In 2011 I made my fulltime living from billing clients for my time. Financially, that was a pretty good year for me.
But was I happy? Did I see a bright future ahead of me? Not really. I knew I needed a change.
So in 2012, I made it my mission to transition from being a freelance web designer to being an owner of a product business. A product business could scale and grow over time. That idea excited me. That’s where I wanted my career to go.
I thought it would take about year to get there.
It took three.
It turns out, launching a product business, and growing it to a point where it can fully replace a comfortable freelance income is a lot harder than it seems!
But I did it. I eventually figured it out. I built and scaled up a business, then sold it for a six-figure exit. Now I’m building and scaling up another product business.
How did I make it happen? It’s easy to point to the nuts and bolts. The product decisions, the marketing tactics, the “lucky” breaks, and whatever else that appears on the surface.
But underneath it all is what really makes the difference: My mindset.
As I look back on these past few years, what really sticks out is my change in mindset. It really has completely transformed in ways I never could have predicted or expected back when I started this journey. And although it took many months of trial and error before arriving at each of these mindset shifts, I believe that once they settled in, they allowed me to truly crack the code on this long, hard, road from billing by the hour to selling products.
So let me share with you these key mindset shifts. Maybe you’ve already embraced these. Maybe you’ve yet to discover these. My hope is you’ll take these and think a bit deeper about where you’re at in your business, and where you want it to go.
