The Startup Chat with Steli and Hiten podcast.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how not to get ahead of yourself.

Sometimes we tend to get ahead of ourselves when things are going well in our business, and this can be a bad thing as we tend to lose focus on what’s working and get distracted by what we could be doing.

In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about how to contain your ambition when things are going very well in your business, they share specific examples of how we can get ahead of ourselves and talk about why it’s a good idea to chill out sometimes and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About today’s topic

00:31 Why this topic was chosen.

03:00 An example of how we can get ahead of ourselves sometimes.

04:05 Why it’s a good idea to chill out sometimes.

06:24 Why you shouldn’t worry about scaling at the early stages.

07:17 Why being small is ok in the beginning.

08:19 Issues you’ll have once you start scaling.

09:12 The importance of thinking about how to make things work.

10:36 A specific example of how one can get ahead of themselves.

3 Key Points:

Don’t let short term success turn into long term losses.

When you find something that you can work on and make money on, just make more money first.

Keep it simple! Small is ok in the beginning.

[0:00:00]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah : And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:04]

Steli Efti: And today on the Startup Chat, I don't know what we're talking about, maybe managing your ambition, managing your greed, taking it slower when things go well. I'm not quite sure how to frame this episode. I'm sure by the end of the episode, Hiten, you're going to have like a killer title to use, but here's what I want to talk to you about and what I want to share with the listeners. Last night a good friend of mine is visiting somebody that used to work for me and now he's doing something on his own quite successfully and we had a long really exciting and great conversation about life and everything that's going on. And at the very end he was like, you know, one thing, he had a question for me. Basically, you know, he did something entrepreneurial himself, put that on pause and then started doing coaching and consulting to founders, right, as a means to make money. He quickly realized that his skill set is really, really valuable and he's able to make a ton of fucking money, right? More money than has ever made in his life being an entrepreneur or working for different startups. Right? And so he had now a few months of like really successfully kind of growing this coaching consulting thing that he's doing. He has a bunch of clients that pay him every month. He makes, he paid down all his debt, he put up some savings. He made some investments and he is feeling fucking great. Right? The year's ending, he was like, this shit is awesome. It's fairly easy to do. I'm creating tons of value. I'm making all this money. I've paid all my debt. Like I feel amazing. Right? And now he was asking me, Steli, give me some advice. I'm struggling with this at the end of this year. I could keep doing this and I think if I make X, Y, Z improvements and additions, next year, he would make an insane amount of money. Right? That's his kind of his assumption based on what he's learned so far and I think he could do that fairly in a fairly straightforward fashion. But he said, but it's limited. I could only make X amount of insane money and not even more, right? And now I'm thinking should I potentially instead of just doing this myself, should I start trying to build more of a business around this and hire a bunch of other consultants and coaches and kind of make this a much more scalable thing? And I looked at him and I said, if you, are you truly passionate about being a coach and a consultant and ...