Pod Insights The $100 MBA Show MBA2555 Q&A Wednesday: How Do I Gain The Confidence to Start a Business? About this episode Struggling to find the confidence to start your dream business? Wondering how seasoned entrepreneurs muster the courage to dive in despite the fear and uncertainty? Let’s break down how you can build that confidence step by step. Build the confidence you need to launch your business in this Q&A Wednesday episode. From starting with small, manageable wins to surrounding yourself with supportive people, you'll learn practical techniques to boost your self-assurance and begin your entrepreneurial journey. Plus, Omar shares his own experiences and insights that can propel you forward. Confidence grows with every step you take. Let’s build it together, one action at a time. Click play at the top of the page to dive into this lesson. To submit your questions, visit 100mba.net/q. Download the free worksheet at 100mba.net/worksheets. The Wayback MachineBook ReviewsWatch the episodes on YouTube: https://lm.fm/GgRPPHiSUBSCRIBEYouTube | Apple Podcast | Spotify | Podcast Feed
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1:16 Speaker 01 Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhome, and today's episode is a Q&A Wednesday episode where we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners, one of our subscribers on YouTube, one of our community members. Today's question is from Jerome, and Jerome asks, "How do I gain confidence to start a business?" Jerome, this is a big question. I'm excited to get into it because I get asked about this a lot. This concept of confidence, is it something you're born with? Is it something that you have to cultivate or build? How do you get enough confidence to get started? All that and more. So I'm going to dive into this idea of confidence. How do you have confidence in the first place so that you can start on the path to where you want to be, to where you want to get to?
2:00 Speaker 01 And by the way, if you have a question you want to ask on business, any topic, anything that you're going through right now as you're building your business, go ahead and ask it. You could submit it on our website, 1000- MBA.net slash Q. Submit your question and we'll answer right here on Q and A Wednesday. Here's the thing, confidence is not about knowing you're going to succeed without a shadow of a doubt. It's about being okay with the unknown and still take action. This is what entrepreneurship is all about. It's about understanding that action is what's going to get you results, is that the confidence will come the more you take action. Okay, confidence grows when you push through self doubt, when you actually do things and look back and say, oh, I did that.
2:45 Speaker 01 I actually went past my fears and made it happen. So let's take a look at how you can start building that confidence one step at a time. The first step I recommend is to start small and build momentum. I'm a big believer in momentum. Momentum is huge because it allows you to get some wins. It allows you to get some pushes that make you feel like, okay, I can do this. And that's where the confidence builds. So you want to get started with some tiny, tiny wins. Okay. Even if that small win is something like, I'm going to sit down today and write in my journal and just brainstorm some ideas about my product or service. It may not be a sale.
3:29 Speaker 01 It may not be making, you know, $10,000, but it's a tiny win where you say you're going to do something and you do it. Confidence isn't built overnight. It comes from small, consistent wins that give you proof that you are capable, you are capable of pulling things off. This is why I love the practice of exercise, daily exercise, going to the gym or playing your sport, because you're proving to yourself every single day that you are a person that is consistent, that holds to your word, that, hey, I'm going to work out. And you work out and every time you work out, you're reinforcing this idea that you're consistent. So these are tiny wins I'm talking about, just building the confidence that you can do it. And you need to do that in building your business.
4:14 Speaker 01 So don't wait, don't wait until you feel confident to start a business. Your confidence will come when Then you start the business. It's the other way around, okay? When you start moving forward, the confidence will start to grow. Start with small actions that feel manageable for you and build upon that success. Let me give you an example. When I started my first business, I wasn't like immediately confident like, I'm a baller. I can pull this off. I can make any business a success. No, I took small steps like reaching out to my network and securing my first client. I slowly built my website. I started to go to conferences. I started just being around successful people. And that was a baby step to becoming successful myself.
4:57 Speaker 01 So I want you to take an action step to move forward. Take one small action today, whether it's researching your business idea, talking to a potential customer, or creating a simple business plan. Small actions compound into big confidence. If you are curious about how to take a small step and you're looking for ideas, you can go to our worksheets. We've got tons of worksheets like creating a business plan over at 100mba.net/worksheets. It's totally free. Go ahead and grab all our worksheets. Number two, surround yourself with support. This one might be the most important takeaway from today's lesson. I alluded to this earlier, but confidence can grow and shrink depending on who you are around, right?
