E005 – Advantages of Being an Entrepreneur

In a previous post, I talked about why I chose to be an entrepreneur, and I’m sure I covered some of the things that I’ll be discussing today, but I wanted to present them in a more clear cut way.

Transcript:

So on one hand you have people who are for lack of a better word. They’re just employees, right there. They’re conditioned or their ambitions only take them so far as to want to be an employee. Now there are different types of employees, right? There are employees who work minimum wage, and there are employees who are middle managers and their employees who are high-level managers or CEOs or whatever the case may be.

Nonetheless, they’re still employees. And the essence of being an employee means that you are working to make someone else’s wealth, right? You are building someone else’s empire. Now in comparison to that you have entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs are people who are motivated to build something of their own.

 Right or to pick up a franchise or to pick up someone else’s business for whatever the reason may be, maybe they were an employee and then the owner gives it to them. Maybe they start from scratch, as a mom and pop shop. There’s a million different ways that you can be an entrepreneur. But the bottom line is that it is someone who chooses to be their own boss.

 That’s what it basically boils down to. And I think that’s what drives a lot of people to entrepreneurship is the idea that they don’t want to have someone else over them. The funny part about it is you can’t get away from having people over you, because even when you are your own boss, Clients or your customers, they’re still over you, you need to deal with them in a specific way so that you are able to provide them a service and have them pay you.

 And in order to do that, there has to be a certain level of customer satisfaction. So in a certain way, that gives them the ability to Lord over you, right? That’s the whole idea of not having a boss, because you don’t want to have someone that you have to answer to someone that you have to please and acquiesce.

 But if you have clients and customers, you still have to do that. So the concept that, Oh, I’m going to be my own boss and no one’s going to tell me what to do. That’s not real. Okay. You like anything in life? You’ll have exceptions, we’ll have someone who makes money and they don’t care about providing good service or having good relationships with the people they do business with.

 And they still are somehow able to thrive, but that’s not the norm. Okay. So those are basically the two types of people that. Make-up employees versus entrepreneurs. Now, in my mind, when you’re first starting out in entrepreneurship, you should be a hybrid. You should be a little bit of both. In other words, in my long years of experience in doing business, the one thing that I have learned is when you are starting up a business, You do not want to start up the business on savings or solely dependent on the money that the business can make.

 You, you want to be able to start the business and have your bills paid without worry, because you will compromise and you will make bad decisions based on the fact that you need money to survive. And you’re trying to get the business to give you that money to survive is detrimental in two ways, one, you’re going to make bad choices.

 You’re going to be forced into deals, and you’re going to be forced to take clients that you normally wouldn’t take, which is going to sour your experience on entrepreneurship, because you need the money and to the money that you’re taking out of the business to pay bills, you should be reinvesting into the business to grow your business.

You see what I’m saying? So if you think of your business like a baby, when you give your baby food, your baby grows. But now, if you have to take half of that food that you would normally give your baby to feed another baby then there’s a chance that both children end up underweight. And so that’s the same thing with your business.

 If you’re going and your business is your baby, and you should be investing all the money that it’s making for you back into it. And instead you’re having to pay the rent and you’re having to pay the light bills and things like that with a lot of that money. Now you’re just surviving. And the business isn’t growing as good as it could.

 So you’re going to be stuck in this situation longer than necessary, and it lowers your chances of long-term success. And so that’s why I say that you should be a hybrid. You should have a steady job. It doesn’t have to be super high pain. Ideally it’s something in sales, right? Why? Because if you choose to be an entrepreneur, what you’re actually choosing to be is a salesman.

 Now you may disagree, but that’s facts. There are no businesses that succeed without someone in the organization, especially you for most people, because you’re usually a one man, a one woman organization. Who doesn’t have a good sales skillset because you have to be able to persuade people to allow you to help them solve their problem.

 When we spoke about this previously, the whole essence of business is you find the problem that needs to be solved and you provide a solution. Then you talk to people and you persuade them to let you help them. And they in return give you money. That’s business. It doesn’t matter whether it’s selling shoes or selling houses or doing someone’s hair or doing someone’s nails or washing people’s cars.

 The bottom line is people have a problem. You provide a solution, you have to convince them with your marketing or with your salesmanship to let you give your solution instead of your competitor. So you’re going to be doing sales. You have to have some sort of people skills. You have to deal with people, right?

 Because it’s people who are going to give you the money. So you have to have some sort of salesmanship in my mind, if you having a steady job, if you don’t already have a steady job, then my recommended you do something that has to do with sales. Why? Because in the necessity to feed yourself through sales, you’re going to find a way.

 You have to always trust yourself that you will find the way. And then when you do, you’re going to now be developing a skill that easily transitions over into your own business. And so that’s going to help your business grow because it’s the most essential skill for running a business is being able to convince customers to give you a chance, to try out your product or service. And so now, because you do that as a full-time job, and now you’re doing it with your side hustle, which eventually will hopefully build up into your full-time business. You give yourself a better chance of winning. So my recommendation is never try to run a business unless you have started capital.

 If you’re running a startup and you got some, venture capitalists or some angel investors, someone who’s willing to give you money just to try and build up your business. Great. In my mind, being an entrepreneur, one of the major advantages of it is when you do it, right? It’s one of the fastest ways to build wealth.

 If you look at rich people in the world, they build wealth off of two things. Real estate because God’s not making anymore. So it’s always going to go up in price, right? The more people they’re on earth, the more the land will be valuable and stocks. Stocks are always going to go up. They have shown that over time.

