Entreprenext: Shift from Start-Up to Scale-Up and Elevate Your Mindset for Success

By Nick Barnsdall

Are you ready to grow or give up?

So you have started your business, congratulations! But now the excitement is over, the bills are stacking up and the late night are relentless. You're not getting any new clients and as much as you want to put your prices up you're afraid that it might deter people from working with you.

You're got

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Barnsdall
• Release date: Dec 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9780648569053

Nick Barnsdall

Nick Barnsdall is a highly successful entrepreneur who has built over 43 businesses over his lifetime and owns over 14 today. From humble beginnings and starting his first business at 19 in New Zealand as the son of parents owning a struggling fish and chip shop, to today running companies with over 150 million in turnover. Nick's perspective on entrepreneurship comes from the grass roots and doing it tough, showing that commitment, hard work and authentic leadership create success for die hard business owners.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

So, You’ve Launched Your

Business. Now What?

Potatoes Today, Caviar Tomorrow

I was 28 when I launched the company Hyundai Construction Equipment in Australia and I paid myself $39,000 per year. My wife, Lyndsay, and I have always loved to challenge ourselves and at the time, one of our favourite games was, Who can spend the least? Every weekend, we would play $10 weekend and would set a budget of $10 for the entire weekend. We made our own food, often chopping up potatoes to make home-made fries, and created our own fun. We played chess, stayed home, and cooked.

While we were largely surviving on one small income, we never complained. In fact, we enjoyed it. We knew what would be waiting at the other end of the rainbow. We knew that our sacrifice and hard work would pay off some day.

And now someday has come. I’m going to fill you in on how I went from potatoes to caviar, from having $10 weekends to having a net worth beyond the imagination of most.

Do you have what it takes to do the same? Yes, you do. But you need to believe it.

It’s Not the Wedding But the Marriage That Counts

Now, let’s talk about you.

Once upon a time, an idea popped into your head. A simple spark, like magic dust, arrived in your mind. And you let it simmer, until one fateful day you decided it could be more than just fairy dust.

Whether your idea was the solution to one of your own problems or the answer to someone else’s, whether you disrupted something old or invented something new, or whether you became so passionately embedded in a hobby or skill that you couldn’t imagine not taking it to market – your business was born.

You toyed with it, talked about it – maybe you made a prototype of your product. You wrote lists, started planning, and began goal setting. You believed in your idea, knowing that it would be something tangible, that people could hold or utilise, and that it could change the world and the way things had always been done. And all of this became part of your business, bringing your idea to life.

The process of launching a business is much like the lead up to your wedding day. The build-up is immense. The planning, preparation, time, and money that goes into the big day only seems absurd after you’ve done it all. For months, or even years, it’s all-consuming.

The planning, preparation, time and money that goes into your big business launch day is just as immense. You build a website, create a marketing campaign, plan your social channels, and tell your friends, family and every person on the street about the incredible product or service that you’ve developed. You set up landing pages and pre-sale orders to build the hype. Your innovative idea is about to be birthed and you want the world to know.

The part that everyone seems to forget is this – it’s not the wedding day that truly matters. It’s the marriage.

Launch Day Arrives

Navig8Biz¹ is my passion project. It’s one of the 13 businesses that I currently own, and it’s the perfect example of such build up. It’s also the perfect example of what typically happens on and after launch day.

As soon as you launch, and immediately after, your friends and family support you for the most part. They buy into it. They share the message and cheer you on. Perhaps they even make a purchase.

Because of this, the first few weeks feel pretty good – people like you! They really like you! Of course, by you, I mean your product. But it’s easy to confuse the two when you launch. You are NOT your product or business, even if you’re selling your intellectual property or personal brand.

Then, somewhere in the first two years after you launch, you realise, it wasn’t the wedding that mattered at all – it’s the marriage. You realise that while you were planning the perfect wedding (launch), you should have been planning to build a sustainable, long-lasting marriage (your business). No one told you what it would take to sustain your business for years to come, and you were so focussed on the launch that you never took the time to find out.

Let me interrupt your story with a statement that you need to hear: you are not alone. This scenario is all too common, and I’ve seen it repeatedly with clients, customers, friends, and acquaintances. But the data paints the true picture. According to November 2020 research by Fundera², here are the facts:

•20% of businesses fail in their first year.

•30% of businesses fail in their second year.

•50% of businesses fail within five years.

•70% of businesses fail in their 10th year in business.

Let’s return to your story. You watched a thousand YouTube tutorials on how to build an Instagram following. You followed a branding expert. You read the handbook on launching and marketing. You did the course on building a website.

However, you never learned how to understand critical business systems, such as sustaining cash flow, employing your first recruit, growing a team, cultivating culture, data analysis, understanding market shifts, raising capital, finding customers, closing sales, creating self-awareness, copywriting to sell, building a database and establishing customer relations, or client contracts. Above all, you never learned that you need to love your business, through good and bad, not just at the beginning but always. Without love, care, and attention, your business will die, and your hopes and dreams will go with it.

