Millionaire MBA Day 7: Self Belief
by
Millionaire MBA
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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Copyright © Millionaire MBA 2011
First Published 2011 by ELW Publishing Bath, UK
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Contents
Introduction
A few years back, 50 leading UK entrepreneurs and business owners were interviewed in their homes, offices and hotels. The purpose of the interviews was to find out exactly what made them successful, and how other aspiring entrepreneurs could replicate their business success.
Those digitally recorded audio interviews were turned into a 'timeless' business mentoring programme called Millionaire MBA. Millionaire MBA is regarded as one of the best programmes in the world to teach entrepreneurial thinking and the 'millionaire mindset'.
Millionaire MBA is a rich, deep mentoring programme which existing and aspiring entrepreneurs listen to over 40 days. Literally tens of thousands of entrepreneurs (like you) around the world have benefited from this programme.
In this ebook, you’ll find the actual transcription from one whole day of the mentoring programme.
To find out more about the full business mentoring programme or to listen to the audio version, please visit http://www.millionairemba.com/
Day 7: Self Belief
Welcome to Day 7, "Confidence."
It's almost too obvious to say that you need to have confidence to be a successful entrepreneur. In fact, confidence - and, more so, unnerving self-belief in both yourself and your idea - are essential to strive forward.
That said, entrepreneurs don't always start out with this. They often start from a position of self-doubt.
It's only when they start investing time and energy in their idea their confidence builds. From there, self-belief grows and self-doubt can be eliminated.
Moving forward as an entrepreneur with a new idea, perhaps your own idea, requires a massive amount of faith in yourself and your business proposition.
Once you take that step as an entrepreneur, you put yourself in a visible position where people can clearly see you succeed or fail.
You put yourself on a path of unknowns, turning your back on paid employment to follow your own intuition, your heart and your head.
The one question no entrepreneur truly knows the answer to is this: How do I know that my idea will become successful? The answer is you don't.
You simply have to believe you'll be successful. To know as a fact is to predict the future, and no entrepreneur I know of can do this for certain.
Take a listen to our entrepreneurs who share their thoughts on this.
Tom Hunter
Well, I didn't know. That was luck or intuition. I felt it was right. I'd looked at some sales data from my dad's market stalls and just saw trainers. And it was an intuition. I didn't know.
Tim Etchells
Well, I didn't know for at least a year, and when I started my business, it was me with two other people and it was a pretty scary time.
Every Friday when the bank statements came, I used to open them and think, "God, have I got enough money to keep going?"
And it was also very scary when I first went out to sell our products to clients because I wasn't working for a big company anymore.
Suddenly I felt very exposed because I didn't have the warmth of a big company, and neither did I have the track record, and why would they want to do business with me and so on.
It took quite a long time to gain that confidence. And, of course, not only was I gaining confidence for me, it was also for my staff because, of course, they felt the same thing.
It took a year before I suddenly felt, "Hey, we're onto something here and it's going to work!" And our business is actually running events, so it was after we ran the first event that it actually happened.
But to get there, it just took an enormous amount of time.
Glenda Stone
I can't say I knew we were going to be successful. I knew I was going to make it be successful.
Elena Souto
When I first started, I'd done my research and I had passion and determination. But I still didn't know it was going to succeed - you don't know it's going to succeed.
I think you have to set yourself little targets, little steps and [once] you've achieved that step, you go on to the next one. And before you know it, you know, you've built a big company.
And to me, I always believe in what I'm doing, and I know there's a gap in the market, and I know that, especially offering a personal service, people grow to like you and they will buy from you because they're your friends.
So I just knew that I had to keep on going, but you never know... I'm sure you speak to lots of large organisations; they probably still think they're not doing well enough; they have to do better.
So I don't think it's something that you realise . You've just got to keep on planting the seeds, and one day you'll look back and you'll be like, wow!
Stuart Wheeler
I wasn't sure whether I would get the company going.
One of my best friends who helped me in the business, the first piece of serious advice he gave me was that I should close down the business because there were signs that it wasn't going to work.
Well, I didn't even think of doing that because I thought it had a reasonably good chance. But I'm not the sort of person who says, "Oh, I knew it was going to work."
I think one never knows the future. But I always thought it had a good enough chance.
I actually was in a strange situation that - first of all, I was unmarried and had low expenses and no people dependent on me, but also I'm a reasonably good bridge player, and I used to play at a club where the standard was very low and the stakes were quite high.
So I was supporting myself during the first short period when the company wasn't making any money - I was supporting myself in that way.
So it was more... perhaps slightly more relaxing for me than for other entrepreneurs who've perhaps mortgaged their house, have a wife and two children.
That would have been much more stressful than the thing was for me.
Chris Hughes
I think the premise of the question is not right for us because I don't think I did know it was going to be successful.
I just hoped, and then you find yourself out in the middle of what feels like a very bleak ocean and you just sort of keep paddling because you're there.
My biggest fear was that having done quite good jobs in our industry, I'd now turned my back on the career ladder, and I was either very visibly going to fail or visibly going to succeed...
And my fear, my biggest fear to start with, was the idea of going back into employment having become a failed entrepreneur. And that was quite a scary thought.
But the truth is, you find yourself out in the middle of nowhere and you've got no choice but to keep paddling. And the one thing that kept us going early on was the - although it was quite an expensive pleasure - the joy of being your own boss.
I think it wears off after about six months, but because they're your mistakes, because they're your problems, because they're your staff, there is quite a lot of excitement, even though what came to us quite quickly was sort of scary.
We had six months enjoying spending the money that we were rather pleased to have raised from investors. And then we spent a year making virtually no money - making it pay, money in, money out.
That famous time that Michael Heseltine talks about - paying slightly more slowly than you were receiving.
And so there were two very clear stages of the start: the first one was rather carefree - "Isn't it great to run our own show" and then actually just spending money like nobody's business and making a lot of mistakes - and then a year of, "God, we're in a terrible place; we have to now just keep battling just to stay alive."
And it was staying alive, but we were very lucky. We have a chairman who's seen this done before, who's quite at arm's length but has the ability to be incredibly insightful and tell you as it is.
And there's a famous speech he made at a board meeting when he said I was playing at it.
And I think for the first six months I was enjoying employing people.
I was rather flattered that they wanted to work for me and not for the company that I worked for, and actually the truth is I was spending far more money than I should have been at the start of our business.
Fortunately, I've a chairman that slapped me and brought me to my senses, just as the money ran out. And we decided that we needed to fight our way out of our launch, and then it all started to come good eventually.