Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs will continue to fail because of their endless “trial & error” marketing pattern

Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs will continue to fail because of their endless “trial & error” marketing pattern

 

Read how these 4 successful entrepreneurs managed to use their biggest failure to reach their remarkable ongoing success

 

Over the last twelve years of working with entrepreneurs, the issue of the high percentage of entrepreneurship failures became a major discussion. The way of managing entrepreneurship using a “trial and error” mindset became conceivable.

 

Suddenly, it seems like entrepreneurs don’t have to fit the criteria of a small business to succeed and to gain profits, return investment, and loans.

Instead, many startups are focusing mainly on raising money (that isn’t theirs), and it is okay to fail. There is much less obligation to succeed than any other small business.

 

Too many times for entrepreneurs It’s either “I will become a billionaire” or “I’ll close the company after five to eight or ten years (and probably start a new one).” 

 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the idea of VC backed entrepreneurship, and there are fields of innovations and new technologies that can’t become a reality without investments. And that’s exactly what the VCs’ backed entrepreneurship concept was invented for.

 

However, the uncompromised need for investment is mainly relevant for the development phases, not the business, marketing, and sales phases.

So how come so many entrepreneurships are depending on their investors for five, seven, and ten years after they started to sell?

 

We see that in many fields and with many innovations, going to the market and attracting high potential customers to you can be very effective. However, many entrepreneurs have neither the know-how nor the obligation to do so.

 

During the last two and a half years, I interviewed more than a hundred of the most successful entrepreneurs and opinion leaders to my REACH OR MISS podcast. I was surprised to learn about the tight connection between the causes that lead entrepreneurs to their biggest failures and the main factors behind their biggest success.

My advice to entrepreneurs struggling to find the breakthrough to success would be to study the roots of their failure. The answer is most likely there.

 

The tight connection between the biggest failure and the biggest success of most successful entrepreneurs

 

I would like to introduce you to four very special and very successful entrepreneurs who chose to focus on their customers.

 

Antoine Martel

At the age of 23, Antoine Martel is a very successful real estate investor with a business that buys and sells over 100 homes a year.

Networking is the leading motive in Antoine’s biggest failure, exactly like with his biggest success.

Biggest failure with a customer

• It would be following up. When I first started, the first two years, I would go to meetups, I would have coffee meetings with people, and then I’d never follow up. There were hundreds of people I met one on one in my first couple years of doing this that I just never reached out to again.

Biggest success due to the right customer approach

• My success has come from a whole lot of networking and not selling.
• I updated my site and wanted to add something on my website so that people can buy a house from our website in one click. My dad and brother said there was no way that will work.
• I put the button on the website, and a week later, someone came to the website that I’d never met before. They filled out the form, and I saw the email coming through. All I did was send them the contract through an email and an hour later, they signed the contract, and I was blown away!
• Later I asked the buyer, “Why did you trust us so much, and why did you buy a property you hadn’t asked anything about it?” And he said, “I was referred by one of your past clients, and this house is down the street from my friend’s house, so I thought I should buy it.”

 

Josh Steimle

Entrepreneur Magazine put Josh Steimle on their 50 Inspirational Entrepreneurs to Watch, and Forbes recognized him as one of 25 Marketing Influencers to Watch in 2017.

Choosing the right people is the motive of Josh’s biggest success, and not surprisingly finding the right partner was the factor that drove his success.

Biggest failure with a customer

• I’ve had so many failures. If I’ve had any success, I’ve had ten times as many failures.
• Most of my biggest failures have to do with people; where I made a bad decision either in hiring the wrong person or in hiring the right person but putting them in the wrong role, or I hired the right person. Maybe I put them in the right role, but the way I managed them or the way I set up their relationship was the wrong way.

