The Future of Entrepreneurship

Transcript

You’re Listening to the AntiFragile Entrepreneurship™ podcast, Episode #51! 2020 has changed the way the world works, and the future of entrepreneurship. Is it for the better? Stay tuned and find out!

[INTRO TRACK]

I've been reflecting a lot lately on the future of entrepreneurship and how much the world has shifted over the past year. Everyone I talk to says how quickly 2020 flew by, yet how long it felt at the same time. Even though most people didn't ask for it, they were stretched. They grew. They were challenged. They were tested beyond their limits. And maybe during that process, you discovered just how strong you really are.

2020 was a hard year, there is no denying that. Yet looking back, can we agree that there were moments for deep growth and even joy? Moments where you found a hint of silence and stillness in the busy hurried pace of our digital, distracted, and achievement-hungry society? Those are the moments we need to hold onto as we move forward in the year ahead.

I've also been reflecting on the future of entrepreneurship because throughout 2020 we've seen such a shift in people taking their businesses moving them online. They're navigating a whole new world of digital marketing that they know nothing about, without the needed skills for entrepreneurship. When I started my business online four years ago it was a huge learning curve. I didn't have the skills for entrepreneurship I needed to succeed. There was so much to learn in so little time. But I've since figured out a new way to work and live. A way where you can have the success you want, but not at the expense of the things you love. So inside of today's episode, I’m making my predictions for the future of entrepreneurship, and showing you the four critical skills for entrepreneurship you need to develop if you want to succeed. There are ups and downs and every entrepreneurial journey no doubt, but what I'm going to lay out for you today will help you avoid the pitfalls that many entrepreneurs fall into, will help you develop the skills for entrepreneurship you need so you can find success with less time, energy, and effort.

It starts with some simple skills for entrepreneurship: I call them the 4 steps to living an EffortLESS Life®.

But before we dive into those and the future of entrepreneurship, I’m going to let you in on a secret. Did you know the reason most entrepreneurs fail is that they lack the four key elements required for entrepreneurial success? The four elements are:

Lack of Structure
Lack of Help
Lack of Accountability
Lack of Systems

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You’ve hit 6 figures (or close to it).

You know your stuff.

But you don’t know how much longer you can sustain the pace you’re working right now, because you've already maxed out.

You wonder, “How can I grow and reach the next level if I’m already working at my max and can’t physically do (or) work any more?”

Most entrepreneurs think the reason they’re stuck is that they lack certain skills for entrepreneurship, like:

Lacking the income needed to grow at the pace they want to, or they
Lacking organization
Lacking focus and motivation
Lacking the ability to follow through on what they said they would do, or (here’s a big one)
Lacking the time management skills needed to succeed

But all of these are symptoms of lacking one of the overarching key elements: structure, help, accountability, systems. And without these, the future of entrepreneurship looks pretty dismal.

Lacking one or more of these four elements causes you to experience these symptoms and forces you to run your business reactively vs. proactively. Without the skills for entrepreneurship in place, it leads to exhaustion, overwork, chronic stress, and burnout.

But you can turn things around and get back control of your business. You can get a system in place for running your business vs. having it run you. You can develop the needed skills for entrepreneurship and it's easier than you think. When you do, the future of entrepreneurship for you will look very bright.

The way I see it, every successful entrepreneur has mastered the four critical skills for entrepreneurship:

VISION
STRATEGY
MINDSET
WELL-BEING

The future of entrepreneurship — and your success — depends on how well you master the four core skills for entrepreneurship. When you do, running your business will feel fun again. You'll finally experience the freedom you've been so busy working toward. Your business will work for you, not the other way around.

We’re a company built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, so we get what it's like to be on the hook everyday to build your dream. We listen to our community and serve based on what you need most. We teach these four critical skills for entrepreneurship to all of our students who work with us, because they make up the foundation of an EffortLESS Life®.

I like to think of these skills for entrepreneurship like steps. Steps for getting what you want, without the hard work and hustle. Without the hurry and the frenetic pace of life that can creep in and steal your joy.

So the first skill for entrepreneurship you need to live an EffortLESS Life® is to have a clear vision for what you want. The future of entrepreneurship will be bright when you do. Yet would you believe that this is something so many entrepreneurs don’t do? They might start their business with a big idea and a dream, but before you know it, all the crap gets in the way. They get bogged down by all the shiny objects and all the things the “experts” out there are telling them they need to do in order to succeed. By having their attention divided between so many areas, it becomes difficult to focus and impossible to make forward progress. Maybe you’ve felt the effects of not having these skills for entrepreneurship in place: you feel like you’re burning the candle at both ends. You’re spread too thin. Your calendar is too full, but you’re not sure how to say no because you’re afraid of missing out on an opportunity that'll help you get one step closer to your dream. To make forward progress, you need to move in a direction. But how can you move forward, when you don’t know what direction you’re moving? Without a clear vision on where you're going, how do you expect to get there? So the first skill for entrepreneurship you’ve got to have in place if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur is to have a clear vision.

