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Empower Hour · #99

A Successful business model means a Successful business!

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Full episode transcript

Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.

Folks, obviously the income examples discussed are extraordinary. The income claims presented are not intended to serve as a guarantee of income. Instead, they're designed to give you an idea of what's possible. Success in this business requires leadership, hard work, and dedication. Since we want to help you make an informed decision, we've gone above and beyond with our income disclosure document.

If you want to see the average earnings, please visit the page at www.empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php. Welcome to the Inner Circle Mastermind Audio. We're Chris and Susan Beasley, bringing you this training from just outside London in the UK. Now, we want to start by asking you a question. And that question is, are you an entrepreneur?

Now, I want you to think about that seriously, because we asked this to 300 people at an event we were running at the weekend. And I was expecting every single person in that room to put their hand up. But probably something like a third of them didn't. Now, that was quite surprising, considering it was a room of business owners. So the thing is, is everybody has a different understanding of the word entrepreneur.

Now, some people see entrepreneurs as people like Richard Branson or maybe Donald Trump, because they're highly successful billionaires. But the reality of it is, is that anybody who starts a business is an entrepreneur. And as I said, when I asked this to 300 people at the weekend, about a third of the room didn't put their hands up. And I started just to think about this and started to explain the story to them, which is my own story is when I started my very first business. And why people are entrepreneurs, even though when you're listening to this audio, you might not have yet started your business, but you have the intention of starting that business, because otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this audio.

Now, when I started work many, many years ago now, I used to work for a commercial catering equipment company, and that was owned by what you would call a middle aged guy. And it was quite a successful company. Well, after I'd been there a couple of years, because you know, I was the accountant there, after I'd been there for a couple of years, his son joined the business and became the managing director and started to develop and run the business. And I worked with him for probably a further five years, had a great job, thoroughly enjoyed what I was doing, learnt a lot, but there came a point, there came a point in my career where I was thinking, you know, there's something else I need, there's something else I want. And I didn't have any direct sort of handle on exactly what that was.

I didn't know specifically what it was, but I knew that within myself, although I had a good job and I was enjoying what I was doing, there was still something missing. And that's what I want you to think about when you answer that question. Are you an entrepreneur? Because as I said earlier, you may not have yet started your first business, but is there something missing? Is that what you're actually thinking about now?

I went on to leave that company because I was never going to satisfy that itch. I was never going to scratch that itch by staying where I was. And so I went on and I moved to another job. Now that might seem a strange thing to do because I moved to another job, but I hadn't actually done what I wanted to do. But what I'd actually done personally was I got myself out of the environment where I wasn't going to do anything else.

And I was putting myself into an environment where I could actually start to think about what I wanted to do and see what happened. Well, what happened within 12 months, an opportunity presented itself with a friend of mine. And we decided that there was a business opportunity there and we started a business. We started to plan a business and we then went to approach some advisors to start talking about the business, as to whether the business was in actual fact viable. Now, the thing about this was that I still didn't know what I wanted.

If this is what it was, but I started to feel as if I was coming into my own power, if you like. I was actually taking control of something that I wanted to do, but I didn't know what it was, but it was quite amazing because as soon as you start sharing your ideas with people, other people who are already entrepreneurs, other people who look at businesses in a different way from 90, 95% of the population, they started to believe in me and my partner. They started to tell us, yes, you've got a good idea here. You've got the grounds for a business. We were talking about traditional business here.

So this is what we started. We started a traditional business and in 1985 our first business got off the ground and we started to grow, and think about how we could manage and make a profit with that business. So when you come back to the question and you ask yourself, are you an entrepreneur? Maybe you haven't started your business yet, but you're listening to this audio and therefore in our opinion, you must be thinking about it.

So you can see really people call themselves different things, and actually I love what Chris said, because when he started that business, he didn't know he was going to start it, but an opportunity presented itself. And when we were looking at the definition in the dictionary, we actually found it described as someone who starts their own business, especially when this involves seeing a new opportunity. But realistically, do we really care at all about these official definitions? The one that I absolutely love the best, and which I shared at that same event at the weekend, was from Steve Jobs. He says, here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.

