The Most Important Business Lessons 2016 Taught Me

This Post: The Most Important Business Lessons 2016 Taught Me

was put together by our team of editors who are Business Review Consultants that give their expert recommendations, on the latest business software & tools that have been launched onto the market.

When we publish the latest money making opportunity or business software review on how to start an online business,

 
we will give you our complete analysis on the most popular software product tools. We will expose the most profitable online systems that top internet marketers don't want to share with you.

 

We reveal some of the most Powerful web programs  That have recently been launched onto the market that will help those starting an online enterprise or setting up new revenue streams.
We will test these software apps, to examine every feature of the tool, making sure its delivering results.      

All the videos we post on our constantly updated blog,

just like The Most Important Business Lessons 2016 Taught Me that your about to watch,

will give you the competitive edge in your online business ventures,

that are targeted towards those interested in using the best tools on the market, that will help you start an online enterprise or run a profitable Home Based Business Franchise, using the most powerful web tools.

in this video you’ll discover what the most important lessons were that I learned in 2016 hello I’m Shane from active growth and I want to make this video because it’s a bit of a tradition on the slide that every year at the end of the year or the beginning of the next year depending on my schedule I look back at the previous year and I try to kind of condensed the greatest lessons the biggest learnings into a video or podcast or some kind of a thing and I think I want to continue doing that because it’s even just for me it’s interesting to look back over this development and it creates an interesting record of how I have basically gone from zero to where I am now and I really want to continue that and I know that this kind of content isn’t necessarily for everyone maybe it requires a bit more patient than what I often do but if you do take the time to look at these logs than I think you’ll find it very very interesting now 2016 has been another great year in fact with rice beans which is still you know the main thing that I work on we managed to double our revenue again in 2016 and we’re at a size now where that kind of growth is no longer you know it doesn’t come easy anymore obviously the more often you do that the more often you double your revenue the more difficult it gets so but we managed to do that again in twenty sixteen which is very very good outcome and also you know our team has continued to grow and basically I think once again i think i might have said the same thing last year basically any metric you want to look at it has been an incredibly success for the year you know basically all the all the right numbers are going up so things are going really well so again that the reason i mentioned this is like you know there’s that indicates that we must be doing something right and so the top lessons might be valuable for you as well if you are an entrepreneur now it’s that i want to get into what i want to get into something that i noticed again in 2016 and perhaps more strongly than before which is that if you’re an entrepreneur and in fact no matter what level you’re at the success of your business and how your business will do is very closely related to your character what kind of a person you are how you do things how you go about things how you think about things I think this is well this is something that we notice when we become entrepreneurs because it’s hugely challenging and how we deal with challenges is very much a question of character it’s all something that requires a lot of growth you will you have to do you know you have to learn you have to you have to acquire new skills and all that so again it’s a question of character and I bring this up because well as I just said before there’s been a lot of growth things are going well you know we’re also very profitable like with thrive themes for a while we had gross but basically we weren’t making a profit every time we had a bit of money we’d hire someone new or you know we basically reinvest everything into the company but now we’re actually properly profitable as well so you know everything is great right this is the dream this is what everyone wants so is that the mighty might surprise you to hear that this year over 2016 was probably the hardest year for me ever as an entrepreneur in fact it’s not you know it doesn’t quite fit into the year but certainly roughly September 2015 to end of 2016 was the toughest period I’ve ever experienced as an entrepreneur and I came close to my breaking point several times incredibly difficult times and that’s on purpose so I could have a much more comfortable life than I have I could definitely do that the you know the company’s fry screams is is running without me is running quite well without me it’s like we’re getting to the point where i’m not actually needed in this company anymore which is again fantastic why doesn’t everyone once so what am i doing why am i not just chilling on a beach somewhere well basically it’s because i have a missions to do more and so I deliberately make things difficult for myself I deliberately take on large challenges because I don’t want to get complacent and because even you know even at this size me as a character my character what I can bring into the company as as me the person is is important and so I don’t want to be yeah I don’t want to be as lazy as possible or as comfortable as possible I want to continue growing and I want to be able to help other people grow in a similar way now what that specifically means is that whenever I get too comfortable whenever you know whenever I basically feel like I’ve more or less mastered the thing I’m doing now I ask myself well what’s the next step upwards right how can I take this a step further and for me that I has often had to do with how do I pass on the things that I do in the company to other people so up until actually not very long ago I was the entire marketing department of thrice teams it was just me doing marketing and so I took on and you can listen to a podcast episode about that I did kind of an apprenticeship thing where I brought on some people work with them train them up for several months and that created then the new marketing team and then I did the same thing again in twenty sixteen which is another apprenticeship went way better right the second time obviously learned from the mistakes of a first time second time was way better we now have a sizable marketing team