Skills for Success.
What are the essential Skills for Success in small business and life?
In this episode, Henry Lopez and guest co-host David Begin break down the critical skills and traits that lead to long-term success. From self-discipline to curiosity, they explore practical insights to help entrepreneurs and professionals thrive.
Henry and David discuss the key skills and personal traits that they’ve observed in successful business owners and leaders. Drawing from personal experiences and coaching insights, they share lessons on resilience, adaptability, and leadership.
Skills for Success:
- Defining Success – How personal and professional goals shape our definition of success.
- Self-Discipline & Sacrifice – Why delayed gratification and persistence are critical.
- Being Teachable & Coachable – The role of seeking mentorship, coaching, and lifelong learning.
- Curiosity & Asking Great Questions – How curiosity fuels innovation and decision-making.
- Making & Owning Decisions – The importance of embracing accountability.
- Persistence & Resilience – Overcoming setbacks and learning from failure.
- Self-Awareness & Leadership – Understanding strengths, weaknesses, and personal growth.
Top 3 Takeaways:
- Success is personal and requires self-discipline, persistence, and adaptability.
- A growth mindset and curiosity lead to continuous improvement.
- Surrounding yourself with the right people and mentors accelerates success.
Episode Host: Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, small business coach, and the host of this episode of The How of Business podcast show – dedicated to helping you start, run and grow your small business.
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Transcript:
The following is a full transcript of this episode. This transcript was produced by an automated system and may contain some typos.
Henry Lopez (00:16):
Welcome to this episode of the How of Business. This is Henry Lopez and the OG cohost David Beginners with me today. David Henry.
David Begin (00:24):
Thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure.
Henry Lopez (00:27):
Absolutely. We’re here in the Florida Studios of the How of Business International Studios
Henry Lopez (00:34):
Yes, absolutely. And we’re going to chat about Skills for Success. I’ll explain that more in a moment, but before I do, you can find all of the how of business resources, including the show notes page for this episode, and learn more about my one-on-one and group coaching programs at thehowabusiness.com. Also to invite you to please consider supporting this show on Patreon, and please subscribe wherever you might be listening so you don’t miss any new episodes. For those of you who might have joined the podcast more recently, maybe don’t know who David Begin is. David, it’s arguable as to whose idea it was to start this podcast. It might’ve been David’s, but then I’ve taken the idea, but he was my original, so if you’ve gone back and listened to, I don’t know, the first hundred or so episodes, maybe
David Begin (01:23):
One. I was going to ask how many episodes we did before we off.
Henry Lopez (01:27):
Yeah, I’ll have to look that up. So then he got dismissed and moved on to bigger and better Things, had his own podcast for a while to howl car washing, and then he makes frequent appearances and we pretend to like each other still.
David Begin (01:41):
Yeah, works out good. Works out great.
Henry Lopez (01:43):
But tell us briefly for those of you don’t know briefly about your background and what you’re doing today.
David Begin (01:50):
Yeah, Henry and I had similar backgrounds and then we got into small business together. We’ve owned small businesses together. I transitioned from the high technology industry as Henry did, and got into the car washing business in the early two and mid two thousands and did that for just about 15 years. And now I’m doing wash consulting, helping new investors understand the car wash industry and get stood up operationally. So we help new investors and we also help existing car wash owners who need assistance with their business. So currently doing that, I’m trying to transition into retirement, but still get brought into a number of different things, but I’m working on it and I’ve been doing that and coming to see my good friend in Florida.
Henry Lopez (02:36):
Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, and so on the podcast, you probably have, if you’ve been listening for a while, you’ve heard me talk about iop it. Well, that’s a business that David was my partner in. He was actually the majority owner. And then I came into the car wash business later for the third location that David owned, and I was a minority partner there. I think those are the two primary businesses. We had a software development that we had to abandon for all kinds of different reasons. So we had that project. So we’ve done quite a few things. And like you said, we met back in, I want to say 90, 90, 91 with the two respective companies we worked for, merged, and then that’s how we came to know each other and spent a better part of the nineties doing software sales, enterprise resource planning, software sales.
Henry Lopez (03:28):
Anyway, so let’s get into the topic for today, which is we were throwing around this idea and discussing about what are the skills and traits that lead to that we’ve observed in ourselves and in others and my clients and your clients and people that we’ve worked for over the years worked with over the years. What are some of those common traits that we believe lead to success primarily in small business? But I think as we talk about it, it’s about success in life as well. And we’ll define success here in a moment, but what are some of those skills and traits? We’re not pretending to have the exhaustive list here. It’s the things that kind of have come to mind here as we think about it. I’m sure there are others, and in fact, I encourage you in the comments wherever you might be listening to give us some that you think we might’ve missed as well. But we’re going to chat about that and what we think some of them have been. At least it had been key to our success in life. But let’s start with David. When we were talking about this a couple of days ago or yesterday, you made the point of well, let’s define success. And I want to make sure we define that because everybody has a different definition of success. But how do you look at it? When we talk about success in business,
David Begin (04:37):
I think you’re meeting your goals, your objectives in business. It’s becoming what you want it to be in some cases. Sometimes what you want it to be isn’t what it should be, but I think success in businesses, you’re fulfilling your dreams and desires that you wanted when you started getting into small business.
