If you feel like you’re failing or getting nowhere fast, here’s the solution to right the ship

As an entrepreneur who also enjoys a healthy dose of real estate inspiration, I have a guilty pleasure (that I know I share with millions of others): I could binge those “Asking mansion owners what they did to get rich” videos all night long. While I don’t binge them all night, I have given myself permission to watch a few in a row for one easily justifiable reason: They’re educational.

I mean, what’s more informative than pulling back the curtain on an in-depth interview (and home tour) revealing how insanely successful founders we otherwise wouldn’t know about amassed their wealth and built their success?

If you’re anything like me (fellow ambitious and insatiable entrepreneurs out there), I’m guessing you proactively use this newfound knowledge to bolster your own success and earning power, too.

• You take note of the industries you hadn’t even thought of, adding them to your “to-do” list of future opportunities to explore.
• You mentally compare where you are at your age to where they are now, determining if you have time to catch up.
• You build in additional pursuits to your healthily-packed schedule, since you feel that you obviously aren’t doing, learning, or conquering enough — at least not fast enough.

It doesn’t matter if you’re in the idea stages or running multiple profitable businesses; you’re instantly dissatisfied with your progress and game-plan how to level-up ten notches in ten months. That’s when the self-sabotage begins. If any of the above sounded a smidge familiar, read on to course-correct your flailing ship before you capsize altogether.

If I told you I run multiple profitable companies, advise entrepreneurs, and write about half a million or so words a year, between monetized fiction and nonfiction, not including sales copy, you might think that sounds like a lot. It may, but I’ve crafted a schedule into which these diverse pursuits fit nicely. However, that doesn’t leave tons of room for embarking on brand-new projects without shoving other live ventures to the wayside. Unfortunately, I — like many overly ambitious, perpetually dissatisfied entrepreneurs — have succumbed to starfish syndrome all too often (and recently).

What is starfish syndrome, you ask? It’s what happens when a driven, go-getter entrepreneur operates under the fallacy that they have five arms, not two. Thus, they add another goal, skill set, or obligation to their plate, since they weren’t getting “there” (successful) fast enough.

Ironically, if you watch a few dozen interviews with some of the most successful entrepreneurs, many credit one common sentiment as the key to their success and their biggest recommendation: Maintaining one focus.

So many people try to do too much, too fast, and instead end up distracted, derailing the burgeoning progress they deemed “too little” or “too slow”. However, if you really want to build a business, make a million bucks, or impact millions of people, it’s the small steps and bite-sized milestones that will lead you there. Furthermore, they neglect to congratulate themselves for those small wins, so they can barely recognize their own progress enough to amass the encouragement to keep on going. That’s when dissatisfaction, doubt, and distraction rear their ugly heads and plot your derailment.

So many people in the startup world love to push the narratives of “ship early, ship often” and “fail fast”. While that may work for those with a product, a team, outside funding, and the mental stamina to power through a succession of rapid failures on the journey to hopeful profitability, it isn’t actually a surefire plan to success. If you’d like a plan with a much higher batting average, I’d try something like the below:

Step 1. The necessary investment

The most crucial investment to the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey (or the inception of your “next big thing”) isn’t money; it’s time. In particular, it’s time spent studying, learning, and to some degree mastering the one problem you want to solve and how you’ll do so.

Plainly put, sweat equity and augmenting your intellectual market value are two things that can’t be skipped or fast-tracked.

Step 1: Dedicate X hours per week to studying and mastering the problem, task, skill set, solution, or industry.

Step 2. Get experience practicing, mastering, or executing it

This is the part most wantrepreneurs skip in attempt to accelerate their success, and doing so often bites them in the you-know-what. Far too many aspiring founders go straight from learning to selling, with zero real-world practice or experience in the field, in the industry, building connections, meeting customers, and getting their hands dirty.

This could be formal practice, such as shadowing or apprenticing an established expert in your chosen field, or perhaps even taking on a part-time job that allows you to exercise your new skills or expertise. It could also be much more informal, like creating test projects or taking on freelance clients to get your feet wet before officially building out your empire.

Step 2: Dedicate Y hours per week to real-world practicing, mastering, or executing in the industry before officially launching or selling your own services, product, brand, or solution.

Step 3: This is where you do the illogical thing on purpose

If you’re a business-minded person, someone with a finance background, or a recently-minted MBA, jazzed to exercise your business modeling skills on your own venture, you probably want to jump right to the cash flow. You probably want:

• Multiple streams of revenue
• Varied tiers of products and prices
• Recurring revenue opportunities
• Scalable ways to grow sales fast and large

Step 3 is where you stop yourself from going all-in on your fancy financially-steeped business model engineering and instead intentionally build just one small offering. Just one. Forget about scalability. Forget about multiple revenue streams. Forget about different tiers and varied prices. All you want to do here is to build one small, but good offering with slam-dunk potential.

Slam-dunk potential means the possibility of providing your customer a stellar experience that they will want to write home about. Then, actually get them to write about it (as a client reference or testimonial).

Where did you get these step 3 clients? They didn’t come from complex sales sequences, months of SEO traffic build-up, or paid acquisition. They came from your own circle, tapping your existing network of friends, family, and digital connections. They came from word-of-mouth recommendations and cold outreach. They came one-by-one, not all at once.

Step 4. The second illogical decision we have to make in a row

This is where you get to scale, right? Turn on those Facebook ads and watch the sales roll in, huh? Maybe even start building funnels and hiring some full-time salespeople to start taking prospective client calls, perhaps?

Nope. Despite your most gripping instinct to get fancy with marketing and dive right into scaling, that’s not the best move just yet. Instead, step 4 is to repeat step 3. Again and again. Repeat step 3 until you’ve tapped out the readily-available customers in your network and have amassed enough client experience, feedback, and testimonials that you feel confidently ready to face the big-bad-world of strangers and reach the broader market. Once that happens, then you can move onto step 5.

Step 5. There’s only one problem

There’s only one problem you’re solving in step 5: Convince many people at once of the same thing you convinced many people individually.

In steps 3 and 4, you already figured out how to sell this product, service, or solution. Step 5 is just transferring that into a more efficient platform or strategy. If you can master selling one product or service to the masses and provide them an overwhelmingly positive outcome or experience, you can build a successful business. Only then, after mastering step 5, should you return to steps 1 and 2 to begin exploring additional products, revenue streams, opportunities, or industries.

Unfortunately, part of the nature of the entrepreneurial spirit is the unquenchable thirst to do, learn, attempt, and achieve more. With that comes an avalanche of unproductive self-talk that may creep in to hijack your journey. These are the lies you’ll have to fend off:

• You’re going too slow
• You aren’t making enough
• Having just one product is nothing
• You’re worlds away from behemoth CEOs
• You can’t build an empire with tiny steps, sales, and bootstrapped funding

In reality, slow and steady often does win the race. If you measure your milestones and progress in years, not weeks or months, you may be surprised just how far you’ve come. Bill Gates once said “most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten”, and it couldn’t be more relevant.