Big Talk About Small Business
Hosted by Mark Zweig and Eric Howerton. Our Mission is to inspire, empower, and equip entrepreneurs with the knowledge and insights they need to succeed in their ventures. Through engaging conversations with industry experts, seasoned entrepreneurs, and thought leaders, we aim to provide valuable strategies, actionable advice, and real-world experiences that will enable our listeners to navigate the challenges, seize the opportunities, and build thriving businesses.
Big Talk About Small Business
Ep. 117 - STOP Chasing Passion. Start Making Money.
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What if we took the pressure out of starting and put revenue back at the center? We sit down with Jim Beach, author of School for Startups and host of a nationally syndicated radio show, to break the myths that keep people stuck: you don’t need a brand-new idea, you don’t need to raise money to begin, and you don’t have to wait for passion to strike before you sell something people want.
Jim shares how he built a computer camp into 89 locations by understanding parents and shy, tech-loving kids, then won a classroom bet by launching a profitable Pakistani furniture import in one semester with less than $5,000. The throughline is simple and liberating: copy proven models, do them better, validate fast, and only spend money when revenue demands it. We contrast the risky glamour of fundraising and AI hype with the boring businesses that quietly print cash, pallet routes, restoration services, local trades, and unpack why undercapitalization often creates healthier, more disciplined companies.
We also challenge the “freedom” fantasy. Real businesses require heavy lifting: emails at midnight, talking to customers daily, and solving problems on the ground. Working in the business teaches you what to fix and scale. Through the corridor principle, we explore how action reveals opportunity and how passion often follows competence and wins, not the other way around. Jim’s new book, The Real Environmentalist, adds a powerful dose of optimism, profiling entrepreneurs profitably, solving climate issues in water, air, plastics, and coral restoration, showing why builders, not institutions, are moving the needle.
If you’ve been waiting for a sign to start, this is it: make a small bet, test for real demand, and let the next step reveal itself. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs a nudge, and leave a review with the one “boring” business you’d improve in your city.
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You don't spend money until you absolutely have to. And I've taken that to the extreme where I don't incorporate my business until I have a check in that name. Why spend the money to incorporate if you don't have a check yet? Why get a business account if you don't have a check to put into it?
SPEAKER_04:Well, hey, it's great to be back here again with another episode of Big Talk about Small Businesses. We've got Jim Beach uh online with us here from Atlanta. And uh Jim's an interesting guy. Before the show started, he was telling me about all the places he got asked to leave. I didn't get into the details on that. But uh but anyway, Jim, Jim's got something called the School for Startups. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that, Jim? What exactly do you do?
SPEAKER_03:Well, thanks for having me on the show. I hope you don't ask me to leave. The School for Startups was a book that I did for McGraw Hill about uh 14, 15 years ago now, and did very well, the book. And over time it turned into a radio show. I did a lot of radio and podcasts to promote the book, and someone said you should have your own radio show one day. And I don't know if manifesting works or I don't know if it was just luck or whatever, but eventually I was offered a radio show. It was one day a week on an uh online radio station, and that has turned into five days a week on a hundred stations, AMFM around the country, and good podcast listenership as well, teaching our core belief that entrepreneurship should be pursued by more people that anyone can do it. The problem is that everyone defines entrepreneurship wrong, and therefore a lot of people sit on the sidelines and don't get involved. Uh, I have a three-prong philosophy that creativity is awesome for artists and people like that. But if you want to be an entrepreneur, do the thing that 93% of other entrepreneurs and copy someone else's idea and just do it better. I'm a big fan of risk as long as it doesn't involve me. I don't believe in entrepreneurial risk. Entrepreneurs spend$5,000 or less to prove their idea. And if you can't prove it for$5,000, you probably shouldn't do it. And I don't believe in passion. Passion is awesome for the church, the synagogue, the mosque, and the bedroom. But I don't think you need to love your business. You just need to like it more than working for the man, working for Walmart. And so that's our philosophy. We try to get people involved in entrepreneurship by bringing great stories to the radio show and getting people motivated to get off the sofa because uh it's easier than you think if you just follow some simple guidelines. So there it is. I saw you laughing at me. Go to town.
SPEAKER_04:We we it it it it dovetails perfectly with my own philosophy. I teach entrepreneurship here at the uh Walton College, and in my opinion, the whole idea that you have to do something that's never been done before and then validate your idea is is a is you're you're almost dead in the water right away. You've created a super high-risk situation, doing something new in an all-new business. What are the odds that's gonna succeed? And beyond that, what if you can't come up with anything new? That then implies you can't do anything entrepreneurial, which I disagree with. So we're we're in line with you there. Eric does invent stuff that's new and he cashes out hugely as a result. But it's like to me, that's like saying I'm I'm growing up in the ghetto and I play basketball and I'm gonna be Michael Jordan. You know, there's not that many of those out there. They're well.
