I believe that one of the biggest reasons that I've been successful at a relatively young age as an entrepreneur, has been my determination in simply knocking on as many doors as possible, until someone actually opens the door. Gary Vaynerchuck would call this "hustling your face off" and that's basically what I did back in the day.

I've got a story to tell in this regard, but first I need to say that life is hard for a young entrepreneur; it's hard to find the trust, capital or partnerships needed to launch a business. I only knew one way to get a leg up in my entrepreneurial journey and that was to beg and borrow. :)

The Story of *the* South African Pin-up Girl

Towards the end of my first year at varsity (2004), I created Akkerliefies (translated to Acorn Lovelies, where the "acorn" was symbolic of Stellenbosch University campus where I studied), a website which featured a few pretty girls from campus in the type of "girl next door" photoshoots that were (and probably still are) popular back then.

This was in the days before WordPress & social media, so none of the "easy" tasks existed back then; the site was hand-coded with text files used as databases and the only distribution / marketing channels available where a handful of South African bloggers that had built up a bit of a following. Yet I managed to run the site for 2 years, having built up quite a cult following on campus. Heck, I wasn't the most popular guy ever at varsity, but I was well-known on Campus for being "that Akkerliefies" guy. Maybe that's due to those incredibly awesome parties that we threw...

During the 2 years that I ran Akkerliefies, I begged & borrowed my way to the following:

• I never paid $1 for hosting the website, which was admittedly quite bandwidth heavy with all the high-res images.
• We got Red Bull to sponsor some insane parties with loads of freebies and a massive bar tab to boot. Who is going to say no to that?
• I managed to convince some really pretty girls to get into their bikini's & allow us to take pictures of them. We never paid them, normally required them to pay their own transport and use their own make-up etc.
• I wasn't into my photography as much back then and if I remember correctly, I wasn't responsible for one shoot. Instead we got some really talented (and established) photographers to help us out for free (they could use the photos for their portfolio too) or we simply borrowed proper DSLR's from people we knew and I then got friends to take the photos.
• We got loads of big name clothing & accessories labels to sponsor clothing, accessories & make-up for our shoots. They sometimes trusted us with stock worth more than $3000, which I would've never been able to pay back had something happened to the stock.

Heck, this was an awesome period of my life. I loved every single moment of the 2 years that I tried to grow Akkerliefies into a profitable & sustainable, but eventually decided to sell it in the last year of my Bachelors degree (it was either Akkerliefies or passing and finishing my degree; I couldn't handle both anymore).

Akkerliefies was never profitable, but I broke even after selling it. I learnt though that by knocking persistently on as many doors as possible, you're increasing the likelihood that your efforts will be rewarded. Someone is bound to open a door some time.

I meet too many younger entrepreneurs who aren't willing or interested to be this persistent and show the determination needed to establish a new business. Having to cold call someone or beg for something when you know you can't offer reciprocal value is helluva embarrassing, but I needed to do that to survive.

Moving on from Akkerliefies, this same "knocking on doors" mentality has served me incredibly well. The initial doors that got opened accelerated my personal development as an entrepreneur and I've met some incredibly people along the way (I first my WooThemes co-founder, Mark, via Akkerliefies when he was one of the bloggers to give us some publicity).

To this day, I still believe in firing off the exploratory e-mails, knocking on doors and hoping that someone responds. Most of the time this hasn't panned out as I would've hoped, but I've had just as many favourable that has contributed to the big success we've had. Keep knocking on those doors.

I'm limited. My skills are finite. Regardless of how many new things I learn, my skills set is not limitless. This obviously means that there is only a limited number of things in my life that I will be truly good at. Some skills I may be able to enhance with practice / experience and a few others I'll be able to hold my own (whilst never being great at those). Fact is, I can't do everything.