The next skill for entrepreneurship you need to live an EffortLESS Life® is to have a plan to get there. The future of entrepreneurship for you depends on this key element. You’ve got the clear vision to know where you’re going, now, HOW are you going to get there? What are the specific steps you have to have in place in order to take you where you want to go? This is the strategy piece of the puzzle. But not just any strategy.; the right strategy for your unique goals. No two business strategies should look alike. And boy do we have a problem when today’s top influencers and business gurus are telling entrepreneurs en masse to build a business that looks this way or that way. Your business is not a cookie; therefore it should not be shaped by a cookie-cutter strategy. When you try to build your business by these cookie-cutter strategies people are selling you left and right thanks to sly marketing, you will hit a wall. I did. So I stopped listening to everyone telling me how my business should look, and I started building to MY vision of what I wanted my business to look like. There’s a difference. This is why we teach our students how to find the right strategy for their business. It looks different for everyone, and that’s ok; it should! But strategy is a two-sided coin, because strategy is nothing without execution. So this step isn’t only about identifying the right strategy you need to have in place in order to grow (hint: your strategy will change and it will need to be adjusted and tweaked in order to hit every new level of growth, too) it’s about executing the strategy. How are you taking steps every day to put your plan into action? This step encompasses your overall business strategy, your personal daily strategy, or action plan of WHAT to do every day, as well as having the right systems and support in place in order to start building out your dream team because you can’t do it all yourself. That's why having both the strategy and execution plan in place, is such a critical skill for entrepreneurship, and the future of entrepreneurship for you will be very positive.

The next skill for entrepreneurship you need to live an EffortLESS Life®, and run an EffortLESS business, is your mindset. How are you removing the obstacles that stand in your way? The future of entrepreneurship depends on how well you know how to remove these roadblocks. The better you are at identifying them, and removing them, the faster you’ll be able to navigate through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. Part of this is about cultivating self-awareness, part of this is about taking complete ownership of your results and taking 100% personal responsibility. And the other piece of this is having the right self-coaching tools in place in order to overcome those mindset blocks. Do I believe in having a coach? Absolutely. I wouldn’t do the work I do if I didn’t. But I also believe you shouldn’t have to pay an arm and a leg in order to get the coaching you need to grow. That's why we make a point to equip our students with self-coaching tools so that they can quickly pull themselves out of a downward spiral anytime they experience negative feedback or when they’ve had a hard day or when life hits them out of left field and takes them off track. And, even more importantly, helping you understand when you need a coach to guide you on your journey, so that you can invest your time, energy, and money into the right coaching based on what you need. Do this and the future of entrepreneurship will look very bright for you.

Finally, the last skill for entrepreneurship you need to live an EffortLESS Life® is to be mindful of your well-being. This is absolutely essential if you want the future of entrepreneurship to be full of potential for you. Sometimes this trips people up to hear this though. Vision makes sense, Strategy makes sense, Mindset makes sense, but Well-Being? What the heck does that mean? What it boils down to is: Are you living in alignment with your priorities? How good of a job are you doing at holding your personal boundaries, in your life and in your business? How good a job are you doing at mastering the art of managing your energy, over managing your time? Time management is a load of crock my friend. I talk about why on Episode 38 and also on Episode 33 with my friend Kate Northrup. You don’t have to work as hard as you think you do or as everyone says you do in order to be successful as an entrepreneur. But the kicker is that you have to know how to take care of the human behind the business in order for your business to truly thrive.

Your success as an entrepreneur depends on how well you master the four critical skills for entrepreneurship: vision, strategy, mindset, and wellbeing. That’s when running your business feels effortless.

Here’s what I predict in terms of the future of entrepreneurship: without these skills for entrepreneurship in place, succeeding as an entrepreneur will be very difficult. It will feel hard. It will be a rocky road, and I’m not talking about ice cream. It’ll be tough and feel like a drag. Your business won’t be sparking joy; it’ll be a breeding ground for stress, resentment, frustration, and indifference. Entrepreneurs who don’t have these four critical skills for entrepreneurship in place will struggle, and many will fail. But the future of entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be this way for you.

When you build your life and your business around these skills for entrepreneurship, these four pillars if you will, the future of entrepreneurship will be bright. Everything in your life and work will fall into a natural rhythm. You’ll have a business you run, not one that runs you. You’ll be in control, you’ll experience rapid growth, you’ll experience deep personal growth, and you’ll get to enjoy your life in the here and now. Building your business will feel fun again, and you’ll experience the deep peace of knowing that you’re exactly right where you’re meant to be. The future of entrepreneurship will be full of possibilities.

Want to join me on this journey? Keep it locked right here, and tell all your biz friends to join us here every week as I share the trends to avoid, the tips to succeed, and the tools to get you where you want to go, with less hard work and hustle. When you do, I can promise you one thing: the future of entrepreneurship for you will be very, very bright.

Tell you what, I’m going to do something special here. I wasn’t planning on this but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m going to host a live virtual workshop for you where we dive deeper into how to cultivate these critical skills for entrepreneurship, and I will show you what it’ll cost you if you fail to put them in place in your business. We’ve barely scratched the surface here today, and I want to help you succeed long-term so that your future of entrepreneurship is one that's full of possibilities. This workshop will be by invite-only, so you’ll need to add yourself to the waitlist to get notified via email as soon as my team puts together the dates and times for the training. You can do that right now at theeffortlesslife.co.

And! If you’ve ever got a question you’d like to ask me, follow me on Instagram and send me a DM @theeffortlesslife.co

Coming up next week on the AntiFragile Entrepreneurship™ podcast, I’m going to give you 10 reasons why you should ditch New Years’ resolutions altogether, and what to do instead if you want to set goals for yourself that you can actually hit. Knowing the right way to set goals is another skill for entrepreneurship you need to succeed, so make sure you hit subscribe and join us back here next week. Until then, go live YOUR EffortLESS Life®.