There's one thing I see people often overlook, and it's something I personally struggled with—recognizing that your greatest asset is your team. One book that really resonated with me is People Over Profit, which emphasizes the importance of treating your people right. When you prioritize and invest in your team and focus on improving the customer experience, profit naturally follows. In that book, they argue that people should always come before profit, because when profit becomes the top priority over people, you're setting yourself up for turnover. And when your team starts to leave, it negatively impacts the customer experience. This leads to both employee and customer churn, which creates a vicious cycle that’s hard to break.

One key rule of thumb is to prioritize activities that directly drive revenue, rather than getting caught up in distractions. What I mean is that many new entrepreneurs often get bogged down by things like designing the perfect website, picking the right logo, deciding on brand colors, or obsessing over the details of their LLC formation. While these things are important eventually, they can easily become a way to avoid the real work that actually moves the needle—like talking to potential customers, making sales, and focusing on the actions that will truly grow the business.

I always say, if you're going to do something, commit fully—go all in. I've seen too many people start a startup with one foot in and one foot out, and that makes everything harder. It creates confusion and feedback that isn’t really reflective of the situation because you’re not fully invested. You have to be ready to take risks—real risks—because that's the only way you'll find out if it’s going to work. If you’re not all in, you can’t ask anyone else to be. You can’t ask others to make sacrifices if you’re not willing to do the same. But, it’s also important to know when to switch gears and shift out of that mode at some point. That’s a tough thing to navigate.