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Entrepreneurial

Jul 02 2014
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Ups and Downs of Working on Holidays

By Comments & Opinion, Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Business Insights, Foundations of Success, Personal Accountability One Comment

For many of the Canadian business owners I know, this past two day weekend turned into a four day Canada Day long weekend – for better or worse. While some entrepreneurs may be taking a well deserved break, the majority that I know will probably be working in some capacity during these days off.

Throughout my years of working holidays, I’ve come to discover that although there are many advantages of working those extra hours, there are also disadvantages that you don’t fully realize:

Disadvantage #1: Missing Out on Family Time: Long-weekends were made for family-gatherings. When working all weekend long, you miss out on time spent with your family that you will never get back. Take the time to put down the laptop and set aside the work, and just enjoy good company. Surrounding yourself with the love and kindness of your family will help you get back to your work with more purpose.

Disadvantage #2: Burning Yourself Out: Taking a break has actually been proven to increase your productivity. If you continuously work yourself to the bone, when the time comes for you to meet an unexpected deadline you simply won’t have the energy or stamina to do so. Pace yourself.

Disadvantage #3: Draining Your Creativity: Putting all your focus on one project may seem like a good idea, however, it’s not beneficial if you are trying to come up new creative solutions. Taking your mind away from a project will allow your mind to wander and come up with incredible new solutions to old problems.

Of course, working during a holiday definitely has its advantages:

Advantage #1: Capture Opportunity: When the rest of the competition is sleeping during the holidays, working allows you to capture opportunities that would have otherwise been taken by your rivals. Entrepreneurs want to maximize their business’ potential and continuous hard work allows us to do that.

Advantage #2: Momentum: Like I mentioned in a previous post, once you stop, it’s hard to start again. We’ve all heard that before in many different aspects of our lives, and work is no different. Keeping a steady working momentum allows entrepreneurs to keep pushing forward because they almost forget how to stop. As any entrepreneur will tell you, achieving success requires persistence.

Advantage #3: Cut Down Your To-Do List: As you run from meeting to meeting, your to-do list often gets larger and larger. Now that you have those extra couple of days, it’s time to cut down some of that list. In fact, this might be the perfect time for you to focus on lesser tasks you’ve been pushing aside, leaving the priority tasks for your return to the office.

As much as we want to continue pursing success by working hard, balance is required to get there. The best entrepreneurs don’t have a fully “off” mode. They’ll lounge by the pool or lay on the beach relaxing, but something will always spur their next great idea.

Jun 23 2014
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How Do You Keep Moving Forward?

By Entrepreneurial, Self Education, Business Insights, Foundations of Success, Planning for the future, Personal Accountability No Comments

Keep_Moving_ForwardBy nature, an entrepreneur runs head first into things regardless of the risk, meaning that sometimes we make mistakes that make us want to quit. Though it’s hectic and overwhelming, especially when dealing with multiple businesses, you need to learn to move past these small missteps to truly succeed.

Throughout my years of being an entrepreneur, I’ve realized that wanting to quit is inevitable – but failure isn’t. Every time I want to throw in the towel, I know that it’s time to take a step back and re-evaluate before I move forward again. The real question is, what can you do to ensure that you keep moving forward instead of quitting?

Take a Step Back and Look at Yourself – Take a second to examine the path you’re taking. What’s brought you this far? Determine whether you’re the person stopping yourself from your own success. Sometimes the problem is simply self-doubt and in that case, you need to find ways to overcome it.

Be Brutally Honest With Yourself – Take the time to question if you’re making excuses or whether a certain venture is a bust and you need to start over. If you can’t move past a particular mistake, is it due to a missing skill-set? If so, why haven’t you reached out to someone to overcome this? You need to be resourceful and keep on asking why until you get to the source of the problem.

Clearly Define Your Goals – When you’ve clearly defined where you’re going, it’s easier to pick up momentum and keep going forward.  Your small positive efforts will turn into larger positive returns in the future. It’s important, however, to create a plan for yourself so that you know which steps to take next so you don’t burn yourself out. Even if your steps are small, every step is a step forward.

Put it in Writing- Do you ever break contracts with your clients? I sincerely doubt that you’ve done it on purpose, so why would you a break a contract with yourself? Write down your commitments and put it somewhere that you can see everyday so you’ll always feel accountable.

