Do you believe you’re behind in the race of life? Do you get the nagging feeling you were made for more, but you don’t know what more looks like for you? Or maybe you’ve enjoyed a lot of success, and you feel you’ve arrived on some level but you sense it’s still not enough, that something important is missing. If so, this is the podcast for you. Join April Shprintz, noted mindset expert, award-winning author, business accelerator and creator of The Generosity Culture® as she seeks to help listeners from all walks of life reach their goals and become a better version of themselves. She will inspire, motivate, and guide you to the consistently winning mindset that will help you meet and exceed your goals in life.
Mindset isn’t an isolated thing. It affects a lot of different areas of your life. This includes business. The mindset of the owner is a major reason business succeed or fail. April has identified three specific mindset-related factors that can cause your business to crater. They could also be an integral part of its success.
In today’s episode of the Winning Mindset Mastery Podcast, she talks about each one. As you listen, here are a few things you’ll discover:
- Why April got caught up in hamster work when she started her company, and what caused that to finally go out the window,
- The business advice April would give anyone just starting out,
- One of the most important things you can do even if you already have a successful, established business,
- What you should focus on, what you should ignore.
If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, or you own a business that’s already successful, let’s face it. Your mindset is crucial to your success. Even if you work for another company, your winning mindset still matters. Either way, this is an episode you don’t want to miss. Listen Now!
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Listen to the podcast here
How To Finally Get Off The Hamster Wheel
Thank you for joining me. In these short little ten-minute or less conversations that we have, I’m often talking about mindset and how it can help you in different areas of your life. I use this quite a bit in my business as I go to help small to medium-sized businesses scale and in some cases, even turn around. Much of the work that we do centers around mindset.
One of the questions I get asked often is, “How much of a factor is a mindset in a business that either fails or is doing poorly and is headed that way?” I would say almost 100%. There are 3 different areas that I see when people are struggling in a business or 3 different areas that if they pay a lot of attention to, they can succeed in a new company.
The first one and these are all, in my opinion, mindset related, is fear. It’s fear around all sorts of things and it can show up in a lot of different ways but the basic fear is that you won’t be good enough or you don’t know what you’re doing. Maybe it shows up as Imposter syndrome or feeling like everything has to be perfect for a product or a service to launch.
It can show up in so many different ways that sometimes people don’t even know that fear is a factor in what’s holding them back. One of the ways that I encounter it most often is what I call hamster work. Think about a hamster on a wheel and how they’re running and running. They’re not getting anywhere but they feel good about it. There is a lot of work that you can do in your business that qualifies as hamster work and I will call myself out on this.
Business Advice: Fear can show up in so many different ways that sometimes people don’t even know that fear is a factor in what’s holding them back.
When I very first started my company, I did a lot of hamster work for about the first six months because I was afraid whatever it was that I was going to try to do and bring to people wasn’t going to be good enough. It’s one of those fears that most people have when something’s important to them and they’re starting something new. For me, I busied myself with marketing materials, great presentations, videos, photos and all the things that I would need to replicate what I had experienced in the corporate world.
That sounds reasonable and a real thing you’d need but it was hamster work because what I needed to do was to get in front of my clients and talk to them about how I could help them. The interesting part is when I started doing that, it changed the scope of my business and the things I was helping folks with. All of that hamster work went out the window. I don’t regret it because it taught me a valuable lesson about the way that fear shows up for me.
Think about it for yourself if there’s a way that fear is showing up for you and what you’re trying to do for your business. The second area is funding or funds. Regardless of how you look at it, it comes down to the revenue and money in a business. Some people would say, “Mindset doesn’t have anything to do with this,” but it does because you can have some limiting beliefs around the way that you can get funding in your business that can hold you back.
Business Advice: Some people would say, “Mindset doesn’t have anything to do with this,” but it does because you can have some limiting beliefs around the way you can get funding for your business that can hold you back.
There are traditional ways that people are familiar with. You take out a business loan, get a line of credit and sell your product or service once it’s ready, maybe you get grants or have investors but there are other ways to do it as well. There isn’t one right way. If I could give any business advice to someone who’s starting, I’d say go ahead and get that line of credit, get a loan while you don’t need it and have that ready.
A lot of times, a bank will not give you a loan when you need it. Having that capital there at the ready if you do need it can help you expand your business at those crucial times. It can also give you great peace of mind. I say mindset comes in here because a lot of people would like to start and run their businesses without ever having any debt. At the same time, having access to that cash when you need it can be vital.
Another way that you can get cash or funding for your business is to think about pre-selling. Whether it’s a product or service you have, there are people you know you can talk to about what you’re going to have, who, for some type of incentive, might want to go ahead and purchase early. That helps you get some revenue coming in and allows you to talk to the people who are going to be using and benefiting from your product and service.
Telling them myself here, I learned so much more when I was engaging with the people who needed my help than I did when I was trying to think about what I would give that would help them. That input is incredibly vital. Let’s say you’re designing your product or service and you want to talk to people and get feedback about what would be useful to them. That could also lead to sales.
If you were talking to them about something that would bring them value, they’re going to tell you and you’d be surprised how often some of those early conversations translate into clients very early on. I say again that this is a mindset because there’s no one set way to do it and you have to have these conversations, be ready for them or any set place in development for your product or service that you have to be. Most of us have ideas about how we should get revenue in our business. Limiting beliefs can come into play and hold you back.
I would tell you that even with a successful business, this last one is the most important and it’s focus. One thing that can be the most challenging about starting your endeavor, especially if you’ve been an employee before or you were a business owner, is you are used to having someone tell you what your job description is and what your lane is. The biggest awakening for me when I first started my company was every lane was my lane.
Business Advice: One thing that can be challenging about starting an endeavor, especially if you’ve been an employee before or a business owner, is having someone tell you what your job description is and what your lane is.
I could do anything and everything I wanted to in the company. My job was never done. There was always more that I could do. I found that almost paralyzing initially. If you could do anything, what should you do? A lot of business owners may not tell you this and people don’t share these types of things about starting a business but it’s a gift for you to know that that can be a struggle.
It is a mindset piece because the ability to focus and know what those vital few things are is a skill that we’ve been practicing with developing a winning mindset all along, focusing on the things that matter and ignoring the things that aren’t going to make a difference in where you’re trying to go. You identify those few things in your business, that regardless of industry, are very similar. It’s going to be around revenue and your clients, knowing your numbers and taking care of your people. Those are the things that you focus on day in and day out consistently to make sure you’re successful.
Focus on the things that matter and ignore the things that aren't going to make a difference in where you're trying to go. Share on XIf you want some help developing that winning mindset in your next endeavor, whether it’s a business or something else, don’t forget that you can go to www.WinningMindsetMasteryPodcast.com and download my free gift, which gives you 3 different ways to improve your mindset in less than 1 week and double your wins in less than 7 days. Here’s to your success.