SPEAKER_01:But I also think that the reality is is that I'm, I mean, I'm even experiencing this right now in our AI company of where we are trying to innovate something new, but we keep finding ourselves just doing traditional things a lot better because we've gone for something new, right? We have a new way of thinking, new way we're building, and then it turns us in. But uh really the where the revenue makes the line, it's it's doing things better than what they've been able to do before. So I think that's been in my experience in that. Hey, uh Jim, I'm really interested to hear what your definition of entrepreneurship is because I'm a big I believe the same thing. I mean, maybe not what your definition is, but I do believe that entrepreneurship is often not defined correctly. What's your definition?
SPEAKER_03:People starting businesses to make money that they kind of like. You know, it's not that big, you know, it's not that complicated. It's it has nothing to do with passion, and it's got nothing to do with creativity or risk. It's just people that start businesses and hope to make some money from it. So I don't think it's complex. You know, I love some of the things that we've all heard, you know, entrepreneurship is like building an airplane as you fly it and you know, those sort of uh memes and stuff. They're all true. I love all of them, but I just think that we need to get these uh restrictive words removed from entrepreneurship. There's nothing special about uh the entrepreneur other than dedication and grit and hard work, and all of those are things you can decide to be. I can decide to work harder, I can decide to give up my weekends, I can decide to work every day after I come home from my job to work on a side business. And so I don't have to be special, you know, have special creativity. I don't need to be specially good at handling risk. Um, I just need to follow a different set of guidelines. So I I I want to be as all inclusive with entrepreneurship as possible.
SPEAKER_04:How did you come up with your philosophy about entrepreneurship and all the insight that you have? What was your experience that led up to this?
SPEAKER_03:Well, I started a business in my 20s. I was invited to leave Coca-Cola, and I was 100% sure that I was going to one day be the CEO of Coca-Cola. And they had other ideas and said that I didn't play well with others. And this is after I saved them a billion dollars. I was at Tokyo, uh, Coca-Cola, Tokyo, and they put me on a project, and I was over able to save them over the next 10 years a billion dollars. And I thought that will earn me a job in Atlanta. And so I came back to Atlanta where I'm from and was uh applying for jobs at Coca-Cola, and no one would hire me. And eventually I found out that I just had a bad reputation and that I should uh go and do something of my own. And I had never thought about that. That was just completely uh crazy to me. But I did, and so when I was 23, I sat down and made a list of summer businesses and things that I could do during the summer. I also decided I want to go back, I wanted to go back to school and get an architecture degree. Mark, you and I were talking about that before we came on uh on the air. And so I made a list of summer businesses so that I could go to school during the year and swimming pools and landscaping and summer camps and all of those things were on the list. And I don't really like being outdoors and getting sweaty and stuff and things. So I decided to start a summer camp, but a computer summer camp. And the important thing is I went to one of those when I was a kid. In the 70s, there was a company with a Fairfield University professor. A guy opened up a summer camp in uh Connecticut. And when I was 10, 11, 12, my parents sent me off there because I loved computers. And so uh when I decided to start a business, I contacted that man and said, Do you need an Atlanta office and or an Atlanta location? And he asked for about 80% um in terms of royalties, and so I said, I'll just do it myself. Started um with a friend, and he we were didn't know really what our niche was going to be or how we were going to be different. And my friend, kind of on a lark, Doug, my business partner, called Stanford and said, Stanford, can we have a location there? And in like five seconds, they said yes and agreed, and that was done. And I was like, we were both just kind of blown away. And so I called MIT and they said yes. And it was a little bit harder, but we started off in 1994 with a summer computer camp at Stanford and MIT. And within seven years, we were at 89 locations in three different countries teaching computer stuff to kids. And the important thing is we learned very, and this is so textbook. This is one of the best textbook examples of marketing that I've ever heard or seeing. We knew so much about our customers because we were there when their mom and dad dropped them off twice a day. And so we got to talk to mom and dad, and we learned that the customer was exactly like me, a shy introvert who was not good at making friends, and these kids didn't have a best friend yet. Um, and we were sending them home with best friends for the first time in their life, and kids that had not found their niche yet all of a sudden found their niche, and that's easy to sell, you know, when you have uh a mom on the phone and you ask the right questions and you can immediately find out um that the kid's a shy introvert and not on the basketball team, not on the football team, not a cheerleader. Those are our students. And so we sold that business when I was 31, and I became a college instructor. And then I'm getting to your answer to your question right now, Mark. And so I was uh teaching my first week uh at Georgia State and night school, really smart kids. These were people getting their MBAs at night, they were working at Delta and Home Depot and Coke and uh places like that during the day. And I made an offhand comment that entrepreneurship can be pretty easy, see how easy it was for me. And the class said, no, it's actually pretty hard. I said, No, it's pretty easy. They said it's pretty hard. And I made a bet that I could start a class or start a business that semester, make it cash flow positive that semester, and they got to choose the country and the industry that I would start the business in. And this was right after 9-11, and they chose Pakistan and furniture. So I had three months to build a profitable Pakistani furniture company. Well, if you go on my LinkedIn profile and scroll to the very, very, very bottom of my experiences, you can see the product that we came up with. They are absolutely gorgeous. While we would take hundred-year-old Killam Persian rugs, you know, gorgeous carpets, and cut them up and use