Today is my 28th birthday, and I’m happy to announce that I’m in a better position in my life than I have ever been before! As a result of the SEO industry, I’ve been able to build myself an array of successful businesses, a strong community and a network of some of the brightest minds which has allowed me to live wherever I choose, benefit everyone around me and have true freedom.
I can only thank you and these people for allowing allowing of this to happen in the first place! Without your continual support, without the information I get from the network I’ve built and without the opportunities this personal brand has given me then I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am today.
So, as a thank you for that support, I am doing FOUR things for you
- I am running a giveaway (you can enter via X/Twitter below) where you can win up to $5,000 worth of SEO goodies and consulting time with yours truly.
- As I turn 28, I am giving you 28% off EVERYTHING on CharlesFloateTraining.com using code: BDAY28 - My courses, eBooks, downloads, consulting, audits, links, strategies etc etc… This is your ONE-TIME, 24-HOUR ONLY chance to get any of the above you’ve been thinking about.
- Tomorrow, I’ll be launching my next premium webinar (after the major success of the first one) and whilst I’ll still be pricing it at $199, for the first 72 hours, I’ll make it ONLY $56! That is a massive saving you will NOT want to miss out on, so make sure you stay tuned for the upcoming announcements.
- The rest of this blog post contains 28 lessons I’ve learned that have helped me succeed and thrive in not only my entrepreneurship but also my entire life.
Enter The Giveaway Here:
28 Lessons From 28 Years On This Planet
I’ve always been able to achieve things I’ve set my mind to, but I’ve become far better at it over the years by learning from my mistakes, the world around me, my mentors who have helped me immensely and an unending appetite and curiosity for technology, business and self improvement through education.
So, here are my 28 lessons that I hope can help you as much as they did me, randomly assorted, in no particular order:
1 - Stoicism For Business & Life
Emotion and ego have often been the downfall of many great businessmen, and I can say with some regret that my younger self should have learned a lot quicker that reacting with emotion and not logic gets you the worst possible outcomes. Ryan Holiday has some great books on this, and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hayes Edition) is the ultimate source.
2 - Don’t Follow The Herd, Stay Away From Shiny Objects
I’ve got caught up in too many crazes and trends that ended up being fads more than I would have liked to admit, but there is a fine line between being informed and being bleary. Stick to the paths that have made you gold, not the ones that look like they’re made out of them.
3 - Journal, Analyze, Audit & Review Regularly
"Self-awareness gives you the capacity to learn from your mistakes as well as your successes." - Lawrence Bossidy
Journal, note or record important decisions, new information, and new experiences and regularly compile them all. Even if it’s as small as appointments to better prepare your readiness or as big as meeting the love of your life, our brains tend to be pretty bad at recalling specific parts of our busy lives, but the fastest way to better them is by reflecting on where we could have improved on every path we choose to go down.
This only works if you are honest with yourself. Some people prefer to keep these things very private for a reason, and privacy is an important part of our lives.
4 - Adaptability Is All That Matters, The Obstacle Is The Way
In business and in life, adaptability is everything. The ability to pivot when things don't go according to plan is a game changer. This is not just about bouncing back from failure but also about turning obstacles into opportunities.
There's a stoic concept that fits perfectly here: "The Obstacle is the Way." It means that the challenges we face aren't just barriers; they are the path forward. Each difficulty is a stepping stone, each setback a lesson, and it's in overcoming that we grow.
5 - You Never Know It All, You Should Never Stop Learning
No matter how much you achieve, there's always something new to learn. Even the greatest athletes and scientists in the world are constantly looking at what they don’t know and discussing interesting, new theories with peers - You should be doing the same thing, never think you’re the best at anything, because there’s always someone out there doing some part of it better than you are.
6 - Risk is Part of The Game
I can’t help it, I’m a natural risk taker, I like to gamble, which is why I actively try not to - Besides the occasional late night bet on a video game tournament! With that being said, entrepreneurship in and of itself is a risk for many, it’s a risk of failure, humiliation, financial loss and heartache.
For most people, your business becomes your baby (but at least real babies sleep…), and it is going back to that stoic approach, where calculated risk based on proper due diligence is where you create your opportunities for yourself.
7 - Your Network Really Is Your Net Worth
All businesses and entrepreneurs need allies and mentors, it’s the only way you succeed when you’re in need of growth, opportunities and capital. The easiest way to grow your network is by putting yourself out there… There is this myth that 8, 9 and even 10 figure people are unapproachable, and I can tell you that is far from the case! These are often some of the most interesting and interested people in the world, bring your raw self, develop your confidence in day-to-day life, learn to read rooms and even throw your hat in for public speaking, you’ll soon find doors opening.
