In this episode, we tackle the myths or the old world views of business which are completely gone due to the accelerating development in technology.

These myths need to be put aside:

It takes money to make money.

There is some truth to this statement. But when compared to the industrial age, we don’t need a large amount to start businesses. Businesses can be started at a grass roots budget. Use technology and you have so much access through your fingertips.

Additionally, funding sources have also expanded. For instance, there’s crowdfunding and angel funding that support your entrepreneurial ideas. You just need to expand your horizons and become resourceful.

Business will consume my life.

There will be times when your business seems life-consuming. But remember, you cannot separate your work and life. If you do your business with a passion and a greater purpose then it is not going to feel like life consuming. Know that when you’re building a business, you’re building a life. You can also outsource to leverage your work while maintaining control of the core activities of your business.

I need a good idea.

Ideas are actually dime a dozen. There are plenty of phenomenal ideas out there that are never executed. So we don’t need a plethora of ideas, we need the discipline to execute it. It is not innovation but entrepreneurs that impact on the economy. Innovations are simply ideas and entrepreneurs that execute it will make it have an economic impact. Success is not the generation of ideas but the execution of ideas.

I need a business plan.

You don’t need a business plan in the form of a document because a document can be shelved and never looked at. What is more important is the process you go through. You need a viable business model to create and deliver value in a holistic way. When we create a proper business model, the business plan will come together naturally. Instead of focusing on creating a document with words, numbers and pages; focus on the realism of a business model.

You can’t start a business in recessionary and depressionary time when there is economic uncertainty.

This is just seems to be a good excuse. There are number of businesses like Microsoft, GE and FedEx that started during the recession and were successful. There will always be a need in the marketplace that should be served. All we need is to be resilient and strategically navigate through the ups and downs of the economy.

“I can’t do it”

There’s very little in the world that hasn’t been done. You can use the internet and the vast ocean of information available online to learn “How to do it?” Once you find it, model it and build from there.

You can also get a mentor who can tell you right from wrong. Mentors are those who have faced the same challenges that you are facing. They can guide you in context with their own experience.

Most businesses fail.

Businesses fail due to bad thought process or a bad belief process. Businesses also fail due to the lack of execution. Some are created with the wrong business model that makes sense today but isn’t fit for the long haul. So, when it comes to business failures; it is not the business that failed, it is the business owner that failed the business and the end result happens to be the business failing.

So avoid the myths, create a business journey based on the vision of your life and do not allow untruths to hold you back. Find a way past and you are headed in the right direction.

Get the Podcast here 

— Transcription —

Hey there this is Mel Abraham and welcome to this session of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show. In this session, I’m going to take you through some of the myths, what used to be the truth but are no longer the truth; that can destroy your business. The things that are holding entrepreneur’s back. So, in a moment I’m going to come back after this brief introduction. I’m going to take you through some of these … I’m going to give you the truth about being an entrepreneur in today’s world.

• How do you escalate your business?
• What are the alternatives and options you have?

So, stay tuned … see you soon.

Hey there, welcome back. I’m Mel Abraham, the author of The Entrepreneur’s Solution and the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy where we teach you how to design a business and to create a life: To create a life of financial freedom and peace of mind.

And welcome back to this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution and in this episode I kind of want to tackle some of the things that I’ve seen over the years, over the decades as being an entrepreneur and an entrepreneurial mentor, as well as a consultant; that have held businesses back, that have held entrepreneur’s back from not only starting but achieving their full potential.

And they’re the untruths, they’re the myths, they’re the old world view of what they think still exists today and I can tell you that much of that is completely gone and

• Our ability to excel,
• Our ability to create businesses,
• Our ability to build businesses,
• To scale businesses,
• Our ability to have access to:
  • Capital
  • The customers
  • To the world

Based on technology has expanded immensely. I mean beyond imagination, at an accelerating pace and it’s going to continue to do so.

So, I want to take you through some of these things in hopes that what we can do is put them aside and deal with them right up front before we start digging deeper into business and say:

• “These things don’t matter.”
• “They’re not going to have an effect because they don’t apply” or
• “There are alternatives or there’s options that may be you haven’t thought about”.