Biggest success due to the right customer approach

• In 2013, I brought on a partner for my business, Cory Blake, and he’d just come on. Right when he came on, I started writing for Forbes; when I first started, nothing good was happening. I was getting attention on my articles, and people liked them, but it wasn’t doing anything for my business.
• This is because I didn’t understand who my audience was, and I didn’t know how to write for my audience.
• I started looking at this and thinking, well, who am I writing for? Who’s my audience? Who should be my audience? I realized I was targeting the wrong audience. I was writing for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs don’t hire my agency. So, I asked, who is hiring my agency? Well, mid-sized to larger businesses mostly, and really, I’m looking for people who are looking to hire marketing agencies, that’s my audience.
• Once I understood that, it totally changed the content I was creating. I wrote one article that was the golden one. I created an article called “4 Tips on How to Hire an SEO Firm.”
• So, I wrote this article to say, hey, when you’re hiring an SEO Firm, here are the things you should do: ask for references, make sure the firm is the right fit for you, and I explained to people, here’s how to hire the right firm. I don’t care if they read that article and don’t hire me, as long as they’re hiring the right agency for them. After I wrote that article because it was on Forbes, it had a lot of credibility, and it jumped to the top of Google whenever somebody searched “how to hire an SEO firm.” And who is searching for SEO firms on Google? People who want to hire SEO firms!

 

Pamela J. Goodwin

“My Motto is: Never Give up!

And the other one is: Always Find a Way!

Those are two that I constantly live by.”

For Pamela, both the biggest failure and the biggest success were a consequence of trust.

Biggest failure with a customer

• I had been working with a client for more than a year; it was a retail tenant looking for space. Sometimes, because I’ve been doing the business for so long, I can trust people, and sometimes I think documents and paperwork can get in the way of relationships. But you still have to be protected, and in this case, I did trust this person too much so that we were working one on one, meeting with the landlord, and then when it came time to sign the deal, the lease, he requested half of my commission, which was a complete surprise. Which doesn’t happen too often in our business. I refused to pay him half because it was never talked about up front, and then he contacted the landlord, telling him that I was no longer representing him.
• Thank goodness, the landlord protected me; he knows my reputation. But it just goes to show that definitely, even though you trust people, you still have to have the correct documents in place to be protected, no matter what.

Biggest success due to the right customer approach

• One of the biggest successes that I’m most proud about is one of the first deals I’d worked on, building a relationship with a motel owner who owned it since the 1950s. We had a national tenant wanting their prime corner location for a Walgreens. I must have spent at least two years with a 90-mile one-way trip once a week to go visit him. It took almost two years of building trust before he finally sold his motel and now there’s a brand-new Walgreens in that space. Persistence and building a relationship.

 

Lance Scoular

Lance Scoular believes in the concept of care, protection, and guidance for your clients.

For Lance, both his biggest failure and his biggest success are part of his business concept of care, guide and protect your customer.

Biggest failure with a customer

• Well, I’ve had failures… like most of the guests on your show. It’s a learning situation.
• Back in 2007 and 2008, I was running my own course, but I was also asked to be a guest presenter at the Sydney Community College, two courses for young entrepreneurs.
• So, I felt compelled to share with those entrepreneurs what I considered to be the worst night of my life.
• It was in October 1999 when I realized I let down the most important client: my business partner and wife, Sandie. I came home, and I found my wife crying so much, and I realized this is going to be our last night in the house we built 26 years earlier, that we planned to live in for the rest of our lives.
• The customer here was my wife, who was my business partner, and I wasn’t caring, protecting, and guiding her. I was too busy taking care of the business’ clients.
• I want to tell these young entrepreneurs that you have a duty of care to your business partners and your employees, as well as for your family.

Biggest success due to the right customer approach

• I was a trainer for the Australian Federation of International Forwarders, and I run a course around the capitals of the five states of Australia. We had a Christmas party, and when I said goodbye to the CEO of AFIF, Brian Lovell, he asked me to come to talk with him tomorrow. And he asked me to arrange what became to be a massive structure of meetings, guidance, presentations, and seminars around new tax rules.
• That was a big boost for me, and I managed to use my ability to explain these new complex tax rules in very clear and simple words to many businesspeople at all levels.