888: The CORE VALUE that changed my life and business

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Hey, what is up?

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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and in this solo Sunday episode, I am opening up to talk about one of not only my core values in life and in business, but one of the core tenets and beliefs behind the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast, and that is that a rising tide lifts all boats.

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I'm so excited about this one.

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Let's dive in, all right.

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So in last week's Solo Sunday episode, I took you all back in time 16 years ago, all the way back to 2008, which is when I was 19 years old and I just started my very first business.

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And last week we talked about some of our reflections on 16 years of entrepreneurship and my own personal development and growth, as well as my growth and development as an entrepreneur and what really struck me and I'm super grateful for all of you listeners who reached out either over email, at hello, at imetbriancom, or on Instagram.

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Again, it's super easy to remember now that you met me on the show.

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My Instagram username is imetbryan, super easy to get a hold of me, and I love hearing from all of you listeners around the world, and last week it reminded me how much you all enjoy these reflections and really the inside stories from how I grew my first business, because, going all the way back to 2008, it changed my life, my first business.

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Yes, it took a while to get up and running and to make it successful, but it really is the inflection point that got me so deep into the world of entrepreneurship and showed me so many things that are possible.

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And so this week I decided to really go into the treasure trove of what has shaped my entire entrepreneurial journey.

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And the one thing that I learned from that business that just guided my entire trajectory and it's one of my core values as a person and as an entrepreneur, and it's probably the core value behind this podcast is that a rising tide lifts all boats.

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It's something that I say very frequently.

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If you ever get to work with me, if you ever get to hang out with me or you're in the vicinity of me for quite some time, it comes up in every single conversation.

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I love saying it all the time, and today you're really going to find out why it is such a strongly held belief of mine and value of mine.

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So a rising tide lifts all boats.

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It's not something that I came up with.

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It is a quote that I heard a long time ago and it's so stuck with me because it reflects so much of the I want to say strategic lessons, so many of the strategic lessons that I learned with my first business.

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As I was struggling, I had no idea what I was doing.

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I honestly didn't know how to grow a business.

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I didn't know what a business actually was.

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I was a young college student at the time and, yes, I was in business school, but so much of the stuff that I was learning about inside the classroom, it just felt like it didn't apply in the real world, and I'll give you some tangible examples here.

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So a rising tide lifts all boats.

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Let's really get into the crux of it.

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I remember when I started, so my first business for those of you who maybe you haven't been listening for a long time, or maybe you just don't know my story personally, which is totally cool my first business was a soccer blog, and I grew that blog by junior year of college.

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We had three and a half million readers every single month from all over the world, primarily within the United Kingdom.

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80% of our traffic was from the UK and I was flying to England at least once a month.

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I was interviewing players.

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I was interviewing some of the biggest names in the world of soccer, which, for those of you who know me, soccer is life for me.

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I absolutely love soccer Still to this day a huge fan Obviously don't play as much as I once used to, but huge fan of it and so when I was sitting in college classrooms I was hearing professors talk about, you know, swot analyses and competition and the market and macroeconomic stuff and microeconomic stuff, and all of it seemed so scarcity and fear-based about how there's only limited dollars to go around.

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But then, when I wasn't in class, I was working on this burgeoning business that had a worldwide audience of really fans I mean, shout out to Lee Butler, some guy in Blackburn, england, who I've never met in person but I will meet for sure one day who got a tattoo of our logo on his arm because we just had these huge aficionados that bought into what we were doing.

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We were a fan driven football website, soccer website, and that was meaningful to us, and so we were slowly growing and what I was doing was I was looking at all of our fellow soccer bloggers because we were doing something different than the traditional media.

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You know, you could go to the BBC, you could go to Sky Sports and you could go to the big English newspapers the Guardian, the Independent, the Telegraph and you could read what the mainstream was saying.

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But that was either a mix of I'm going to call them out right now it was a mix of what the clubs were feeding to them, what the agents were feeding to them, what they were pushing on their own internal agendas from higher ups at these huge conglomerates, media conglomerates, and so what we were all doing was very different.

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At the grassroots level, we were fans talking about fan conversations, and to me that's the fun part about soccer is that we, the fans, we are the sport.

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It's the beautiful game.

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For a reason is that you can link me up with a fan from Cameroon and we could talk literally for days.

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Even if we don't speak the same languages, we will find a way to talk about players and teams and goals from history and historic events from the beautiful game, and it's why they call soccer the universal language.

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It's something that you can speak football with other people from other cultures, other walks of life, socioeconomics None of that stuff matters when it comes to sport, and so that shaped so much of it.

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And so when I talk about my fellow soccer bloggers, that's what I really recognized would be our growth strategies.

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Teaming up is, collaboration is a rising tide, lifting all boats together.

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How did that manifest in our actual strategy and the actual tactics that we use?

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Well, I'll give you a few examples here today.

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So, first things first.

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When I didn't have any web traffic, what I used to do was I would email other soccer blogs that had at least a little bit of traffic certainly more than I did and I would say, hey, I'd love to write for your website, I would love to contribute to your website.

