7 Business Lessons I've Learned After 5 Years

Key Takeaways

hey in this video I'm going to show you the seven lessons I've learned in my five years of running an online business so please keep [Music] watching so if you don't know me my name is Nathan gotch and I'm the founder of gotch SEO and gotch SEO is just an SEO training company and a wh label services company and so I started gotch SEO back in 2013 and I am now in my fifth year of running my company and so in the last 5 years I've learned a ton and I definitely won't be able to explain every single thing that I've learned but I've narrowed down the list of things that I've learned to a few really important ideas and so I'm going to give you seven of the most important things that I've learned and I hope that these are going to help you avoid a lot of the mistakes that I've made in this journey so let me start off with a very important disclaimer I am only 28 years old I've only been in business for a little over four years I'm currently in my fifth year so there are people that have had way more experience than I have there are people that have achieved higher levels of success than I have and so I don't want you to believe that I know everything there is to know because I do not and I have a very long journey ahead of me where I have to learn even more but I have been operating a business for almost five years so I have learned a few things and I know that you can definitely learn from a lot of my mistakes and a lot of the things that I've encountered along this journey and that's all I'm trying to do I just want to help you not make the same mistakes that I have and most importantly help you achieve better results than I have so the first business lesson that I really want to cover and this might be the most important one is you just have to understand that entrepreneurship is really really hard and I know that's probably not what you wanted to hear but it is very very hard and anyone that wants jump into entrepreneurship it is the absolute greatest thing on earth when you start getting results because you're able to do what you want you're able to do what you love and when I tell people about my business and they ask me you know why why do you work so much why do you do this so much my answer is the same every time I just tell them because I I actually enjoy it um you know running my business isn't like going to a 9-to-5 job it's something I get excited about doing every single day and that's the value of Entre R preneurship because you were in control of your destiny and you're in control of your success ultimately and that makes you feel empowered and that makes you feel just so incredible but the downside of having that type of freedom and um you know having the audacity to try to live that way unlike the majority of other people is it's really really hard and it's hard to run a business it's hard to sell products it's it's hard to market products it's hard in every single category in business and so you just have to be willing to accept that it is going to be hard and anyone that tries to make you believe that business is easy they are simply not telling the truth because they're not showing you what they're doing behind the scenes they're just showing you all of the success they're not showing you the 80% of the failures that they've probably had and in fact anyone that has achieved any level of success in business I guarantee they've had a long list of failures that they don't tell you about and so that is kind of the issue with the Internet is that you only see the success that people have and so the first business lesson is that you just need to understand that it's going to be hard and just go in knowing it this is going to be hard and like you just got to battle through it and it's not going to be easy and there are going to be times where you're going to be like man I just don't know if I can continue to do this and you're going to feel on top of the world at one point and then two days later you're going to be in the pits and if you can't handle the roller coaster it's going to you're going to have a very very hard time and you just the one thing that I've learned that helped me so much as far as you know dealing with how hard it actually is is that I try to separate my business from my personal feelings essentially so anything that happens in my business I just look at it as okay this is what's happening in my business it doesn't affect me personally personally so for example if a client decides to no longer work with my company sure I could be offended on the personal level I could be so mad that you know what are they thinking why would they not want to work with us but of course that wouldn't bring any value to my business so I have to handle it professionally and just say you know what what did I do wrong in this situation and what can I do better in the future to prevent this from happening and that's all you can do you can just make small incremental changes as you're going along and that's really all you can do in your in your company is just constantly try to get better um and so as I said number one lesson just go into it knowing it's going to be hard and knowing that you're going to have to put in the work and don't get fooled by all this stuff online on Instagram on any social media platforms that will persuade you to believe that this process of building a company is easy it is not easy and I'm not here to try to fool you or try to make you believe that it's easy because I know for a fact that it's not and so I'm not going to sit here and tell you that it's easy so that is my first lesson I'm not trying to be like you know a doomsday type of guy here but I'm just really want to tell you the truth about what you're going to be getting into or what you're already in and if you're already in entrepreneurship you know it's hard so I'm basically just preaching to the choir so the second business lesson is that you have to understand that most of the things that you're going to do in your business