Brene Brown says ‘if you’re not in the arena, participating, don’t you dare stand on the sidelines and put me down’. Tough words—basically if you haven’t got any skin in the game you haven’t got any authority to criticize.
I just watched two speakers pitch their businesses through Sydney City Council. Both speakers had the drive and creativity to reach at least $2 million in revenue. Despite being at the beginning of their potential, both businesses had already raised as much revenue as the median Australian earns in 40 years of work.
So what does it take to build a business?
The median sole trader earns around $10 000 per year of income (abs.gov.au). Yet in Australia’s $2.5 trillion economy there are many small to medium businesses that earn much more than that.
So how do you get from averaging $10 000 to $2 million+?
I don’t know how. I’ve not been able to do that, yet.
But I do know some things that don’t work:
- Law-of-Attraction or prayer—being a good person and living mindfully is one thing, but if you pray to win the lottery instead of putting the work into a business plan, you’re not going to get much out of it besides a gambling addiction.
- Pessimism and deciding you’ve failed before you’ve begun. Again, great to take criticism and feedback on board, but despair and defeated-ness are definitely not winners.
- Refusing to listen to feedback—ask your customers what they think of your product
- Basing your product entirely on what other people ask for—Henry Ford said “if I had asked people what they wanted they would’ve told me to breed faster horses”.
- Charging by the hour for your own work. It’s not scalable. Even if you earn $100 per hour, you will never make the return on investment that you would if you had a scalable product.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below 🙂
References:
https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/talks-courses-workshops/visiting-entrepreneur-program
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