Henry Lopez (05:01):
Yeah, agreed. And of course, there are very obvious measures. Are you generating enough of a profit to compensate yourself for the effort and the investment that you’ve made? And there’s no way around that. We get into business to make a profit, otherwise it’s a hobby or a charity. So that ultimately is a measure of success. But as you and I have talked about often, and I had to learn the hard way is you need to also in business enjoy the journey, the process of creation, of developing the business and working towards that path of success. And then the other thing I think is so important is being careful as to what is that success tied to? Is it tied to these outliers that we hear about or read about? Is it that you think you’re going to be the next Bill Gates or somebody at that level? And that’s great. Those are great inspirational leaders and heroes that we might have, but the reality is that the vast majority of us will achieve a level of success that is what we need or what we are able to achieve with our resources. And that’s more than good enough. At the end of the day, a business needs to be able to provide for you enough income to be able to support yourself and the lifestyle that you wanted to support. But there are other components as well as well that comes from that success, right?
David Begin (06:27):
That’s correct.
Henry Lopez (06:29):
For example, for both of us, and certainly for me, I’ll let you speak to it. One of the things that success, my definition of success was the flexibility that I always allowed and was able to get for myself from a time perspective and being able to do the things that I wanted to do with my family. And that was critical to me, and that was something I was able to achieve. So to me, that’s part of the definition of success in business for me.
David Begin (07:00):
And I think you did a great job of that. I think you were better at that than I was in terms of developing a business that gave you time, flexibility and time freedom. A lot of people go into small business and they give away all their time working in the business, being responsible for the business, thinking about the business. And I think if you decide you want to do this or if you’re doing it currently right now, you’ve got to focus on some of the freedoms, one of the advantages of having your own businesses, the freedom of having a business, but also determining your time freedom as well.
Henry Lopez (07:35):
Agreed. Agreed. And if you’re not getting that, then something’s wrong. Certainly for periods of time, we have to make significant sacrifices. And I’d like to start there, and then these are not in any particular order, David, but I’ll kind of prompt us along based on the notes that I took when we were briefing on this and preparing for this conversation. But I think the ability to make a sacrifice or as your wife Brenda begin when I asked her the question yesterday said, self-discipline, I think that is critical to success in whatever endeavor you take on in life is that ability to delay gratification, to stick to something even as it gets hard or harder to fight through it and to stick through it and to persevere and related to it. What I mean by sacrifice is you will have to make to be successful in anything, you will have to sacrifice certain things. Maybe it’s giving up sitting in front of the tv, maybe it’s giving up, going out with your friends, maybe sometimes it’s even time with your family that we must sacrifice as harsh as that might seem, but we must make sacrifices and be self-disciplined to stick to something long enough to achieve success.
David Begin (08:50):
No, that’s exactly right. And as you were saying that, and the whole thing about delaying gratification, it’s forcing yourself to do things that you might not want to do when you want to do them is a big part of that. And when I’m consulting with my clients, and you might’ve experienced this as well, when people think they want to get into business, they go into business thinking that they’re going to have that freedom of time, they’re going to have the freedom of money, but they don’t understand that there’s a period of time they got to work through to get there. And especially in the car watch industry, we’ve seen more and more people who want to get in it because they think it’s just a money maker and everybody’s making a bunch of money and it’s a passive income, and I don’t have to put much effort into it, and it just produces all this cash and nothing can be further from the truth, but it can get there if you put the time, energy, and effort into it during the first phase of the business. And I think that’s what most people forget.
Henry Lopez (09:48):
Agreed, agreed, well said. And that startup phase, we have to make sometimes extraordinary sacrifices with our time and commitment and focus. And that’s one of the reasons why if you do have a spouse or a partner, it’s so critical that that person be in alignment with you on what you’re doing because it’s going to impact them. But yeah, there’s those crunch times that always come with, in my experience as small business in that launching and startup phase for us as small business owners with the resources that we have and the way that we’re able to start businesses, we don’t have the luxury of necessarily, at least in my experience, to have somebody do all the work and we just fund it. That’s being an investor. But when we’re active small business owners, there are crunch times, there are phases when we must be all in. Now, if you’re still all in to your point earlier, three years later, four years later and you are consumed and you’re working 80 hour days, something’s broken, the business model is probably broken. That’s not what we’re talking about. Like you said, we should and must be able to achieve that level of freedom of time to some extent at some point in the process.
David Begin (11:04):
I think you’ve got to have a vision of where you want to be in a couple, let’s say three years in terms of what do I want to start hiring? What’s my next hire and why would I want to hire this person to do whatever that I’m doing? And one of the big mistakes I made when I got in a small business, I thought, well, I just have to work harder. If I’m going to double the number of units that I own, it’s going to require double the effort, double the work, as opposed to how do I start leveraging myself and hiring people who are born to do these particular task and start taking some of those things off my plate. And that’s one thing I struggled with when I was a business owner at the very beginning. I got much better at that as I went along, but it was incredibly difficult.
Henry Lopez (11:54):
This is such a critical point because in my observation now in coaching numerous clients, it’s what keeps people from being able to scale beyond either being a solopreneur or a very small business or again, getting to that point where they’re not working 80 hour weeks. Leverage is a key word. That’s what we do as entrepreneurs is we leverage other people’s money and time and effort. That’s what we do, and we coordinate that and we take those opportunities to leverage those other people’s skills and time and money to make something happen, to create something. But if we don’t get to a point where we can empower others and lead others to work together to accomplish something in that business, then we will not grow. I always mention my dad as a classic example, he was a master carpenter, highly paid and at different points in time, he had a crew, a company, but he ended his career slogging away, still trading dollars for hours essentially because nobody could ever do it well enough. He was always a perfectionist and never accepted anybody else’s work. So he couldn’t grow, he couldn’t scale.
