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In episode #24, Wilco shares his experiences on hanging out with guys who run 8 figure businesses.
Links
Russell Brunson's Mastermind Group
Hey, hey, hey. It's me, Wilco de Kreij, and I am back for a new episode. I'm actually excited, a lot has happened since last time. I want to apologize in advance first, because I'm actually sick, but I didn't want to use that as an excuse not to record this episode. If I sound like a mess, if I sound terrible, I apologize. Anyway, so last week or the week before my wife and I we went away for a week, a holiday. We went to the southern part of Italy, which was awesome. Mainly because we went away for one week. Normally we take trips for three or four weeks at a time, so do a couple of one month trips every single year, but when you're away for three or four weeks, as you can imagine, it's not easy to be away for that long if you have an online business, right? I've got roughly 20 people on our team, we've got tens of thousands of customers, so it's literally impossible to be offline for three or four weeks. It's just not possible, right?
What usually ends up happening is that I spend a lot of time working while I'm on holiday and this time around we just went away for one week. It's just so much easier. There's not a lot of things to prepare for that and you can just be pretty much offline for a week. I did some checking on my phone and I answered a couple of questions to my team, but most of the things were just, they could just say, "Well, if we're not able to handle it, we'll be back in just a few days." That's totally fine. People understand that, right? It's been a blast and it really helped me to sort of zoom out and basically get my helicopter view of the business back, so see where we're headed, where we currently stand, what's the longterm vision, and things like that. Because to be completely honest, sometimes it's not easy. I actually recorded another episode about this not too long ago actually where I talked about working in your business, versus, on your business.
Sometimes I get trapped by work in my business and that's just not the most effective use of my time. I need to work on my business and sometimes you just need to step back for a little bit in order to realize that you've actually started working in your business without evening noticing it. Right now I got full clarity again. I'm really excited about it. One of the things I realized is that it's so incredibly important to hang out with people who are ahead of me, right? This might be different for everyone else, but I just need people who are ahead of me, people who have a business that's bigger than me, bigger than mine, people who are doing ... Who have a bigger team, who think ... Who I actually look up to and those are the kind of people that I need to hang out with, because if I don't I tend to ... It tends to result in a limiting belief, basically. I need to see others achieve something, because then when I see other people achieve it, then I know I can do it as well, right?
When I started in the online marketing world, I mean, I was already running a business, but when I started doing in the online marketing world, I saw a lot of people who were quite a few steps ahead of me. I was able to learn a lot, I was able to be inspired by them, and think, "Wow, they're doing some amazing numbers and they're doing this and that." It was awesome, but to be completely honest, a lot of those people they sort of plateaued, right? They didn't really grow, they sort of ... They have minor ... They sort of grew their business but not to the amount of a level that I want to grow, so over time all those people that I used to look up to, now are ... There's nothing I can learn from them anymore. Over time ... I don't want to sound like a dick or anything like that, but over time it became harder to find people that are ahead of me, right?
Fortunately, I've been lucky enough to run into various people. I've run into, for example, Russell Brunson's mastermind and that helped me to connect with a lot of people who are still quite a few steps ahead of me. Also, outside that space I've been able to find people who are doing eight or sometimes even nine figure businesses, which is insane, right? They're so many steps ahead of me and it's been awesome. It's been so great, because it really helped me to believe bigger things, basically. I know from my past experience, every single time I set a certain goal and I believe that it can be achieved, then it's easy, right? The hardest part for me personally is to start believing that something is possible, right? I mean, it's easy to believe that I've worked all these years and this year I for example, 10% growth. I mean, that's not hard. If I worked all these years to get to where I am today, and then being able to triple my business this year, I mean, that's something that is hard to believe.
Then, in addition to that, next year triple it again. I mean, that is something that's insanely hard to believe. I need to see other people who've done the exact same thing or even bigger to actually say, "All right. If they can do it and frankly, they're not smarter than me. If they can do it, then I can do it as well," right? There is a downside. There's definitely a downside, because one thing I also notice is that the more I hang out with people who are ahead of me, the more I sort of assume that whatever I know isn't that special, right? I'll give you an example. For example, I haven't emailed ... I mean, you might be on our email list as well, but I haven't sent out that many emails to my email list, because quite frankly, I sort of feel like, "What do I know about what they're interested in? Everything I know, they know as well," right? I sort of forget that where I started out and where a lot of our audience is still at, right? Most of our audience they don't have, for example, a seven figure business, or they don't have 20 people on their team, or they don't have ...
That's totally fine, that's not the point. The point is that, the more I hang out with people who are doing better than me, the more I think I don't have the right to talk about anything I know, right? Actually, yesterday, I'm not sure, you might have seen this or not. Yesterday we opened a Facebook group for one of our businesses, for all the customers for Connectio. For a long time I didn't do that because I literally thought, "What do I know? Why would I listen to me? I mean, I'm just this guy and I don't know that much," because I was always comparing myself to guys who were ahead of me, right? Last week I was actually reading, rereading the book of Russell Brunson and he said something in the line of like, "You don't have to know everything to be an expert in a sort of niche, you just have to know more than your audience." That's actually true.
I mean, if you look at the movie, Catch Me If You Can, it's actually based on a true story. That guy, he was actually giving classes on a university, and he wasn't ... Nobody saw that he was just tricking the system. He was basically a student and he pretended to be the teacher. All he did was every single time, he just read the next chapter in advance. It was always just one chapter in advance, he was reading it. That's the classic example of like, he just knew more than the rest of them. That's really the downside, that you might believe or might think that you don't know as much as you actually do. Actually, last week I had a small get together with some local entrepreneurs here in the Netherlands and as I was talking, I'm like, "Wow, so much stuff that I think is logic and so much stuff that I think actually makes sense and everybody knows it. All of them, they don't have a clue." That's totally fine, right?
Once again, I'm not judging them or anything like that, but my here is that even if ... I would highly recommend you to try to hang out with people who are ahead of you, because you can learn from them, you can prevent mistakes that they've already made. At the same time, never ever forget where you came from. Never ever forget that you know more than you actually think you do, right? I mean, it's just so easy to just think that everything that you do and everything that you learn it's common sense. Because for you, it is common sense. Because for you, it is actually easy. For you, all these things do come naturally. That doesn't mean that for other people that comes naturally as well and that other people know what you know, right?
Even I ... I just have to continuously remind myself and I'm still feeling sort of awkward about teaching all this, because sometimes I just feel like, "Why would they listen to me?" It's only after I actually get people to say, "Ah yeah, I had no clue," and then I'm like, "Huh? I thought it was obvious," right? Then I sort of start talking more. Yeah, that's also one of my limiting beliefs I assume. Anyway, I just wanted to share that. For all of you who want to grow your business, do two things. Make sure, first of all, to hang out with people who are ahead of you. That's been my biggest lesson over the last year or so. It's helped me to grow my business a ton. Secondly, never ever forget where you came from. Never ever forget that you know more than you actually think you do and you're more valuable than you think you are. With that said, I will talk to you all soon.
"It's so incredibly important to hang out with people who are ahead of me."
"Never ever forget where you came from. Never ever forget that you know more than you actually think you do."
"You're more valuable than you think you are."
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