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Pull to Eject

All good entrepreneurs say ‘Yes.’

It’s the way to get your first client.

Or sell a new service you never planned. We can figure out how later.

Entrepreneurs have rightly earned the reputation of chasing new things.

Look - a squirrel! 🐿️

But there is far more power in saying ‘No.’

• No, that isn’t what we do

• No, that project isn’t a strategic fit for us

• No, we’re not so busy that we need to hire

• No, we don’t need larger office space

• No, we’re not raising money

Especially when things are going well - ‘No’ is put on a back burner.

Experience taught me the hard lesson that once you have employees, you can’t say no as often as you should.

• Yes, we’ll take on crappy projects, because we can’t afford to keep seats on the bench.

• Yes, we’ll do the project that isn’t exactly what we do, because we need to make payroll next month.

• Yes to clients that are clearly not the type you want to work with.

And all of those projects sucked.

Full stop.

The Don’t Do List

It is counterintuitive, but what don’t you want to do?

A ‘Don’t Do List’ starts to make your focus much more clear.

This truly helps you to niche down.

Where are the places that your product or service adds the most value?

Only do work that makes sense. As a bonus, many times you’ll find those jobs are also the most profitable.

Or as Jim Collins defined the hedgehog concept in Good to Great, the Venn overlap of passion, talent and market.

It takes hard knocks to develop your nose to filter which ideas are great (but not for you) and which Ideas are worth pursuing and investing time.

This ultimately helps define your authentic brand.

Your brand is not just color and font choices.

Your authentic brand impacts every single decision you make.

Not just how you communicate, but also which clients you do work with, who you hire and fire, what products and services you develop, the partnerships you form.

In fact, your brand is your super power.

And if you only deliver your authentic brand … it’s easy to say ‘no.’

Now go launch something 🚀 

Subscriber Stories: Naras Eechambadi

Meet Naras Eechambadi: Ph.D., McKinsey alum, author, mentor, “Most Influential Person in Data” and entrepreneur who sold his company … twice. He is definitely one of the most interesting men in the world!

He’s also one of the most likeable.

With his background in marketing, data and technology he put himself in unique roles to first help blue chip companies build, and later allow him to create his entrepreneurial success.

Quaero provided Fortune 500 and large enterprises with sophisticated customer data management platforms and services. When he sold the company the second time he thought he was retired.

But his unique expertise was too valuable to sit on the shelf.

A completely new industry needed his knowledge.

When approached by Universal Music Group, he told them he knew what he didn’t want to do anymore.

And they enticed him out of retirement to create a role that he did want.

He founded and is scaling UMG’s global data and analytics team, driving a growing direct-to-customer (DTC) and e-commerce business.

Naras has attracted and mentored talent, setting up UMG’s future success long after he completes another fascinating chapter of his career portfolio.

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So what exactly does beehiiv offer?

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Modern Tools

Loom might be the easiest screen recorder I have ever used.

But it’s more than that.

Record “how to’s” or important ideas and easily share the video via email. It’s video messaging for any use case you can think of.

Embed these videos in Slack or Google workspaces or wherever you share docs. Easy.

Old School Wisdom

Focusing is about saying ‘No.’

Listen to Steve Jobs Q&A at the 1997 World Wide Developers Conference. Telling his best customers - we’re not going to do that anymore - even though it was cool.

What are the fundamental directions we are going in? And things that aren’t in that direction, no matter how cool they might be, need to be jettisoned.

In February 2024, Apple discarded a decade - and billions of dollars of investment - into electric and self-driving cars. More than 600 people were let go as the company instead shifted its focus to the company’s generative artificial intelligence efforts.

‘No’ does take intestinal fortitude.

Free Knowledge

Digital products are intangible goods that exist in a digital format.

These include ebooks, music, digital art, software, online courses, and virtual goods in video games.

Everyone knows Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms for selling. But they also give away a lot of info on their blog and in video’s like the one below.

You don’t need an account to learn about best practices from the ecommerce leader. Grab a little inspiration to add to your career portfolio.

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