David Begin (13:10):
What are the exercises? I put some of my clients through and I have a client up in the Montana area who’s an engineer, and he has his own engineering firm and he’s sort of struggled with growing, but I say, why don’t you sit down and tell me what your business is going to look like hypothetically at $3 million? And then if your business is $5 million, what does your business look like? What does your business look like at 10 million and what does your business look like at 20 million? Just so he can start understanding the fact that the business will be very different when it grows from 3 million to 10 million, and he needs to start thinking and preparing for that and get the right people in the right seats on the bus to help him make that growth. But I think we sort of get stuck in that $3 million mentality and we don’t see who the next hires are and why we’re hiring the next hires. And I think if you’re going to be a small business owner that either wants the freedom of time, the flexibility of time, you got to start thinking what the future looks like and who’s your next hire and why you’re going to hire that person.
Henry Lopez (14:18):
So that strategic thinking, having some kind of a vision strategic plan in place, and then that begins to give you a stake in the ground in the future that then you can develop a path towards and then figure out how to get there. But you’re also touching on something you mentioned as well as we come back again to skills related to success. You called it being teachable, I might call it being coachable. I think being open to input, mentorship, coaching, whatever the case might be, I think is another key that’s not, I guess a skill, but a trait to be open to that I have found to be critical to success. And that’s part of what you’re talking about here in this instance.
David Begin (15:02):
Yeah, I think being teachable is incredibly important because there’s a lot, there’s a, you can learn from, you’ve got people out there that have been successful. You can study those people, you can understand what they’re doing and see how it applies to your particular business, but there’s nothing new under the sun. It’s all out there. It’s just a matter of you searching for it. We get a lot of people and we get a lot of people who want to get into our industry that have got a lot of confidence, and that confidence bleeds over into I’ve got this. I’ve been a successful real estate agent or a successful banker and I don’t need any help. And that’s another thing that’s so far from the truth. Good people that I see be successful when they first enter the business are the ones that says, I was successful in real estate. I was successful as a banker, but now I’m transferring to a new industry and there’s a lot of things I don’t understand about this industry and I would like to get some help. Those are our best clients. We’ve got both types of clients, but those tend to be our best clients. They’re easy to work with, they listen. They’re going to take your advice for the most part, and they’re going to implement and execute well on what you give them as opposed to the person that thinks, oh, we’ve got this
Henry Lopez (16:22):
Right. And listen, I was that person when I started in business in the early nineties. I was arrogant. I thought, I’ll figure it out. I had that personality for all kinds of reasons in my childhood where I was never willing to admit that I didn’t know something or that I couldn’t figure it out. And reaching out for help was a sign of weakness. So all of those things. Now, fortunately, I had a partner, a business partner, so at least between he and I, we could help each other navigate it, learning how to do this. It’s only later in business that I realized, wait a second, what am I doing? There are so many people out there, like you said, that are talented and have done this that I can learn from. And then it always brings to mind one of the smartest people I ever worked with when I had the opportunity to work for Ariba, which was a startup, the gentleman there, Boris Botanic, probably the smartest person I’ve ever had the privilege of working with, but he was so intellectually curious.
Henry Lopez (17:17):
He genuinely was so interested in hearing everybody’s opinion or point of view because he was beyond any level of arrogance and humbling enough to know there might be something there that I can learn. And so that always inspired me. He really inspired me to look at it very differently that everybody does have an opinion that matters. You’re very good at that. You have always, you’ve taught me as well to get input from multiple people, and you take that and process that and then you make a decision. Now, sometimes that drove me crazy, right? Because like David, I told you that, but you take input from multiple people. I had to learn that
David Begin (17:59):
What I would do is I’d take one of your ideas that you told me months ago and then somebody else would tell me the same thing. Let’s go, Hey, Henry, guess what? Here’s a great
Henry Lopez (18:07):
Idea. Yeah, that’s the part that really made me upset
David Begin (18:11):
And I get it. And believe it or not, you’re not the only person that was frustrating with
Henry Lopez (18:15):
Me when I
David Begin (18:15):
Did that. But yeah, I always want to be the dumbest person in the room. I’m probably not the dumbest person in the room, but I like to act like I’m the dumbest person because when I’m in a room, a really smart people, I really like listening and learning and changing my ideas and perspectives on things. Many times I’ll have a very strong opinion, but if I listen to the right people enough times, I’ll be able to change that opinion. Being able to change your opinion too, or change the way you think about something is sometimes difficult to do, but I think it’s an important attribute of a person who’s successful in business.
Henry Lopez (18:52):
Yeah, well said, well said. And I think it ties back to if we tie this a bit back to the sacrifice to self-discipline, it goes back to who do you surround yourself with? What rooms are you putting yourself in? And you’ve got to be aware of that, and we’ve got to make sure that we keep upgrading that room that we’re a part of so that we do have these people around us that influence us. And I think that’s an important skill to be able to be self-aware enough. We’ll come back to that point and willing enough to continue to surround ourselves with people that are probably sharper than us, brighter than us early, more experienced. At the same time, you’re going to play that role, you’re going to help others, but that’s so important. And I think that’s a skill, if you will, maybe or a life lesson that I think leads to success.
David Begin (19:47):
I agree. And then the example you used for your friend from the software company
Henry Lopez (19:53):
From Ariba, Reba. Yeah,
David Begin (19:55):
Boris. Boris was probably a good person that asked questions. He asked a lot of questions, correct. I found that with a number of entrepreneurs, really good entrepreneurs ask good questions, and if you don’t have that skillset of asking good questions, I think it’s something that’s easily learned, but I always try to ask great questions.
