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Managing Expectations While On Your Entrepreneurial Journey
Preface: I'd consider myself relatively successful now that I've built up a company that's generating over $1 million in ARR and I'm finally able to reap my rewards via fat dividends checks. I’m writing this from the perspective of someone who is building an enterprise business instead of a lifestyle business. At the time of writing this, I’m completely debt free, I have 9 employees, and I’m in the process of getting a divorce. If we aren’t doing 8 figures per year in a couple of years, I’d be really surprised. It's taken me 8 years to get to this point since first reading TMF.
Managing your expectations so that you can persist through your journey is EVERYTHING. If you do not properly manage your expectations, I firmly believe that you will not succeed.
Your expectations need to evolve over time as your company grows. Start out aiming for small wins, and as you gain experience running your company you need to expand your definition of success. The ever changing definition of your own success is what will propel you to higher revenue tiers in your business. I think that you have to earn your right to expect more from yourself, otherwise expecting too much from the start is setting yourself up for failure. Managing your expectations is an art in itself.. If you expect too little, you might not get anywhere, and if you expect too much you might disappoint yourself to the point of quitting.
Learn to thrive on little wins.
When you begin your journey to financial freedom, you need to realize that you aren't going to be doing $10k per month right off the bat. The process to get there for me was long and hard. It took a little over 2 years for us to have our first $10k month. If you’re hustling Amazon products, I’d hope that you reach this milestone before I did. If you have the expectation that you will be doing $10k a month after putting in a month or two of work, you are setting yourself up for failure and disappointment. The better expectation to have is that if you just made a dollar, you can make a hundred dollars. Gradually increase your expectations over time as you get little wins. Raise your expectations a little more after each win so that you can reach your next goal.
When I started out, due to the complexity of my business, we had trouble hitting $10k in a single month. What kept me going during the first few years were random $10 sales from a new customer every other day. These little wins were the small bits of validation that I needed to keep pressing on. $10 dollars is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but at this stage in the process, it meant the world to me. If someone is giving you money in exchange for your offering, you’re on the right track. New sale notifications and the dopamine hit associated with them was incredibly addicting.
You may have to rely on these little wins for months or years though, so train yourself to see each new sale as a small echo that you’re onto something. Use these echos as fuel to keep going.
A piece of side advice is to not obsess over your sales notifications/analytics like I did. I burnt up many hours of time refreshing my inbox when I should have been working.
Eventually small sales/wins will lose their charm.
Expect to come to a point where you are no longer getting that big dopamine hit from small sales. Maybe you’ve reached the $25k/m milestone. If you’re selling a $50 widget, then you need 500 sales each month to get to $25k/m, which would come out to roughly 17 notifications a day. After a year of steady sales you’ll have seen over 6,000 sales notifications.. At this point they likely mean nothing to you. I think this loss of interest in small wins is of great detriment to you. Once you stop cheering yourself on for each sale, you may lose sight of the bigger picture and become complacent.
To counteract this, you need to move to a new dopamine hit. What dopamine hit is that? Units per day. The higher your units per day, the more money you make, and the funner the game you’re now playing is on a macro scale. Tracking sales analytics, visualizing units sold with line graphs, and trying to beat your best scores (days) is addicting. Use this game to your advantage. Consistently try to hit higher units sold numbers. You can play this same game with revenue, MRR, ARR, or any other metric that is most exciting to you.
Complacency is your worst enemy.
I don’t have much to say on this other than that if you lower your expectations for yourself and you become complacent, you will F*ck your business up. Once snow starts sliding on a mountain side, there’s a good chance it’s going to turn into a powerful and destructive avalanche. Don’t let your complacency slide, or it could cause the avalanche that destroys your business.
Fighting complacency is hard, and even I’m guilty of it. However, if you expect that it’s going to happen you can recognize it faster and prevent yourself from being complacent for too long. Any time you’re twiddling your thumbs or have your head in your a$$ is time that your competitor has to overtake you or widen the gap.
Expect the desert, but swim in the hidden oasis.
I have no doubt in my mind that you will cross multiple deserts of desertion on your journey to your first million dollars. If you understand and expect that you are going to have to cross huge barren deserts, you can prepare yourself for it and recognize when you are in it. The great thing about deserts is that they often have an oasis. An oasis could be a customer cheering you on, a new contract with a fortune 500 company, or an investment. The people who quit when in the desert of desertion probably didn’t find their oasis in time. These sweet bodies of water will allow you to rehydrate enough so that you can cross the rest of the desert. You may find multiple oases throughout your trek across the desert.
