When Colonel Sanders retired at the age of 65, he was flat broke, with his only income a $105 monthly pension check.
Knowing he couldn’t survive on that, he drove from restaurant to restaurant across the country, often sleeping in his car, to attempt to sell them his secret fried chicken recipe for a small royalty for every piece of chicken sold.
He was told “NO!” 1,008 times before he got his first sale. After two years, he had secured a total of only 5 restaurants. But 12 years later, he had a restaurant franchise that he sold for millions of dollars and a mainstream brand name.
J. K. Rowling spent 6 years working on her first book while living on government benefits. Twelve publishers turned her down before it was finally accepted, earning her billions.
I once called, e-mailed, and faxed (yeah, I’m old) a prospect I wanted a meeting with every week for three months before he agreed to talk to me.
In the early years, no one would pay me to speak, so I offered my services for free, even paying my own travel and expenses, for the opportunity to get on someone’s stage, suffering a LOT of abuse and crappy gigs, eking out just enough money to make the rent, but not much more.
I took clients on based on a percentage of sales and repeatedly got swindled out of my money. Early on, I was a target of ridicule for many, with a handful of people determined to undermine my speaking engagements, client relationships, and reputation (guess not much has changed).
Point is, most people just don’t have the ability to push through a TON of criticism, difficulty, rejection, and crappy work that you often need to go through before you get your act together and start earning the big bucks.
I know of many MSPs who traveled a similar journey, starting out small, climbing over boulders and swimming through sewage-filled alligator pits of problems to get where they are today. Real resilience.
The world is full of really smart, extremely talented people with a ton of potential and ability. Not many have the pigheaded determination and single-minded tenacity to stick with something long enough to MAKE it work. At the first sign of setback or failure, they’re quick to start pointing fingers.
Take marketing as an example:
Someone sends out a direct mail piece that fails. Instead of giving actual thought to what they did wrong, they jump to “Direct mail doesn’t work in MY business” to brush it off and move on to something else easier. Admittedly, it’s a lot easier to blame something else or someone else than to dig in and figure out what role you played in the train wreck.
Clients I work with DO have an advantage over those who aren’t investing in learning how to do marketing and selling the right way, speeding up their pace and chances for success. But still. If you can’t handle a lot of frustration, problems, setbacks, chaos, and things going WRONG all at once, you’ll never reach any significant level of success in business. Yeah, I know, you certainly don’t want to hear THAT, do ya?
Rocky Balboa famously said, “You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.”
I’m very good at putting together marketing campaigns that generate results. It’s very, very rare that I do something that is a total flop – but it DOES happen. Further, I am, more often than not, fixing, adjusting, revising, adding on and struggling through a goal. It’s rare to have a single e-mail that produces ALL the leads, ALL the sales, ALL the new clients I need or want. Life DOES take a toll on all of us.
Given the fact that marketing campaigns that generate a 2% response are considered a HOME RUN in the advertising industry (which means 98% of the people ignored us), I’ve developed a higher-than-average tolerance for pain and true resilience in the face of adversity.
It is also my observation that this is true of all successful entrepreneurs. They embrace chaos and push through the problems, doing what’s necessary, not what’s convenient or easy. We don’t spend a lot of time trying to avoid work and obstacles. We just accept it as part of the process and embrace it.
If you’re an MSP or IT services business owner who isn’t afraid to put in the work, and know that maybe it’ll be a little bit more challenging in the beginning but worth it to get to the other side… you need to seriously consider attending the IT Sales And Marketing Boot Camp event happening in Nashville, April 11-14, 2023.
If you just show up, you are guaranteed to get the equivalent of an MBA in marketing IT services, leadership, sales strategies, hiring, management, and IT excellence delivered in just 4 action-packed days. Plus, it’ll be one of the most exciting experiences you’ve ever had and will be helping you grow your business exponentially the day you get back. You can click below for more information on the event:
More Information On The 2023 IT Sales And Marketing Bootcamp
