Entrepreneurs Are Never Losers

Alex Charfen: An entrepreneur might be challenged, frustrated, upset, or confused, but in my book, entrepreneurs are never losers.

The last couple of days have been pretty busy, so I'm recording this podcast actually walking outside. I had to get out of the office, get some fresh air, so if you hear anything in the background, like a bird chirping or some dogs barking, it's because I'm walking by my neighbor's house and they have two huge dogs that are insane with how much they bark and so luckily they're inside the house, but you might still be able to hear them even through the walls. Anyway.

The topic of this podcast is really about how we treat each other as entrepreneurs. I want to just share a story with you that happened a few years ago. I was a member of the mastermind and I went to one of the mastermind annual meetings and it was a big meeting with a lot of people who were speaking. And one of the speakers was a woman who I had a lot of respect for.

In fact, Cadey had been in her product. We had looked at her online stuff. She was getting more and more well-known and we had a lot of respect for what she was doing and Cadey just loved her stuff.

And she was speaking about how to lower your returns and I remember she got up in person or she got up in front of the room and she said, "You know, today I want to show you how to lower your return rates because you don't want the scumbag and loser clients that you have getting their money back and you know, making it so that you don't make any money. I went from a 25% return rate down to a 4% return rate and I'm going to show you how," and I remember when she said scumbag and loser, I had this pain in my chest.

Because as a product marketer, if you've got a 25% return rate, you have a product problem. You have a funnel problem. You have a channel problem. You're bringing the wrong people in and you're selling them the wrong thing. That doesn't make the people who are returning the product scumbags and losers. And I remember, it literally was a pain in my chest.

And she went on to describe how she had created this elaborate return system where she had 100% money back guarantee, but in order to get the money, 100% money back guarantee, you had to jump through so many hoops that it was near impossible to actually get your money back. So, she didn't talk about improving the product. She didn't talk about making things better. She didn't talk about making it easier for people to use the product. She talked about how you basically make it impossible to get a return so that you can still say you have a 100% money back guarantee.

And I remember just being disgusted by the presentation. I was so frustrated by it because first, I don't think entrepreneurs are ever scumbags and losers. I don't think entrepreneurs are ever losers. In fact, you know, I was called a loser for most of my life and it gets me emotional when we as entrepreneurs refer to each other in a derogatory way. Because let's be honest, every single one of us has been put down, made fun of or bullied, made to feel less than.

And when we create that impression, like we are hurting our own tribe. We all go forward faster together. As entrepreneurs, we collectively are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution. And we always will be. And when we support each other, when you support another entrepreneur, it's like supporting the member of your own family. It's the tribe; it's who we are.

It's part of ... That entrepreneur is part of your tribe, part of your club, part of the same group that you belong to. And when we refer to entrepreneurs is losers or when we refer to each other as losers, we're taking away who we really are. We're hurting our ability to be an entrepreneur.

And I remember watching her presentation and feeling so let down and frustrated and just really upset that she had made the presentation and that, you know, people clapped at the end and they like said, "Oh, that's great." And you know, this was coming from a place where Cadey and I had been selling to real estate agents and we had spent the previous five years prior to that prior to that presentation, selling the certified distressed property expert designation to real estate agents. And when we first started, our return rate was like 10%.

And it freaked me out. I didn't want anything near 10% return rate. I didn't know that was good and we started working on the product. We refined it. We put a ton of effort into it. We made sure on a monthly basis we were collecting all the questions, all the issues and that we were improving the product actively so that we could improve our return rate.

And we got it down over a lifetime of over almost 50,000 sales to less than 3%. And we didn't have some crazy return policy. We had a no questions asked, you can return the product return policy. If for any reason it doesn't work, you have 30 days to return it. And if we didn't know if it isn't what you expected, you have 30 days to return it. We were bringing in the right avatar, selling them the right product, solving a major pain for them, and giving them massive momentum. So our returns were hardly anything. That's how you really create a product and lower your return rate.

But what I'm really talking about is the way we treat each other as entrepreneurs. You know, when we were selling to real estate agents, we got some of the craziest phone calls and questions into our customer service department. We had real estate agents who called our customer service department to figure out how to use the computer so that they could get online to use our product.

