One Tip to Boost Your Confidence for Entrepreneurs with Alex Oliveira

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06/20/2022

Show Notes:

What do you want to achieve in your business? If you’re still not sure about the answer to this question, it’s time to do some self-reflection. But first, listen to our guest’s entrepreneurial journey.

Alex Oliveira is an Entrepreneur, a Book Author, and the Host of the Dadpreneur Podcast. Throughout his career, Alex has helped generate more than 25 million leads for clients like Ford, Metlife, Autonation, and more than 3,000 SMBs.

Today, he helps business leaders identify the keys to sustainable growth while taking control of their time. On top of that, he also teaches an MBA program at FAU to train Marketing Directors at global corporations. One of his achievements is his Dadpreneur podcast, where he interviews successful entrepreneurs and asks them to share their secrets to success.

The purpose of Dadpreneur is to help businesses discover what’s new and what works in Business and Digital Marketing.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about the importance of hiring the right people for your company, how to create an effective employee assessment, why you need to determine your ‘why,’ and how to build your confidence.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Alex Oliveira

💡 What he does: He’s an Entrepreneur, Marketing Expert, Podcast Host, and Author.

💡 Noteworthy: He’s the host of the Dadpreneur podcast, where he discusses digital marketing, his entrepreneurial journey & balancing life as a dad while homeschooling 4 kids with his wife and running several businesses.

💡 Key Quote: “For every business owner out there listening, whether you’re trying to scale or you’re starting a new venture, pay close attention to the people. You can’t overstate it enough.”

💡 Where to find Alex: LinkedIn

Key Insights

If you have the right people, nothing else matters. Your employees are your company’s most valuable asset. If you’re looking to start a new company or scale your business, start by investing in your people first. Even if you have only one reliable and trustworthy person on your team, you can still go a long way together.

Alex explains, “I think the thing that stands out for me always is people. Every time I’ve scaled a line of business, right now, I’m actually doing that with the new line of business that we’re launching in Brazil. If I don’t have the right people, it just, it doesn’t matter. I can fund it right. I can have the right technology, the right leads. But if you don’t have the right [people]. It doesn’t have to have the right people like the whole group, especially if it’s a new line of business, as long as I have one really great person.”

What is an effective employee assessment? If you want to find the right people for your business, you need to create an effective employee hiring process. But conducting employee assessments is not that simple. Each position requires different skills; therefore, a completely different hiring process.

Alex explains, “Maybe I asked you, the potential candidate, hey, Tyler, what I need you to do is send me a video, five-minute video or two-minute video of yourself telling us why you want to work for us and how you’re going to solve our problems. But I need you to put that video into Dropbox, YouTube. See? I didn’t say YouTube.

Again, following instructions then, I need you to send it here, then I need I start to create this whole process. And the people who follow that process they’re going to make it to the last round of applications. And like you said, it’s not bulletproof. But I’m telling you, it really shows who’s paying attention, and it’ll save me a bunch of headaches at the end.”

Know what you want from your business. If you don’t know what you want from your business, you may get stuck in stagnancy. That’s why setting goals is important. But in order to set the right goals for your business, you have to start by asking yourself: What do I want in life? What do I want from my business? And what am I passionate about?

Alex shares his experience, “I think you need to be clear on really your ‘why,’ what you want out of life. Are you really doing what you want to do? 2016 is a perfect example. Hey, you’ve got this company’s growing 2 million in revenue at that point. That was just one business line or main one, the lead gen system we built, and I’ve got 40 employees. What’s wrong, Alex? What’s wrong with you? You just keep growing. Well, there’s so much that was wrong. I didn’t really have a ‘why.’ It was like, Okay, it’s a company. It’s growing. But am I really passionate about it? I wasn’t.”

Build your confidence. Confidence is one of the keys to success in business. It helps you reach your potential, improve your communication skills, and deal better with conflict. There are many different ways to build confidence. You can work with a business coach, talk to a professional, or give yourself a challenge.

Alex share some tips, “For business, I would say confidence, building your confidence, showing up every time I think, whether it’s a meeting or to an employee or to an investor, whatever. If you’re not feeling confident, it’s probably because you didn’t do your homework. […] When I do a presentation for a potential client, a new client, I really do my homework so that they can feel that confidence and that passion so they know that this is not bullshit. It’s going to be how I work every single day with you.”

Top Quotes

“I’ve got family members that have succeeded, others that are still trying to get there, which is very normal for any entrepreneur; some journeys take forever to get there. So I’m not saying to people that they shouldn’t do it, but I was afraid, honestly, early on, especially in my mid-20s.”

“The biggest lesson for me was over-leveraged. And I’m talking specifically finance. Employees was good; we had great products, both companies were growing, marketing wasn’t a problem, sales, all the different pillars were working great. My problem was I was over-leveraged. Too many credit lines.

“For every business owner out there listening, whether you’re trying to scale or you’re starting a new venture, pay close attention to the people. You can’t overstate it enough. I can go back to 2008, 2009 and say that the big problem there was not people, it was finances, as I mentioned, but I learned how to make that better and make that systematic. I can’t say that I’ve found the secret sauce to talent acquisition. Sometimes it’s just timing.”

“If I were to show you my process, I probably spend 30% of my time just planning, so just spitballing, brainstorming. That means no computer, no apps, no software, just me, a piece of paper and planning out, planning out every other move, planning out every other move, who’s involved here, who’s involved there? How does that impact the financial? And then figuring out who am I going to delegate it to?”

“I feel like it’s a little bit like marketing and accounting, in that you constantly have to optimize, optimize. So if in that time that you’re planning if you’re looking at what is happening, how was performance, how’s my sales performance last week, last month? How does that compare to going into next week, next month? And then how does that compare to the plan that we set out to do?”

“Follow that journey. So for anyone listening here, I would ask that you put yourself through that process. And then, to make it more unbiased, ask a colleague, a peer, a friend, or a family member to go through the same process and say, ‘Hey, why don’t you secret shop our company?’ So go through the whole process and tell me what you liked, what you didn’t like.”

“I’ve always taught my kids that. Look, you’re going to make mistakes. It’s inevitable. And more often than not, they’re accidental, so you just need to apologize, say I’m going to fix it, and move on. Not harp on it, but never hide from that. “