Henry Lopez (20:19):
I think that’s so critical and that helps us in so many ways. Of course, we learned how to do that. You and I perfected that in our sales careers because that’s critical to that process, but it’s really critical to everything. But it ties to the other trait or skill that you had mentioned when we were talking about this, which is curiosity. I didn’t come up with this term, but I like to call it intellectual curiosity. I think it’s related to that. And sometimes it’s literally asking a question of someone. Sometimes it’s asking a question of what you’re observing, asking yourself a question, but being curious, wanting to learn is critical to success no matter what or how you define success.
David Begin (21:00):
That’s correct. Yeah, I agree a hundred percent.
Henry Lopez (21:03):
Do you think I found, do you think you were always a curious person, even as a child?
David Begin (21:10):
I think so. I think it might’ve been something I grew up with. I think Dan Sullivan had that ability as well to ask good questions. And I think he always talked about, as a child, he would ask adults questions, which I think was a pretty interesting trait because most kids or children at this time isn’t comfortable asking questions directly to adults, but he was good at it and he felt like that was a big key to his success. He learned a lot as he was growing up. So
Henry Lopez (21:43):
Very interesting, and when we talk about this topic of asking questions, absolutely you can get better at learning how to ask questions, right? We’ve gone through training and being coached and all of that. We help people. I’m always learning. We read about it, but I’ll tell you, it says simple, really, and all those things are important, but if you are genuinely listening, if you’re genuinely interested in what somebody else has to say, then the questions even don’t matter as much. We hone our questioning skills, especially when we have limited time, let’s say in the sales process. But if you are genuinely listening as opposed to just making conversation until you can inject and talk what you want to talk about and talk about yourself, if instead you’re genuinely listening and you’re curious, the information will come to you, the questions will come. Does that make sense?
David Begin (22:36):
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And as you were saying, I was thinking about anytime I get to meet somebody famous, either industry or entertainment, I always try to think, what’s a great question? I can ask this person right now. I want to learn from them. How did they get, I’m not going to learn in one question or two questions how they got to where they’re at, but I want to pick a good question so they can talk about themselves because I don’t want to absorb that information.
David Begin (23:04):
So I always think of, what’s a great question?
Henry Lopez (23:08):
Alright, the next skill that I had written down, maybe some of these overlap, obviously like I said, but persistence. You mentioned persistence, and I think that’s somewhat tied to self-sacrifice, or excuse me, self-discipline and sacrifice. But how do you view it? How do you think persistence and why that’s so important to achieving success?
David Begin (23:28):
You’re not going to see success or results every day. And if you’re doing the right things every day, you’re going to stack those up. And if the stars aren’t aligning and your efforts pay off, you’re going to see success eventually one day, but you’re not going to see it every day. So you’ve got to be willing to get up, do the right things, do the things that make you feel like you were successful that day, and hopefully those things will stack up to a successful business or job or whatever you’re looking at. So I try to tell people that are in sales that your job is not to always close sales, but your job is to make the 10 or 20 calls you need in order to close a sale. So how do you define success if you can define successes? I made my 20 calls and I had a sales manager one time teach me the paperclip technique where you have a jar of 20 paperclips and you take one and you put it over into another jar, and when that jar is empty, you’ve accomplished what you needed to accomplished from a sales generation standpoint, which was make the calls.
David Begin (24:43):
And so you can define success for you that day as I made my calls, but you’ve got to make your calls every day. You can’t
David Begin (24:51):
I’m only going to do it Monday and Tuesday and I’m going to forget it Wednesday through Friday and expect to get the results you want.
Henry Lopez (24:58):
Where if I get hung up on the first five times I quit. That’s why this overlaps with self-discipline. But being persistent enough said, you know what? In the face of no, in the face of rejection, I’m going to continue to move forward in the face of fear. I’m going to continue to move
David Begin (25:12):
Forward. And no teaches you a lot. And fear will teach you a lot if you get curious and you say, why am I getting nos? Do I need to adjust my sales pitch? Do I need to try a different technique? Do I need to try a different channel? You’ll learn from all those things to kind of refine and build what it is you’re trying to do. But I think that visual technique in the case of sales, for example here where you move the paperclip from one jar to the next, that’s okay. I’m one 20th there. I’m two 20th there, I’m three 20th there. And it’s just that visual representation of I’m making progress. I’m meeting my goal as small as that is, and by the time I get all those paperclips in the other jar, I would’ve accomplished what I needed to accomplish from a sales generation standpoint on this day. That’s persistence.
Henry Lopez (26:06):
Agreed, agreed, well said. In my observation, perseverance as much to do with it as anything else in achieving success. It’s not because somebody was smarter or they had a better education or even that they had more money. At small business level, sir, money helps. We have to have some money, but it’s that perseverance to fight through the hard times to keep at it in the face of setbacks, in the face of obstacles, in the face of challenges that seem insurmountable, that persistence is what’ll get you through it. If you are not able to do that, not willing to do that, then it tells me a couple of things. Probably you’re not ready to be a business owner or you’re not combined. You’re not passionate enough about it. You don’t want it bad enough. You have got to want success. We’re applying it here to business ownership and success in business ownership.
Henry Lopez (27:04):
You’ve got to want it bad enough because it’s not easy. This is really hard to do. It can be done and it doesn’t require any particular superpowers. It’s great if you have them, but the superpower here that’s so important is persistence to be willing to get up every day and go fight it again. And sometimes it feels, who would talk off to David where it feels like it’s a battle, especially in business to business, how much we experience people. Seems like everybody’s against us. It can feel that way. So if you’re not persistent and you’re not ready to go fight that battle, to fight through the hard times, you will not succeed.
