The Complete Business Startup Playbook | Nathan Forrest | Skillshare

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The Complete Business Startup Playbook

teacher avatar Nathan Forrest, Musician, Mentor, and Innovator

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

8 Lessons (43m)
    • 1. Introduction

      1:09
    • 2. Getting Started

      3:22
    • 3. Quiz Results

      5:05
    • 4. Building Your Team

      6:47
    • 5. Business Model

      8:45
    • 6. Developing A Strategy

      5:45
    • 7. Cost & Risk

      5:41
    • 8. Execution

      6:53
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About This Class

Looking to start a business with a proper foundation and strategy? Learn how to polish your plan with the Business Startup Playbook!

In this 45 minute course, Nate will show give you the knowledge and tips he has learned from coaching over 200 small business owners and sole proprietors. 

There are so many items to keep track of when starting a business and that is why we need to stay laser focused on the necessary building blocks for a solid foundation. Without this foundation, we are likely going to focus in the wrong areas of the business and will become inefficient. Maximizing every dollar is crucial for us to keep the business growing and keeping up with a continuing evolving market. 

The course is broken down into six sections:

  • Entrepreneurial Quiz
  • Building Your Team
  • Business Model
  • Strategy 
  • Cost / Risk
  • Execution

Whether you are starting a brick/mortar restaurant or are launching a simple online retail business, this course will give you the necessary tools/resources to minimize efforts and maximize results.

Meet Your Teacher

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Nathan Forrest

Musician, Mentor, and Innovator

Teacher

Hey There!

Nate here, coming at you from the live music capital of the world, Austin, Texas! I am obsessed with starting businesses, playing music and I want to share my knowledge and passion with the world.

I coach small business owners to help get their startups off the ground. I have worked with about 1,000 entrepreneurs and love helping them with any challenges that arise. There is a reason why 90% of businesses fail and my goal is to help business owners from being in the 90%.

I have been playing guitar for over 15 years and have enjoyed every minute of it! One of the biggest challenges I had when learning how to play the guitar is finding the path that was right for me. I teach you the guitar basics, but the fun begins when you develop your own style... See full profile

