HOW I CHANGED THE DIRECTION OF MY BUSINESS
It Started With Watching YouTube Channels and My Son’s Soccer Game
I started a business to augment my salary. It was tiring looking at our bank account, barren after paying the bills. I asked myself, is this all there is? Your life is a daily grind to pay the bills, and you do it again, and again.
The very definition of a rat race: you wake up, go through traffic to work and then do it again tomorrow.
The routine became boring so how I started a business.
I’m a scientist, a chemist to be exact. I look at numbers everyday and an expert in chemistry. But when I started my business, that’s where I realized, business is a skill that I can study, just like chemistry.
To tell you the truth, this is not my first rodeo with augmenting my salary with a side hustle.
eBay, Stock market, options, Forex trading and Amazon Private label, all I did with no success. I lost money and it was frustrating.
But what do you do when you want to learn a new thing?
YouTube.
YouTube university, as other people call it. To start a business and learn businesses, I immersed myself with motivational videos from YouTube. In addition, I read books, such as “The One Thing”, or “4-Hour Work Week”, and then watched the summary in YouTube. I studied Pay Per Click related to Amazon advertising in YouTube.
I consumed a lot of motivational content by Arnold Schwarzenegger (watch his speech, it’s inspiring), and then watched Tony Robbins too.
While I was watching one of Tony Robbin’s content, he said that one of the thing that will make you successful is “strategy”.
“I mean you work hard planting for your food but you do it during the winter, your crops will die no matter how hard you try.” Tony Robbins said. “That’s because you got the wrong strategy.”
That’s where I realized, my business strategy was wrong. I was dabbling in the retail business, selling things I ordered from China (through Alibaba) and then sell it on Amazon.
With this model, you’d be lucky if you can have 10-20% return of investments. In the very beginning, you expect losses during the few months after launch, because you rely heavily on advertising.
From listening to lectures in YouTube, one guru suggested to sell information, as an infopreneur. You sell information that people can use. In my case, I started selling chemistry tutorials.
What I like about this model, the information business, is that you don’t need inventory spaces, or storage spaces, or a huge capital. You sell your expertise, in my case chemistry, to a starving crown looking for help in chemistry.
This leads me back to Tony Robbins again, when he said, a strategy is essential.
He was right, I was working so hard on my previous businesses but my strategy was wrong. What I usually do was work hard. There were days were I pump myself up to work until 2 AM.
But it wasn’t enough. I was still losing money.
Hustle till you die mentality is not the way to build a business. There should be a balance.
This brings me back to my kid’s soccer game.
My kid is skillful in soccer, because I thought him skills, strategies and fundamentals like controlling the ball and dribbling the ball. Yesterday, I was listening to a parent. His son was in the same team with my son. He was giving instructions to his son to “be a hard worker”, “don’t be scared” motivation.
What I realized was that if you don’t know the fundamental skills, your hard work will not be in the fullest potential.
I remember the kid’s arm was broken last year because he “wasn’t afraid” and played hard. I have nothing against player that works hard, but you should play smart too. Learn the fundamentals.
As I was working on my business, I told myself, I’m going to pay a a coach to coach me in the relevant skills to succeed in business.
I can’t just motivate myself every morning to hustle and work hard. I need a coach; somebody who is an expert to increase my sales and marketing skills.