It’s important to realize that you’re not the only one experiencing these challenges. A challenge may end up sucking your energy for an entire day or even a week, but that doesn’t mean that you have to call it quits for good. How do you keep pushing yourself forward when you’re close to calling it quits?

Jun 16 2014
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The Definition of Success Changes With You

By Comments & Opinion, Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Achieving Wealth, Business Insights, Foundations of Success No Comments

entrepreneur-successIn my blog post last week I talked about how failure makes you a stronger person, but this week I want to focus on success. Success can mean a number of different things depending on the individual, and your definition of success also changes as you continue your career.

For example, it was announced last week that my company, The Wish Group, made it on the PROFIT 500 list of Canada’s Fastest Growing companies – number 364 respectively. Of course I’m extremely proud of my team for getting us this far, especially since this is the third year in a row that we’ve received this award.

This is considered a success, but this wasn’t the end game for me. My end game is becoming one of Canada’s premier providers of business solutions – a goal that’s radically changed since I first started my own business. Back then, I was simply focused on becoming a world-class leader of teleconferencing solutions. Thanks to multiple meetings with different entrepreneurs and spurring ideas back and forth with different people, my goals have now changed.

From chatting with these various entrepreneurs throughout my career and watching my own goals change, I’ve found that people define success in two different areas:

Money Made – This one is the most common definition, for better or worse. I’d say that the majority of people and not just entrepreneurs define their success by how much money they make. While money is important, becoming wealthy shouldn’t be your only goal. The most successful entrepreneurs I’ve met are the ones that see the wealth they’ve accumulated as a means to further their business, be it by funding new ideas or improving their current ones.

Difference in People’s Lives – This point is a big one for me. I personally want to help as many people as I can find their true calling in life, be it an entrepreneurial endeavour or otherwise. This means that I create as many jobs as I can, and mentor people to watch them grow and become successful on their own. While this may not always work with everyone who walks through my door, I at least hope that I touch their life far beyond just a paycheck.

How you define success isn’t important, what matters is how you reach that success. Let the accolades and positive feedback that you receive along the way motivate you towards your goal of success, and then push yourself one step further.

Jun 09 2014
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Failure Isn’t The End

By Comments & Opinion, Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Self Education, Business Insights, Business Health, Foundations of Success, Personal Accountability One Comment

Failure-Isnt-The-EndThere’s a big misconception when it comes to failure. Ever since we’ve been children, we’ve seen that failing is nothing but a negative experience. Teachers would be disappointed and parents would yell at you for failing a test. If you failed a course, you’d use up your valuable summer time taking make-up courses. There has always been negativity associated with failure.

Things change once you’re an entrepreneur. By no means am I saying that failure gets easier. It still sucks, and it still stings and lingers with you for quite a while. However, when either your business or your product fails, it doesn’t mean that you should call it quits and give up. Quite the opposite, actually. I’ve touched on this in a few previous blog posts, but I thought it was time to dedicate an entire post on the often not discussed upsides of a failure.

It Makes You Stronger: As I mentioned in my previous post, when an athlete experiences failure, they don’t let it crush them. How many times have you seen a team lose a game, only to have the whole team give up? Obviously they don’t and neither should you. There is no one failure that should completely make you give up entirely. You need to dig deep and find out what you could have done to prevent the failure. If you couldn’t have prevented it, at the very least the experience will make you a better person and teach you about yourself.

It Teaches You Multiple Lessons: Besides teaching you about yourself, you’ll also learn a lot about your business. Specifically, it’ll teach you about the strengths of your team, which is always valuable to know. While you shouldn’t necessarily blame a team member for the failure, you’ll know what areas they can improve on, and where you can mentor them to become better. If the failure revolves around a product launch, you’ll be able to pinpoint what needs to be changed about your product and why the market didn’t latch onto it.

It Makes You Re-Evaluate: Once failure teaches you a lesson, the obvious next step is to re-evaluate. As hard as it might be to accept, perhaps there simply isn’t a market for your product, or perhaps there’s a crucial element that you’ve over looked. This is the time where you make changes to your work formula and make some tough decisions to continue moving forward. This is also the time to listen to any feedback that you’ve received, particularly negative feedback, as this is what will accurately tell you what you need to reconsider.

At the end of the day, don’t let one or even multiple failures stop you. You need to build your own path, and stay strong while you’re on the road to greatness. I’m curious to know what failures you’ve had as entrepreneurs, and what lessons have they taught you?

