Neil Patel In the end, its about hard work and execution.

Neil Patel “In the end, it’s about hard work and execution.” Neil Patel: “In the end, it’s about hard work and execution.” Image Source: Neil PatelNEIL  Patel is one of the world’s most brilliant entrepreneurial minds. Not only is he the co-founder of companies such as Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetricsâ€"he is also the ‘go-to guy’ for companies such as Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom seeking to boost their revenues online. He is also just 31 years old.Authoritative, energetic, insightful and accessible, Patel has phenomenal reachâ€"he was recognised by President Barack Obama as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 30; awarded Congressional Recognition from the United States House of Representatives; and he regularly receives plaudits from media sources acclaiming him as one of the leading, most brilliant influencers on the web.In conversation, he is softly spoken and unassuming, pragmatic rather than grandiose. Like many successful people in business, he had early exposure to the entrepreneurial mindset. Born in 1985 in London, he was two years old when his parents moved the family t o Orange County, California. There, his mother set up a home daycare business, and all of her brothers had multiple business, one of them employing his hard-working father.Despite his storied and successful career, Neil Patel offers no pat soundbite answer on the best way to start in business. However, he offers at least two non-negotiable prerequisites. Everything else, it seems, is only tangentially or incidentally related to whether you will succeed.“Your upbringing doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be successful.”Firstly, you must have the courage and fortitude to start a new business, rather than thinking about it.For example, although he was exposed to the entrepreneurial mindset at an early ageâ€"his mother set up a home daycare business, his father had a strong work ethic, and his uncles on his mother’s side had multiple businessesâ€"Neil insists this is not necessary to excel in business.“I don’t think you need to be around that kind of mindset, necessa rily. There’s a lot of successful entrepreneurs who didnt grow up surrounded by other entrepreneurs. Look at people like Elon Musk. I dont think his parents were extraordinary entrepreneurs, or that he was surrounded by a ton of people like that. Also, look at Mark Zuckerberg. His parents were, like, a psychiatrist and a doctor or something like that. So your background, your upbringing, doesnt necessarily mean you’re going to be successful.”“If anyone asked me for advice on starting up a business, I would just say, just go ahead and start it. There is not really any specific answer that tells you, ‘This is the next best step’, or any of that. People need to just go out there and start. Not doing that is the big mistake that I see people making.”Image Source: Neil PatelHAVING  started your business, the second essential factor is to work hard. This will be unsurprising to anyone remotely familiar with Neil Patel’s career, and the seemingly bottomless supply of inform ation about business, marketing and social media that he distributes and shares worldwide via the web.Neil Patel has written at length about his early experiences in business. One of his earliest efforts was an online job board named ‘Advice Monkey’, for which he hired a succession of Internet marketing agencies, with disappointing results. So he learned internet marketing himself, and while still in college, was, with his future brother-in-law as a business partner, the head of a profitable internet marketing company. During that phase, the pair started up Crazy Egg, which shows business owners  what your users are doing when visiting your websites, enabling admins to optimise their sites according to these usage patterns.In the  period prior to Crazy Egg truly taking off, Neil was already working more than 60 hours a week, as well as attending college as a full-time student, and he was travelling almost every week and speaking at an average of 50 conferences a year.Again, his takeaway from this period of his life is based in action; in doing;  in pragmatism: “My success was based on  learning from a whole set of circumstances, it wasnt a specific thing. I mean, throughout experience, you end up learning more and more about what works and doesn’t work; what people like and what they don’t like; different rules, and so on… In the end, a lot of it just came down to hard work. Hard work and execution.”“I’m trying not to do so many new businesses; more so just focusing.”MID-2016, just after his thirty-first birthday, finds Neil Patel in a reflective space.  Despite the huge successes he has enjoyed with a range of businesses, this is a time of reflection and focus. “There is nothing new, really, I’m just doing the same old stuff,” he says, modestly, although he admits he  is “trying not to do so many new businesses; more so just focusing”.In many respects, he is a normal, single guy  in his early 30s. Away from work, he likes to rela x with “just simple things like the movies, theatre, hanging out with friends, games, a bit of everything really”, but he continues to be inspired by his business role models.“I love people like the Elon Musks of the world; the people who do stuff thats really revolutionary. I think Matt Mullenweg from WordPress is amazing as well. Look at what he did with open source. I believe that he changed the whole production of content, worldwide. WordPress is responsible for so much of the world’s information right now. So, those are the two entrepreneurs that I really look up to.”His current period of focusing and scaling back his involvement in new businesses seems to be delivering on what he has written about previously on  his Quicksprout blog. There, he writes that while he probably has “a few more good startups in me… after that, I want to focus on the non-profit world”.This shouldn’t be taken as a sign that Neil Patel is turning his back on the entrepreneurial world. The inspiration he continues to take from Musk and Mullenweg is at least one sign of that, and it’s something he emphasises when asked about it: “Well, I really enjoy helping out others. That is what truly makes me happy. So Im just trying to figure out what’s next. But I really like being an entrepreneur. So I will do non-profit stuff, yes, but that doesnt mean Ill stop being an entrepreneur. It just means I won’t be creating as many companies.”This will be good news to companies and individuals who follow his writings and seek out his expertise. In terms of the social media landscape alone, he is emphatic that expert marketers and influencers such as himself will continue to play a vital roleâ€"especially now, when tech has given business so many options that it creates fresh dilemmas.“There are so many things that you can end up doing… so, which ones do you end up choosing, and focusing on; and how do you know those are the right ones. How do you know what the righ t decisions are so that you can grow the business faster?”“Even social media alone is still changing, and so much,” he says. “And the people who are staying on top of the changes, companies are looking to us to get feedback and knowledge on what’s happening. If you look at something like Snapchat; it’s new, and everyone is joining it, right? But even then, how many companies are on Instagram? Very few. How many companies are actually leveraging Facebook? They leverage Facebook ads, but they still dont know how to leverage Facebook effectively.”Image Source: Neil Patel