This honest self-evaluation has been especially true for in my business / work life. A couple of years ago when I co-founded WooThemes, I was a DIY-type designer / developer / jack-of-all-trades. As the business has grown though, my role has evolved significantly and I'm now the "business guy" at WooThemes (main reason being that this is something I'm much more passionate about than pushing pixels or writing lines of code).

In this role, some of my main responsibilities are marketing & business development (whatever exactly that is). Considering I did my graduate studies in accounting & only did a one year post-graduate in business strategy, neither of these two are things that I'm necessarily great at, yet I'm tasked to take care of those in a very successful business. I don't think I'm bad at those either and in fact I think I've got a bit of natural talent too. My 3+ years of experience has obviously also helped. I'm still not great though. 

So with this in mind, I've been doing a couple of things to counteract the inevitable fact that I'm simply not great at everything. Natural talent goes a long way, whilst a "student-like" mentality coupled with experience will increase the reach of that talent. None of those are sustainable though and I've identified a couple of ways in which I can avoid stagnating personally, as well as within our business:

• I believe that every single person we've hired at WooThemes, has been better than myself at something. As mentioned earlier, I was much more hands-on initially in terms of design & development, but these days that is not needed since we have incredibly talented people taking on that responsibility. I also believe that it is absolutely crucial that - as an employer - I need to trust these guys' opinion and back their decisions with conviction, because they are much more talented, skilled & experienced in those areas. If we didn't hire guys that were better than the co-founders in some way, we'd stagnate pretty quickly, since the company could only grow at the speed at which we could grow as individuals. Hiring a team that is better than you though, drives the momentum of that growth / innovation forward exponentially.
• Being based all the down in Cape Town, South Africa (read: far removed from any major tech hub) it is a challenge to make friends and have mentors in our industry. Through the years though, I've spent a lot of time building relationships online (WooThemes' success has obviously helped with this) and I have many great friends that have founded or are working at much bigger companies than ours. Whilst they don't necessarily act as an "official" advisor / mentor, they are always available to me if I have any questions or I just want to bounce an idea off them. This kinda feedback from an experienced individual is absolutely invaluable in terms of exposing myself to other ways of thinking and implementing generic strategies.
• One of the things I've been intrigued about in recent months is the notion of working with specialists to consult on specific things within our business. A couple of months ago, we worked with CoSupport to improve the way we were doing customer support. Sarah Hatter (who heads up the team at CoSupport) was previously responsible for the setup & running of 37Signals' customer service for 6-odd years. So you can just imagine the type of invaluable feedback that she & her team was able to pass onto us. The whole experience was so enriching, I'm no actively pursuing a collaborations with similarly awesome individuals to consult on other areas of our business.

I don't generally do things out of fear, because I think that fear is a relatively stupid foundation on which I can base a decision. I do however have a fear of stagnating. I want to learn more every day and every morning I want to wake up, I want to try be better than the day before. This same attitude applies to what I do in business and right now this energy is directly focused on growing WooThemes even further.

There is just however no way that I can do that without working with other people that are better than I am. Recognizing & embracing this has probably been the best decision I've ever made in business.

I found this article so incredibly valuable, purely because this has been something that I've always struggled with. Running & co-owning 2 companies for 3+ years now, you'd think that I'd be able to delegate with my eyes closed, yet that's not close to the truth...

The first in a new series of posts that will aim to share the lessons we have learned from running and building WooThemes in the last 3 years.

Deciding on a strategy (irrespective of the complexity) is extremely hard. Sticking to it with “unwavering dedication” is even harder - especially when the going gets tough.

See, in the good times, it’s pretty easy to sit back and be content with one’s existing strategy, because there’s no reason to re-think the decisions you’ve made in the past and the direction you’re evolving in now. But when the shit hits the fan, it becomes much more difficult and second guessing becomes second nature.

I believe real entrepreneurs stick to their guns, but only long enough to realize that they need a bigger gun. If things aren’t working out, then eventually you need to wave that extreme dedication goodbye and pick a new challenge.