Now we're here to share with you our experience and knowledge in order to take you and your business from where it is now, even if that's right at the very beginning, to where you want it to be. And that is at any stage in your business. So our background, why, why can we sit here and talk to you about becoming an entrepreneur, being an entrepreneur, how you can take your business to the next level? The reason we can do that is because Susan and I, as I think I mentioned earlier, we are accountants and we're management consultants, and we've worked with small businesses together for many, many, many years. Now, although I started my first business well before I knew Susan, she in actual fact started her first business two years before me.

But the thing is, once we became a couple and we got together, the first thing that we actually did, following me being made redundant, funnily enough, because I'd actually sold my first business at that point and gone back into an employed situation as part of the sale, we started our own consultancy business. And so at this point in time, we'd been running a management consultancy business for 15 to 20 years. And we've been helping small, medium sized businesses grow and develop. And that's exactly what we want to help you do here today.

So here's our success formula. And we want you to visualize this, because even though you're listening and it's auditory, I think you'll really get it. We call it a BLT and fries. So I just want you to picture that in your mind. And of course it means a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich with fries.

Now, why do we call it that? So we wanted to give you something that you could picture. And if you were watching this visually, you would actually see this picture, but we want you to imagine, we want you to visualize this really lovely bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich and a bag of fries going with it. Why is that important? Because it's the initials that are important.

It's B, L, T plus F. So that's the thing you need to write down right at the beginning of this audio. Now I want you to write down B, L, T plus F. So that's the model that we're going to talk to you about. And this is what we call our Entrepreneur's Success Formula.

So let's start with the B. B stands for believe. And there are three things that you need to believe when you're starting your business and to become a successful entrepreneur. The first thing is that you need to absolutely believe. Absolutely believe in yourself.

And sometimes that can be difficult. And if you remember what I said just now, when I told you the story about me starting my first business, or starting the thing that at the time I started, you didn't know it was going to be a business, but it wasn't until you get around other people who are entrepreneurs, who may be successful in their own right in a different way, and they start saying that they believe in themselves.

They believe in you, that they think that what you're doing is a good idea. It's got a chance of success and it may very well take you to the next level. It's when other people say that to you that you can start to believe in yourself. You have to believe that you can do what it takes. You can learn what you need to learn, and you can do stuff with whatever.

You learn to build the business, whatever your idea is. You know, all ideas start somewhere and no one person has a monopoly on ideas. You might look at something and you see an opportunity there. And so you think, I could actually do this.

I could fulfill the problem. I could help people solve a problem in this particular area. That's an opportunity. And you take that opportunity and you believe in yourself that you can, in actual fact, do it.

The thing is, you might not know how you're going to do it at this point in time. All you know is that you can and you will. So that's about believing in yourself. And of course the thing is, you need to surround yourself with people who have a similar outlook on life, maybe people who have a positive outlook on life, because they will help you believe in yourself.

The thing is, if you surround yourself with people who have a negative outlook on life, or maybe are not as ambitious as you, or maybe don't have the same dream as you, then it's very easy to get knocked off course. So that's the whole thing. The first thing you have to believe in is believe in yourself. Now, the second thing is you have to have a very strong belief in your reason why. Now everybody will have a reason why for becoming an entrepreneur, for changing whatever they're doing right now, and your reason why is not our reason why, and vice versa.

