Always learn from other people's mistakes, not your own - it is much cheaper that way!
Mentoring
Business Owner / CEO / Consultant / Mentor
It was the first week of January, on paper my business was scaling at an exciting rate. We had gone from six employees to fourteen in the space of six months, had just signed a new office lease and had landed new work with some of the most exciting startup businesses in Australia.
From the outside looking in we were crushing it, however, this couldn’t have been further from the truth.
I was sitting down on a Monday morning, staring at our cash in the bank account, our overdue invoices, and our accounts receivables — things just weren’t adding up.
By my calculations the business had only one and a half weeks worth of cash remaining, just enough to run the next payroll and clear some well overdue bills. For a split second I thought, fuck, this is it, we’re done. We’ve grown too quickly, spent too aggressively and we’re over…
Luckily enough, I had someone to turn to in this instance, my business mentor Greg. In a haste, I called him and scheduled a coffee catch up. Within thirty minutes, we were sipping flat whites and dissecting the situation like two detectives on a cold case.
Greg shared many of his experiences of when he’d been in similar positions, how he’d overcome those challenges and how he built robust systems to always stay on top of his own personal and business finances. I frantically took notes and asked clarifying questions. After an hour and a half, we had a plan and I vowed to never be in that position again. Following this, we completely overhauled our financial systems, reporting tools, reset our marketing plan, refined our sales goals and attacked the situation.
Why do I share this story? Well, even though I am older and wiser than I was that fateful January, to date I still meet with at least one of my business mentors every single week. Mentors are so important for growth, they have walked in your shoes, made mistakes of their own and come through on the other side.
Always learn from other people's mistakes, not your own - it is much cheaper that way!
