9 Valuable Lessons From A 7 Figure Brand

Key Takeaways

starting a new business is terrifying it's also one of the most rewarding ways to get your ideas out of your head and into the world where they can make an impact hey everybody my name is dan dempsky i'm a co-founder of unbound merino an e-commerce apparel brand built right here on shopify in this video i'm going to share nine of the biggest lessons i've learned over the past 10 plus years as an entrepreneur here's how i launched multiple seven-figure businesses including one that i started in my mom's basement hopefully i can save you some time as you roll up your sleeves and embark on your own entrepreneurial journey so let's dive right into it every week learn with shopify releases a new video to help you start and grow your online business featuring industry experts and entrepreneurs like me who share tips insights and real-life stories from our experiences this channel is here to help you get started on your journey so make sure you're subscribed to learn with shopify tip number one don't procrastinate one of the hardest parts of starting a business is actually starting it because there are a million ways to procrastinate with essential tasks that are nothing more than busy work for example you may think you need to build the perfect website or get flashy business cards you might have been told that you need to write a lengthy business plan to succeed and while each of these things are nice to have none of them are essential at least not right away the planning phase is exciting and important but it's all too easy to get stuck in this phase but remember while it's nice to be prepared it's equally if not more important to get your idea out into the wild so you can start making progress we're five years into starting our business and there are still things about our website and our business as a whole that feel incomplete to me but if we tried to make everything perfect right out the gate we'd never have gotten anywhere a quick story about our first sale will help illustrate this point when we were building our website we picked the shopify theme we liked and began uploading some product photography and writing some product descriptions as we arranged our very first version of our shopify store it was exciting we had big plans for our big store launch that was coming up in just a few weeks but i'll never forget sitting in a coffee shop with my partners looking at our shopify dashboard of our soon to launch website and discovering that there were almost a dozen orders already there waiting for us to fulfill our site was far from perfect but it was live and more importantly we were making sales i use this story to illustrate an important point we often create artificial barriers in our minds that stop us from getting started a checklist of tasks that you have to complete before you take the next step if i can just get the website to look a little better if i can just polish the logo a little more if i can just map out our 90-day plan if i can just find the perfect font for that newsletter here's a secret you'll never be completely ready to launch your business do it anyway as the old proverb goes done is better than perfect the best thing you can do is just get started and once your site goes live all those things that bug you your unprofessional photography or less than perfect sales copy can still be fixed but the difference will be you'll have that live site with real customers testing your idea for you and that real world feedback is worth a heck of a lot more than weeks or even months of meticulous planning tip number two save some money starting a business costs money the good news is you don't need a ton to get started i've heard stories of people starting businesses with just a few hundred dollars but if you can save at least ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars by waiting tables or delivering uber eats and you'll be in a much better place to start your own business again you could start a business with less it's just a steeper hill to climb the best part is while you're saving you can still tinker with getting started tip number three improve your weaknesses my first business was a video production agency my business partner and i we were pretty good at shooting and editing video and as a result we kept getting more and more clients by way of word of mouth the challenge we had to solve was how can we get bigger clients with bigger budgets in order to expand our client base from small companies to medium-sized clients and eventually to large corporations we had to learn to get better at sales something that had nothing to do with video production so i studied every sales book i could get my hands on and over time our client base grew in just three years we moved from our humble beginnings in my mom's basement to a seven-figure business with almost 20 employees and we got there not by focusing on new video editing software or lighting hacks but on getting better at the things we were the weakest at capitalizing on your strengths is important but you'll grow more quickly if you learn to identify and improve on your weaknesses if you struggle with marketing subscribe to the leading marketing blogs and newsletters and study the latest trends if you have a great product but you struggle to make it look good on your website make it a priority to improve your design skills or more likely find someone who can elevate the quality of your design for you finding your weaknesses can be your best opportunity for growth tip number four join professional organizations you've heard the old saying you're the average of the five people closest to you well it's absolutely