that to make furniture in an American-style looking furniture with this old uh rug as the fabric. And they were just absolutely gorgeous. And they sold for$2,000 each, cost$400 each to get them into the port here in Savannah. I only had to sell, I bought, I think, 18 to begin with. I only had to sell 12 of them to win the bet. I, of course, sold out and uh sold all of them and won the bet. And this is when my idea came. I did nothing creative here. I actually saw this product at a Santa Barbara flea market 10 years before and said, I want to build a business one day that makes that chair, that fabric on that chair. I want that. And I couldn't afford it at the Santa Barbara flea market, but I had the idea and I copied it from someone else, and it was a blatant copy. I spent less than$5,000 to get the whole business started. I used the um US uh State Department gold key service to get introduced to a factory in Pakistan. I never went there. Uh they sent us a sample. We tore it apart with a chainsaw in the lobby of the building, got in a little bit of trouble for that one. And um, it worked out. You know, we were able to do it for$5,000, and I have zero passion for the business. And so there was the first manifestation of the philosophy truly in action. And I made the bet 12 more semesters in a row, um, never lost and had some cool businesses, but I've that's the way I've done it myself. I've never done it any other way. I didn't know you could go raise a bunch of money and start. So I thought you had to start on your own credit card. And my credit card limit was$2,000. I'll stop, Mark, and let y'all respond.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. Love it. I mean, I what you know what I'm liking about this conversation, Jim, and your philosophy too, is I think you can attest, you said it right at the end, you didn't know that you had you know that you could go raise a bunch of money, right? This there's this whole stigma going on right now for younger folks, especially. I didn't I didn't understand it when I was 20. I don't know that Mark you did either. Like I didn't know. I never raised any outside equity. Raising capital. That was never even discussed. I didn't even know that that existed. Right. But I mean, that's all that people talk about today. And I honestly think that it's you know, it's damaging. And I think maybe that's where you're coming across, right, Jim? Is you're it's preventing true, just that American entrepreneurism that that's really kind of innate in a lot of folks, that they want to do something like this or they have they see something in a way to make money and to provide for themselves. Uh, but it's it's it stumbles them, right? And then they might get pulled into something that they absolutely despise, which is running around doing pitch decks and proving off to investors that are sitting behind a you know a table judging them the entire time and their entire life, right? And I mean it's it's just not entrepreneurism, right?
SPEAKER_03:I mean I think it even goes further than that, Eric. The idea now is that you have to have some sort of artificial intelligence AI platform, and that you need to go raise a bunch of money, and that's the way to be an entrepreneur. That's 0.001%. 99% of entrepreneurs open gas stations and laundromats and hotels and restaurants. The richest man that I know personally got rich paving, you know, putting roads on the ground. And there's nothing sexy or anything about that, but he's the richest guy I know, worth about five billion dollars. And he's as unsexy as could be. And I think that the media sends us all of these you have to be sexy messages, you have to be AI fundraising. What you really need to do is copy the dog laundromat from around the corner and go do that in Cincinnati because there's not a dog laundromat in Cincinnati yet.
SPEAKER_04:Exactly. That's right. I think uh it makes so much sense. And this is really completely in line with what I tell my students. You know, how about this though, Jim? Um, I want you to comment on this. What is, you know, I think the other place people sort of go off course in entrepreneurship is they think the only way to do it is a cold start. What about buying existing businesses? What do you have to say about that?
SPEAKER_03:Oh, there's so many opportunities now with the, you know, the baby boomers retiring and having all of these uh businesses that their children don't want. There's so many amazing businesses. Uh I know a guy who does a pallet business. He collects pallets from the back of Walmart and places where you unload things and takes them over to places where you need pallets. And he has that business that makes$200,000 a year, but it actually involves going to the back of Walmart every day. And he can't find anyone to take it over. He can't find anyone to buy the business, and it throws off$200,000 a year. Um there are thousands of opportunities to buy businesses, and almost all of them can be bought with some fun, uh some kind of owner financing. The people who you buy the build or the business from, you pay them out over 10 years. I just don't think that there's a model that they're going to find. No, no one's going to come up and just say, here's a million dollars. That's just not going to happen. And so what's more likely is you're going to say, here's$200,000, and I'll pay you$100,000 a year for the next 10 years. And that's more likely the way the deal is going to get structured. And so your capital requirements to buy those businesses are incredibly small and you know, usually in the 10, 20, 30% range. And so if you didn't want to start your own business, yes, please go to the business brokers. I've interviewed hundreds of them on my radio show and ask around, look for a business that's for sale, contact your CPA, your lawyers in the area, and see what you can buy. Uh that's a great opportunity. And then you buy three or four more of those in the same space, and then you own all of the vinyl installation businesses in Arkansas, you know, and then you're worth$100 million. Uh that's a great way to do it. And I've seen a lot of men who have had huge success in, you know, the building trades and um, you know, the water restoration companies and things like that. Um, those are great businesses because water keeps messing up basements. And so um there's incredible opportunities. I I think that if you want to be an entrepreneur, take your remote control, go place it underneath a rock, go really hard with it on the rock and you know, throw it away. We've got to stop watching Sports Center and the Real Housewives and take that time and devote it to your side business. Did I get you there, Mark? Is that yours?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. I'm with you 100%.