So I want you to think really carefully now, and maybe just write that down as you're listening to this audio if you can, or come back to it at a later point and write it down. What is it that is so strong for you that will enable you to keep going day in day out no matter what obstacles or challenges may come your way? And we'll talk about a little of those just further along, but your why has to be so strong. And I'm going to share ours with you in just a moment, but as a way to visualize this, I want you to think of a story. It's quite a well-known story, you may or may not have heard it before, but there's a plank that runs between two buildings, and those buildings are 10 stories high above the sidewalk, above the pathway, depending on what part of the world you're in. And one side of that plank is thousands and thousands of dollars, maybe even a million dollars in a suitcase, just waiting for you. Would you walk across that rickety plank that separates those two buildings, 10 stories high above the sidewalk? Probably not. But what if on the other side of that plank there was a building, and not only was this money in there that you've just visualized right now, but one of your family were there and you could see their face in the window? But worse than that, you could see their face in the window, and you could see that building was on fire, that the flames were licking at the windows and there was smoke pouring out all over the building. Would you rush across that plank then, no matter what? I think you probably would. Well, we asked that question in a slightly different way with a slightly different story at our event this weekend, and every single person in the room, where you were 100 people, stood up at the point of that story. And that's why we're telling you this, because your why needs to be so strong that you would do whatever it takes no matter what obstacle was put in its place. Now for us, I said we'd come back to our story. For us, our why was actually to do with our age, to a good part, because we're probably baby boomers, aren't we, Chris? I think so. And baby boomers are people of our age. We're in our mid to late 50s. One of us is in mid, one is a little later, but we won't say which way around that is, will we, Chris? No, absolutely not. But you know, younger than you. He's younger than me. You know, he's my toy boy. But guys, listen, the point of this is we had a really strong reason why to change what we were doing. We absolutely loved our successful business, our accountancy management consultancy business, but actually it had become to us no more than a job, because we were working ridiculous hours, probably on most weeks six days a week, coming home at seven o'clock at night, starting out the next day at seven o'clock in the morning, preparing for our clients on a Sunday and over the weekend, which is why I was saying six days a week. And we were just absolutely worn out, not getting any younger. Our kids are all grown up. We've got five lovely children who've all left home barring one, and we just wanted the freedom to do what we really wanted to do, to travel, to actually fulfill some of our greater dreams, particularly one of where we sponsor beautiful kiddies in India, because we feel that their right is to have a child in the world have education. We don't just want to do it monetarily. We're those kind of people, we just want to be there and actually do it physically. So that was a big why for us, but probably our biggest why, and what actually made us take a massive action to change our life, was when one of our clients said to us one day that they wanted a computer system put in, because you know, we were focused on their businesses, and it meant that we had to cancel a holiday that we had really and truly looked forward to for so long. And the thing was about that, it was, if you like, the straw that broke the camel's back. Now, one of the reasons you're listening to this audio is because in our opinion you are an entrepreneur. You already are. The thing is there was something that made you take that step. Now whether this is the first audio you're listening to, maybe this is the first step you've taken, you're listening to these Inner Circle audios, you might not have started your business yet, but you know there is one that you want to start, and that you're going to start, because you want to change something from your current circumstances, whatever they are. We don't know what your current circumstances are and we don't know why you want to start your business, but the thing is, you may want to do it because everybody starts here, and we started here. The initial thought in your head is, I want to start a business, I want to change something because I need to make more money, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. Personally, we believe that it's where everybody starts. You want to make a change because you want more money, but I think as your journey begins and then your journey develops, and bear in mind this is a journey, there is no final destination, because as your journey progresses you'll find that there are different destinations. And for us, we started our online business because we made the decision to start this business because we wanted to get out of our job situation, our time for money. We needed to find a way of leveraging income and building a residual income, because we didn't have a pension of all things. We had a very small pension, but it wasn't going to keep us in the lifestyle to which we'd become accustomed.

And it also wasn't going to allow us to do the things that we really wanted to do, which, as Susan mentioned, we wanted to travel and we wanted to help. We wanted to help children in third world countries who we believe have a right to education, but may not at this time be getting it. We wanted to do things to take that forward for us, and, of course, for them. But the thing was, once we started.

Our online business, what we found was we actually had a passion for teaching. We mentioned we ran an event for over 300 people at the weekend. That is one way that we fulfill our passion to teach people. We want to teach and help as many people become entrepreneurs as physically possible as we can, because the thing is.

The thing is, the internet changed the world a few years ago. The internet seriously changed the world. And why do I say that? I say that because if I go back to when I first started my first business in 1985, it was very much a local business.

It was based in London, but it was based on customers in and around London. And I remember getting our first two computers in the office, and we had a piece of wire going between them, and that was a network, you know, so the computers could talk to each other, but they were literally two foot apart. Think about this.

You're listening to this audio, I'm sitting in the UK, you're listening to this audio on the internet. You could literally be anywhere in the world when you're listening to this audio. And that is how the internet has changed the world.

It has allowed people to communicate, become friends, create relationships with each other around the world, from anywhere in the world. And that's why I mean the internet has changed the world. And therefore, it has made it very much more easy.

For anyone to become an entrepreneur and start a business. We are so passionate about that we even wrote a book about it. We were able to tell our story and help you get over some of the things that we experienced in our change from becoming what I call, well, having a job, really being an employee, right through to actually becoming an entrepreneur. And that's why we're sharing this success formula with you today.

