RUNNING A successful business is no easy feat. There are many challenges you go through—from making a healthy profit margin and bringing in new business to scaling your operations and taking on more staff.
Struggles that seem unique to your situation are not out of the ordinary for an experienced entrepreneurship coach, though.
Working with Entrepreneurship Coach Mike
I’m Mike van der Poel, and I help aspiring entrepreneurs like you turn ideas into results. Every week, I publish blogs on this website about topics like:
- How to set business goals and stick to them
- How to stay focused and be more productive
- How to create good habits and break bad ones
- And tips & tricks for any business that you can imagine
Why? Because I know that running a new business can be challenging.
I’ve had more than my fair share of struggles over the years, and before I could run a profitable business and teach small business owners how to do the same, I owned 2 businesses that failed and lost a gut-wrenching amount of money.
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How I Got Here
In my first business, I drop shipped kitchen gadgets and lost over 4,000 dollars in just a year (a large amount of money for a broke university student).
My second business broke even, but I succumbed to a completely different challenge: I faced judgement and criticism from my peers. I created a number of digital products on the health benefits of avocados and explained how healthy fats can lead to better overall health, but threw in the towel because I was tired of being labelled “the avocado guy”.
There I was, a broke student, feeling hopeless with nowhere to go.
What I didn’t realize was that my efforts had accumulated in the background. Even though I felt like I got nowhere with both of my businesses, I went through much personal development and—unbeknownst to me—became an expert in navigating business challenges (And digital marketing; I learned how to write keyword-optimized blog posts, run an advertising campaign, and engage an audience on social media, which eventually lead to my first successful business, Vandy Marketing).
Friends and family started to approach me for advice, and without me having to lift a finger, they started paying for my advice.
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What Struggles Are You Going Through in Your Business?
One of the best decisions you can make is to learn from other people’s mistakes, and not your own. Warren Buffet, one of the world’s wealthiest people, put it like this, “When people tell me they’ve learned from experience, I tell them the trick is to learn from other people’s experience.”
Successful entrepreneurs don’t become that way by chance, but by making good decisions. Sign up for a free discovery session today at no risk, and together we will take your business to the next level. You can drop me a line by emailing me here if you’d like to learn more.
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As an Entrepreneur Myself, I Can Relate
I know from experience that running a successful business doesn’t happen overnight. The first few dollars usually don’t come rolling in until weeks, if not months, after launch. It takes you a long time to be profitable.
When you first start, you also have to wear many hats. The fewer people you have working for you, the more you need to focus on boring tasks, like bookkeeping and customer service. It’s not a one-man job and you carry a lot of responsibility.
Then there’s the competition. Developed businesses have multiple people working for them, each with much knowledge and years of experience. It’s tough to compete with others.
Research by CBInsights, an intelligence platform that analyzes millions of data points on start-ups, found that there’s rarely just one reason for quitting a business, but that there are often multiple areas of weakness that lead to failure. In a survey, the research team asked 111 failed start-up owners, “Why did your business fail?”. Amongst the top answers were…
- We ran out of money or capital
- We did not have the right team
- We lost to competitors
While there’s no denying that these things lead to failure, most of them can be avoided through entrepreneurial coaching. Fewer issues slip through the cracks because someone else is looking at your situation with a fresh pair of eyes.
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I Focus on People, Not Businesses
There are distinctive traits that people need to have to run a business that works. And that’s exactly what I write and talk about on this website.
I consider it my job to study successful businesswomen and men and share with you how their personality traits propelled them toward success. Is that something you’d like to learn more about?
I share new articles every week and keep people like you accountable with my free On-Track Newsletter. If you want to receive weekly tips and tricks to stay on top of things, then you can subscribe here:
My work isn’t the only way to think about entrepreneurship, but it’s how I think about it. So, I hope you enjoy your time here. If you’d like to take it a step further and want to take action now, feel free to drop me a line here.