Is your mind blown? Of course. But no one ever taught you what you truly need to know, and that isn’t your fault.

Reality Hits

Six months after launch, you’re in the daily hustle, barely breaking even, and you have no idea what to do next. You’re arguing with your business. Your values are misaligned. It’s draining your energy. It’s siphoning all your time and money. The marriage is failing.

And the worst part is, you have no one to talk to about it. Most of your friends are employed, so they don’t understand the 24/7/365 effort, emotion, and mental energy that goes into your business. You’re completely lost. You’re now wondering, Is it even worth it? You send all kinds of ultimatums to the relationship. Just one product/season more and if it doesn’t work, I’m out.

I know this well because I’ve been in this position COUNTLESS times. To get past that, your commitment needs to be unconditional and unwavering. You need to ask yourself, Are you committed? Are you REALLY committed?

•I’ve owned 34 companies throughout my lifetime. And every time I build one, I think to myself, Doesn’t the world know they need this? What’s wrong with them? I know you’re thinking that too.

But in this book, I’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong with that way of thinking. And I’ll help you understand exactly what you can do to change it.

As a fellow EntrepreNext, I understand you and I know exactly where you are at right now. I know you’ve done a great deal of hard work already. I know you’ve put months or even years into building and growing your business and doing absolutely everything yourself. Let’s take a moment to congratulate you!

But here’s the secret about this critical turning point that no one seems to know: you’ve only just begun.

Here’s the other secret: if you’re hearing crickets, it’s OK! It really is. I’ll tell you why.

Businesses, big or small, will ALWAYS go through peaks and troughs – sales go up, sales go down, then they go back up again. But here’s the fun part. You get to work out why. You get to be your most creative self, conjuring up ways to solve this colossal Rubik’s cube known as your business. Finding out why your product or service is no longer working is an analysis that you will consistently go through for the lifetime of your business.

To learn this hard lesson in the early stages of your business is a tremendous blessing. It means you will never be complacent, but will always be learning and growing. And it means that you will be able to keep your business and yourself malleable.

This is building resilience.

The ‘Untouchables’

When I launched Hyundai Construction Equipment in Australia, we thought we were unstoppable. For the first five years, we were on an enormous trajectory of growth. The problem with that was the same problem that many successful businesses run into – you think you know everything. You think your business is untouchable.

From 2003 to 2008, when I was aged 28 to 33, we had an incredible run. Until we didn’t. And when things went south, I quickly realised we had to reinvent ourselves if we wanted to survive.

When it comes to reinventing yourself and your business, sometimes it’s branding, sometimes it’s product and sometimes it’s the business model. For us, it was our business model that wasn’t working for the customer. So, we worked on fixing it.

We added other revenue streams, more ways for our customers to access our product, and more convenience. We entered new markets, added rental options, and provided finance. Implementing these ideas moved us back into the growth space, and we were able to move forward again.

Talking about this time in my life conjures up a lot of emotion now. It was such a big move. Building and then ultimately reinventing Hyundai Construction Equipment meant having many meetings with 60-something-year-old wealthy men. It meant pushing what I knew would be a better way to run the business, though I was much younger than the others in the room. And the whole process was also very raw, because my business partner Mark suddenly passed away in ‘06. That meant that I was going through this business shift on my own.

What drove me at the time? Wanting something better. I was running on emotion and adrenaline. I didn’t want to let down staff, customers, or my family. When Mark died everyone thought the business would fall to pieces. But the fastest way to get me to do something is to tell me I can’t do it. I come from a long line of stubborn women, which can be a good and a bad thing! If that’s you, and it means something to you, use that stubbornness to your advantage.

When Mark left me his legacy, I felt it was on me to make sure it was going to work. Every minute of the day I worked – failure wasn’t an option. It was never even contemplated. Instead, I always asked, How are we going to get to number one?

Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, humbly refers to the biggest mistake he has ever made in business: complacency.

Every business is going to face a number of choices in a time of turmoil or crisis. If the company’s culture and values are filled with a reservoir of trust, then you can say to your people, ‘We are facing real challenges,’ and you can lay out what they are, said Schultz.

In 2008, Starbucks got into a lot of trouble, because the growth and success of the company covered up mistakes, and a carcinogenic disease entered the company. We almost lost the entire company. I returned to CEO in ‘08, and the first thing I did was apologise to the entire staff for letting them down. Even though I wasn’t the CEO, as the Chairman of the company I wasn’t paying close enough attention. I started crying. I was so sad that I had let them down.

When he met with his team of 12,000 store managers, he didn’t hide any details, though his colleagues had warned against it. He knew his team deserved to know the truth and told the staff, "Approximately 50 customers a day are