My 5 biggest mistakes as an entrepreneur
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 8:18 am
I have made many mistakes throughout my career (and I will continue to make them). They are part of the learning process that has brought me to this point. So I don't think I should hide them. On the contrary, I think it is good to air them as a reflection for myself, and hopefully as a learning experience or inspiration for you.
As you can imagine, when you accumulate years of experience, you also accumulate all kinds of situations from which you can learn. I am going to focus on the second part of my career, from when I started to undertake until now, and especially on these last few years as a mentor for SMEs and entrepreneurs.
When you jump into saudi arabia mobile number owner name the digital world of entrepreneurship, things happen at tremendous speed. I have experienced more things in these years than in two lifetimes in a company. Very good things have happened to me, and of course some bad ones.
On the bright side: three profitable companies created, six books published, dozens of conferences given internationally, hundreds of hours of class in master's courses, almost 1,000 articles on this blog, trips around the world... and above all, I have met many people who are worth it.
On the not so good side: big disappointments with people close to me, stress, mistakes in my professional strategy… this is what I want to talk to you about. The positive side is that I have come out stronger from each of these issues.
And it is precisely from these setbacks that we learn the most. At least that is what has happened in my case.
1. Work for money
Reading the title of this section, more than one person will think “ here we go with the clichés ”. Of course, ultimately we all live off the money we earn and everyone, including me first, is interested in earning it.
The problem comes when your primary goal is to make money, not to provide value in the form of good work or service (if you are self-employed). By focusing on money, you are killing the source that generates the most income (good performance in the case of an employee, or the search for customer satisfaction if you are self-employed).
I have been able to test both situations on two occasions on my own and I assure you that the results were not good.
When you focus on doing things well and adding value wherever you are, money comes as a consequence. Both in the personal and professional spheres. The problem is that in some cases fear, in others greed and in almost all cases pressure, get the better of you. And you stop thinking about the person on the other side, to focus on billing.
And if you don’t believe me, just take a look at what the “inventor of marketing” says about another of its founders (Philip Kotler talking about Peter Druker. If you don’t know who they are, you can start looking them up on Google!). They talk about the founding pillars of marketing, but this is still fully valid no matter how many people say that traditional marketing is dead, etc. etc. (How many books about purpose come out every month? They were already talking about it more than 50 years ago).
I took this excerpt from Mark Schaefer 's newsletter that I received a few days ago . It talks about companies, but we can apply it to ourselves:
“ Peter Drucker was really the first real marketer. He saw early in the 1950s that the question every company should ask is, what is your purpose? And his answer was, “not to make money.”
“In fact, he said that making money gets in the way of doing the right things. The purpose of a business is to create a customer, and then went on to say that we better understand what is “value” to a customer, and you can't define that unless you understand what the customer defines as value .”
2. Addressing the wrong audience.
We have made this mistake over and over again since the Internet began. We put our efforts into gaining visibility where the audience is the largest without asking ourselves if our target audience is there and if when they are there, they are looking for our products or services.
Well, something similar happened to me for a while (it's funny how sometimes we do the opposite of what we recommend to our clients). If you are a big company and you have a big budget, you can afford to kill flies with cannon fire. But as in most cases, we have to be able to get the most out of our marketing efforts.
It took me a while to realize that most of the people who read me are not my target audience.
The vast majority of them are marketing professionals looking for inspiration, training or both. But my client, despite being digital, is not a big reader of blogs or user of social media. Yes, he reads and visits social media, but he doesn't spend even a third of the time there that you and I do.
Much of my marketing effectiveness is in referrals (do you know anyone who knows about XYZ? That's where you play a key role) or in the exposure I get in other forums thanks to this blog or my books (conferences, classes, interviews, etc.).
3. Follow my heart instead of my head
If we have to choose between a head and a heart, I usually let myself be guided by the latter. But sometimes these decisions play tricks on you.
In my case, I decided to launch a venture more with my heart than with my head. On paper it made perfect sense, but we didn't stop to think too much about the roles of each of the partners (and their contribution of value). It was more like, "if we work together it can't go wrong. We'll see how we organize ourselves." I left a stable and well-paid job for this adventure and I was wrong.
In the end, you learn from everything and everything contributes to you, especially mistakes, but leaving was a difficult time. It is part of the path that has brought me here, and in addition to having a great time, I have learned a lot.
