Tag / entrepreneurship

by Nathan Coumbe

Impresarios make softball happen

The MLB is investing in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, a long-overdue organization for the United States’ outstanding softball players.

I’m sharing this article here, not because the MLB is investing in it, but for a different reason entirely.

As I read this, all I could think was, “A group of impresarios made this happen.”

Impresario: someone who organizes something, who brings the right people together to connect and make things happen that need to happen.

A group of people (mostly strong, driven women) said, “Why isn’t there a professional softball league? Why aren’t softball players making a career of this after dominating in college like all the men in MLB get to do?”

So what did they do? They made it happen themselves. Eventually, other groups, such as ESPN and MLB, took notice and decided to invest. But that isn’t the impressive part.

What’s impressive is that a small group of people decided that something that didn’t exist should exist. And they made it happen, without permission, by bringing the best and the brightest softballers together to build something great.

This is the work of an impresario.

This is leadership.

by Nathan Coumbe

25 free business ideas you can steal

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I challenged myself to come up with as many business ideas as I could in 10 minutes that met the criteria I laid out. Here’s what I came up with. Feel free to steal any of them and start your own business.

  1. Offer training content creation services to businesses with a small (or non-existent) L&D department.
  2. Become a health coach and offer sessions in-person or online.
  3. Lead in-home personal training sessions for clients (a concierge training offering). As a bonus, help them set up a minimum viable home gym to meet their health goals.
  4. If you’re a clear and persuasive writer, offer your writing services to small businesses or the marketing departments of larger organizations.
  5. Help other people land new jobs, negotiate raises, or change careers by offering your services as a career coach. This one, you could offer as a no-fee upfront service and take a small percentage of their new salary as payment (like a talent agent).
  6. Become a health and wellness consultant for large companies and design wellness coaching packages for their employees as part of their HR offerings.
  7. Start a green lawn care service, using only electric tools to keep people’s yards looking nice while lowering the carbon footprint of that work (I’m sure you’ve seen all the e-lawn tools if you have a Costco membership).
  8. Become a piano tuner. You can learn how for less than $1,500 bucks, and you’ll have almost no competition as it’s a dying trade.
  9. Become a drum tech for churches. Have you ever seen how beat up and terrible-sounding those drum sets are?
  10. Here’s an easy one: teach music lessons. Specialize in helping students prepare for, and win, auditions. There’s a lot of scholarship money to be had for musicians in college (and the military).
  11. Become a tutor in whatever field you know best. Take the summers off or offer “preparatory” tutoring when school is out.
  12. Become a writing coach for K-12 students. This may be the most important skill students will learn today as AI proliferates and the skill that makes us human is supplanted by garbage.
  13. Create and sell a really helpful e-book that teaches someone how to do a very specific task or skill.
  14. Create an online course on a topic or skill you know well. You can put it up on an e-learning site like Teachable, or you can offer it as an “email correspondence” course like Ryan Holiday does with his excellent Stoic challenges.
  15. Shuttle seniors to doctor’s appointments. You could charge them a low price by the mile or see if senior care homes might pay you for the service.
  16. Start a “walking school bus” for the children in your neighborhood. Children need more movement in their days, and parents might be willing to have a responsible adult or two get their kids to school in the morning while also working off some of that kiddo energy.
  17. Here’s one I’ve been thinking about: create a membership group to organize people around citizenship and political activism.
  18. Offer pet grooming services in your town.
  19. Along the same lines, wash and detail cars.
  20. Here’s another: buy a sponge, bucket, squeegee, and cleaning solution, then sell your services as a window washer to businesses and restaurants in your city.
  21. This one is big where I live: powerwash houses and driveways.
  22. One more handyman idea: paint houses.
  23. Know how to promote the work of others? Become a marketing consultant for small businesses. Trust me, they all need help getting the word out.
  24. Are you a decent cook? Deliver home-cooked meals to customers who don’t have time to cook for themselves every night.
  25. Speaking of cooking, why not offer healthy cooking classes to small groups looking to improve their health and that of their families?

10 minutes, 25 business ideas. I don’t know that I could pull all of them off, but some of them seem promising.

The hard part is picking one and being brave enough to face rejection. Regardless of what you choose, you’ll get a lot of no’s.

But if you’re starting your own thing, that comes with the territory. Don’t let it deter you!

by Nathan Coumbe

The secret approach to bootstrapping

You can be an entrepreneur: someone who builds something big, hires lots of people to do the work, and gets a ton of start-up money from investors.