true when i first started in business i spent years in toastmasters learning to be a better public speaker after that i joined my local board of trade and then i joined eo entrepreneurs organization where i was a member for six years now i'm a part of an entrepreneurial mastermind peer group called catalyst i've been a member of or heavily involved in some kind of organization every single year of my journey as an entrepreneur clubs and professional organizations are a great way to meet people who are growth oriented and want to see you succeed the people you meet in these organizations are also the types of friends you want close to you it may take you a while to find an organization that you get a ton of value from but it's worth the effort put in the time and contribute the more you give the more you can take out when you need it being on the board and regional council of eo has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life and it's helped me through all the biggest challenges i faced as an entrepreneur i don't know where i'd be without the support of the brilliant people i've met over the years in the various groups and masterminds that i've been a part of and on top of that it's a ton of fun to be involved in something tip number five use personal experience to find a gap in the market from what i've experienced the best businesses to get into are the ones where you feel like the current solutions just aren't that great we've all had those moments where a business idea has popped into our heads usually because it's an idea of something that solves a problem you're experiencing in that very moment when you have those aha moments do a little digging you'll be surprised at how many ideas that may seem obvious to you are not being capitalized on when we started unbound mourinho we got the idea from a reddit post i was looking for a way to travel overseas without packing more than a carry-on and i came across an article where someone mentioned that they like to travel with merino wool t-shirts because they're antibacterial and odor resistant and because of this they could pack two to three t-shirts for a multi-week trip and not have to worry if they couldn't wash their shirt after one two or more days marina wool meant that their clothing would never smell i thought it was brilliant so i bought a few merino wool t-shirts the material performed as promised but i didn't really like the way they looked i wanted to find a simple classic and nicely fitting merino wool shirt but everything i found looked and fit like activewear i loved the fabric but i didn't love the finished product that i could find anywhere and that's when i asked myself can i be the person to take this to market i figured if i wanted my merino wool shirts to be done differently why don't i just go and make them and so began our journey to learn to manufacture clothing it was born out of our own need for something different as you go through life pay attention to those moments when you wish something could be done better differently or smarter you could be on to something bigger than you think tip number six expose yourself to relentless feedback this is a lesson that i really learned on a trip i once took with my eo peer group to new york we met up with a business owner that recently sold his business for 800 million dollars he was kind enough to show us around his facility tell us all about his rise in business and his exit and then he took us all out for lunch to one of his favorite restaurants near his office while there he showed us some early prototypes of a new product he was developing my group were all business owners with various degrees of success but none of us were even in the same stratosphere as he was compared to him our businesses were quite small but he was so keenly interested in our opinions on what he was developing that it struck a chord with me i realized at that lunch that he was just an obsessive tester he wasn't afraid of getting his feelings hurt and his idea cut up in fact he welcomed it he didn't have to agree with everything we said or thought but he had a group of people who had a different lens than he did and he listened attentively as each of us shared what we liked and what we didn't like about what he had in front of us after this lunch i decided to be more aggressive in my own hunt for feedback from my peers i sometimes don't agree with what i'm told but a different set of eyes on something can only help just take in all the information in front of you and use that to expand your own thinking about what you're embarking on tip number seven set quarterly goals and dream big this tip will apply to those of you who already have a company or the early seat of a company have a beehag a big hairy audacious goal a term from jim collins book good to great a beehag is a vision of where you can take your business if things go beyond well and you're incredibly lucky and everything just goes amazing 15 to 25 years from now for example let's say you're in the business of selling activewear for a bhag you may say you want to create a brand that's the main apparel sponsor of an nba finals mvp the next lebron james this is setting a goal that is so big that it's completely unreasonable based on where you are today but you don't have to achieve that goal right now in fact the only reason you need to set a b hack is because it sets a direction for you no other reason from the b hag figure out where you could be in three to five years if things go extremely well the three to five year goals need to be leading you towards this vision of the be hack for example let's say that in five years you want your business to do 10 to 15 million