?? 7 Lessons I Learned After Selling My First Business

1. Know your WHY:

Knowing exactly why you're in business will determine how much effort you put in, drive and determination you have and perseverance when the going gets tough.

If you have a strong enough WHY, you will effortlessly put in the work to make sure you reach your goals.

I was quite selfish at the start. I wanted to start a business as I always liked the idea of being an "entrepreneur", so I thought what better way to get the practical skills than by getting 'right in the trenches'. I was studying Engineering & Finance at the time which a whole lot of theory and not much practical application.

(The quotation marks previously were there because I did have a slight bit of ego for wanting to seem cool that I run a business by being called an entrepreneur ??)

As the business grew, it became less about me, and more about the customers we serve. Many people booked us for special moments - kids birthdays, bucks parties, hens parties, work team building days and so on. We wanted to make sure we threw them a special event that they could look back on for days, weeks, even years. As a result, this drove us to create a memorable customer experience with the equipment we bought, the staff we took on and customer service throughout the whole process.

2. You learn by doing:

You're not going to know everything and you will encounter problems. That's ok. The beauty is having the self-belief that you will find solutions to overcome your roadblocks - because if you don't, nobody is going to do the work for you.

We had no clue what public liability insurance or GST were or how to register a company or how to get customers - pretty basic stuff right? Our first invoices were in Word format - not even PDF's ??.

We simply learned by doing and making mistakes.

3. It's never a lack of resources, it's always a lack of resourcefulness:

My main man Tony Robbins really solidified this for me. It's never a lack of resources, it's a lack of resourcefulness. You can make all the excuses in the world: "I don't have enough time", "I don't have enough money", "I don't have enough customers". You have to stop playing the victim and start helping yourself.

4. Action is ALWAYS better than inaction:

I often found myself over-analysing new ideas and whether we should try them or not. Spending too much time on one thing with no action takes up valuable brain space and literally keeps you in the same place as you don't progress or learn.

There's a simple formula:

1. Idea
2. Implement the idea
3. Analyse the data (did it work or not?)
4. Make changes/pivot/stick to it

We did this multiple times with different pricing structures, refund policies, marketing angles and so on and by doing this, we quickly found how to streamline the business and increase profit.

5. Have multiple sources of leads:

If you are reliant on only one source of leads, what happens when that lead source runs out? You're stuffed! Eg, let's say you use Google Ads and they change their terms of service so your industry can no longer advertise. If you have no plan B, C or D - it can cripple your business.

It's well and good to have a main source of leads, though have a few other streams as well.

For us, we used Google Ads was the main driver though we still invested in SEO, Facebook Ads (of course ??), referral networks with our competition, corporate team building directories and email marketing.

Having well-diversified sources of leads meant we had consistent leads coming in each week and if it was ever a slow period, we could simply do a few extra emails or increase budgets accordingly.

6. Become friends with your competition:

I firmly believe in collaboration over competition. There's plenty of clients for everybody out there. We made sure to connect and network with our competitors as it only had positive benefits.

Whenever they had overflow work they couldn't handle, guess whom the leads came to? Even when they paused their operations, we still got their inbound leads coming to us. We also had the opportunity for collab bookings which would not otherwise be possible by one company due to their complexity and equipment needed.

7. Know your customer inside and out:

I can't stress this enough. It's important to understand who your customer is so you can tailor your product and message to them. If you speak in their language and understand what they want, they are much more likely to convert.

At the start, we thought EVERYBODY needs to try bubble soccer - we serve everybody in Perth. We quickly found out that kid's birthday parties were the main booking type we had so we tailored our messaging on our website primarily to parents. This really helped skyrocket our inbound leads.