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I'm not asking for anything in exchange other than, at the bottom of the article, to say, brian Lofermento is one of the writers behind PremiershipTalkcom and just link to my website.

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And if people really like the article it's going to be a totally unique article that I write just for your publication Then, like the article, it's going to be a totally unique article that I write just for your publication then they can click through and hopefully they'll like the work that they find on my website as well.

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And so many of these soccer bloggers, fellow soccer bloggers, started saying, yeah, sure, and they were like, can I contribute to your website as well?

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So we really started kind of this ring of all of us contributing on each other's websites and we actually started, as a result of that, passing traffic back and forth.

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And you might be thinking well, brian, why would you want your competitors to grow?

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Why would you want their web traffic to grow?

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And here's the reality is that web traffic is an abundant thing.

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There's no limit to how much traffic we can all get.

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It's not a scarcity mindset, it's something that we all win.

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And I saw my traffic was increasing, and I also saw I could see in Google Analytics how many people were clicking from those articles to my guest contributors' links as well, and that didn't bother me.

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That was really cool.

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In fact, if anything, it showed that the tactic, the strategy, was worthwhile, that we were all starting to win.

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And so that's when I realized, well, holy cow, we all have all of this advertising space on our blogs.

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We all have these banners, these horizontal banners, vertical banners, these square banners.

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This is back in 2008, 2009, 2010,.

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So the web was a little bit different back then.

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It wasn't as developed you couldn't simply just throw up very easy to find ads from, like Google AdSense, for example.

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So I emailed all of these people that I was constantly collaborating with, knowledge sharing with and really just growing with, and I said, hey, if we have unused ad inventory, why don't we show each other's ads?

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Why don't we create banner ads for all of our own websites and just rotate them into our banner ad display?

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And we'll all just grow even more.

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And guess what?

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We started doing it and it's not to say.

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I guess I'll inject a huge disclaimer into this part of the conversation is that not everybody was down for this.

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Not everybody understood this, but that's okay.

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Not everybody has an abundance mindset.

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And so did I get rejected?

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Yeah for sure.

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But did I let it stop me?

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Absolutely not.

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I doubled down.

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I tripled down on the people who were in it together, just like I was, the people who understood that a rising tide lifts all boats, will all win from doing this stuff together, and so a lot of us.

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I think it was a.

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Basically, it was a directory of 30 or so websites where we all were just trying to stack the deck for each other.

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We were showing each other's ads on our website, our banners on our websites.

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We were writing for each other's websites and publishing those posts with backlinks, which in turn, had search engine optimization benefits, which, in turn, meant that we climbed to the search engine rankings, which meant that we got more organic traffic as well.

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Just everything good was happening from these collaborations, and so, inevitably, some of us were on different growth trajectories and, because I was at the center of a lot of this, I was able to have all of those individual relationships, not with one of them or a few of them, but with all of them, and so that definitely helped us on our growth journey.

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And so when I started locking up very small advertising deals, I started emailing other websites saying, hey, do you guys have any advertising deals?

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And if they said no, I was like, well, this company is advertising on our website right now.

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You want me to introduce you guys?

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And so we started passing around referrals and introductions with advertisers.

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So, again, a rising tide lifts all boats.

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We all started getting more and more revenue and more ad deals because of these introductions, to the point where this was honestly one of our biggest growth strategies and growth hacks is we actually started bundling our websites together, so we had a Google analytics account where we could create a basket of all of our website traffic under one formal partnership and arrangement really a network is what we call ourselves a fan-driven soccer network and we would basket all of that traffic together and then approach bigger advertisers and say, hey look, my website alone we only get 10,000 readers a month.

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This website only gets 17,000.

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This website only gets 4,000.

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But together we get this big amount.

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And at that time it was pretty sizable.

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It was only gets four thousand, but together we get this big amount.

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And you know, at that time it was pretty sizable as a few hundred thousand readers when we pulled all of them together.

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And so we then had more bargaining power so we could go to bigger advertisers and say, hey, we'd love to get your message, your banner, your link, your story, whatever it may be, in front of this many diehard soccer fans from all over the world.

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And it started working.

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All of a sudden we were in rooms, we were having conversations that we couldn't have individually, and so we literally started pooling these ad deals and then sharing the money.

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Of course it wasn't an even split, because some websites were way bigger.

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I was not the biggest website in this basket, by the way, there were some much bigger websites than me who they were getting the majority of the ad revenue, which is totally cool.

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They deserved it.

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They had an amazing audience, and so it also then allowed me to say hey, we're working with Nike, we're working with Under Armour, we're working with KitBag, we're working with all of these really cool companies, and that then I was able to snowball and leverage into other conversations, both within our network but also from my own site individually, while at the same time passing those introductions and referrals and receiving the same in return from my fellow soccer bloggers.

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So even just in these stories, it's really fun for me to look back on, because when I think about, you know, 19, 20-year-old me in college classrooms being told all these things about our competitors, and I just realized one of the best growth hacks was that my competitors are my fellow people in the same space and we can do all of these things together and we can all grow faster.

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It's only going to accelerate all of the things that we're all hoping to accomplish, and in those efforts I found a bunch of other people with a huge abundance mindset, and so that's really the building blocks.

