Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Bergen County
Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Ep. # 82 The Moving Company with Integrity: A Conversation with Justin Rokach
Step into the transformative world of moving with Justin Rokach, the visionary behind Optimum Moving. In this episode, we explore how Justin transitioned from a troubled teenager to a successful entrepreneur, defying family expectations and prevalent industry norms. Delving deeply into his early experiences, he highlights the misconceptions and deceit that often plague the moving industry. When most people think of hiring a mover, they worry about hidden fees and unreliable service. Justin gives us an inside look at how he reshaped these expectations through Opimum Moving’s commitment to transparency and exceptional customer service.
Join us as Justin shares candid tales from the road, including challenges faced while scaling his business from a single truck to a significant fleet swiftly. He connects the dots between personal accountability and the success of a business, stressing that the effort one puts into their venture directly correlates with the outcomes experienced.
This episode is not just for those interested in moving services. Justin's insights into entrepreneurship serve as inspiration for anyone considering starting their own business. He addresses the cultural shift from seeking job security to embracing financial freedom, motivating listeners to take the leap into entrepreneurship regardless of their backgrounds. Whether you are contemplating a career change, curious about the moving industry, or seeking motivation for your own journey, this episode is filled with valuable nuggets of wisdom. Don’t miss the chance to learn from Justin—it might just inspire you to follow your entrepreneurial dreams!
Optimum Moving
Justin Rokach
201 West Passaic Street Ste 102,
Rochelle Park, NJ 07662
(855) 315-6683
info@optimum-moving.com
optimummoving.com
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Doug Drohan.
Speaker 2:Welcome to another episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast brought to you by the Bergen Neighbors Media Group, based in Bergen County. I'm joined today by Justin Rokach from Optimum Moving. Optimum is a New Jersey-based business. They are a five-star rated residential and commercial moving company. Welcome to the show, thank you.
Speaker 3:Pleasure to meet you and actually, funny enough, I was just on a podcast three weeks ago and we had to do four takes before the interviewer stopped calling me Jason. So you're not the only one. My name is Justin, last name is Rokach. I am the president and co-founder at Optima Moving LLC, based in New Jersey, correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know. One of the things I like to do with the show is talk about the origin story. You know how you got to where you are, why you started a moving business. You know what you love about what you do and kind of what your you know unique selling point or USP is. So why don't we just go back? You know why start a moving company when the world has so many moving companies?
Speaker 3:Sure. So the origin story itself is actually quite long and I know we only have like 15 or so minutes, so I'll try to kind of consolidate it. But to go to the origin, I was 14 years old and I was getting in a lot of trouble regularly. Um, my dad's best friend owned a moving company and so when my dad realized that sending me to my room was not doing anything, he thought that like putting me on a truck, uh, as like a slave essentially, um would maybe, you know, teach me a lesson.
Speaker 3:And it turned out that at 14 years old, when you're a small, you live in a small town and you haven't really seen the world, getting on a moving truck and traveling, you know, to Pennsylvania and New York city and all these different neighborhoods all across the tri-state area, really was like astonishing to me, like I was amazed. I'm, like you know, really like a freshman in high school and I'm traveling, basically, and it felt like the world to me, but to see all these different places and and also I'm very much into fitness and it was so back then so like moving furniture was fun, like I had a great time and I ended up and so it started out as a punishment for three weeks where I wasn't getting paid, and then I ended up kind of sticking with it and doing it throughout high school on summer, you know, summer break and winter breaks and spring breaks and then I did it through college.
Speaker 3:I got my degree from Rutgers University, pre-med, and the whole time that I was there and I was studying to become either, you know, a chiropractor or a physical therapist, all I could think about was how terrible and shady the moving industry was. And what was even more incredible than that was that all the owners of these shady, terrible moving companies were successful. And so, like you know, I, as you know, I come from a Jewish background and so my you know, my parents always wanted a Jewish doctor. As for a son, and when I told them I'm graduating pre-med but I'm going to get a moving truck, my mom my mom nearly killed me. She I mean, I thought I almost killed her when I told her.