Or you can be a freelancer: a skilled craftsperson who does high-quality work directly for clients.

But there’s a third option: bootstrapping.

To bootstrap a business is to find a group of customers with a problem who are so willing for you to solve it that they will pay you up front to build the business that will solve it for them.

And the secret to bootstrapping that many up-and-coming business people don’t know is that you don’t necessarily have to have the solution to the problem.

You simply have to see the problem, empathize with the people who have it, and trust yourself to know that you can and will figure out a solution that works.1

Why does this approach matter? Because smart, solution-oriented people often get so bogged down in the details of how to solve a problem that they never do the hard work of finding customers with a problem that needs solving.

So, find people who need help first, then figure out how to solve the issue.

(H/t to Seth Godin and the folks over at Purple Space)

  1. Don’t lie to people and tell them you can solve their problem, then take their money and run. That’s not bootstrapping – that’s a con. ↩︎
by Nathan Coumbe

Helping people get what they want

Zig Ziglar had a saying:

“You can have everything in life you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.”

And as many times as I’ve heard it, it’s always meant, “help people get more stuff.”

That’s what 150 years of industrialism has taught us—what people want is more stuff. And that’s what we’ve built a lot of our businesses around. 

But I’ve realized his saying can (and does) mean so much more. Think of all the people who don’t want “stuff”. Instead, they want:

  • Clean water to drink
  • Access to quality, useful education
  • Freedom from fear
  • An end to diseases that plague them
  • Roofs over their heads
  • Fewer catastrophic effects from climate change
  • A way out of insurmountable debt
  • Hope for their futures and that of their children

What if we focused entrepreneurship on ideas like those instead of selling more stuff?

What would a business like that look like for for someone like you?

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by Nathan Coumbe

Begging to pay you

Instead of relying on third-party sponsors for your work or your art, why not rely on the people who benefit from it instead?

Rather than having advertisers on your podcasts…

Or big publishers for your book…

Or a major label for your music…

…you instead did work that people loved, needed, and wanted so much that they begged you to let them pay you for it?

What would your work look like if you took that approach?

by Nathan Coumbe

First, put wood on the fire

Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Earl Nightingale:

“It’s foolish to sit in front of the fireplace and tell it ‘first give me some heat. Then I’ll give you some wood.’“

Of course, it’s a little foolish to talk to your fireplace at all. But that’s not the point.

Why would you expect the fire to warm you up with no wood? That’s as foolish as thinking people will buy from you before you’ve created value for them.

You have to help people before they’ll give you money…

You can’t get warm if you don’t put wood on the fire.

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by Nathan Coumbe

The messy middle

Any worthwhile pursuit has a messy middle. In his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller talks about what it’s like to cross a stretch of water. We leave the shore and eventually arrive on the opposite side.

But in between those two points, we have “the hard work of the middle.” That’s where the journey becomes a slog, the motions seem repetitive, and the effort seems useless.

Pursuing a goal, starting a business, losing weight… All of these pursuits have that same hard work to be done in the middle.

In almost every case, we start strong and make decent, even quick, progress. But soon after we hit a point where we lose focus and motivation.

“Why am I at the gym for the third time this week? I just want to go home…”

“I really just want to pig out on pizza, beer, and ice cream. I don’t feel like cooking…”

We get frustrated, hit plateaus, and our motivation wanes.

It’s when we hit that point we have to rely on our “why”.

Our reason for pursuing whatever it is has to be strong enough to get us through the messy middle. Seth Godin calls this “the dip” in his book of the same name.

Without a strong why, without a reason to keep pushing through, we burn out and quit.

Not only does our motivation have to be strong, but we have to revisit it every day. Zig Ziglar had a saying about this rule:

“Motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it every day.”

First, identify a strong reason why you want to pursue something.

Then make time every day to review it. Keep your motivation front of mind.

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by Nathan Coumbe

3 Easy Tips to Help You Get Unstuck

Being stuck is rough. It can leave you with feelings of hopelessness, frustration, or even anger.

Maybe you’re in a dead-end job you can’t stand…

Or your money situation is quickly moving from bad to worse…

Maybe you don’t even know why you’re feeling stuck. All you know is you are.

So how do you break the logjam?

