How to Keep Moving Forward as an Entrepreneur

How to Keep Moving Forward as an Entrepreneur

Sean: Now David. So we got a lot out of your sales expertise and wisdom. And I want to know, because I’ve read your bio and you mentioned that there was a time in your life when you lost everything and nearly your life. I’m not going to ask you for the details, but I want to talk about hitting rock bottom. Because there are entrepreneurs out there, especially during this time of the pandemic where they feel like – this is it.

This is as low as I can get and they need to hear from you about how you got back up. Can you tell us about that?

David: Yeah, a hundred percent. It’s a funny question because I, we were saying this alot offline earlier, to those who are listening. But I own my L’s, I’ve made massive mistakes. I mean, I’m really screwed up.

Mine was based around, and I’m quite open with it. Mine was based around alcohol and drugs. I got massive success, for those out there that hype themselves up and go hyperactive after a deal and gone out and celebrated. And going back to work the next day and I’ve done it again and I’m going to celebrate, I’ve just done that for a few years to an excess, but because things were going well, I thought it wasn’t a problem.

So I ended up losing everything. I had a breakdown, lost everything to the extent I ended up sleeping in my car. And the reason I’m saying this is I want to give people context. If you ever have it, if you wake, if you’ll pull in your house and nothing’s all, and you don’t know any difference, it was still horrible, but it’s different because you don’t know different.

It goes from a fact of habit, everything, and you screw it up. You make the mistakes. It’s hard to come out of that because you just hit yourself with a stick. To go from eating in the top restaurants, driving the cars, having the road trips and all the holidays to sleeping in a car and literally not able to afford to buy a sandwich.

Like that bad and I wanted it done, but it also gets to the stage where you can’t, but you have to get through that day. It’s horrible. It’s painful. You have to become accountable to yourself. You have to realize everyone messes up, everyone makes mistakes. And if you’ve ever watched Rocky, imagine if Rocky ended at the bad bit.

What a miserable film it might’ve been, right? When he’s down, and just beaten and he just died and that’s it. End of the film. Right. In fact, that’s the stage you’re at now you have a choice. You have a choice to end the Rocky film now, and make it a miserable film or fight back. No one said it was easy for Rocky. Have you ever seen this?

Have you ever read the story about Sylvester Stallone like Rocky? Yeah. For those who don’t know. I mean Sylvester Stallone had nothing; it was also big money at the time, like 200,000 pounds for Rocky, but not to be in the film. And he was like, “no, I want to be in the film.” He was so skint. He had no money. He had to give his dog away and his dogs actually the one in the film, isn’t it. Think of Sylvester Stallone right now, every film you’ve ever seen him.

He could have been a crackhead during this. But the determination that he had at that point, if you are now with your business and you’re going through a hard time and you’ve got people knocking on the door because they owe you – you owe them money. Their business is collapsing. It could have collapsed. Your wife left you, your kids hate you.

You’re in hell, don’t stop. Hell isn’t the place to stop in. Hell is not the place to retire in. Like it’s a crap town, it’s a little village on the way to your success. And the only way it becomes your permanent location is if you stop. Now it doesn’t matter how you get out there. If you got a car, you  drive out of hell, if you got a plane you fly out of hell.

If you can walk with your legs – you walk out of hell, if your legs don’t work – you crawl out hell.  What you don’t do is stay there and burn in heat and die. It’s just not it. Now you might not believe in yourself or someone might not think they deserve it and you might not. Which is hard but it’s true, but it doesn’t matter what, right? If you’re in Hell, it doesn’t matter whether you deserve it or not, it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter whether you could achieve your day or not. You just gotta do it next week. You just gotta get through today. You just got to get in the next hour though.  You just have to manage a minute, and everyone can manage a minute to do one thing if you improve 1% a day, right? Take your life right now.

If you improve your life 1% today, that’s manageable. If you do that again tomorrow and again the day after, in a year’s time you have twice what you have today and that might not be a lot. But a year after that you’ll have another hundred percent. But there are actually 200% that you would’ve gone up and it will keep growing like that. We need to have this foresight and the resilience our families and parents who have gone through.