Speaker 3:But you know, listen, there was this huge gap in the industry for a trustworthy, high-end relocation service that people can trust. And so I knew that if I was able to educate the consumer on the shady things that were going on the bait-and-switch tactics and what a real professional, seamless move looked like then we would probably do pretty well and sure enough. You know, I started out with myself, my business partner and another employee and one truck and I think within the first five years we were up at six or seven trucks and at our height we had 16 trucks, 75 full-time employees. Believe me, at 25 years old, it's not easy to convince people that you people that not only should you use me but you should pay triple what the other people are quoting you, because their quote isn't real. But listen, at this point, with the internet it's very easy to hop online and take a look and see that a lot of the things that I'm saying have a big space in reality.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I mean most of us. I lived in the city for a while, um, and I moved. I was trying to count like how many times I moved different apartments and sometimes you hired a moving company. Sometimes you got your friends in a van and offered to buy them pizza and beer afterwards, sure, um, but yeah, I had some instances where I hired these guys. I was moving from one apartment to the other.
Speaker 2:You know your landlord says you gotta leave. You know you've agreed to leave, so you pack all your stuff up and these guys show up and say, oh well, you gotta pay us from the time we left our other job in new jersey. And I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, well, pay us or you're out of luck. And then you get to the new building and it's a walk up, like, oh, we got to charge you more for that walk up, mike, but I told you on the phone that it was a walk-up, you know, yep, or if you want us to uh, move that couch, you're gonna have to pay us extra. Yeah, I almost, I almost took the guy's keys and threw him in the sewer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, and you know, there's stories like that are moved to my house in bergen county from hudson county. The guy came to my wife you know, our house in hudson county was a hundred year old house, like four floors at backyard gave her a quote and then when the guys showed up, they're like this is like a two truck job. And I'm like, well, you're the ones who told us, you know, there was one truck job we had to go back the next day so it ended up costing me, you know who knows what? Um, it was ridiculous. So it's one of these guys who like under bid to get the job. But then you know, I had to tell you. Well, you know, I told you it was gonna be 2 000, it's actually gonna be 3 000.
Speaker 2:So and then you're stuck, what are you gonna do? You got all your stuff, you gotta go. So I think that's why these guys a lot of it is a lot of shady guys, because they know you have no choice. Once you've agreed to work with them and you've packed your house or your apartment, it's not like you can go hire somebody now, all your stuff sitting out in the curb, what are you going to do? Take it and weave it, so, yep, so where? At what point, did you? I mean, where did you grow up? In New Jersey? I mean, are you there? I've gone off. Oh, can you hear yeah, okay, yeah. So where did you?
Speaker 3:grow up in new jersey. So I grew up in fairlawn, uh, new jersey, bergen county, um, and the companies that I started working for when I was 14 were in patterson, so you can imagine that they were the shadiest of the shadiest, yeah, and yeah, I mean, that was. I mean exactly what you're describing. Um, that was exactly what was going on at the first company that I that I worked for, but I was 14. I really didn't know much. I didn't understand what was going on really.
Speaker 3:And then, once I turned 16, and you know, I had a foreman that didn't show up that day and my boss was like, hey, you have a driver's permit, right. And I was like, yeah, yeah, but I can't, I can't drive a truck, like I've driven next to mom a couple of times. And he's like, okay, well, there's this job going on in West Virginia and your driver's not showing up. I need you to drive down to West Virginia. And so I did it, you know, and it was incredible, it was very fun. It was actually for a professional NBA player, george Murasan. I don't know if you remember him, but we moved him down when he got traded and, and you know, I decided you know what? I really need to leave this company. Like this is dangerous. And then you know, after that I worked for six other moving companies and they all had the same practice Give very low estimates, get the job and then send in you know fast-talking, you know young guy to go in there and triple that goal and at the end of the day, hopefully the cops don't show up and at the end of the day, hopefully the client isn't throwing beer bottles at your face. You know, I mean, and that was every company that I worked for.
