MBA2351 Why Chasing Home Runs is a Bad Idea + Free Ride Friday

0:08Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, powering up your business with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a lifetime membership to our$100 MBA program. If you want to win a free ride, just go ahead and leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review, and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that easy. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode.

0:42In today's lesson, you'll learn why chasing home runs is a bad idea. Many entrepreneurs, especially new entrepreneurs, think that success lies in the big thing, the big idea, the one product, the one business that's going to blow up and make them successful, make them rich, and solve all their problems. Many of us will keep chasing these quote-unquote home run ideas, home run businesses, hoping that the next one will be the one that's going to make us big and take us to the promised land. But this is a huge mistake and can cost you a lot more than you think. In my experience, in the experiences of all the entrepreneurs that I've studied, ranging from billion-dollar companies to small businesses doing seven figures, this is not how they get rich.

1:26It's not how they get successful. Home runs are a myth, and I'll explain why in today's lesson. I'll also show you what you should do instead, what you should focus on, and what actually equals success. There's nothing wrong with being ambitious and shooting for the stars. But when you expect one idea, one business, one action, one product to set you in the stratosphere, you're setting yourself up for failure. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I've heard so many entrepreneurs say, if I just had that one business idea, that one product that everybody loves, that one thing that just takes off.

1:59If you ever find yourself saying this to yourself in your head, or even out loud to a friend, I implore you to reverse engineer, to go back and study some of your favorite products and really find out how they became successful. What you'll find might surprise you. It more closely resembles the story of the tortoise and the hare. Slow and steady wins the race. Slow, almost painfully slow incremental improvements and growth is what gets them to the promised land. It's only when we hear about these products and services that we think, wow, this company just blew up and came out of nowhere. No, they were around for a very long time in most cases, but you just never heard of them.

2:39They were struggling. They were really working hard on perfecting their product and service. And this is how people become successful, period, let alone get rich or have a very popular or successful business. It's not one thing that makes them successful. It's not one thing that makes them rich. It's small, little wins, day after day, month after month, year after year, that compound over time. And when they look back in the last 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, a lifetime, it looks like a big deal because they were just consistent. Now, there is one problem. There are companies and people that make it big with home runs.

3:20There are very rare, rare, rare occurrence where they come up with an idea, they launch this business or app or whatever it might be, and a year or two later, they get acquired for a billion dollars. Instagram is a good example of this. And whenever we hear these stories, we think that this is the rule. No, it's the exception to the rule. It's the very rare exception to the rule. And it's actually causing more harm than good. It's doing less good to people who think it's inspiring. I actually think it's pretty harmful because setting a precedent is just not reality. It's not actually likely. I'm a big believer in working on things that increase my chances of success.

3:59If there's something out there that is a low likelihood of success that's about to happen, I don't have anything to do with that because that's a bit of a waste of time because I want to have everything in my favor. So people will see these headlines, they hear about all these news stories, but what you don't realize is that this is like one in a million businesses that have this story. And if you study those stories, you realize that they just had everything right at the right time, with the right team, with the right valuation, with the right people, the right space, the right location. It's very hard to do that.

4:31And I don't like to do things that are, again, not in my favor, that are very hard to replicate. I like to do things that I know my hard work will pay off. And that's why working on a business, a product, a service, that you know will serve your clients for years to come, that will help them grow, that will help them and help you in the return, day after day, month after month, is a better strategy because you know you have something viable here. You know that people want it. They're paying for it. You just need to rinse and repeat over and over and over. And what people don't like to talk about is that most of business is pretty boring.

5:05It's pretty boring. It's mundane. You got to do things over and over and be consistent and be professional and show up. And the people that are successful are the people that can do the boring stuff over and over for the sake of success. The people that quit don't make it. And that's just the raw truth. Pinning your hopes on this product just going gangbusters, going viral, being picked up on TechCrunch or whatever you think might make your business blow up, it's just not a reality. A lot of those things are not in your control. The other thing is that a lot of people overestimate what those viral moments will do for their business.

5:42They're often really great for some bursts of traffic for your website, but die down after a day or two and you're back to where you were grinding it out. The sooner you accept the fact that it's not going to just blow up all of a sudden, it's going to take time and it's going to be so imperceivably slow. You're not really going to see it happen, but you'll see it in hindsight. The better it is for you because then you can just get to work and focus on what you gotta do to grow your business rather than chasing that home run and then giving up when things don't just blow up all of a sudden and start to go your way or just start to have this explosive growth.

6:17I've been doing this business thing for almost 20 years now. And any kind of success I've had over the years, it's a trend. I have some peaks and valleys. It's never a hockey stick. It's up for a bit, then steady, sometimes a little bit down, then back up. And these slow incremental wins. And if I look back at the year or two or three or four in the past, I could see the trend is, yes, I'm going up, but nothing in particular is actually making anything go crazy or blow up or be a home run. And I'm here to tell you, I'm not special. I'm not unique. This is how most businesses grow. But that's not sexy.

