You have to Pay to be Successful (but there are 2 currencies) ⏰💵
Hey all! I thought it might be interesting to start a money/success discussion amongst the facilitation chat here as I think being a successful facilitator is just as important as being a great one.
So here's a topic I believe strongly about: You have to Pay to be Successful
To become successful at anything, you’ll need knowledge and experience. You’ll need to learn hard lessons.
To run a successful Design Consultancy, I needed to understand how to build a design team, how to sell, how to market, how to manage and everything in between.
To run a successful Online Course business I needed to understand how to build online courses, how to package them and most importantly: how to sell them.
To be a high-day-rate Facilitator, I had to learn not only how to run any kind of session for any type of company, but also how to SELL facilitation to any type of company.
All 3 required a lot of lessons learned to bring them to their current multi-million dollar revenue states… but I used a different “currency” to build each one.
In the end, there are only 2 currencies an entrepreneur can use to learn the lessons needed to become successful:
  1. Time
  2. Money
Time:
At the beginning of my career I used the only currency I had a lot of: time. It took years of grinding before AJ&Smart even reached the 7-figure (million-dollar revenue) mark. I was shooting in the dark, trying to build something from scratch, learning the lessons in real-time as they happened. It was like hiking up a mountain with no map, no guide and no signs. Eventually, I made it to the top of the mountain but it was a painful process and it nearly burned me out.
This is why I decided to try a different currency for the second business: Money
Money:
From the beginning of building Workshopper, in fact, even before I created the first line of dialogue for my first course, I decided to pay for the lessons I needed to learn using money!
For the second business I decided that if I could pay someone who’d “already been to the top of the mountain” to tell me how to get there quicker and safer, I would pay them. I didn’t want to trudge up the mountain blindly, taking years to learn the lessons that others had already learned the hard way.
The result? The money I spent on guides (mentors) and maps (online courses, masterminds) dramatically reduced the amount of TIME it took to get Workshopper to 7 Figures.
Time VS Money
It might be easy to conclude from this post that I had to use TIME when starting AJ&Smart because I didn’t have MONEY… but the truth is, even with the very small amount of money we were making, we could have been “buying lessons”.
There were agency owners selling their mentorship at prices we could have afforded, I simply didn’t even know that “buying lessons” was a thing!
If I were to go back in time today to my early-20’s building AJ&Smart, here are a few of the things I would have spent MONEY on rather than TIME:
  • A mentor who had already reached the point I was aiming for
  • Courses on selling services (ideally the types of services we were selling)
  • Courses on marketing
  • A mastermind group with some people who were “ahead of me” success-wise (I was in Sam Ovens Mastermind till it shut down this week)
So, if you look at your journey to building a successful business… where could you be spending MONEY instead of spending TIME?
And what currency are you using most right now?
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Jonathan Courtney
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You have to Pay to be Successful (but there are 2 currencies) ⏰💵
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