In a recent Authority Magazine Q&A article, Fractional Leadership Founder and CEO Ben Wolf shares his story about the challenges he encountered on his way to forming his own business and why he never gave up.

Q: Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

A: I left the company where I “grew up” entrepreneurially — a healthcare startup called FreedomCare — because I realized that I like making massive change and building things and my ability to do that had plateaued. I accepted a role as COO at a smaller organization I hoped would be an even greater opportunity long-term to make a massive difference in their mission, growth, and organizational health.

While I knew about some of their major organizational challenges, I had already joined the company when I Iearned about some organizational dysfunction among the partners. This dynamic doomed me to presiding over a slow-motion train wreck I was powerless to avoid.  

I had just left a stable position and had to choose between the misery of feeling responsible to solve problems I was not permitted to even address and risking going out on my own with a wife and four children to support with no certain prospects. With my wife’s support and some savings, I had built up doing some consulting work on the side, I decided that the misery of staying where I was outweighed the risk of taking the entrepreneurial leap.  

I submitted my resignation two months after starting the new role and hung up my shingle as a Fractional Integrator, a term coined by Fractional COOs who work with companies running on the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS®). I was very scared.

I began doing business development by having calls with business owners, various kinds of trusted advisors, other Fractional Leaders, and EOS Implementers®. I started a podcast called Win / Win — An Entrepreneurial Community, met with 12-18 people every week, and created measurables for myself to ensure I was doing the right kind of business development work for my new solopreneur business.

It was maddening at the beginning. Together with my beloved wife, before I was able to get any clients, it felt like that song from The Greatest Showman, “Never sure, never know how far we could fall. But it’s all an adventure. That comes with a breathtaking view. Walking a tightrope with you.”

Finally, after over three months, I got my first client. That was amazing! I helped drive massive change with that company and they grew their top-line revenue 25% the first quarter I worked with them. Things got a lot easier for me personally then, but we were still financially walking on a tightrope.

I continued hacking away at emailing, Zooming, calling, and meeting with people for another six months, always putting on a confident, non-desperate affect, when COVID-19 hit. All the business owners I was speaking with froze up, but I kept plugging away at the emails, calls, and Zoom meetings. I wondered whether I would ever feel successful. Would it ever get easier?

Then, in May 2020, the dam finally broke. As people’s paralysis broke and they realized they could no longer put their lives and businesses on hold, more and more started reaching out to me to be their Fractional Integrator. I got one client, and then another, and then another. Once I became fully booked, I began referring the leads I continued to get to other Fractional Integrators and getting invited as a speaker at various entrepreneurial groups. I began paying off my credit card and student loan debt. It was a huge relief I would never have experienced if I hadn’t kept up my weekly regimen of emails, calls, and meetings without regard to the self-doubt I felt.

Q: So, how are things going today? How did your grit and resilience lead to your eventual success? 

A: As John Astin used to say on Night Court, “I’m feeling much better now.” Because I kept going out there and helping whoever I could and connecting with more and more people, I started to develop a bit of a reputation as one of the most competent Fractional Integrators and one of the industry leaders in the Fractional Leadership community in general.

Because I continued getting so many referrals and leads for Fractional Integrator clients, I converted my “solo-preneurship” into a firm, Wolf’s Edge Consulting, with several other Fractional Integrators. I developed a proven process we took our clients through, identified what made us unique, and set up a meeting pulse through which we helped resolve each other’s challenges with clients. Now none of us are on an island, a challenge every solopreneur knows too well. 

And the people I met through my podcast, in the EOS community, and in the Fractional Leadership communities ended up making me realize that the whole Fractional Leadership world was completely fractured. There were thousands of websites by the various Fractional Leaders, both firms and solo practitioners, but there was absolutely no center of gravity in this relatively new industry. That ended up being my inspiration to write Fractional Leadership: Landing Executive Talent You Thought Was Out of Reach and creating FractionalLeadership.io as the first vetted Fractional Leader referral platform for business owners.

