If you've been in a corporate environment for a period of time and you're working towards starting your own company, you'll need to shift the way you think about business and how you approach business activities. Stay tuned as we talk about the 10 mindsets you'll need to incorporate into your business startup to be successful.

Welcome to episode #12. My name is Jeremy Epp and I'm here to help you set up, launch, and grow a profitable business. Before we begin, do me a favor, head on over to JeremyEpp.com and subscribe to the show. This way you'll stay in the loop on vital information including new podcast episodes that will help you in your journey to reach your career goals while creating an amazing lifestyle for you and your family.

My first introduction into the startup business mindset began when I took a job coming out of college. I had a recruiter gal that was helping me locate a job that was better suited for my talents and she gave me an opportunity to join a startup company, which I was very excited about. The startup company had three partners and I was to be the fourth person to join the team. The first employee.

I still remember sitting at a table listening to the owners of the business talk about how they were to approach various problems with different solutions and I recall hearing them talk in a different way than I've ever heard before, and it dawned on me while sitting at the table that if we did not sell anything that we did not eat. There was no guarantee. There was nobody writing a paycheck for anybody. There was no higher level corporation that was behind the scenes with their accounting department waiting to write a payroll check every other Friday.

Understanding that and looking at how these individuals thought differently than anybody else that I had been exposed to, it opened my eyes up to the world of entrepreneurship and startups and running your own company. Today, I want to share with you 10 key startup mindsets that you'll want to adopt if you want to be successful.

Now, I've worked in the corporate environment for many years as well, and so I understand the paradigm shifts between the two mindsets of both an entrepreneurial mindset and a corporate mindset, and so we'll talk about the mindsets that as you're shifting away from a corporate environment that you need to be successful and to think differently.

So let me jump right into it. I want to talk about mindset #1, which we've talked about this in another podcast, but it's very, very important and that is the mindset about cash flow. Everything you do must be focused on creating and increasing sales or decreasing costs. Now with that, you can only decrease costs so much. Primary focus needs to be on increasing revenue to the company. Everything you do must be focused on that, especially during the startup phase. It is critical to maintain and grow your business. You've got to get that cash flow, that lifeblood, that business lifeblood flowing into the business to build it up for the ups and down cycles that are to come in a business.

You'll also need to think differently as far as how you design your products. And what I mean by that is you'll need to go out and sell your idea first. Sell your product first, and then create the product. This seems counterintuitive, but if you think about it, it's really the smart thing to do. You might go out there and spend countless hours and money building up resources to develop a product just to turn around and make an introduction into the marketplace and find out nobody wants it. You missed the mark completely. They're perfectly satisfied with their other alternatives, or you're missing the mark with your features and your benefits. So the smartest thing to do would be to sell first on the idea before you create the product, and then go out and create it knowing that you've got sales in mind.

Mindset #2, speed. You've got to change the velocity in which you take action. You don't have the luxury of time to build the perfect product or have the perfect marketing strategy or to sit there in debates and have discussions with coworkers and big committees to get approval. You need to move quickly. You have time working against you and you have cash flow putting pressure on you. You must move quickly in response to the market and to get out there. You don't have the time to set up this elaborate system. You must go, go, go and get the system caught back up with you.

All right, let's move to mindset #3. You must be humble and you must have the willingness to take on roles beneath your skills as well as learn new skills. Let me say that again. You must be willing to take on roles beneath you as well as learn to take on new skills. You're going to need to be the CEO as well as the janitor. You're going to be the finance department as well as the sales department. You're going to be the product development team as well as the customer service call center.

When you start out, you're going to be wearing all these different hats. Now, you might be in a position with your startup to have a partner or you may have enough resources to outsource some of this stuff immediately, but more than likely, you may have to grow into that as your business grows. So initially you're going to need to understand things and be willing to jump in and help out wherever it's required. So be prepared for that. You can't just outsource this to anybody. You're going to be doing the important work as well as some of the mundane, boring work, but yet it still needs to take place.

Mindset #4 you'll need to get creative on your solutions. And what I mean by this is due to cashflow constraints, due to cash constraints, you won't typically have access to all the latest and greatest tools. You may come from a corporate environment where you've got all these amazing software products at your fingertips to do the job, but when you break out on your own, those products are often quite expensive and in some cases quite customized already. So you may be getting software off the shelf that has to be customized to tailor fit to what your needs are, or you may not even be able to afford some of that software and you're going to have to get creative on how you utilize what tools you do have in order to make your business work.

All right, moving on to mindset #5. At first, you will not have a steady paycheck. You know, we've all heard the stories of these amazing entrepreneurs that struggled and scraped together and bootstrapped their business, and after a period of time, typically years of hard, hard work, they're now making amazing amounts of income and they're able to help grow their business and support their families in ways that they've never even dreamt of.

But there's a price to pay and everybody has to kind of go through the motions and the experiences of really struggling at the very beginning. Not that that's what they want, but that's just reality. Now, the good news is if you can think beyond that point, you realize that in the corporate environment, there's always income limitations. When you work for somebody else, you will only grow so much. You may have caps to how much your paycheck can rise over the course of a year. Maybe it's a cost of living, or maybe there's small promotions. But bottom line is there's limitations to that and it takes a long time to move up the ladder. And eventually, you're going to find yourself in a position where you kind of flatline out. Now, with a startup, initially, you're not going to have any income, let's be honest, but over time it becomes almost unlimited is the opportunity there. So keep that in mind if you're successful in your business.