SPEAKER_03:Do you want to Sports Center every day? You can afford to because you're already at the other end.
SPEAKER_04:I I don't I don't watch Sports Center or the Real Housewives either. I occasionally I I do get sucked into um uh the uh swim with the sharks uh uh what what is that uh what's that uh show called with the uh shark tank? Yeah, occasionally I get sucked into that one. I I do enjoy that, I gotta admit, even though I hear a lot of it's fake.
SPEAKER_03:I was on Shark Tank. Were you? Yes, and it was it this this I think really encapsulates uh that show. Let me tell you my little story. So I was raising money for a tech healthcare, and Barbara, the real estate investor, wanted to invest in it, but she had an investment here in Atlanta already. She invested in the very first deal that was ever done on Shark Tank, which was an elephant-shaped baby dropper to get children to take medicine better because it was shaped like an elephant. And Barbara invested in that$100,000 or something in that deal. Well, the deal never worked out, it turned out to be a stupid idea, and then the founder got cancer and everything. And so Barbara wanted out of the deal. So I arranged for a stock swap where there was a stock swap between Barbara, the tech company, and the elephant dropper lady. And through that, the company that I was raising money for got$250,000. From Barbara. And the show displayed it at pretended that it was a big deal. Congratulations. The elephant lady has already made her first merger. They're doing this thing. They're signing papers. And so Barbara came down to Atlanta and we all sat at a table. And you can see me, my bald spot. I'm the farthest guy on the right. And we're sitting there watching Barbara and the tech lady sign papers for a deal that had nothing to do with Shark Tank. It was completely manufactured television. It was basically getting Barbara out of a deal she had nothing, didn't want to be involved with anymore, the elephant dropper lady. And they manufactured it as Shark Tank's first merger, you know, and it was just all complete BS.
SPEAKER_04:Well, you confirmed my suspicion.
SPEAKER_01:Well, but I mean, I think it's the it's a testament to the hype and the confusion, distraction that people are going through. I mean, with the inundation of entertainment. I mean, you're either influencer, you're watching influencers, you know, and people think when they're I mean, I would probably say for the young, younger generation today, when they think of entrepreneurship, they think of something to do with with some type of influencing. Like they have to be an influencer, that they have to be so widely known in order to be successful. And so I think that this discussion, you know, hopefully there's some younger folks that are listening to this, that it's you don't have to that like that's not even true. And Jim, I I've always made this statement when Mark and I talk. What I love about this discussion is that if you rewind about a hundred years ago, majority of all Americans were entrepreneurs, they were small business owners. And so, yeah, and that's been going on since way, way early in human history. The big corporation, the typical career path with the pensions and retirements and the IRAs and all these other types of things. So healthcare. It's a new invention. It's a new invention that's been that's been around for only like a hundred years at the most. Yeah. Yeah. The real core of our being is build something to survive. Yeah, or do something you get paid for. Do something you just get paid for. Yeah. And what does it matter, right? Like just do it, you know, and uh and that's really at the core of our of our humanity, especially in America. Like that's what America was built on. Were these people, this mindset like you're talking about. Would you would you agree with that statement?
SPEAKER_03:100%. Absolutely. Uh America is the great entrepreneurial uh opportunity, and the laws are written for us to try again if we fail. Most countries don't allow that. Um, America is the the Mecca, and you know, so many of us want to be entrepreneurs. If you're not, you should listen to our message and redo your thinking. And instead of trying to sit there and wait for your idea, go and find an idea to copy and you know all the other things we've talked about this morning. Uh, there's nothing holding you back in America, absolutely nothing. And the idea that you have to go find a bunch of money, it's just not true. And most people qualify for some form of uh money anyway. You know, if you are a veteran or if you're a woman or if you're disabled in any way, you're going to have easier access to money too. Or you get a credit card, you get 10 credit cards. Or you get a credit card. That's right. But I think something like 75% of America qualifies as a minority status in some way to find money. You know, there is a fund out there for Native American entrepreneurs. So if you are Native American, 2% blood or whatever, you know, there's a fund out there just for you. There's a fund out there for African American women. There's funds for African Americans, there's fund for veterans. You know, there's places to go find money if you need it. So don't there's really just no good excuse anymore in America.
