How to Adopt a Solid Entrepreneur Mindset

When you’re just starting out as an online entrepreneur, the mindset piece is easy to miss. 

You’re focused on the physical things that need to be done and the endless to-do list. From where you’re at, it seems impossible to be successful when it looks like everyone’s platform is huge. How can you compete?

Earlier this week, someone new in my online-world said they couldn’t do what I do and make consistent income because they didn’t have a huge platform like I do. Beyond the assumptions that person was making (a huge platform is subject to interpretation), there is something that person missed…

We all have to start at zero. 

When we’re born into the world, we aren’t walking or talking. It's the same with our businesses. We all have to start somewhere–even if you think you can't do anything like make a consistent income. 

So if your entrepreneur mindset needs a shift, here are some things to consider.

How to Adopt a Solid Entrepreneur Mindset In a Few Simple Steps

If you’ve started your business on the side and you're still working as an employee, it's a different mindset compared to the one you'll need when running your own business.

You have to get out of the employee mentality. You can no longer just show up to work and get the same amount of money every week. That's a J.O.B. 

Your pay is fixed; your growth is fixed. 

When you run your own business, it's different. You are now in charge of everything. 

Claim the mindset of being an entrepreneur and you'll begin to understand that your income and growth are limitless.  

At the end of the day, if we want to make money in our business, we actually have to sell something. That can be a product or a service, but we can't just hope and wish that someone's going to buy our stuff just because we hang up a digital shingle. We have to let people know we have something to offer and intentionally sell it. 

Whenever I say the words sell or sales or selling, does it trigger you? Does it actually make you feel funny or icky, or do you want to just turn and run? Believe me, I get it. Six months ago, I had a resistance to selling. It really felt icky for me to do it. I felt like I was having to do sales calls and stuff like that, which I don't like at all. 

I had to change my mindset, knowing that as an entrepreneur it isn’t about me as much as it is about the customer I'm trying to serve.

It's also very much about finding a balance between what you need to do to make money in your business and what feels right to you. 

There are so many different ways to intentionally sell that don’t require sales calls. It depends on your business model. 

And when I say business model, I’m thinking:

• Printable business
• Coaches
• Course creators
• Writers and/or authors 

Those are all business models or online businesses. As long as you know what your kind of business model looks like, then you’ll have a better understanding of how to sell.

I’m all of those things… 

I have a printable piece of my business. 

There is a coaching piece to my business. 

I'm also a course creator and author of 30+ books. 

I'm multifaceted and that suits me perfectly because at any given time I can either be introverted or extroverted in my sales approach. 

But selling as a course creator looks a lot different from selling as a printable creator. 

It's about deciding what you want to do and offer in your business. Once you know that, then you can decide how you want to sell those different offers.

For example, if I'm selling a course or live program, I'm going to do more intense value-driven content.

But if I'm selling a printable product, I'm still going to bring value, but it won't be as intense. I might also simply run ads to the printable product.

It always comes back to what do I feel equipped to sell and how do I want to present the offer?

Making Consistent Income As An Online Entrepreneur

There's actually a very clear step-by-step plan for making consistent income online and you can read more about it here. But you need to know is this: 

1. You do not need a large audience, you need an engaged audience, and
2. In order to consistently make money you need a plan, a money-making plan. 

Know your numbers and who your audience is. As long as they're engaged, then it's just a numbers game. It becomes less about you as a person and more about you as a business. Then it’s easy to create a money-making plan and intentionally ask for the sale.

In my business, it’s a combination of having an engaged audience and having things to sell. You need those two pieces together because you can't just post something up for sale and do nothing else. That’s just hoping and wishing. 

Many of my students have asked me for direction on how they can hit $5k+ per month consistently. I created a program to show them how to do that without overwhelm and burnout. It's part of the Digital Income Accelerator, a monthly business mentor membership to help you start and grow an online business that is easy, fun, and profitable.

Here’s what I’ve done to hone my entrepreneurial mindset so I can make consistent income…

Be a Giver

I start with the customer in mind and how I can help her. 

When I’m creating offers, I always come back to the number one law out of the stratospheric law of success–The Law of Value.

In the book The Go-Giver, the first law is the Law of Value, which is to give more in value than you receive in payment. 