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: 90% of businesses fail and these businesses are failing because of the three main factors needed for success. I've coached over 200 small business owners and entrepreneurs over the years, and I've noticed the same factors come up over and over and over now. The first factor we will master is how to correctly build a required support team so you can leverage others to help you become more successful. The second is how to take a scientific approach for running a business and executing on this. The third involves a few different sections of this course, but once you get it down, you will be 100% confident and ready to hit the ground. If you often think of great business ideas but struggled to see them through fruition. I'm grateful to share my knowledge with you to help bring these ideas back to life. And I'm excited to start this journey with you. Let's go 2. Getting Started: Okay, so first things first. We need to download the quiz and playbook. And so if you're on the first page here, the main page underneath the video, there's going to be a few tabs. We want to click on your project and on the right, you'll see over here the complete business startup playbook. Click on that and that will get you the PdF for the course. So let's download that. I'm going to save it to my desktop. And once we've done that, I can go ahead and access the playbook. Double click there and here we are on the first page, you can see you that we have the entrepreneurial quiz, and what we'll do is read all these statements below. There's 20 of them and if you disagree with the statement, will rated a one. If you agree, we'll rate it a five, and so I'll go ahead and do the 1st 1 with you. So if a person is performing better than me, I do everything I can outdo them. So for me I would say I am competitive, but I'm not that competitive. I mean, I have, ah, big drive, but I would say I kind of fall in the middle there, so I'm gonna rate that a three and what will do? Just go through this and start rating all of the statements. And if you get to the bottom, it will start adding these up for you says you can see here. I'll give that a five in. It'll update the score there. So once we get the total, the final score will go to the next page, and there will be four different categories. And depending on what you scored, you'll fall into one of these categories and will have notes and advice for whichever category you fall in. And that's basically the quiz. Once we're done with the quiz scrolled 1/3 page, and this is the start of play book. And so what will use this four and the rest of this? All these pages is to take notes, and what we can do is not only take notes, but there's going to be some questions that you'll need to answer. And we want to complete this entirely to make sure that we can get everything that we can out of the course. And so here's the first question what? Your goals for the course. So, what are you looking to get out of this? Ah, So I'm gonna go ahead and put I would like to start my business and make 2000 dollars her months by months, number three. And as you go through this, we can go ahead and save the document. And I know you probably won't finish this with in one sitting, but you can always come back and everything will be saved for whenever you want to pick up where he left off. So let's go ahead and start the quiz. We need to get that done. And once you finish it, go ahead and go on to the next lesson. 3. Quiz Results: Hey, guys, In this video, we will cover the quiz results. If you haven't taken the quiz already. Stop the video. Go back. Download that. Pdf, take the quiz and come back to this section. For those of you who have taken the quiz, let's go ahead and see how we did. So obviously, the higher the score, the better. And what was your score? What category did you fall under if you fell under the high risk category? Honestly, I'm just gonna be blunt and say it Don't start a business. You don't have the necessary skills drive and everything that you'll need to get a business off the ground. I would say maybe you could learn about investing, spend as much time and get as much knowledge as possible. And that might be a better fit for you. If you landed in the seek help bucket. I would say the odds are still gonna be low. Um, I'm not saying that it's impossible, but I would say if you have a partner that is very successful and knows exactly what they're doing, that would definitely be a big help for you. And I would say still use as many resource is. Take some business courses either online or at a university and reassess after you do that . If you scored between 50 and 75 I would say you definitely have a lot of the skills that it takes to become a successful entrepreneur. But I would highly suggest that you use all the resource is again as you can. We want to make sure that you give you the best shot possible to be successful with this business. And lastly, if you were in the go category anywhere from 75 to 100 business is second nature for you. You have what it takes and you have a really good shot at running a successful business, Remember? I mean, running a business is never a guaranteed thing assed for being successful that ISS. So you're still going to have to work very, very, very hard. Ah, whatever category you fell under. Now what areas did we score low on? Let's focus on these for a moment because these weak areas will be holding us back on the road to success. For example, one of the statements was my significant other spouse or close family member doesn't support the ventures that I pursue. If this is the case, then there's going to be a lot of friction down the road and it's just gonna make things very difficult if we continue this battle day in and day out. And I'm not saying that we should end the relationship and just cut that relationship off from your spouse. No way. What I'm saying is maybe we should make a point and a plan to get them on your side and basically convinced them that, Hey, this means a lot to you and it's very important and it would really help if they were on board with that. And I'm not saying it's your way or the highway. What I'm saying is, maybe both of you can compromise and find out what works for both of you, to make sure that everyone is happy and looking at your results, does it make sense to start a business Now? I'll let you make that call and go with your gut and for some of the weaker areas, we want to make sure that we surround ourselves with a support system that will help you with some of these weaker areas. Also, we can develop business skills through learning. There's online courses, college courses. You can learn a ton of stuff on podcasts and YouTube channels. Um lynda dot com. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's an online learning platform. They have over 1000 business courses, and it costs about 30 bucks a month. However, I went to my local library and I got a library card, and with my library card, I'm able to access all of their courses for free. So check with your library, see if they have this option. I know that some might not have this option, but they use a different platform. But check with your library, see what they do use and definitely maximize on those resource is. And another quick way to solve for some of these weaker areas is to get a partner. A lot of times you may struggle with certain items, but you could get a partner that's amazing at those, and they really thrive with those areas of the business. And so all in all these air, three different options to fill some of those gaps, and some of those items that you scored low on 4. Building Your Team: No. Let's talk about the team we need to build and have in place to give us the best shot possible. It. Let's with ourselves. So, looking at our own personality, do we have the grit that it takes to run a successful business? Mark Cuban didn't take a vacation for seven years when he first started his own business. Seven years. Will you get will stay strong whenever you don't see return on your investment after the 1st 3 months. I mean, this is really what we need to get us through some of those big hurdles, those challenges, those things that are really going to stress this out. And we need to make sure that we tackle those problems and keep moving forward, and that brings us to passion. Is this something that we are truly obsessed with if we don't have a strong passion and it's not something that just gets us excited, you are likely to give up early on and be careful whenever you're starting a job from a hobby of yours. If you have a hobby and you're looking to make money from that a lot of times that can add a lot of stress, and it can make that hobby less desirable. I've known people that know, knew a person that started their own baking business and ended up working six days a week. They became so stressed out that it ruined that hobby for them. They were always thinking about Okay, I need to make ends meet. I need to make sure my customers are happy any to make sure that I have everything in place . Where is before? She loved baking, and now it kind of that business ruined it for her. And lastly, we need to set ourselves up for success. We definitely need to stay healthy. And that's physically, mentally, spiritually, because every aspect kind of weaves together and it ties in our personal life ties into our professional life and everything needs to be solid. I mean, there've been nights where I've been drinking until 3 a.m. And I woke up the next day hungover with a pounding headache, and it really hurt me. I wasn't able focus on my family. I wasn't able to focus on the business that next day was just me and bed and I wasn't productive whatsoever. I definitely think that Ah waking up early is huge. If you're gonna be running a business, typically if you wake up early, you're gonna get more done throughout the day. And I truly believe that we have a finite amount of brainpower each day. And so I think about a really rough day that you had just a really long day. Um, I don't know if you work in 9 to 5, but at the end of your work day, sometimes if I have a rough day, I'll come home. And the last thing that I want to do is work on a business. And so if I wake up early, let's just say 30 minutes early and I down a cup of coffee. I am ready to go. I have all the mental brainpower ready, and it's super quiet. I don't have any distractions. That's gonna be huge to, ah, work on your projects and make sure that you're moving forward each day. And here's a good quote that I found from Vince Lombardi really resonates with me. Ah, the difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength or knowledge, but rather a lack of will and I truly believe that I don't think anyone has to be amazing. I think anyone could be successful as long as they're working each day at this and let's look at the support system we can create. So who will help us succeeded This? Let's use all the resource is available so honestly, where we don't have toe work is hard at the bottom. We have our friends and family. Let's surround ourselves with people that truly care about our success. And we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. And so let's not spend a ton of time with people that are going to dragging us down and not helping us succeeded. Surround ourselves with people that truly care about us and wanting us to be successful. Next, we have guidance from mentors. We definitely want to find a mentor that has been successful with this already or in any business. And so, see if you can find a mentor that will help you out there gonna be a huge help in getting you towards success. Then we have Mrs groups and Meetups. There are a plethora of business groups that you can join I would say start joining these. There's mastermind groups, networking, meetups, social media groups that you can join, and they will be very helpful. And we have podcasts and YouTube channels. These industry experts will be able to share what they've learned to help you on your journey. And I do have another tip. If you are in the US, there is the S B. A. