Learn from you, me and each other.