Discussing the 5 P’s of Successful Entrepreneurship – Pete Mohr

If you feel like your business owns you and has control over your life, it might be time to do something about it. Our guest says, entrepreneurship is about freedom, not frustration.

Pete Mohr is an entrepreneurial coach and business owner. He is the Owner of the Simplifying Entrepreneurship company that helps entrepreneurs become more successful. His coaching program and podcast are focused on giving entrepreneurs the necessary tools, workshops, and knowledge to succeed, both professionally and personally. Pete himself has been a business owner his entire life. Now, he wants to give back to his community of like-minded entrepreneurs by teaching them how to achieve their goals.

Pete believes that life-long learning is the ultimate key to success, so he is committed to sharing all his know-how with the world.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we discuss how to deal with failures as an entrepreneur, why you need to implement systems and processes, what are the five Ps that will help you deliver your brand’s promise, and how to accomplish your goals.

If you want to turn your frustration into freedom, make sure you tune in to this week’s episode to find out Pete’s tips and tricks.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Pete Mohr

💡 What he does: He’s an Entrepreneurial Coach and Owner of Simplifying Entrepreneurship. He’s also the host of The Simplifying Entrepreneurship Podcast.

💡 Noteworthy: Pete has owned and operated businesses in service, trades, and retail. He has also operated franchise and independent businesses so he fully understands the ups and downs of both systems.

💡 Key Quote: “You own your business. It shouldn’t own you. And if you’re feeling like your business is owning you and you’re not owning the business and having the control of the business to give you back the life that you want, then you’re probably suffering in one of these areas.”

💡 Where to find Pete: LinkedIn

Key Insights

Your failures are the best learning experiences. Failure is inevitable, especially in entrepreneurship. Every entrepreneur had to face at least one major setback in their journey. But what matters is how you move past those hardships. The truth is you can’t escape failure; you can only learn to grow from it.

Pete talks about some of his most challenging moments as a business owner and how they helped him build resilience. “We’re not big city type retailers. We’re independent retailers, indie retailers, as they call it, it’s sort of in the business. We’re small town. We understand small-town attitude. We treat people like they’re family. […] There was no sort of community, no sort of connection and it just didn’t fit the way we ran our business. So there was a lot of different learnings around that Tyler, that whole learning situation, but truly it was that store was a failure. And you know what? In entrepreneurship, when you’re in entrepreneurship, and you’re a business owner, you are going to have certain things that fail.”

Business systems can save you stress, time, energy, and money. Systems and processes are the building blocks of every business. Whether you’re a product or service-based business, you need to implement systems in every aspect of your work. Without them, you might lose too much of your precious time, run across unnecessary problems with your team, or put yourself through too much stress.

Pete explains, “If your team doesn’t know how to answer their question, and they have to go around and ask things, it creates confusion for your team member, it creates confusion for the customer. And now the experience is suffering and some of these other things. So my philosophy around process no matter whether it’s an operational process, a sales, a marketing, a human resources process, it should always be made and in full communication and understanding at the lowest possible level of the organization.”

What is the Five Ps Framework and why it’s important? According to Pete, the ultimate goal of implementing processes is to have clarity among all team members. He shares with us his own framework for turning frustration into freedom; it’s around the five Ps – promise, product, process, people, and profit.

As he points out, everything starts with a promise, either to your customers, to your employees, or yourself. And everything should tie back to that promise. “So we start with the promise. What is the promise and why does that promise matter? And if you look at a promise and how to develop your promise, it’s pretty simple. What’s the problem that your customer is feeling or facing? What’s your unique solution that’s going to satisfy that problem? What does their life look like afterwards? […] And if your product, taking your product, whatever that is, doesn’t align to that, it doesn’t work. If the process doesn’t deliver, that doesn’t work.”

Having clarity can help you reach your goals. Not knowing what you want out of your life will make it harder for you to accomplish your goals. That’s why you need to work on gaining clarity. Clarity is vital in both life and business.

Pete shares an interesting example of how you can get to know yourself a little bit better. It’s called the buckets of life. “Take a sheet of paper for each of them, write them down, and just sort of jot note this stuff because it’ll give you clarity about what you want to do for your life. And when you have clarity about what you want out of your life, then you can take that back into your business. […] Without that, life just goes on, business just goes on. So the owner needs to have that clarity in order to make the adjustments within the business to deliver it back.”

Top Quotes

“I like this acronym and the acronym for the word system is: saves you stress, time, energy, and money. So what does the system do? It saves you stress, time, energy, and money. And when we can do that, when we have the right systems, when we have the right processes in place, boy, does that actually make things true. So we’re always trying to perfect our processes, but there are no perfect processes in most cases, right? We’re always trying to make it that little bit better so that it’s reducing our frustration.”

“There’s just processes in every area of your business. And most often, what I find, at least with small business, most of the processes are here, for those of you watching, if anybody’s watching. They’re in your head, and that’s not the place they need to be. They need to be written down and understood and communicated by everybody in the organization so that there’s ultimate clarity because it all starts with clarity.”

“There’s more gray area around people than there is around process. Process, it’s like, ‘Oh, that isn’t working. Okay, well, we just need to pull this lever and change that lever’. With people, it’s just not that easy. There’s conversation. There’s feelings. There’s a variety of different things that are uniquely personal. And from that perspective it becomes, let’s call it more physically and mentally draining to have conversations, what I call crucial conversations with these key people, especially when you know change needs to happen.”

“I have a lot of frameworks for coaching and stuff like that, but this one framework is called ‘Love it or leave it’ and this idea of working in the areas that you truly love to do. And I can say I’m happy to be working in my ‘love it’ zone. I live this sort of stuff, all of my tools, all the different things. I’m a business owner, so I try them myself. When I look at this idea of turning your frustrations into freedoms, what I want to do is be having these conversations with guys like you, Tyler. So that we can help other entrepreneurs grow and do well and all this. That gives me energy and excitement.”

“I’m not living on an island. I don’t own a private jet and I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life. So I told you I just had a major setback a few years ago. If you lose a lot of money, it takes a while to build that back up again. You need resiliency to stay at it and keep at it and all this other stuff. And you know what? The ups and downs of entrepreneurship aren’t for everyone.”

“I have no intention of retiring. But I just look at retirement as saying, okay, well, I see this portion of my life as being a coach and a speaker and all that sort of stuff, writing books and things like that as part of my retirement package because I love to do it. So why would I want to stop that? It’s no benefit to me to retire if this is what I actually want to do so that I can sit around and watch some TV and go golfing occasionally and do whatever else. It’s like, I can still do that and do what I do.”

Links

Simplifying Entrepreneurship Website

My Business Report Assessment