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#271 The Mindset Principles That Grew my Business to $2M+

• Darren Lee

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What separates rich entrepreneurs from everyone else struggling. It's not strategy, it's not resources, it's none of what you actually think. It's the mindset behind how they've built their business, how they've built their empire and what they're doing to sustain that into the future. I've worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs. We've managed many of these entrepreneurs' business and we've seen a clear differentiation between the winners and the losers, and the reality is these people are one degree off, but one degree off can actually end up in tragedy for your business. A plane that is one degree off doesn't land on the target. In fact, it completely misses it. And I know that from experience because I was in that exact same position for many years. When I started my podcast and my content business. I started with bare bones, nothing A simple $60 microphone from Amazon with a money back guarantee, because I truly believed at that time I was going to return it and I wasn't going to make it. Fast forward to today, our content business generates over $220,000 every single month and it's not based on a funky strategy or a new resource or a new way of doing things. It's actually the principles and methodology that I've lived my life by for many years and how we've implemented this in our own content business, and today I want to share with you the eight mindset shifts that have completely transformed our business and will transform your content business as well. These same principles are what some of the biggest creators also use. People like Dan Co, iman Ghazi, alex Ramosi have all based their entire business around core principles. That makes them distinguishable and makes them a category of one.

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But here's the harsh reality of the scenario. You can have all the tricks in the book, but if you don't have the right mindset, you're not going to break through, and the reality is people need to stop making small errors that actually compound over time and start making small incremental changes that add up over time. And what I truly want to help you with today is the ability to think for yourself. Henry Ford put it best, saying the hardest job in the world to do is to think, and that's why so few people actually go and do it. Most people aren't thinking. They're actually reacting to the scenario. They're waiting for the perfect strategy or the perfect business model or all the circumstances to come together, and that's actually a losing strategy which will actually not help your business or your content to actually take off. So these are the actual principles that I've lived by for the past couple of years, and it starts with something that's even more logical than just mindset on its own, which is always follow the money.

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And I wanna tell you a little story about a bank robber in the 1900s in Chicago. So this guy was going around and he was robbing loads of banks and he was robbing a lot of mini banks here, taking money here and taking money there and constantly doing everything he can to evade the police. And after several years, the police finally caught up to him and arrested him and they put him into an investigation room and they sit him down and ask him one simple question why did you rob the banks? And his response was well, that's where the money is. So instead of trying to invent where you can find money for your business, instead of trying to put a square peg through a circle hole, you can simply do what this bank robber did and follow the money, follow the flow of money, and that's been a huge ethos and principle behind everything we do. If you're building content and it's on LinkedIn and your prospects are on LinkedIn, go to LinkedIn. If you're selling to the Twitter bros, go to Twitter. Don't try to put a square picture or circle hole and simply follow the money. It is the easiest, simplest way for you to live in alignment with what your business is doing, because it's right in front of you 24-7. And this wasn't even just me. For a lot of our clients in our content, business Voix, we've used this to track all the performance across the major channels and it just makes sense. Corporate clients go to LinkedIn, the online business bros might go to Instagram or Twitter, or even the corporate clients might even want to go to email, but you simply go where your prospects are and this is a universal law across all businesses.

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The second shift, which truly changed everything for me, is a shift between a finite mindset and an infinite mindset. I come from an individual sport background, running 100 meter track for a lot of my early life, and this was a huge finite game. You were always viewed as the loser until you are the winner, and the framing around this was in the finite game. It's based on anxiety, fear, stress, and this is even true from a logical perspective, because if you look at, let's say, a football game or any sort of competitive sport, there's a set time limit 80 minutes, 90 minutes, 120 minutes, it doesn't matter. The finite time means that it brings on stress, anxiety and pressure, whereas I moved from that mindset to an infinite mindset, which inspires creativity, enthusiasm and actually the desire to do really cool and fun things. That's allowed me to be much calmer within my business. It's allowed me to try more creative things within the business and also explore different things with our products, our services, our pricing, even our clients, because we are operating from a position that we don't need this to be successful. Today, we can plan much more for a longer time horizon because I truly, I'm truly building an infinite game. This is not something I want to do over the course of two years and then sail off into the wind, even though I live in Bali. What I actually want to do is I want to play this game forever, and switching out that mindset from this needs to work instead of I want this to work has completely shifted how I view business and how we've grown our company to multiple six figures a month Now.

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This mindset shift may come to a surprise to you, but it's understanding the world of constraints and constraint theory. So every system that is designed has a constraint, in some way, shape or an other. Let's look at it your time has a constraint on this planet, your energy has a constraint and your business model has a constraint. There is only so much that your business, time and energy can produce on a daily basis. And then there's also the internal constraints. These are the limitations that we put on ourselves, these are the stories we tell ourselves. These are the things we tell ourselves we cannot do. These are the limiting beliefs and all of the unnecessary things that we tell ourselves that are not possible, which hold us back in our businesses. This was a huge thing for me to understand, because the goal is to always spearhead the constraint. Wherever the constraint is, you want to go towards it, especially as the business owner or the CEO. If there's a bottleneck in the business, if there's a bottleneck even in your mindset, we need to go towards that, and I felt that the entire period from growing our company from a tiny small agency into a media company, growing the media company into an education business, it was always around eliminating the constraints, and that started with me.