Whilst conferences often lack the necessary information directly from the speakers, if you can get into private masterminds and circles, they can be life changing with the ideas and opportunities they can bring - I’ve ran events before with over 100 attendees where the average net worth in the room was over $10,000,000 and that was mostly just SEO nerds.
8 - Always Aim High, But Be Realistic
I can only really speak for the SEO industry folks here, but the average agency employee is currently way undervalued in take-home pay. You can easily make 2-3x most of these salaries doing consulting for a single client, building niche ecommerce sites and
With that being said, I’m not putting down these jobs, I actually think a lot of the fact folks are underpaid is on them not valuing themselves as highly. We live in a mostly remote world now, and if you can improve your CV/Resumé, know how to do interviews, work on personal projects with professionally presented case studies and do some light social media brand building; You can fast track yourself to higher salaries rapidly - I’ve seen this recently at SEO.Careers, the candidates that are active, show results and have good traits get to demand significantly more.
9 - Track Your Time
I started making considerably more money when I started tracking my time and analyzing how much I'd earned per week/month vs. the time I'd spent on that project. This made me quickly realize I was spending far too much time on certain sites in my portfolio (This is where the 80/20 rule often comes in to play) for less than $50 per hour, which was terrible vs. my other ventures.
Once I started to get a better picture of my earning ability, I could also increase my hourly consultancy rate with good reason to far exceed what I'd be able to achieve from other projects and have grown that arm of the business into a $800k/yr capital cash cow.
10 - ALWAYS Get Feedback
Whether you’re getting it from your network or from AI now, it’s impossible to create anything truly perfect, but you should always be looking at how you can improve your content or creations to their highest possible peak before putting them out into the world.
11 - Health Is Your Real Wealth
I’ve been in several motorcycle crashes, had to have multiple surgeries to remove growths from my body and even fallen down the stairs once in a work induced stint of exhaustion. The one commonality was that despite thinking I was working overly hard towards my business goals, I actually ended up making poor decisions and completely destroying some aspects of growth and staff morale with my frequent hospital visits.
The one thing I’ve learned over all of that time is that you need to take time for yourself and that money is fickle, especially with the turbulent new world economy we live in. So spend the resources you are hoarding to make sure you can keep amassing them, get some sunlight, touch some grass and eat a salad once in a while, though I still stick to mostly steak.
12 - Persistence Pays Off (Compounding Growth)
It doesn’t matter if you’re doing SEO, trading stocks or crypto, doing real estate investments or even building your way up the corporate ladder; Consistent, good work will pay you back if you put it into the right industry, at the right time, just always do your due diligence and analysis, like I said above.
13 - Learn To Delegate Early
You can only scale so much on your own, and whilst I do think that there will be some solo billionaires thanks to AI, I still think they will be a very small minority of hyper intelligent people that have experience in specialist fields already.
Take your time to develop your talent, but make sure you are removing yourself from tasks you are literally not worthy of anymore. If you can automate it awesome, if you can outsource it for cheap good, and if you have to hire employees then find the best person for the job that can build better processes with you.
14 - Scale via Automation & Efficiency First
I have always come from an efficiency and ROI mindset, and as I said in the point above, you can now scale a lot of tasks with AI and automation technology like Make, Axiom and Autogen.
I try to always be on the cutting edge of technology and AI has allowed me to effectively be an expert in anything, wherever I run into a problem I can just ask ChatGPT for the exact steps in how to solve it for me.
15 - Your Personality Plays A Massive Role In Your Best Position
It took me a few years to figure out that I am a really good SEO but a really bad CEO. I don’t particularly like leading people, I tend to have emotional reactions when people get things wrong and I dislike responsibility. If you can figure out your best traits and where they are best positioned, you will not only thrive down that path but likely be a lot happier, and make the people around you a lot happier too.
16 - Learn To Say No, Especially To Assholes
There is the age old saying “the customer is always right” but actually, sometimes customers are assholes… And I mean we’ve dealt with racism, xenophobia and ageism routinely throughout the last 15 years of running this business. Some customers will ruin your teams morale, demand the world and still never be happy.
Cut the bad fruit off, apologise and fire them. If you are in a job, then your work should be sticking by you, and if not then you should know your worth and take it elsewhere that does.
17 - Diverse Perspectives & Opinions Are What Make The World Great
The SEO world is notorious for having a black hat vs. white hat debate and war that has raged on for the better part of 20 years now. There are few people that happen to have true knowledge of both sides of the battlefield, but often when comparisons and honest debates do occur they are the greatest exchanges of information in the industry.