Your life might be crap right now. Think about a lot of them right now. It’s hard. You still have the internet, but listen to this. Imagine your parents, my parents, my grandparents in the war where bombs were going off. Hitler’s dropping bombs on London. They didn’t have the internet to build a business or a bomb shelter. They didn’t have food being delivered by the waiters.

They didn’t have Moz, they didn’t get updates. They didn’t have anything. They literally had food stamps, bombs. So whatever we’re going through now, whatever you got now, there’s people out there, that got less. If you are listening to this, you have electricity. You’re already over some people in the world. Right?

Unless you’ve got a hamster in a wheel while making some power. If you’re looking around at your house and you got a light on, or if you got lunch or food in your house that you can cook tonight,you’re doing better than some. You have a laptop, you have something there, you can have to do anything now. Internet businesses collapsed, went off and became an affiliate marketer. You don’t even need products; start marketing for them. If you’re in sales and you were good at sales before, you’re good at sales now, you’re just being lazy. You’re just going through the habits of beating yourself up – ” this is hard.”

I think for too many people out there, they let themselves off too easy and they beat themselves up far too easy. And I think this is the big difference for a lot of people. If we’re gonna be on a stage where we’re going to get every single one out of this world. Imagine, do everything we have to do to get it.

Not “oh I’m going to do this, but then I’m going to finish at five.” If you’re moaning about your life and you finish at three o’clock this afternoon, it’s on you, but we have to go and get everything we want, but we have to go and do the work to get it. It’s not a buffet. It’s not, “Oh yeah, doing a bit of  work in the morning, but yeah I’ll do that.” No, do it all.

If your friends are terrible and they like to party all a time and you don’t, stop seeing  your friends. “Oh, but I’ll get lonely.” So? If you’re thirsty, don’t drink poison. “Oh, I’m thirsty. I’ll drink that.” So if your friends are toxic, stop being around them. It’s better to be lonely, and content – that will come. But to drink poison, remember seeing this James Bond film.

And he sends them off in a desert with the oil. He got that thirsty, that the oil was more appealing than staying where he was, knowing that he would die. We do that with our friends. We do that with our circle. We do that with our actions. We have to go off and we have to deliver over and over and over and over again. And when we stop, we don’t, we don’t.

It doesn’t work to change that mood.

Sean: That’s awesome advice right there. And you mentioned a lot of stuff that you take with you right now from that rock bottom period in your life. But I want to ask if there was one discipline, one discipline in your life during that time, when you hit rock bottom, that is super important to you that you still practice today, or you have it in your mind today.

David: If you beat yourself up over a lot of stuff, keep it. Note a journal; I’ve got notebooks everywhere. Oh, that’s my memory isn’t great. Part of it is I suffer massively from anxiety, so it’s very easy if you have higher anxiety or you’re stressed or you’re depressed to not have focus, I just work for a list. Now in the same way, as when you go to the gym, they will get some of your fight with you or your friend. I work top to bottom.

So some days I’ll get up and and I’ve got an awful job to do at half five in the morning. Certainly, I’m not looking forward to it, but just get it done. If you commit to being committed, if you hold yourself accountable, if you say you’re going to do it, you do it. You will build your confidence up.

A lot of the time we are our own worst enemy. A lot of the time we say we’re going to do it, but then we let ourselves off. And then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now this is the thing. If you’re in sales and you’re getting screwed around on deals, look at what you do and your own actions. Do you let yourself down? A lot of the time we do, and I’m not accusing of – I used to do this.

I would say to everyone, “yeah, I do this. I’ll do that. I’ll do this” – knowing damn well, I wouldn’t. So what happened when I dealt with prospects? I could relate to their lives because I used to lie to me. I could understand. And this is why if you’ve got no money and someone gives you a no money objection, it’s very easy to relate.

