Dear Friend,

you'll notice I'm publishing this one later than I should have (Last Saturday).

The fact is that it's been quite hectic lately and I'm struggling to keep up.

Much like a bad student who's supposed to deliver on time but doesn't.

Good thing is bad students are more likely to become successful entrepreneurs.

If you weren't top of the class in school it might be a clear sign that you're destined to do something bigger.

To prove the point I'll bring the example of Marco, a coaching client of mine who despite being pretty bad in school (to his admission), proceeded to bootstrap several multimillion-dollar businesses before the age of 30.

Keep reading to find out if you too can awaken your entrepreneurial mindset and how.

School performance does not define your business acumen.

I had several language coaching sessions with Marco when we worked together to improve his English communication skills.

One thing I noticed was that he would religiously neglect my assignments.

It looked like he just didn't give a shit.

I later discovered that he'd had a similar approach in school when he was younger.

He was definitely not the type who did homework assignments. Very reluctant to follow the rules he didn't like.

People say that rebels are geniuses in disguise but you don't really think it's true unless your name is Steve Jobs.

In the case of Marco I wouldn't say he was particularly genius, yet he managed to bootstrap a cleaning business, a human resource business and an IT support business — among a few, that were all insanely profitable in the first year.

How could someone like Marco create multiple multimillion-dollar empires? I thought.

I believed that following the rules and getting good grades was the best predictor of success. I was wrong.

Entrepreneurship requires you to break the rules

Marco wasn't always a businessman. After dropping out of school he started working and did all sorts of manual jobs to make ends.

This forced him to work for a cleaning company where he was literally scraping filthy toilets.

One day he had to clean up an extremely dirty toilet. It was so messy he couldn't even see the colour of the furniture.

If he had followed the rules on that day (doing exactly as he was told), he would've kept cleaning toilets for the rest of his life.

Instead, he decided to pour bleach all over the place and cover the whole toilet in it from top to bottom.

Unsurprisingly, his boss wasn't happy about it and the whole situation led him to leave the job on the very same day.

Now, we could debate if spreading bleach left right and centre is the best approach to deep cleaning.

But this is not the main point.

The main point is that Marco's thinking was to find the best solution to a problem.

NOT to follow the rules.

This is the best type of mindset you can develop if you want to build your own empire from scratch as Marco did after leaving that nasty job.

I'm saying "develop" because this mindset can be learnt. Here’s how…

Start thinking as an entrepreneur

The first thing you can do is stop observing businesses as a customer.

I grew up in a left-wing family. All my family members have always been employees.

To my dad, the only thing businesses cared about was stealing our money.

The big company is the oppressor, we are the target.

What Dad didn’t see was everything behind the company. The pain, the suffering, the resilience and the patience.

So, start looking at companies around you as an entrepreneur.

Every time you come across a service, a restaurant, an app or whatever, ask yourself the following questions:

• What problem are they trying to solve?

• Am I their ideal customer? Why?

• What's their vision for the next 5 years?

• How much money do they make per day, per month, per year?

• How many employees do they have?

• What sort of costs do they have? (bills, suppliers etc.)

• How did they start? Did they bootstrap or raise money?

• How do they advertise themselves and where?

Essentially, think as if you were running that business yourself. And what you would do to make sure it is profitable.

Start thinking about solving problems

The second thing you can do is think about problems, not solutions.

All businesses solve one precise problem someone has.

The products and services they sell are just a tool to accomplish that goal. NOT the main driver of success.

Instead of starting from what you have to offer start from the problem you can solve.

It's easier than you think…

If you've lived in this world you've probably had lots of problems to solve, right?

Chances are other people in the world have the very same problems.

Package the solution you found and sell it for profit.

Start thinking about your customers

The third thing you can do is to impersonate your ideal customer.

This is easier said than done because we tend to view the world from our own perspective.

When I was working as a mentor for Wix, I often faced clients complaining about features I thought were not important at all.

I was blind. Those customers were using the product intensively and knew exactly what they needed.

I only touched on it while working with the delivery teams. How could I possibly know what was really important for them?

Obsess over your current or potential customers. Amazon made its fortune on this very principle.

• What do they want?

• What problems do they have?

• What will they need in the future?

• What challenges will they face?

Alright...

The spiel is over.

I could've summarized this issue in one sentence:

It's all about them. Not about you.

But it wouldn't have been as fun to write.

Hope it'll be useful. But even more, I hope you'll do something with it.

I'll see you next week.

Yours truly,

N.

Sent while pretending I was a good student