5 things I wish I knew when I started my business

Everyone has the things they wish they knew, but too many times I see the same regurgitated ‘5 things’ or ’10 things’ that really don’t dig into helping us better understand ourselves. Because while tools and tactics certainly have their place, those things have little value if we haven’t first mastered ourselves and built our businesses with that awareness.

I go back to the belief that the best business for you is the one you love. And these 5 things helped me love my business and the results speak for themselves and make more money at the end of the day.

This is an ongoing list I keep as I document my entrepreneurship journey, but these 5 are some that I felt have been the most impactful so far. I hope this resonates with you so that you take action to define what you love, ditch what you don’t, and delegate the rest.

1.      I wish I had known my working genius.

I recently read a book called The 6 Working Genius’s, then took the accompanying assessment, and it was incredibly eye opening for me. As I write this, I realize how life changing because I immediately had my team take it and we updated a lot of our structure immediately.

For a brief context, the book states that there are 6 working geniuses, and every person has 2 of them, they have 2 competencies and 2 frustrations.

I have always been a visionary person that loves to learn how things work, and that passion has extreme value in the world (I recently began to actually believe). But until I had clarity on my working genius’s, I would often feel bad for my frustrations (Enablement and Tenacity). Not that lacking in these areas is an excuse, but it explained a lot and empowered me ultimately to be a better leader and to lean into what I love. I see how I provide the most value with the way I lend a new perspective and the ability to simplify nearly anything down to it’s essence to find solutions for others.

Overall, it helped me see my power and it seems many people could use some confirmation of their own powers to lean into their passions. Because that is truly where we make the most impact. You can go here to take the assessment, and it only takes 10 minutes, and will give you back so much more. ( this is not an affiliate link)

2.      Clarity around the Progress to Profits client results journey.

One of the mistakes I made early on was not being clear on the transformation I wanted to take people through and the difference I wanted to make in their lives. And with that, the business model and stages that we would take our clients through to get there.

I’m a licensed CPA, so when I began my business, naturally all kinds of people wanted my input, and any business owner needs a CPA. So, I took nearly any referral I got. Much like how a nurse gets asked about people’s ailments on a regular basis because they have an RN license. Any professional knows what I’m talking about.

And while referrals are a blessing and the most inexpensive form of marketing, it can become an expensive problem when your referrals aren’t properly aligned with what you want to offer.

The key here is to be clear on what you want to offer. If I could go back, I would have invested in understanding messaging and positioning so much better, so I attracted the best clients for my passion of building businesses sooner, rather than trying to be a one-size-fits-all solution to any business owner that came my way. This would have allowed me to better articulate the payoff and solution we provide at Progress to Profits and would have avoided much of the pain of hard conversations.

I don’t regret the lessons I’ve learned however, or the skill I’ve developed in confronting challenges head on.

If you find yourself running a business right now that you know is out of alignment with your passion, take the time to clearly articulate the vision for your life and what difference you want to make in the lives of your people (clients, family, spectators). We have a great module in Progress University that will help you do this with ease.

3.      Selling is the most important 1st skill to learn.

Related to #2 and defining the client results journey, I didn’t understand how important the skill of selling was. Coming from the corporate world as a financial accountant, selling wasn’t something I had ever explored or understood. I knew (great) salespeople made lots of money, but I never thought about that before I began my business. And again, I was blessed to get many referrals along the way, but early in the infancy of Progress, they weren’t necessarily the right referrals. But I didn’t know that at the time.

So if I had been clear on how I want to help people and clear on my working genius’s, I wouldn’t have sold people into traditional CPA offers which would leave me burnt out. I would have been able to sell people and again, attract the right people, into the offers that I created and knew would provide value but wouldn’t be cookie-cutter industry offers that would burn me out.

Now I understand that helping entrepreneurs build a life that their business will support (instead of vice versa) is my passion, not tax returns and financial statements, even though those things are important and I have skills in them. Chances are you have skills that can make you money, but they don’t make you happy.

It’s great awareness to realize for yourself that there are things you are capable of and important for your clients to know and have, but that doesn't mean you have to be the person for that. It means that you have clarity on how you want to make people’s lives better and are so certain of that, that your messaging and positioning sell it with ease.

And because of the clarity of how you help people, selling the value becomes second nature.

If you want help in this area, I have some great mentors to recommend.

4.      Be a solution seeker, not a problem solver.

1 of the worst pieces of advice I ever got: “Focus on solving people’s problems.”

That has been a huge waste of time and attracts people with problems. I think the intention is pure (most of the time), but I see this sabotage so many people because what you focus on expands.

As an example, my personal experience with this was focusing on people that were having money problems in their business, which means I was attracting those people. But the money problems weren’t the problem, they were the result of actions (or the lack thereof) that person was taking. And I’ll spare you the details but this was always a losing game for both parties. The ones that needed help couldn’t afford it, and the way I wanted to help wasn’t ‘affordable’.

So as I better developed the skill of selling, I better understood the mindset of the people that truly wanted my help to grow their business. I understood how to focus on the payoff and not the price, problem or process. Those elements can be used to get attention, so our people know who we’re talking to, but they are not the focus. When you focus on making people’s lives better, as a result, problems get solved and often are avoided.

5.      I don’t need their money; they need to write that check.

Charging people for doing what you love and are good at can be challenging from a mindset perspective. But I heard Myron Golden talk on this when I got to see him in person at an event and it has been branded into my brain since then.

He was talking about making offers and one of his offers at the time was $350,000. He said that sometimes our prices don’t need to make sense. He said in talking to a prospect, “I don’t need your money, but you need to write that check.”

He didn’t need to make money from that offer. He knew what he offered was valuable no matter the price, but if he was truly going to change someone’s life, it was necessary to get them in the feels. It needed to make them use their noggin.

Because when people pay, they pay attention. And not just any payment but paying a price that makes them intentional and focused because that’s what gets results.

Too many times I priced offers and services way too low and it was a disservice to those clients because they weren’t attentive because the price was something they could ‘afford’. It was easy for them to pay. I then I saw how their results were not what I know I could have given them, but I couldn’t give them what I wanted because there wasn’t enough margin.

Now I look at pricing completely differently. I want to get people seriously transformational results which allows my team and I to deliver high-quality containers and service. I charge prices that I know will allow me to fully show up for that person and not need to cut corners to be profitable.

Along with this mindset and understanding, it’s also a case of being responsible with your money so that you don’t feel the need to make an offer for something that you truly don’t love to offer. Needing to make money is a scarcity energy that rarely ever serves anyone for lasting results and keeps you in a place that you can’t truly thrive.

These are just a handful of things that allowed me to became a better leader, entrepreneur, and ultimately, a better servant to the clients we can truly serve. For the ones that value growth and building impactful businesses that they can run from anywhere they want.

The clarity these 5 things brought me also the tools I needed were more apparent and I wasn’t swayed by every gimmick I saw on the internet; I was able to clearly discern the type of coach I needed for the areas I wanted to master in my business which has saved me a lot of time and money.

If you’re looking to build a business that you love to build that will support your life to do all the things, join Progress University where we have a suite of tools that make business simple, our team at your fingertips, and live calls to address people, processes, and profit drivers that will give you certainty to run your empire.

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