are probably not going to work and so there are going to be things that work like crazy things that are going to surprise you how well they worked but a lot of the time you're going to do things and they're just going to really not work at all or they're not going to work in the way that you believed they were going to work and that applies to pretty much anything you're going to do in your business so for example you may put out a blog post and you may spend an entire month creating the most epic blog post of all time but then you publish it and a week goes by a month goes by three months go by and that blog post just gets no traction no engagement and it just doesn't do what you believed it was going to do and that comes down to a very important fact that it doesn't matter how hard you work on something because the only thing that matters is how the market responds to whatever you've created and so I know it on the personal level you're like man I spend so much time doing X you know creating a blog post this product doing something spending anything where you spend a ton of time on it and you put a lot of effort into it you naturally believe that well because you put in all this effort and you put in all this time that you deserve to be rewarded for it but unfortunately that's not the way it works in business you only get rewarded based on what people believe is valuable and sometimes you just don't hit the target and that's just the nature of it and so you just have to realize that when you put things out don't believe that it's going to be a home run every single time you know sometimes you're you're GNA strike out it's just the nature of it and and excuse my baseball analogies because I am I am a former baseball player so I I have a lot of baseball analogies but it it's very interesting because in baseball you know let's say you took a 100 bats against the best MLB pitcher we'll say I don't know uh we'll say Clayton Kershaw for example or if we want to go back we could say Randy Johnson so if you took a 100 at bats there's a very good chance if you have no experience in baseball that you would probably almost never make contact with the single pitch if they're actually trying but if you continue to practice and maybe after the thousandth at bat you may finally make contact that is showing you that now there is the possibility that you can succeed and slowly you just get better and better and eventually you'll be hitting Bas hits eventually you'll be hitting home runs But as time goes on you start to see what doesn't work and you get better and you get better and you get better and you get better and you get more effective and you're able to get results on certain elements of your business faster and you just become more effective but when you're starting out it's really really hard to be effective because you just don't know what works you haven't built those connections in your mind to know what actually works in your particular business and so my second business lesson is that you have to understand that most of the things you're going to do are probably not going to work in the beginning but you will get better over time and you'll stop making as many um mistakes and you'll strike out a lot less and that brings me to my third business lesson which is very closely related which is action will almost always win in business and so to be totally honest I have a right behind this camera I have a huge shelf of books and I read a ton I really love reading I love getting information from people who've already had experience in things that I haven't or they have just more experience than me in general that's what books that's the value that a book can add to your life and your business but the truth is every single big success that I've had in my business has been the result of me taking action and there is just no better way to learn than to actually get your hands dirty and try to figure it out yourself and learn from your mistakes and that is just simply the best way to learn just through action now that's not to say that you shouldn't get that base of knowledge it's very important to get a base of knowledge but it doesn't matter how much knowledge you have it only matters what you do with the knowledge that you get and so for example a lot of the people who joined my training course Scotch SEO Academy I try to do everything I can to get them to take action on the information that I've given them because I know if they do take action it can be a GameChanger for the business in their life and so I want them to take action on it because I know that's the most important part of course anyone can can join a course anyone can get a book anyone can get information but it's how you actually apply that information that's actually going to get you results in real life and the way to do that is you just have to take action and you have to do things that are going to be hard things are going to make you feel uncomfortable like me talking to this camera this used to be the most uncomfortable thing ever like I used to shake thinking about even getting in front of a camera but now you know it's not that bad I still feel a little nervous I feel sometimes like I can't form formulate my thoughts but over time you just the more you do these uncomfortable things the better you're going to get and so that's what it comes down to and the only way you're ever going to get better at anything is you have to actually take action so you know back to a baseball analogy you could have two people one person who never goes up to the plate and bats and one person who goes up and Strikes Out a thousand times but eventually this person who's gone up is eventually going to make contact and he's eventually going to get better this person they'll never get better because they never actually stepped into the box they never actually stepped into the arena and so you have to actually take action you have to actually take steps to get to where you want to go and so that's if you take anything out of this I