And it's really important. So you've now got our B of the BLT and Fries, and there's just one part left, that we believe is the third part of believe. So we said the two things that you have to believe in so far.

Are yourself and your reason why. That reason has to be really powerful, but there is also another question in that belief, and that question is, will it work for me? Now, you're listening to this audio because, as I said earlier, you already are an entrepreneur, but you may not yet have started your business. You might be just researching whatever business it is, whatever things.

You're passionate about, to create a business. You might be looking to start that opportunity. But the thing is, there's always this question, will it work for me? I've seen it working for other people. I've seen other people start a business. I've seen other people start a business and fail.

There's all these questions that all surround this. Will it work for me? I'm certain that in your head, I call it the fruit salad. There's a little voice, and some people say it's something sitting on your shoulder.

And for me, it's a little voice in your head that I call your fruit salad. And whenever you start something that's new, you step outside your comfort zone a bit. You've always got this question there. Will it work for me?

It doesn't matter how it's phrased. Will I be able to learn technology? Will I be able to do this? Will I be able to do that? It's okay for them.

They've got this experience. It's okay for that person, they've done it before. There are all these things going around in your head, and it's perfectly natural because everybody has them, and you're going to have them for the rest of your life. You know, even though Susan and I are entrepreneurs and we run a successful business, we still have questions.

We look at new things, new suggestions. Oh, can I do that? Will that work? And the answer is, you're never going to know until you try it.

What I was going to say, I just wanted to share a quick story with you, that while you've got these questions going on in your head, suppose you've done your research and you're seeing other people being successful entrepreneurs, supposing your best friend came up to you and just whispered in your ear and said, I just wanted to share something with you, for the last two or three months I've been running a business. I started a business three months ago and it started to work for me. I'm making money. It's only a small amount of money, but I'm making money.

It's working for me. How would that change your belief? Because whilst you thought you could do it and you see other people doing it, there's still this nagging doubt, isn't there? But if one of your best friends came up to you and said, I've done it, personally, I think all of a sudden.

You would go, I can do it. A light bulb will come on. But the only question I would ask you about that is, even if your best friend doesn't come up and say that to you, what's changed? Nothing has changed.

You've still got the same questions. You've still done the same research and nothing has changed. So for me, I would still say to you, if you believe in yourself, it doesn't matter who else is doing what, you're quite capable of doing it, and you just need to understand and believe that you're quite capable of achieving what you set out to achieve.

So now you have the B, the belief, the full story of belief. And next we're going to do the L of BLT, and that's to learn. You're going to need to understand that you're going to have to learn new skills. So whether you are just starting out right now today, as you're listening to this, understand you're going to need to learn new skills.

And if you've been around a while and maybe things have not been as successful as you expected them to be, understand this is a journey. You're always going to be learning. Now, the thing is, when we're learning, and I mentioned the internet earlier, the internet potentially also has a downside. Why? Because the internet can give you, as my son said to me on the phone last night, we were talking about something and I said, oh, do you know how to do this?

I was talking about the cable television controller, and I said to him, do you know how to do this? Because I can't find out. And the first thing he said to me was, just Google it, Dad. I said, of course, you have a totally different, he has a totally different approach to Google.

As Susan said, we're in our mid to late 50s. And my thought was, oh, I need to learn this, I need to find out how this thing works on the cable box, the cable TV box. And I thought, what I've got to do is I've got to wade through the manual and I've got to find it. That was my approach.

My son's approach was, just Google it and you'll get the answer straight away. The reason I'm sharing that with you is that there is so much information on the internet that what can very easily happen, when you decide you need to learn some new skills, is that you get overwhelmed. If you type your question into Google, let's think about this. How do I build a website?

Okay, so let's say that's the question. How do I build a website? If you type that into Google, you are going to get thousands and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, or maybe even millions of answers to that question. All different.

All different. Where do you start? Which one is the right answer? They're probably all pretty well right.

But the question is, which is the right answer for you? Because we all learn and take on board things in a different way. And the thing is, it's not just about how you're going to learn, but in which fashion you're going to learn, because looking at Googling that question and seeing all those answers, you are going to be just so totally overwhelmed that you won't know where to start.

And if you're human, just like most people are, you'll go, oh my God, I can't do this, and you'll switch off and walk away. Or I'll go and put the kettle on and make a cup of tea while I think about it, and you never come back to it.