Speaker 3:And so you know, as I mentioned, like, I realized, like this, this industry is filthy. I want to go to college. There are a lot of my friends that went to college. I know that I'm smarter than and so like, why would I be a mover for the rest of my life? All I could think about was how terrible this industry was and how they were. Basically, the industry was begging for somebody to come and save it. And so I kind of created this niche where we do flat, guaranteed pricing, and now you have a lot of these companies that are doing flat rate and they have a lot more money to invest. So they have much bigger companies.
Speaker 3:But I mean, we were really the first company to start doing it in New Jersey, where every single move that we that either myself, my partner at the time, it was just the two of us would go out and do an onsite survey, survey the entire scope of work, write a detailed job description of exactly what we were agreed to do and then, based on that job description, we were giving a flat, guaranteed price, and we still do that to this day. It was very easy to do when we were doing 10 jobs a month. But you know, on our best months we're doing 300 to 400 moves at this point, but we're still doing 90% of the jobs that we operate on. We are doing in-home surveys meeting with the client, discussing exactly what services need to be done, taking full inventory lists, you know, making note of what items need to be disassembled and reassembled, what items need different packing material or cr creating, and that way there's there's no question.
Speaker 3:If your client adds things to the scope of work, of course we're going to charge for it, but that's not. But that's not a surprise because it's all in detail, right, and that's the difference between you know, these surprise fees that you hear about. So much is that those things are never discussed and the quotes are given over the phone and they're, you know these, these estimators, quote-unquote. They're allowing people to hang themselves. They're like not asking any questions. So somebody says, you know, oh, in my bedroom I have a bed and um an addresser, and they're like okay but don't take the time to ask.
Speaker 2:Like it's a square footage of your house, where are you moving to? Yeah?
Speaker 3:right. But you know, more importantly, like if, if I have a client that I'm, you know, isn't able to have me inside of their home and they tell me they have a bed and a dresser in their bedroom, I'm then following up and asking oh, do you have any nightstands? Oh, yes, I do. Do you have a TV in that room? Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Oh, do you have any lamps? Do you have a mirror? Do you have artwork? And now, all of a sudden, the two pieces that are in that room ends over on people is, hey, this is what you told me you had. And now you have all this extra stuff and we're going to bill you out the wazoo for it. Right, yeah, and it's just like allowing people to lead themselves into these situations is what they've specialized in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know you mentioned the services that you guys provide. So what are the services that you like? The typical services or the three main ones?
Speaker 3:I think it's a lot easier to mention the services that we don't offer, like painting services. We don't offer Uber services. No, I'm just kidding, but we do literally everything Everything from wrapping furniture, which is part of our basic service, packing services, where clients don't have to lift a finger. We pack absolutely everything for them. We also offer unpacking services. We have specialty creating services uh, for, you know, antique pieces. We have specialty creating services for, uh, large marble uh, you know tables, statues uh, we have fine art crates that we build. There's absolutely nothing that we don't do. As a client, you can do as little or as much as you want, and essentially, based on the services that you choose, we'll be able to fit into a certain budget.
Speaker 2:That's great. And then you guys are all over New Jersey, like north, south, east, west.
Speaker 3:We are. So our main headquarters is in north New Jersey, but we're a moving company. We have trucks that move so we can get pretty much anywhere around the tri-state area. So probably about 70 to 80% of our work is people moving within the tri-state. So New Jersey to New York, new York to Pennsylvania, pennsylvania to New Jersey. We go up to Connecticut quite often that's our local branch and then anybody that is moving where their origin starts within the tri-state area, going to anywhere in the contiguous us. Uh, we're handling those long distance moves. Um, it's unbelievable how many people are moving to florida and georgia, the carolinas, texas, colorado. Um, california I think I mentioned california is huge right now. Um, you know, surprisingly so. But yeah, I mean we handle all those long distance moves as well and we we specialize in in a lot of them.