Jun 02 2014
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Heartbreaking Lessons from the Habs

By Comments & Opinion, Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Business Insights 2 Comments

Heartbreaking_HabsMany Canadians had faith in the Canadiens this year, as they were the only home-based team that made it to the playoffs. It’s no secret that I’m an avid fan of the Habs, so of course I found their loss this year particularly heartbreaking, given all that they had been through to make it that far. The team obviously knows where their weak points are and what they need to improve for next year. With the Habs learning lessons from their tough games, I also picked up on a few business related lessons while watching them play game six:

Stay Calm During the Unexpected – There’s no doubt that losing Carey Price to a knee injury had a massive impact on the Canadiens. While naysayers will argue from watching the series that they didn’t lose because of goaltending, it’s still a mental blow to the team. It was extremely difficult to predict they wouldn’t have their gold medal goalie in the game, but it goes to show that you can’t always expect things to go smoothly. The unexpected will happen – be it your company’s internet going down, a key presenter being suddenly called away or even dangerous weather preventing you from making an important business trip. You need to always have some sort of contingency plan, or at the very least, stay calm under the pressure of the unexpected.

Sometimes Your Best Won’t Cut It – I, along with many other people, believed that once the Habs conquered the Bruins, the cup was theirs. While the Rangers aren’t a pushover by any means, I assumed that by sweeping the first round and fiercely battling through their grudge match with Boston that they had built a solid momentum that would take them to the finals. They clearly tried their absolute best, but sometimes your best just isn’t enough. This is an invaluable lesson to learn when you’re an entrepreneur. Your pitch to a new client may have been the best you could do, but your best won’t always take you to the top, for various uncontrollable reasons. This doesn’t mean you should give up – far from it in fact, which leads to my next point…

Failure Makes You Improve – Montreal players have already said they were proud of their team and vowed that better days were ahead, which is nice to hear after a defeat. You need to have the same mentality when things don’t go your way as well.  It’s difficult to see your absolute best efforts crushed right in front of you. There are many people I know who latched onto a promising opportunity and gave it their all, only to be rejected and then they essentially gave up after that one experience. Don’t let failure stop you on your way to greatness. Everyone has failed in their life, multiple times, be it professionally or personally. As cliché as it sounds, you can’t let one failure crush your dreams. If everyone gave up on their dreams after one setback, the world would be a much different place.

You can learn many valuable business lessons in almost anything, be it sports teams or movies or anything in between. What are some of the most unexpected places that you’ve learned valuable lessons?

May 26 2014
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Creativity – An Entrepreneur’s Blessing and Curse

By Comments & Opinion, Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Business Growth, Foundations of Success, Personal Accountability 3 Comments

There is one trait in particular that all entrepreneurs share, and that is a being naturally creative people. Entrepreneurs need to have creative minds in order to come up with new ways to enhance their business, or devise original product ideas. I’m not sure how other entrepreneurs feel about their creativity, but I personally find my creativity to be two sides of the same coin.

On one hand, I think that my creative nature is a curse. I say this because I have many different ideas that I have that I want to create and spread with the world, but unfortunately life is finite and there isn’t enough time to accomplish all of these things. This means that many of the what I feel are great ideas never see the light of day because I’m attempting to bring various other projects to fruition.

That being said, I also consider my creativity to be my greatest asset and a blessing. Here are the top three things to remind yourself when you’re focusing on the curse instead of the blessing.

Your Pain is Your Customers Gain –While you may not have all of the time you would want to get all of your ideas to life, when you finally bring one of your ideas to life it will no doubt be of tremendous value to your customers. Whether it’s painstakingly refining a current product to become something better, or creating an entirely new business venture, your new product will be fueled by passion which will make your customers happy, even if the process in and of itself can be grueling.

The More You Create, the More You Learn – Even if all your ideas don’t see the light of day, once you have an idea you’ll immediately begin to research any related topics to see if it makes sense or to learn about any intricacies of a new industry. For example, my company the Wish Group operates multiple businesses in multiple industries, such as event webcasting, staffing, teleconferencing and marketing to name a couple. Once I had the idea to start these companies, I had to learn as much as I could about these industries to see if my business plan made sense, and if there was about the industry that I was overlooking.