 They always go up, no matter how many crashes we have the stock market over time continues to rise, which means if you put a dollar in today and you come back 30 years from now, it’s going to be worth way more than a dollar. Okay. So this is the way that rich people make money. You need to get in on these things.

 You need to become versed in these things for you to think that, Oh, my, my car flipping business or my house flipping business, that’s all there is. If you have a house flipping business, you’re halfway there, but any other business that you may be in, regardless of how much money it makes you, there will come a time more than likely.

 Excluding stocks and real estate, where you’ll be too old to continue the hustle. That’s just life. Most people will age and they’ll slow down and their mental acuity will diminish. And in the end they have to end up retiring or whatever the case may be. So now if you have a business that you have to open up every day and push that gate to the top and unlock the front door and get everything all set up, that’s great.

 But you’ll reach an age where you just don’t want to do that anymore. Now, if you take some of that money and you invest it in stocks and in real estate, those are vehicles. Those are investment vehicles that will continue to give you money. Especially the earlier you start investing in them. And the more you invest in them, obviously they will continue to give you money while you’re sitting on your couch, or while you’re sitting at the beach or while you’re sitting by the pool, enjoying your grandchildren.

 But in the end, entrepreneurship for me is the best way to get started down that path. And then real estate and stocks are the way to make it all grow. So we talked about building wealth for yourself versus for others. We talked about entrepreneurship being the fastest way to actually build wealth, now here’s the more important one after your business has become stable and you’ve reached a certain level of success. And that is the fact that when you build a business, you have the opportunity to leave a legacy for others, right? So when you build a business and you’re able to be consistent because consistency is the key to success.

 When you’re consistently able to run your business and it’s growing steadily, just like that turtle that always wins the race slow and steady. Now you can leave this business to your family. You can, your children can grow up watching you run this business and they can step in and help you. And at some point take over, your friends can come in and help you, or they can model after you and do the same.

 You can have better life experiences. Maybe they have jobs or whatever the case may be, but you guys can now enjoy more things in life because your business affords you the opportunity to do that right. To treat them to things that normally they wouldn’t have available to them. And then there’s something else is the fact that you may take on students.

 You may teach people these things, right? You might have employees or you might sell a course or whatever the case may be. And now you’re sharing this wealth of knowledge that you’ve accumulated through years of experience. With others so that they can replicate your success. So now you’re providing, you’re giving back to the world, you’re providing a valuable resource, which is your knowledge and experience to the world so that others can come along and accomplish what you’ve done without the, all the trial and error.

 That’s what I’ve tried to do with this podcast and with my book and with my course, that’s my goal is to help others avoid all the years of toil that I had to go through, figuring things out and studying and going and finding mentors and stuff like that. And so finally, in this day of, information and this information is that we live in, it’s very hard to have a successful business, especially online without followers.

 And so now all this knowledge, you can pass it onto your followers as well. There’s a lot of people out there that are doing that. And I really appreciate people that do that kind of thing because they don’t have to, but they understand what it is that I’m saying. They have that same understanding, legacy. You want to help others achieve things, rise up out of bad situations and it costs you nothing to do so why not? So there’s that too. It’s very rare that you’re going to be an employee somewhere and you’re going to be able to have legacy. Not that’s impossible because obviously there are people in positions that can do these things, but that’s more rare for employees than for entrepreneurs.

 And then finally, I spoke about this previously as well, but entrepreneurship, when done right. Affords you three different types of freedom, it affords you financial freedom. That’s the most common one. It affords you. Time freedom when you set it up, right? Meaning you’re not having a high paying job, but you’ve actually removed yourself from the process of running your business.

 You hire people to help you do it. They get experienced, they’re trained up and then you remove yourself as the bottleneck and let them run with it and let them grow it for you. And then that affords you location freedom. So you’re able to be anywhere. You’re able to have time to yourself and you’re able to have all the money you need when you’ve built your business properly.

 Is that common? No, the reality of it is this 90% of businesses fail 90 that’s high, and it could be higher than that. But in about five years, 90% of businesses fail. And the reason being is because the people who are starting these businesses usually do not start them in the right way. They don’t start them because they’re thinking or they even know, Hey, my job is to solve a problem.

 So let me go find a good problem to solve that pays well. And there’s a bunch of customers that need the service, and then let me go provide that service and let me have some good sales skills so that I can persuade them to try me instead of a competitor. And then let me give them outstanding customer service.

 So that they will return and tell their friends about me. Most people don’t have that mindset. Most people say, Oh, I got an idea. Yeah. And I’m going to go do this idea, and I’m going to go drop a bunch of money into this idea, or I’m going to go borrow a bunch of money from family, or I’m going to go do this thing or that thing.

 Yeah. And then it’s trial and error. And so if you’re not prepared, you just don’t know what you don’t know. And that leads to a lot of businesses failing. It’s my goal with this podcast and all of my other content to try and avoid that happening to you, to give you the opportunity so that you don’t run into all those mistakes that I made.

 But instead you can avoid those because you step into business with a clear mindset as to how it needs to be done so that you can be successful. It’s not easy, but it is simple. It takes hard work. And it takes consistency and it requires knowing a couple of these things that I’ve mentioned today, and that I’ll continue to mention in the future in order to avoid very common mistakes that once you’re made aware to them, it’s like a pothole in the street.

 If you don’t see it, it’s going to wreck your car. But if you do see it, you simply swerve around it. So with that, I hope that this was helpful and I will talk to you soon. Have a blessed day. .