SPEAKER_01:I would argue the biggest bottleneck is this perspective of of what we've been talking about, this vanity perspective of entrepreneurship, right? Like entrepreneurship equals Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, right? Oh, yeah. Like, I mean, that's just what everybody hears about that has a lot to do with the media, the social media, and I mean, and all that type of stuff. Like, it doesn't have to be this hell on earth kind of scenario.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I think pop culture has really done us in in a lot of ways. Um it's it's created an artificial idea about what entrepreneurship is, as you're pointing out. And I think it's also um it it's also convinced a lot of people that they can't do it and shouldn't bother with it. I mean, to me, it seems, you know, you brought up early on corporate America have an alternative to that. That's that's what I tell my students. My mission is to give you an alternative to selling your soul to the corporate devil. Um, that, you know, there's really no security in that whatsoever. Um, you could be doing a great job working for corporate America, and like you said, you save, you know, a billion dollars or whatever. They don't care. They could hire McKinsey, and McKinsey says, What are you doing that for? You should farm that out.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_04:You know, in our new strategic plan, we no longer do that. Or, you know, uh the guy you work for doesn't like you. I mean, there's just all these things that can happen that are out of your control. And it seems to me it's like you're self-employed, but you have one client or customer when you work in a big company. That's a very risky position to put yourself in. But when you got your own business, you can get fired every day by somebody. But if you get 50 new ones, who cares?
SPEAKER_03:Right? I 100% agree. You know, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, everyone said that corporate safety is the way to go, but then we started downsizing, right shoring, off-sizing, near shoring, all of these things, you know, and landscaper has a hundred different clients. Someone who works at Coca-Cola has one client. And so if I get upset or you know, I piss off the wrong person at Coke, I'm fired. Or if they just have a resizing and they get rid of a thousand people in the building I'm in, and I'm one of those cut, another, no fault of my own. However, the landscaper can lose 10% of his business and still have 90 customers, you know, and so I think it's riskier in today's world to put all of your eggs in the Fortune 500 basket.
SPEAKER_01:Yep, I'm with you. So, you know, in all this talk, though, I would want, I'm I I agree. Like, I feel like that there's this, you know, natural ability for everybody to be an entrepreneur. However, I'd also say that there's it's not it's not what a lot of people may think, right? That's the second kind of problem. So if you're listening to the show, you're like, oh man, this makes sense. You know, thanks, Jim, Mark, you know, I mean, like, we're you made me realize that I don't have to, like, maybe my perspective of how to go about entrepreneurism is not correct. It could actually be a lot more simple as you're talking about. You know, but if you step out in something, I'm seeing a lot of folks kind of like they they really lead with that, you have to be extremely passionate, you have to love it. You know, they're actually moving into entrepreneurism because they think that they're gonna just have this freedom feeling and this love and this happy, happy life and existence, right? That like they like if they're working at a major corporation, they feel trapped, like we were just talking about. But entrepreneurism shall set me free and everything's gonna be hunky-dory. I think that that's extremely dangerous to have that kind of perspective as the reason why you may lose your or quit your job to go off and seek after your passion. Because you're not gonna be free. You're gonna have a lot of work, you're gonna have a lot of responsibilities. Yes, and maybe that's Jim, what you're kind of referring to. It's not about passion. So, what is it about? What would you say to somebody that's like, hey Jim, I have a I have a job right now, uh, and and I don't really like it because I can't just sleep for an extra two hours. I have to be there at eight, or I'd rather just go on my own clock and have all this freedom and I can take vacations.
SPEAKER_04:I hate working for somebody.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I don't like taking orders, you know. I don't like all the things I'm doing. What would you say? And I want to change because I want to be free.
SPEAKER_03:I work my butt off. And every entrepreneur that I know works their butt off. And this idea, the the worst book ever was The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. I hate that book. It's so unrealistic. It's uh it's like finding a unicorn on a unicorn. Uh it's just absolutely crazy. And so, you know, I worked incredibly hard. I still work incredibly hard. I work the hours that I choose, but I'm still working a lot. And so here's let me take the passion discussion a step further. I am passionate about being an entrepreneur. I love it. I enjoy the stuff that goes along with it: the emails and the fighting for new radio stations and the writing of books and trying to find publishers and all of that. It's a fun game. And I enjoy all the aspects of being an entrepreneur. I love trying to grow my market and have a new idea and try to go out there and play with it and see if other people like it. It's fun, it's a fun lifestyle. And so I want to propose that you can be passionate about the lifestyle, working for yourself, wearing what you want, working when you want, going to ballet practice with your daughter and soccer and tennis with your son, and then working until four in the morning. You know, that's what I uh exactly entrepreneurship is it's working very hard. So when I talk about the beauty of growing to 89 locations, I didn't mention the part of the story where the doctor said, uh, you're so sick, I'm going to go get you a hospital bed, stay there. And I put my clothes back on and snuck out the back door of the doctor's office because I had a meeting at the bank. I didn't talk about that. I didn't talk about going 480 days without taking a day off. And I had an 800 phone that rang to my wherever I was, carried it around. And it would always ring at two o'clock in the morning with some disaster that I had to put out, you know, and so it was very hard work, very stressful, and four hours a week is the dumbest idea ever.