You’ll Grow Professionally and Personally – Whether your idea is a success or a failure, you’ll grow from the experience. Apart from all of the new knowledge you’ll gain, you’ll also get a better understanding of why this particular venture was unsuccessful when compared to your other ones. You’ll also get a better handle on what your customers actually want, and of course if it is a failure, it will only make you stronger.

Do you ever feel that you don’t have enough time to bring your ideas to life, of that you simply have too many good ideas and not enough time to act on them? I’d love to discuss this topic with you in the comments.

May 12 2014
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Don’t Let Fear Hold Back Your Entrepreneurial Instincts

By Comments & Opinion, Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Business Insights, Business Health, Foundations of Success 2 Comments

Don’t-Let-Fear-Hold-Back-Your-Entrepreneurial-InstinctsIf you decide to leave your job and open your own business, there are a few things you assume you’ll leave behind as well. Job security, consistency and a personal life are what some people think they’ll leave behind – and sometimes this is true. The problem here is that when people really start to think about these things, they get worried, and that worrying more often than not leads to fear.

This fear can be used as motivation for some, but more often than not this fear will inevitably stop you from taking the plunge and stop you from creating your dream company. We’re all familiar with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s quote on fear: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” While the quote may be used quite often, that’s simply because it rings true, and if you can overcome your fear you will head towards greatness. Here are a few things that you need to keep in mind to keep your fears in check.

Take That First Step – No matter what your instincts may be telling you, the hardest part is taking the first step. However, if you find that the results from this first step aren’t encouraging, don’t abandon hope so quickly. Much like with losing weight, the first step is difficult and most get discouraged when they don’t see any immediate results. Just have patience, and know that the road is long but well worth it. Creating a business plan, getting your financials in order or reaching out to other entrepreneurs are just a few things that you can do to get you started.

Keep The Big Picture In Mind, But Take It One Step At A Time – Tying in above, once you take that first step, make a list of other goals you want to attain. You should keep the big picture in mind, like wanting to become a multi-million dollar company for example, but also make sure to have smaller attainable goals first. Acquiring a certain number of new clients, finding an office space and other similar things are small goals you can start off with. Meeting these smaller goals will keep you motivated as well, since reaching them will let you know that you’re well on your way to the end game.

Drop The Negativity – One of the biggest side effects from fear is the non-stop negativity that comes with it. Your fear makes you believe that you’re incapable of meeting your goals, or worse, that you don’t deserve to reach your goals. There’s no one way to get over this, but it’s important to know that this will take time. Write down what is making you afraid and then list off realistically if your fear is based on facts, or simply something you’ve made up in your head.

Do you feel that you’re now over your fears, or are there still things that you feel are holding you back? I’d love to discuss this topic with you in more detail.

Apr 28 2014
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Using Videos to Augment Your Brand

By Comments & Opinion, Entrepreneurial, Business Insights, Business Growth, Foundations of Success 2 Comments

I was in a meeting this past week when I suddenly remembered an amusing old video from Ogilvy called “The Search For The World’s Greatest Salesperson.” The video series was part of a contest, and it really got the Ogilvy name out there. You can see my personal favorite below:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzAYGtZosGI&w=640&h=360] The campaign was funny, original, and succeeded in delivering Ogilvy’s message in a few short and succinct videos. It got me thinking of some of the video work we have planned for the Wish Group, so I thought I’d share how we decided that video was imperative for brand awareness, and why it needs to be part of your marketing plans this year.

No One Reads Anymore: While some people still prefer to read articles, a staggering amount of time online is spent watching videos. According to Domo, 72 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, and on top of that, 4 billion videos are watched online every day. These stats alone should be enough to motivate your company to produce some share worthy videos.

Viral Appeal: This is a bit of a double-edged sword, but great videos tend to be shared online at incredible speeds. There’s no doubt you’ve encountered Gangnam Style, the hit music video that has the most views online (more than one billion and counting). Brands have had success with viral videos as well, such as the “First Kiss” video for Wren Studio. I say at viral appeal is a double-edged sword because it creates the idea that every video you make needs to go viral, or it won’t be considered a success. This isn’t an further from the truth, and leads directly into my next point…

The Chance to Have Some Fun: At the end of the day, you need to remember to have fun while you’re making these videos. Maybe you’ll hit a home run and have a multimillion-view video, maybe you won’t. As long as you produce something original and creative on a regular basis, and are having fun while you’re making them, you’re guaranteed to at least get some people’s attention in the process.

