How We Beat Overwhelm To Launch £1M Businesses (Episode 125)

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🗣 In this episode, Lewis Smith and James Eardley dive into one of the most common challenges entrepreneurs face—feeling overwhelmed when starting a business. 

They share strategies to break free from the overwhelm, offering actionable advice to help you get your e-commerce business off the ground and headed toward £1M in sales.

👉 Prefer to watch this on YouTube? Check it out here ➡️ https://youtu.be/iMik_gitxBI

Topics Discussed:
★ The Power of Clarity: Learn how narrowing down your focus and breaking tasks into smaller steps can help you overcome overwhelm.
★ Mindset Shifts: Discover how embracing mistakes, practicing patience, and focusing on progress can shift you from feeling stuck to taking action.
★ The Role of Mentorship: Hear why mentorship and community are crucial to overcoming overwhelm and accelerating your business growth.
★ The First Step to Success: Get advice on how to start small, build systems, and move forward without getting lost in the details.
★ How to Avoid Perfectionism: Understand the dangers of trying to perfect everything at once and how to focus on getting things done instead.
★ Real-Life Success Stories: Lewis and James share inspiring examples from their community of entrepreneurs who overcame overwhelm and achieved success.

Links and Resources Mentioned:
Pick up a copy of Lewis’ book: https://dropshipunlocked.com/book
Get Shopify for £1 a month for 3 months: https://dropshipunlocked.com/shopify
Get a free trial with a professional phone line: https://dropshipunlocked.com/circle

Key Takeaways:
★ Clarity is Key: Narrow your focus to small, achievable steps to prevent feeling overwhelmed and make progress.
★ Patience is Vital: Understand that things will take time and be okay with making mistakes along the way.
★ Mentorship Can Make All the Difference: A mentor helps you avoid mistakes, stay focused, and move forward faster.
★ Start Small and Build Systems: Don’t try to do everything at once—focus on taking manageable steps and building the right systems to scale.
★ It’s All About Progress, Not Perfection: Keep moving forward, even if things aren’t perfect, and you’ll see results over time.