David Begin (27:45):
And I would say they’re not always big battles. I’d say that most of the battles we fight are small battles. So you’re going to get up this morning and are you going to do this particular task? Yes or no? If you could just do that, that builds the momentum you need to continue being persistent day after day after day. It’s not, we look at the overall war, but we’re not looking at the individual battles and the skirmishes that we need to do on a day-to-day basis to get where we want to go.
Henry Lopez (28:15):
Absolutely.
David Begin (28:16):
So it’s not many times, it’s not huge, it’s just the small things that we got to do every day.
Henry Lopez (28:25):
That’s right. That’s right. Extremely well said. That’s often something I help people with because that’s often what causes people to get paralyzed. I look, oh my God, I have all of these things to do, all of these challenges. I still got to get all this stuff to the lender to see if I can get a loan and the landlord is not negotiating on the lease and the equipment isn’t going to be delivered on time and on and on and on. But to your point, if you’ll just take what’s most important next one step at a time and continue making progress on a daily basis, that’s how you do it. If you look at the mountain, it seems insurmountable. And so that’s a great point. Thanks for clarifying there. Related to that is the other point that you had mentioned previously when we were talking about this, which is you said it everything is not a 10. What do you mean by that philosophy or that approach?
David Begin (29:13):
I think one trait that I had difficulty developing, it took me years and years and years to develop this, is that when something went wrong, not all things are created equal and not all problems are the same. And I eventually developed the ability to say, this particular problem is not that big of a deal. I’m not going to deal with it or we’re going to just let it go versus this is a really important problem, I need to focus on this. And out of the fear of running the businesses, I treated everything the same. Everything was a crisis.
Henry Lopez (29:48):
Everything was a five alarm,
David Begin (29:51):
And I would create crisis if there wasn’t a crisis because I needed a crisis to deal with. And that became very physically and mentally exhausting over time. And then finally just running out of energy. I believe I decided I am going to focus on the things that are really important and the things that are not important, I’m not going to give much credence to or just say, you know what? That’s fine. I’m just going to let that go.
David Begin (30:18):
And my life got a lot better and I was able to focus on the things that matter because we only have so much energy as human beings and we can’t devote all of our energy to everything. And I think that’s another problem that we have sometimes when we go into business, we feel like through sheer force and physical effort, mental effort and time and quantity, effort, we can make a ton of difference, but that only can last so long. And that’s good to do when you first get started, but then you’ve got to transition into how can I work smarter? How can I focus on the things that are important, not worry about the things that are not
Henry Lopez (30:58):
Right? How do I empower my team so that they help us get it done?
David Begin (31:03):
That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So when I say everything’s not a 10, everything’s not a 10 on the Richter scale, everything was a 10 on the Richter scale to me and my employees, unfortunately, I would react to everything and they didn’t understand what was important either because I couldn’t coach them on, here are the important issues versus here are things probably we shouldn’t be worrying about.
Henry Lopez (31:27):
Yeah, it’s such an incredible point. It makes me think about as well, developing the ability to compartmentalize. In other words, just because something broke or is broken doesn’t mean the entire thing needs to be thrown out the window. That overreaction is part of this as well. We having a particular problem here, but we’ll fix it. We’re going to address it, we’re going to work on it. But letting that contaminate your entire mood or view of the business is what we have to be careful with as well.
David Begin (31:58):
And I think you go into these processes sometimes thinking that nothing should ever go wrong and not thinking about it, but that was sort of my attitude and when things went wrong is why did this go wrong as opposed to there’s going to be a lot of things that are going to go wrong. There’s a lot of things that are not going to happen exactly the way I want it to. But accepting that sort of took the energy out of it and allowed me to deal with it rationally or say, this is probably not an issue we need to deal with right now.
Henry Lopez (33:39):
Alright, so this leads me to two that I like to combine though as we’re talking about skills or traits or abilities that I think lead to success in small business and I think in life or whatever it is that you’re looking to accomplish. One is embracing decision making, or maybe it’s not a skill, but I’ll put it in that category, that ability to want to and to make decisions is critical in anything we pursue in life. But particularly in small business, you and I were talking about this last night that for both of us, that was one of the things that stifled us in our corporate careers is not being empowered as an employee is not fully empowered to make decisions. We had to check in with someone else. The big decisions were made by someone else and we felt whether it was arrogance or whatever, that we were capable and sometimes better capable of making those decisions. So I think that that applies to success in business ownership. If you are not at this point the type of person that wants to be making the big decisions, boy it is going to be really stressful for you to be a business owner.
David Begin (34:50):
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think we wanted to make the decisions, the decisions were made for us and the decisions were implemented to us or through us or whatever you want to call it. And that was sort of frustrating for us as corporate employees because we wanted to sit at the big table to make decisions as well. And that was an indication to me that I didn’t like the corporate environment and I wanted to go into business for myself, but I couldn’t identify that for years, that frustration level that
David Begin (35:25):
You and I probably had when it came to people. Okay, here’s your new quota, here’s what you’re going to be doing, and we had no input on it. So you got to want to be able to make decisions and you’re going to want to be able to, which gets into another trait I think you’ve got, which is we’ve got to be able to feel comfortable being responsible for the decisions that we make. That’s right too. So we have to, the fact that the buck stops here with us, we like making decisions and we like being responsible for decisions. And you and I have done a lot of episodes over the last years on decision making and decision fatigue if we’re having to make too many decisions. But generally, you’ve got to be able to make decisions and make them relatively quick because as a small business owner, the level of decisions you have to make are quite numerous. And if you don’t get some of those decisions off your plate, they start stacking up, the business becomes paralyzed and nobody’s getting anything done.
