“Yes! I made it across the finish line! My business is self-sustaining, I’m building my million-dollar wealth platform, and I’m never going back! My staff will never need me to step in and fix things! I’ll never run out of money! It’s all Perfect Days from now on!” —No One Every business owner eventually makes some progress. He or she takes a step forward in business. That’s not really the hard part anymore. What comes next is the hard part. Make Fewer Mistakes After a small success, some owners will immediately take a step back again. They fix their marketing problem and then find out they don’t have enough materials or staff to fulfill all those orders. Some owners even take two steps back after their first step forward. They discover that they don’t have enough materials or staff—and they don’t have the money to get them. Or maybe they even take three steps backward: Their disappointed new clients leave! The key to success as an entrepreneur isn’t to avoid the backward steps. It’s to minimize them. When I found a mentor, I learned to take a better step forward before I had to step back again. And soon, I took two steps forward for every one step back. Then three. I noticed my new momentum. Then four, and five, and six—and then, years later, I looked around and realized I was sprinting. But that didn’t mean I would never take a step back again. When I visited my mentor, Todd Herman, in Manhattan last week, he told me this: “I read your book. You’re back in Farmer Phase.” And he was right: but this time, I was in Farmer Phase with a $7 million company instead of a $500,000 company. The stakes are higher, but the steps are the same. Level Up In my first business, the shift from Farmer to Tinker was a “one step forward, ...
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