“Oh yeah, no, I understand that it’s quite expensive, yeah it’s 4,000 pound.”

But imagine if you got a million pound in the bank and you’ve just been to a financial advisor and you started working on your long-term plan, and you’re paying this and you’re paying that and someone said the same rejection, like hang on a minute? I know being on that stage, and I know what I did. You become more proactive. So we have to look at our own life and our own life is a direct reflection of the prospects that we find, the network is normally very similar to the way you are.

If you are struggling with stuff, change your processes, become committed to that commitment, without being commited. Have a list, and the list is good because; one, you write down all the stuff you’ve got to do. If you look at my white board here.

That’s my to-do-list for today. My to-do-list is there for my own peace of mind, because sometimes I’m so busy. I don’t know what I’ve done today, but when I’ve done it all for I feel alive for it . So say, if I have a bad day today, stuff happens, whatever. If I ended the day I am picking myself up. I look at the board, I wipe them off the boards, but I live for it. You go; “I got a lot done today”

So I might not have, I might not have reached a lot from my crops. I might have had a bad day, but I sowed a lot of seeds on that day. I’ve got nine things that are killer, done. I’ve got some ridiculous ads being created in really cold videos. So yesterday, like I said to you, I’d see things go on a bit of a bizarre day, but I also had the website launch, I had a new interactive landing page set up.

I have set up and I’ve booked in for another six podcasts, two live radio programs. Two videos that have been created, what else did I do, I was on another program. So that’s a lot of things, If I had my bad day my focus could have been there. Right. But then at the end of the day, push them to one side because they do already happen.

I’m like “Wow. I actually got a lot done.” And having a list there will enable you to then stop beating yourself up and see the progress. You have a farm, and you’re trying to reap the crops and you’re not getting enough crops or enough food from your crops. If you’re doing enough planting every day, eventually those crops won’t matter because you’re going to have others that will give you fruits.

The problem is in sales if you are not in enough business and are not an entrepreneur, it’s easy to knock down the seeds that day. Easy to sit on your farm, sit in the store and cry because there are no foods to eat, but you need to pick yourself up, dust yourself down, get out and start planting seeds. Because if you plant seeds long enough and you look after those seeds, they will tu

rn into being the monster fields and the crops that you can down on for the rest of your life.

And those other crops were seen insignificant. We hold too much value on them too. We’re just going to take those processes. Don’t you think?

Sean: Do a list. That is one of the things that a lot of people don’t do up to today. Surprisingly, but yeah, so I used to do it. It’s an app, but dude, a white board works exactly fine.

David: Yeah. I actually find it for me, they work better. So on my phone, I have eight different categories of to-do lists on my phone. And there’s like 90 free and I’m in the process of moving. So a lot of this stuff on there, a lot of this are ideas on videos to record. So they are not urgent stuff, my whiteboard has things to do.

These are things I want done, but it’s not urgent. These are ideas. So the good thing is with that, if I cleared, I’ve got 40 things on there. So even if I – that whiteboard, we’ll never be clear. Now, this is the other thing, you have to accept that that will never be clear. We’re not trying to get a clean white board, we’re trying to get increased productivity.

Some people are like, “Oh, I need to finish this like everyday.” No you don’t, stop being so vain. No one cares about perfection. You don’t want a clear thing. That’s just like saying “Oh, I want to make sure to take all  the money at my bank account everyday.” No, you want to make sure you have enough stuff there. So I’ve got my whiteboard. That’s my to-do. And I’ve got my to do so I could have done this.

This is what I want done. They can move on to there when I’m ready. So when I walked around in a restaurant and I think so many are close on this list . Then, my to-do-list is nearly done; something else is going on there – my daily stuff, I’ve got a content thing on this calendar. This is how organized I’ve got.

So I literally have turned this calendar, and this is my content for the next month online. That’s awesome. So that calendar – now if I think of something when I’m out or I hear somebody’s inspiration. “Gosh, I need to do a video on that” I’ll go on my list when I get home and do it.

