Who is this book for?

Candidly, the book is for myself. As crazy as that sounds, it’s when I first started out to write it, I really wanted to write it under the lessons I believe in and that compass when it comes to entrepreneurship, as almost a daily reminder, right, like your North Star. But coincidental, there is thousands of entrepreneurs that I knew would appreciate something like this. In fact, it’s what I do for a living, right? I teach these principles, so although somewhat egotistically and somewhat selfishly I wrote it for myself, I coincidentally and purposely wrote it to help as many people as possible, too. But I don’t want to mislead. It really is something where I needed something to remind myself why I love what I do, what I’ve learned over 10 years of what I do, essentially a reminder when things are stressful, things are tough, when you hit the bumps in the road, but it’s for any entrepreneur in their entrepreneurial journey.

What is the big idea behind the book?

Long story short, in 2013 I nearly killed my company and bankrupt myself, and it was because I was a wantrepreneur and not an entrepreneur. This book was written under the understanding of what’s the difference between an entrepreneur and a wantrepreneur at its surface, but it was also meant to be a practical guide on what makes a great entrepreneur. And basically I defined eight key fundamentals of a framework in the book, that when you gauge yourself off of it and you look at yourself upon each of those pieces in the framework, that’s how you’ll become a successful entrepreneur and how you’ll stick to the game long-term.

And one thing I would add is this isn’t a book I wrote on how to properly file your tax returns or make money or die or any of the normal business cliché and things you read in business books. Even though it’s a business book, it’s written more from a philosophical layer, it was a very stoic layer, because that’s the piece that I feel is not talked about enough in entrepreneurship, and the difference between a great entrepreneur and a wantrepreneur, hands down.

The 8 step framework

I break down the framework into eight pieces:

1. Empathy
2. Leadership
3. Short-term thinking
4. Long-term thinking
5. Economics
6. Operations
7. Purpose
8. Self-awareness

Even when you write your own book, sometimes things jump in, right? It breaks down each of those eight, and basically the idea is how can you rate yourself between a zero to 100 on how you’re doing on each of those individual skill sets. So, like, how you doing from an empathy perspective when running your business? How’s your leadership style when it comes to running your business? Are you thinking too much about the short term, or not enough? Too much about the long term, not enough? How are you gauging your business and economics, understanding economic cycles? How are you dealing with operations? How are you monitoring the health vitals of your company? It’s your purpose, right? Not your passion. What’s your purpose? What literally will make you keep working, even if you feel burned out, and frustrated, and upset, and angry, and stressed out, and everything in between?

And then self-awareness, probably the most key aspect of it. You can’t do any of this without being self-aware. You can’t actually gauge yourself without being truthful to yourself, right? So throughout the book I break down each of those key dimensions, each a part of that framework.

What will readers learn from the book?

The book is broken into two parts. The first part is basically explaining why you need a framework. It uses my story, it uses examples of what happens when you don’t have a North Star, and then it introduces what the framework is. The second half of the book goes into each fundamental of the framework, giving real lessons, real stories, and then actual practical guides on what to do to better engage yourself. And then at the very end of the book, we actually include a diagram of the framework and how you can actually rate yourself and consistently do that. So it’s actually both. In many ways, it’s almost like two books in one, the how and the why, and that’s kind of how the book was broken down into.

What are the next steps after reading the book?

The cool thing about the book that I’ve been very fortunate to hear from feedback is it gets better when you reread it, and it gets better, or once you read it, it starts feeling more like common sense, and you can just apply it and you can start almost, I hate to use the word subconscious, like this book’s on higher meaning, it’s not that. But a lot of the lessons you learn really are common sense, but we don’t think about it, because we feel like in entrepreneurship, things need to be more complex than you need to be to be successful, which is, a lot of times it’s just the fundamentals as needed. So a lot of times, that beats down the fundamentals so that you just stick to it and it acts as second nature for you.