4. Complacency
Related to some of the above, another mistake I have made is settling down. Getting carried away by routines, not innovating… finding that comfort zone where things work well and not considering going much further.
As you can imagine, when you accumulate years of experience, you also accumulate all kinds of situations from which you can learn. I am going to focus on the second part of my career, from when I started to undertake until now, and especially on these last few years as a mentor for SMEs and entrepreneurs.
When you jump into saudi arabia mobile number owner name the digital world of entrepreneurship, things happen at tremendous speed. I have experienced more things in these years than in two lifetimes in a company. Very good things have happened to me, and of course some bad ones.
On the bright side: three profitable companies created, six books published, dozens of conferences given internationally, hundreds of hours of class in master's courses, almost 1,000 articles on this blog, trips around the world... and above all, I have met many people who are worth it.
On the not so good side: big disappointments with people close to me, stress, mistakes in my professional strategy… this is what I want to talk to you about. The positive side is that I have come out stronger from each of these issues.
And it is precisely from these setbacks that we learn the most. At least that is what has happened in my case.
1. Work for money
Reading the title of this section, more than one person will think “ here we go with the clichés ”. Of course, ultimately we all live off the money we earn and everyone, including me first, is interested in earning it.
The problem comes when your primary goal is to make money, not to provide value in the form of good work or service (if you are self-employed). By focusing on money, you are killing the source that generates the most income (good performance in the case of an employee, or the search for customer satisfaction if you are self-employed).
I have been able to test both situations on two occasions on my own and I assure you that the results were not good.
When you focus on doing things well and adding value wherever you are, money comes as a consequence. Both in the personal and professional spheres. The problem is that in some cases fear, in others greed and in almost all cases pressure, get the better of you. And you stop thinking about the person on the other side, to focus on billing.
And if you don’t believe me, just take a look at what the “inventor of marketing” says about another of its founders (Philip Kotler talking about Peter Druker. If you don’t know who they are, you can start looking them up on Google!). They talk about the founding pillars of marketing, but this is still fully valid no matter how many people say that traditional marketing is dead, etc. etc. (How many books about purpose come out every month? They were already talking about it more than 50 years ago).
I took this excerpt from Mark Schaefer 's newsletter that I received a few days ago . It talks about companies, but we can apply it to ourselves:
“ Peter Drucker was really the first real marketer. He saw early in the 1950s that the question every company should ask is, what is your purpose? And his answer was, “not to make money.”
“In fact, he said that making money gets in the way of doing the right things. The purpose of a business is to create a customer, and then went on to say that we better understand what is “value” to a customer, and you can't define that unless you understand what the customer defines as value .”
2. Addressing the wrong audience.
We have made this mistake over and over again since the Internet began. We put our efforts into gaining visibility where the audience is the largest without asking ourselves if our target audience is there and if when they are there, they are looking for our products or services.
Well, something similar happened to me for a while (it's funny how sometimes we do the opposite of what we recommend to our clients). If you are a big company and you have a big budget, you can afford to kill flies with cannon fire. But as in most cases, we have to be able to get the most out of our marketing efforts.
It took me a while to realize that most of the people who read me are not my target audience.
The vast majority of them are marketing professionals looking for inspiration, training or both. But my client, despite being digital, is not a big reader of blogs or user of social media. Yes, he reads and visits social media, but he doesn't spend even a third of the time there that you and I do.
Much of my marketing effectiveness is in referrals (do you know anyone who knows about XYZ? That's where you play a key role) or in the exposure I get in other forums thanks to this blog or my books (conferences, classes, interviews, etc.).
3. Follow my heart instead of my head
If we have to choose between a head and a heart, I usually let myself be guided by the latter. But sometimes these decisions play tricks on you.
In my case, I decided to launch a venture more with my heart than with my head. On paper it made perfect sense, but we didn't stop to think too much about the roles of each of the partners (and their contribution of value). It was more like, "if we work together it can't go wrong. We'll see how we organize ourselves." I left a stable and well-paid job for this adventure and I was wrong.
In the end, you learn from everything and everything contributes to you, especially mistakes, but leaving was a difficult time. It is part of the path that has brought me here, and in addition to having a great time, I have learned a lot.
4. Complacency
Related to some of the above, another mistake I have made is settling down. Getting carried away by routines, not innovating… finding that comfort zone where things work well and not considering going much further.