Henry Lopez (36:29):
Absolutely. Well said. And related to that, one of those episodes is episode 2 45 where I talk about two responsibilities, this decision making, and we’ll dive in a little bit more here into accepting mistakes. And then you and I, and like you said, have done several episodes. I’ll have links to it in the show notes page to this episode at the how a business.com, if you want to listen to those episodes where we go deeper into the subject. But related to this, when you analyze, one of the primary reasons why people don’t want to make decisions is they’re afraid of making the wrong decision. And the way I’ve always explained it is that, yeah, you’ve got to learn about business and that comes into play, that getting help, getting mentorship, getting a coach, whatever. You need a consultant to help you in the areas that you don’t have that knowledge, or maybe that’s why you’ve partnered because that person has that knowledge or that skill. But then at the end of the day, the problem is some of these decisions, there is no right or wrong. We just got to make a decision and we don’t have a crystal ball to look at to say or remember those little, the ones we used to have on our desk that was the lucky eight ball, we would ask them that question, the questions.
Henry Lopez (37:42):
Yeah. Because it was as good as anything, right? The point is, we got to make a decision. What I have found is that I make plenty of mistakes, but I have confidence that I’ll make more right decisions than wrong decisions because of what Malcolm Gladwell talks about. Those hours and hours that I’ve spent making these kind of decisions increases my confidence. But it’s a hard thing, especially when you’re starting out in business.
David Begin (38:09):
I would agree. And I think most decisions that we make are not monumental. I think very few decisions during the week or during the month that we make are life-changing, business changing decisions. And so the ability to be wrong doesn’t carry so much risk. I started thinking about when I make decisions quickly, what am I always thinking about? I’m thinking about the risk of a decision and I try to teach my clients and the people that I coach think about it in terms of risk. What risk are we taking if this decision doesn’t go the way we think it is going to go?
Henry Lopez (38:47):
Most
David Begin (38:48):
Times that risk isn’t great, and I think most people don’t make decisions because the fear or the risk of making a wrong decision. And if you analyze that decision, chances are there’s not a whole lot of risk to it. There are some that have great risk, but you’re going to treat those differently than you’re going to treat the day-to-day decisions. But I think your team and your customers, your suppliers will appreciate you as a business owner if you can make decisions relatively quick and get things out the door.
Henry Lopez (39:20):
Well said, well said. And have you heard me typing in the background? I was looking up two episodes specific that you and I have done where we dived deeper into this episode 5 26. We covered the topic of decision making and then we went into complex decision making in episode five 30 because we break down what you’re talking about Dave there and we explain that in more detail. So those are two great episodes for everybody because we all are challenged with this. We’re all dealing with this whole thing that is talked about, so much about failure is good. We learned from my failures, those are all true. However, I’m wired, I was indoctrinated, I was taught, I was influenced to look at failure as a horrible thing. So from coloring outside the lines to whatever the case might be. So it is hard. We bring those things to business ownership and then we’re supposed to accept failure. And I can tell you that while I understand what they mean by that failing fast, it’s nonetheless not something I respond to very well. Am I making sense there?
David Begin (40:31):
I think so. Yeah. I understand what you’re saying there, but that feeling of, okay, I made the decision and my wife uses the analogy of hitting balls like baseballs as a batter. These pitches are coming in at a furious pace and you’ve got to figure out which ones are the home runs, which ones you’re going to foul off, and you just need to be able to take those pitches and do something with them quickly. And I think that’s a trait that we all ought to think about and continue working on.
Henry Lopez (41:04):
Yeah, good analogy. Good analogy. And a good hitter will persevere. We will think about it, we’ll strategize, we’ll adjust, right? So continue with that analogy. And then in baseball, if you’re batting 300 or above, so three out of 10 you hit, that’s hall of fame level material there.
David Begin (41:25):
And it’s interesting how fast those pitches come in. So we talk about in terms of the speed of making a decision those people have to make in less than a second. I don’t know what the timeframe is, but it’s got to be almost instantaneous, their decision-making process, if they’re going to hit that or not hit that ball.
Henry Lopez (41:44):
So what ties to that? This is such a great analogy, I hate to, for the people who are cringing out there, sports analogy, but it so apropos, what comes into though is the planning and the preparation that before that batter even gets to the plate, right?
David Begin (41:59):
Yeah.
Henry Lopez (41:59):
Same thing on the pitcher side. There’s watching a film, what are the tendencies? There’s coaching, you’re looking at the coach on your third baseline and on the first baseline and what are they telling you? You’re looking for all of those inputs you’ve prepared, you’ve planned this picture, the pitches that are stronger or weaker, where you’re at in the count. All of those things come into play to make that instantaneous decision.
David Begin (42:26):
And it is very much experience. I don’t know at what point, it’d be interesting to know at what point a batter decides to hit the ball or not hit the ball. But it’s super early. It’s probably even before they throw the ball, I would think. I don’t know.
Henry Lopez (42:39):
Correct. Yeah, it’d be interesting. I’ll look into that. Maybe we’ll talk about that in another episode. Alright, so we’ve talked about quite a few skills. I’m looking through my list here to see if I’ve missed anyone, but a big one I want to come to we’ve kind of touched on is accountability. David, we have got to be accountable. Gino Wickman, who I’ve had the pleasure of having on the show, and he’s written traction of course, and another book that he most recently wrote called The Entrepreneurial Leap, where he lays out what he thinks are the six traits that you must have to be an entrepreneur. And now it’s important here to distinguish a business owner from an entrepreneur, a small business owner is someone who owns a business typically remain involved in that business to some degree. And entrepreneurs here for the purpose of discussion.
