Getting your Mindset Right with Misfit Entrepreneur Dave Lukas

The Business of Art

I met Dave Lukas on Twitter of all places. We followed each other and exchanged some DMs, and that led to emails, phone calls, and eventually being on each other’s podcast. This is another podcast exchange episode. I was on Dave’s podcast, The Misfit Entrepreneur (http://www.misfitentrepreneur.com) to talk about improving your sales game without feeling gross about it, and he came on my show to talk about how to get your mindset right so you can scale your business to the next level.

Here is his bio:

Dave M. Lukas is a serial entrepreneur, author, and investor. He is vice president and co-owner, at Grasp Technologies, has almost two decades of global business development and corporate leadership experience. Mr. Lukas brings his senior executive business acumen to a wide range of organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to small and mid-sized enterprises.

Mr. Lukas is the author of amazon best-seller “The Ten Year Career, The Fast Track to Retiring Young, Wealthy and Fulfilled.” The book is a culmination of 5 years of dedicated research into the mindset and habits of success, and leads the reader on a path to greater success and fulfillment. From teaching readers how to harness the true power of their mind’s capabilities, to the consistent habits and methods of the most successful, “The Ten Year Career” gives specific action steps required to achieve higher levels and sustain them. The uniqueness of the book is that everything Mr. Lukas teaches he painstaking executed in his own life for over 5 years, proving the viability of the methods and refining them before the book’s publishing.

At a very young age, he founded his first business and continued to develop successful businesses throughout his college years. It was this entrepreneurial spirit that catapulted him into a successful career path where he earned recognition as the top sales producer of a Fortune 500 company early on in his journey.

Prior to joining Grasp Technologies, Mr. Lukas was a sales leader at Paychex Inc., responsible for developing training programs to accelerate rookie sales reps’ early success companywide and as a turnaround manager for underperforming districts across the mid-west. As the owner of LCS Group, he has consulted with companies at all levels, from startups to multi-million dollar organizations, coaching senior executives, developing sales programs and platforms, in addition to offering training and general business consulting services.

In 2005, Mr. Lukas invested in Grasp Technologies, a leading SAAS and software development firm, providing business intelligence software, global data consolidation and solutions for data related issues and efficiencies. Mr. Lukas joined the company full time as Vice President and CSO in 2010. He is responsible for leading growth strategy, sales, marketing, and operations. Under his guidance Grasp has realized eight consecutive record-setting years of growth; over 50% growth annually, is now doing business in over 100 countries, and was recognized to the INC 5000 list of Fastest Growing Companies in 2015 and 2016.

Mr. Lukas is an accomplished investor in real estate and stock investing. He is a member of the Trading Concepts team, an investing education company, lending his expertise in its mentorship and training programs to students worldwide. As a compelling public speaker, Mr. Lukas has spoken extensively in front of a wide array of organizations, with an emphasis on teaching individuals the strategies to reach their true potential and deliver exponential results. He has been featured on radio, TV, and in many top trade publications, including Forbes Online. His latest venture is a podcast called the Misfit Entrepreneur.

It is a weekly podcast devoted to giving the audience incredibly useful and unique insight from the world’s top entrepreneurs with a focus on their non-traditional methods for achieving success, their Misfit side. Misfit was created to give the best, actionable advice to accelerate a listener’s success!

The show’s open format and Misfit 3 concept, combined with Dave’s intuitive and engaging interview style quickly uncovers each guest’s key tools, tactics, and tricks that listeners can start using in their lives right now. Released in August 2016, the show has already gotten many 5 star reviews and has had some of the top entrepreneurs in their fields from around the world as guests.

Mr. Lukas received his Bachelor of Arts in Business Management, Finance and Economics from Baldwin-Wallace University, and lives with his wife and daughter in Columbus, Ohio.

I usually cut some of the bio, but I put it all here to show you that Dave knows his stuff. He is a passionate businessman who brings creativity into his work. In fact, from the first question he spoke about his biggest passion is creative problem solving, and he shared several examples of that.

We talk about a lot in this show and cover many topics, but we focused on mindset at about the 30-minute mark. Mindset is such an incredibly important part of any business, and getting it right can help you with rejection, time management, productivity, and everything else. It’s really the foundation that a creative business is based.

I know in my own life, it was only when I learned how to get into the right mindset that my career took off and I felt like I had my life under control. So often, I hear creatives talk about rejection, or their inability to find work, or criticism, and I literally don’t deal with those issues because I’ve been able to build my mind into a steel trap. That’s not to say I don’t have haters or don’t get rejected all the time. It just means I don’t let it bother me.

I tell people all the time that if you don’t get your mindset right, then all the tactics in the world won’t help you. It’s why I start out by telling potential clients that if they aren’t willing to look at their art like a business then I’m not the right fit for them. My old talks used to be 80% tactics and 20% mindset, and they were very poorly attended. However, when I moved the needle to 80% about mindset and 20% about tactics people started seeing massive results immediately. That’s because when I gave them the tactics they were ready to implement them. That’s the power of mindset.

I know when I have business people come on to talk about their tactics they tend to be the least listened to episodes of the show, but I hope that’s not the case with Dave because he gave a step by step guide to improving your mindset that every single creative entrepreneur needs to hear.

If you like this episode, head on over to listen to my episode of his podcast of the Misfit Entrepreneur (http://www.misfitentrepreneur.com) and show him some love on Twitter. His show is awesome.

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