would say that number three business lesson that I've learn personally every time I've taken actions and done things that are uncomfortable it's led to really really great results in my business so the fourth business lesson that I've learned is that people's success that could be people success in your industry that could be your family member success that could be anyone's success it doesn't matter like it literally does not matter any other person's success other than your own because success is relative okay because you choose what you define to be as success so for example success is nothing more than you setting a goal taking those actions that will lead to success in that goal that's success just taking those actions is success and on a more micro level success is generally just going to be you setting a goal and achieving it and it's all that matters to you it's not what anyone else has done or you comparing yourself against other people that stuff does not matter and it is absolutely the most toxic thing that you can do for your mind is to try to compare yourself to other people and their circumstances so when it comes down to some other people may be smarter than you they may have more resources than you they may have more connections than you you don't know every person's circumstance and it doesn't matter because all you can control is your circumstance and how you define what success is so to give you an example when I first got started in 2013 in fact when I started in 2012 when I was still in college my number one goal was to never have to worry about paying my bills again and that's kind of a deepsea of goal because when I grew up I grew up with a single mother and she was really honestly worried about paying bills a lot of the time and that was a very stressful environment because not knowing if you're going to be able to pay your next bill is a pretty scary thing and so from a very young age that's something that I never wanted to have to experience in my life because I I witnessed it firsthand and I did not want to experience that so that was my goal when I when I started trying to figure out this whole online thing trying to make money online the one goal I had was to never have to worry about paying my bills again and fortunately I've achieved that goal but to me that's success for me because I achieved the goal that I said it's not necessarily that you know you should be making more money than people you should have better things than people that none of that stuff is success success is what you define it as and so you have to figure out what success is for yourself and then that's all that matters and you just you just grind every single day until you get those goals at least continue to take those actions that could lead to whatever goal you have and if you know if you're not hitting your goals on a consistent basis and you're missing them most of the time then maybe you need to reexamine your goals and you need to either make them easier or maybe make them harder if you're achieving them too easily so you just have to figure out what success is for you personally and that's all that matters never ever compare yourself to other people it does not do anything positive for you in your situation ation because no one is living in your situation no one will ever walk a day in your shoes and so all that matters is what you're doing and the success that you're achieving in your own individual experience my fifth business lesson for you is to focus on other people's lives and improving their lives and trying to make a difference because that's what business is all about it's not you don't get into business just because you want to make money because that is honestly the worst motive that you can have and certainly there are many people throughout history that have gone in with that motive and made a lot of money there's no doubt about that but the businesses that stay around for a long time the people that have impact for a long time are the people that actually take people from point A to point Z and in between they make their lives better in one way or another and sometimes those changes are not this middle ground it can be smaller it can be larger you know sometimes it's hard to take someone from point to point Z if the problem is bigger but if the problem is smaller there's a smaller Gap but the the main point is that business is much easier when you focus on helping people achieve something as opposed to selling your product because people don't buy products people buy solutions to their problems so once you understand that and you understand that your job as a business basically on all El all sides of your business including marketing the actual product everything your goal is to help your prospects achieve a particular goal and if you focus on them and you focus on helping them and all of your thought and all of your effort is on trying to help them achieve that goal you are going to be very successful and it's crazy what happens when you change your mindset to I need to make money I need to make money I need to make sales to I'm just going to do my best to help my prospects achieve their goal and I'm going to Market my product because I know that if they use my product it's going to help them achieve that goal and it just changes everything when you when you shift your mindset to that as opposed to worrying about you know how am I going to make $3 million this year or how am I going to make X or just when you take it off of the actual Financial element you focus more on what your product is actually designed to do then it changes really everything so my sixth business lessons that you need to focus and I know this is super hard when you're starting out because there are so many things that you can do in your business but that doesn't mean that you should do them and so the good news is that it's really easy to focus because all you need to do is pick something very specific to focus on such as a specific marketing channel a specific product and it's just