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Transcript

0:00

Well, the first step to beating overwhelm is to create clarity in your goals. But most people go wrong when they when starting your business. The second biggest mistake you can make is trying to be perfect from the beginning. But even worse than that is to when you're overwhelmed, it's really, really easy to feel stuck. But I found that a game changer for me has been one thing I wish that I'd known from the start. When I first started, my business was overwhelm is definitely a feeling that many entrepreneurs face. So you have to shift your focus too. I Louis, welcome to the dropship unlocked Podcast. I'm Louis Smith, the founder of dropship unlocked, and with me is our client success coach, James Eardley. Now when we're not recording podcast episodes or running our own e commerce businesses, you'll find us helping aspiring entrepreneurs launch their own high ticket drop shipping stores. So if you're ready to build your own six or even seven figure online business, then head over to dropship unlocked.com. Forward slash, start now, sit back, relax and let's unlock your potential with the dropship unlocked podcast. Okay, today we're going to be diving into a topic which is probably one of the most common challenges that new entrepreneurs face, overwhelm and especially that overwhelm that you might be feeling when you first start a business. So Louis, we both know about how overwhelming it can be to launch a business, especially when there's so much to think about and so many hats to wear. So what advice would you give to someone who feels stuck and overwhelmed right at the beginning of their journey? It is easy to fall into that trap of overwhelm, but I think you have to focus on clarity, and one of the ways you can do that is try and narrow down your objectives to clear actionable steps. So don't just look at the big picture of like, here's this huge goal I'm trying to achieve, because it can feel overwhelming and like there's no light at the end of the tunnel. You can't see the thing you're creating, so you almost just want to give up because of that feeling of overwhelm. But if you can break tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks, like micro actions, it feels so much less daunting. So create a road map. Map map out the plan. Follow a proven blueprint, whatever you have to do to break down these huge, lofty goals into nice, manageable actions that you can take one of every day. That way you can prioritize the actions to maintain momentum and make sure that as well, you reduce your decision fatigue along the way. Because that's a big one. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the nail on the head for what really helped me when I had a big goal of building an online business for the first time, was that I was so important that I didn't look at that huge goal of having an online business that was generating maybe 10k a month or something, because that is a few chapters down the line, and there's nothing that you can take action on right now. You can't just do something that gets that over the line within a few days, there's all these little micro actions that lead to that big goal. And so it's a lot less overwhelming when you think about, okay, I'm just going to register a company today, or open a business bank account, because that's the first step. Rather than thinking, I'm going to build a business that's capable of doing 10k a month today, it's just going to overwhelm me, and you probably never start. I think that's probably the biggest thing there is, is that overwhelm. The worst thing about it is that it really it means there'll be inaction, there'll be a lack of action, because you feel overwhelmed to even get started. Yeah, exactly. And then that's a vicious cycle, because the less action you take, the more it seems like there's this insurmountable mountain of tasks ahead of you, and you feel like you can never make progress. The trick is, chip off a bit of the mountain. Tackle it one bit at a time. Take that one very first step, and then feel the momentum of that journey, and feel that fuel you and allow you to, like, set your sights on the next part of the mountain. You just work your way up gradually, step by step. Just get into the next flag on the way up the mountain. You don't just look at the thing and run directly at it. It's just overwhelming, and you're gonna fall flat on your face Exactly. That's it. Just break things right, right down. What was the saying Rome wasn't built in a day, and it's so cliche, but I felt like I had to drop it in there, because it does perfectly sum up the fact that you can't expect to do anything big in a short amount of time. The way that they built Rome was by doing one little brick at a time across the whole city. And it'll be the same way that you build a business, and why not build the business that's as the same size and as colossal as Rome? If you do things in the right way, and you take things step by step, then you can build incredible things. But the most important thing is that you break it right down to manageable chunks, because nobody can think about building a huge business in one day. It's all done day by day. Small, tiny, little actions the field almost not even important in the moment because they're so small. But enough of those in the right direction and you'll build something incredible. So what sort of mindset Do you think people need to adopt then Lewis, in order to get better at handling tasks that may have previously overwhelmed them? Well, certainly embracing mistakes is going to be a VA. Valuable first step. That's a really vital kind of mindset, trance transition to take, because they are an important part of the learning process. So if you can embrace mistakes along the way as they're going to be prevalent, they're going to be necessary. I have to get through them, and yeah, you continue the journey in spite of them. I think that's a nice reframe, rather than just hitting a mistake and realizing, oh, that I did that wrong, therefore I shouldn't continue. It's like, no, that's just part of the journey. Another part would be practicing patience along the way, so delayed gratification, making sure that you remind yourself that, yes, there's this amazing, big mountain, and yes, we will get to the summit of it at some point. But that takes time, as with that business takes time, and that's okay. You don't want to rush the process. You want to just make sure you're constantly reminding yourself of the end goal, but only tackling the micro tasks every day that get you incrementally closer to it. Because if you just focus on the big picture, it's very difficult to then chunk that up into actionable steps and then focusing on the progress that you've made would probably be the next point, like making sure that you recognize yourself and pat yourself on the back for every micro step that you took along the way. Every single small step counts, even if it feels insignificant at the time. If you did one thing today, then recognize that, congratulate yourself on that, reward yourself for that. Because if you don't, then you're not going to enjoy the journey, and therefore, you're probably going to give up before you reach the summit. So you've got to make sure you enjoy that path along the way 100% Yeah, I agree. I think that's that's important you give yourself a little dopamine hits every time you celebrate a small victory, and you're incentivizing yourself for carrying on and noticing all the small things that you do. Think you can become overwhelmed if the only thing you're focused on is constantly that big goal that you've got, you know, a million pounds in revenue. Maybe that's your goal with the business. Well, if you've got that as a goal, it'll feel quite underwhelming every single day that you don't achieve that there's nothing else to celebrate. So don't make that the biggest goal. Make your smaller goals chunk right down into very actionable tasks, and so you can celebrate them on the way. Something that sums this up nicely is the way that people climb to the top of Everest, I believe that they have to spend about three months on the mountain before they can actually summit on like do a summit day to the top of Everest, and that's to allow your body to acclimatize. So everyone that's walking up Everest that they're not expecting to be able to do it in a day. It would be incredibly overwhelming task. So the way they do it is they give themselves time to acclimatize, and they know it's a big process. I'm not expecting anyone to be listening to this necessarily have climbed Everest to be able to compare that to but maybe you've climbed Snowden in the UK. Maybe you've run a marathon. There'll be people listening right now that have run a marathon, which is incredible feat of discipline and consistency, and yet they'll feel overwhelmed at building a business. So I know, Lewis, you've done some running in your time. I mean, do you think there's some some crossovers that you can make in certain areas of your life that you could definitely apply to building a business as well. Yeah, for sure, there's, there are times aren't there where you feel the the stitch, the you know, the cramp, as while you're running, and yet you just, you kind of think to yourself, in that moment, I could stop right now, or I could just power through. And it's that I know what I want to do here, and I know I want to power through, and I know that it will pass, and over time, I'll, I'll get back on track. And that's, that's probably the biggest comparable that you get when you hit that wall. They call it the runners wall, don't they, but yet, you you power through it anyway. That's kind of the equivalent, really, with building a business like this. You might hit that. It might not be a physical fatigue wall, but it's a mental fatigue oil. It's that, like there are so many mixed messages and different things that different people online are saying, it's really difficult to know what to do. You know, I've got like, mental cramp, then you just stop. Whereas I think the thing that the the antidote to that is probably just picking mentors, really picking a mentor that then speeds up the learning curve and helps you avoid the costly mistakes along the way. To avoid that confusion, it's like putting the blinkers on if you're a horse in a horse race and you're just looking in one direction and you know exactly the way you're going. So being in a community with other like minded individuals as well is helpful, because then you're not alone. You can celebrate those micro successes in public and get the recognition from other people in the community, that motivation, that accountability, if you're someone that needs that, and yeah, I think a mentor can provide a real road map and help you see the big picture and stay focused on what matters, because the difficulty with doing it the other way, trying to piece together stuff from the internet and AI and YouTube and stuff, you're getting mixed messages from a variety of different sources, none of which you know whether they're even proven, and it can become very confusing. Absolutely, I think sometimes we need a hand holding, and there's so many overlaps between sport and business. So you mentioned running, not only is it similar, where you need to push through a wall or approach a marathon with one step at a time in the same way that you'd approach a business with one action at a time. It's also that crossover of how runners and elite athletes approach mentorship and coaching whenever runners, or any athlete, for that matter, whenever they go up and take a medal or do an interview, they're always very quick to talk about the team that's behind them or the coach that helps. About or the parents that sacrifice to help them out. Because I think any kind of individual accolade that you achieve, whether that's in business, whether that's in sport, there's always a team around you that's helped you to get there. So if you want to start your own business, which is a big thing to do, so it's not easy. It's a big challenge thing, it's important to have a team around you that's going to push you to get there. The best types of teams are people that not only support you because they're on the same level as you and they all want to achieve the same goal, but the best of a team would also have a coach that is dedicated to be your guiding star and to be able to tell you the steps to take. It's why all elite athletes have coaches. By all elite football teams have coaches. The coach is not necessarily there to hold their hand all the time, but it gives them the direction. It gives them the mentorship, and it tells them the direction to go. Direction to go, so you can go on and achieve incredible things. So yeah, the power of accountability is huge, and we have covered this topic before in another podcast episode. So if you are interested in learning about the importance of mentorship, then I recommend checking out Episode 111 of the dropship unlock podcast, and that's called watch this before starting an online business. So yeah, where would you say is the perfect place for somebody to start that feels inspired and wants to get started with business? Yeah? Well, that episode, Recommendation 111 is a really great one. Watch this before you start an online business. That's definitely a good place to start. If you've watched that maybe and you're ready to get started. It's all about just taking that first step, as we talked about today. So start small. Build the right systems. Be patient with the process. Make sure that you're you're making those incremental compounding steps towards where you want to get to, to whatever your mountain is. The next steps for this model we've laid out for you at dropship, unlocked.com, forward, slash start. So my recommendation would be to head there. We'll link it below and get yourself started there. Are you enjoying the podcast? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment or a review, and we might feature it in an upcoming episode. And for detailed show notes and resources, visit dropship unlock.com forward slash podcast. If you found value in any episode of this podcast, please. Could you take just 10 seconds to leave us a quick five star review on your favorite podcast app? It helps us more than you can imagine. And who knows, you might just hear your comments read out on the show. Thanks for being a part of our community. Your support helps us keep delivering new episodes to you every week. Now it's time to answer a question that we've received from a listener of the podcast. So if you're listening now and you have a question that's popped up while listening, all you need to do is leave a comment beneath the YouTube video version of this episode, and not only will it be answered in the comments, but it may also be featured and answered on an upcoming podcast episode. So this week, the question has come in from Jordy, sure, or so forgive me if I'm getting that wrong without your YouTube handle. So Jordy has asked, Do I have to be in the UK to set up a tide business bank account? Thank you for your question. Geordie, so no, I don't think you'd have you need to check this one with tide, but I don't think you'd have to be in the UK to set up their tide business bank account, but you would probably have to have a UK registered business. And however, to do that, you don't necessarily have to be living in the UK. So you can be a director of a UK Limited Company, even if you don't live in the UK. So you can do that. And then once you have that company, you can then probably get a account from tide, but you'd want to check that with tide. If you meet the requirements that they set out, then you should certainly be able to apply for a tide account. You could also set up an account in your own country if you wanted to, especially if you want to take advantage of local market conditions, local suppliers, local services, local bank accounts, things like that. You can apply the home turf advantage model into other markets. We just are based in the UK. We set it up in the UK, and we make it work in this market, because that's what we know and what we've done personally. But yeah, you could absolutely adopt it to your own market. And we do have members in our community who run UK businesses, but don't necessarily spend all their time in the UK. Absolutely. Yeah, great question. Keep me coming. And thanks, Lewis for your answer there. We're now going to highlight a recent review that we've had for the podcast, because we love to do this, and we love to read through your reviews and to give you a shout out as well. So we're going to highlight a recent review that we've had from the podcast from Diana. So Diana 811, so she shared her thoughts. And Diana said this about a recent episode that we did on mindset. She said, This is so powerful. Thank you so much for refocusing on this subject and for helping me get to back to basics and back on track. Whenever I hit a wall, I listen to your episodes, especially the ones focusing on mindset, and I get back to working on my future. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for your review. Diana, 811, really glad to hear that you've been enjoying the podcast and that you found that particular episode on mindset helpful, if this episode resonated with you, if you found anything valuable in this episode or any other episode, maybe you'd consider sharing the dropship unlocked podcast with someone you know who might benefit from what we teach. Your recommendations help us grow our community and can. Continue delivering valuable content. So if you could take a few seconds to quickly share it with a few people in your world, that would make a big difference to us and to someone you know. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. We hope you are leaving with new insights and inspiration to fuel your entrepreneurial journey, to kickstart your E commerce business. Head over to dropship unlocked.com, forward slash, start. It's the perfect place to start and get access to resources that will help you build your business from the ground up. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button for more episodes packed with strategies, tips and success stories, plus, if you enjoyed this episode today, a five star review would mean the world to us, and you might even get a shout out on the next episode. Thank you for choosing to spend your time with us today. We can't wait to bring you more insights on the next episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. You.