More of Our Entrepreneurial Mistakes

Note: This transcription has been generated with AI and there may be errors present. 

They say that wise people learn from their mistakes. But true wisdom is learning from other people’s mistakes, and not making it yourself. So what we want to do here, and this is part two of a set of videos about the biggest mistakes we’ve made in business, what we want to do here is to tell you about the biggest mistakes we’ve made in business to help you avoid them so that you can make more progress quicker than we ever had. So I’m going to give you the next four biggest mistakes that I’ve made in my business over the years, in an effort to help you make more progress quicker. So number one is playing in the wrong pond. When you launch your business, you’ve got an idea of who you’re going to sell to. And it might be I’m going to sell to mums or teachers or I’m going to sell to these people or those people. And I’ve tried selling to lots of different palms, lots of different groups of people. When I first started out, I was doing some training for businesses. I did okay, I made some money. My second year, I was selling to schools didn’t go so well. What I found out what schools didn’t have money for what I was offering, so it was a really bad pond to go fishing in, it was a really bad market to go to, because they didn’t have any money is actually my worst ever year in business. And since then, we’ve tried selling to councils we’ve tried selling to the Department of Work and Pensions and the job centre. We’ve tried selling to housing associations, we’ve tried selling to all of these different groups. And actually what you need to do is work out which pond is best for you to fish in, which has the most fish which is easiest to get, which will pay you the most value for what you’re doing. Number two, is not hiring someone sooner. I procrastinated for several years over hiring someone full time. I did a lot of hiring contractors in and small jobs. But I put it off hiring someone else. Actually, I was earning the money to hire someone else many years ago. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t take the action. So actually my advice to you is if your business has grown to a scale that it’s turning over 60 to 100,000 pounds, and you feel like you need someone to help you. Maybe even less than that. Maybe you’re earning 40 grand a year and you’re just you need someone to come in and help you take it to the next level. take the plunge do it make it happen by procrastinated too long before it hired Henry to come and help me. And I hired Henry, we started making more progress. I persuaded Simon to come back from corporate life, there’s three of us, we started making even more progress. We’ve hired jack to help us do these videos, we’re making even more progress. And every time I hire someone, my business takes a jump and we seem to make more progress. Number three, I’ve wasted a lot of money on protection by have bought dominant limited companies to protect my company name. I have bought loads of domain names on domain name registration to protect my company name.

I’ve done all these things. And I’ve spent all this money to protect my names because I was scared. And I was told by the entrepreneurial advice to be scared that other people would Nick my company name, and it never happened. I don’t think it will ever happen. And I’ve wasted a huge amount of money doing all this stuff and time when I didn’t need to. But actually what I’ve learned over the years, if the best form of protection for your company name is not having officially trademarked and registered and all that stuff. It’s owning Google, if you type in pop up business school onto Google, what do you think comes up the first 25 3040 results are all my business. If anyone next my name and tries to promote a pop up business school, and people Google pop up business school, we pop up. So actually, if they knit my name, they’re promoting my business. So why am I wasting my time and my money and my energy, trying to protect my business from someone else, when I could just be getting out there promoting marketing and making money and growing on Google. And the final one for this one is number four, is don’t procrastinate over the advice you’re given implement religiously. And here’s the bit when I first launched, people suggested to me that I should start a mailing list. People are interested in my business, I should start a mailing list, or I should get a YouTube channel and I should start putting out my content. Or I should do an online course on how to present yourself and sell it there. And actually, I’ve watched lots of other people over the years, do all of these things in the same business space as I have and they’ve done it. They’ve implemented, they’ve grown and they’ve made money, and I haven’t because I do Do it. And that’s the bit for me that really, it cost me an absolute fortune over the years that I didn’t implement this stuff quicker. Maybe the time wasn’t right, maybe I couldn’t work out how to do it. Whatever it is, I didn’t do it, whatever bullshit excuse I made up. I didn’t do that. If you want to do it, start doing it today. Get out there and make it happen. So those are four huge mistakes I’ve made over the years that have cost me a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of pain. And my hope is that this video enables you to avoid making the same mistakes as me. You can go out there and make new mistakes and make new progress. So what I would like you to do, we are we have a YouTube channel which gives out daily advice, inspiration, tips and guidance on how to start up a business and being an entrepreneur. So hit subscribe to get the latest videos. They come out Monday to Friday throughout the week.