Every entrepreneur I have ever met has a shared goal: to be more profitable.
Being an entrepreneur is difficult.
You work 80 hours a week to try and get an edge.
You wake up in the middle of the night worrying about next week's production run.
...or tomorrow's delivery schedule.
......or this week's payroll.
And if not any of those then you wake up worrying that you must be forgetting something.....
Being an entrepreneur means you are
supposed to have all the answers.
You're it.
Being an entrepreneur means you have to be good at your thing, the thing that made you want to go into business in the first place.
AND you have to be good at the "art of business".
The Art of Business
So many people find focusing on the business side to be soul-sucking! Any of these sound familiar to you:
- it's not what I love to do
- it feels unnatural
- it's not what I'm good at
- it feels like work
- if I'm not focusing on my product my business will suffer
I shared a meal...
...with a professional whose mind and spirit I admire. The conversation flowed through dinner until he suddenly turned to me after the dessert course and asked
"What do you do? I mean, I know what you do for a living but what is it you do??"
I was a bit taken aback, but responded by describing my role as a business mentor and leadership coach.
Why a mentor?
I explained how I work with entrepreneurs to help:
- expose existing blind spots
- develop strategies
- devise tactical plans
Discretionary purchase?
Without hesitation my professional friend responded that I must only be busy during economic booms, since my work was an extreme example of a "discretionary purchase".
He rolled his eyes, got up, and walked away.
I sighed and shook my head. And laughed.
A good mentor has an ROI
Here's the thing:
A good mentor should save an entrepreneur far more than he costs.
A great mentor should raise an entrepreneur's level of profitability significantly faster than the entrepreneur could ever do alone.
What makes a mentor?
A mentor is a mentor by virtue of two factors:
- he has already paid the Stupid Tax himself,
- he is willing & able to save others from doing the same.
The Stupid Tax
The Stupid Tax is very simply the time, energy, effort, and money we expend because:
we just didn't know any better!
It is the real cost of mistakes that we never would have made if we only knew then what we know now.
I have paid the Stupid Tax many, many times myself. And to this day the lessons I learned best are the ones that cost me the most.
The ONE GOOD THING about the Stupid Tax
The Stupid Tax has one redeeming quality: you get to keep the receipts!
And THIS is one of the core reasons to find a mentor: you get to read their receipts. Suddenly the cost of the mentor is pennies against dollars.
Not so much of a discretionary purchase anymore....
Getting back to my friend
I sighed because my friend drew his conclusions about me, and others like me, without asking a single question.
I shook my head because it was evident that he had never thought about the amount of Stupid Tax he pays.
I laughed because the receipts in my pocket would have been very helpful to him.
Ignore at your own Risk
That's the thing about Stupid Tax receipts: a person can only read them at their own discretion.