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My good friend, tim Stoddard, once looked at our business. I think we were making like $13,000 a month. We were grinding it out. I was doing everything sales, marketing, fulfillment, accounting, payroll the whole thing we were doing. And he looked at it and asked me a simple question. He said do you think that you're better than everyone else in the world to be able to do all these things? And it was obvious I obviously wasn't. I was taking too much things on, I had too much of a scarcity approach. I believed that I was maybe better than the scenario, and he allowed me to open up my eyes to see yes, there is a constraint here. The constraint is me.

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The constraint isn't necessarily the business, and that's when I made this shift to understand this. And even where we're at now, which is many, many steps ahead of that, the business is 20 times bigger than what it was back then. There is still a constraint that we need to work on every single day, so it never eliminates. It's how the world quite literally functions. But understanding that allows you to change your mindset around this. Instead of viewing it as a drag or a task, you view it as an opportunity to get to the next level within your business. And the reality is smart entrepreneurs use this to their advantage. When Jerry came to Vox and he joined the incubator, his show was super stagnant, it was super low, it wasn't really moving and he was considering actually canceling and just giving up on the podcast. But within a few short weeks we had 20 extra growth of his podcast. We had actually given him all the money back through sponsorships. He signed long-term yearly deals with brands as well and he was able to basically turn his podcast into a revenue generating machine for his business and for his podcast specifically. And how we did this was reshaping the mindset as to how he positions it and he was a constraint so overcoming that allowed him to get to the next level.

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The next point is really about when you're one degree off, everything can actually fall apart. Because one degree off, you might think I'm pretty close. Right, I'm going to work it out, I'm pretty close. But if you're one degree off, you could actually consistently end up not getting the result you want. You can go through the same six months, the same 12 months, the same decade, and the only thing that's getting older is you, because you haven't made that change. And that's the big difference between the companies that crush it and truly take off versus the entrepreneurs who just sit there wishing that their business takes off.

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Take an example for a customer, andrew. So Andrew's a young guy, 19 years old, joining our program. He's making 6K a month. Within a few short months we'd made a few small tweaks to his offer, to his content, to his positioning, and that skyrocketed from 6K up to 24K a month, exactly for exercise of his actual business. And the real logic was he wasn't anywhere more successful or smarter or more intelligent. We just gave him small directional changes and that actually opened up his whole new world to where he can get to. And now the 4x jump from where he is right now to 100k a month is again one degree up. It's not 10 changes. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. Business in essence has never changed. We just need to lean into the actual components that have the biggest result for you.

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And I'm telling you, none of this really works unless you truly understand the next point, which is needs versus wants in your life. If you go through your life and you need it to work, I need this to work, I need this to work you actually begin to repel the thing that you really truly need. Again, it activates the scarcity part of her brain, the anxiety part of her brain, because we're focused on making this happen right now. It's a need mentality. It's quite needy. Think of it from the context of dating. You wouldn't go up to a girl and say about how much you like them and, as a result, you'd actually repel them.

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In opposite to that, you want it to happen. You want to build a business, you want to build a podcast, you want to build a content business, and when you want it, you don't need to explain it to anyone. You can want what you want without having to explain it to anybody. That's the beauty of wants versus needs. And when you want it, it almost gravitates towards you. It's a flow of energy. It's how energy is, like transmuted between one person and another. Because like transmuted between one person and another, because over time, these things start moving towards you, because you set up the right systems, you deliberately put the actions in place to be able to scale, to grow, and then you actually want that to happen. This is the fastest way to stop acting from the survival instinct within us that we need to push, push, push, really work as hard as possible just to make sure this works, and I honestly think that I've never worked less in the business over the past couple of months when we've had our most growth, because I've just enabled it to happen. And this can happen all the way from someone business that's 0k a month to 10k a month to 50k a month, all the way up to 100k a month is that we need to find the right areas to put our energy into and we want it to happen. When I run my team calls, when I meet my team, put our energy into and we want it to happen when I run my team calls, when I meet my team, when I meet my leadership team, when I meet all of our clients and customers. I don't have to do it. I don't need to do it, I want to do it. I might fly across to Dubai or meet clients in New York, and I want to do that. I want to build a stronger relationship with it and, as a result, they see that energy reflected back to them and then they want it more, and that's the beauty. We've ended up having long-term partnerships. We've built products together. We've built many different aspects within their business, because we look at it from a position of creativity, enthusiasm, intrigue, and we truly want to do this together.