I’m excited to share the great videos that will come out of the Wish Group later this year, but in the meantime here are the rest of the videos from the Ogilvy campaign. What are your plans for video this year?

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZSVLL2hxzY&w=640&h=360]

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFXz8gi4Xyw&w=640&h=360]
Apr 21 2014
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Why you Need to be a Thought Leader

By Comments & Opinion, Entrepreneurial, Business Insights, Foundations of Success, Leadership, Personal Accountability No Comments

As I mentioned in my blog post last week, using social media is a great way to gain exposure and build your personal brand. One point that I briefly touched on was about sharing your unique industry experiences through social media channels, and how this will make you a thought leader. But what exactly is thought leadership, and why is it important?

The term itself is pretty self explanatory. It’s someone who has established authority in their work field and has become the “go to” person when you need to know about a specific topic. I’m not going to explain how to become a thought leader, as there are plenty of articles that do a great job of detailing how to create thought leading content. However, I do have three main reasons as to why you need to be a thought leader – and one cautionary piece of advice:

Kills Competition – The best thing about being a thought leader is that you’ll instantly kill your competition. Think about it, if you were a potential customer and had to choose between two different companies, which would you rather choose: the company that has a president who regularly produces content as an expert in their field, or just a regular company?

Lead Generation – Speaking to the point above, generating knockout content that provides your audience with great value isn’t just useful for building a following. There’s bound to be people who’ll take a look at your content and decide that your product or service is worth the price of admission, based only on the fact that you’re an expert at what you do.

Increased Exposure – Another benefit to thought leadership content is the amount of exposure it will get you and your company. This will bring many visitors to your website or blog, and with the proper linking techniques,it can be great for your SEO, PR and content marketing efforts.

However, be Prepared to be in the Spotlight – The piece of cautionary advice that I mentioned links directly to the point above, and most entrepreneurs don’t consider it. Love it or hate it, once you’ve become an established thought leader every piece of information that you publish will be under scrutiny, which can lead to some nasty dialogue between you and your newly expanded audience.

It takes a long time to position yourself as a thought leader, but the sooner you figure out why you should become one, the sooner you’ll begin the process of becoming one. Of course, I myself am still on this journey, but I’m glad I started sooner rather than later. Are you trying to become a thought leader? What pieces of advice would you offer anyone starting out?

Apr 14 2014
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Personal Brand Building with Social Media

By Comments & Opinion, Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Business Insights, Foundations of Success No Comments

One of the biggest challenges I’ve recently faced is jumping deeply into social media. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t understand the value of social media, I honestly just couldn’t dedicate an adequate amount of time to try and build a proper following. Fast forward to the present and I’m happy to say that I’ve not only been able to post consistently on my blog here, but also on my personal Twitter account.

But why even bother with a social media presence? Most entrepreneurs have been told time and time again that social media is important, but it’s rarely explained why it’s so important. Every user will define the importance in their own way, but for me, social media is a powerful tool to build your own personal brand. As an entrepreneur, you’ve probably started a business in the field of your choice, which means that you’ll be able to provide incredible value to your audience by sharing your unique insight, be it with short and succinct tweets or in-depth blog posts. Sharing these kinds of insights on your social media channels will eventually make you a thought leader in your field, but of course, this will take time.

When it comes to social media, another point that will take time and effort is growing your number of followers. For what seemed like the longest time, my Twitter account had only a handful of followers and refused to grow. After discussing strategies with a digital marketer, the two most valuable lessons I was able to learn was that (a) follow growth takes time and (b) I simply wasn’t being social enough.

These two items are very important to know for any of your social media efforts, be it for personal use or for your brand. The first point about follower growth is especially critical, as business owners become very disappointed with their lack of growth in a set period of time and abandon all of their social media channels. Using my own Twitter account as an example, after two months of consistent use, I now have 190 followers. This is following three months where I couldn’t break 40 followers. So what happened that made my follower number jump? It leads directly to the second point of being social.

It’s called social media for a reason: if you don’t join in on the conversation, then you can’t expect to see any kind of growth or engagement. Admittedly, one of the things I want to improve on is the engagement of my audience. While I do interact with my followers, I want to specifically try and reach out to more of them and get a regular dialogue going. You need to interact with your followers regularly, otherwise no matter what kind of information you share on your accounts, it’ll quickly become irrelevant.

What has your experience with social media been like? I’d love to discuss this topic more in depth in the comments below.

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