Henry Lopez (43:28):
As someone who has a portfolio of businesses who is no longer involved in the established businesses day to day, they have people in place who are running those businesses. So that’s what we mean by an entrepreneur. And I would just quickly rattle ’em off and then we’ll come back to the last one on his list, which is responsibility or accountability. He says you have to have vision, you have to be a visionary, you have to be passionate, you have to be a problem solver, you have to be driven. You have to be a risk taker and you have to be responsible. In other words, you don’t blame others. Listen, there are things that happen that are beyond our control. When covid happened, nobody to blame for not being prepared for that. It impacted our self-serve frozen yogurt business. There wasn’t much we could do for that. Yeah, we could blame Covid for that. However, even in that situation, we took accountability and we did what we needed to do to survive that period of time. So talk to me, what are your thoughts on being accountable?
David Begin (44:30):
Yeah, I wrote down accountability and the word responsibility as well. I don’t know if there’s much difference there between the two, but yeah, I think you’ve got to be accountable. I think if you are blaming everybody else for what’s going on, there’s always opportunity. And I think you need to be able to see that there’s always opportunity there. In this political climate that we’re in now, a lot of people are nervous from a business standpoint, but there’s also a group of people looking and saying, well, what are the opportunities that lie before us in this? There’s always opportunities and the people that are willing to be accountable are the ones that are always looking for the opportunities or looking for how can we make this a better situation? What can we do? What can we do to minimize our risk? And they’re the people that like to be accountable and for whatever reason, you and I enjoy accountability and that’s what I think makes us interested in business and makes us successful in business is our ability to say, yeah, I’m willing to be a hundred percent accountable for what’s taking place.
Henry Lopez (45:36):
Agreed, agreed. We’re willing to have no limits except for what we impose on ourselves and in our resources. But at the flip side of that is I have to be accountable for my failures as well as my successes. I have to be accountable for when things don’t go well, how can I make it better? It can’t be always pointing the finger at somebody else or something else that impacted my business. Now I have come to understand and realize and accept that we all need a little bit of luck, but related to luck, I always love the saying, and I’m paraphrasing that we got to get in the way of luck, and if we don’t and if we continue, and this is what happened also, I see we will have a failed business attempt or something goes badly and that sours them entirely. Oh, there’s no business that’s any good. That just doesn’t work. Well, you had a failed attempt. That doesn’t mean that it can’t work again or it can’t work in a different business model or a different environment or a different idea. So being accountable that we learn from that, hopefully those mistakes we adjust, maybe we have to pivot and we keep moving forward and being accountable at the next level.
David Begin (46:54):
It’s interesting, as you were saying that, I was thinking about the personality type that probably entrepreneurs and business owners are in terms of this hard charging type A, we sometimes identify with success and we identify with failure as our identity. And I’ve ran into that before myself and I’ve become a little bit more self-aware of that. When I’m successful in my business, I am a success. When I’m not doing well in my business, I am a failure. And you got to keep those separate. You’re not the failure. The business is the failure, and if you’re success, the business is a success.
Henry Lopez (47:31):
However, having said that, inheriting what we just said about accountability is it’s almost like some of that is unavoidable, but I understand what you’re saying, but then it’s almost opposed to being completely accountable because it’s almost like saying, well, the failure wasn’t because of me, but I understand what you’re saying, but you understand how those overlap and how that can be very confusing.
David Begin (47:57):
Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think that that’s a good point. And I think there is a line we’ve got to draw somewhere because we were not accountable during the Covid crisis. We were accountable with what we did for that, but covid something that we were responsible for or accountable for. So that’s taking it to an extreme,
Henry Lopez (48:17):
Right? Exactly.
David Begin (48:18):
There’s some outside, there’s always outside influences, government regulations or the economy or that’s right, interest rates or whatever you want to call it. There’s a lot of things that we can’t, are not responsible for, but we’ve got to decide what can I be responsible for and what can I do in light of these other things?
Henry Lopez (48:37):
And as you said there, what I am responsible for is how do I respond? How do I react? How do I adjust?
David Begin (48:44):
Correct.
Henry Lopez (48:45):
Covid was so revealing to me in that respect, in that what it identified for me is that there was a group of business owners, small business owners, and it’s interesting because as I think about it, they were probably in that category of they were already flailing or struggling in their businesses, and then this was kind of like the last straw. It’s classically that restaurant that was barely breaking even, but Covid broke them. It’s hard. It’s terrible. However, the reality is that that was a monumental curve ball that was thrown at us that we had no accountability to at having happened. But it did one of two things. Some group of business owners, it paralyzed them. It was like deer in the headlights did not know what to do. And then there were the other that were the people who realized, this is business. I didn’t see this coming. Nobody did, but what do I do now? And I think it ties back to resiliency. I think it ties back to a lot of the other traits that we’ve talked about that say, okay, I’m going to adjust. I’m going to figure this out and see if I can’t navigate through this.
David Begin (49:59):
Yeah, I was thinking about when we had the yogurt shop, we had these bins of toppings that people can serve themselves during covid that was like, we can’t do this, but this is the basis of our business here. And so we had to pivot a little bit and put ’em in little solo containers of things that you get dressing in or those little small two or three ounce cups.
Henry Lopez (50:25):
Yeah,
David Begin (50:25):
I’d put our toppings in,
Henry Lopez (50:26):
Forgotten about that,
David Begin (50:27):
And then they would grab those and use those. Now, there was a little bit of expense there, but that kind kept the self-serve toppings theme going. But we had to pivot a little bit.
