"Is My Passion for Coding Holding Me Back?"

0:00Alex, how do I deal with uncertainty of a business? Okay, I tried freelancing and starting a development agency but after a few months I was still focused on day-to-day survival. All right. This translated me being in my head most of the time, imagining doomsday, not doing as much as I used to during the early business, my sales pitch being really bad. Okay. Now I jumped into full-time role again because I do not see myself improving and wanted to swim in the swim to shore as fast as possible. Okay. One thing that I did realize is my technical skills as an employee and my passion for coding were bottlenecks. I was doing custom software builds. I focused more on providing quality but that extended time on. Okay.

0:30And this passion for something doesn't translate well to business. That is just false. Just false. I think that is that's cope. That's cope. You didn't know other skills and you're saying that your passion is why you didn't do well. That's not true. I'd say if anything being really passionate about the product might be one of the few things that actually matters. Um if I had been working like an operator doing only 1/10 of what needed, I would have fared better. No, you were mispriced, dude.

0:56There you go. That was the solution. Like if you're like, I want to do this very complex work, fine. Would you do it for a billion dollars? Yes, of course you would. Okay, would you do it for a dollar? No. Okay. So, there's nothing wrong with the work, you're just priced wrong. And so you're like, well, I would have, you know, I would have made money if I did a tenth of work. Right, at that price. It's like we assume that the price is somehow fixed.

1:21So, what are the skills that you're lacking? You didn't know how to sell. Right? You said it. You don't know how to sell. And because you don't know how to sell, you priced too low. Because you priced too low, you're still delivering more than you charged for, but that's on you. And it's okay. Everybody starts there. Dude, I've I I I failed at selling a free trial. When I started the gym. All right? Like every like everyone starts somewhere. Everyone falls the first time. This is normal. Uh but just do not believe this excuse that you are too passionate to be good at business. That is that is the biggest load of I've ever heard.

1:54Like like ridiculous. You might be good at this thing. You might not be good at as good as you think you are, and you're certainly not good at selling, you're not good at pricing. That's okay. All of those are learnable skills. So, I would say go back out there, and then sell like you mean it, and since you don't need the money anymore cuz you got a job, sell what it's actually worth for you. And again, I encourage you everybody here is like we have this obsession with like [clears throat] I want to make sales, but I want to make money. In order to make money, you have to be willing to say no.

2:27And you have to have faith that if you continue to do the advertising activities, which is letting more people know about your stuff, that you will get another customer who says yes. It really comes down to that. Now, you originally asked how do I deal with the uncertainty of a business? You action alleviates anxiety. So, what is what is the uncertainty? The uncertainty is what what what could happen? All these different things could happen. Okay. So, of those things that could happen, how many of them are under my control?

2:57If none of them are under your control, they're not worth thinking about. Because again, the fear only exists in the vague, never the specific. And so, you have this fear around the uncertainty of business, but just play it out instead of letting your mind play games on you. Like fear, super amygdala, tiny part of your brain, walnut-sized, that gives you this very strong feeling. It's super evolutionary, hundreds of millions of years old, right? Alligators have them. Very old part of your brain.

3:22It's very good at making at changing your behavior cuz it kept you alive, which is good. But what it's not good at is being detailed. So, what do I mean by that? If you say the uncertainty of business frightens me, that makes sense. But what part? Is it the like reaching out to people that frightens you? Is it that like 17 people didn't respond your email? Is it is it like I Basically, and let's play it out a little further. Um let's say that this business fails, which again, big word, how do we break it down? Means that you didn't make money fast enough to pay your bills so that you have to get a job again.

4:01If that's what we decide failure is. But we get to decide what failure is. If you keep trying, did you fail? So, one of the interesting things about success is that the only requisite for success is that you try for it. And if you try for it, you're successful. It's one of those beautiful things. >> [cough] >> Because one of the things that I learned when I sold the company was that you were successful the moment you decide you are.

4:27If you had a kid, I would imagine, and they tried really, really hard, and they were 7 years old, and they weren't a billionaire, would you think they were a failure? No. Would you be proud of them for? Trying and getting better. Right. And so, we can take the exact same frame for ourselves. I'd be proud of that I tried. And then and then still going and still putting myself out there. And so, when you play out the worst-case scenario, you realize it's not that bad anyways, because you're not going to starve. You're going to have shelter, because you probably have friends who you don't you don't seem socially inept. Right?

4:54And so, if the absolute worst-case scenario is you can move in with friends, move in with your old folks, and if you have neither of those, you can move into a homeless shelter. And still get food. That is the absolute worst-case scenario, which means you don't die, which means you have unlimited shots on goal. And if you have skills, it seems like you do, the worst-case scenario is that you just have a job and you have to work 5 5:00 in the 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.

5:179:00 p.m. longer than you currently are. Doesn't sound like that bad. And so, I think this idea of fear and uncertainty is holding you back more than the reality of the uncertainty, which is you don't know when it's going to work, but you know that it will work as long as you keep working. I hope that helps. If you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page you can book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help and if we can we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.