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they basically helped small business owners and give them a thana resource is to become successful, and that brings us to partners. So why have a partner? Well, ultimately, you're going tohave business expenses, work, stress, needed skills and relationships that other people can help you with. So we might as well break this up. And that way you can focus on your portion and you don't have to put in all the expenses, all the working stress and just make that easier on yourself. And if you decide to have a partner, let's make sure that we have complementary streaks and weaknesses, and so we don't want three amazing sales people if you have all of the same type of personality or all the people are good in one area, you're gonna fall short in the other areas of the business. It would also be very wise toe list out, and all of you agree to the roles and responsibilities that each person has. One way to do this is through a partnership agreement, just a legal way to make sure everyone's on the same page when it comes to all the roles, the duties, what you're going to be putting in to the businesses faras, financial responsibility, all of that good stuff. 5. Business Model: in this lesson will focus on our business model. Of course, we need to figure out how the customer experience will go from A to Z, but we also need to focus on some of the necessary building blocks of creating our model. As you can see, we have five different categories. We have a problem to solve our target market competition testing in building our brand. So let's go ahead and begin with the problem. So what is the problem that we're trying to solve anyway? If we can't clearly define this, we won't know how to solve it correctly and we want to know are unfair advantage. This will help us with selling our product or service, and we need to find out what do we do that is completely unique and better than anyone else out there that selling their product or service. In other words, why should anyone choose you? And now that we know the problem and solution, how can we propose our solution to our customers? And we want to make sure that we keep it clear and simple and easy for our customers to grasp? And so here's one from stripe it says payments for developers. Strike makes it easy to start accepting credit cards on the Web today so you can easily see OK, who is it for? And then you see what problem they're solving. They make it easy to start accepting credit cards on the Web. And here's a couple other ones went from Shopify and one from Male Chimp as well. And here we have our target market if we want to have success marketing our company that we need to know who we want to sell to. So who will want our service To give you an example, A professional fisherman isn't going to go to a body of water and just blindly start casting for any type of fish. They will want to know exactly what type of fish they were looking for, and they may do some research to know. OK, which lake? Which river has the best chance possible of catching that specific trout or bass or whatever they're hunting? And what is the perfect client look like? So whenever we want to take a look at who we're going to hunt, we need to know. Okay, what is that perfect customer? Are they older? are the younger? Are they male? Female single, or do they have a big family? Ah, where do they live? Obviously, if they're living in taxes, we're not gonna be selling them snow shovels. If they are in middle or upper class, that's an important thing to determine. What benefit are they looking for? Are they just hungry? And they'll eat Whatever is there or are they looking for eggs from free range chickens? Ah, lot of these characteristics and factors air really important. So we can nail down exactly who were targeting. And we need to make sure that we planned for engagement. And we know exactly how we're gonna find these customers on. So again, the professional fishermen, they have many tools. They have rods, reels, lures, nets to catch that fish. What tools are they gonna use? And so if you take that example ah, they may say okay with this specific lake, I know that I can catch bass if I use a top water spinner lure. Ah, And so we want to know exactly what's going to give us the most bang for our buck to find that exact customer that we're looking for and So what tools will we use to get that bite? We're gonna use social media, email, marketing. Um, use our website or what? Presence and s e o. We're gonna be doing a lot of networking, engage with influencers to help us out with getting our perfect customer advertising here. Just a few tools that you can use. Different strategies. But we definitely need to make sure what makes the most sense for who we're going after. And we need to look at our competition. Understanding your competition will give you a wealth of knowledge about the industry and how you can better fit your solution in the marketplace. We need to find out who are competition is. And I suggest that we find three competitors that provide a similar product or service. But find three that seemed to be very successful. That way we can learn from the best. And how do we compare to these? Take a look at everything and let's do a complete analysis of their product, their pricing? Who do they target? What tools are they using to market their business? And let's take a look at the entire business model. What are those strengths what are those weaknesses and what makes you better, Or actually, after looking at all of this data, can you find opportunities within your business to improve your business model to make you better than