If you know in your gut that your business has potential, and you’ve made sales, do not give up under any circumstance. The desert of desertion kills more business ideas than anything else out there. There were so many times I wanted to quit. Societies EXPECTATION is that you are going to quit and rejoin the rat race. Have different expectations for yourself. Keep one foot in front of the other and press on.
Expect stress, but realize it’s bullshit.
Stress is when a company gives you $20,000 out of the blue and then they email you telling you that they never got their product. Then, when they get the product it doesn’t work. Finally, when you are almost done with a solution for your first customer, another company gives you $15,000 and they are facing the same problems. This was a situation that actually happened to me due to some minor oversight on our backend but was a pain to unravel. I stressed out so much over that two day period where if I were older, I probably would have died from a heart attack. After this traumatic event I realized that stress is nothing but bullshit. It’s nothing more than B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T. Want to know why? Because the entire time the customers were understanding and forgiving of our mistakes.
At worst, most problems are only going to persist for a few days or maybe even a week. Eventually you are going to solve the problem, and when you are armed with that knowledge, there’s no reason to stress. I now have the experience to backup my expectations that problems will be solved quickly, thus reducing my stress levels. If you look back on stressful moments in your life, you just may realize that things panned out just fine and the stress was unnecessary.
Expect sacrifices.
Starting and running a successful business is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but don’t let that scare you away. The life that I have is so much more interesting than if I just sat on the couch all day watching the 19th rerun of The Office. You will sacrifice nights out with your friends, some relationships, money in the short term, and lots and lots of time. Knowing that you are going to sacrifice so much is empowering because you can use these painful sacrifices as leverage to propel yourself forward.
Expect rewards.
The plus side of all of these sacrifices is the reward. Financial freedom. Quitting your job. Intense satisfaction in knowing what you’ve created. Breaking free from the chains of debt. Not worrying about whether or not you can afford that cool new toy you’ve had our eye’s on for a while. Building my business brings me great satisfaction at the end of the day and money is no longer an issue.
Go forth and prosper.
Hopefully I've stressed the importance of knowing both what to expect on your journey and keeping your own expectations grounded with reality. There will be things that you cannot foresee or know to expect, but learning to manage your expectations you can get through any rough patch and excel when things are going great.
Preface: I'd consider myself relatively successful now that I've built up a company that's generating over $1 million in ARR and I'm finally able to reap my rewards via fat dividends checks. I’m writing this from the perspective of someone who is building an enterprise business instead of a lifestyle business. At the time of writing this, I’m completely debt free, I have 9 employees, and I’m in the process of getting a divorce. If we aren’t doing 8 figures per year in a couple of years, I’d be really surprised. It's taken me 8 years to get to this point since first reading TMF.
Managing your expectations so that you can persist through your journey is EVERYTHING. If you do not properly manage your expectations, I firmly believe that you will not succeed.
Your expectations need to evolve over time as your company grows. Start out aiming for small wins, and as you gain experience running your company you need to expand your definition of success. The ever changing definition of your own success is what will propel you to higher revenue tiers in your business. I think that you have to earn your right to expect more from yourself, otherwise expecting too much from the start is setting yourself up for failure. Managing your expectations is an art in itself.. If you expect too little, you might not get anywhere, and if you expect too much you might disappoint yourself to the point of quitting.
Learn to thrive on little wins.
When you begin your journey to financial freedom, you need to realize that you aren't going to be doing $10k per month right off the bat. The process to get there for me was long and hard. It took a little over 2 years for us to have our first $10k month. If you’re hustling Amazon products, I’d hope that you reach this milestone before I did. If you have the expectation that you will be doing $10k a month after putting in a month or two of work, you are setting yourself up for failure and disappointment. The better expectation to have is that if you just made a dollar, you can make a hundred dollars. Gradually increase your expectations over time as you get little wins. Raise your expectations a little more after each win so that you can reach your next goal.
When I started out, due to the complexity of my business, we had trouble hitting $10k in a single month. What kept me going during the first few years were random $10 sales from a new customer every other day. These little wins were the small bits of validation that I needed to keep pressing on. $10 dollars is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but at this stage in the process, it meant the world to me. If someone is giving you money in exchange for your offering, you’re on the right track. New sale notifications and the dopamine hit associated with them was incredibly addicting.
You may have to rely on these little wins for months or years though, so train yourself to see each new sale as a small echo that you’re onto something. Use these echos as fuel to keep going.