For instance, one of the biggest things that I’ve heard through the years with entrepreneurs is, “It takes a lot of money; It takes money to make money”. I mean how many times have you heard that? We’ve all kind of heard that, “Takes money to make money”.

And, you know, there’s some truth in that and certainly in the industrial age where we needed to spend a lot of money to invest into assets, into equipment, into labor, into structures, into facilities and all of those types of things; it took a lot of money. It took a lot of money to develop businesses at that level.

But today, given the technological advances, today given the kind of expert industries that we’re in, the kind of access we have, given internet and global economy, and all of the advancements that exists; we don’t need a lot of money. We can build a business on a grassroots spaces.

And when you think about what you have access to today, compared to years gone by, it’s staggering. Just take a moment to think about the fact that we at our fingertips can become a publisher. All we need to do is use a blog or go to a print on demand. There’s very little cost to doing that other than the cost of print-on-demand.

I don’t have to, I remember years ago, I published a book and bought three thousand copies—they were sitting in the garage on a pallet—until I can get them sold. We don’t need to do that today. You know, today I can literally, create a book and have it published on demand. Even better, I don’t even need to publish it. They can just download it as an electronic e-book through either kindle, or on the iPad or some other electronic reader. So, we have at our fingertips the ability to be a publisher. We have it at our fingertips, the ability to have our own TV station.

I’m sitting here in my home office down by the beach in Southern California and I’m broadcasting to you in what’s basically an office studio environment right now. It allows me to do this and if you look at the studio, it’s not some expensive board, it’s not some expensive equipment, it’s not a huge investment—certainly there is some investment in lights and camera and software and that type of thing—but nothing of magnitude that we would be used to if we were trying to film in the past or record anything in the past.

Then, all you need to do is to take that, do some editing on it and you know, quite frankly you get iMovie on the Mac for free or cheap and you can use that to edit. And then you upload it to YouTube and you’ve got yourself your own broadcast station at your fingertips.

I can have my own radio station. As I sit here today, I’m recording this. This is going to turn into a podcast. Then I’m going to put my podcast out there in iTunes. So, I in effect have my own radio station and I don’t need to purchase the equipment, the antennas and the frequencies. All of that information and when you think about communication with your customers and your clients and your marketplace, we have at our fingertips the ability to connect with them at a level that is unsurpassed in times gone by because of technological advances.

So, yeah in some cases, in some businesses we need some money and we’ll talk about where some of those funding sources might come from. But, by at large, if you are smart, if you take the time to strategically think about your business, to strategically plan your business, you can do it on a grass roots budget without having to make some huge investments in dollars.

Another one of the myths that kind of goes along with this is that there’s no funding for businesses. And I totally get that, especially with some of the economic changes and shifts that have happened in the recent half-a-decade or so that we don’t necessarily have access to the funds that we once did. But, we still have access to the funds and we in-fact have access to funds that didn’t exist back then, that exists right now.

For instance, the whole concept of crowdfunding is huge. They say that the crowdfunding in itself is a 2.7 billion dollar industry and that’s going back, that’s going statistics back a couple of years right now. So, it’s going to expand, it’s going to be a three-four-five billion dollar industry where we can go out to the public and get funding.

In fact, one of my good friends has had the biggest, most successful Kickstarter campaign in history; over 11 million in dollars in a Kickstarter campaign in which he came up with a design, he put it out there. In fact, he failed the first time he went out to Kickstarter to fully fund his project, his idea. And he came back, he re-structured it, he re-strategized it, he re-designed it; came back at it and not only successfully funded it, but funded it to magnitudes that were un-imaginable.

And so when you think about there’s no funding for your business, it’s a matter of looking in the non-traditional areas.  If we’re going to go to banks, yeah you’re probably going to have some challenges and some difficulties with getting funding because banks, traditional lenders are not lending in the way that they used to lend in the past.

But there’s at least 20 other funding sources out there for you, that you can use to fund your business. It’s about being creative, it’s about being resourceful, it’s about looking at what exists in the marketplace today whether it’s a crowdfunding source.