6:53That is not newsworthy. That's not a headline. So therefore, you don't hear about it. But I'm here to tell you about it here on the podcast. so if you aren't supposed to chase these home runs what should you do well you should spend some good time especially in the beginning when you're starting your business validating your business idea making sure people are willing to spend money for your product or service and vp-ing it putting it out there and once you start getting traction you know that okay customers like this product or service they're willing to pay for it they've paid for it let me improve it let me iterate it let me double down and your whole job is to make your business better your product better, your offer better, your service better, day in and day out?

7:33What are the ways you can improve your business so that today is better than yesterday? Whether it's your customer support, whether it's your packaging, whether it's your value metrics, whether it's the product itself or your marketing or your sales funnels or your newsletter or your email correspondence. Every day you can work on something to slightly increase one area in your business just by half a percent, right? So if you improve your marketing half a percent every Monday, by the end of the year, you have grown tremendously and your marketing has done so much better. This is very similar to training for a sport or even going to the gym.

8:12Just showing up and lifting the weights every single day will help you get better. Instead of, you know, going to the gym for 10 hours one day and not going for the rest of the week, you're going to go for 45 minutes. for five days a week. And those five days is going to be more impactful because of the consistency, because of you going at it every day, improving. Same thing with your business and the different areas in your business. That's what you just got to focus on. You're just competing against yourself. How can I be better than yesterday? And I do this with everything I do in my business, including this podcast.

8:46Before I recorded this podcast, I asked myself, how can I show up to this recording, to this episode better than yesterday, better than the last episode? How can I be more impactful? How can I provide better value? How can I communicate better? And that's my focus, getting better. Because I know if I do this every single time, as I have in the last 2 ,300 plus episodes, I will get better. The product will be better. In this case, this podcast will be better. And I'm relying on myself to win and not on something else helping it go viral. The other thing that's great about this is that when you don't chase home runs and you just deal with reality of just getting better every day in your business, you start to understand what you have to do.

9:29You break it down to a system, into a routine, so that when you build one business that's successful and it's starting to get traction and it's helping you become profitable and you're making money and it's great and you want to start something else, you know the blueprint. You know what to do. You've done it already. And the whole point of a lot of us becoming entrepreneurs is for us to be in control. And this is the ultimate feeling of control is being able to repeat wins. A lot of people say, when you make mistakes, review, figure out what you did wrong so you can learn from it. I'm 100 % on board with that idea.

9:57But I think it's just as important, if not more important, for you to study when you have wins. Study what happened. Why did you win? Why did it work? Why did it sell? Why did customer like it? Why did customers like it? How do I repeat this over and over in my business? How do I repeat this in something new? I got to transfer one concept or one strategy from one business to the next. Or if I'm helping other businesses or other people in my niche, how do I transfer that win to somebody else, a client? Stop chasing home runs and focus on getting better every day. You're going to waste a whole lot less time changing direction, pivoting, scrapping ideas that are half-baked.

10:35No, not one thing is going to make you successful. It's the consistency. It's the repetition. It's the compounded work and success that's going to help you ultimately reach the promised land. Thanks so much for listening to The$100 MBA Show. But today's episode's not over. It's free ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is Mark R. That's the handle on Apple Podcasts. Mark R says, great info delivered in a focused format. Five stars. This podcast explores very timely topics in great focus and detail. This focused approach on every episode helps ensure the listener will not be wasting any time at the$100 MBA show.

11:12If any topic of the podcast is of interest to you, then the podcast delivers details and explanations about that topic that can help you make decisions with confidence. Thanks, Mark R., for that great review. Your mission is to email me over at omar at 100mba.net to make sure I hook you up with the$100 MBA program, our six-part course on how to become a better entrepreneur, 100 % guaranteed. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple podcast rating interview and you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like right now to see if you won. It's that easy.

11:43Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of my favorite stories from a book called Grit by Angela Duckworth was when she was interviewing an Olympic swimmer and she asked the swimmer, do you love swimming? And I'm paraphrasing here, but he was like, do you mean do I love waking up early in the morning, jumping in a cold pool, looking at a blue line in the bottom of the pool for four hours, doing laps, going back, going to the gym, hitting the pool again. Of course not. That's really hard work. It's boring, but I love winning. I love winning these races. I love being a part of the sport.

12:18So I'm willing to do the grind. I'm willing to do the hard work, the day in and day out commitment I need to give to the sport to be successful in it. I love that because it doesn't ignore the fact that there's going to be some things in your business, in your life, that you're not going to love doing, but you have to do it in order to be successful. It's going to be boring sometimes, and that's okay. If you're willing to do it, you're probably willing to do the things that people are not willing to do, which is to be patient, to work hard, and be consistent. That's your competitive advantage.

12:48Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you on Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

13:02Thank you.