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All of these stories today are just real life stories and applications to show you that a rising tide lifts all boats.

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I can give you a million examples of this, and it doesn't just apply to blogging, it doesn't just apply to sports, it doesn't just apply to the way that I was doing things back then.

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In fact, I can honestly tell you every single guest that we have on this show, we internally I mean, we've got a very strict document about who we invite to come on the show.

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Our entire team has access to this document, and it just outlines here's what we're looking for, here's what we're not looking for.

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If they interact with us like this, over email, then those are entrepreneurs that we're not necessarily interested in having on the show.

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We don't want to amplify their voices and their messages, because we're looking for people who believe in abundance.

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We're looking for people who share our core value of a rising tide lifting all boats, and so that's why I can honestly say and it's probably the proudest thing that I can say about this show Sure, I can brag about the fact that we're 888 episodes in.

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I can brag about so many things.

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We're a top 1.5% show on planet earth.

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We've got listeners from over 150 countries.

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We're in the top 200 charts.

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All of those things are very cool, I will tell you.

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They're very cool and I'm very proud of them.

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But what I'm way prouder of is that every single entrepreneur literally there are not exceptions to what I'm about to say Every single entrepreneur that we are so grateful and we're so lucky to have here on this show.

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They're all amazing and I can so confidently say this because I personally interact with every single one of them.

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Of course, in the interview you hear us together live on the air.

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You know, three days a week we're doing guest interviews, but I get to interact with them over email.

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I get to interact with them before we hit record.

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I get to interact with them after we're done recording.

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It's so cool for me to not only get to hear their genius and their brilliance here on the air, but it's just the more I get to talk to them as people and as entrepreneurs, as business leaders, as people who are so dedicated to serving the customers and the clients that they have.

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It's just so apparent to me how much they operate from a place of abundance, and so that's why I'm just going to for you listeners, if you've ever wondered, you know, is it cool if I reach out to Jennifer, who we heard from this past week on Wednesday's episode Jennifer Golba she's incredible.

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I have nothing but the most amazing things to say about Jennifer.

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Or on Friday, we heard from Adam Pisk, who is just growing a global brand, multi-million dollar global brand, with thousands of employees involved in this, and he's always hiring.

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And you're wondering are these people really cool, are they really accessible?

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Are they really someone I can trust?

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The answer is resoundingly yes, because these are all entrepreneurs that believe in the power of what I'm sharing with you today, which is that a rising tide lifts all boats, and I know it's true for all of us behind the scenes at Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur is that I do my best and our entire team does our best to support all of our guests and introducing them to each other and introducing them to other opportunities that we have access to.

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Because we have this incredible network of entrepreneurs, we're always looking to help them succeed and that's the beauty of getting yourself into these circles, of getting yourself into the world of abundance, is that when you surround yourself with other people who understand and embrace and act on the fact that a rising tide lifts all boats, you start being one of those boats that gets lifted, even if you are quote unquote behind in whatever measurement you wanna use for that.

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If you've got smaller revenue, if you're just starting out, your timeline is much shorter than what other people have done.

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It's what I experienced in my soccer blog.

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We were one of the new kids on the block quite literally, I was a kid at the time and we just fearlessly went for it with an abundance mindset, and others helped us, they lifted us up and in turn, we were able to do the same for others.

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We had a lot of websites in that directory, in that network, that basket that I talked about, who were just starting out, who literally had no traffic, and I learned from them and they learned from me, and we all learned from people who are much bigger than us.

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But the common denominator across the entire network, across the entire community that we were building and working with, was that we all believed in abundance.

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We all believed and understood and knew that a rising tide lifts all boats.

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So if you've ever heard me say it before, these are the origins of that story.

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It has honestly changed my life.

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It's transformed the way that I operate, the way that I think the way that I see the world, the way that I see opportunities, the way that I love helping and working with and collaborating with so many other people and entrepreneurs, this extrapolates way beyond just business.

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We're all humans here together, we're all looking for the same sort of things in life and I think it's important for all of us to remind ourselves of that, to remind ourselves of that.

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So this is a story from the archives, but it's really revealing because everything that I've done up to this point reflects and has shaped who I am today.

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So I hope that this resonates with you, wherever it is that you are, and it's just that little push for you to embrace this mindset in the way that you operate.

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Because I'll tell you what it is such a beautiful thing that a rising tide lifts all boats.

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That's it for me here today.

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Pound that subscribe button and if you enjoyed today's episode, I would love to hear from you.

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Drop me a line.

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My personal email address is hello at imetbriancom.

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I'm way more of a voice memo type of person than a sit down and text all day type of person, so drop me a line.

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Otherwise, pound that subscribe button, because we'll be coming at you as always every Monday, wednesday, friday, saturday and Sunday here on the entrepreneur to entrepreneur podcast.

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Hey, it's Brian here, and thanks for tuning in to yet another episode of the entrepreneur to entrepreneur podcast.

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If you haven't checked us out online, there's so much good stuff there.

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Check out the show's website and all the show notes that we talked about in today's episode at thewantrepreneurshowcom.

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Initiate a live chat.

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