There is one mistake that I see entrepreneurs make over and over again. And this mistake leaves them with little confidence, a lot of confusion, and sometimes even a failed business. 

So, what is that mistake? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode along with how to overcome it,  avoid it, and create a custom business plan for you and your small business. 

Join me in this first episode of the Goal Get It Podcast. 

Big Takeaways:

• The ONE big mistake most entrepreneurs and business owners make

• The solution to that mistake and how to create custom plan that fits not only your business but your life, that truly works
• The action step that you can take right now to help you move forward and begin to implement this advice immediately

Links in this episode:

• World-Class Wake Up: https://workwithprocess.co/wakeup
• DM me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ms.erin.haworth
• Join the Unstoppable Action-Taking Entrepreneur Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/actiontakingentrepreneurs

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The thread through everything that I do, create, and teach revolves around this one concept. I see entrepreneurs make this mistake over and over again and it leaves them with little confidence, a lot of confusion, and sometimes a failed business. 

So what is the mistake?

It’s simple:

“What works for them will work for me.”

And you may be thinking, wait what? Because that is literally what most businesses are built on. Someone figures out how to do something and then shares their way as the answer to do the thing. Legit the entire business coaching industry aka MY industry is built on this. 

Learning from other people is legit the keystone of personal & professional growth so what am I talking about that this is a big mistake?

Well it goes a bit deeper than surface level.  What usually happens is that we as entrepreneurs are looking for the shortest way to get to our goals. We don’t like to waste limited resources of time, money, and energy so we look for the shortest path between where we are and where we wanna go. 

We know that others have gone before us so we start looking to them for guidance and how-tos. All of this is good and well. 

The problem comes in when we try to take their exact process and apply it to our own life as is. 

I call this copy-and-pasting someone else’s success plan onto your own life.  And to be honest it fits like someone else’s jeans. 

And not like the idyllic world of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants where everyone’s thighs and butt look incredible in the same pair of jeans. 

These jeans are too tight or fall off your hips. They are too short or drag the ground. The hug in all the wrong places and just aren’t comfortable. 

You might feel like you weren’t good enough and a bit shameful about your body.

But if you went and had those jeans tailored to fit you, it would be a perfect fit. You could confidently walk around because you knew that those pants were working for you. 

The same is true when it comes to running your business. You are not the same person as the the person who actually did the thing — your situations are different, your strengths are different, you two started from different places, your personality, your why, your mission, your motivation — all those things vary from person to person. But when we try to take their success plan and copy-and-paste it into our own life without modifications, it becomes something that isn’t sustainable. In order for it to work for you like it worked for them, you have to fake it to be more like them. And that is never sustainable. 

And when we fail at it, we start to think there is either something wrong with us (shame, confidence drops) or that they were a con artist and not a great coach, teacher , etc.  

So what is the solution?

You can draw inspiration, best practices, strategy, motivation, and ideas from the way someone else built their empire, but you must custom-fit those things into your life and business if they’ll truly work & work for you long-term. 

And here are a few tips for how you can do just that:

First, self-knowledge should be a priority. You should be an expert on you. You should know how you learn best (auditory, visual, kinesthetic). You should know what your strengths are and what lights you up. You should know what inspires you and how to motivate yourself. You should know how others view you and how you interact with others. How you make decisions. How you gain perspective on new ideas or concepts. What your fears are. Whose opinions matter. 

Because if you know all of these things, then you know how to start customizing things to fit to you. 

The second thing is to start treating business like an experiment, because truly that is all entrepreneurship is: a series of experiments. 

What does that even mean?

Well, I’m gonna dig back into my college days when I had 8am organic chemistry labs to help me explain. 

Basically, an experiment just means that you are testing an assumption that you have in a very controlled way so you can draw educated conclusions from the result. 

So, in organic chemistry lab – wait, nope, we are going back even further to preschool. In preschool, an adult probably told you that mixing red and blue together made purple. That is the assumption. 

You actually taking the red and blue finger paint and mixing it together was the controlled way of testing it, the action part of the experiment. 

After you saw the result, the purple paint, you then drew the conclusion that red and blue made purple. You then could start guessing at what combinations of other colors resulted in. 

So, how does this show up in business?

Well, you can treat your business and strategies like an experiment by following those same steps. 

Assumption: My audience wants to hear me talk about X.

Experiment: I talk about X  on FB live and gauge their engagement and reaction.

Result: Audience either behaved or didn’t behave in a way that you thought they would.

Conclusion: Either you were right or there is room for improvement and a new experiment. 

Experimenting is a bit easier on the ego. If everything is an experiment, it is easier to separate your personal success from your experiment’s success. Because in actuality, no matter if your hypothesis is supported or negated, it is still a success because you learned something! Say you try out a morning routine like the 5am club but after the experiment you realize it isn’t for you. That isn’t because you are less of a business person or not committed. You can start to look at the individual pieces of the routine and modify it to make it work for you based on what you know.

And continue to test and re-test. Lots of little experiments.  

And the third thing is to pivot with new seasons and data. This actually plays nicely with treating business as an experiment, because what works now might not still work in 6 months. And the only way to know that is to continue to run experiments. 

For example, a student of my World-Class Wake Up method was on day 2 of her morning routine and feeling good about it but then her newborn started a sleep regression, throwing everything off. She reached out to me to ask if she could move some of the things she had planned for her morning routine to the evening. To which I replied, of course! It is YOUR morning routine, YOUR business, your WHATEVER IT IS, and if you need to modify it to make it work for you, do it. 

We make plans based on the information we have at the time of making the plan. But we are constantly acquiring new information and data, and seasons of life change. The external circumstances we find ourselves in sometimes change through no doing of our own. How you pivot and modify plans and strategies gets to be reliant on not only those external circumstances but also how you want to show up, feel, and run your business.  

You have to be the expert on you. Trying to take someone else’s road map to success may get you there but chances are it won’t be fulfilling or fun. You can take the best practices, strategies, and tactics and combine that with what you know about you, you personality, your dreams + vision, your goals, and your values to create a plan that is truly customized to you. And that will be a much more delightful way to run your life & business. 

Action Step:

I always like to end each episode with an action step that you can take right now to help you move forward and begin to implement immediately. Here is your action step for this episode:

Set a timer for 10 minutes and in that 10 minutes write down everything you know about you: the way you best work, learn, what your preferences are, your strengths, things that light you up, personality test results – an all-about-you brainstorm. Be open and let yourself be impressed by how awesome you truly are.