How do you know whether your ideas will fail or be successful? You can think about it for a month, a year or even an entire lifetime but thinking alone will do you ZERO good.  At some point, you need to put your ideas out into the real world and see whether they will succeed or fail.  The trick is to do it fast and with little cost/risk and in this podcast I provide you with one of the most beautiful examples there is – the story of Steve Madden shoes.

Do you ever feel like you're drawn towards complexity like a moth to a flame? Most people are obsessed with complexity and they feed their addictions with advanced strategies and tactics but they completely miss the point.  Obsessing over the complex is like having the best silverware for a dinner party and overcooking the chicken, nobody cares about the silverware because the main thing was the food. This happens every day in business.  I see people arguing over which software to use and which color button to have on a landing page but forgetting that the main thing is the offer.  Most of the results you will get in anything in life are derived from the basics, NOT the advanced.  In this podcast, I explain how and give you three real life examples.

As an entrepreneur starting out there’s a lot of things you need to know. The best way to learn is by reading books. I have been to university, I have been to  $15,000 dollar seminars, I’ve been in masterminds & I have mentors. You know where I have learned most of my knowledge is definitely from books and this is awesome because books are readily accessible from anywhere in the world and you can buy them on Amazon and everyone has access to them and there is so much knowledge to be gained through books.  A question that came up a lot after that, the audience was writing to me saying, “Sam that’s awesome but what books would you read specifically?” It’s a very good question and in today’s podcast, I’m gonna share with you the four books that I believe every entrepreneur should read.

One question that I get all the time almost every single week is: “Sam, if you were starting from scratch, you knew nothing and had nothing, say no money, no knowledge of anything, no ideas for a business, and you are literally starting from zero, all the way back in the beginning. What would you do?” That’s a question I get asked all the time, and in this podcast, I’m gonna tell you exactly what I would do if I was starting from scratch today.

When you're starting out as an entrepreneur or early-stage business owner NOTHING is as important as sales.  Without sales you don't have customers, without customers you don't have revenue and without revenue, any business will quickly die.  There's no argument that sales are mission-critical to the early-stage business, so why do we find it so hard to do?

We as humans constantly have voices inside our heads that guide us through decisions in life however when we try to do something important or something challenging those voices tell us to do something else.  When we sit down at our desks in the morning and know our business needs new sales, our inner procrastinator tells us to work on our LinkedIn profile or to get a haircut and when we need to get a direct mail campaign out the door it tells us to answer email instead.  The secret isn’t to ignore these inner voices but harness their power and use them to guide you towards what matters.  Don’t listen to what your inner procrastinator is pulling you towards but what it’s pulling you away from. All of life's greatest rewards are behind barriers of temporary discomfort and pain and when you hear your inner procrastinator telling you to do something unimportant you know you are on the right track – just power through and enjoy the reward on the other side.

When was the last time that you took a proper break? If you want mental clarity, that sharp edge and those quantum leaps in both your life and your business then working harder without taking a break IS NOT THE ANSWER. Many of life's greatest opportunities are lying in plain sight but we fail to see them because we’re zoned in on the unimportant. Sometimes the only way to gain clarity about what things really matter and where we should be placing our efforts is by taking a break. In this podcast, I talk about certain steps to taking rejuvenating breaks as an entrepreneur, and why.