A piece of side advice is to not obsess over your sales notifications/analytics like I did. I burnt up many hours of time refreshing my inbox when I should have been working.
Eventually small sales/wins will lose their charm.
Expect to come to a point where you are no longer getting that big dopamine hit from small sales. Maybe you’ve reached the $25k/m milestone. If you’re selling a $50 widget, then you need 500 sales each month to get to $25k/m, which would come out to roughly 17 notifications a day. After a year of steady sales you’ll have seen over 6,000 sales notifications.. At this point they likely mean nothing to you. I think this loss of interest in small wins is of great detriment to you. Once you stop cheering yourself on for each sale, you may lose sight of the bigger picture and become complacent.
To counteract this, you need to move to a new dopamine hit. What dopamine hit is that? Units per day. The higher your units per day, the more money you make, and the funner the game you’re now playing is on a macro scale. Tracking sales analytics, visualizing units sold with line graphs, and trying to beat your best scores (days) is addicting. Use this game to your advantage. Consistently try to hit higher units sold numbers. You can play this same game with revenue, MRR, ARR, or any other metric that is most exciting to you.
Complacency is your worst enemy.
I don’t have much to say on this other than that if you lower your expectations for yourself and you become complacent, you will F*ck your business up. Once snow starts sliding on a mountain side, there’s a good chance it’s going to turn into a powerful and destructive avalanche. Don’t let your complacency slide, or it could cause the avalanche that destroys your business.
Fighting complacency is hard, and even I’m guilty of it. However, if you expect that it’s going to happen you can recognize it faster and prevent yourself from being complacent for too long. Any time you’re twiddling your thumbs or have your head in your a$$ is time that your competitor has to overtake you or widen the gap.
Expect the desert, but swim in the hidden oasis.
I have no doubt in my mind that you will cross multiple deserts of desertion on your journey to your first million dollars. If you understand and expect that you are going to have to cross huge barren deserts, you can prepare yourself for it and recognize when you are in it. The great thing about deserts is that they often have an oasis. An oasis could be a customer cheering you on, a new contract with a fortune 500 company, or an investment. The people who quit when in the desert of desertion probably didn’t find their oasis in time. These sweet bodies of water will allow you to rehydrate enough so that you can cross the rest of the desert. You may find multiple oases throughout your trek across the desert.
If you know in your gut that your business has potential, and you’ve made sales, do not give up under any circumstance. The desert of desertion kills more business ideas than anything else out there. There were so many times I wanted to quit. Societies EXPECTATION is that you are going to quit and rejoin the rat race. Have different expectations for yourself. Keep one foot in front of the other and press on.
Expect stress, but realize it’s bullshit.
Stress is when a company gives you $20,000 out of the blue and then they email you telling you that they never got their product. Then, when they get the product it doesn’t work. Finally, when you are almost done with a solution for your first customer, another company gives you $15,000 and they are facing the same problems. This was a situation that actually happened to me due to some minor oversight on our backend but was a pain to unravel. I stressed out so much over that two day period where if I were older, I probably would have died from a heart attack. After this traumatic event I realized that stress is nothing but bullshit. It’s nothing more than B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T. Want to know why? Because the entire time the customers were understanding and forgiving of our mistakes.
At worst, most problems are only going to persist for a few days or maybe even a week. Eventually you are going to solve the problem, and when you are armed with that knowledge, there’s no reason to stress. I now have the experience to backup my expectations that problems will be solved quickly, thus reducing my stress levels. If you look back on stressful moments in your life, you just may realize that things panned out just fine and the stress was unnecessary.
Expect sacrifices.
Starting and running a successful business is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but don’t let that scare you away. The life that I have is so much more interesting than if I just sat on the couch all day watching the 19th rerun of The Office. You will sacrifice nights out with your friends, some relationships, money in the short term, and lots and lots of time. Knowing that you are going to sacrifice so much is empowering because you can use these painful sacrifices as leverage to propel yourself forward.
Expect rewards.
The plus side of all of these sacrifices is the reward. Financial freedom. Quitting your job. Intense satisfaction in knowing what you’ve created. Breaking free from the chains of debt. Not worrying about whether or not you can afford that cool new toy you’ve had our eye’s on for a while. Building my business brings me great satisfaction at the end of the day and money is no longer an issue.
Go forth and prosper.
Hopefully I've stressed the importance of knowing both what to expect on your journey and keeping your own expectations grounded with reality. There will be things that you cannot foresee or know to expect, but learning to manage your expectations you can get through any rough patch and excel when things are going great.
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