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The next point comes straight off wants and needs, which is the gap and the gain. You know, when you're speaking to that entrepreneur, that business owner, he's getting out of his Porsche, he has his phone in his hand, he's dialing someone and he's super stressed all the time he is operating from the position of the gap. What he doesn't actually have, okay, it's always the gap. He doesn't have the Lamborghini, he doesn't have the girl, he doesn't have the 10 million in the bank account and, as a result, he's making decisions and not truly grateful for where he's at. But the people that are operating from the gain is completely different. They look at it as what else can be gained in the process of building out these businesses, these systems, whatever. Even they're learning. And then, when they want to scale up and they want to learn from other people and they're investing in education, they look at it from the upside.

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What is it that I can gain from this? What aspects can I add into my life to truly get more out of what I have? Versus looking at it from the gap, the gap comes from deeply inside us, which is what we're lacking. Okay, and I felt this for many years. I had the lack. I had the financial lack. I had even things like my physique when I was training, when I was younger. I wasn't big enough and I wasn't lean enough and I wasn't fast enough as a sprinter. We're always looking for the position of what we don't have. Now we can reframe it into what can we gain from this experience.

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So before you start you know, starting a new offer or running a podcast or investing in education you have to consider what's on the upside here, because you're only limited to the downside, depending on how you frame the scenario. Oh, I've spent this money or I've wasted this time. That's only comes into existence if you literally allow it to, if you allow it to be say this is the gap and this is where I'm lacking. Then you will begin to fall into that category. And the two remaining points the last one in particular you're going to really enjoy. But the second last point is all around focus, and Stephen Covey said the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. People get shiny object syndrome. People always look at the new opportunity, the new thing. They move industry, they move niche.

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We've built our business from zero to multi six figures a month by just focusing on one thing, which is podcasts. We grow, monetize podcasts. We do it in different ways. We do it for people, we do it with people, we coach people and we're there as a strategic partner, but we do the same thing. We grow and monetize podcasts and we never leave sight of what that core essence is and what we want to see differently in the world.

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The second you start going off and trying to fund your new fun activity with your main thing is the second you start losing focus. And if you think about what focus is is that we have a limited amount of energy within the day. We all are given, let's say, a hundred energy for the day. And the second we start giving that to other people, or the second we start giving that to other businesses or other products and other offers is a second. We start diminishing it and then you realize that life gets in the way. You might have children, you might have a partner, you might have friends, you might have a social life. That diminishes your energy. So with the limited amount of energy that you're left, you need to put that somewhere that generates revenue. So where are you going to put that? Are you going to put it into one business? Are you going to put it to 17 different things and drop ship this and sell this and do that. That's not going to work. It's just plain and simple. But you're never going to make it if you're just going to do seven different things, whereas when you have your focus narrow focus in on one specific area, it is inevitable that it will work, because you'll also realize the depth of actual mastery that's involved.

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The deeper you go into something the deeper I've gone into podcasting the more I've realized oh, my speech can improve, the way that I set up the cameras can improve, the guests can improve, my intros can improve. Everything starts, starts to adjust and it becomes almost like an observation. If you imagine an art gallery, I see all the pieces of art as if they're all pieces of my content. It's like I can improve this, I can change this, I can review this, and I'm speaking to my leadership team frequently about what aspects can we improve, where can we get better? And even last night I even spoke to them about what can we do better with our content, where can we change it? Because that's the reality of focus to get right, that you truly need to focus on one specific area.

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And the last point is something that's very true to my heart, very close to my heart, is rough roads and smooth, smooth roads and rough. I have personally seen people who have taken the easy route in life, have taken the easy job, have gone into the nine to five, have taken it easy, have struggled, have said, oh, it's the government's fault, or it's this person's fault, or it's this fault. They've taken the easy path, they've taken a smooth road and that ended up a rough ending to them at the end of their life. Whereas I've taken the rough road, I've left the job in fintech and finance. I was making $100,000 a year and I went out to build my content business and I took the rough path and I truly struggled through a lot of my 20s and now we're getting into the path where we're slowly starting to hit the ground running.

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And, guys, I haven't even started with our plan, with our content, where we want to go to in the future, but it all goes back to rough roads and smooth, smooth roads and rough.

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If you're thinking I might just take the easy path, it will invariably come back to bite you 100%.

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So I want you to think if you are serious about building a content business and you really want to get it to the next level.

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We've helped hundreds of podcasters and entrepreneurs do this within the incubator to refine their positioning, improve their content, build scalable systems and give them a single offer that goes from zero to six figures a year. And if that sounds like you, feel free to schedule in a call down below with our team, we're happy to show you a full demo call of what it looks like inside the incubator and what it truly takes to build a content business, and we're only working with a lot of serious entrepreneurs, so we want to make sure that it's a good fit for us as well as it's a good fit for you. But before we finish up, I can't stress to note that everything that you want is just one degree off for the better and for the worst. So the question is are you going to change course and are you going to improve the mindset required and take the actions that you need to truly build the business and life that you want?