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Every entrepreneur wants their business to succeed; that’s just a given. In this podcast, Nate Woodbury shares with us the nine key ingredients for business success. These he discovered in the process of running his own businesses for a decade. Stay tuned!
Okay. You want your business to succeed. -Yeah. -Right? And there are 9 ingredients or requirements that if you’re missing one of these, it’s likely your business will fail. -Okay. -So, we’re going to cover all 9 and hopefully you’re taking notes and checking these things off to make sure. Otherwise your business is likely to fail. -9 things. I’m curious what they are. Is that, is it like a specific order thing? -Not necessarily specific order. This first one should be obvious. I’m going to say you need to have a really good idea. -Okay. -Right? Because there’s a lot of businesses that will fail just because their idea really isn’t thought all the way through. So, how do you quantify that? I don’t know how to tell if your idea is good or not. Everyone thinks that their own idea is good. -Yeah, yeah. -So, that’s all I’ll say about that. That’s number 1. You have to have a good idea. -Great. -To succeed in business, you’ve got to be disciplined. Because you’re not just filling one role but now you’re the boss. And you’re the security guard, or you’re the accountant. You’re the marketing team. -Yeah. -And you control your own schedule. And you get to work where you want. -And it’s the best part. -And you get– you get full control of the budget. You get to spend the money how you want. -Which could be the worst part. -And so, I think that’s the biggest reason why a lot of people don’t go into entrepreneurship. -Okay. So, we’re talking about discipline. Like, what do you mean by discipline? -Really, the ability to focus, to prioritize, and to make sure that you’re working enough. You know, I mean, that 8 to 5 schedule is common but that was just arbitrary. -Right. -Divide the day in 3. You sleep, you work 8, you play 8. -Yeah. -But if you’re going to work for 8 hours, what are you going to do? -I could especially see that being you have to discipline yourself with those 8 hours, right? Because if you’re working from home, we’re pretty easy… -There’s an office just around the corner and it’s a big video game console set up in there. -That’s a pretty idea. -Maybe they’re gamer. I don’t know. And that brings me the third requirement here is tenacity. -Okay. -And what I mean by that is… Because I had 8 and a half years of a financial rollercoaster. -Okay. -Like for real. -Yeah. -Like some of the lows, one time I was in the Walmart parking lot in tears because I couldn’t afford to buy diapers. -Oh. -Right? That’s legit. -Yeah. -It’s a hard time. Why didn’t I get a job, right? Okay, then another time, this is not too long ago like 4 years ago if I were to guess. Maybe 5. Asking my mom if I could borrow money or not necessarily borrow. “Can I… can I have some money?” -Mm-hmm. -And my mom asking me, “Nate, why don’t you go get a job?” -And you have to have that conversation. -Yeah. -Yeah. -And I still stuck with it. -Yeah. -And now, my mom and dad will say, “Wow, we’re sure proud of you, Nate.” Well, what about a few years ago? I was doing the same thing then. -Yeah. -So, even just a few days ago, somebody emailed me and asked me about that tenacity. Like, how do you stick it with it? And it’s really… I have something that I really believe in. It’s like, I believe that what I’m creating and I believe that entrepreneurship is noble. And, like, quitting on that is like failure at life for me. -Yeah. -That’s what it feels like. -Yeah. -To go back and get a job, I just feel like that would be a failure. And yeah that’s just my mindset. I’m not saying that employees, or anything like that, that they’re failures. I’m just saying that’s for my purpose and whatnot. And so, I’m putting tenacity as a requirement because I think I took longer than some. I mean 8 and a half years before I finally… -Yeah. That’s a good long time. -But yeah. I mean, I would still… You know, I’m 10 years in. 10 years in now. I’d still be going even if I were still in the financial roller coaster. -Yeah. That’s a great one. I think that’s… And that’s inspiring for myself as a writer and actor. It’s very easy sometimes. Or actually, I won’t even say myself. “Are you someone that more people know?” Chris Hemsworth. The guy who plays Thor. He talks a lot about how he and his wife for a long time were like, “Can we keep doing this?” Because he was a freelancer and it’s the same thing where he’s totally an entrepreneur, right? And and they talked for a long time like, “Why don’t I just go get a job?” And they decided that they were going to stick with it. And I totally agree. I think it’s like.. It has nothing to do with going and getting a job being a bad thing. But it’s if you’ve put your mind to doing something and you don’t have the strength to keep doing it, then it’s not going to work. And that’s a failure on you. For, like, for yourself personally. And I feel that all the time. I’m like, if I give up on this, that’s me. That’s not anyone else. And so, I have to keep going, right? I love that tenacity, it’s a great one. -Okay. So, those are attributes. Talking about the business. I put one category as a brand. -Okay. -Like a business really needs a brand. And what I mean my brand is not necessarily a logo. That’s a cool thing to have. But like in my case, I’ve had different logos. I’ve had different brands. But until my brand really had a track record behind it. So, that’s what I mean. Like a brand that actually means something that… -Yeah. -And you can do things to really ruin