SPEAKER_04:Man, I am so with you on that. The other one that really gets me I hear a lot is work on your business, not in your business. Like, you know, I shouldn't be bothered. If I'm in the plumbing business, I can't do plumbing. I need to be only working on my strategic plan. That's such bullshit.
SPEAKER_03:You know, I still don't understand when a woman says that I love you, but I'm not in love with you, or what is you know, the you know what I'm talking about? How there's two different definitions of love. You know, love is love. You either uh I've had so many girls dump me and say, I love you, but I'm just not in love with you, or whatever. Absolutely ridiculous.
SPEAKER_04:But but isn't that true? I mean, you've got to be highly engaged with your business. And if you get completely out of it, you're not gonna know what your customers want, you're not gonna know what your people do, you're not gonna know what the weaknesses are of your system and and what you're doing. I think you gotta be an active participant in the thing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, you have to be on location and actually looking at the the outcome and out there uh talking to your customers on a daily basis. And as soon as you go and retreat to the headquarters, I think you're you're no longer an entrepreneur, you're a business owner or a CEO, and those are different words and different uh occupations. And so uh we all get there. I got to the point in my business when you know I didn't see a single kid all summer, and I was in a summer camp business. And so um, you know, we haven't talked about one thing. I want to bring up one thing that you were alluding to earlier, if I may. So many people, because I think of the media, decide they're going to be an entrepreneur and they announce that they've got a new business and say, hey guys, swing by the office. I've got an office, and uh the secretary Stephanie is there. Uh, if I'm not there, she'll give you one of my new shirts. I've got an incredible logo shirt. I'd love for you to have one. That's awesome, Bill. What are you doing? Well, I haven't 100% decided yet on what my business model is, but I already have a logo, I already have a receptionist, I already have a golf shirt, I already have monthly expenses that I'm incurring, and I don't know what my business model is yet. I see that every day, and it just makes me want to go crazy.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, that that all comes after you figure out what you're doing and and you get somebody that'll pay you to do it, right?
SPEAKER_03:Well, let me expand on the whole$5,000 risk thing. Oops, sorry. What that means is that you don't spend money until you absolutely have to. And I've taken that to the extreme where I don't incorporate my business until I have a check in that name. Why spend the money to incorporate if you don't have a check yet? Why get a business account if you don't have a check to put into it? You know, I I know that's taking it to a bit of an extreme, but I go and buy the URL. If I have the website I'm in business in that name, I'll go and sell. If I finally get the business to work, I'll then go incorporate it.
SPEAKER_04:Then, you know, expensive out on LinkedIn to that effect in the last week. Yeah. I I had that exact discussion with a student of mine who was really worried about what his legal form of his business should be. And go, and I'm like, dude, until you decide exactly what you're selling and make it and then go sell it to somebody and get some traction with that. What's the point? Yeah. Why why are you even thinking about this?
SPEAKER_01:It's I had the exact discussion. You know, it just reminds me of like there's only problems in business. They're either good or bad. They're either good or bad, right? You create bad problems by being preemptive. What you want to do is have good problems like, oh crap, I just brought in$100,000. I better incorporate this thing immediately, you know, or I better get my cap table lined out because you know, so-and-so just gave me, you know, ten thousand dollars to get this thing going, and I haven't done anything formal on it. You know, like the good problems are what you're looking for. Yeah, and you'll always have problems. You just want them to be the good side, and that that's usually a result of getting some sort of revenue in. Yeah. You know, or like I just sold somebody on the service, I don't have anybody to do it. Yeah, how much done? I need to start hired somebody. Yeah. I need to hire someone.
SPEAKER_04:I love that. I mean, my theory on the whole being undercapitalized thing, Jim, is that it makes you a better business. It you develop much more discipline when you have no money. Um, you're gonna be c billing faster, collecting faster, worrying about how you're gonna convert your your turn your cash over. If you got too much money, it's not a blessing. You build a lot of bad habits in that are gonna hurt that business later.
SPEAKER_03:I raised about eight million dollars for uh a business at one point. And you know, the first thing I got, guys, was you know those laser logo projection things they use at the NBA to shine your logo down onto the floor and your logo can bounce around. You know those things? I got three of those for my office. You know what the ROI is on a laser logo projection system? Zero. Got three though. I had three. I had three. There you go, man.
SPEAKER_01:But Jim, you're making a really critical point for today's show and for our listeners. So you're saying that you've made these mistakes in your past.
SPEAKER_03:Every one of them. I've done everything wrong that you can.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I think that's important because I think when we even when we sit on the show, Jim, on your show, you know, we're sitting here having this dialogue, somebody might be watching or listening's going, well, I mean, I don't, you know, now I'm I'm I feel a little bit like, you know, I don't know all these different things that we're sitting here talking about. But the reality is it's about taking this step in. Yeah, you know, just like what we all did, right? Like, I mean, we've learned I've learned really key points in my brain that I don't even realize where from, but I've learned them somewhere along the way because from doing. Yeah. I've made I've made a million mistakes. I hell I've made about 15 of them this morning already before I got here.