I’m not a recommender of venture capital sources of funding unless it’s very specific setup circumstances. Angel funding: I’ve been involved with a number of angel projects. For those of you that don’t know what Angel funding is, that entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs such as myself that will take on start-up companies and start-up entrepreneurs, and help fund their process to build because

• We want to see them grow.
• We believe in the product.
• We believe in the management.
• We believe in the idea that we want to see it grow.

And so, you can get access to angel investors just the same.

So, when you start asking the question and say that there is no funding for businesses, if you’re knocking on a bank’s door then you’re probably going to find that it’s going to be a little more challenging, if impossible in some cases especially if you’re just starting out to get funding. But that doesn’t mean that that’s the only source.

So, all I am saying is, “Expand your horizons, expand your view and start looking and researching and being resourceful to find sources of funds”.

I’m not a recommender also of, I don’t recommend going and running up your credit cards to start your business or to run your business. I don’t recommend that you go and strip out your retirement to build a business. I would tell you that there’s other sources to go to first, before you ever even think of that.

So, next myth is … old world view is it will consume my life. And certainly there are times, I’ll be totally honest with you, there are times that your business and your ideas will consume your life. But at the same time:

• If it is your passion,
• If you’re on purpose,
• If you’re on path,
• If you’re on the right journey,

It’s not going to feel like it’s consuming your life.

But remember what I said earlier, that there’s this concept of work-life balance is a fallacy and that every decision, every choice we make is a life choice. So, I invite you as you start to build to think about your life and think about all the choices that you’re making as life decisions and how you can build that in.

And it’s about planning, it’s about managing, it’s about understanding and being intentional about the things you do; when you do them. Knowing that hey you know what, “For this next week or so, I’m going to have to bury myself in because I’ve got a deadline but then I need to pull myself away, give some space for myself to grow”, and all that.

My wife and I, we intentionally plan our time away. We intentionally plan our time together as breaks. We put them hard coded in the calendar to make sure that we’ve embedded in the system so that we don’t allow just life to take on and work to take on. Because, it’s really easy to say, “Well I’ll get to that; well I’ll get to that next week. Next week we’ll take some time off, next week we’ll do that”.

No-no-no make it part of your life. Make it part of who you are, make it part of how you’re showing up, make it part of your value system and make sure that it is clear that you’re putting it in there. It doesn’t need to be this way and now with outsourcing and access to doing things; you could leverage a lot of the aspects of your business. And by leveraging the aspects of your business it relieves you from doing things.

There are a number of things that there are in my business right now but I leverage out, and I’m pretty much the conductor and just orchestrating it right now and other people are doing some of the things for me. But all the core things come back to me and all the core elements of my business I run, I oversee and I take care of. So, that’s one of the other myths.

The next one is that, I need a good idea. And the interesting thing is that ideas are dime a dozen. Ideas and innovation are dime a dozen. I know that some of you may argue with me on this point, but hold off for a second, bear with me for a moment. The fact is that there are a plenty of ideas out there that have never seen the light of day. There are phenomenal ideas that are phenomenal innovations that have never gone anywhere.

The reason that they’ve never gone anywhere is because it was a lack of execution behind them. What we need is not a plethora of ideas. What is need is a discipline of execution and with execution we’ll bring that forward. In fact there’s a movement now in society where they’re saying innovation is going to bring our economy back. That’s absolutely not true. Innovation will not bring our economy back. Entrepreneurs will bring our economy back.

Here’s why I say that: Innovation for itself is simply ideas, it’s innovative thoughts, it’s a thought process, it’s concepts, it’s concept cards, it’s concept products, its concepts-concepts-concepts.

But, the only way they come to the world, the only way they come to fruition, the only way that they have an economic impact is when an entrepreneur gets behind that innovation, behind the idea, behind the concept and moves it forward into customers’ hands where there is a value exchange like we talked in the last session, the last episode—that there’s a value exchange out there. That’s driven by entrepreneurship.

So, the real key is behind your success is not the ideas, but the execution of the ideas you have. The other thing that I hear a lot from entrepreneurs is, “I’ve got this product, I’ve got this idea and built it and they shall come”. You know that whole cliché, that whole mindset of building and they shall come. Well, not in today’s world.

