Was einen guten Unternehmer ausmacht

0:00In your view, what makes a really good um entrepreneur / leader? I think that they have to have the power to influence, and that is across lots of things. Uh just they have to be able to move other people. And you can define sales as the ability to get people to comply with your requests. You can define leadership the same way. Um management, marketing to a degree is getting people to comply with a larger request, you know, publicly. Um but I think that fundamentally is a skill that people have to have if they're going to be successful in entrepreneurship. Um they have to have tremendous drive, whether that's a combination of towards or away. So, they have a big mission that they really want to achieve, or they have some very big fear that they're running away from. Either way, I think the fuel works. Uh just from a pure entrepreneurship perspective, um third piece is impulse control.

0:46Is that they have to be able to say no to things on a regular basis for an extended period of time. Um and I think they have to be able to boil down the success of their business into inputs and outputs. Like if you do not know the inputs that are going to get the output that you want, then what are you doing? And so, I think for for most entrepreneurs, like if they have those things, if they have the ability to lead other people / sell, just influence, they have some big motivator, they can control themselves long enough to keep ongoing during that period of time, and they are doing the right things because they know the inputs and outputs uh to be successful or to create their the thing that they want, um becomes a very difficult person to beat.

1:27On that first point then, sales. Mhm. One of the things I I read um in some of your work is this idea that if everybody just went and spent 2 years doing door-to-door sales, then >> Oh my god. Why is that important? Why Why do you think door-to-door sales is a key thing? I think it's um just for what for broader definitions for the audience, I think it's just high volume transactional sales. So, whether that's you doing door-to-door, or you cold calling, um or you working the front desk at a gym where you do 20 consults a day, like just having a high volume because in order to learn a skill, you want to have as much exposure as you can to repeat the action, and then you want quick feedback loops so that you can learn what you did wrong. So, the perfect scenario would be mentor, mentee, repeated exposure, fix this, try again. Fix this, try again. And um in sales, if you can survive that long, then you are good enough that you will have gotten enough feedback. Like for most people, if they can weather the first 3 months of sales, then they'll usually be fine. And so, for the people who are coming up, I always tell them like go shadow the best guy and do twice the volume he's doing because you're not as good as him. So, like do twice the volume that they're doing, work all of the hours, and you will get better faster because you're doing You have to suck for X period of time. And so, if you can condense how how long that takes you in terms of calendar days, not hours, um you can get there faster. But I think that it's important because one, you have to learn how to get rejected and still keep going, and I think that's a very valuable skill.

2:52And then two, there's lots of like little things that you learn in just interpersonal communication that allow you that you can use with teammates later, you can use in marketing because a lot of the best marketers started as sales people, and marketing is just sales one-to-many, at least as as as I understand it. Um and so, having that kind of repetition just develops a deep understanding of human psychology, I think. Um and I think it's important for if you want to get people to give you money for the thing that you have, um having that as a base skill comes in handy.

3:21I think a lot of people aren't orientated towards developing skills. I think they're orientated to lifestyle, to what I can post on Instagram, to cool, whatever's cool. Um but this idea of developing skills requires this thing that's kind of absent in modern culture, which is patience. And a lot of like you said rejection, who wants that? You know? It wasn't There was no glamour in what you said, Alex. Yeah.

3:48It's funny because a lot of us want traits, right? We want to be patient, we want to be humble, we want to be, you know, long-suffering, whatever words you want to use. Um but in order to if I was to say, "Hey, how would you create if you were to create a human, what would you put them through to make them tough?" It probably wouldn't be a really chill life. Yeah. What would you put them through to make them patient? You probably wouldn't give them things immediately.

4:11And so, it's like we want these traits, but each of the traits has a price tag attached to it, and it's just like, do you want to pay the price tag to get the thing? And so, I think if if people reframe the the period of life that they're going through as the price that they're paying out of their wallet, but the wallet is their time, it's the seconds of life that they're trading for it, then I think more people would be willing to make the trade. Because at least when I look at myself, like when I'm 80-something years old and I'm looking back at my life, I want to have these traits. But in order to have these traits, I know I have to go through these things. And I think for me, that's given me a lot of comfort in hard times. Real quick, if you are 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 into 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 just book a call with my team, and we will look at your 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.