better to focus because when you try to spread your resources and spread your time and even just spread your mind across all all these different things that you can do you're just not going to get a lot done and you're going to move it a snails pace and so to give you an example when I started out I focused purely on SEO like I didn't try to be a Facebook ad master I didn't try to be an email marketing master I just focused purely on getting good at SEO and that was my only focus and that really was a good decision on my part because that ended up being something I got very good at because I just made that my focus and so the same goes for your products I mean it's better to have two or three really amazing products than it is to have hundreds of products that are subpar so focus is always going to be better and if you look at a lot of the great companies they focus and they focus in their marketing department they focus with their product department they focus in their operational department so focus is the best and you just need to totally avoid shiny object syndrome because that is a deadly thing to be doing jumping from one thing to the next trying to see if you can make this work or make this work when in reality you should just focus on one thing put all your effort into it and you're going to inevitably get better at it and your business is going to benefit from that so that is my sixth business lesson please just focus and don't get distracted by all the noise and all of the things that you could possibly do it's will really harm your progress in the beginning and even really when you're deeper into your business Cycles all right so now my seventh and final business lesson is very simple you just have to try to get better every single day and that's the one thing that I've really tried to do in my business is I just try to do everything I can to get better and so what does that mean that means reading new books that means joining new courses that means actually taking action and learning through experience so when you start to combine all those things together you start to get better and you start to get better at a very rapid rate and so you just have to make the commitment that you're going to get better and I'm telling you the best way to get better is number one get base knowledge so that may require you to buy a book or that may require you to join a course and so the differences between books and courses are pretty substantial a book will give you Base information but it's not usually going to give you the the actionable overthe shoulder stuff that you need to really be successful so a book is a good foundational element but then courses are even better because then you get to actually see step by step how something is done and that's really really great and so I can't tell you the amount of times that I've joined a course and taken action on it and seen tons of results and I was so grateful that I invested that money into the course and to give you an example I invested in a Facebook ad course and that was the the best thing I ever did because all that time before I was trying to figure it out myself and I was getting decent results but as soon as I joined that course I just totally just took like a thousand steps ahead because I got all the information I needed I got it exactly what I needed to be successful in that particular skill and it just accelerated my my skills and so definitely recommend that you invest in good courses and of course you know I'm naturally biased because I sell an SEO training course but I can't tell you the amount of people that are so excited after they go through my course and they start taking action on that stuff and they start getting results they realize like man why didn't I just do this before and that's I've had that feeling countless times and every time I buy a good course I'm like man why was I trying to figure out myself when I could have literally just taken this course and invested money so that I can then just get better faster and that's really the benefit of a course so then after that though you got your book you got your course then you need to take action on what you learn and as I've mentioned before action is what's going to really drive your results forward and really help you build those connections in your mind that are going to last a lifetime because you're going to really it it's hard not to get smarter when you're just actually learning from your mistakes and you just completely build all these Connections in your mind and you just get smarter every single time every single time you make a mistake every single time you actually take a step forward you just usually won't make the same mistake again sometimes you do I've made many mistakes multiple times but eventually you're like okay now I know not to do that or you just continue to learn over and over and eventually those connections that you build through experience are honestly will last a lifetime and so that is my little three-step approach you know get base knowledge usually take a course so that you can see step by- step how to do something and then most importantly about 80% of your time should be spent actually doing whatever you've learned and so those are my seven business lessons that I've learned in the last five or so years of being in business and like I said there are many other things that I've learned but I tried to narrow it down to the ones that I first of all could think of and second of all the ones that I felt are most important for you and your journey and wherever you might be and who knows you may be more successful than I am doesn't really matter because as I said before my success is my success and your success is your success so that is all for this video If you like this video please subscribe and hit the Bell notification so you can get notified when I publish something new and if you really liked it you could share it on any social media platform that you want so thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video