David Begin (50:40):
We could become paralyzed in the fact, oh my gosh, we can’t run our business the way we used to run our business. And that would’ve been the end of that. But thinking about, okay, what can we do differently here? How can we maintain the idea that we had and in light of the covid restrictions that we had as well? And I think we were able to come out of that strong for that very reason.
Henry Lopez (51:06):
Well said. Alright, let’s wrap it up with this because I think this one we’ve touched on, but it’s somewhat overarching on all of these, and that is self-awareness. We both believe and have, are self-aware enough to know that that’s a trait, perhaps more than a skill, but maybe it’s both. I don’t know, being self-aware enough to self-analyze. And that leads to all kinds of different things. It leads to identifying those habits that we need to change, our approaches that we need to change, getting help. All of it, I think in part comes back to being self-aware. What do you think?
David Begin (51:47):
Yeah, I think if you want a secret weapon in your business, I think sitting down and there’s a ton of assessment tools that are out there for business owners and for employees. I would incorporate that into your company, even if you have a small company. I think if you’ve got anybody that you interact with as a business owner, if you’ve got more than one employee, you should probably identify and find an assessment tool that can help you understand yourself and your tendencies. And then also have your employees take that assessment and see what their tendencies are, their strengths and their weaknesses. I think that’s super important. The one thing I’ve liked about some of the assessments that I’ve done recently is they only tell you what your strengths are, but they also tell you that particular strength has a shadow, shadow self, for lack of a better word.
David Begin (52:40):
So if you are hard charging, that could be one of the good strengths. But what happens when you’re tired or stressed and you’ve got that tendency of being hard charging? How does that hard charging trait show up when you’re not at your best? And I think that’s a really important thing to understand. Some people call it the shadow self, and there’s some people call it less resourceful versus more resourceful, but looking at both sides so that when I’m acting like this, okay, I’m acting like this. It’s not my best self, and the reason why I’m acting like this is because I’m stressed, I’m tired, I’m anxious, and so this great characteristic or trait that I have is being manifested in this way where I’m judgmental and I’m short and I’m angry or whatever it might be. You can become a little bit more aware, okay, I’m in this particular state, I’m being less resourceful.
David Begin (53:41):
I need to take a little bit of time and transition back to more resourceful and get back to where I want to go. But it’s also good to know when your employees act out or act up or you’re like, why is this person doing this only because this is their strength. If their strength is maybe attention to detail, what happens when they’re stressed? They start becoming like this or they do that or they say this, okay, well this person is acting out of stress or anxiety, and it’s a natural way that they would act because this is their strong trait. This is what happens when they’re under stress, if that makes any sense.
Henry Lopez (54:21):
Oh yeah. No, no.
David Begin (54:22):
I like assessments. We’ve done a ton of assessments
Henry Lopez (54:25):
There. One, I mean, I know you and I have talked about Colby, it’s not perfect. None of them are perfect, but is there another one that comes to mind or we’ll put some others in the show notes page as well.
David Begin (54:35):
There’s an Enneagram assessment, which I think is good. I think there’s one called the Hertz assessment, like the rental car company, Hertz that looks at the shadow self. And these are two that I think were good for me to say, okay, if things aren’t working well, given your strengths, this is how you’re going to act out if things aren’t going well. And I just think that’s very, very helpful to be more self-aware as a business owner and then understand your employees better when they’re not acting the way that you think they should.
Henry Lopez (55:14):
Agreed. Agreed. And on that point, why this is so important, and I wanted to end with it is when we are that employee or we’re in the corporate world, if we’re working for a good organization, they’re doing that, or our leaders are doing that for us, or HR is helping us do that. But as a business owner, now you have the freedom as well as the challenge of there’s nobody saying, Hey Henry, you’re not thinking about this the right way, or you’re acting like a you know what? Or you’re limiting yourself. Unless we are self-aware enough and we open ourselves. In other words, it leads to us being able to close off any inputs and think that we’re just the greatest thing ever and continue to operate from a point of arrogance. Instead, being self-aware allows us to see these things in ourselves so that we can grow as people, as well as grow as business owners and leaders. And that’s why it’s so critical,
David Begin (56:15):
And I think it’s good to be able to point out, and this is one thing I’ve done with a manager in a company I own, and I’m having to manage this, and when we talk later on in the week, for example, the manager might come to, Hey, you seem pretty frustrated with this. What I would tell them is that I have a tendency of being impatient. That’s a tendency I have, and I’m trying to work on that tendency, but that’s probably a result of the conversations we had earlier in the week, is I’m impatient. I want to see these things get done and I’ve got a vision of what this can be like in two or three months, but I’m super impatient right now. I want to see it implemented, and so I’m working on that and it lets the employee know that I’m
Henry Lopez (57:01):
Human.
David Begin (57:03):
I’ve got tendencies that are not so good, but I explained to ’em that’s the thing I’m working on is being impatient and I think there’s a lot of benefit there when you open up as a human being to say, here are my tendencies. Here’s what I’m good at, and here’s what I’m working on. Here’s what I’m struggling with.
Henry Lopez (57:20):
Agreed. Yeah. Well said. Well said. Alright, David, we’ll wrap it up. Thanks again for being my co-host today here at the Florida Studios and sharing your thoughts on this topic of the traits and skills that we have observed, either in ourselves or the people that we’ve had the privilege to work with or coach that lead to success in small business and in life as well. Hopefully it was valuable for you as the listener, this is Henry Lopez. Thanks for joining me on this episode of The How Business Again, my co-host today guest co-host is David Begin. I release new episodes every Monday morning and you can find a podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts, including at my YouTube channel, the How of Business YouTube Channel, and my website, the how of business.com. Thanks for listening.