them? Also, we need to understand all the liabilities of the business. So the weaknesses, opportunities, obstacles and challenges. How can we fill these gaps now? Testing and validation is so important for the business to stay as efficient as possible. You need to treat the business as a scientific experiment and you should never really stopped testing. Just always, always test everything that you do. We need to know what is working so we can double down on those areas and have we tested our product in the market before launching the business? Why invest money in something that is going to be a coin toss of either being successful or not? And we can do this by surveying and interviewing people, and we want to get all the feedback possible so we can start to tweak our product and make it better. And before launching, let's do a few experiments and let's sell our service and get some testimonials. If we get all positive testimonials, then I think it's safe to say that we're on the right track. If not again. Let's polish up our service and make it better for the next go around. And one way to validate a need is to take pre orders. If we can get 2030 50 people to pay for a service in advance. I think there's probably a need for that. And let's go ahead and keep the data clean again. Let's treat this as a scientific study, and we don't want to get any bias results. And negative feedback is valuable because it's gonna help us grow in the end. Now, when we do anything with the business, we want to ensure that we're representing our brand in the best way possible. Your brand should connect with your customers, and that should make them feel a certain way. So how are we going to build our solid brand? What we can start by understanding our company's core values? What values are most important to you? Is it integrity? The family? Would it be simplicity? Find your top core values and incorporate these with any action you take with the business and what is your company story. Share this with your prospects, your customers, and let them know that you're human too. And how are you going to represent yourself? What is going to be your company? Mission and slogan. What are you all about? And how are you going to appear to others? Are you going to appear hip? Are you gonna be very professional? Uh, and what colors are you gonna use for your logo? How are you going to show off your brand and considering everything that we're talking about, How are you going to connect with your community? I think that's the most important thing is just connection and reaching out to people and letting them know who you are. 6. Developing A Strategy: it is now time to talk some business strategy, and we'll start with lean methodology. If you guys take anything away from this course, I hope I hope I hope you adopt this methodology. The lean concept started as a system to reduce waste for manufacturing goods, and Eric Res wrote a book about how to reduce waste for your business. Start up and it's all about minimising waste of time, money and energy with anything that you do with your business. And ultimately, the goal is to use a feedback loop that will basically help validate the progress that you make with the business. And we went toe, learn and understand the needs of our customers. And once we understand what they need, let's go ahead and build a solution based on those needs. To do that, we're going to develop a minimum viable product, also known as an M V P. This product needs to be the bear boats, the most simple product or service that you can provide to your customers. I want to give you an example. I had a client that I was coaching and she wanted to start a food truck, and she said that she had $35,000 that she could pull from her 41 K She was gonna take that money out and put it in her business bank account to start this food truck that she wanted to start. Yes, me, Nate, should I do this? And she was kind of has a tent, and I didn't really know what to tell her. So I dove a little bit deeper and I asked Okay, So how maney food trucks have you started in the past? And she said zero. Then I said, Okay, so how much she was selling fried chicken And I was like So how much fried chicken have you sold in the past? And she was like, none. This is a new venture for her, and I asked, OK, do you cook good fried chicken? And she said, Yeah, everyone loves it. And I was like, OK, show me the proof. Where's the data that I know? People absolutely love it. If you don't have any sales, if you give chicken away, I'm sure people like it. But if you're not selling this to rain on people, you don't really have any good data and so I suggested. I mean, you can put that money into this business, make account by a food truck and go the whole way. But why would you just do this without testing the model first? And so I suggested, Let's start with getting feedback and collecting data and let's do a tasting and get with friends and family. See how they like it. Okay, Did they like it? Awesome. Let's go to the next step. Let's get random people and do a tasting people that you don't know. Do they like it? Okay, Perfect. Let's go to the next step. Let's get random people to pay for it. Do they like it? Okay, let's go to the next step. Let's start doing catering events. Um, if those go well, you do 5 to 10 catering events and you get all successful feedback and testimonials. Then maybe it makes sense to move forward and start putting money into the business. But there's just too much invested without testing and learning and just measuring those results from the customers. And so what we want to do is develop that M v P just the most basic way that we can sell our product or service. Get that feedback and then move on to the next step. Once we measure those results and feedback and we learn about what they like and what they don't like, we can start to adapt our product and basically look at all of this data and confirm. OK, does