Living The Red Life - 4 Deadly Sins Of Entrepreneurs & Small Businesses

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

What are the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make? Fresh from a course where our Man in Red has been teaching entrepreneurs how to get their young businesses to hit the million-dollar mark, Rudy Mawer is serving up his financial and marketing insights to us on a platter in an episode of Living The Red Life that you're not going to want to miss!For every mistake that entrepreneurs make, there's a lesson to be learned. From shifting to mindset to knowing where to focus your time and energy, and from spending on sales, marketing, and promotion to fuelling your hunger so that you stop playing small, Rudy's breaking it down for us so that we don't need to break down ourselves before hitting that million dollar milestone. Ask yourself: do you have a way to make money off your customer after that first sale? If the answer is NO, then you need to tune into this episode right now and learn what mistake you're making. Rudy ain't messing around no more. Entrepreneurship is tough and takes a lot of sacrifices to succeed. The doors to Wonderland are open, but it's you who has to run the 4-minute mile to get inside! Please join us. "Shift your mindset on what you do when you wake up. Shift your mindset on what you think about and obsess about all day, every day. Sales. Marketing. Promotion." ~ Rudy Mawer In This Episode:The scary statistics of entrepreneurial successThe importance of investing in sales and marketingIs your focus in the wrong place?Lessons from the 4-minute mileWhy you need more than one product (understanding the ascension model)Connect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/rudymawer/Instagram - www.instagram.com/rudymawerlifeFacebook - www.facebook.com/rudymawerlifeTwitter - www.twitter.com/rudymawer

Shift your mindset on what you do when you wake up in the morning. Shift your mindset on what you think about and obsess about all day, every day. Sales, marketing, promotion. I don't care what you got to do. Get a tattoo on your forearm. Get a sticky note and put it on your Mac or your monitor. Put it as your desktop screensaver. Sales, marketing, promotion.

My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today, we're going to talk about the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make and why most entrepreneurs fail. I just taught an online class and I gave them some statistics. They're very scary, so make sure you're sitting down. Only 5% of small businesses and entrepreneurs make it past a million dollars. Get this, less than 1% make it to 10 million dollars. And the average small

business and entrepreneur takes home $70,000 a year. And guess what I put on my next slide? You may as well go and work at Hooters because the average waiter at Hooters earns 70 grand a year. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm all for the entrepreneur. I used to be a small entrepreneur struggling to make it work, not knowing what to do. And one of my biggest goals and what I'm passionate about and what we do as a company is literally fixing those appalling statistics. I want you guys to be successful. I want to help you at least hit a million dollars. I think every small business and entrepreneur should at least hit a million dollars because if you hit a million dollars and you get to that level, then you're going to get to the point where you're probably making two to 300K

because you should have 20 to 30% margin. So I think as a rule of thumb, every entrepreneur's goal should be hit the million dollar annual revenue goal. Now, the reason that only 5%, less than 5% is crazy, get there are the mistakes I'm gonna talk about today. And as an entrepreneur, as you know, we take all the risk. We work longer hours, okay? Most of the time, our family and

friends don't get us. We sacrifice relationships. We sacrifice our health. We have more stress than most people. So we should be earning way more than most people. We should be able to hit those big revenue goals. So listen closely to what I share today and I'm excited to dive into some of these mistakes. Now as I go through each mistake I'm only going to go through them for two or three minutes just for sake of time. I could easily do a whole hour training on each single mistake. So I obviously encourage you to go deeper down the rabbit hole. I encourage you to go and take what I'm saying here and really analyze it. Look at where you're making those mistakes, how to fix those.'t know how to get attention on their brand. One of the things I teach in my marketing systems and formulas is rule number one is attention.

