The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Self-Development and Other Ways of Thinking

Hi, everyone! 👋🏾👋🏼👋 Welcome back for the exciting follow-up to Diego Sampaio's entrepreneurial journey. In today's newsletter, he'll share his thoughts on self-development. You'll find out the following:

🌴 How it can be applied to your business

🌴 The types of skills and self-development courses he recommends for today's world

🌴The thing he had that allowed him to take risks

🌴 If you missed Part One, catch it here. It's also not too late to subscribe to this newsletter for free.

🌴With that, let's get to know the entrepreneurial mindset of CEO and co-founder of Globalfy, Diego Sampaio.

SELF-DEVELOPMENT IS A WIN-WIN APPROACH

“Here in the company, we have a really strong culture regarding self-development. We have a self-development budget for everybody.”

In Diego Sampaio’s world, self-development is what gets employees engaged.

Sampaio believes in it because he’s used self-development to get where he is today – from having a dream in Brazil of owning an international business to actually launching and running Globalfy in the United States.

The CEO and cofounder of the tech platform that helps foreign entrepreneurs get registered as a business entity in the United States says success centers on a fundamental question surrounding employees.

“How can we help them to achieve their goals? Because if we help them, they are definitely going to help us.”

Some of the team at Globalfy (formerly called Company Combo)

MAKE SURE SELF-DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES ARE AVAILABLE TO ALL

Sampaio says the self-development budget doesn’t focus on job title or pay.

“For each one of our team members, regardless [of] their wage or their position, they have $100 every month that they can spend [on] anything for their development.”

The choices are varied.

“They can buy books. They can go to events. They can buy online training. Some of them pay for, let’s say, English classes or Spanish classes.”

He says he has employees in customer service that are spending their $100/month budget learning to become developers.

EVEN THE CEO CAN BENEFIT FROM SELF-DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Of course, as the CEO of the company, I had to ask him how he spends his self-development budget.

“I invest my budget going to events. That’s how I spend it. Like every time there’s an event, a big event [in] the industry, I want to make sure I can go over there to [network] and to [learn] from my peers.”

INVEST IN CODING OR DATA ANALYSIS SKILLS

But if Sampaio had to give advice on how others should spend that money if they want to change or grow their careers, he says, “I would tell them to invest in coding. For sure.”

He believes you can’t go wrong with coding or data analysis.

“You can apply data analysis, if you are a customer service representative.”

He says you can use it to improve reports or to better understand what customers are asking.

If you’re in sales, marketing or finance, Sampaio says data analysis skills can help you answer a lot of questions, such as “Where is the money going? How can I connect? How can I create a nice dashboard where I can see the trends and so on?”

Employees making it happen at Globalfy

EDUCATION SHOULD BE LIFE-LONG

As you can tell, Sampaio believes in being practical and forward-thinking, no matter where he is in the journey.

From starting his own business, even at the age of 15, he doesn’t get wrapped up in formalities.

He graduated from a small university in Brazil, Faculdade de Tecnologia Opet, but he doesn’t think it’s necessary.

Sampaio says, “It’s not all about the degree, right? It’s way more about you wanting to learn something… There [are] a lot of entrepreneurs doing really well here… without college. And they are developing themselves in really specific and strategic areas.”

The pressure to stay ahead of them is great for entrepreneurs.

GET USED TO THINKING AHEAD

“Even when your company is doing well, it’s doing well because it’s delivering something to the market that’s already out there… Once we launch the product, we already fulfilled that need. So now we have to start thinking, what’s going to be the next step?”

It’s why, as an entrepreneur, it’s hard to savor a victory.

Sampaio says you, “wake up some days thinking that you’re doing amazing and then go to sleep thinking that you’re not going to have the money” to make payroll the next day. “And then, some days, you wake up thinking that you’re in the worst [situation], and then you end the day signing a contract. It’s never stable.”

A SAFETY NET = SECURITY TO TAKE RISKS

Globalfy has expanded to 60 employees. And, with new funding, he anticipates growing further.

And that’s why Sampaio stresses the importance of having a safety net as the key to his success. But it’s not the kind you may be thinking.

He says that, if things go too far, he still has “a place to come back [to] and to ask for help and to ask for guidance. So I think… the safety net that I always had from my parents and my wife, it’s something that allowed me to take risks.”

INSPIRATION FOR THIS ISSUE:

I’m always wanting to learn new ways of doing things and, more importantly, looking at the world.

Sometimes, I do it by daydreaming. At least that’s what I tell my sister who teases me when catching me daydreaming.

Entrepreneurs are a great group to tap for different ways of thinking and doing things.

They take risks because the desire to achieve something is too great to let them get constrained by the usual ways of operating and thinking.

That’s why I was so interested in Diego Sampaio’s so-called self-development budget.

Because it’s that time when we get to just think and daydream that we come up with new ways of solving old problems.

It’s why I believe kids need to be allowed to just play freely and not have every minute of their day planned out or overscheduled with activities.

Sampaio has been taking risks and making things happen for himself since he was 15 when he started his own business.

How much time have you devoted to self-development? Do you block out even 10 minutes to just think freely every day?

I know. It’s hard.

It’s something I need to work on myself.

We’re overscheduled as adults.

But I do believe that that’s when we really grow and dream and plan the big dreams, not just the everyday tasks we all have to do.

Self-development, no matter how you invest in it, pays off. It pays off with big dividends in your most precious commodity – you and your goals and dreams.

So excuse me while I go devote some time to daydreaming – er, as entrepreneurs like Diego Sampaio like to say, self-development. #theskyisNOTthelimit

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