You’ve packed your bags, kids are in the back seat with their electronics, and your significant other is in the passenger seat ready to keep you company and help you navigate to Grandma’s house. It’s your annual 9-hour trip to go and see your family since you moved away for work. You check the GPS, the car is full of gas, the windshield is clean, and everyone has on their seat belt.
You pull out of the driveway and take the first left-hand turn. No issues so far. You get to the first stop sign and cautiously make that right-hand turn going towards the bypass. The first traffic light that you approach is green, and you’re are feeling invincible going 3 for 3 so far on your trip. Nothing is stopping you today.
Cruising along, you have navigated 7 miles of your 540-mile trip. Uh oh, the next stoplight is red. What do you do? Do you realize that today just isn’t your day and turn around? No, you wait for your turn and go when it’s green. Continuing your trip to Grandma’s house, you are about 5 hours away from seeing your family. You come to a road and it is closed because of a bad traffic accident. Do you throw in the towel, turn around, and go home?
Waiting for the “right time” is like waiting for every single light to be green on your 700-mile trip to Grandma’s house. Waiting for the “right time” is ensuring that there are no obstacles on your path for 9 hours of driving. If you waited for perfect conditions to go to Grandma’s house, you would never see Grandma.
This is exactly how starting a business is. You have a grand plan for being successful. You plan out your grand opening. You know how you are going to start marketing, how you are going to raise the funds for operating cost, what your profit margins are going to be, you have even projected your first year of profit. You are just waiting for the right time so that nothing can go wrong.
I’m here to tell you that NOTHING ever GOES as PLANNED!!! You can plan all day long and save all of the money that you think you need. You wait for the kids to be out of the house or wait until you pay off your car. You can wait for your brother to get back home or for your sister to finish her degree so she can help.
That is all great, but things are still going to go wrong, at some point. If you ever get around to actually starting your business, you are going to miscalculate projects. You are going to go over the budget. You are going to lose that client that you were so desperately counting on. You are going to be told no. You are going to lose that “sure deal”. It’s going to happen.
All of that is going to make you better. Because you are committed to success, you aren’t going to quit at the first sign of adversity. You are going to overcome these obstacles and continue your road to success. The road that you thought might take 5-6 years may take 15-16 years. Maybe even longer. That doesn’t matter. Because when you started your business, you decided that you were going to do whatever it takes.
Just like when you set out for Grandma’s house, if you encountered obstacles that detoured you an additional 4 hours and 200 miles, you still weren’t going to turn back. You were damn sure going to see Grandma. You must realize that is life and that is business.
After 15 years of army service and 12 years in Special Forces, I went on more missions than I care to count. We would spend hours, days, and sometimes weeks preparing for a mission. I’m here to tell you that not one time did a mission ever go as planned. We never went back to the base. We never aborted the mission. We took our bumps and bruises, took a few wrong turns, met a lot of people that wanted to kill us, but we never failed our mission. You have to have that understanding and intensity with your business. You will NOT fail. You will do WHATEVER it takes.
We began our business with the plan of flipping four houses a year and wholesaling about eight per year. That wasn’t even close to what actually happened. We flipped two homes in our first year and averaged only $10,000 for each of the two flips. Not spectacular numbers by any means. Our business began to go down quickly without revenue coming in. We didn’t quit. We reevaluated our market and our niche. We had to come up with a creative way to monetize the type of leads that we were getting.
Two years after starting our business, we actually found ourselves. We found our niche in the market and we created a systematic way to help people who had little to no equity in their homes. If we had not adapted to our market and to the need of our clientele, we would have surely failed. We didn’t start our business with the intention of owning rental property and living off of passive income. We didn’t plan on being financially free in only three years.
I tell all my clients that you have to follow success. What you think you are going to do and what the market actually needs could be completely different things. Be flexible, be mailable, and don’t quit when things start to get overly challenging.
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