Read the full Authority Magazine piece, “Ben Wolf of Fractional Leadership: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Began Leading My Company.”

Perhaps there are a few people who can succeed in business quickly, but I’m not one of them. It took me three months to get my first client when I went out on my own and eleven months before things really started taking off. I had self-doubt and felt discouraged, though I never showed it outwardly. If I gave up and accepted a full-time job, which several people offered me, it would have guaranteed my failure at creating two businesses and taking on a formative role in the Fractional Leadership industry.

Boy, am I glad I didn’t give up. I learned that three character traits contributed most to my business success:

1. Disciplined persistence
2. A help-first approach to all interactions, and
3. Authenticity

With disciplined persistence, I created measurables for myself and set minimum numbers of email and (custom-written) LinkedIn reach-outs, calls, and presentations each week, month, and quarter. I almost never went below these quotas. These efforts in the long run have a cumulative effect. I wish there was a shortcut, but I haven’t found one that works.

Next, I recognized that nobody wants to be sold to. You have to approach every email, call, and meeting with a help-first approach. Don’t wait for people to give you a lead or make an introduction before you help them. As the saying goes, people only care how much you know after they know how much you care. Here are a few simple ways to do this:

• In every email, share an article or resource you know from a prior conversation the person can really use or needs.
• Take notes about the people you speak with on your calls and refer to those notes before you send an email or have your next meeting with them. Ask about their spouse, kids, hobby, or cause the next time you interact with them.
• Refer other people to them whenever it’s helpful, even if it has nothing to do with what you do. Send them a great florist, app recommendation, favorite movie, show, or connect them with a competitor of yours if they’re a better fit for the person.

Keep this approach up and you’ll build up social capital, your reputation, and people will become more likely to think of you when they or their friends actually do need someone with your experience.

Finally, being authentic can go a long way to developing business relationships. Some people feel they succeed by ensuring that every phrase they utter, every conversation they have, and every podcast interview they do is highly engineered to make them look maximally professional, successful, smooth, and polished. I’m sure that this is one approach, but to me, such people feel fake, slick, and untrustworthy.

I’m not great at posturing and creating highly calculated interactions with people anyway, so my approach is to speak honestly. I openly mention my areas of weakness or past mistakes when it comes up in conversation because it tells people that I am what they see. They don’t have to wonder what I’m concealing because they see I’m not trying to carefully maintain the perfect veneer.

By being authentic with people, they respect and trust me more because they’re not wondering who or what I really am and don’t feel like I’m trying to sell them something if it’s not right for them.

If you’re thinking of starting a business, knowing the positive impact these three traits ahead of time can help give you peace of mind and confidence from the start. (For other insights I believe help makes a successful business and leaders in my blog “The Most Underestimated Aspect of a Successful Company.”)

Perfection Can Hold You Back

As a business owner, insisting on perfection 100 percent of the time won’t get you results. In my experience as a Fractional Leader, the most common mistake I see an entrepreneur or organization’s leadership commit is waiting until everything is “perfect” before launching a new business, product, service, or system.

The Pareto Principle, also called the “80% Rule,” states that most of the time, you get 80 percent of your results from 20 percent of your effort. After your first main push toward creating your new business or product, you’ll find yourself 80 percent of the way toward completion. You then spend 80% of your effort on the remaining 20 percent of the results you need. And your efforts get less and less productive the further into the remaining 20 percent you get. Your efforts have an exponentially diminishing rate of return.

Get yourself most of the way there toward your minimum viable product (MVP), and then just launch it. You’d continue improving and iterating after release anyway, and your efforts at building “perfection” before testing your product or service against the reality of the real world are almost certainly not “perfect” anyway.

Most of the time, the right path is “launch and learn.”

If you can model your business approach around being persistent, helping first and being authentic while at the same time not letting a mindset that seeks perfection slow your progress down, you’re well on the road to success.

The blog is comprised of modified excerpts from Authority Magazine‘s December 2021 article, “Ben Wolf of Fractional Leadership: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Began Leading My Company