Speaker 2:Nice, Nice. So and then you guys. So if somebody's um, you know they don't want to pack their stuff themselves, they don't want to pack their kitchen up, they don't want, you know, you offer those services to packing.
Speaker 3:We do, yeah, and we, we actually will build out unique packages for clients based on their budget. So if we're going to do like a full packing service where we do absolutely everything, it's pretty straightforward. But sometimes we'll you know, client wants full packing, they don't want to pack themselves. We give them the price and they say, hey, you know what? That's a little bit outside of my budget. What can we do to get me to this price point? And then ultimately we'll say, okay, well, you know, what do you really not want to pack? It's usually the kitchen stuff from the closets. And so we'll come up with some kind of unique packing package. Yeah, packing package, that sounds crazy, but yeah, we'll come up with a unique package where we do X and Y and you do the rest of the alphabet, and that way we can get into that person's budget.
Speaker 2:You know it's, it's interesting. You know, obviously you're one of your unique selling points and of the reasons why, or the main reason why, you started this business was because there were so many shady characters out there. And then having that flat fee, not being kind of undersold and then getting this huge bill at the end, is key. And you said other companies are doing that. But aside from that, a lot of people just work off the Internet. From that, like you know, a lot of people just work off the internet and they say they type in okay, I'm gonna sell my house, uh, moving companies near me, right, I don't know. I just I'm gonna type that in right now. So I've got, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and that was just the first page. So it's tough to say. And you and everybody's got five stars, ooh, five stars, five stars, five stars.
Speaker 3:And that's true because you're looking on Google, Right, right.
Speaker 2:So my point is how have you been able to grow your business. You said it was just you and your partner at the time, two guys in a truck. And now you have how many employees? At this point, we have 55.
Speaker 3:The game kind of changed a bit once mortgage rates jumped from three to eight. So we had to let go of about 20 people from our staff just to kind of fit the amount of workload that we have without rotating people up to the point where they're not getting a full-time hours. But yeah, I mean. So really the answer is A. You know, at this point we've been in business for about 13 years so we've moved thousands and thousands of people, um, and so we get a lot of referrals, we get a lot of word of mouth. But you know, originally, you know the, the foundation of our business has come from our relationships with real estate agents with uh buildings, um, you know who hand us out, uh, hand out our flyers and our cards as the preferred vendor for people who are moving in and out of the building.
Speaker 3:Real estate agents that we build relationships with, who recommend us to every single one of their clients, because they know that if they don't recommend us, that client is going to hop on Google and have 15 vendors that all have quote, unquote five-star reviews on Google, which may or may not be a moving scam, because Google doesn't have an algorithm to filter out fake reviews.
Speaker 3:So that is one of the biggest issues that we see in not only my industry but I think, most industries is that Google is not doing a good job of filtering reviews.
Speaker 3:It's literally a hundred dollars to somebody in Vietnam to spend all day on your Google page writing reviews, making up reviews, yelp although people hate them for this, but they filter out a lot of reviews they have an algorithm that makes sure that the reviews that are being set are credible. And so if you look at my Yelp page, for example, first off, all of my reviews are legitimate, but we have 289, something like that five-star reviews on Yelp, and then we have 570 not recommended reviews that are also five-star rated and through their algorithm, basically they're figuring out is this person using Yelp often? Are they reviewing people often? How many friends do they have on Yelp? Are they communicating and using Yelp often? So even if you wanted to leave a review on Yelp and you don't use Yelp regularly, if you review anybody, it is going to get filtered into not recommended because you're not an active Yelper. So it just allows for a little bit more legitimacy in the reviews.
