How An Entrepreneur Can Optimize Business Income

In order to get the experience ,you have to make decisions. Wrong or right, you have to make decisions even when you do not have enough information. You see, a lot of times people say, “I could not make a decision because I did not have all the information”. Let me ask you this, if you’re a fireman and a house is burning and you know that there are people in the house that are dying right now. You have already lost a couple, they are screaming. Are you going to stand outside that house and start asking lots of questions? You may ask a question or two such as “Quick! How many people are in there? Are there dogs or cats, men, women, big, small? Quick!” If I do not have an answer in 15 seconds and I am a brave fireman, I’m going to run into that building and go to the sound of the screaming voices and I’m going to pull that person out. Right? I do not have to have all the information. It is the same way in your business, you do not have to have all the information. You may think that you do, you may want all the information. If I’m a fireman going into a burning home, I may want the information, but if all the firemen were to stand outside burning homes and say, “I’m not going to go in there until I have the floor plan.”  How how many more people would die in fires?

Entrepreneurialism is exactly the same way, sometimes you just have to act without having the information. You don’t have to have all the information. When I first started my core Internet marketing business, I did not have all the information, I hardly had any information. I looked at what other people were doing, but boy, when I started writing articles, I had no idea if it was going to work or not. After a month, I still didn’t know if it was going to work or not. After two months, I still didn’t know if it was going to work or not. I was constantly evaluating. But, I continued to do it, and continued to do it, until such a time that I could have decided to quit. But I didn’t because at some point it started working, but I had to get the experience.

If you don’t make decisions, you will never get the experience. You see, decisions, right or wrong will lead to experience and experience leads to better decisions. Failures reinforce better decisions. Let me repeat that, decisions, right or wrong lead to experience, and experience leads to better decisions and better decisions, right or wrong, lead to better experience and better experience leads to even more better decisions. How can we make the best decisions in the long run? By making lots of decisions as quickly as possible, right or wrong in our business. Make lots of decisions, right or wrong and then there is this pattern of making decisions that leads to experience which leads to better decisions, better decisions lead to more experience, better experience to even better decisions, better decisions lead to even more greater experience. Do you see where we’re going with this? It just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But you have to take the steps to make those decisions.

Let sum this up and move on. I want to give you something that you can sink your teeth into. There’s got to be a constant reevaluation because it prevents over aggressiveness. I mentioned to you earlier this concept that I believe entrepreneurs tend to be more aggressive than the average population. But, we have to prevent against over aggressiveness. So, we want to get out, we want to be aggressive, we want to do it, but, if all we are is aggressive, then we will probably fail. It is kind of like a football team. Successful football teams are more aggressive than non-aggressive football teams. But, if you have a football team that says, “Ok, we are just going to unleash aggressiveness.” When we get out there and we are really aggressive, what happens? We start making mistakes, we start getting penalties. The penalties push us back. We stop getting first downs, we are too aggressive. How do we find the line? We go out there and we play a game and we are too aggressive and we get lots of penalties. We lose the game not because we were not the better team, we lose the game because we got too many penalties. So now we go back in, we reevaluate things and we say, “You know what, a little bit too aggressive, we have to back off.” So the next game, we go out, we back off and we lose the game. Why? Because this time we were not aggressive enough. The next game we go back in…exactly the same thing with you. You want to be aggressive, but then you want to prevent over aggressiveness. How do you do that? Because you are constantly looking back and evaluating what you are doing.

You may ask the question, “How often do I evaluate?” If I were to say, every single day, to some people, after about three days, you would just quit. I have the temperament to be able to evaluate things every single day. I can look at things every single day and I may come up with the same answers that I did yesterday, and then I say, “Ok, well things have not changed.” Then, I go back to work. But for some of you, you may need a Monday morning meeting or you may need a Friday afternoon meeting with yourself. You may need a monthly meeting. The yearly meeting is not enough for anybody. Somewhere between a daily and a monthly, or daily and every two weeks you will need to reevaluate what you are doing.

Sometimes it depends upon what you’re doing. If you’re doing something where you are making lots of efforts right now in a short period of time, it is a daily evaluation period. If I’m buying a new source of traffic and I’m spending $100 a day on that traffic, I’m going to watch it like a hawk for the first three days. I’m going to daily evaluate it. Hopefully, I have committed enough days to it that a day three I will not get cold feet and quit. At the same time, I’m not going to not look at it because I may feel like I need to make some adjustments. Not quitting adjustments, just some adjustments.  Raising bid prices, lowering bid prices, changing keywords etc. etc. I may make some changes, but I’m committed to the first 14 days. I’m committing to $1400. I’m committed to that and that is my bounded aggressiveness. I’m aggressive, but I’m bound by $1400. Then after the two weeks of $1400 of investment, I can look back and say, “Even though my budget was $100 a day, I only spent $40 a day on average, and so, I’m nowhere near $1400, can I go another week or two?” I say, “Yes, I sure can.”  Then I look at my results and I say, “I’m starting to make some sales. I’m still upside down, but I’m starting to make some sales. Can I continue another week or two?”  Yes, I can. I can be aggressive.

I can look and say, “Why am I making sales? Why am I not?”. Notice, if I had done nothing and not invested the money, if I had not invested in the traffic, if when I first got started when I was not investing $100 per day, when I was personally writing articles, if I hadn’t written articles before I even knew what would work, I’d never figure it out. If I didn’t write lots of resource boxes, I never would have figured out which resource box worked best for me and I wouldn’t have been able to teach other people what resource box worked best for me. I had to make those decisions over and over and over again.