with brilliant people to you know to counterbalance all the other brilliant people who are working in development and support and test canal and all the other departments in the company so up until late 2015 we had a great disbalance much too much on the product side much too little on the marketing side and so what I did is bring in these people did this you know did these events to to find and train people to have a marketing team and this was incredibly difficult so so difficult to do this is so intense news for three months at a time I barely recovered from the first one by the time the next one started again three months have incredibly challenging times for me but you know also very very valuable and I learned a lot and I grew and it was it was very good for me so that is an example of what I mean when I say I deliberately kind of make things difficult for myself so I don’t want to just coast along right and I don’t because what also you know there would have been many derivative with many ways to accomplish kind of the same result in a much easier way right I could have said okay we will hire one person going to start working together with that one person until they can take on most of the you know most of the stuff i do then maybe we bring in someone else kind of you know take it slow but no i decided to do it in an intense bursts where my leadership skills my my teaching and communication skills were challenged like never before i decided to throw myself into an environment where i had to grow to be able to survive so to speak so it’s basically you know jumping into the water so that you either drown or learn to swim and so that’s that’s what I did that’s an example of something I keep doing I want to make sure that I don’t just stagnant because with with the kind of marketing work I was doing I I think I did a decent job and I was you know I knew what I was doing but I and I could have easily just coasted along right but that doesn’t seem like such a good thing to do that doesn’t it’s not as good for my company but it’s also not as good for my personal growth so when I see that when i see like okay you know this marketing thing I’ve been doing this in a certain way I’ve kind of found my groove this works I don’t just want to keep doing that and I also don’t want to just improve what I’m doing my groove by ten percent but I ask myself well how can i how can I double this how can I 10x this how can I take a large leap and this this whole thing this again comes down to character this is this is something that I choose to do and overall in my entire entrepreneurial story starting from you know absolutely having no clue building some websites trying to sell some stuff and failing miserably to now where I enjoy considerable success and and you know the things I do are working out really well this kind of attitude has been a huge advantage for me it’s been a huge advantage for me on the one hand because of how it how it leads to growth it makes me grow faster than than I would if I can stay comfortable so it means that you know i acquire new skills of new knowledge much faster than most people within my position because most people in my position would take a more comfortable route and this also brings me to the second point which is it gives me a competitive edge I know that I do things that most people would shy away from doing and that gives me a competitive edge and and that’s something that goes into the entire company and everything we do I have this you know kind of this these high standards this attention to detail this kind of relentless pursuing of more and better is something that I also that we also bring into our product right this is essentially philosophy that we bring into our products where the same thing we don’t look at oh you know here’s something we could do easy we make this plug-in or we make this piece of software and we cash in good stuff that’s the easy route right now we go how can we make this the best possible thing how can we build a thing that is the best we can make it that is much better than the last thing we built and and we are willing to pay the price of overwhelming the beginning and exhaustion by the time we finish and again we’re willing to do this because it helps us grow and it gives us advantage another thing that I’ve noticed is that i now think of building a business as having three distinct stages the first one is starting the second one is gaining traction and the third one is scaling this is useful to think of because in the three phases you will face very different problems and you will need very different skills to solve them so the problem that most entrepreneurs face is a problem of starting because well you know most people try to start and never get anywhere so that’s like that the big crowd is it starting so there and and there your character and your ability to gain skills quickly is super important because in the starting phase it’s probably just you or maybe it’s you and the you know and a friend that you decided to start a business together or something but we’re not talking about large teams we’re not talking about large budgets not talking about like managerial and administrative problems we’re talking about the photo of how do we figure out how to get this thing off the ground how do i get from nothing to figuring out if i can build a product that someone wants to buy the second phase is traction so that’s if you have gotten something started you’ve got something online maybe getting some traffic you’re slowly growing a mailing list you know stuff is happening maybe people are buying something from you but it’s not really paying the bills yet but it’s not really going anywhere yet so then the question is how can we take this thing and get well gain traction right how can we get enough people to pay attention how can we grow our audience to the size where we actually generate real income from this and we can maybe start hiring people and you know pay the bills first of all I’m gonna start hiring people and so on in this phase so this is basically all about marketing the better your understanding of who you’re selling to who you’re marketing to how they take what they need and so on the better your understanding of that the better your understanding how to get your value across how to generate how to create a real strong unique selling point the better that kind of thing the better you will do in the traction stays and then the third phase is scaling so at this point you’ve got a real business stuff is happening and the question is well how do we how do we really scale this up how do we go from you know kind of doing this from our living rooms to building up a real team to scaling this to kind of a worldwide thing rather than just Oh some people