Speaker 2:So you know you, you shocked your parents. I'm not going to be a doctor Pre-med was great, but I'm going to buy a truck and start a company and your mom or dad says what do you know about running a company? Maybe they said that, Maybe they didn't. I mean, I know your mom was shocked. Maybe your dad was like I'm 100% behind you If you need any help. Were your parents entrepreneurs? Did your dad own a business? What I'm getting at is like All right, you saw a need, you want to fill it, but what? What has the journey been like of being a business owner so?
Speaker 3:so my mom and dad actually met on the streets of New York. They were both selling fake watches. They didn't. They didn't know each other. My mom ran her block, so to speak. My dad stepped on mom's block and mom told dad about himself very quickly. Like this is my area, you need to go bring those watches elsewhere. Dad was intrigued, and so that's how I became a person, without going to the biology of it.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, I mean entrepreneurship was always very much in my wheelhouse. I started my first business when I was 12, cutting hair in my bathroom, and then I started selling CDs and got into the moving industry. And, as I mentioned, the moving industry has taken quite a bit of a hit in the last couple of years with mortgage rates going up and this gridlock that's going on in the real estate world. And since then I've actually acquired equity in two other companies, and so now I'm running the moving company, a functional medicine clinic, and working with a developer to develop multi-unit buildings in Jersey City, Union City and West New York. So the entrepreneurship is very strong inside of my soul and it's just kind of what I do.
Speaker 3:But I'm sorry to go back and answer your question what did I know about running a business? The answer is absolutely nothing. I was on a truck moving moving furniture and boxes, and my business partner, the reason I connected with him, was because he was in the office at a moving company and so he knew the office. I knew the field and I remember the first day that we started I sat in the office at my desk with a computer and I looked at him and I was like now, what you know, I had. No, I knew how to move furniture. I didn't know what the computer was for, how jobs ended up showing up on the schedule.
Speaker 2:How are people going to find you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, but I'm blessed to be pretty social and I ended up just going out and advertising myself and being a walking business card and building relationships. And, you know, slowly by slowly, I earned uh, you know, trust from a lot of really big real estate agents who trusted us with their work and, um, once they started referring business our way, I realized, okay, well, this is what I need to spend my time doing is building relationships with you know lead sources and generating my own leads. So that's what I spent a lot of the last 13 years doing.
Speaker 2:Nice, nice. I just spoke to a. Before this show I had a realtor on who got into the real estate business in 2020, right when COVID hit. In June of 2020 is when he got his license.
Speaker 3:Lots of those.
Speaker 2:Not a great time to get into real estate If you were new. I mean, it was a great year for real estate. It turned out, but that was usually the ones that had built the brand and had a lot of connections, ones that were just starting or were just kind of dipping their toes and they didn't do well. But he said he was a perennial entrepreneur. He owned a business at 13. He was selling. I said, well, were you selling lemonade on the corner? He's like no, I was selling baseball cards and I sold my collection for $4,000. Then he owned an ad agency and then he worked at different companies. But he's always had that entrepreneurial spirit and one of the things I've seen as a common theme is that people have.
Speaker 2:There are some like you that have always had it in them. There are others that are doctors and opening your own practices, starting a business. But you go to medical school and nobody teaches you how to run a business. Nobody teaches you about marketing and dealing with insurance, which I'm surprised they don't teach that in medical school. But the bottom line is they again, they saw a need and they went into, but this was the first time they've ever run a business, whereas people like you yeah, I don't know anything, but I'll figure it out. You have have that, that belief in yourself that you can do this, where I think there's a lot of people in the world maybe the majority that say, well, I don't know how to do that, I can't. How do you do that? I can't do that.
Speaker 3:You know, I don't know the first thing about running a company.
Speaker 2:I need a job. Somebody's going to pay me nine to five. You know what do I know about that?