SPEAKER_04:And the problem is when I keep making the same ones over and over. That's that's the problem. Um don't understand why. Yeah, I can't say I haven't done um for sure. No, but I do think you, you know, the there is something to be said. I mean, again, I'm not a big fan, and and and Jim, you know, we all hear uh fail, fail early, fail often, fail a lot, learn from failure. My goal is to not fail, okay? But I think people confuse failure with experimentation. We need to experiment. Not every experiment works out, but failure is a horrible thing that we want to try to not have happen to us. And it again, if it's if the expectation of people is, well, I'm gonna go in business, but I could fail, and that's okay, then they're gonna give up too easily.
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SPEAKER_03:And that's another reason that we try to limit our investment to only$5,000 and only spend money as absolutely needed. Uh, it's harder to have that attitude um when you're not spending money. I want to introduce a new word into the conversation. I feel like uh a lot of things you were just talking about, Eric, in particular, uh there's a principle called the corridor principle. The idea that I am standing at the entrance to a very, very long hallway of life. And as you go down this long corridor, you can see doors to the left and to the right, but you can't see into them. The only way to see into those doors is to start walking down the pathway of life. And then you will discover new things in the doors that you would never have seen otherwise. Oh, this is a really cool business idea, but you wouldn't have done that, seen it, discovered it if you hadn't started walking down. And you'll find this is really important with passion. Maybe your passion is in the third room, and you don't discover the third room unless you live through rooms one and two first. And you have to do certain hard things and have unpleasant parts of life and go to school and get degrees and learn skill sets and things like that so that we can get to the room where we find all of the enchantment, the unicorns, and our passion. And so it's so important that we start down the corridor because we don't know where our gold mine is going to be.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, agree with that. The whole passion discussions uh is just as complex as this. Entire dialogue that we've been having, right? Because I could see somebody, and I've actually have talked with some folks that are like, you know, I just don't have the passion, you know, or I don't know what my passion is, and I can't start a business unless I know what that passion is. And it's like, you know, when we talk about passion, it's to your point, I did not discover the passions. My passions are completely different now today. And I don't really calculate what's my passion. You know, I'm just like, there's something that I like to do stuff. Yeah, I you feel the energy ball, right? Of like, oh, I need to go get that. Like you just come across it because you opened a door to your point, right? I mean, like the whole AI thing, right? I'm I don't have a passion about AI, but I do. There's this energy ball that I had about a year ago. I'm like, dude, I need to get up in this because I can see how this can make some things change. It's a new evolution. It's a it's a revolution of technology that can help me with freaking landscape. I don't know what's going to help me with necessary.
SPEAKER_04:It's because, you know, this guy was in the marketing consulting business and he decided he was going to turn it into a SaaS company, which he did successfully. It's the same thing. Same thing. You never would have come up with your SaaS idea if you hadn't been in the marketing business where you saw you needed certain software to deliver what you had to deliver for your client. And so it's exactly the same thing. Now you're like, oh, I need AI solutions in order to be able to deliver.
SPEAKER_01:Well, what I love about it though, you know, Jim, on this point is like the is the past, if I really tried to self, if I tried to self-evaluate this, what I love is is finding kind of your point really in the beginning, finding ways to make things even better. There's the opportunity stick for me, right? And what SaaS does, did and does, and what AI does is it makes things a little bit faster and scalable, and it changes things. And so it could make certain things a lot better. Now, I don't believe in a lot of the big hype that's going on about it. But I mean, the reality is that's really where the passion lies. It's like problem solving, it's fixing. It's it's you know, you know what I'm saying? Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:I to me, I mean, I think what Jim is saying, and I can say I've experienced this, is my passion for certain things when I got into that as a business, have led me to make bad decisions in a way, because I'm so passionate about it, I'm not thinking about the rational implications of that, you know? And and maybe I'm throwing money at something that I shouldn't be just because I like the subject area. Not necessarily the way to have the best business. Right. Makes total sense. Well, what other advice do you have for our listeners, Jim? We got a few more minutes left. Uh, but I I will say this if you ever want to go into business with somebody, I'd love to talk with you because man, you got your head on straight, buddy. Well, thank you.