it make sense to adapt and change this change that, um, and let's say they don't like it or we're starting to fail at this model early on. Ah, we need to make sure that we pivot and basically change something to make our product or service better. Ah, and so this isn't like making a tweak. This is actually changing the product type. Uh, maybe we shouldn't do fried chicken. Maybe we should do burgers or hot dogs, who knows? But we need to make sure that we take the proper steps that way. We don't just start throwing money, time stress all this energy away. In a way, the playbook is a simplified version of a business plan. We should compile all the information and formally have the strategy all in one organized place, especially if you're going to need hope. Planning for the future of the business. If you decide to take on a partner, I highly recommend that bolt of you have a solid game plan and both take a look at that. Know exactly what the strategy is. If you're looking to get a business loan, it's pretty much required. Also, if you're looking to get a lease that could be required. If you're looking to get investors, another reason why you would need one. Remember that these aren't meant to be rushed. It may take quite a while to get all the information needed, and this is going to be evolving over time. But take your time at it and just do a little chunk here, a little chunk there. Eventually you'll get it all done. 7. Cost & Risk: Now that we have our strategy in place, let's look at some of the more boring parts of running a business. We'll take a look at the costs and risks associated with running a company. And first off, we need to find out how are we going to finance this business? There are many ways to get money to start a business, and we need to determine. Do we even need to get funding? I mean, are we just gonna be drawing money from our personal account? Are we needed to go to family and friends? Should we go look and consider a bank loan? Which, by the way, they're really hard to get it if you don't have a lot of collateral or if you don't have a strong track record If this is your first business, it's gonna be really hard to the land of bank loan. Are we gonna be dipping into savings? Looking at crowdfunding, it's really important to know exactly what expenses were going toe have. That way we can set up a budget and that would weaken. Determine. Okay, How are we going to pay for all of our expenses? And so here's just a few that you can take a look at and see. OK, what am I going to need? At least look, for the next 12 months, When am I gonna need to make sure that I keep moving forward in the right direction with this business? One of the biggest pitfalls that I see is whenever entrepreneurs do not spend enough time budgeting everything and all the sudden there scrounging for extra cash. And so don't be that person. Look ahead of time, see what we're going to need, and let's start getting money set aside for that, and that's really important. We want to set these funds aside in a business, make account That way, it's separated. It's already there. Something comes up. We should have the money in the account for that. Obviously, there's going to be surprises here and there. But the more that we plan, the more that were organized. We have the budget in control, the better off we'll be, and we definitely want to take a look at the keeping aspect of the business. So a lot of times, business owners, they don't spend a lot of time looking at what money is coming in what money is going out and they're very unorganized, and you don't want to wait till tax time to get everything in order. I promise you, you just take a day and get familiar with whatever software you're using or called that a customer support number. That way you understand how it works. You're using it correctly, and it's going to make tax time so much easier for a moment. We're going to assume the worst case scenario for the business. Let's just say that we're selling food and a customer of ours gets sick and put into the hospital. If they came after your business, would your personal assets be protected? I mean, have you thought about forming a legal entity? I think I would highly suggest, do quite a bit of research and also speak to an attorney to find out what makes the most sense for you in your specific situation and there a lot of factors to determine what type of structure like who's gonna be running the company, how you're gonna be funding the business, and what you're gonna be doing is for us Operation Wise and strategy. But yeah, it's very important to understand and know what structure you should have in place and have you done the necessary research with the city, the county, the state and even the federal government offices, just to make sure that you have all the necessary licences to operate. You don't want to be conducting business, and then all a sudden your business gets shut down or slapped with a heavy penalty. And we do want to look into business insurance. Sometimes general liability is probably what's mostly needed. Uh, depending on the industry. You may have certain requirements that you have to fulfill, but I'm not an insurance expert. I suggest you speak to some broker and get some quotes and information about what makes sense for you. And lastly, we want to take a look at our intellectual property. First, let's do a search. Let's find out okay with your business name. Is there anyone else out there operating with the same or similar name, even though they don't have the exact same name? If it's a similar name in a similar industry, if you are operating, lets you say online or all over the place. If you are operating in that same geographical region. There could be some friction, and so you want to make sure that you do some searches, find out who's out there, and then you can also check on a national level if you're in the US with the USPTO office and search to see if they have any trademarks that they filed or if there's going to be any friction there whatsoever, and then also, if you're creating any type of AP or anything is tangible that you want to protect and make sure no one's ripping off of you, it's gonna be really important to make sure that we get those things protected. So again, I'm not the person to talk to about that. But you can consult with an attorney and they'll be able to help you out there. 