If you’re struggling to get your first business up and running, whether you’re trying to:
- Find a Business Idea & Develop Your Product or Service
- Make Sales (On the Phone or Copywriting), or
- Be More Motivated to Start Your Business
Trust me when I say this, we’ve all been where you’re at right now.
Except when I was just getting started out, I was at one of the worst times in my life. All I had, was only one tiny glimmer of light way off into the distant future, which prevented me from giving up for good and kept me going.
It wasn’t until a couple years after my first business took off before I’ve been having that crystal clear vision of my larger goals and aspirations coming true with the belief that yes, I do have what it takes to achieve these outrageously large goals I set out for myself. Yes, it’s possible; no matter how much you don’t think so right now.
It’s going to happen.
I remember back in 2011, this millionaire on the internet used to post videos on his YouTube channel of him living in Scottsdale, Arizona for the Winter, escaping to the cool mountains of Colorado for the Summer; and the rest of his year was sprinkled with exotic vacations around the world.
I had no clue what I was doing.
I was 25 years old, broke, unemployed for 2 years and living in my parent’s retirement home in the middle of rural North Carolina. That’s when I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Four Hour Work Week, and The Millionaire Fastlane; all of which woke me up to entrepreneurship for the first time.
I drove across the country with $250 to my name to have lunch with the millionaire from the internet, worked a stressful customer service job for two years after I got there; doing all the common things we all did as first time entrepreneurs.
- I had no clue what type of business to start.
- I taught myself how to code websites.
- I read lots of books and watched a lot of YouTube videos.
- I jumped from idea to idea when something didn’t work out right away.
- I always jumped on board those hyped up ‘opportunities’ the information marketers sold me on in order to get rich quick.
But mostly, I was procrastinating, lost and confused, and I was making no progress going forward with my business. 18 Months of my life went by, and I was pretty much back at square one.
That’s the moment of my journey where I attended a Millionaire Conference. I met two other younger guys at the same stage of the game as me, and we formed a Skype mastermind group.
After six months of having weekly accountability calls (and no luck) trying out everything in the book from trying to sell physical products, affiliate marketing (getting my Facebook Ad account banned in the process); we decided that now was the moment we have to take our businesses more seriously.
And it’s true.
If you are truly committed to having success in the business world, it’s not something you can dabble around with in your spare time. It’s something you’re going to have to fully commit to.
We rented out a luxury apartment in Scottsdale, Arizona and my two roommates moved from California and Toronto to live together for six months, committing ourselves to one business idea and see it through all the way until the end.
We called it Project Scottsdale, named after a house some guys rented out in the book The Game by Neil Strauss.
We began getting a few millionaire mentors that we met from the conference to give us guidance and feedback on our businesses; but mainly to give that good ole boot in the ass to keep us motivated and literally forcing us to take action through the darkness and uncertainty we were walking into.
None of us ever built a business before…
By the end of the first month, one of my roommates did $10,000 in sales selling pet products through Facebook ads. $12,000 in month two. $45,000 in sales in December 2013 alone (month 3). Seeing someone like him (a day job graphic designer who used to talk about nice cars and girls with me on Skype most of the time) have that much success in business did one very important thing for my journey (after two years of failing).
It allowed me to believe it was possible for me, despite never having any formal training or experience in business before.
My other roommate did $20,000 in the first week of his product launch of an SEO training course.
Ok, seeing two others just like me have this success allowed me to realize that this type of success is definitely possible for anyone with a dream and desire.
But I still had my doubts. I had nothing to show for it.
My iPhone apps were rejected 16 times by Apple’s review team. I was still working a day job, miserable, hating my life, wishing that all of my hard work would finally pay off. I wanted to give up and call it quits after every single struggle and frustration; because I was sick and tired of wasting my time on something that wasn’t paying off.
In January 2014, it did. I made $68 in sales that month after my first iOS app was approved.
$500 in February.
$1,000 in March.
$3,000 in April.
May 2014 was the first month I earned $10,000 in a single month.
I took my NLP Practitioner Training in the middle of May, and by the second week of June 2014, I put in my notice to my day job saying that my online business was finally earning me a full-time income and I am going to quit.
The plan was to pack my car and drive to Boulder, Colorado to spend the summer; just like one of the videos the millionaire posted on the internet years prior. He had the song One Republic – Good Life playing in the background of his Colorado video, so I felt it was appropriate to use the same for mine.
From there, I spent the next three years of my life living off of passive income from my app business, traveled all across the country, spent a summer driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, and I started an NLP Practitioner Training Company, as well as Limitless Academy to help first-time entrepreneurs make the same transition I made from being stuck where they are to getting their first business up and running.
It wasn’t until September 2016 before I caught up to the rest of his videos and added some international travels to my list of experiences.
Don’t let the travel videos distract you from the task at hand: Getting trained in entrepreneurship comes first. Execution comes alongside that. Then comes the results after the journey you go through (similar to the one I described above).
I’m just showing the videos to demonstrate the struggles you face now are normal (and should be expected). The doubt, lack of direction, constant failures, lack of support from friends and family, confusion, lack of motivation, are all a normal part of the process.
Just the fact that you’re experiencing this struggle means that you are on the right path.
No, I did not get lucky. For the hundreds of entrepreneurs who built their business in Limitless Academy, persistence is the new form of luck. There is the old saying that any self-made entrepreneur will tell you, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
Your friends and family who say we get lucky haven’t spent 18 months (7 years as of the date I’m writing this) committed to building businesses for a living. They will doubt you, they won’t believe in you, they will say you are being delusional and unrealistic. But the fact that they limit you is only a projection of a doubt within yourself.
When you do this a couple times over, anything anybody says who doubts you won’t get through your undying confidence in yourself. You just haven’t walked this journey that far (yet).
You. Have. What. It. Takes.
With the right entrepreneur education, mentors, persistence, and failures along; you’ll eventually get there if you commit to this journey and persist long enough. For the tens of millions (yes, tens of millions) of business owners who walked this path before you; the journey is the same, and most of them started exactly where you are at today.
So I guess my message to you for this post is to provide you some hope and inspiration that you’re on the right track.
Keep pushing forward and you got this!
Also, I’m about to get flown out to Lima, Peru to manage the online marketing campaigns for a Colorado-Based food company that is down there about to bring their product to market. So if I don’t respond to any email from the contact form link (May 2018), it’ll be take some time to get squared away while I’m down there; I’ve got a company to bring to market.
Anyhow, if you want to keep in contact and learn more about building your business, subscribe to THIS YouTube channel (different than the one above), and then I created a private Facebook business mastermind group you can join for networking with myself and other business owners like me.
-Andrew Alexander, Founder & CEO of Limitless Academy
Also, if you’re still looking for a business idea and need some help developing your product or service, Limitless Academy’s Product Development School has a training program designed specifically for that; with enrollment for the next class open now; and classes begin in just a couple of weeks. You can find more details on the course description page below.
