MBA2541 How To Drastically Improve Your Odds of Success in Business

0:05Hey, welcome back to the$100 MBA show. And in today's lesson, I'm going to be sharing with you something I wish somebody told me 20 years ago when I started my journey as an entrepreneur. I'm going to show you how to drastically improve your odds of success in business. I'm going to give you what really matters. We all know that starting and growing a business is tough and the stats can be pretty intimidating. But don't worry, I'm going to share with you some key strategies that can make all the difference when it comes to tipping the odds in your favor. Speaking of statistics, did you know that 42 % of startups fail because they lack product market fit?

0:44That's according to CB Insights. I mean, this is pretty, pretty astonishing. Nearly half of all startups fail because they don't align their products with what the market actually wants and needs. Today, I'm going to break down how you can avoid this disaster. So you're not into one of these statistics, right? And how to drastically improve your odds to succeed in whatever business you do. Now, there's five things I believe that if you do them, they can drastically improve your odds of success in business. And it starts with number one, and that's solving a real problem. So many people are obsessed with their ideas.

1:21They're obsessed with the new widget, the new app they think that's going to change the world. And it actually doesn't solve a real problem in the real world. And this is making your life so much harder. It's going to make it so much harder for you to succeed if you're trying to offer something that people don't actually want. They always say it's better to solve for a pain. It's better for you to sell a medication versus a vitamin. OK, vitamins are good and they still sell in the marketplace. But medications are things that people actually need to solve a real problem, alleviate certain pains.

1:53If your product or service doesn't address a pain point, it's going to be hard for you to find customers who are willing to pay for it. The truth is, is that you're making your life so much harder if you're not solving a pain that is really painful. So before you go any further in your journey of entrepreneurship, make sure you're solving a problem that matters. Let's take Uber, for example. Uber is a really good example of solving real problems, real pain points, really creating an innovative product to solve it. Before Uber, in order for you to get around town in a car that wasn't like a friend of yours was a taxi.

2:30So there's two sides to this problem. Number one, there's the actual customer side where it's like hailing a cab and paying a fare. Right. And there's the cab side as a cab driver in order to be a cab driver and to fulfill the service. So if you are the customer, it's really painful to have to stand outside in the cold Lorraine and have to hail a cab. Right. And sometimes you don't know if they're busy, if it's available. You just hope that they're going to stop. And then once you get inside, you have to negotiate. Sometimes the meter's working, not working. Maybe you're afraid that they're going to overcharge you.

3:08They don't know if they take cash or credit card. There's a whole bunch of problems as a customer. All right. Do they know how to get there? Do you know your location? You have to show them your directions. There's safety issues, all this kind of stuff. And then on the driver's side, it costs a small fortune to buy a medallion for a taxi in order for you to drive a taxi. And it's tax got to look a certain way. And it's just a whole mess of problems. Uber came in and disrupted the market and became the market leader because they really solved the pain point on both ends. It's easy to order from your phone.

3:39You can be in the restaurant. You don't have to be in the rain. The driver knows exactly where you're going. It's using GPS technology to get you there. You pay in advance. There's no money changing hands. As you can see, great solution for the customer, for the driver. You don't have to go through a plethora of paperwork. It's really inexpensive for you to be an Uber driver. Any car will do as long as it's safe and it's up to date. It's incredible how they really solved a real problem. Too many people are not solving real problems. And now I'm not saying you have to be an Uber and be a billion dollar company, but you have to solve a real problem.

4:12I'll give you another example real quick. When I started my software company, Webinar Ninja, I solved a real problem where webinars were overwhelming. It was really tough to have all these pieces of technology work all together. Email marketing software, landing page software, video streaming software, chat software. I brought it all together and created a software to make it easy for you to run webinars with one software. And I solved the real problem of having to pay for all the software and knowing how to use them all. And hopefully they all work together. Don't have to worry about all that.

4:42It's a high stakes thing when you run a webinar. You don't want to look bad in front of your customers, in front of your audience. So with Webinar Ninja, our software, we lowered the stakes, made it easy, made it simple, and it made it very affordable too, because you don't have to spend that much money. It's just pay one software versus several. So I want to give you an actionable step to implement. Step number one is before you build anything, spend time talking to your potential customers, not your friends and family, if they're not your potential customers, not people that will not buy or not your target audience, to your potential customers.

5:12That means talking to strangers. Yes, it's okay. You could do it. Ask them what their pain points are. Ask them what they wish existed to solve these problems. They may not give you the answer directly, but they're going to try to describe what they don't like and what they wish they would have. And then you take that information and your job as the innovator, as the entrepreneur is to come up with the solution. This ensures you're building something that people actually need. When they actually talk about the problem and say, oh, I hate when this happens. I hate when I have to do this. I wish it was an easier way.