And this goes up now to Wednesday, the 2nd of December. Every single day, there is something I’m going to do, but that saves time thinking and planning. If you end up more time on one day, I can start the following days as well, with that getting more productive with what we do, and holding ourselves accountable.

Sean: Amazing and David, so we have gone on and we have learned a ton from you.

We are better for it. Now, perhaps the last question that I want to ask you is if you had the chance to go back in time during the time when you were making a lot of sales, what would you tell yourself in order to prevent the rock bottom?

David: You know, we watch films on a TV program. And there’s a bomb underneath the bus and no one knows there’s a bomb underneath the bus.

Right? I think there was that bomb there anyway. And I think a lot of the traits I had, I didn’t know were just unbelievable. We got this, we all got these infections, but it manifested. If I’d had better goals that kept me focused and if my circle and I’m not putting them on my circle, I was the instigator. I was the circus leader. I was the ringmaster. Everyone else was after the ride. 

If I leveled up and had a mentor at the time above me, who had achieved more, who I was inspired by, I would never fall into the trap. I became a big issue myself, I was the guy who I didn’t listen to other people, their opinion didn’t really matter because I’m doing this.

If you’re an in 400,000 pounds a year and everyone around you were earning 50,000 pounds a year. Now, they are better people, but when they try to talk to you about what you’re doing about spending money and you sit down and say “oh, mate don’t worry I’m alright.” Because you know they aren’t really doing well, but actually, if you surround yourself with someone who makes a million pound a month, you wouldn’t feel as fulfilled.

So you’d be striving more. You’d be watching what they do with their money to try that 400 into  million. And I didn’t do that. Yeah, that’s the one thing, and I think that’s why I’m approachable and acts as well. For me, I have people to coach me and I coach people and I enjoy it. Like I genuinely enjoy seeing people or get a message; “hey mate, I’ve just made a thousand pound today.” Brilliant.

Their coaching business, got someone in a minute who’s just why they sell. And they’ve gone from the other two phone calls, so an introduction, then a sales call – long call. And they’d done their first one called sale. Now, when we first spoke, this person would do – say introductions day, send out some information, throw them in a week and it wouldn’t get the deal for us.

Now they’re literally phoning people, getting deals on that phone call, money’s in the bag. And now they’re like “this is great – I’ve been doing good in three weeks.” And they’ve increased their earnings by 40% and this, and that’s amazing getting those messages. I love that. And now the very thing, which is the reason I didn’t have, cause I didn’t have my own coach.

Now I help other people to not do that. So the very thing that messed my life up has ended up being this catalyst, which has given me my best life.

Sean: That’s awesome. David, thank you so much for all the wisdom advice that you have given. We have practical advice, tactical, strategic, on sales, and we learned about how to get back up when you fail, that is super sweet, super important for everyone, especially during this time of the pandemic.

Now, if there are people listening in and they want to know more about you, they want to, they want to get in touch. Where is the best place to do that?

David: The best place to go to me is one of threeways.

The @salesangel is my handle on Instagram. Should just go on the @salesangel and I am there. I put content out every day. Talking to the DM’s, talking to the messages. There’s loads there. I put the link in my bio on there.  There’s loads of different podcasts, eBooks loads of free content on there as well.

And just drop or you can book a strategy call with me there or drop me a DM. Or you can go to thesalesangel.com there again, you can find out a bit more about me. You can get in touch through bear or on Facebook, I am the “Sales Angel”, my Instagram is on the website too. So yeah, drop by there’s some really good stuff I’ve got a few big campaigns coming out at the moment, just getting a lot more content out for free for people. But yeah, if anyone’s listening to this and wants help, or just wants to have a no BS conversation about, “can you help.” Just get in touch with me more than happy to help.

Sean: Awesome. And we’ll have all of those links in the show notes.

Just go to the leadershipstack.com/podcasts – look for David Angel. That episode will have all his links down there in the show notes. Well, David, thank you so much for your time. We are better for hearing you out.

David: Thank you for having me.