All right, mindset #6, you do not need a fancy office and a prime location. You need to put your ego to the side and you need to be thinking about cash flow. So again, I keep coming back to this because it really is the lifeblood of your business. But when you begin your company, there is very little reason why you need to rent space in the downtown area of the city in a high rise. Often times you can start out by working at home or sometimes in a shared office environment. You need to take on that bootstrap mentality. Take a look at what kind of work you're doing and analyze if you really need that presence to where people will come to you for business. Often times in today's technology environment, you could do things through Skype or video chats and other activities.

I know an attorney that I work with that he has a home office in Seattle that he spends half of his year and the other half of the year he's in Spain. So again, he's not having people come to him. He's generally on the phone having meetings this way. When I was in real estate, I found out that I did not have people come to my office for meetings, typically. I would go to them. So typically you do not have to put yourself into an office environment where you've got additional funds coming out. Now I understand that not everybody's home situation allows for them to do that and perhaps you can get creative. One time for a couple of years, I rented space inside of a CPA firm's office. I rented one of their offices. I didn't pay anything for utilities, I didn't pay anything additional for a front desk.

There's other options like WeWork that allows you to rent space, whether it's a dedicated office space or just an as-needed office space. So there's more and more opportunities and options that are coming up, which is fantastic. And I think also importantly, the public, your customers understand that there are creative ways to work as well and they may not necessarily think anything less of you and your business if you do not have that high rise office space that you think that you may need.

All right, let's move on to mindset #7. As a startup, you do not need anyone's permission to take action. You are the sole decision-maker. You can move forward. You do not need to have permission from the finance department and from the directors to move forward. You can make a decision and move forward. However, for some folks, this can be difficult, especially if you're used to bouncing your ideas off of others to get their perspectives and sometimes you could even say and to get their permission.

So again, if you need to be in a place to make a decision and move forward, and be confident with that, which leads into mindset #8. You need to expect failures and setbacks, but you need to learn from them, adjust, and move forward quickly. Again, you need to expect failures and setbacks, but you need to learn from them, adjust your actions, and move forward quickly. Just as #7 was you don't need anybody's permission to take action, that also means that you are the sole responsible person if you make a mistake.

The key here is that you cannot let failure stop you. You need to expect them. They will happen. This is part of the entrepreneur's journey is to make mistakes, make adjustments, learn and grow, and make a better product, and make a better service. Don't let failures shake you from your confidence, but at the same time, be wise when you make these decisions. Don't bet with all your chips to where if you were to fail, you're out of the game. Don't go all in. You want to be nice and steady and wise with your course of action. You want to test the market, get feedback, make adjustments, learn, tweak, and make a better. Put it back out there for more testing and more feedback.

All right, you hanging in there? We got two more. So moving on to #9. The beautiful thing about being an entrepreneur and a startup mentality is that you get a focus on creating something new and fresh versus being focused on competition. This mindset shift comes from Justin Atlan. Justin talks about, in the corporate environment, there is this competitive nature. Large companies are continuously competing for market share. Coke vs. Pepsi, Nike vs. Reebok, Ford vs. Chevrolet vs. Dodge versus Toyota. You get my point. Companies in a competitive environment are always racing to find the next feature that customers are wanting and also they're in a pricing war typically.

You as a startup can't compete at that. You don't have the deep pockets and the time on your side. Instead, you need to shift your mindset to focus on creating unique solutions to problems and offer alternatives to the marketplace that they don't currently have. That's your unique selling proposition. You're going to come to the market with a better mousetrap, with a new opportunity, with a different way to do things and that is what's going to set you apart. Don't go after the same thing that everybody else is doing. Don't put your hat in the ring of competition.

I saw this in the mortgage industry after the housing boom. They took a lot of the creative products that were misused and abused by unethical mortgage brokers and banks and they took those off the table. And what that did is it put everybody in that industry at a pricing war. And so instead of offering and having the ability to offer creative solutions that were uniquely designed for an individual borrower, it put them at a pricing war. There was a 30-year fixed rate mortgage option and there was a 15-year rate fixed mortgage option and that was it. So at that point, the consumer says, "Well, if it's the same price, I want the best rate at the lowest price." Who wouldn't? So again, focus on being creative with something fresh and new.

And lastly, mindset #10. When you're in the corporate environment, you are typically working 40, 50, maybe 60 hours a week. Sometimes a little bit more. But generally somewhere in the 40 to 50 hours a week. When you clock off for work and you walk out the door, you might have some lingering thoughts about a meeting that's coming up or reflecting on a meeting that you had and how you would address those concerns, et cetera. But generally, for the most part, you're kind of off work, in air quotes.

Well in startups, you're on 24/7. When you wake up, you're thinking about how to do things differently and how to do things better. When you're at work, you're not punching in a clock. You're working as much energy as you have and then some. You're constantly thinking about it in the evenings. In the weekends, you're going to wake up in bed thinking about things. So your mindset is going to shift. But the difference here, and there's a benefit to all this and that is you won't mind because you're building something for yourself versus building a business for others.

This is the joy and the amazing opportunity that startups and being an entrepreneur offers is you get to be creative and you get to help others and you're building something for you and your family and your future as the owner versus building something bigger and amazing for somebody else.

If you want to learn more about how to launch your own business and work toward leaving the corporate environment, then head over to my website, JeremyEpp.com and subscribe to the show. Begin learning on how to set up, launch, and grow your profitable business to take you to the next level. I appreciate you tuning in. Thank you again for your support and I look forward to speaking to you on the next episode.