Top 5 Things You Need to Know When Starting a New Business – Casey Grey, The Conscious Builder

There are five things that I wish I knew when I started my business. Basically these are all mistakes that cost me a lot of time, and cost me a lot of money.

Number one is a financial thing. When I started my business, I didn’t understand the difference between markup and margin. That literally cost me thousands of dollars. Essentially, the markup is adding on to what your cost of your product is. Say it’s a hundred dollars, and you’re gonna add twenty dollars to it. That’s the markup. The margin is based on going backwards. So, the margin would be how much you made based on the revenue. So, the total sale price is 120 dollars, you can do the math yourself. If you were to mark it up 20 from 100 up 20 that gives you 120. But if you’re to work backwards to figure out your profit margin, that would be 120 divided by 100, which would actually be 16.7 percent.

Number two was understanding the importance of environment, and how it’s way more powerful than willpower. Willpower will only get you so far. If you want to go to the gym, you might be motivated, and you go. But you might lose momentum. You’re tired, it’s cold out, or you don’t want to get out of bed. Whatever it may be. But if you’re surrounded by people who are pulling you, and holding you accountable, that is the environment. That will make you better. If you want to be a successful business person, surround yourself with successful business people. One thing to add to that is it’s not just the people. It’s what you listen to, and what you watch. Be very careful about what you allow into your mind. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t watch a lot of media unless I’m specifically looking for something.

Number three would be understanding the difference between urgent and important. That means that not everything that’s urgent is necessarily important. In business, there are things that are really important. But there’s always so-called urgent things that come up. In my business of construction, it’s important to work on the business. It’s important to put together a financial plan, a marketing plan, work on videos. the courses that we’re doing. Those are all important things. But none of them are urgent. The urgent thing might be when a client calls because they’re upset because the the paint color is wrong. But as a successful business person, I need to make sure I put time aside to work on the important things, and not worry too much about the urgent things. There are things that are urgent and important, but I know we’re building houses, not saving lives. If somebody called me, and the roof was leaking, and the guys just left or something like that, that would be urgent and important. We’ll take care of that. We’ll get the guys back there. But rarely does that happen.

Number four would be making sure that you’re clear on your values, and the people who work for you are aligned. The reason I say that is because I had people that were working for me when I started my company, and I ended up having a lot of internal problems. They’re all great people but our values weren’t aligned, or their values weren’t aligned with each other’s. So there is internal conflict. Get clear on what your values are as a business. Ours are fun, honor, and mastery. People are very aware of what our values are. Make sure that people are aligned. That doesn’t mean that they have to have the same beliefs, because there’s a big difference between values and beliefs. But it is important to have the values aligned. Like you can both value health, for example, but have very different beliefs on how to achieve that.

The last thing, number five would be how to say no. This is important once again going back to your time, and people demanding more and more of your time. You need to be aware of what you’re saying yes to. It’s easy to say yes, and you want to say yes, and you want to grow and grow and grow. But be aware that every time you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else.

It’s funny how the universe works. You just have to trust, and you need to go with what you believe is right, and magic will happen.

We’re all over. You need to search The Conscious Builder. We do have a lot going on, on our YouTube channel, definitely check us out there. If you are a contractor, I recommend going to consciousbuilderacademy.com. We have some free courses there, as well as some great paid packages.