You have to be able to drive traffic to your website. You need attention on your brand. If you don't have attention on your brand, it's a very simple formula. If you don't have attention on your brand, you're not going to get people landing to your website, which means you can't sell products and services. It's literally a two plus two formula. It's like saying, if you don't eat food, you're going to lose weight. If you eat a bunch of food all day and you eat McDonald's five times a day and ice cream five times a day

and pizza five times a day and you eat more calories than you burn you're gonna gain weight it's almost an exact formula that is like 99.999 accurate it's the same here in business if you don't have continued attention on your brand and you don't know how many people are hitting your website you're simply never gonna make it it's physically impossible it's like having a restaurant right a restaurant that gets you know have you have the chefs, blah, blah, blah, you have a nice restaurant. But if you only have five people come into your restaurant every day or walking past it and not even've got to build a big social media. You've got to run ads. People are scared of ads. People think ads aren't for small businesses. It's actually the opposite. When you're a big business, you have crazy traffic. You don't need to run a bunch of ads, right? Think about it logically. If you're super famous and people are coming, if Apple or Best Buy or Wayfair or Amazon or Facebook, they don't need to run ads to grow because they're famous. It's the opposite.

When you're a small business, you have to run ads because no one knows who you are. It's physically impossible to get people there unless you're running ads. So you have to get attention to brand. You have to go in with social media. You have to run ads. And you have to be creative in how you're promoting your products and services, or you're simply not going to make it work. Okay, rule number two, right?

Or mistake number two. The CEO's focus is in the wrong place. In your business, your number one job is to get sales and promote your brand and get customers and create cash, cash flow, revenue, okay? Now, you need to spend at least, in my opinion, at least 80% of your time. You've got to spend 80% of your time on this exact thing. You've got to spend 80% of your time on what I just said there, on promotion, on sales, on marketing, on getting attention. When I analyze what I do all day, apart from recruiting, HR bits, and apart

from some coaching, live calls, and content like this, I'm literally focused on sales and marketing. And you could argue all the content stuff I'm doing equals more attention on my brand, i.e. you watching this or listening to this right now, which in turn equals sales and marketing, right? So most of my day for the last 10 years of my life has been sales and marketing. And then I spend little amount of time on fulfillment, operations, 20, 30%, but most of it sales and marketing. The problem that I see, especially with entrepreneurs making less than a million dollars a year, is it's the flip of that. So they will spend 80% of their, and I asked them, I've surveyed hundreds of people. They will spend 80% of their time on

all the other stuff and 20%, sometimes like five or 10, but on average, 20% of their time, maybe 20%, if I'm being generous, it's probably more like 10, but say 20% of their time on sales and marketing and promotion. So they'll spend 80% of their time on product development, fulfillment, content, like blogs and stuff, some tech stuff, design stuff. They won't spend the time where they need to spend the time. So the CEO is spending their time on the wrong stuff. If you're trying to get to your first million dollars or your next couple, you've probably spent more than enough time, more than enough time on the product. The product's okay. Leave it alone. Don't touch it. Because guess what? A great product with no sales impacts zero people, helps zero people. A good product that's sold a000 copies or 10,000 copies or 100,000 copies impacts how many people?

100,000 people. Okay. I would soon have good that impacts 100,000 people, 100,000 people impacted by my good product than an amazing product that's impacted zero people or one person or five people or 10 people, right? So shift your mindset to how you run your business. Shift your mindset on how you operate. Shift your mindset on what hats you wear every single day. Shift your mindset on what you do when you wake up in the morning. Shift your mindset on what you think about and obsess about all day, every day. Sales, marketing, promotion. I don't care what you got to do. Get a tattoo on your forearm, get a sticky note and put it on your Mac or your monitor. Put it as your desktop

screensaver. Sales, marketing, promotion. I don't care what you got to do, but obsess over sales, marketing, and promotion all day, every day. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. Before we go into the rest of this episode, I'm going to interrupt abruptly and just ask you one big favor. I hope you're getting a ton of value, a ton of knowledge. I hope you're getting some breakthroughs from myself and the guests. And I want one thing in return. What I would love is for you to subscribe and leave a review. The reviews and the subscription grows the podcast. It allows me to bring you even better guests. It allows me to invest even more time and money into this podcast to bring you the latest and greatest, the best entrepreneurs from around the world that are crushing life, crushing their business,

