Christo: Hey there! In this episode, I want to share some insights around the different levels we kind of move through as we go~ you know, advance through building a business and ultimately, achieving success. Now, when people tend to start a business like the kind of level one, they’re very optimistic. You get excited, and start registering domain names and register the business and it all seems fantastic because it’s all exciting. Inventing a business is a really exciting process. And then level two comes along which is the reality. The reality is then you’ve got to try and get these customers. And a lot of the level one is really spending money and kind of that excitement of creating. But then actually generating sales is the kind of reality this level two~ where it gets a bit more difficult, and you realize okay friends and family telling you, “It’s great!” isn’t going to sustain the business. And then what tends to come after that, the level three is really a breaking point. Now different business owners will reach this at different stages. Sometimes it might be within the first year, sometimes it might be within the first few years. Or the world might change, a pandemic hits, and suddenly it’s like a breaking point for your business. Now the gift in the breaking point that I’d say, having worked with so many different business people over the years is—it’s a breaking point for everyone; everyone in business at some point will reach these breaking points and they’ll likely reach them again and again at different stages. So what this does~ the gift to you is a lot of your competitors will stop. That’s the reality. Most people don’t have the grit to work through this kind of breaking points that they reach. And then if you get through this and you continue on then you reach a level of success. It’s kind of like the level four is the level of success where you know it. You’ve been through things. You know it wasn’t just a stroke of fate; a lucky chance to~there’s something that happened overnight that allowed you to grow your business to be successful. You worked
through it. And so you’re grateful, usually at this point in business success. But we reach this level of success where it’s like you know your industry, you know everything, you kind of get to this point when you’re beyond the breaking points where it’s like there’s almost no problem in business that you couldn’t solve at that level. And if you achieve success for long enough what then will tend to happen is you kind of reach this next level which I call level five, which is really the~ almost like creating an impact, it’s where you contribute, it’s where you give back. And suddenly you see this if you’ve reached success for long enough and you feel like the challenges left, what likely happens is you get to this point where you start to want to help a family member. Start a charity, advance team members’ careers… like you suddenly get to this level of like significance. It’s almost like survival of the first couple of levels, and then you reach the success level. And then you reach a level of significance up here. And in this kind of level five, the only real risk is if you haven’t made enough money to sustain forever then sometimes what we’ll see is people’s focus shifts away from the business so much then the business actually starts to suffer, and then they kind of dip back down to~ kind of like almost a breaking point again that they have to work through to get back to success and ultimately back to level five. So just wanted to share this a bit of an insight for you because you’re likely to be at different stages and
I think as most small businesses we tend to reach that level five, and then you kind of bounce between three to five, where we go back to kind of a breaking point up through success and kind of tend to yo-yo through there and that’s part of the… I guess the gift that is running a small business and what keeps things interesting for us. So I trust you got something out of this video. I just wanted to share it as an insight, and obviously, if you are at those challenging times, there is a kind of a gift in that for you at the same time. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, of course, feel free to share it with anyone else you know, especially those who might be kind of battling in business right now, as a little bit of an inspiration to know we all go through it and uh it all happens whether it’s a pandemic or not and otherwise, any questions for Basic Bananas, simply get in touch with the team and we’ll see you on the next video tip!