8. Execution: Hey guys. So we made it to the last lesson. Today we'll be talking about execution and we want to make sure that we hit the ground running. So let's take a look at action here. And the biggest reason for failure is simply not taking enough action in the right areas of the business. That's it, period. If we keep doing things in the wrong areas of the business or we just keep doing the same things over and over or not progressing each day, we will fail. That's the bottom line. I think the main reason for this is uncertainty and doubt. When we have uncertainty and doubt, we can easily give up when we don't see results. And so how do we fix this? I think we must establish a few things. What is our why we can't lose sight of this? Why are we starting this business in the first place? There's gotta be some reason deep down beneath, and we need to make sure that we keep that on top of mind every day, and we need to fix our mindset. How can we motivate ourselves day in and day out? Everyone has different motivations would it be listening to music would be surrounding ourselves with the right people. Let's get in the habit of making sure that we are able to motivate ourselves to keep that drive. And let's create a daily ritual to progress each day. I know Ah, a lot of times we get stuck doing the same thing over and over and over. We end up plateau going out and we give up. If we get stuck was try something new. Let's do something different is long, as were crawling each day. That's a win. As long as we just accomplished the tiniest thing for our business. That is a huge win, and we need to make sure that we set up a scheduled routine. We want a literally block off time each day to focus 100% on the business. And let's let our friends and family know like, Hey, no, I can't watch a movie right now. Remember I told you at from 7 to 9, I focus on my business on Saturday mornings. I have that blocked off for my business. Let everybody know that way. You don't have these distractions. We need that be laser focused and there's gonna be times where you're banging your head against the wall. You're gonna be pissed off. You don't know what to do next. And I promise you this this will happen. There's gonna be obstacles and challenges that don't end up helping you whatsoever. And we really need to use our support system. Tender Scott. She is a She sells jewelry and very successful entrepreneur. And I love this quote by her, she says, Ah, lot of people think it's a sign of weakness, but the greatest sign of strength is asking for help. And it's a natural instinct for people toe want to help other people. And so a lot of people assume okay, No, I don't want to ask them for help because it makes me look bad that people that ask for help are the ones that get the help and they end up getting further in life. And so remember, used that support system from that lesson before I reach out to the mentors, reach out to friends and family, reach out to colleagues, they're all there to help you. Like I mentioned before, we can't focus on the wrong tasks in order for us to ensure that we're on track. Let's get a system in place to help us keep things organized. Mind mapping is a great way to a word. Vomit and get ideas on paper for tackling a project. Here's an example for making a cake for a birthday party, so as you can see, we'll start in the middle, and that is going to be our project to complete baking a cake for a birthday party. And as you can see, there's tasks that branch off from that project, and some of those tasks have tasked with within those as well. And so if you look at, uh, cooking the cake, we need to preheat the oven in order. Cook it where we also need to prepare the ingredients and then placed the cake in the oven . And so this is a way that, ah, it's supposed to be rough and scrappy. But the goal is to get all the necessary items on paper, which this is actually the scope of our project, consisting of goals and deliverables requirements, the tasks and deadlines of the project, what resources we have and what constraints. And we want to take all of these things and let's prioritize those. So we know exactly what is the most important items for our success on this project and as were continuing out our projects, we want to make sure that we organize thes tasks and do whatever we can to make our jobs easier. And so if you look at pre heating the oven, that's a pretty simple task. I don't really have to do that if someone else could help me with it. And so let's say I am baking this cake for a party. I could simply text my wife and say, Hey, do you mind pre heating the oven? I'll be home in 30 minutes and she could do that. Ah, and I could buy the ingredients through an online app that delivers groceries to my house. I can outsource that, and so we want to take his many items off our plate. If is, if it isn't too costly. And if we're able to delegate these things, obviously, if we can eliminate tests, that's the easiest one. Um, automating is a little bit more difficult, but definitely is worth it in the end. And so there's a lot of different options that we have Teoh organize and have a strategy in place to accomplish the goals that we have and when were carrying out these projects. There's a lot of tools online that you can use a lot of digital tools. Teoh. Keep all your tasks in order and there's a lot of free services out there. So take a look, see what you confined and definitely use a system like this to stay on track.