The good news is there are a few things you can do now that’ll help you get unstuck:

  1. Learn Something New: This might be a new skill, a new way of doing the same thing, or just a new piece of information that helps you change your mindset. Pick up a book from the library or Amazon. Type your problem into YouTube and find 100 videos that’ll give you a new approach. Or listen to a really insightful podcast or TED talk. I wrote up an entire blog post on how you can get a free (or nearly so) education WITHOUT having to go back to school. Check it out here.
  2. Take a Break: One thing many folks do is bang their head against the problem over and over without seeing any new results. Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop and walk away from the problem. This could be as simple as going for a 20-minute walk outside. Or it could be even more extreme: a weeklong vacation to leave all your troubles behind. Regardless of how you choose to take a break, you’ll come back to the problem with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective.
  3. Find a Teacher or Mentor: This tip is the one that’s helped me the most. Coaches, mentors, and teachers have a way of looking at the same problem you’re dealing with and seeing it in a whole new light. I was stuck in my career, hating every single moment I was at work, but I thought there was no other way to live. “That’s just how work is…” Then I had a coach show me that work could be a part of my life’s purpose AND enjoyable. Now I’m in a job I love and doing work that matters. All thanks to an outsider’s perspective.

Speaking of mentors, my coach Dan Miller is hosting a free masterclass today at two different times: 1pm CDT and 7pm CDT.

And the best part? The whole thing is about getting you unstuck no matter your problem.

“5 Reasons Big Dreamers Get Stuck And How To Blast Through Them To Success”

You can register for your seat here.

If you’re tired of going it alone and want an outside perspective on your problem, I strongly encourage you to sign up.

You’ll come away with fresh ideas, a renewed sense of hope, and strategies for moving forward on your most important goals.

There’s still time to register, but it’s happening TODAY. So make sure you sign up before it’s too late.

Save your spot now by clicking here!

I’ll be there too. I hope to see you this afternoon.

by Nathan Coumbe

Feeling stuck making your dreams a reality?

It’s okay to feel a little stuck sometimes… Stuck not knowing what to do or how to do it to make a change in your life.

Maybe you’re dreaming of a job that you actually enjoy… A job you wake up excited about doing.

Maybe you’re dreaming of time to spend with your family instead of working all that overtime just to make ends meet.

Or maybe you’re dreaming of work that puts your skills and talents to good use doing something that really matters.

But you don’t have a clue where to start or you’re just scared of letting go of the J.O.B. you have now. 

It’s okay to feel stuck. 

But it’s not okay to stay stuck.

My friend Dan Miller has helped thousands of people take their dreams and develop a plan and act on them with resources like his New York Times Bestseller 48 Days To the Work (and Life) You Love and No More Dreaded Mondays.

He’s going to be hosting a FREE Masterclass that I think you should check out on Thursday, July 15th with two times to choose from — 1 PM CT and 7 PM CT.

“5 Reasons Big Dreamers Get Stuck And How To Blast Through Them To Success”

You can sign up here.

He’ll walk you through those 5 reasons. Chances are one (or some) of them are what’s holding you back from your dreams as well.

He’ll also help you with some immediate action points and some real-life examples of people who have used them so you can start blasting through those stuck points to the success you’ve been dreaming of.

So take action NOW and save your seat for this FREE masterclass.

Click here to sign up.

by Nathan Coumbe

Do you have big dreams?

I see you there, hiding away to dream about what it would be like if you weren’t in your current J.O.B.

  • If you actually enjoyed what you’re doing and didn’t have so much trouble waking up each morning to go to work
  • If you had time to spend with your family instead of working all that overtime just to make ends meet
  • If you felt like your skills and talents were being put to good use doing something that really matters in the world

It’s so great to have big dreams. 

So what now? 

Feel stuck in moving forward with those dreams? Do you want them to become more than just a break-room diversion over a bologna sandwich or a microwave pizza?

My friend Dan Miller has helped thousands of people take their dreams and develop a plan and act on them with resources like his New York Times Bestseller 48 Days To the Work and Life You Love and No More Dreaded Mondays.

He’ll be hosting a FREE Masterclass that you NEED to check out. It’s Thursday, July 15th with two times to choose from — 1 PM CT and 7 PM CT.

“5 Reasons Big Dreamers Get Stuck And How To Blast Through Them To Success”

You can register here!

He’ll walk you through those 5 reasons. Chances are one (or some) of them are holding you back from your dreams as well.

He’ll also help you with some immediate action points and real-life examples of people who’ve used them so you can start blasting through those sticking points to the success you’ve been dreaming of.

So open up those eyes, dreamer, and save your seat TODAY for Dan Miller’s FREE Masterclass. 

Click here to register!