And at the time, this was a long time ago, we used to ship a CD and they would tell us that ... We shipped a CD that had all of the documents and all of the backup information on it so that they could reprint them. This was before there was a lot of like, just download online. We shipped a physical manual and a resource guide and we had realtors tell us they put the CD in their car and expected to be able to listen to the product when it clearly said field manual resources, reprint resources, and we got questions like that all the time and we had a policy in our company that we never talked down to our customers.

We never talked bad about our customers. We never made fun of our customers. If somebody in our customer service department got off the phone and said, "Wow, what an idiot," we would go over and talk to them and say, "Hey, they're not an idiot. They might be having a bad day. They might be overwhelmed. They might be balancing business and family and children. They might have a lot going on, but they're not an idiot." And we were very adamant that we treated our customers with respect. And as an entrepreneur, if you want to succeed, you have to treat other entrepreneurs with respect.

You know, it's interesting. We run a lot of Facebook ads and on a daily basis we go in and we clear out all of the haters who go in and put crazy stuff on my ads. People say, get your, you know, expletive off of my Facebook page, or how do we know that's really your backyard or nice rented car or all kinds of rude comments and nine out of 10 times when I click through, it's another entrepreneur. They have some type of a business or they have some type of thing that they're offering and they're actually one of us.

And I always think to myself, you know, you're probably not doing that well, one, because you had the time to just be rude on my ad. But two, because you're criticizing your own tribe. You don't even understand who your own people are. And so if you're having trouble creating momentum, moving forward, doing what you want to do, I want to ask you, you know, are you respecting the other members of our tribe? And in a business, if you're selling to entrepreneurs, do you have that dialogue with your team, with the people who are working with you, that entrepreneurs are never losers? Because we all know that we've shown up in a way that wasn't our best on any given day. I know that there's been days where I've been overwhelmed or reactive or triggered or frustrated or upset or confused and I showed up in a way that somebody probably could have called me a loser.

But the reality was it was my situation at that point in time. And when it comes to any entrepreneur, the people on my team know that there's no such thing as a loser. There's people who just are in a situation where they're having a tough time showing up at their best. They're in some type of a life situation or a business situation or a situation with their family that's making them show up in a way that's challenging to us. But the judgment that we should have is not against that person. The judgment we should have is to accept what's going on for that person and then help them move forward if we can and if not, move on. But when we take the time to stop and criticize and entrepreneur, when we're on stage, when we call people losers, when we put negative comments on people's ads or criticize, you got to understand as an entrepreneur, that's all going to come back to you.

On that same token, when you support someone, when you help someone, when you give someone momentum, that's the fastest way to get it for yourself. If you go help someone, if you contribute to someone, you will actually feel better about yourself. But the act of criticizing, the act of calling somebody a scumbag or a loser, the act of doing that, it holds you in place. It will cause constraint and it will rob your momentum.

It's interesting, the woman who gave that speech actually has gone on to sell more and more product and create a higher and higher level of notoriety and a when all the speeches in that mastermind were actually recorded and they were put into a platform and about nine months after she gave it? Hers disappeared. I think there's a reason. Think maybe she was having a bad day that day and maybe she didn't mean to call everybody scumbags or losers and maybe she just wanted to get a laugh from the audience or maybe she was nervous and didn't do a lot of public speaking, because that was taken down and she's gone on to help tens of thousands of people and I think there's a reason that speech was pulled out of the platform.

Because if anybody had just taken that clip and shared it online, I think a lot of people who had bought her products would have been mortified that that's how she looked at them, as scumbags or potential scumbags and losers, even if they didn't try to return the product. And if anyone understood that what she really did back then was make it near impossible to return the product rather than improving it, I think they would have been frustrated with her too.

And so that speech was gone, her product radically improved. She's done tons of stuff now to move things forward and I think there was probably a lesson in that even for her because energetically, when you judge someone else, when you call them a name, when you label them with something like scumbag or loser, it's hurting you. It's holding you back. It's taking away your momentum and it's putting you in constraint.

Think about that before you're quick to judge another entrepreneur because every one of us has showed up in a way that we don't want to and we later think about and we all go forward faster together.

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