SPEAKER_03:I'm always starting new businesses, I always have new ideas out there. Can I talk about my new book real fast? Yes, please. I I this one is just right up all of our alley. It's called The Real Environmentalist. And I was interviewing a really amazing man for my radio show named Wayne Elliott. He is the uh largest ship recycler around. He buys aircraft carriers and reduces them down to recyclable metal and stuff so they don't rot on the bottom of the ocean. And along the way, he's the guy that invented alkaline battery recycling and sold that to BlackRock and was able to get Canada up to 97% recycling of our uh their batteries. Do you know what the American recycling battery rate is? 3%. Less, 0%. So anyway, uh Wayne Elliott uh was just an amazing guy, and I started thinking about him, and I asked about writing a book about him, and then I started to realize he is the tip of the iceberg. There are so many American entrepreneurs now who are doing environmental businesses, and I started looking around and I found in the sea, the land, and the air, there are currently for-profit American businesses that are solving climate change. The problems are being solved. Whatever your particular worry is, there is a for-profit company out there solving that problem today. And I discovered 216 American for-profit companies that are solving climate issues. Things like uh a company run by Gator Halpern, real name, he has figured out how to grow coral 50 times faster than God does. So he can go in and drop a new coral reef overnight. And if your resort needs a coral reef, he can just put it there. People like that are solving the issues that the UN is having these conferences about. And guess who's not invited to the UN conferences? People that are solving the issues. Not a single one of them. And so I worry about the environment. I've got me four kids. I don't want them to have, you know, to live in nuclear waste zone and you know, cabbages growing sideways. I don't want that. I want them to have a great environment. But you know what? I don't worry about it anymore because I met the person solving it.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, that is a great book, it sounds like to me. Um it is.
SPEAKER_03:Tells the story of five entrepreneurs that are solving the problems that you've heard of, you know, water, air, uh, plastics, the microplastics. All of these issues are being solved for profit. And there's the huge difference. There, these are not people going and trying to get a UN grant to then create a white paper to go and study something. These are people who saw a problem and said, I can solve that problem. Ooh, and I can make money at the same time doing it. And so it's an incredibly positive, upbeat message. The idea is that government and academia need to get out of the way and let the entrepreneurs do what we've always done, solve problems. And listen to this story. One of my uh incredible heroes in the book is a professor at UC San Diego. His dean came up to him and said, You've got to stop wasting time on all of this entrepreneurship stuff. He's the guy that figured out how to get the microplastics out of our bloodstream. And they're saying you need to stop doing that and get back to the basics of a research. Don't figure out how to use any of it. Don't get it into the mainstream. Just get it in the academic journals. Get it in a journal so no one will ever read about it. And that's what the dean said to him.
SPEAKER_04:That's crazy.
SPEAKER_03:And so the uh the book is trying to fight that message and say, we're we're doing great as uh environmental uh issues, and we need to reconsider how catastrophic we really think things are. I don't know if you saw this, but Bill Gates came out um about a month ago and said that uh he was no longer as worried about climate change and we need to change our focus on climate change. He is an investor in a European company that has figured out how to get all of the bad junk out of air. They literally clean air. You know, why is he investing in that company? Why is he commenting that climate change may not be as big a worry? Because he's part of the entrepreneurial solution. He has seen what the entrepreneurs are doing. So there's my uh latest um well, that sounds like a great book.
SPEAKER_04:Where is that available for purchase?
SPEAKER_03:Everywhere, Amazon, please.
SPEAKER_04:Okay, great real environmentalist. For what it's worth, I I I that's great.
SPEAKER_03:The real environmentalists um and see how the leaves are changing into dollar bills as they fall down the side.
SPEAKER_04:Ah, very catchy, very good. I like that. I I can tell you at the Walton College where where I am, uh where I work, um, we are be getting more and more conscious of the fact that our research has to be useful. Yeah. I I can I can assure you that it's not, you know, I remember 20 years ago being in discussions in the department that I was part of at the time, that if there were certain academics that felt like if the research had a use, it wasn't worth doing. That somehow that compromised it from the get-go, which is the most absurd idea I've ever heard in my life. So academia is catching up. We're, you know, there is a movement, I think, um, afoot in a progressive school like ours to do stuff that actually does have practical application. I'm glad to report.
SPEAKER_01:Jim, I'll have to agree with your statement. I feel very comfortable when the entrepreneurs are behind the environmental stuff, right? Because if when you look back at anything, they're the ones that get crap done, man. I mean, to me, it's the Vanderbilt theory, right? Back in the day. Cornelius Vanderbilt, right? Uh that that everybody was like shipping postage across the seas. Yeah, and he's gonna build a real.
SPEAKER_04:Well, you got a really positive message, Jim, and it's been great having you on the show. I I am so grateful that uh we got hooked up and uh I think it's fantastic. Where can people find more out about you? Is there a good website to go to where all Jim Beach stuff ends up or what?
SPEAKER_03:JimBeach.com works and schoolforstartups radio.com works. We're on five days a week, a hundred stations around the country talking entrepreneurship every day. So thank you so much for having me out. A lot of fun.
SPEAKER_04:It's been great having you here. And uh we are uh big talk about small business.com. And we're looking for a sponsor. So if you know anybody, send them our way. Uh in any case, it's been great being with you, Jim.
SPEAKER_01:And this has been another episode of Big Talk about Small Businesses. It's enjoyable, Jim. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_03:Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks for tuning into this episode of Big Talk About Small Business. If you have any questions or ideas for upcoming shows, be sure to head over to our website, www.bigtalkaboutsmallbusiness.com, and click on the Ask the Host button for the chance to have your questions answered on the show. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn at Big Talk About Small Business. And be sure to head over to our website to read articles, browse episodes, and ask questions about upcoming shows.