And believe us, we have been there many, many times. Yeah, absolutely. Now, one of the things that we're going to say to you is, when you learn, learn in a systematic formula, learn in a systematic way and follow a structure. Because that way you will learn the things that you need to learn, and you'll learn them in the right order.

And believe me, when you're building a business, it doesn't matter what the business is, when you're building a business, you need to learn new skills in the right order. Now, think about this. When Susan and I first started our online business, four years ago, we came out of our management consultancy and decided to build an online business using exactly the same skills that we were using offline.

And that allowed us the freedom to do our traveling and to develop our skills of teaching and our passion for teaching. And it allows us to teach people worldwide these entrepreneurial skills. But we had to follow a structure.

And so that's exactly what we did. We started as accountants and we found a mentor who was a young guy, 27 years old. So he was, you know, we actually had children older than him, but he was an expert in things online, online marketing. And we'd established that for us to develop our business online, we needed to learn online marketing.

Now, bearing in mind, we've been management consultants and accountants for 15, 20 years, teaching small and medium sized businesses how to develop and grow, we actually didn't do very much marketing for our own business, because all of our stuff was by word of mouth. And we certainly didn't market on the internet. We had a website, but it wasn't exactly marketing, it was just a brochure online.

But the thing is, our mentor said, you need to learn marketing. And that was so far out of our comfort zone, that was unbelievable. We'd never done it, we'd never learned it, especially online.

So what did we do? We asked him. We said, okay, what should we do first? And he gave us a structure, he gave us a system to follow, which meant that we learned things in the right order and we didn't get overwhelmed.

And that was quite amazing, because last week a guy in the US called us on Skype and we were talking about his background, and he said, I've actually got quite a few skills online. And he was an entrepreneur, wasn't he, a serial entrepreneur? Yeah, he was a serial entrepreneur, but he wasn't having any success, or he wasn't having the success that he wanted.

And I said, okay, so tell me what you know about online. And he said, well, I established that I needed to learn about lead capture pages. This is his particular story. So he learned about lead capture pages. Then he said, I understood I needed to learn about.

Auto responders. I went and learned about auto responders, and then I understood I needed to learn about traffic. And when I started to look about traffic, there were so many different ways of getting traffic, traffic strategies. And don't worry if you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm just talking about getting visitors to your website. He had learned all these things.

So I said, fine, okay, so you've got the basics, what did you do with them? And he said, nothing. He said, because what I did was I learned, and then I didn't know what to do with it. So I put it aside and I went and learned something else.

So what did you do with that? He said, well, I learned that and then I didn't know what to do with it. So I went and learned something else, I put that aside and went. And he said, that's the way I learned.

But all of a sudden, he's got all this knowledge in all these different things, but he had one bit missing. And that bit that was missing was, he didn't know how to put them together. He didn't know how they all worked together, how they all interacted to create a system. And so all he was doing was overwhelming himself with information.

And as he said to me, he was never, ever going to turn his knowledge into some sort of financial reward, because he didn't know how to do it. And that's exactly why he was talking to us, because he wanted a structure, a system that he could follow, that would allow him to put these things together, put it into a business and make it work. But you see, learning is really important, as you just heard. Personal development, which is the same thing, is very important. Things.

Like this audio you're listening to now, reading books, watching motivational videos, all of those things are really important, because you have to work on yourself first so that you can work better on your business. But a little story here that is actually quite funny and very relevant, and we were actually able to relate to this guy when he called us and said this, because when we first got started, we had hugely great intention, just like most people do, and we booked ourselves on course after course, after course, seminar after seminar, and just about every weekend for six months, whilst we were in the transition from moving from our full time management consultancy business to our online business, because we'd given ourselves six months to do this. We thought we were doing marvelous.

Do you know what? It was actually just a lot of shelf development, because we spent so much time learning. But we are still learning. So now we have a lot more to do, we can do things in our life, but we're still learning.

And so I'm going to give you a few tips. The first one is, it's not something that we ever put into action. And that fits perfectly for the next part of our formula, which is the action word, taking action. So BLT, believe, learn, and T, take action.