and giving you all the tools, the mindset hacks, the knowledge, and the environment you need to be successful. So do me a favor, if you've got any amount of value from today's episode so far, or any previous episode or any of the content I've done, it would mean the world to me if you hit a five star review, give us your feedback on the show, the episodes and subscribe and download. Plus, if you do that and send me a screenshot on Instagram at Rudy Moore Life, I will send you a bunch of my free training, marketing courses, sales courses worth $499. Yes, $500 worth of courses for a simple 30 second review. It would mean the world to me. Send me that screenshot. I would love for you to leave that review and I would appreciate it very, very much so we can keep growing this show and make it awesome. So let's get back into the episode.

I appreciate you guys and let's dive back in. Now, again, some of you might go, well, what do I do, really? I don't have time to explain all that right now. I have hundreds of hours of content on that that you can go and get for like $10, $20, $50 in my courses, right? You can go on YouTube and learn all this stuff for free nowadays. Just make sure you check it from someone good, not bad, right? A reputable, well-known person that's got a lot of success. The point is spending the time on it. So that 80% of time in the first six months might be a lot of learning. It might be taking the courses. It might be going on YouTube.

It might be learning that stuff, right? And some people go, really, I'm not good at it. I can't do it. Well, you've got to know enough to be dangerous. You've got to understand it because you've got to hire people. And if you suck at it and you don't understand it, you're never going to hire good marketers. I promise you, because I'm one of the best marketers in the world and I still struggle to hire good people. And I know exactly what to ask them, what to test them on, how to audit them, how to trick them, how to quiz them,

how to monitor them. And it's still hard to find great marketers. So don't be fooled into going, oh, I'm not good at that. I'm just going to outsource it because you ain't going to find anyone good. And then you're not going to be able to monitor them and you're going to waste months or years of your life saying I can't grow my business because I can't find a good agency.

That's not, that's not, this is an excuse. You've got to own this stuff. This is the most important part of your business, sales and marketing. Okay. So rule number one, focus on mass attention on your brand. Rule number two, get more focused on what you should be doing as a CEO, which most of the time is sales and marketing and promoting your brand. Okay. Rule number three, change your mindset. Mistake number three is a bad mindset. What I find with most entrepreneurs is they don't, they want to become an entrepreneur and they kind of want to make money and do their own thing. But most of them don't truly believe they're going to

be millionaires. Most of them don't truly believe they can make millions of dollars. So when they fail for many years or they're stagnant for many years or they grow super slow, 50k a year, next year 80k a year, next year 200k a year, next year 250, next year 300. To me that's slow, right? I grow million dollar companies in a year, right? If I'm not growing a new million dollar company in a year, it's slow. Why? Because I have the skill set, but I have the mindset, right? So that might sound arrogant when I say that. If I'm not growing a million dollar company in a year, it's slow. I'm doing that on purpose to show you that's my mindset, right? So if I have the mindset that a million dollars in a year is slow, guess what? All my goals, all my actions, my intent, how I rally the team, how I set goals for the team, how I budget my advertising. It's all around that goal of a million dollars in a year.

Now, if you are only thinking 50 grand a year is a good start, then 100 grand is good, then 150 is good, then 200, you're going to spend 14 years of your life trying to get to a million dollars when you could be doing it in four years or two years. I'm just trying to help you right now. You, you could get there too in a year if you really had to. If you had the tools, the system, the strategy and knew exactly what to do and then you believe that you could do it. You have to believe you can do it. Okay. Have to believe. You have to have the tools, skills, strategy and path forward and then you have to believe you can make it but that's so important so you've got to shift your mindset you've got to think bigger and then it's not just writing these goals down so i'm gonna make a million you've really truly

got to believe it because when you believe it and you're hungry for it everything you do every day is going to be aligned around that okay when you truly know that i deserve to make a million dollars this year and i'm going to be frustrated if I don't, you're going to be hungry. You're going to go for it. You're going to get, get, get all in. You're going to spend the money. You're going to hire the people. You're going to test. You're going to keep going when you fail 17 times, like you will, I promise you, because you're all in and focus on that big goal. So change your mindset. Stop playing small. Understand you can easily make that million dollars and way more in a way, way, way faster time than you ever thought possible.

