Entrepreneurship is a Team Sport

“Tal­ent wins games, but team­work and intel­li­gence wins cham­pi­onships.“ — Michael Jor­dan

I just had an amaz­ing trav­el back through time as a guest on the Your First 100K pod­cast with host Joseph War­ren, which just went live.

Client and good friend Nigel Ben­nett referred me to him, and it was a phe­nom­e­nal expe­ri­ence. Joseph took me back to when I start­ed my busi­ness 25 years ago, and the strug­gles to make my first $100,000. I found myself laugh­ing as I remem­bered some of the crazy stuff I did – some of which worked, and some didn’t! If I knew then…

So, what didn’t work?

I start­ed with­out enough mon­ey and racked up debt because I was liv­ing the lifestyle I used to have when I had a great job. I even­tu­al­ly had to move back in with my par­ents when cash flow became too tight. And I pro­cras­ti­nat­ed on new busi­ness devel­op­ment activities.

But the biggest mis­take was try­ing to do every­thing on my own.

My big turn­ing point came when I real­ized that busi­ness and entre­pre­neur­ship is a team sport – not an indi­vid­ual sport. From there, the three things that worked the most and had the biggest impact were:

• Col­lab­o­rat­ing with a great men­tor and past man­ag­er of mine on a sales train­ing program
• Join­ing net­work­ing groups to meet and build a net­work of peo­ple where we could help each other
• Help­ing to cre­ate a mas­ter­mind group of oth­er start-up entre­pre­neurs to sup­port, brain­storm and col­lab­o­rate on strate­gies to improve our businesses.

Although these seem basic and obvi­ous, it was all new to me when I was in my ear­ly 20s, as I start­ed out in a new indus­try, with no expe­ri­ence work­ing for a con­sult­ing or coach­ing firm.

Talk­ing about it in the pod­cast made me real­ize that if I were to start again, with the same capa­bil­i­ties I had back then but with the strate­gies I know today, I could have grown my busi­ness dra­mat­i­cal­ly faster. 

It’s about know­ing the right things to focus on. That’s why I talk about the impor­tance of get­ting advice and men­tor­ship in chap­ter 11 of my book, Quadru­ple Your IQ. You can learn a lot from peo­ple who have suc­cess­ful­ly dealt with what you are fac­ing, 14 times before. I call them the 14Xers.

New entre­pre­neurs often try to do too much on their own through igno­rance, pride, or ego.

Those who learn that entre­pre­neur­ship is a team sport from the begin­ning, def­i­nite­ly have the advantage.

Chal­lenge

• Think about where you are today, whether you are start­ing out or scal­ing up a large enter­prise. Reflect on what made you suc­cess­ful ini­tial­ly: Is there some­thing about those sim­ple prin­ci­ples you can return to that can make your com­pa­ny bet­ter today?
• Is there some­one on your team who needs to go back to the basics, who you can men­tor to share your knowledge?