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Owning a successful enterprise isn’t always as glamourous as it is portrayed on social media. The reality is, creating a business from the ground up is an extremely difficult endeavor, that might take years of blood, sweat, and tears to get off the ground.
It took the most famous innovators of the past century a decade for their ideas to gain traction. Names that come to mind, include the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk.
The life of an entrepreneur is always going to be filled with doubt, often from the people who know nothing about the industry. There will always be skeptics, who’ve never left their comfort zone, that will try to give “advice” to discourage people who are trying to achieve more daring endeavors.
The key is whether you can differentiate between helpful feedback, that can help improve your product, from what is just noise. Building confidence in yourself and for what you worked hard on, can help you mitigate the negativity that will inevitably come your way if you achieve success at a certain thing.
Christian Mikkelsen and Rasmus Mikkelsen, also known as the Mikkelsen Twins, have dealt with the polarities of extreme success and learned what the word truly means to them. Far from just mass wealth creation, their focus has shifted from the minds of spontaneous, free-spirited boys, into the serious entrepreneurs and fathers they are today.
As they gained extreme traction in their online education business, Publishing Life, they’ve learned how to navigate challenges in business, as well shift the focus from purely financial success to supporting their own families and the lives of others.
Here is how minimizing noise and adopting a laser focus on the business will help you take it to the next level.
Always optimize your mindset to focus on the positives.
There’s a difference between blind optimism and constructive optimism. Being blindly optimistic is when you ignore all the feedback and risks and do things only according to the hope that it “might work”. Being constructively optimistic means that you remain positive even when there are hurdles in your path to creating a successful business. This means remaining diligent about identifying the parts that are working and not working for the business.
The Mikkelsen Twins know firsthand what it is like to pursue a seemingly crazy idea with zero dollars in their pockets. They reflect on having to move back with their parents at one point to focus on their vision of creating this digital publishing empire. And “that’s something to be really proud of”, the Mikkelsens comments. It’s more important to look at the “positive changes, and not the 1% of people that are upset that it didn’t work for them, because it’s not going to work for everyone if you don’t want to put in the work”.
The Twins have focused on engineering and perfecting the program over the years so that it can help their clients achieve success upon following through on all the steps. It is ultimately the responsibility of the clients to remain accountable to their journey.
Although to most people, giving up three years of “fun” and partying on weekends might seem extreme— the Twins saw it as a short-term sacrifice to build a successful business for themselves, and now their families. The positives that came out of this are the tens and thousands of lives they were able to influence through their educational programs; helping people get out of their 9-5 jobs, and pursuing passive income streams from online publishing.
Perfecting the Product Through Multiple Iterations
The offer is what is going to determine how successful your business is. Having a clear, concise, and well-engineered product that will solve your client’s problems is essential. A common pitfall that entrepreneurs face is letting themselves get distracted by new business opportunities rather than focusing on improving what they already have. The truth is, it takes more effort to build a new product than it would be to improve an existing product. Having a strong customer experience coupled with a stellar product will lead to lifetime clients and a well-established brand in the long run.
The Mikkelsen Twins used feedback to their advantage. When clients weren’t getting the results from the programs, the twins researched what the primary roadblocks were and worked arduously to resolve them. This eventually led to them hiring a team of coaches, to help walk the clients through their biggest fears and challenges. Christian states that “we’ve always reinvested into the product itself to make it a better and better experience for the students. And it’s because of that, we’ve been able to stay at the top”. This is an example of how you can utilize critique, to create a better product that stands above your competitors.
Having a Tunnel Vision on the End Goal
When your vision is compelling enough, it will steer you to taking the appropriate actions to achieve it. Mitigating all kinds of distractions becomes pivotal to help you stay on course. This might mean forgoing temporary luxuries to invest in your company.
To build the company from “the ground up”, the Mikkelsen Twins had to invest countless hours into their business. The key to their success was diligence and consistency; and never getting complacent on their product, even when success started pouring in. The way Christian works is “how you define tunnel vision, he does one thing at a time and can’t do anything else… until it’s 100% and perfect”.
The product speaks for itself—with 45 hours of training about everything from the self-publishing process to mindset training and on-demand coaching sessions, it aims to help anyone, even those without a lick of writing experience, to become their own self-publishing CEOs through the program.
The widespread success of their clients have translated into the Mikkelson Twins being able to sustain Publishing Life as a full-time business with several employees. Now their focus is on how to get others into the right framework and implement the steps to achieve exactly what they have.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, creating a successful business is not for the faint-hearted. It requires you to step out of your comfort zone, work incessantly to perfect a product or service that will bring value to people. Mitigate distractions and focus on your business’s key value factor and you’ll be closer to building the business of your dreams.