You have to implement what you learn, and there's no point, sorry Susan, I didn't mean to interrupt you there, but there's no point doing what we did, going and learning and learning and learning and then getting to a point and saying, right, okay, we're going to implement this, because you can never remember what you've got to implement, the order in which you've got to implement it, and you're never going to see any results. This is the thing about taking action. Okay, if we say learn stuff chunk by chunk, what do I mean by that? I mean decide, if you're following your structure, you know what you need to learn next. So let's talk about marketing strategies, because they're really important to any business. Marketing strategies are absolutely the key to any business, especially when you're starting out, because until you learn to market and you learn to implement some of that marketing, nobody has a clue in the world about what you're doing, what you're selling and what the benefits of it are. So you're never going to make any sales unless you start marketing, and that was what we found, that's why it's the first thing we learned. But the thing is there are so many marketing strategies out there, you couldn't possibly expect to learn them all, and you will get total overwhelm. So the thing is, what we say is, learn chunk by chunk. So just talking about marketing strategies, I said there are a lot out there, and there are free ones and there are, what am I going to call it, paid for marketing services, paid for marketing. And there are, you can do ones by writing, you can do ones by audio the same as this, or you can do ones by video. So there's many choices, many choices of marketing strategies. Now, dependent on where you are and what will work for you, you need to understand that you choose the right one. So for example, if you couldn't write, let's say you couldn't write articles or you couldn't write a book, or you found it very difficult, why would you start with that when you maybe found video very easy? For me, if I found that I couldn't write but I could do videos, I was comfortable doing videos, I would start with video marketing, I wouldn't start with writing blogs or articles. But equally vice versa. So the thing is, you need to choose one strategy. We say, to start with, choose one strategy, learn it and implement it. Okay, so come back to general learning, whatever it is you need to learn first, learn it and implement it. Once you implement it, you will start to see results. We call it learn and do, not learn and learn. Absolutely. So the thing is, once you start to learn, you implement, and you see results. What then happens is that encourages you to do the next thing, it encourages you to learn some more and implement some more and see some results. Also, by learning and implementing you become more and more proficient, more and more of an expert. What that does is it releases you time, that time you can then spend learning the next strategy or the next thing you need to learn. You learn that, become an expert, implement it, and you'll find that you're getting time. Now an option here is once you've learned something you could outsource it to somebody else who's got that skill as well. So there's lots of ways you can do this, but the biggest thing is you learn and then take action. Okay, do not learn and then think, I'll take action, because it doesn't work. You see, a dream is just a dream without you taking any action. You have to be committed to your dream and your idea that you have while you're listening to this audio now, and do everything day in day out to actually make that dream come true and succeed in your business. That means whatever your idea is, whatever your business is, whatever your products, whatever your services, you have to show it to enough people every single day that you have enough people saying, consistently, yes, I want it, yes, I want it, yes, I want it. And as you gather momentum you will make more money in your business, see the success you truly dreamed of. You see, taking action fast, see success fast, and you have to get a lot of failures. Sorry, I have to put this in here, you are going to fail sometimes, I can tell you, we failed over and over and over, and so do the most successful entrepreneurs in this world. Many have built multi-million, multi-billion dollar businesses and they failed. Donald Trump is one of them, Richard Branson. Every idea he had, he has, doesn't succeed. Does that stop him? No. His island, his home, Necker Island, got burnt down. Did he say, oh well, I won't bother with that anymore? No, he went back and he rebuilt it and made it better. You have to do that, it's really important. You must keep your emotions high all of the time and keep your intentions strong.

So we're going to move on to F, the F word, and not the F word you're expecting, no. The F word stands for focus. So we've got believe, learn, take action, and now it's focus. You've got to focus on your business, you have to focus on it every day. Let me explain what I mean. Now, Susan said earlier on that we wrote a book, and we did write a book and it's called The Mindset Shift, and it talks about how you graduate from an employee to becoming an entrepreneur. That's what we wrote about. We found people had the biggest difficulty in focusing and doing stuff on their business every single day. What's really important here is that most people, and we would encourage you as well to take this on board, most people start their first business on a part-time basis. And in actual fact, about this time last year, I think, there was a lady called Sharon Lecter in London at an event, and we went to that event. Now, if you don't know who Sharon Lecter is, she is the co-author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And she is also an emissary for the Napoleon Hill Foundation, and is a co-author of one of the second books coming out of the Napoleon Hill series, not Think and Grow Rich, but a book called Three Feet from Gold.