5:40 Speaker 01 If you surround yourself with people that actually believe in you, that have done what you want to do, have been there already, are already successful, it's going to be natural for you to feel like you could do it. It's going to feel normal, right? For example, if you're around people that work out every day, they're just fitness brats, right? They love going to the gym. They're super healthy. If you just hang out with these people every single day, you don't work out yourself, but eventually you will feel compelled to work out. You're going to feel like this is something I should be doing. Everybody around me is doing this. I feel left out. This becomes your new normal. I experienced this in my journey. I surrounded myself with some amazing people. I moved to a city with great entrepreneurs like New York.
6:24 Speaker 01 That's a little bit of extreme, but you can surround yourself even virtually online or go to conferences or meetups. Go to a coworking space in your area that has other entrepreneurs. And what this does is that it shows you what's possible. I met some people that really inspired me that that made me feel like, oh, I can do this. These people are not so different than me. And they're living these lives that I wish I could have, like having an online business and being able to be financially independent. You know, when I met these people, it was not only inspirational, but it gave me confidence to believe I can do it too. That doesn't happen by accident. You need to take action and you need to surround yourself with the right people. And by the way, surrounding yourself with people that don't do the things that you aspire
7:08 Speaker 01 to do or are not aligned with your goals will actually lower your confidence, will make you feel like you can do it because they can't do it, right? They're not doing it. So then you're thinking, I can't do it either. Here's an action step. There are actually two steps here. Number one, you're going to come out, come out to your friends and family that you are now an entrepreneur. Okay. I now identify as an entrepreneur and I need your support. Share your business idea, your passion for what you're trying to do for the future that you believe you can have with your friends, your family, your mentors, with the people around you, with your community, so they could support you. And if they don't support you, you'll know that you can't spend too much time around them because they're not going to help you get to where you're going. Right?
7:53 Speaker 01 They're going to hinder you from progress. The second action step is you need to find the new people in your life that are going to support you, that are going to help you, that are going to give you the confidence that are already a few steps ahead of you. Right? And they're not that far away. It just means meeting some new people. Going again to meetups, go to meetup.com, go to eventbrite.com in your local area. Meet these people, you know, spend some time, you know, once or twice or three times a month, meeting up with people and you'll be amazed how confident you'll feel because you're around people that are doing what you aspire to do. Number three, learn from others who've done it. Now, hanging out with other people that are successful or where you want to be is one
8:35 Speaker 01 thing, but pulling out the information and learning from their journey is another. Right? When you see other people's journey, you realize they started with doubts just like you, and you learn that their story gives you perspective, right? And it gives you the reassurance and the confidence to grow in your own experience. It also gives you a reality check. It also tells you, hey, I'm learning about this person. And by the way, you can learn about somebody through a book, right? You could read somebody's biography. This is one of the favorite things I like to do is read biographies or watch documentaries, because what you learn is this is this person's journey. This is what they went through. This is what they had to go through to get where they are today. Am I willing to go through that? Am I willing to suffer a little bit and delay gratification?
9:19 Speaker 01 It gives you some perspective, but it also gives you a wake-up call that, hey, this is gonna be tough, and I gotta be ready for that. But the story of being able to be patient enough to go through those tough times and make it out the other side gives you the confidence that you can do it too. Like I mentioned, I love biographies. I read about 50 books a year. If you are interested in reading about what I think of these books, I have book reviews on our website, so you can get a synopsis or get a little summary of what the book's about. You can listen to a whole podcast episode of my must-read review, and you can go over at 100mba.net, and on the top you'll see book reviews. Just click that, and you can search and you can filter by topic.
10:01 Speaker 01 But some of my favorite biographies is Open by Audrey Agassi, Kitchen Confidential by late great Anthony Bourdain, Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger. These books are incredible. They change your perspective on what it takes to be successful. So your action step, pick up a book that you enjoy. Choose one of the books I recommended. Listen to a podcast interview of somebody you look up to and hear their story. Notice how they built confidence over time, and not before they started. It's when they started, they built confidence. Today's episode is supported by Cash App. When it comes to Bitcoin, you may be surprised to learn that it was invented way back in 2008. But you still haven't made the jump to Bitcoin yet? Cash App makes it easy.
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11:32 Speaker 01 Support for today's episode comes from Square. You probably know Square is the thing you tap your card on at your favorite coffee shop, restaurant, salon, or local store. But for the person running that business, Square is a whole lot more than a way to get paid. Square brings the tools you need to run and grow your business together in one system. From payments on appointments, to staff, inventory, sales, and customer relationships. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, detailing cars, running a restaurant, or starting something new. Square keeps your business tools working together so you can focus less on managing the moving parts and more on what's next. And right now, listeners can get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com/go/mba.