That doesn't mean that you give all your stuff away for free. It's not about that at all. It's about finding the balance in terms of what you offer and charge and providing value. 

The whole reason I got into business was to help other people figure out how to start and grow their online businesses. I intentionally do that and offer a lot for free, but that doesn't mean I don't deserve to get paid for the other things I present. 

Intentionally Ask for the Sale

When I'm offering something of value and someone recognizes that the offer is exactly what they need, then it's my responsibility to make sure that I offer the opportunity for them to buy. 

It is as simple as giving as much value as possible every single day, and then presenting the opportunity for someone to buy and go more in-depth inside my programs. 

That's what I mean by intentionally asking. I am not selling in an overt, telemarketer kind of way. It’s more of a soft ask. But it’s always about letting people know that I have more to offer and they can get it in this offer I'm selling. 

Here's the thing: you’ve gotta let your people know you have something for sale, but it doesn’t have to be in a salesy, spammy kind of way. 

In fact, I intentionally only ever have two sales posts a day inside my Facebook group. Even then, they're not hard sales. In those posts, I'm having a conversation with real people who I genuinely care about. And if what I'm selling resonates with that person, then they will buy. 

All I have to do is present the opportunity and give them a link for where they can look at more information. 

The point is to make sure that you give as much value as possible, to a point where you feel so generous to be doing it. You deserve to get paid for your knowledge, but it starts with you being intentional about presenting your offers.

I’m always giving away free stuff on my website, inside blog posts, and inside my emails. I consistently deliver free information that provides a ton of value to my subscribers. Someone can come into my email list and learn a whole bunch of stuff without ever buying a single thing from me. 

And that feels good to me because I know that eventually, they'll see something they love and buy.

But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't charge for things I’ve created. It’s the customer’s choice if people want to access a product where they can learn even more.  

It's a balancing act. And a constant gut check of does this feel good to me?

Stack Value into Your Offer 

So how do I decide how much to price my offers at? I make that decision by choosing a price based on my monthly financial goals and plan. And then I ask myself what makes me feel good about this? If it doesn’t feel right, I don't change the price, I add more VALUE to the offer. 

That's when I start to stack the deck.

I start adding more value in the form of bonuses. I do everything I can to over-deliver because being generous feels good to me and my entrepreneur mindset is all about being generous. ????

Always check in with yourself and ask does this feel good? Do I feel okay about offering this product at this price? 

You must feel confident when you ask for the sale or the energy will be all wrong. When you present the opportunity to buy from you, if you don't feel aligned, it comes across as wishy-washy. Stack the deck by adding more value aka bonuses.

And I get it. I've been there. Last year I was wishy-washy when offering my stuff for sale. 

I was like, well, you know, I have this thing… and maybe it's good for you… like, I don't know…

In wanting my customer to not feel pressured and only buy if it felt right for them, it came across fairly limp and like I wasn't confident in my offers.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to work with someone who comes across as not confident in their own programs! 

Once I became conscious of how I was coming across, I worked on my money mindset to discover what I needed to become more confident in selling my offers.  

Get behind the things that you offer. 

You should feel that you’re offering so much value that it’s a no-brainer for your customer. Have the mindset that people are lucky to get access to your product or service and that their lives are going to be better for having invested in themselves. 

Again, whether someone buys from you or not isn't about you personally and it’s not egotistical. It's about the customer, providing a solution to their problem, and providing as much value as you possibly can. 

Be Intentional 

I put a plan in place to intentionally grow my email list this year to over 15k. I'm not randomly doing a whole bunch of stuff that I think might work. It's strategy driven.

There are several ways to grow your email list in a consistent way. I focus on a couple of different ways. I run lead generation ads and I participate in regular collaborations.

If you're wondering how to come up with a way to grow your email list that works for you, start with these questions:

1. What freebie can I offer that brings the right people into my world?
2. Am I prepared to invest money into growing my email list each month?
3. How quickly do I need to grow my email list in order to hit my income goals?

Be Strategic

You know you need to have a business strategy, but sometimes you need help and new ideas. Part of the entrepreneur mindset is investing in yourself.

