Wow! We had 85 participants, who joined us at our seventh webinar – Keep Going 4.4: Developing an Entrepreneurial Mindset with Andrew Walton, founder of African Overland Tours and Build It Boost It held on Thursday 28th of May 2020.
If you haven’t already, don’t forget to register for the next one, which is just brilliant as a follow on from Andrew’s session and one for the whole team. Another interactive and collaborative experience with Kelly Millard, on Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement.
We were all inspired by Andrew’s story of how he established his motivation. He wanted to live “like a salmon swimming upstream”. He realised that regardless of whether he aspired to own his own business or not, establishing this vision was profound and would be the motivation he needed to live with passion and purpose.
After hitting rock bottom, he realised that passion may not have been enough and he needed to gain clarity and control. So he embarked on a journey to refine his:
- Desire – he realised it was huge!
- Plan – a simple plan written down and measurable, easy to refer to daily.
- His way forward – understanding what he was really amazing at. Not just good, but amazing.
These are the three steps Andrew says are imperative to building an entrepreneurial mindset.
Andrew found he was amazing at changing lives through travel and he set up his first venture. Now, over 10 years later, the venture has grown into a very successful African travel experience company: African Overland Tours. During this time, Andrew has weathered more than coronavirus and lockdown. He has experienced many personal ups and downs, political and economic hardships and epidemics like ebola.
Andrew learned through this experience that he couldn’t overcome those hardships on his own. He decided to upsize his plan by 10x! What would his desire, vision and mission look like if it was 10x what he was currently doing? How could he achieve this? The answer was simple, he would need his team.
His next step was to take his team through the process of discovering their desires, making a plan and tying this to the opportunities they have at hand and then finally taking a step forward. Andrew says it wasn’t as easy as it sounds and actually it took several months of team collaboration to honestly agree to shared values and tie these to a business they would build together.
As we know the travel industry has been the hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and the last few months have been tough. With no money coming in, jobs at stake and no end really in sight, Andrew and his team have had to dig deep and let their HUGE DESIRE push them forward daily.
They have remembered their plan and set to work asking the questions:
- What are we amazing at?
- What do people need?
- How can we help people better than anyone else?
The team realised that they are amazing at generating online leads and optimising tools like SEO and Google Ad Words. They also realised that they are incredible at selling and have experience with helping other small to medium businesses establish a sustainable process to ensure they grow. Enter their new baby: Build It Boost It.
On top of that, they realised that as soon as the borders open, people will still want to travel, so they have developed packages that are specifically designed for their prospective travellers to book so they can still enjoy the splendour of Africa safely (www.africanoverlandtours.com). This has made it possible for them to continue to change lives by providing African travel experiences.
Andrew has also pivoted his business by bringing in temperature monitors and manufacturing a hospital bed, which he is distributing to the field in the midst of the pandemic.
This is a team that has been busy and not taken it lying down, but rather created new opportunities, simply by asking the right questions and working together. They drew on the values of entrepreneurship that they have practiced daily for the last several years, which has set them apart. What questions should we be asking in our own roles as a receptionist, a PA, recruiter or agency owner?
Andrew says that entrepreneurship is not about starting your own business, but taking control of your destiny, multiplying it and then using the opportunities at hand to be the best you can be.
Contact Andrew for your next African overland experience, if you need help with scaling your small to medium size business and driving online leads or if you need insights on what the best podcasts are to listen to!
andrew@africanoverlandtours.com / andrew@builditboostit.com
Register for the next one:
