my top 5 business mistakes

Summary

the five biggest business mistakes I made in the last decade. each one cost me time, money, or both. write your own list. you will avoid the repeat.

1. waited too long to monetize. I had an audience and a clear value-add for a year before I asked anyone for money. you learn nothing about your business until someone pays.

2. missed the YouTube wave. life got in the way and I told myself “later.” later was 5 years later. circumstances are real, but most “later” decisions are excuses.

3. took on too much. too many products, too many partnerships, too many side projects. focus is the rarest discipline in entrepreneurship and the most valuable.

4. failed to lead. for a few years I ran my company like a friend group. it felt nice. it cost us speed, decisions, and accountability. lead first, be friendly second.

5. let the team define the brand. the company drifted toward whatever each employee thought we should be. the brand has to come from the founder, period.

read the list. write yours. don’t repeat them. try harder.

Transcript

introduction to the podcast and today’s topic: top business mistakes

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe, if you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Have you ever made a mistake? I’m sure you’re perfect and you never have, but I have, so I’m going to be going over some of those mistakes today. This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and I want to dive right into it.

So I’m gonna be going over the top five mistakes I’ve made in business over the last decade plus, and this list is not exhaustive. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but when I sat down to prep for this episode, these five came top of mind real fast. I’m talking, I wrote down the first five within like 10 or 15 seconds, they were all written on the page.

mistake #1: waiting too long to monetize the business

So I figured it’d be easy to record an episode on these because I’m always thinking about them. And I recommend you do the same, whether you are, have made a mistake you’re aware of, or you’ve had a setback, journal it, write it down, because these are the lessons that we learned from and helped us press forward and not make the same mistake again.

So I’m gonna go over these quickly. Again, this is not an exhaustive list, and also I’m not gonna go into every single little detail about these mistakes. Maybe I can do an episode on each one, in all honesty, I probably could, but I’m gonna go over the top five and give you the highlights. The first mistake I ever made was waiting.

And what I mean by waiting was, I waited a long time, too long to try and monetize what I was doing. So I was doing the online business thing when I started, it was part time. I was collecting leads, I was writing articles, I was doing all these things. But then, as that started to grow, I had some followers, I had an email list that I could launch to, I could sell things to, I realized, I was like, to me, I thought I had this ace in the hole.

mistake #2: missing out on maximizing the youtube channel

I thought I could sit around and wait, but I waited a long time, I waited like a year and a half, two years before I really launched anything of significance. And what I realized was, while it was very successful at that time for me, given my standards, given my motivation, it was not easy, and then there was a lot of learning.

And I could have been doing that learning like a year and a half before I did it. I could have just started, made the messy mistakes, and adjusted. But instead, I waited too long. So it really was just a setback. So waiting to monetize, if I had to, if I had to like put that down as like one thing.

So I waited too long to try and make money. So that’s the first thing, first, just because of the biggest reason there is not because I’m upset I missed out on making money, it’s that I wasted a year and a half of lessons learned. I could be ahead a year and a half more. Now I do think everything happens for a reason.

mistake #3: taking on too much and losing focus

But ultimately, I do think I could have learned some of these mistakes faster. The second one is missed opportunities. This one is specific to YouTube. I started a YouTube channel before it was the Garage Gym Athlete YouTube channel, which isn’t massive by any means, we’ve never had a great focus on YouTube.

But I wanted to start focusing on YouTube when it was under the end of three fitness brand. And I started to do these videos that were doing really well just by themselves. And this was back 2016, 2017, something along those lines, it was a great time to get started in YouTube. And I had a great setup.

I was in Texas, my brother was a cameraman, I did the video editing. Anyway, it was great. And I was picking up on the trends. And I was like, this is a great time to start YouTube. And the videos were good. And like I said, I was getting traction. But then I moved from Texas to North Carolina. And I just did not have that, like, I just didn’t have the setup to create good videos anymore.

mistake #4: failure to lead effectively

Ultimately, I could still do the video editing, I tried making some videos with a tripod, we had Emily was super pregnant and had with Eleanor and had two young ones, so she couldn’t be my cameraman, I lost my cameraman, I couldn’t really afford to have a cameraman come out. So anyway, I just abandoned the whole thing.