We went from an industrial age type of environment, where there were products and there wasn’t a huge selection of products and there wasn’t access to products except within the local area markets—within the local townships—within that locale. But now, we’ve basically transcended geographic lines. Every business has the capacity to be global.

I have clients in Australia, in New Zealand, in Europe, in Germany, in Austria, in Belgium and all around The US. I’ve clients all over the place because I’ve been able to transcend the global space, the geographic lines in doing that. It’s not about build it and they shall come, it’s about connecting with them at a visceral level just like we talked about in the last episode. It’s about connection. What our audience, what our marketplace is looking for is a place to belong—a place of meaning. Remember, when we talked about value of purpose and passion and promise; promise of an aspirational thing.

And so what we need to do within our products, within our services, within our businesses is come from that aspirational view, come from a connection view to go out there and say

• “I want to have a relationship with my marketplace.”
• “I want to have a dialogue with my marketplace.”
• “I want to have an intimate understanding of who my marketplace is.”

There’s a reason that Tony Hsieh and Zappos is so successful—because they’ve come from a culture of delivering happiness. When you deliver happiness, you shift lives, you transform lives and when you transform lives you create a relationship, a loyalty that is un-equaled elsewhere.

So, rather than focusing on building things and putting things out there and hoping they come, focus on creating something:

• That is absolutely phenomenal,
• That serves a purpose,
• That creates a solution,
• That solves a problem, and
• That changes their lives.

And then go out there and campaign it by connecting with them at a deep level.

The next one is, (boy do I hear this all the time), “Oh, I need a business plan”. Yes, and I am proponent of business plans. I’m actually a proponent of the process of business plans. I don’t think that you need a business plan in the sense of a document because what happens with business plans is most of the time we go through all the process of a business plan. We publish a document, it goes on a shelf and it’s never looked at, it’s never even used again. But what’s important is the process you go through.

What’s more important though is you need a business model. The business model which we talked about in the last episode is you need a viable business model, something-

• That is an optimal business model,
• That is this creating value,
• That’s cultivating value,
• That’s campaigning value,
• That’s capturing value and delivering value in a holistic way:
  • To our customers
  • To our vendors
  • To our team and employees and staff
  • To ourselves and to the people around us.

When we create the proper business model, the business plan will come together, and rather than getting so focused on writing a document and focused on the words on a page, let’s focus on the realism of a business model that generates value, real value in the marketplace and for everyone that’s involved in our business.

The other one that I’ve heard is that:

• You can’t start a business in recessionary times.
• You can’t start a business in depressionary times.
• You can’t start a business in when there’s economic uncertainty.

And that is so off base. It’s a really good cop-out, it’s a really excuse, it’s a really good reason to not start it, it’s a really good fear based perspective to stop.

But what you really need to do is instead of focusing on the recession, it’s a mindset shift, it’s an attitude towards things is that we need to be resilient … and the resilience … we’re not going to have a trajectory that’s a linear trajectory. We’re going to have our ebbs-and-flows our ups-and-downs. But we need to navigate that; we need to have resilience and persistence to move through that.

There are a number of businesses that are tremendously successful today that were started in recessions. So you know FedEx is one of them, IHOP’s another, Redlon, GE, Microsoft. All of these businesses, if you look at when they were started, they were started at times when everyone was saying no-no-no it’s the worse time to start a business.

But you know what, there’s always need out in the marketplace and when you serve that need at a high level:

• When you create solutions.
• When you solve problems.
• When you build on aspirations.

There will always be buyers for that.

And when you can create that, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in recession, depression, or boom times—your business will be successful. So we need resilience, we need to be intelligent about it, and we need to move forward and be strategic about it.

Then, the other thing that … in fact I just had this conversation a week ago with someone that we’re talking about, that said “I can’t do it”, I said “Really? You can’t do what you need to do?” and “I don’t know how to do it, so I can’t do it”.

“Well, if you think about that because that is a huge distinction”, I said so “you’re saying you can’t do it because you don’t know how to or is it that you can’t do it because you don’t have the capability?” and she said, “No, because I don’t know how to”.

