Daniel Marcos: An Ace and Influential Entrepreneur of the Times

A business can’t be built overnight. You need to create everything from scratch, which involves a lot of sacrifices both on the personal and professional frontiers. But have you ever thought about how you will feel when your manifestation turns into reality? This means you become a successful entrepreneur bypassing all odds in the trajectory. Isn’t it fascinating? One such dynamic entrepreneur is Daniel Macros, who took many risks and life-changing decisions to be at the position where he is today. Let’s explore his journey of entrepreneurship!

About the Entrepreneur

Daniel Marcos is a serial entrepreneur, business coach, and a passionate learner. He is the co-founder and CEO of Growth Institute. He is also a commendable speaker and a CEO Coach with a mission to help 1 million entrepreneurs.

Daniel says, “I believe entrepreneurship is the best weapon to grow the global economy and create wealth, both for the entrepreneur and for the community that our business impacts.”

Growth Institute is the top-notch online executive education company for C-level executives at fast-growing firms. Their core mission is to help scale growth, enhance the impact and reduce drama for 10 million leaders by 2040. They are doing this by curating the best content, providing implementation tools, and creating a community for mid-market companies that want to scale up.

In less than a decade, Growth Institute has been recognized three times among the top 5,000 fastest-growing companies in the USA, with over 40,000 members across 64 countries.

How did he start?

Daniel Marcos embarked on the entrepreneurial journey with a t-shirt business at the age of eight. Then he partnered with a car detailing franchise to provide cleaning services throughout his high school years. 

At the age of 26, he collaborated with three friends, raised $200,000, and built a business combining finance and the growing opportunities of the internet. Then the company was acquired by what was Argentina’s largest financial player at the time.  

The maestro launched his second business just before the crash of the financial markets in 2008. Unfortunately, the business collapsed, and he was in debt of $1 million. Daniel says, “It was the lowest point in my life, one that drove me away from entrepreneurship and towards a stable job at my father’s company.”  But destiny had decided something else for him. 

Verne Harnish, his mentor, appeared in his life at the right time, and he didn’t allow him to give up on entrepreneurship so easily. So, he offered him a job as a coach at his company. With this, Daniel became a mentor to CEOs that needed help to lead their companies and not make the same mistakes that he did.

He states, “Within six months, I had turned my life around and moved my family to Austin where my partnership with Verne developed. Over a weekend trip to Barcelona, we came up with the idea behind the Growth Institute and the mission to democratize executive education for all business leaders around the world.”

The Roadblocks

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

― Robert F. Kennedy

The entrepreneur’s biggest challenge has been navigating the entrepreneurial roller coaster and staying on course. He says, “As an entrepreneur, you’ll always have difficult situations coming at you, even at the same time, like dealing with an angry investor, having clients that want to leave, not knowing how you will pay payroll every month. But then you have many good moments that make you feel on top of the world. Staying on course through all the chaos is a great challenge. One of the challenges I feel proud of is that in 23 years as an entrepreneur, I’ve never missed out on payroll for my employees. Even though there have been nights that I didn’t sleep worrying about how I was going to do it, I was able to stay on course.”

Take the challenges of life as they come. It’s normal to panic, but don’t ever give up.

Things to boast of

You are successful when you bring a positive influence to your society or community. Otherwise, your success would be very materialistic. 

Daniel is elated for the impact his company has made in their community of business leaders. At the Growth Institute, they’ve seen leaders generate dramatic transformations in their companies through the methodologies they are teaching them. One of Daniel’s favorite client testimonials is from Theresa Labranche, COO of Allure Medical. Theresa took the premium 18-month program called Master of Business Dynamics, and after graduating she said, “When we started the program, we were about $ 20 million. After taking the MBD, we doubled that and reached $40 million last year. There is no doubt in my mind that our increased knowledge has impacted the growth of the company.”

Daniel Macros also gives credit to his team and says, “They’re focused, they’re aligned to the culture, they’re agile, and we operate without the drama that many times stops companies’ growth.”

The Biggest Factor towards Success

Daniel thinks Reading is the biggest factor that has contributed to his success. He considers himself a passionate learner and he reads over 50 books a year. Networking and masterminds are also crucial components of success for him. He is a part of several business networks like EO (Entrepreneurs Organization) and YPO (Young Presidents Organization), where he connects with more CEOs that go through the same challenges as he did. “These two things have really helped me grow myself as a leader and to move my company forward.”

Words of Wisdom

“Play the long game. Most entrepreneurs overestimate what they can do in the short term and underestimate what they can accomplish in the long term. The transition from being an entrepreneur to turning into a CEO starts with the mindset we decide to adopt as leaders, and we can choose to keep the fire fighting mode on, just surviving each day or we can choose to play the long game and start thinking ahead of ourselves. Having a long term vision helps you become ambitious to design a solid strategy for continuous growth. My most effective practice to achieve success is having a burning desire to create something really big, and I know that desire is great enough for me to stay focused for many years.”

For business leaders to develop discipline and focus, we recommend looking up resources that can help them create a personal plan and then execute on it. This is why at Growth Institute we’ve made available the tool “One Page Personal Plan”, which will help you set your personal goals in 4 key areas: relationships, achievements, rituals, and wealth. To download the OPPP, you can go to the following link: https://hubs.li/H0RdWMg0

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