Now the business still grew, and it did well. But I missed the YouTube opportunity. And I could, I could always like start that now, right. But I had started it like at the right time, I was doing the right content, and then it just veered off, mainly due to life circumstances. And I think if I had stuck with it, that would have gone really well.

And so that’s just, that’s on me for missing the opportunity. But if you ever have like an opportunity pop up, don’t let simple hurdles like those are so like looking back on it, those are such easy things to overcome. And again, I have been successful in spite of missing out on an opportunity like that.

mistake #5: letting employees dictate the brand direction

And it’s fine. But I do wish I could, I would have seen that one through and I wouldn’t have quit so early on that one, just because of a few simple hurdles that could have easily been overcome. The third one, this one is what I run into often today, it’s a very hard lesson to learn from and to make the necessary adjustments.

And that is taking on too much or not enough focus on one thing. And I’m feeling that a lot right now. Like I’ve taken on too much, I tried to have too many income streams. And it’s gotten better as I’ve been able to hire people to focus on things, delegate those, all of it, it’s gotten better. But still, I have a tendency when I get more free time to take on more and to take on too much.

It’s just in my nature. And I always have to fight for focus and fight for productivity on what I want to focus on what’s the most important. And like I said, I’m even feeling that now I feel like I have a little bit too much on my plate. But now I’m hyper aware of it. And I know when it’s happening and how to get out of it.

recap and closing thoughts on learning from mistakes and embracing a growth mindset

Like I said, this one just keeps coming back, taking on too much. And this is like taking on too much like big projects. I did an episode recently on like how to juggle multiple companies. It’s more in that vein, like doing too much, because there is a mental bandwidth cost there that is unspoken. So that’s one thing that I’m looking to clear up this year.

I want to get incredibly focused, which might mean I have to make some really tough decisions over the course of this year. And then of course, I will keep you updated as that happens. Now number four, a pretty big one, and that’s failure to lead. I’ve been I haven’t had this happen a lot, but I have had it happen.

And that’s just you get in a position where things are comfortable, you’re comfortable with your employees. And you cease being a leader at some point, you feel more like a peer. It’s a very weird situation to be in. But when everyone feels like they’re on the same level, and everyone feels like they have the same decision making ability, and you’re not actually leading, it becomes very problematic.

That is a mistake I made only once. This is not a mistake that keeps coming back. I won’t make that mistake again. But I have failed to lead in the past and it cost me a good amount. Now the last one, number five is very specific to me, but I want to throw it out there just for anybody who could be in a similar situation.

And that is letting employees dictate the brand. This has happened to me before, and I will not let it happen again. But ultimately, when you do have this tight team, you can employees can start to dictate what the brand is. At first, when this was happening, it’s not like I was unaware of it. I was like, I was more thinking, Oh, this is cool.

It’s part of the company culture. Got a little bit of this person’s flavor, this person’s flavor, and then yeah, my own vibe here. And that’s what I’m doing is forming a company culture. But that’s okay. When we’re talking about company culture behind the scenes, but we’re talking about forward facing brand.

I had a very specific way. I wanted something to look very specific way. I wanted something to feel and it wasn’t being achieved because I was letting employees dictate what the outward facing brand was again, a mistake that I let happen that I won’t let happen again. But I do think that also cost me in, it cost me a lot in time and trying to switch what I wanted a brand to look like.

So anyway, letting employees dictate the four facing brand, and that one can really be like a bullet underneath failure to lead because I should have been more outspoken, but I didn’t feel like it was a failure to lead at that point in time. Because like I said, I thought I was building the team. I thought I was building the culture, but ultimately culture is behind the scenes.

Brand is in front, it’s on stage, right? So those are my top five mistakes that came to mind very quickly. I could do multiple iterations of this podcast and I probably will, but hopefully you got something out of this podcast. Hopefully you can avoid some of those and if you have any questions about any of these specific mistakes, you want to discuss them more, be sure to sign up for the newsletter.

You can go to jerred.com, J-E-R-E-D.com, sign up for the newsletter, reply to any email I send you, and we can discuss any of these mistakes. So today what I’m going to do is I’m going to tell myself to try harder.