To become successful at anything, you’ll need knowledge and experience. You’ll need to learn hard lessons.
To run a successful Design Consultancy, I needed to understand how to build a design team, how to sell, how to market, how to manage and everything in-between.
To run a successful Online Course business I needed to understand how to build online courses, how to package them and most importantly: how to sell them.
Both businesses required a lot of lessons-learned to bring them to their current multi-million dollar revenue states… but I used a different “currency” to build each one.
In the end, there are only 2 currencies an entrepreneur can use to learn the lessons needed to become successful:
Time
Money
Time
In the beginning of my career I used the only currency I had a lot of: time. It took years of grinding before AJ&Smart even reached the 7-figure (million-dollar revenue) mark. I was shooting in the dark, trying to build something from scratch, learning the lessons in real time as they happened. It was like hiking up a mountain with no map, no guide and no signs. Eventually I made it to the top of the mountain but it was a painful process and it nearly burned me out.
This is why I decided to try a different currency for the second business: Money
Money
From the beginning of building Workshopper, in fact, even before I created the first line of dialogue for my first course, I decided to pay for the lessons I needed to learn using money!
For the second businesses I decided that if I could pay someone who’d “already been to the top of the mountain” to tell me how to get their quicker and safer, I would pay them. I didn’t want to trudge up the mountain blindly, taking years to learn the lessons that others had already learned the hard way.
The result? The money I spent on guides (mentors) and maps (online courses, masterminds) dramatically reduced the amount of TIME it took to get Workshopper to 7 Figures.
Time VS Money
It might be easy to conclude from this post that I had to use TIME when starting AJ&Smart because I didn’t have MONEY… but the truth is, even with the very small amount of money we were making, we could have been “buying lessons”.
There were agency owners selling their mentorship at prices we could have afforded, I simply didn’t even know that “buying lessons” was a thing!
If I were to go back in time today to my early-20’s building AJ&Smart, here are a few of the things I would have spent MONEY on rather than TIME:
A mentor who had already reached the point I was aiming for
Courses on selling services (ideally the types of services we were selling)
Courses on marketing
A mastermind group with some people who were “ahead of me” success-wise
So, if you look at your journey to building a successful business… where could you be spending MONEY instead of spending TIME?
Cheers,
Jonathan
Starting for myself I actually decided to spend money on courses and coaching. The stuff I spent money on about getting better (e.g. facilitation or coaching) I have no regrets about. Money spent on business courses, I do have some regrets. In those cases I notice that for me it’s very important that there’s a match with the mentor or coach, or like you said ideally it’s about selling products similar to you. I’m learning on the way what works well for me and what doesn’t.
I just started my business but one year ago I took a lot of courses on marketing or how to define your niche, your product stairs … etc… since I couldn’t find what I really wanted to offer, I had the feeling, it brings me nowhere if I don’t know what to offer. Sunddenly in June, everything was clear and I invested again the rest of my money to get the WORKSHOPPER master method and combine this new skills with my experience and own skills. I thought at the end of the summer: “ why did I spent so much money in all these courses last year” but then I started my business in September and everything I’ve learned before could be used immediately and it was a huge difference than starting from scratch. So yes investment in our know-how, and skills and be part of community or mastermind definitely helps !
But only spend money for exclusive training will not do the work for you! Even with a lot of courses this is a lot of constant work. Since I do what I love, it don’t feel like works !