your brand or whatnot. So, that’s what I mean, is it’s important to have a good brand in order to have a successful business. -That makes sense. Brand kind of being like, “What’s the feeling? What’s the vibe I want people to feel?” Right. So, what’s next? What do you… What comes after that? -So, then you’ve got to create a system. -Okay. -And that’s going to sound really official perhaps. But think about the most successful hamburger chain on the planet. The most successful chain — period — in businesses is McDonald’s. -Yeah. Yeah. -They really have a system that they sell. They don’t have the best burger necessarily, the best fries, or yeah it’s shake. But they– they have a system and they have a brand. -Right. -Their system is that they can hire a high school student. And they’ll just run the system. And so for me, when I hire a new editor, we have a process that we go through and we just train them. They bring their skill set. But we train them to follow our system. It’s like a checklist or whatnot. So, there’s a difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Somebody who’s… A business owner will actually create systems and those systems either run automatically through software or they hire somebody to run that system. So, a business owner can take a step back and look at how’s the business running. “Ooh, here’s something that’s broken. Let’s fix that. Let’s create a system that will make that work better.” -So, if someone feels like maybe that’s kind of intimidating. Someone feels like, “I’ve got a really good idea. I know what my brand would be and I want to get there. But a system? That’s kind of intimidating”, right? -Actually, I’m going to recommend a book. -Okay. So, it’s called E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. “E” stands for entrepreneur. -Awesome. -So, find the book the E-myth and it will really just like open your… It will cause a paradigm shift. You’ll see the world of business in a whole different way and understand the value of systems. Yeah, my company would be chaos and non-existent without systems. I’m going to talk about another one. -It’s another kind of big word that might be intimidating. And I’m going to talk about what leverage. Leverage is required for profit. It’s like, if I can create a service that’s valued at this high but it only costs me this much, that’s that’s where profit comes from. And I found a great opportunity and hiring people in the Philippines. Because I can hire people in the Philippines for $3 per hour that are college-educated and that’s a dream job for them. So, that’s cool. Because that’s a huge blessing to me. And so, what that allows me to do in talking about leverage is I can assign them tasks that normally I’d have to pay people here 20 or 30 dollars per hour to be able to do. -Right. -And so, I can create services and sell them at a cost that’s extremely competitive and yet still be having lots of profit. I guess going back to systems, leverage can be applied to that too, is it’s you’re making things so efficient that I don’t know how to explain without using the word leverage. But you’re just really leveraging things like a lever allows it to lift something heavy. -Right, right. -With small effort. And so if you create systems or tools or resources or leverage people or money or time to create more work. Than you have something of value that people will buy. -So, we’ve talked about some like good mindset, right? You to have your good idea, you need to have discipline and you have tenacity. Right? And then outside of that, we’re like, “Now, how do you have a brand and making systems and then turning all that into leverage so that you can make a profit?” Right? And that’s how you’re going to get going with your business. So now, it’s like, “Okay. Now, how do we see that in action?” -Well, let’s break it down. There’s going to be 3 different areas of your business. Okay? You need to have traffic or some source of customers or lead generation. So, let’s call that what traffic. -Okay. -I use YouTube for a lot of traffic. And I can I can link to a video right there my my leaf strategy video, okay? So, where are your customers going come from? Do you have a storefront in Times Square? -Right. -Or do you advertise on TV or radio? Do you have banner ads online? Do you have a YouTube channel? Where’s your traffic coming from? -Yeah. Then you need to have the ability to sell. -Okay. -Alright? So, how do you take a lead and turn them into a customer. -Okay. -So, you’ve got to have a some type of sales system in place. -Right. -And then you’ve got a fulfill. You’ve got to have some way of delivering that whether you’re manufacturing and delivering a physical product or you’ve got a service that you’re providing. -Right. -And whatever it is, you’ve got to provide good fulfillment that… Like good customer service that you get good reviews that’s not going to hurt your reputation. That’s going to have happy customers that’s not going to have lots of returns. That your products aren’t breaking. So, if you have a good source of traffic, you can turn that traffic into leads and sales. And you can keep your customers happy because they’re getting what they expected. Those were the 9 requirement ingredients to have a successful business. -Okay. -Okay. Now, with that foundation, the next video that I highly recommend that you watch is my leaf strategy video. I mentioned traffic and I mentioned YouTube. My strategy really, really works and it’s so much so that on one of my channels, we brought in 7 figures last month just from one channel. And this is the strategy. So, click this video up here. It’s my leaf strategy video so you can learn how to get lots of traffic from YouTube.