What is it that makes some businesses successful and some businesses fail?
Even though you might all start at the same time, some of you aren’t going to be around in six months, some of you aren’t going to be around in a year or two years. And the truth is only one thing that makes a business successful.
The only thing that matters when you’re running your business, is how long you’re willing to go compared to everyone else in the marketplace.
We’re constantly looking for things like tactics, we’re constantly looking for things like campaigns and ideas and gurus and hacks and shortcuts. But the reality is the only thing that is going to make sure that your business continues making money and continues staying in the game and eventually becomes a success, is the constant and persistent grind to getting the results that you want to get.
Relative success
For example, my book came out and it’s going relatively well. I’ve booked a few speaking gigs because of it and it’s already generating us, generating me, a pretty decent income.
Nothing massive. I mean, let’s think about it. I’ll probably make like $18, not even that. $8 per book maybe. 9$ per book. If I sold it to 1,000 people a year, that would be amazing. So that’s an $8,000 a year scalable income from the book.
The point that the business begins to take off, what we call the inflection point, is where it begins to really skyrocket. That’s because of the three to five years of previous grind and work that I’ve put in.
You can’t cheat a diet
There’s no shortcut, there’s no ability to just kind of skip anything. A lot of the time you’ll look for like diet cheats, when you know you’ve got to lose weight and get healthy.
People will start to look into all these stupid exercises techniques and do stupid diets and do stupid programmes. And the reality is, the only thing that makes you consistently successful is your relentless persistence and the continuing pursuit of doing the same thing day in, day out.
Failing is giving up
When the taxman sends you a bill for £20K, some businesses are going to fold and they’re going to go “fuck it, I can’t do it anymore. That’s the end. This is me failing”.
Failing is giving into that and letting that stop you and stop your business. If you go bankrupt, if your business goes under, if you have to pay off debts, if you have staffing issues, if you have product problems. All of those things are going to keep happening no matter what.
Your job is to keep going
Your job, running a business, is to keep pursuing through that. Your competition are going to release better products than you, they’re going to steal customers from you. You’re going to get bad results, you’re going to get bad reviews. People are going to have a go at you.
None of that matters. The only thing that matters is you staying the game. The only rule is to continue going longer, harder and faster than anybody else in the marketplace and an absolute refusal to give in to anybody else taking over.
Businesses that win, that kind of “definition of success”, come from being the only business continuing to work in the marketplace.
Quitting statistics
Statistically what tends to happen is lets say 100 businesses start in a year. Within six months, 50% of them quit. Within the next six months, the next 45% give up.
95% of your market and competition will disappear in the first year. In the second year of that 5% left, 99% of them are going to quit as well, which just leaves just one or two businesses.
Most of them give up in the first two years, or they quit or they fail or whatever they want to call it, in that next two to five years period.
Marketing continuum
That’s when the real success is made. But it’s not going to look like success. It’s like any compound interest. We’ve talked about this with the law of 8% and the law of compound returns and the law of marketing continuum. If you continue to put in day in, day out for the first two to five years, it’s going to look like really meagre results.
It’s only once you get past that inflection point, where each day yields you more results than the previous day ever could have.
Your job is to keep going. All the problems you’re facing, every business leader in the world has faced them. Every entrepreneur has faced them.
There’s absolutely no one out there who hasn’t faced the same problems as you. Which is why coaching programmes like the Sell Your Service coaching programme, where we help funnel builders achieve their maximum income potential, is dedicated to solving and talking about the same problems that everybody has.
It’s the same with creating a YouTube channel or writing blog content. We get thousands of visitors a month per blog post and I wasn’t even getting a 1,000 a year when I first started.
The continuing persistence of grinding it out day in, day out. You don’t even have to have anything different. Frankly you don’t even have to be the best.
Success isn’t a talent
Even if you rate yourself a 3/10 on the scale of “skills”. Everyone who’s a 2/10 and a 1/10 and even some 3/10’s are going to want to read your content. And that’s the widest portion of the market, the largest portion of the market is the beginner market.
the largest portion of the market, is the beginner market.
They want beginner content. If it’s got your personality in it, that’s all that matters to them. But your goal and your job, should be to persist and be in the marketplace longer than anybody else.
There is noeasier market, there is no easier niche, there is no easier product. All of them are difficult, all of them take hard work, all of them take grind, all of them take hustle.
Absolutely no business leader in the world will ever tell you “yeah I’m really glad I chose this particular business, because it was really easy.”
Richard Branson didn’t choose airlines because they were easy. He wanted to serve a market and he stuck it out. Anyone who’s read his book or listened to his autobiography knows he was plagued with problems from the start.
The same with his record company. Every business suffers from problems but every business is still in the marketplace and known, because they had the persistence to stick it out.
Be okay with awkward
Yes they had awkward conversations and they had no so awkward conversations. Banks are surprisingly lean when you talk to them.
Your people you own money to, debtors, creditors, they’re surprisingly flexible when you talk to them, have a conversation with them. But your job is to stay in the marketplace as long as possible and to show your passion for whatever it is that you’re doing as long as possible.
If you want to start a YouTube channel, you have to create videos longer than anybody else. Loads of people start YouTube channels and put five, ten videos on there and then quit.
Loads of people start blogs, loads of people start Instagram feeds, loads of people start Facebook pages and posts and membership programmes.
Your job is to continue making offers and persist harder and longer than anybody else.