And if you haven't read Three Feet from Gold, write that down, go and find it and read it. It is a superb book. It's an entrepreneurial book and will keep you on track and keep you moving forward. But I'm digressing a bit here. The biggest thing that we found was people would not focus on their business.

I've got to go back to Sharon Lecter, because I just remembered why I was going to tell you her story. Because before we went to that presentation or that event, Susan said to me, she said, I am going there and one of my intentions is to interview Sharon Lecter. I want five minutes of her time. And we went through all that day and Susan kept saying to me, we're going to do it, I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it. And when we got to the end of the day, there was a Q&A session at the back of the room and Susan went straight up there.

She said, come on, bring the camera. And we went up there with a camera and she said to Sharon, Sharon, can I have five minutes of your time? Please, I just want to ask you one simple question. And Sharon said, I will give you my time, you have five minutes, because in 10 minutes' time, I am out of here.

I have to get on a plane because I'm flying to Dublin. And what happened, Susan? Well, I just got ready. Well, we didn't have time to get ready. I had the microphone in my hand, didn't have time to clip it to me or put it in front of Sharon or anything.

But I asked her, what was her entrepreneurial success secret? And this is what she said. She said that everybody should start part time. Everybody should not give up their job to start their first business.

Everybody should start part time, or be in a position where they have sufficient income coming in to cover their outgoings. They can then concentrate on building their business and being able to do what they want to do, build their business, and find the time to build their business, and build their business to a point where their income from their part-time business equates to their income from their full-time job. They then move on from there to allow the business to grow a little bit bigger, and so their business is generating more income than their full-time job. They are then in a position to stop their full-time job. And so everybody, in the words of Sharon Lecter, should start part-time. And it's exactly how we started, for the first six months of our online business, our new career if you like and new way of earning money. We started part-time alongside our full-time job, and we were coming home really tired, but we knew we had to do this because our reason why was big enough to make us do it. And did we give up a lot of stuff? Yes, we did. We stopped watching the TV, we stopped reading the papers, we stopped faffing about, for want of a better reason, we gave up shopping and all that kind of stuff, because you will need to make sacrifices. We're not going to make this sugar-coated for you. For success to come through in your business you will have to make sacrifices, and to be honest, probably the TV is the biggest one that most people are reluctant to give up. And don't give up. So we're going to ask you to make a commitment to yourself that you will give that up. I mean, if you think about it, it's not difficult nowadays, you know, with the technology that's available, you don't have to watch a television program live anymore, you can watch it as and when you want to, you can either record it, or you can watch it live. TV on demand, I can watch last week's television tonight if I want to, I've just got to go and search for it, find the program I want, press the button and it happens. So you know what you have to focus on, because you are now an entrepreneur, you have a big reason why you want your business to succeed, you have a big reason why you need to make some more money, you need to give stuff up, you need to find a minimum of two hours a day if you're starting this part-time to work on your business. And this is where the F word comes in, this is the focus. You have to do that every single day. Why? Because that's how businesses get built, it's how entrepreneurs make money, it's how entrepreneurs create a successful business, and you are no different, you're an entrepreneur, you need to create a successful business. What did we do when we started? We worked 10 hours a day, came home, sat down, found the time to do the two hours a day. How did we do it? We stopped watching the television, we stopped reading the newspapers, we had a plan. When we came home, we knew exactly what we were going to do in that two hours in the evening, and during our journey to and from our clients in the car we listened to what we could on our devices in the car, and you can do the same. You may be listening to this audio now on your smartphone, you might be listening to it in the gym, you might be on the train, on a plane, on a bus, walking to work, I don't know what that is, but try and find little nuggets of time that you can do your personal development, your reading, your listening. It's so important, when you build that into your daily life you can then manage those two hours every single day, if you're building your business part-time like we did, on what we call the money-making, the profit-generating activities of your business, in short your marketing. Those two hours are your marketing hours and you have to do them. You will find, when you first think about it, if you sit down and you go through the stuff you do in the day and the amount of time you've got, you'll say, I can never do that. But as Susan said, you start to say, well, okay, when I get home at 7 o'clock the first thing I do is I have my tea and then I go and watch the television for a couple of hours or an hour, or whatever, there's an hour or a couple of hours that you can knock out, you can start to work on your business. If you've got a significant other half or a family, please tell them what you're doing, ask them to get on board with, you know, when I come home from work instead of sitting down and watching the television with you, what I want to do is I want to spend two hours building my business, because it's going to be better for all of the family. Please bear with me while I do that, in fact help me if you can, and if you get the support of your significant other, you will find your business will grow phenomenally much quicker, because everybody is working towards a common goal, which is a really powerful motivating factor for everybody, not just you. So this just comes down to focus. Okay, Susan said we're going to repeat it, focus on the profit making activities, the PMAs if you want to call them that, that will make you money and take your business to the next level. Yes, it's going to take some, as Susan said again, you can find learning time when you're traveling to and from your work, whether that's on the train or in the car or whatever it is, maybe you go to the gym a few times a week, instead of sitting there listening to music or plugged into the screen up above you, plug into some audio learning. Everything that you learn nowadays can be on audio, so it's really important, in addition to the personal development stuff, you can learn things other than personal development on audio, just as you might be listening to this audio. We're not teaching you personal development, we're teaching you entrepreneurial success formula. So now you have our success formula, our BLT plus fries, but there's one more part that we really think is important, that you build into your entrepreneurial mindset and your entrepreneurial life, because it actually is one of the most important, and that's about planning. Because planning can give you time back, because your time is limited, and if you plan you can absolutely achieve what you want and have the success that you've always dreamed about. And I'm going to share a story around planning, because I think it says it better than me trying to give you very dry accountant speak, which I'm quite good at, but isn't going to help you in the best way.