dollars in yearly revenue and to have a youtube channel featuring sports related content with over a million subscribers this is where you're going to need to go to establish yourself as a sports lifestyle brand as you move towards your uncomfortably ambitious bhag and from these three to five year goals you can find your one year goals and this is where things get really real what is realistic within one year that moves you in the direction of your three to five year goals maybe you sell a hundred thousand dollars worth your core product maybe you have a youtube channel with new uploads every week by the end of the year establish a clear vision of where you want to take the business and start to picture what actually needs to happen to make these goals start to materialize and this is where the best part comes in the quarterly goals nothing is more real than a quarterly goal three months is the perfect amount of time to conquer one meaningful and sizeable project that moves you in the direction of your one-year goal maybe it's to have your shopify store up if it's not already or to get a content partnership with one influencer on youtube whatever goal you set you have three months to do it and should always take you closer to your one year goal which is a step towards your three to five year goals which are all aimed at your b hag this is all about direction you can always tweak the long term goals as you go but the quarterly goals must be set in stone and executed against we break our quarterly goals into weekly and even daily action plans take the whole project and map it out over three months and stay on time trust the plan get in the trenches get to work tip number eight get a good account this tip is really straightforward get a good account right away in my early years in business i didn't spend a lot of time staying on top of the finances i didn't get it i didn't love it and things of course got really messy cleaning up financial mistakes is challenging and time consuming so when we started unbound merino we made the choice to find an accountant we like to hang out with even go for a couple drinks with someone that felt like he could be a real buddy this was one of the best decisions that we've ever made it made getting our finances in good order a whole lot easier and a whole lot more enjoyable our account is relatable fun to hang around with and like a real friend he has her back if you're not naturally strong in the finance department find someone who can help you get on the right foot early make sure you're organized with your taxes and you understand your p l and your balance sheet like the back your hand and that you meet regularly to understand the financial health of your business clearly and thoroughly this stuff is a lot easier to stay on top of than it is to fix when you let the problems arise so find a good friend who also happens to be an accountant and do this as early as possible if you're looking for an area to focus on that will have a dramatic impact on your business then hiring a great accountant is a no-brainer one of the biggest reasons that businesses fail is poor cash management so we've put together a cash flow forecast template to help streamline the process and save you time and stress with this template you'll be able to easily forecast expenses and revenue so that you can predict shortfalls and know when to invest in growth tip number nine believe in yourself yes i saved the cheesiest tip for last but also the most important tip on this list entrepreneurship is rewarding and it can be full of glorious moments and singular triumphs some entrepreneurs today they're treated like rock stars but the reality is that it's challenging things always go wrong and there are going to be plenty of times when you feel like giving up so while entrepreneurship is not for everyone at the very least you need to truly believe in your heart that you can and you will accomplish great things if you just keep at it and don't let doubts and naysayers stop you i don't mean for this to sound like fluff because it really matters if you don't believe you can do whatever you're setting out to do you won't have the strength to get through the challenging times ahead that will test you if you really believe in yourself and that's a choice you can make you'll have the right momentum you'll be able to inspire people around you to help you on your journey and you can really do great things i've been through a lot more downs than i've had ups through each of my four businesses but i stayed on course because i knew i was doing work that inspired me i've always believed that great things will come if i keep growing keep trying and keep believing and that belief is the heartbeat of it all when it comes to entrepreneurship and it's the reason i'm still here today if you're serious about starting an online business shopify has everything you need shopify makes selling online easy fast and scalable you can get started with a free 14-day trial no credit card required set up your store in days and bring your brand to life building an online store shouldn't be this easy or this much fun plus the powerful marketing features and free apps will make marketing simple and allow you to make more sales more often so click this link right here to get started on your business journey so those are my nine biggest tips for new entrepreneurs if you thought this video was helpful make sure to give it a thumbs up that actually helps the channel and community grow and for more simple actionable tips to grow your online business make sure to subscribe to learn with shopify so you don't miss out on future releases i'm dan dempsky thanks so much for watching you