At different stages in my business, I’ve invested in business coaches to help me become more strategic about my business. More focused on different aspects that I needed to grow. 

And every time I do this, my mindset is that it's an investment in myself as an entrepreneur and an investment in my business. And ultimately, an investment in the life I want to lead.

The return is based on me taking action that I otherwise wouldn’t on my own. Even as an Upholder (from The Four Tendencies) I still need a process and steps to follow… in fact, I thrive on those things.

When I invest in myself in this way, I’m expecting to learn something that’s going to benefit my business. By paying money to somebody else for specific information and advanced strategies, I deliberately choose to increase my business. 

This motivates the crap out of me to get a return on my investment! Aka to take action. Spending money on my business motivates me to pull my pants up and do the thing that I said I'm going to do. I have put money behind it, now I have to take action.

Find the people or courses that will do the same for you. It's about figuring out what motivates you and then being intentional about seeking out opportunities to grow.

Do What Feels Easy & Fun 

Another thing you have to do as an entrepreneur is to have a business plan and be conscious in working on that plan… 

What are you doing to make money? What are the daily things that your business needs for you to make money? 

Doing things that are easy and fun for you is key to making a predictable income as an entrepreneur. 

It literally takes me less than 45 minutes to do my daily money-making tasks. 

I’m not spending eight hours a day shaking the bushes trying to make money.

I automate as many things as possible and then momentum starts to build up. It's like compound interest for your business. If you do the things that are easy and fun for you, it all builds up in your favor. 

Be Decisive But Open to Change 

One of the most empowering mindset shifts I want you to understand as an entrepreneur is that you can make your business look exactly how you want it to, yet also change your decisions at any time.

My husband and I were just talking about this recently. We’re both online entrepreneurs and we’ve made some not-so-great decisions that led to us wasting a lot of money over the past few years. 

We chose the best options at the time, but things don’t always work out the way we envisage they will.

Instead of beating ourselves up about it, we chose to pivot. We changed our outlook, made some intentional decisions, and now we’ve set up a different future for ourselves… And as a result of this discussion, we moved to Australia in 202o.

As entrepreneurs, we can change our mindset to decide what we want our lives to look like. We take our businesses with us wherever we want to go in the world. That’s #empowered and empowering.

If you don't make clear choices, your business will run you and you’ll end up with a nasty little monster as I did in 2019. 

My business has morphed and changed over the 10+ years that I've been running my online business because as human beings we are not static.

We evolve, adapt and change based on our external environment and what's going on in our lives. I have no idea what my business will look like in a couple of years' time.  

This is why I make sure that I'm regularly checking in with myself to make sure that the things that I'm doing align with what I want my business to look like right now, in this moment. I have control over that and I get to decide this 100%.

The same is true for you. You always get to choose and decide what your business looks like. What your life looks like.

Because if you don't…

Last year I let somebody else control this for me. I handed over the reins to my business, to somebody else's idea of what a business should look like and it felt like crap. 

I followed business advice that wasn’t right for my business. It took me three months (and $9k) to really figure out it was not what I wanted. I had created a monster that made me feel like crap. Once I recognized it, I then did something about it.

I want you to fully understand that you do get to choose what your business looks like. Otherwise, what is the point in having our business? We may as well just stay in a job, right? Why create a business that you don't love?

I want to empower you to make those decisions now. Yes, it might take you a little bit to get there. And it's taken me time to dig myself out of that little monster that I created in 2019.  It took me a solid three months to make a full transition into a business that I'm more aligned with. 

My point is this: if you don't decide what your day looks like in your business, it will grow into something that you don't like. 

And if you’re there right now, you also can change it. When I realized that I had done this to myself, I also realized that I could change it. I didn't have to keep it that way. 

Just like when you're in a job and you don't like it, you have the choice to change it. You look for another job, you move out of that toxic environment. 

Why would you stay? We always have choices. You just gotta take the next step. And the next. And the next…

Action Steps

So think about future-you, where does future-you want to be in six months' time? 

What decisions are you making and what actions are you taking today that are going to impact future-you in six months? It’s actually up to you. You get to decide this. 

Embrace the opportunity to change your mindset and make decisions for yourself as an entrepreneur. It's up to you. You can do this. 

You can, and you will.