How Confidence Plays Into Being a Successful Entrepreneur

with guest Kevin David #MakingBank S5E42

Entrepreneurs often find themselves on different paths than what they originally planned for. It’s pretty common to follow the route of schooling to then get a job in a corporate world. You might think that entrepreneurs all start out knowing what they’re going to do from a young age – this isn’t always true. 

Take it from Kevin David, eCommerce multimillion-dollar entrepreneur, who talks about his journey on this episode of Making Bank. Kevin started his career in the corporate world working for Facebook and being at the top of the industry. However, he found himself dissatisfied and went on to work for himself and be an entrepreneur. In a short amount of time, he started multiple companies that achieved success and learned a lot along the way. 

The Importance of Reading and Learning From Others 

As Kevin made his way deeper into the entrepreneurial world, he built several companies up along the way. From leaving Facebook to creating a business in which he made his own money that was significantly more than his corporate job, Kevin persisted and continues to succeed 4 years into his journey today. 

One of the biggest things that Kevin has taken from the success that he’s learned is the importance of reading. At one point, Kevin believed that he was too busy to read. But if he kept thinking that way, he’d never make time to read in the first place. “Like if you think you’re too busy to read, you should read to get less busy by creating better systems and processes. And so, I created a book list of the top 100 autobiographies written by billionaires.” 

By reading these books, Kevin got to learn about the experiences of people who have things figured out in the financial aspects of life. Oftentimes, when people figure out the financial aspects of life, they figure out the fulfillment and purpose because they have enough time to do it. Kevin views books like tapping into a decade or a lifetime of learning from some of the smartest people in the world, all from the palm of your hand. Not only are you learning, but you’re also actively applying that information to your own life and business strategy. 

Understanding People and Working with Technology 

Kevin reflects on when he first started, and he realized that everything was growing so fast. He needed more people to help him manage what was going on, and he needed to hire people just to have people. Now that things have grown, he finds that he’s a lot slower and methodical about hiring. 

“We look deeper into people. We check references, we have interviews where we have them do difficult tasks. Cause we can tell a lot about somebody by them doing stuff, right? Like a lot of people are good at interview, but they’re not good at doing [the job].” Kevin says he likes to hire people that know what they’re doing, and people who figure out what to do. It’s a combination that makes a successful workplace. 

Besides utilizing people to help his business grow and make processes easier, Kevin emphasizes the importance of technology. Technology allows for things to be more scalable and leverageable. You can always add more people and more staff, but generally, the things that work best are creating one repeatable piece of technology. 

“Leveraging it through paid media like Facebook Ads, through Google Ads. There’s a lot of different ways to do business. There’s word of mouth marketing with tech startups, where you can create just like a product that’s truly 10 times better. Brute force it and you can create a digital product or some product or service you can scale up with technology without needing incrementally more and more people.” Kevin uses technology as a resource and a tool to manage and handle growth, but also find more effective ways of doing things. 

Kevin constantly looks for ways to automate things and have the fewest people as possible. Although that might sound weird, he’s learned over time that the more people and employees that you have, generally more of the headaches that come with it. 

Being Confident 

Kevin finds himself being asked the question “how did you become so successful?” And to him, it’s hard to boil it all down to one thing. There are so many variables at play, elements of luck, and the people that you meet and connect with. All sorts of different things coincide together to make the perfect situation. 

“In my opinion, there is one thing that’s the most important when it comes to being successful as a human being, you know, in the chaos of life or whatever you want to call it. And that thing I like to call delusional confidence,” Kevin says. In the traditional sense, confidence comes from having experiences and getting results. But the problem is that if you don’t have those experiences or results, you haven’t achieved confidence by default. 

Delusional confidence means that you believe in yourself with unbreakable confidence that you’re going to be successful no matter what.