5:42I wish there was a way for me to do X, Y, Z. So get on some video calls, get on some phone calls. You maybe want to email people, go back and forth, get to meet people in person at meetups or conferences and talk about your proposed solution. All right, second thing that's going to increase your likelihood of success is focusing on execution, not perfection. Entrepreneurs that win are the ones that continually execute. They iterate. They try. They keep going, right? And they're not really looking for perfection every time they try. They're just looking for reps. They're looking for ways to get better over time.

6:18Here's the truth. Businesses that succeed aren't necessarily ones with the most perfect products. They're the ones that execute consistently and improve over time. I've seen this with competitors of mine in the past where they have an inferior product, but they're really good at communicating their product or marketing their product. and because they are marketing their product, they're getting a chance at customers and they're hearing from their customers and they're iterating and improving over and over and over. And before you know it, they're a superior product, okay? So it's not really about having perfection.

6:48It's about you getting out there and trying over and over and over and executing and doing. This is one of the biggest hurdles a lot of entrepreneurs have. They think that they have to have a perfect product before they launch it. They think they have to have everything exactly the way it should be. No, you are starting with version one, two, three, four, five. The vision in your head of the business you want to start or have is probably version 250. OK, so you really need to think about execution. How can I execute and take steps forward in my business every single day? When I launched my software company Webinar Ninja, it wasn't a perfect product when we launched.

7:24It had bugs. It had issues. But when we got it out there, we learned what those bugs are. We learned what those issues are. We learned from our users. We heard from them. We heard what they wanted. they told us how they would like to see certain aspects of the software improved and we improved along the way if i didn't put it out there if i didn't get going if i didn't if i didn't take action i would never know what to improve and here's the thing when you sit there and you think i'm going to build the perfect product and launch it you are pretending like you are the customer you are thinking your opinion matters and what you think is perfect is more important than what the customer thinks.

8:01That is wrong. You can't be your only customer. You're going to go out of business. You need your customers to tell you what they want. You need your customers to tell you what they don't like. And then they can tell you and then you can iterate. Start simple and iterate over and over. So like I mentioned in other episodes, you want to set a deadline to launch your product or service, even if it's not perfect. OK, the faster you get in front of customers, the faster you can improve it. Number three, the third thing that will increase your likelihood of success, and that's building relationships and leveraging your network.

8:33I can't tell you how important this is. I would not be where I am today if it wasn't for the relationships I built along the way. There's so many people I think in my head right now that have helped me along the way, have connected me with somebody, introduced me to somebody. They've personally helped me by introducing me to their audience, allowing me to get more customers, introducing me to somebody that might be able to help my business like a hire. Your network really matters. You need to get out there and meet people. You can't hide behind your desk. In order for you to build your network and to nurture the relationships you already have, you need to get out to conferences, to events, to meetups, go to a co-working space.

9:08You need to meet people as the leaders of your business and build this network of yours so that you can be able to tap into that network. I'll give you a very simple example. A friend of mine named Iz was having a birthday party for his one-year-old son at the time. And at that birthday party were a bunch of people. One of them was a guy named Rob Rawson, who has a business called Time Doctor. And Rob Rawson is a very successful entrepreneur and a tech founder. And at the time, he was a bunch of steps ahead of me. And I got to know him, he became my friend, and he introduced me to Dan Martell, who became my coach when I was building Webinar Ninja.

9:41He's a coach that is specific to SaaS businesses. That coaching helped grow my business and accelerate big time in order for me to have a profitable, high value business that later got acquired. That doesn't happen by accident. I have to say yes to invites. I have to go to these birthday parties. Right. And it's not every single time I go to a party, it results in a relationship that's going to change my world. It's a numbers game. The more invites I accept, the more places I go, the more people that I meet, the more chance I have to becoming successful. No one does this alone. You need to build this network.

10:15I know so many entrepreneurs that have built incredible businesses and products, lost it all, and then were able to do it all over again and be even bigger and better than before because of the relationships they have. So make it a priority. How do you make it a priority? Put it in your calendar and make sure you spend time nurturing and building relationships. Reach out to the people that you know, the people that are in your industry, attend events, go to meetup.com, go to eventbriber.com, go to your local area and get out there, meet some people. OK, even if you're introverted, just tell yourself, I'm going to go to this meetup and I'm going to meet three people.

10:48I'm going to get their contact and then I'll leave. OK, just challenge yourself to do this. Do this consistently. Do it once a month. Do it once a week if you want to. OK, this will build an incredible network over time. This will compound like compound interests. OK, and this will build goodwill and increase your chances to meet people that will support you and your business along the way. Fourth thing that's going to highly improve your odds of success, keeping an eye on your finances. I'm a big believer that you should never outsource your profit and loss sheet, your monitoring of cash flow.

