Are You Running Your Business like a Marathon? (Mindset to 7-figure)

The world has trended towards overnight success — there is not much reporting on the consistent efforts over a longer period behind the scenes that contributed to the seemingly overnight success.

Sustainability is an underrated word in the business world.

We are not talking about recycling, but do you build your business to last? Or do you build your business for quick cash and profits?

Oh yes, your audience can tell the difference.

And the kind of people you attract as customers would be different accordingly.

If you find that your customers are looking for one-time, ad hoc help or one-time purchase who do not intend to develop any relationship at all, they just want the best deal they can get and never speak with you again, that is because your business is built with the mentality of quick cash and profit. Usually, this kind of customers would negotiate for price, more prone to complain about your services or products, less likely to refer others to your business, and unlikely to spend on anything expensive.

If you want recurring cashflow for your business, if you want to grow your business over 3–5 years, if you want repeated business and capture the customers’ lifetime value, if you want to deliver transformation and top-notch services or products that are likely to be high-ticket, this is not the kind of customers you want to attract.

One question I get asked quite a lot by my coaching clients is: how do I attract the right kind of people to my business?

It really comes down to what is the “right kind” of people for you.

This depends on what is your intention or vision for your business — do you build it to sustainably serves your clients and provides for you and even your children? Do you intend it to be a long term asset? Or are you just trying to see if you like it or building it because it is cool to be an entrepreneur?

Why do you start your business?

Are you committed to growing your business?

Business is not unlike a relationship — you have to commit to it and spend time and effort to make it healthy, great and fulfilling.

If you are just playing, chances are your partner will see right through you sooner or later and the result? You can guess it already — breakup or divorce.

And for which reason are you entering into a relationship has a lot of influence on the kind of people you attract.

If you are looking for short-term relationship (i.e. you are not committed to it and just want some fun), you will send out this signal in your behavior and actions. And your subconscious mind will help you do the filtering to which person you feel more connected to based on what you want.

If you are looking to settle down, get married and committed to a partner, again you will send out this signal in your behavior and actions. Similarly, your subconscious mind will help you do the filtering to which person you feel more connected to based on what you want.

Similarly, in business, if you want sustainable, scalable results, you need to commit. Commit to the process, commit to showing up consistently (again, think about the relationship — if your date doesn’t show up consistently and disappear from time to time, would you trust him / her? Would you feel secured enough to share a future together?), commit to consistent execution (yes, actions always speak louder than words).

Too many people I’ve seen (including the past me) run business like a sprint rather than a marathon. We want to earn money fast. We want the strategy that can attract clients tomorrow and 6-figure the day after.

Most like, there would not be any solid foundation or trust relationship in the business and it will be a boom and bust venture.

Truth moment: would you rather have $1million tomorrow or $1,000 every day for the rest of your life? This may be an arbitrary question and it can depend on your age and other circumstances but I just want to illustrate how tempting immediate reward can be.

But if you take the $1,000, in just 5 years, you will get almost double of $1 million ($1,825,000 to be exact).

In 10 years, you will get more than 3 times the $1 million ($3,650,000 to be exact).

Now, if you are working on something that you are interested in and enjoy the process of building it, 10 years would be gone in the blink of an eye. Actually, even if you hate your job, many people do reflect that 10 years in a job they hate seem to fly by before they can do anything about it.

Does that $1 million still sound attractive compared to the $3,650,000?

Yes, there is time and effort involved but if you believe your have a mission, a calling, a message that you are destined to share to serve people who can benefit from this, the time and effort justify itself in the pursuit of a worthy cause, plus you would benefit from additional financial reward over a longer period.

Running a business like a marathon is the way to build real wealth. You may get rich running sprint, but since the relationship and trust is weak, and the execution is a rush, you are getting less from the experience than you would in a marathon.

Yet, a marathon is harder than a sprint. It takes persistent. It takes mindfulness. It takes consistent training (not something you can just wake up and perform).

That’s where many people get trapped and give up because they expect quick cash (sprint) so when it becomes a marathon, many get overwhelmed, lost, confused, burnout, and unprepared.

The mindset, strategy and most importantly execution is vastly different between a sprint and a marathon so you can imagine that when people mixed up the expectation and later found themselves in a different race than they thought they have entered, how frustrated and disappointed that would be. The feeling of failure is not tasty.

The intention of this article is to show you the two ways of running a business and you are free to choose whichever way you want.

Do share with me which way you are running your business now and which way you want to run your business after reading this article :)

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