Scott: There's this age-old debate as to whether entrepreneurs are born or made or whether there are some people who are cut out to be entrepreneurs and other people aren't cut out to be entrepreneurs.
First of all, do you buy into that at all? And if there is anything that's in our character or in our beliefs, what one thing would you say most often holds people back from entrepreneurial success?
John: Number one -- when an entrepreneur starts out they have lots of enthusiasm and they don't really have the skills or the strategies to succeed yet, and then they have the skills and strategies, and some of the enthusiasm is lost or they've beaten up.
I think the characteristics are certainty and confidence to get done what needs to get done. But then you've got to have the ability to multi-task and to navigate through all of the different facets of building a business, and to get out of your own way of thinking that you're the one who has to do everything and when we start out as entrepreneurs, there is just so much to do—there's legal, there's finance, there's sales, there's marketing, there's customer support, and so on, and so on.
There is just too much and as you grow, a lot of entrepreneurs still feel that they have to do it all and they don't know how to get out of their own way and delegate. But those are couple of things, I think, that hold people back from really achieving their business goals.
They have goals of reaching a million or two million or five million dollars in revenue, but they really don't know what it's going to take to get there and they don't want to get out of their own way to let other people help them.
Scott: Is it an ego thing?
John: I think, Scott, there is some ego in there and we are taught to be strong and do it on our own and as much as we know we can do things on our own, we need other people to help us. We need to focus on our unique abilities and our skills.
There isn't one person I know, that has the skill sets in every area of business on their own. There isn't one.
Murray: It's two-fold. There are the beliefs and the behavior and there are also the strategies and the skills. And we have come to learn after working with thousands of entrepreneurs that there are really two things that hold them back.
One is that they don't know what they need to know and the other is they don't do what they know should be doing. John, may be you could speak a little to the latter, because at OneCoach we focused on business growth so we could be very specific. We are all about helping entrepreneurs grow their revenues and that has the limiting beliefs, the behavior, the skills, and the strategies, and the support—all wrapped up behind that.
That really focuses to those two key points that, if we could share with people what they need to know, so that they knew the steps and the action items, and the strategies, and the skills that they needed to have, and we could teach them how to do the things they know they should be doing, then their success would be more predictable, and they would have more confidence and certainty with their outcome.
John: Absolutely. When you think about why is it that we can read books, listen to a call like this or read a call like this, listen to CDs or DVDs, and not take action when we know that the information is valid and will help us get to the next level.
That's the first step. So understanding what drives our behavior. What's our motive for action, as well as, what drives our behavior, our propensities for doing things on a day-in and day-out basis.
That's one of the keys for achieving successes—getting yourself to do the right thing every day. The other part, obviously, is what are the right things, what are the highest income and highest impact-producing activities that an entrepreneur or business owner should be focused on every single day. And when you can match up those two things together, you can start to predict success in a business.