have bought something for me and there unfortunately he is it becomes a lot about management becomes a lot about leadership that’s that’s one of the good parts of it but it also becomes a lot about you know administration and that kind of thing which is I think a bit annoying but that’s something I’ve really noticed this transition because now we’re in the scaling space with thrive themes and yeah like you can tell I like some parts of that I really really don’t like some parts of it but it stays interesting now one reason I bring this up is because I talked about character before and essentially your character is also something that you have to scale because what happens is when you build a team is instead of your character being this thing that matters it’s company culture that matters and and you can think of that as essentially an extension of a person’s character right you can have a person who’s kind of an asshole can have a person who has great work ethic and similarly you can have a company that’s kind of an asshole or a company that has great work ethic and so on and so forth so you can really think of it of those as parallels and it becomes of course a lot more difficult to then create a company with a good culture create a company with a good positive character and this is something that I’ve struggled with a bit I think we’ve been very lucky we have good company culture but I feel like it’s not really you know it’s not really my fault it kind of just happened but trying to really cultivate that and deliberately steer that a little bit in the right direction I find very difficult this is a problem that I can talk more about if if you’re interested so if you want to hear more about that just leave a comment about it then one more thing that has been an important realization for me is or a switch it has been a change in how I think about things that is basically a switch from worshiping talent to developing talent all right so worshiping has a very strong way of saying that but essentially it could also say chasing talent where you well you realize at some point if you’ve done any hiring if you’re kind of in the traction or scaling phase it’s done any hiring you’ve noticed that there’s a huge huge difference but who you hire makes a huge difference is a massive difference between someone who is you know decent at what they do and someone who’s great at what they do the huge difference between or just looking at how much pain a bad hire can cause and how much a bad hire can cost is incredible and how much value a good hire can bring also incredible so it becomes really really important to get the right people on board and what can happen as a result is that you that you chase talent or that you worship talent right did you want to find the people who are already perfect and you want to hire the best right we only hire rock stars that kind of thing right it’s also very kind of a Silicon Valley kind of thing right and I we have this attitude as well I have this attitude as well in hiring a originally this is how I thought about is like we have to find the best people where are the best people right what I’ve realized is that it’s really not so much about hiring the rock stars it’s about developing talents about having a system that develops the right kind of people you can’t really expect someone to walk into the door and already be the perfect person that you need you have to you have to develop people and really for me it seems like I should they should have been much more obvious to me because my personal story is that of development my personal story is instead of going from you know basically clueless idiot to entrepreneur and obviously I had to grow I had to develop my own skills and so it should actually have been much more obvious to me that what’s needed is not a magic formula to uncover the perfect hires it’s actually a system by which you can help people grow their own skills and help people become the best version of themselves in the context of your company so this kind of brings us back to the whole thing from the beginning where things like character and how you learn what your attitude is and and and how you acquire skills become really really important when you get out of the starting and traction phase and into the scaling phase it becomes it or stays just as important it just shifts from me developing my stuff too how do I help other people develop their stuff because my personal work now that we have about 50 people us are working at the right seems my personal input just isn’t that important anymore so it’s not important whether I can you know get a bit better at something it’s important whether I can create a system that helps other people get better at what they do so those are the top lessons that I’ve learned in 2016 and as you can see there there’s kind of a thread that goes through this which is actually you know this is not a deliberate narrative device it really is something that all of the things i noticed can kind of be brought to come around the same thing about character and skill development that has remained stem cells what i do and have been reminded of the importance of that now one more thing that I want to mention even though I start out with maybe a scary kind of idea that you know you do hard things and even if you’re super successful you can still have the hardest year ever and and if you want a competitive edge you gotta work super hard and so on right that’s that’s my kind of message as it’s the way I do things but at the same time I also want to say that I have a deep appreciation and just a pure love for what I get to do here so I also want to be clear about that you know even though I always challenge myself and I I try to not get comfortable and things have been really really difficult i also just have a pure love for what i get to do for this creative work it’s still my favorite thing to do in the world is to create something out of nothing and I can now do it with a team of amazing people and and learning and growing like this is the best thing ever so while it has been a very hard year for me it has also been an extremely successful year and I wouldn’t I wouldn’t change a thing I’ve loved every every minute of it even the ones that were really really difficult alright so those are my thoughts the looking back at 2016 thoughts I would like to know what this you know what this brought to mind for you also if you have any questions about the things that that I’ve talked about just leave a comment below ask away and i’ll be happy to answer and let me know you know does this remind you of something that you’ve experienced is it helped you understand something that you may be been going through what ideas this sparked for you let me know by leaving a comment