Episode Transcript

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys, welcome back to five minute rants.

Well, guys, today I’m going to talk about a few different aspects of entrepreneurship. And I want to talk about working with people. There’s a African proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone, and if you want to go far, go with others. And I want to talk about that because a couple of reasons.

First, most times, when people start their own business, or they start their own thing. They are the means of production, they are sales, they are marketing, they’re the CEO. They’re the CEO. They wear every hat on Earth. They’re doing everything. And if you’re thinking about starting your own thing, and you’re just starting from scratch, right? And you’re not looking for funding, you’re not looking to get a team, you’re just going out on your own to begin your business. You run everything. You’re the accountant, you’re the CFO, you’re everything. And I’m saying this because what happens is, when you go out on your own and you begin doing everything, you get in the rut of that you are the solution. You’re the solution to the problem. You’re the solution to all the work. You’re the solution on something breaks. Oh, well, I got to deal with it, which is true because you don’t have any other team. Other team members.

But what happens is you get stuck there. You get stuck there in that position, and you get stuck in that mentality, and then you actually don’t begin building a team. And Andrew and I, when we first started business, one of the mistakes we made was we knew we needed a team, and knew we wanted a team, but we didn’t build properly for a team when we first started, because we were the solution. We never thought of ourselves as a non viable solution for the company, for production.

And it’s interesting, because that’s how you need to treat yourself. So yes, you’re a band aided solution, and you need to see yourself that way. If you’re just starting out, you need somebody. So let’s go to a plumbing company, right? You start your own plumbing company. You got your van or your truck, you got all your tools. You’re answering all the calls. You’re the last guy that needs to be going out there and fixing the plumbing. You’re the last guy who needs to do it. Why you are stewarding the vision and the life of the company. Cool. You want to be a one man shop and a solo guy, awesome.

You need to see that that’s not a company. You are a sole proprietor at that point. You’re just self employed at that point, and you have a job versus having a company really means going and building a team to get your time back and to where you’re working on the business. You’re casting vision. You’re talking about where the company should go. You’re talking about what the company should be like. You’re building the company for the future. And then you have people that you love and trust working with you, and they’re taking care of production.

And then you bring in, and they’re other in house people take care of financing, staffing, all these other things, managerial things, but it’s building the company in that way. It’s having that mindset, and the way you do that is through process. You must build infrastructure and you must build process within the company.

Now here’s the thing, there’s two sides to this, and Andrew and I call them two sides. You have shippers and you have perfectionists, and normally, most people are in one ditch or the other to where they’re either like, cool, it’s good enough. Ship it. It’s good enough, ship it, and that creates mess, or you have perfectionism, which is, oh, it’s not good enough. We can still improve it and improve it and improve it, improve it. And you get stuck. And when you’re building the company, you get stuck in one side or the other. Perfectionists are afraid of messiness, and shippers don’t care that it’s not good enough and that it breaks. And you need to be aware of those two sides, and you need to know which one you are and which one you are, or which one you lean more towards, because everybody’s kind of a mix of both in certain ways.

And so I’m saying that because if you are thinking about beginning your own company, you need to have the mindset of, I am not the I am not the production. I am not this. I am not that, and make a list of all the things you are not and honestly, if I had to go back and restart the company with Andrew, if we had to start over, one of the things that I would do over personally, is make a list of every job we are not allowed to do, and only make a list of the work we are allowed to do, and start that way, and then begin coming up with creative solutions on how to source and find the means of production to do what we did. And you talk about we would radically have been different.

It would have catapulted us far into the future. Because if I made a rule that says I’m not allowed to actually produce anything, I’m not allowed to design, I’m not allowed to do any of this work. How radically different would the company have been? And this is where entrepreneurs who are pursuing startups, right? They have an idea and invention they want to make, like Facebook, you look at Zuckerberg, you look at Bezos, how they started, how they thought about things, versus a lot of solopreneurs who are going off to their side to start an electrical company. Landscape business, whatever it is, this is where part of that difference is, because it’s a big mindset shift.

And Andrew and I came into the mindset shift later, and we knew we wanted to get here. We just started on the wrong path, and then realized we had to take a big detour.

Anyways, guys, I’m out of time, so I’ll catch you later. Peace.