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12:25 Speaker 01 Number four, focus on your value, not perfection. A lot of us think that we have to be perfect out the gate, and that's just not true. And it's actually a blessing that you aren't perfect in the beginning, because when you're not perfect and you're just getting started, your audience is small. Not a lot of people are watching. Not a lot of people are viewing your material, your work, or whatever you offer. And that's okay, because you're still refining your craft. You're still refining yourself and your service and your business. And as you grow, you start to get more and more popular, and more people look at it. And at the same time, your work gets better. And I say this to kind of comfort you, because confidence waivers when you aim for perfection. When you think that things have to be perfect, you start to feel bad about yourself, because you'll never be perfect.
13:09 Speaker 01 You're always going to be judging your work, thinking that it has to be perfect. Instead, focus on providing value. Is what you're providing valuable to somebody? Is it helpful in any way than not giving that value? When you concentrate on helping people, and you just focus on that and solving their problems, the fear of not being perfect starts to fade. Don't focus on yourself. Focus on the person you're trying to serve. I realized that my goal wasn't to be perfect, but to be helpful. When I started my software company, Webinar Ninja, I launched the product knowing it wasn't perfect. I knew that I needed to do a lot of work, but I thought to myself, "I got time. Why am I so in a rush? Why don't I just see this as like a 10-year journey? And maybe it's going to be somewhere in the first six months,
13:54 Speaker 01 and the next year it's going to get better, and the year after that it's going to be even better. And that perfect product in my head might get there in a decade." And that's actually exactly what happened. I built Webinar Ninja in 2014. I continued to grow it, improve it, make it the best software possible. And when I say "me," it wasn't just me, of course. I had my co-founder, Nicole. I had a whole team of people working on this product, engineers, designers, salespeople, to copywriters, to customer success, to customer support. But in that 10 years, I'm so proud of what we built. And it was such a remarkable feat that we were acquired by ProProfs. And somebody thought, "Hey, we want to buy this company and take it to the next level." And it was a great moment for me, because I really... Thought that, hey, it actually paid off for me to have a long-term goal to kind of see
14:38 Speaker 01 this as a 10-year journey rather than trying to make it happen within months. And when you think that way, you know that, no, it's not going to be perfect right away. I'm going to work towards perfection in the next 10 years. And of course, when I sold it, it wasn't perfect. You know, nothing's perfect, but that's fine. I love that because it allows you to keep striving. So, action step, shift your mindset to how can I help rather than how can I make this perfect? Start with the value that you can provide today, and then you can refine later. You can improve. You can make it better and better, right? There's no pressure to make it perfect right now, right? So, just keep moving on. And if you need some inspiration, if you want to kind of get a real-life taste of what
15:21 Speaker 01 I'm talking about, go on a site called The Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is a website that takes a snapshot of websites on the web, and you can look up any website and what it looked like in the past. So, you can Google up, like, for example, Google. What did Google look like when it got started? What did Yahoo look like? What did Facebook look like, like, the website, right? What did Airbnb look like? And you'll notice how crude the design is, how ugly it is, frankly, how simple the service was. But it got started somewhere, and it got better and better and improved and iterated over time. Jerome, and everybody who's listening, confidence is built over time, not before you start. Start small.
16:06 Speaker 01 Surround yourself with a supportive community, with people who are on the same journey as you and maybe a few steps ahead of you. Lean into other people's journeys, read about their stories, and focus on providing value and on your customer instead of yourself and trying to be perfect. Remember, confidence grows with every step you take, so you won't become more confident until you take more steps forward. Thanks for tuning into the $100 MBA Show. And again, if you have a question you want to ask on Q&A Wednesday, just go ahead and submit it over at 100mba.net/ q, and we'll answer it right here on Q&A Wednesday. No question. Is disqualified, whether it's a beginner question, a more advanced question, maybe even a personal question that you're struggling with.
16:51 Speaker 01 I'm here to help you. And of course, you can keep it anonymous and just say, anonymous sent this. No worries. I got your back. My whole goal with these types of episodes are to just help you out, help the listeners out, help our community out to make sure that your specific issues, your specific challenges are addressed. I hope this episode gave you some perspective and pushed you towards that confidence you're looking for, to start building that confidence through each step you take. I'm Omar Zenon and I'll see you in the next episode.
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