Marcel Daane – Don't Get Overconfident in Your Expertise

BIO: Marcel Daane is an award-winning executive coach and author living in Singapore. STORY: Marcel built a great gym, but because he thought he was the expert in the field, he became a horrible boss. He wanted to run the show to the point where he burnt himself out. Eventually, he had to leave the business that had taken him 10 years and $500,000 to build. LEARNING: Don’t start believing your own hype to a point where you ignore other people’s insights and opinions. Just because you have strong skills in an area that doesn’t mean you’ll make a great entrepreneur.   “When we become over-reliant on what we think, we know we get stuck in our heads.”Marcel Daane  Guest profilehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/marceldaane/ (Marcel Daane) is an award-winning executive coach and author living in Singapore. Worst investment everMarcel had a desire to start his own gym, and it took him about 10 years or so of saving. With the help of his wife, he managed to save a quarter of a million dollars. But Marcel needed about half a million, so he went out and sought some partners and managed to raise the half-million. Marcel then built one of the most awesome gyms in Singapore that you could imagine. He built a speed institute with the intent to give everybody an opportunity, including children, to feel like they were athletes. The gym had sprinting lanes and all that kind of stuff in there. But there were no treadmills. When they opened their doors and invited people to see the gym, they all asked where the treadmills were. It was right there and then that Marcel knew there was a problem. The problem was that he had built a gym that was for him, and it took so much energy to get people to buy into it. But where the investment went wrong was actually with Marcel. As a personal trainer, he was extremely passionate about how he did his work. He considered himself an expert in the field, so he treated his partners and staff like they were working for him and it was his way or the highway. Marcel became a horrible boss.