Here I am in my home office and I was actually just talking to an entrepreneur and we were talking about problems that he’s seeing in his business. He has an MBA and a very analytical mind and is a fantastic business person, in most cases.
He’s seeing these problems that are coming up, problems in his marketplace and problems that I see, frankly, as opportunities. What I had him do is rephrase his problems as opportunities.
So as the story goes, the musician stormed out of the recording studio yelling at the producer and saying, “I’m not coming back until you fix the problem!” Now the musician was complaining about the acoustics in the studio. He was just tired, there was a reverberation and an echo in there that just wasn’t giving purity to his sound. He came back a week later. Now, this was an important musician, and to the producer, this was a chance for him to make or break his career. The musician came back in, he sat down and he started to play and noticed the acoustics were still horrible. And he said, “I thought I told you to fix the problem?” And in response, the producer said, “I did. I actually changed the lights and painted the walls.”
This morning I was talking to a business owner, and during the conversation, he was telling me a story about a sales call that he had. Now, what he didn’t know if I actually knew the person that he was called upon, yet they were on two different continents in the world. I actually knew both of them, which was really fabulous. So I was listening to his story, and what he told me was the actual conversation just fell flat. Now, he was saying, “Doug, we’re having the conversation, and it absolutely just fell flat and went nowhere.” So what did I do, of course?
What is success without freedom? Now, this is a common question I ask business owners when I’m coaching them, or just even during an initial conversation. The reason I ask this is oftentimes as business owners we actually go after success so hard that we lose freedom. I’ve certainly been in this case. When you’re looking at this even if you’re an employee or you’re going after another goal. Right? You’re trying to build your first business, or maybe you’re just working a typical 9:00 to 5:00, but you’re really going after the author of your own story lifestyle so you’re putting other things aside.
I was having a conversation with a young entrepreneur and what he was telling me was he actually moved on to his third business, but the problem he was having is his second and first business had actually had to be closed down because they weren’t becoming successful anymore. Now, they used to be widely successful. When he started with his first he worked his tail off, learned the ins and outs of business and what it took to run a business, actually was able to scale it and then freed his time and used his capital that he had gained from the first business, the money he made, and implied the second business, which I think is actually really smart. Then he did the same thing with the second business, but while he was building a second business, his first business started to diminish, right?