11:22This is something that you should be all over every single day. I am obsessive about my P &L sheet. I want to make sure I'm constantly moving in the right direction with my business financially. Otherwise, I'm asking for trouble if I do it otherwise. If I just leave it to a bookkeeper, right? My bookkeeper does other stuff, the menial tasks that I don't want to do, like, you know, reconciling transactions. She works with our accountant and makes sure that everything's in order. And when it comes to the bigger things like taxes and all that kind of stuff. But the point here is, is that when it comes to my daily cashflow monitoring, my daily profit and loss, my daily expenses, I want to be on top of it.

11:57And you should too. This will increase your likelihood of success because you'll know how your business is doing in terms of its cashflow health. cash flow is oxygen for business. If you don't keep a close eye on your cash flow, you will die. And five out of six businesses die because of lack of cash flow. Okay. It's not because their idea of their business stinks or anything else. You need to make sure that your cash flow really is on point. If you want my template that I use for my profit and loss sheet, I give it away for free because it's so important. Just go to 100mba.net slash templates.

12:34All our templates are there. One of them is my P &L sheet. That's a Google sheet that you can just literally copy and use for yourself with all the formulas. So you could see your cash flow every single month. It's a great way to make sure that you feel healthy as a business. I do this because I don't want to be poor. Okay. Seriously. That's the real reason why I do this is because fear of poverty. I don't want to be poor. I don't want to have a business that's not successful. I don't want to slip into bad habits and overspending and not being healthy and profitable month over month. And you should be compelled to do this because when you have a healthy financial system in your business, you can do anything, right?

13:12You can make the hires. You can take your team on a team retreat. You can spend money on ads. You can expand. You can grow. You can get into new markets because you have the money. But if you don't and you're not monitoring your cash flow, there's no way for you to know if you can do those things or not. So quick action step, just download my template over at 100mba.net slash templates. Super simple, super easy. it's free. No brainer. Now the fifth and final thing you can do to highly improve your chances of success in business is being willing to adapt and pivot when needed. I want you to repeat after me.

13:49Seriously. I want you to just talk even if you're in public right now and repeat after me. My product doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Whatever your idea of a product is right now of your business, it doesn't really matter. All that matters is what your customers need, what problems they have, and how you can solve them. And the problems your customers have today are not the same problems they're going to have tomorrow. If you think your product is going to serve your customers just as good today, and also in three years, in five years, in 10 years, you are dreaming. Okay? Things change over time.

14:22What the marketplace needs today is different than what's going to be needed in the future. Okay? A good example of this, credit card machines, right back in the late 70s they used to make a carbon copy of their credit card and they call the bank to make sure you have the money and if you had the money they approve it then they go ahead and give you the product and they keep a carbon copy of your credit card just in case right horrible system no one wants this today because it's not a good solution to the problems we have right now everyone wants apple pay right so you have to constantly be open to changing your products to pivoting your ability to solve the problems in a different way the greatest example of this in a company that we know today that's very popular is Apple.

15:03Apple is constantly cannibalizing its own products. Remember the iPod Nano, very small iPod and that iPod video. All these products are gone now. Why? Because Apple came up with a product that competes with it and just overtakes it, which is the iPhone. The iPhone is way better than those things. And you don't need those products anymore because they're solving the problem of information, entertainment, connectivity in a better way with the iPhone. And guess what? Soon the iPhone will also be replaced with something else. Slack, for example, which is a team communication app, started as something completely different, a different product altogether and a different business model.

15:43But they pivoted when they realized that customers really needed an easy way to communicate in teams. And that flexibility allowed them to succeed where others failed. Instagram. Instagram is not what it was when it first started, but there was one feature that people really loved and it was the filters on the images and it made the images look better than they were and it made people happy to share images and that became all of Instagram, sharing images with a filter. So be open to feedback, be willing to adjust your strategy if something isn't working and don't be afraid to pivot. The key to this is to stay focused on the customer and solving their problems.

16:22This is why it's so important to talk to your customers consistently as much as possible. Don't let a month, even a week go by without speaking to a customer. So improving your odds of success in business is about more than just working hard and just sticking to it. It's about working smart by focusing on solving real problems, executing quickly, building strong relationships, keeping your finances in check to make sure that you have the cash flow you need and staying flexible. This will give you the best possible shot at building a business that's not only going to survive, but thrives in any market.

16:58Thanks for tuning into the$100 MBA show. I hope you found this episode helpful. If you found it valuable and you want more valuable episodes, check out our website, 100mba.net or our YouTube channel over at 100mba.net slash YouTube. This podcast has over 2 ,500 business lessons for you to dive into. And we publish a new episode three times a week. I'll see you in the next episode.