All my biggest mistakes in under 5 minutes. Avoid these

I think my best content is just reflecting on my mistakes.

If you are going full force at something it is inevitable that you will stumble.

So hopefully I can provide leverage to you all by being able to consume my mistakes in 10 minutes rather than 12 months.

So here are some of my biggest mistakes so you can just avoid them:

• My first business was honestly a bad business. I was trying to do way too much stuff and needed more focus, doing full stack growth for B2B companies. Cold email, offers, ads, sales, positioning, sales assets etc. Terrible way to start in my opinion haha. My number one lesson in 2023 was just focus. Doing anything more than one thing feels terrible for me. Not sure if it’s just a skill issue or what but feels bad. I had to learn to say no, because eventually what happened was that I had ‘partnered in’ to a bunch of random businesses which is just not ideal in any way. You can imagine trying to run one business yourself, then imagine 5-10x that with only 3 entry level employees. I had kind of just bought into opportunity vehicles that seemed like a good idea at the time, but in reality they just weren’t. When I talk about things like focus, making dumb mistakes etc that is just because I have done literally 99% of them in the last few years (lol). It wasn’t all bad because it gave me a lot of experience in a short amount of time, plus some ok case studies, and maybe I would do it again that way but probably not.

• 9 times out of 10, it was never one thing that I did that helped a client scale. It was never that we had a genius cold email script or some type of method. It was decision making. Essentially strategy + how to allocate resources as a ‘growth guy.’ I have quite a good understanding of cold email, offers, copy, sales assets, ad creative, and ops but I don’t think they were nearly as important as consistently making good decisions and trying not to cope on behalf of my clients. For example, one month we booked 40+ sales calls from cold email and my client only closed two, so I reviewed all of the calls and came to the conclusion “you need more intense sales training.” So with this in mind, I realized instead of trying to do everything, I should just have focused on the highest leverage thing. Which is trying to make great decisions for my own business and building an A+++ product. It was always that simple but I was too rookie to realize this at the start.

• The best thing you could ever do is pick one opportunity vehicle and just die in it. Pivoting really sucks, so before you do it make sure that you have a really good idea of how painful it will be.

• Making decisions is really hard and important. If a business is yours and you own it, it’s kind of like when a soccer Mom is trying to tell the coach that her kid deserves to be in the A-Team even if everyone else thinks he is shit. The blinders are on massively. So when it comes to things like this, you have to try and be as objective as you can by looking at your business and yourself as separate entities. To help you avoid this, you need to track everything meticulously. Men lie, women lie, numbers do not.

I talk about some of these things in these videos:

• Doing more than one thing (link)

• Pivoting to a new opportunity (link)

• Being as objective as possible (link)

Hopefully this helps.

Leo