I promise you, because I've been there, done that, got the t-shirt and I've seen it happen with dozens of people I've coached, mentored, friends, people in my network. Okay. It's the whole rule is it's based on the four minute mile. And I don't have time to talk about that today, but I've done content on that, too. If you don't understand what that is, go and Google it, YouTube it. It's this whole principle that the four minute mile for many years, no one believes they could run a mile in four minutes. Roger Bannister came along and did it. OK, and then since doing that, hundreds, if not thousands of people, including college kids, are now running four minute miles. Why? Because they saw it as possible.

They believe they could now do it. Now, until Roger Bannister, people tried for hundreds of years and couldn't do it. But as soon as he did it, 40 days later, someone did it. And then again and again and again and now of times, because they know it's possible. So get in the right rooms. So you know, it's possible when you believe it, and you can see it come into life. Okay, that's mistake number three, final mistake number four. Okay, talked about the first three final, there's more mistakes. So this is the fourth one I want to share with you today. Okay, is having a clear way to make more money after the first sale. It's called lifetime value. Some people call it an ascension model. Some people say high ticket, okay. The one thing I've studied billion dollar brands for many years, I look at what the most successful people do. Generally, when you're going from one to 10 million and beyond, you need more than one product. Or if you only have one product, it has to build more than once.

It's very hard unless you're selling like luxury goods. OK, it's very hard unless you're selling something super high company in America or in the world that only sells something one time to once. It doesn't rebuild, doesn't require maintenance or upgrades or fixing. And it's just one thing, one time. It's very hard to think of one. Let me know in the comments or DM me on Instagram. If you can think of a company, a billion dollar firm that only sells one thing one time to all its customers. It's very hard. Why? Because the

economics of growing a business require you to sell many things many times to make much more money off each customer. It's called the lifetime value. How much do you make for every single customer that comes in? Generally for every single customer that comes in generally for every single customer that comes in you want to make 5 to 10x great example of that is the iphone think about your iphone how much i always ask people is how much money will you spend with apple i ask people oh 10k 20k in my life 50k in my life i've already spent over 150k with apple i'll probably at least spend a million dollars if not two million with apple over my life. I've already spent over 150K with Apple. I'll probably at least spend a million dollars, if not two million with Apple over my life, maybe even more because I buy computers for my office. So Apple makes a lot of money over time. How much money will you spend with Amazon?

How much money will you spend with Netflix? One product, but it rebuilds every month for many years for many people, right? How much will you spend with Nike? You buy more clothes than one piece of clothes. How much money will you spend with Louis Vuitton? How much money will you spend with Verizon? How much money will you spend with Wayfair, the furniture store? I could just go on and on and on. How much money will you spend with American Airlines? The list goes on.

How much money will you spend watching the Miami Heat play? Generally, you go back again and then you buy the merch and all those things. The list goes on. So figure out how do you build that product stack? How do you increase that lifetime value? And how do you make more money for every single customer that comes in your ecosystem? Because when you do that, you can spend more to acquire them. To do that first thing, get attention on your brand. Okay, So there you have it, four key critical mistakes that people make that need to be fixed, four things you can focus on, four rules of success that if only the beginner entrepreneur understood, if only they could grasp these four simple yet vitally important things, the failure rate wouldn't be so large. And I hope today this helped highlight one, two, maybe even all four mistakes that you're

facing and gave you a path forward to be successful. Until next time, take care and keep living the red life. My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life.