Just because you think your opinion or perspective is right, it’s only right in your context and you can learn a lot, especially if you are a marketer, when seeking out those differences.
18 - The Journey Is Often The Most Fun Part
Yes, it’s awesome to enjoy the rewards at the end, but there is something authentic about sticking to a learning curve, having a genuine curiosity for a seemingly new world that has just opened up and wanting to spend every second of every day absorbing as much of it as possible.
Enjoy every moment of it, and try not to get frustrated with mistakes or uncontrollable circumstances, you only have that moment once in a lifetime and it should be treasured.
19 - Knowing When To Be Fast vs. Slow
Some opportunities, you need to be quick with. Some, want to spend as much time doing your research and preparation as possible. Knowing when to do which is an experience that takes time to learn, and is why a lot of people fall victim to scams and fraud, especially online.
20 - Transparency Builds Trust
Showing your work, telling people when it’s an MVP (minimum viable product) and building an open and honest entrepreneur is the quickest way to build trust in a community, and most small to medium businesses are community based in some way or another these days.
21 - Priotize Financial Responsibility & Literacy
One of the biggest challenges I see for the future of my generation is a complete and utter lack of financial responsibility based on a lack of literacy. Whether it’s the education systems, a flush boomer parent clash or a lack of hope and productivity that is to blame, being able to make the correct decisions everyday will lead to a lot less stress.
22 - Routines Really Do Work
As I started in business so young, my early routines were absolutely horrible, and this really led to a downfall in my businesses - I would miss calls, I’d oversleep for work, I’d work all night for no reason and not focus on what was making me the most successful at any one time.
It was only when I turned 21 and started really settling down, having a solid home base/country, building a real relationship and a very talented team around me that I began to thrive, seeing 100%+ annual growth amongst my entire portfolio of companies. I didn’t even need to invest my cash into stocks and crypto at the time, as the digital assets I was building were seeing significantly higher ROI anyway.
23 - Piles of Cash vs. Passive Income
Some people like to hoard piles of gold, some people like to see money fall from the sky each month. There are upsides to both, but cash is becoming less stable due to the massive inflation rates we are seeing in recent years, and things aren’t looking to get particularly better anytime soon for most currencies.
Having investments that beat inflation is much easier said than done, but letting your cash stay completely stale, especially in large quantities, is a massive risk in and of itself these days.
24 - If You're The Boss, It’s Always On You, Accept Responsibility
Yes, I might have been in hospital on morphine having to have multiple surgeries, but the lack of communication and order delivery in my business during that time was still on me, because I’m the boss. Employees aren’t responsible for your company, you are responsible for them.
25 - The Customer Is Always Right
I did say above that you want to say no to customers that are rude and intimidating, but if customers just want some additional service to feel fulfilled, then fulfil it! Try to be timely, polite and as knowledgeable as possible, expect the same from your team based on what you taught them.
26 - Small, Ultra Efficient Teams (Or Systems) Are The Way
Massive HR costs are just too risky for businesses these days, and new AI technologies are disrupting industries overnight. I’ve build a very small, 4 man team that is ran by a single, very talented individual that has worked for me for 11 years now.
If you are trying to build SaaS or any sort of system, efficiency should still be a main priority.
27 - Look After Your People Like Family
A lot of companies have a churn problem, and that’s because they tend to treat employees as if they are disposable, instead of trying to build them up as happy, profit delivery machines.
The best way to do this is by letting people know they can rely on you. That doesn’t mean pizza Fridays, it means going to the hospital at 3am to see an employee who’s been in a car accident, it means helping someone with a visa for a loved one or routinely sitting down with them and helping them build out a progression plan. Connect on a human level, and people tend to stick around for a lot longer than if you treat them like hamsters on a spinning wheel.
28 - Look At The Future
The world is changing so fast it’s scary, and it really is impossible for anyone to truly keep up with EVERYTHING that is going on, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep up with everything that might affect your business and your life.
Look at what is coming, prepare for it, embrace it and be ahead of everything, you’ll be one of the lucky few that thrive, as despite what a lot of these large tech conglomerates are saying about AI creating jobs and being your new assistant, it’s already costing people their livelihoods and that will only accelerate as implementation accelerates.
A Conclusion & A Thank You
I have learned a lot in my years of doing business and travelling the world (53 countries and counting!) and I hope I’ve been able to distil just a glimpse of that into this post for you. If you haven’t already, make sure to enter my giveaway:
Thank you for reading, please share this post on your social media if you enjoyed it, it can be a birthday present from you to me!