Most of us at some point in our lives have gone on a regime, maybe going to the gym or a diet, so let's use a diet for an example. So the story revolves around you deciding you either want to gain weight or you want to lose weight, and it could be either, but to achieve the success that you want on that diet you have to have a plan, and it may involve drinks and tablets and all sorts of things, and there will be instructions that accompany those, when you have to take them, how many times a day, for how long, and you will follow that plan rigidly if you want to achieve the success that you set out to achieve at the beginning of that diet. You have to believe 100% that you can achieve that goal, so that goes back to our belief again. You have to learn what the instructions are to achieve that success, so you might have a manual that comes with that particular diet, recipes, how you take those particular supplements, in what order, how much water you drink with it, and all these things are really important, and your health and wellness are important. They're actually critical in your business in any case, and you will have to take those actions within that plan every single day, so here we have to take action again. And if you focus on where you want to be at the end of that period, maybe it's 10 days' time, and you're focusing on losing, let's say, 7 pounds to 3 kilos, something like that.

If you follow that plan day by day by day without stepping aside and doing something different, and putting something in between that shouldn't be there, the company whose plan you are following will very likely have said you will achieve that result. And you can do exactly that. We've done it ourselves. We've set ourselves a diet regime to lose weight and stay healthy, and we've set ourselves a gym routine to stay healthier because it's really important to us.

And do you know what happens? Not only does that plan help you achieve what it is you want, and your business is no different, you can set plans and set goals in your business exactly the same way. You will get to where you want to go. And believe it or not, by following a routine, following a system, following a plan step by step by step, without diverting and going off down the road and doing something else that doesn't contribute to it, you form a brand new business.

Thank you. And form a brand new habit, and that habit will only increase your success. So I only have a few more words to actually conclude this training, because actually we are from the UK, we can talk for England and we could be training for hours on end. But you know we know you have nuggets of time to do your personal development and your learning.

And what we want to say to you is you have to be the X Factor in your business. And what you put into it, and how you put your time into it, and how you put your learning into it, and how you add your belief into that, will decide whether it's a success or a failure. We know that if you follow a plan, you will achieve the success that you deserve, because a dream is just a dream without taking action, and being committed to your dream and doing everything in your power, day in and day out, will get you to where you want to be.

So just to finish off, I just want to firstly reiterate the Entrepreneur's Success Formula. So it's BLT plus F, believe, learn, take action and focus. And I want you to write that down again. BLT. BLT plus F, believe, learn, take action and focus.

Guys, we hope you found this training inspirational, motivational and gave you some great nuggets to help you achieve the success in your business that you deserve. And I want to finish on a quote that we heard, and it absolutely sums up your entrepreneurial life and our entrepreneurial life, and that is, your future has absolutely nothing to do with your past. It has everything to do with what you are willing to do right now.

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