Well, this concept of I have no experience. So, I have no experience means that, you can’t do it. There’s very little in this world that hasn’t been done before and the cool thing is that given the internet, given our access to resources in today’s world there’s nothing you can’t find out how to do. We just need to go to that whole new invention that just came out. Well, maybe not just came out. It’s called the “Google”. Just go to the Google and Google it “How to? How to? How to?”

There are plenty of resources out there and in all likelihood, there’s nothing you’re thinking of doing or changing or shifting your business that hasn’t been done before and so look for it, model it and build from there, from that perspective. It’s easy to access experience. That’s probably one of the easiest things to solve.

Here’s the other thing to think about: “Do you have a mentor?”

I have mentors, I have colleagues, I have mentors and I have people that I can go to when I’m struggling with something, when I’m trying to figure out something, when I’m trying to get a different vision, when I might be missing the [boat]. I have mentors. We all need mentors and so there are people out there that you should think about and say:

• “Who should be my mentor?”
• “Who do I want to be my mentor?”

And I differentiate between mentorship and coaching. And coaching is a process that someone takes you through, that will help you come to the conclusion and come to some answers to build from but they may not have ever walked the path, they may not have ever had the experience.

In my mind, what a mentor is someone that has walked the walked, someone that has ran the miles, that has stubbed the toes, skinned the knees and broke the nose. That’s why I look at myself mentor from an entrepreneurial perspective. Just trust me, I have stubbed the toes, skinned the knees and broken my nose plenty of times so I can sit down with my clients, with you through the show and work with you in a context with that experience in mind to say, no-no-no I’ve been down this road before, and I can tell you that there’s a hole there and a hole there and we need to avoid that and the way to avoid that is to do this.

And so, make sure that you surround yourself with mentors. Whether you believe in this cliché or not that the level that success is based upon is going to be capped by the average salary or the average intelligence or the average success of the five people that are around you.

And in some senses I believe that. When you surround yourself with successful people that hold you to a higher standard, that spur you to live bigger, to live longer, live at a higher ideal, you’re going to step up. And so one of the biggest things is right now I would look at it and say make a list of the people that you would like as your mentors and start figuring out:

1. How can you get them to be a mentor?

It may be: having to pay them to be a mentor, it may be serving them in some way, it may be some other creative way you come out of it but there is no such thing as a self-made millionaire, not in my mind, because all of the success that everyone has had including myself have been

• With the assistance,
• With the support,
• With the pushing,
• With the urging,
• With the pulling,
• With the clawing of people around me.

I sit here today with the kind of blessed life and success that I’ve had in-spite of all the failures because of all the people that pushed me on and said, “Keep going kid, keep going kid, keep going kid”. If I can serve that for you then that is what this show is about—to say, “Keep going, Keep going, ask the questions, let’s move you forward, let’s keep going to do that”.

Then I think, it’s the last one that I have is the concept that “Oh, most businesses fail” and it’s an interesting thought that most businesses fail but when you really start to look at it, I think that what happens is that most business owners fail the business first and then the business fails second.

Most business failures are result of one of a couple of things:

• A bad thought process or
• A bad belief process

In other words, the way they’re thinking in their business is very tunnel-vision and there’s only one way and they’re not being flexible enough to understand and look at the bigger picture and see what other alternatives and what other ways they might be able to move through that comes about. When you have a foundational thought process that is flawed, every decision and choice you make beyond that will be flawed too and then the results obviously are not going to be there.

The other part of it is the lack of execution. We talked about that earlier. You can’t sit back and expect things to just happen. I mean you know, I think all of us at some point of time in our lives would have liked things to be done for us. But they’re not just that way and so, the execution is the other piece of where failures come about.

Then the last is a lot of businesses are created with the wrong business model, and they’re created with the business model that makes sense today but not six months or a year or six years from now. If you look at things like the Polaroid camera—it was a business model that worked back in the day. But, they got left behind because they wouldn’t shift business model with the trends and technology, the trends and times, the trends and preferences to digital cameras and that type of thing.

So, when it comes to business failures it’s not the business that fails, it’s the business owner that fails the business and the end result is that the business ends up failing. So, check your though process, check your belief process, check the business model and open up the view. And what’ll help you open up the view is what we just talked about earlier, having mentors, having people that can talk about your blind spots and be in a loving way, direct with you to say, “No, you’re totally off base and you shouldn’t be doing it that way” or saying, “No, you’ve got that right”.

So when I look at all of these put together, any one of these can hold you back. Any one of these can hold you back from ever starting your business or hold you back from taking the next step in your business or hold you back from ever getting to your dreams.

That’s the thing that drives me crazy, that’s the thing that really, it’s a thing that I don’t want to push back at because I think we’re here to live a life. Live a life of vibrancy, live a life that is by our own design. To live a life that when we get to the waning years of our life we are huffing-and-puffing and going, “Man that was a hell of a ride”.

The way we got to do that is to create the journey, to design the journey based on our vision of our life and like I say to my son, “As long as it’s moral, legal and you’re not hurting anyone: Go for it!”

You get to choose your life and so do we. I get to choose my life, you get to choose your life and I want to help you in that process to realize that what you think are obstacles are not really obstacles. If you want to build your business to the next level or you want to start a business, and start to grow it, it doesn’t matter what age you are, it doesn’t matter where you are in the world—it doesn’t matter.

It’s there; there are resources out … this age thing I’ve heard before. Zipcar was started by a mother of a number of children who was in her forties and she saw a need, she saw an opportunity, she didn’t have new ideas. She simply combined existing technologies—rental cars, internet, mobile payments and created Zipcar which was … now we can rent cars in an hourly basis instead of on a daily basis.

And she was on the verge of failure, 68 dollars in her checking account before she got additional funding and ultimately ended up selling the business out for a billion dollars. She’s a consultant to congress on transportation policy now and you look at it and say, “It doesn’t matter when you start”.

It matters that you do start; it matters that you take and put the life into those dreams and that you’re moving forward, that you take that business and we start to expand the vision and grow it bigger.

So, looking back on some of these myths, ask yourself, “Which one of these am I allowing to hold me back?” and then find the way past it. Check yourself and look at it and say,

• “All right, have I researched the resources for funding?”
• “Have I exhausted my resources with respect to funding?”
• “Am I managing my life properly, so it’s not consuming my life and it’s not affecting my relationships and my health?” And
• “Do I need to connect with people that might be mentors and might be able to guide my and shorten my learning curve and avoid the potholes that may be I happen to be stepping into?”
• “Am I connected with my customers?”
• “Am I connected with my marketplace?”
• “Do I really know what their fears, fascinations or frustrations are?”
• “Do I understand it as a visceral level?” And
• “Do I message it out in a way that I connect with them?”

And so ask yourself a series of these questions and see how you start to relieve yourself of the burdens of what these myths are, this old world view of how businesses and entrepreneurs cannot be successful because you are successful, you have the potential to be successful and you have the opportunity to grow,

And that’s what this show is about is to give you the tools, give you the skills, give you the strategies to build on. We talked about the foundational elements of in the last episode. I wanted to knock down these myths, right from the get-go. So we can start digging deeper into some of the elements of business in the upcoming episodes.

So, I hope this serves you, I hope that you’ve found this useful and then it flips some lights on for you and that you get a chance to reconsider some of the things that may be have been holding you back in-turn.

So, you like this episode go ahead and subscribe and make sure that you get notification that every time I put another video out or another episode out. And also go ahead and share it with a friend. Give a friend a gift of their dreams, their possibility in their life by them getting access to some of this information.

And if you have a question for me, go ahead and go to askmelnow.com and leave your question or comment there in a voice mail. If it’s a question, I’ll make sure that I get it on one of the upcoming episodes and make sure that we get it answered.

I want you to be supported; I’m your entrepreneurial mentor through this show and through this program.

Until we get a chance to see each other in the next episode,

May your vision be grand, your journey epic and your legacy significant!

See you soon!!

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Like this? Please share it and help a few more people bring their dreams out of the darkness and give life to them again.  Cheers, Mel

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