Speaker 3:I, I don't think it's so much that, yes, and they're definitely people who who feel like they cannot do it, but I think that the um people are raised with with either the idea of financial security or financial freedom. Yeah right, and they're two very different things if you think about that, right, like so, this financial security thing stops people from taking taking the leap and, even though they might be a hundred percent certain that they can leave their corporate America job today and run a business tomorrow, that fear of not having security, that financial security, is stopping them from doing it. Because, you don't know, I've never been of the mindset of financial security. Financial security, to me, is the lowest thing on my priority list. Financial freedom, however, is the lowest thing on my priority list.
Speaker 3:Financial freedom, however, is the highest thing on my priority list, and that was really what made me make that jump after being pre-med is when I realized that I did an internship at a chiropractic office and this guy had, you know, gone to uh, you know, got through four years of his undergrad and then four years of uh of school to be to get his doctor of chiropractic.
Speaker 3:And I see him marketing his business and struggling to get people in the door and it dawned on me like if I'm a chiropractor or a physical therapist, I have to run this business just like I would be running a post-it business or whatever kind of business. Ultimately, you have to market yourself and sell yourself and I was like why am I going to spend all this money and time to ultimately be put in a position where I have to start a business, where I have to get leads to have a job where I'm selling things right, whether it's chiropractic or physical therapy? At that point I might as well sell moving services and save myself the headache of med school and all that money and debt that comes along with it, because ultimately, no matter what you're selling, you're a salesperson and you are a business owner.
Speaker 3:What is the difference? The fancy two letters in front of your name? Not for me.
Speaker 2:No, and I and I think some people that like in that field, they, they, they don't realize that you know, uh, I'm not a salesperson. Well, if you're on your own practice or your own business, you're in sales, whether you realize it or not. But just having that, um, that mindset that you know, just because you open a door or put your name out front and have DC on the back, you know, after your, after your name, doesn't mean people are going to come running in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you don't have a bunch of injured people running through your front door just because you have a sign there. That's not how this works.
Speaker 2:My job is talking to business owners every single day and trying to understand their mindset when it comes to marketing and the majority. Business owners every single day and trying to understand their mindset when it comes to marketing and the majority. The biggest mistake I see is people buy their inventory, they buy their office furniture, they buy their rent, but they forget to buy their customers.
Speaker 3:But I wrote down.
Speaker 2:I think a nice title of our podcast could be financial freedom versus financial security, Because even though this is about Optima Moving and about you, it's also about other business owners and entrepreneurs to learn and to be inspired.
Speaker 3:If I can motivate anybody to take that leap. I would be happy to do it and I've helped a lot of my friends to kind of take that jump, who were working their nine to five job and making 150, $100,000 a year or whatever, and they wanted to do something else. But they were scared to lose that regular income. And I'm just like you're doing an amazing job for somebody else who's making all the money. Just do it for yourself and do it better. You need maybe one 20th of the client base that your employer has and you'll make the same money now. So when you put that into perspective, it's kind of hard to not take that jump. I mean no-transcript into storage, let them renovate and then brought them back in, and we were doing thousands of units like that. So like, is that the same profit margin as a six, seven bedroom house that we used to move? No, but the volume is something we've never experienced before either. So again, we went from.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah, we went from doing a lot of really big work to doing a lot of really small work, and sometimes you just have to make that pivot yeah, yeah, I mean, people did it during, uh, you know, guys who were building homes, uh, during the financial crisis, then said all right, I normally just don't do a kitchen renovation. But you know what? I got a crew, I got employees, I got to bring money in. So I can't build a house right now, I'll just renovate somebody's kitchen.
Speaker 3:Renovate exactly, exactly, exactly over hundred moving companies have gone out of business in New Jersey in the last two years, and it's because they weren't able to pivot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's the biggest thing about what we've gone through not just in the real estate business right now, but COVID and others it's the ability to pivot and that financial freedom gives you the creative freedom, as you said, and I don't have to answer to a boss to say, can I try this and worry that if it fails I'm going to get fired or whatever, because you just keep. All right, I tried it, that didn't work or whatever, and luckily you can keep. Hopefully you can keep your business afloat while you're learning. But that's the, that's the, the value or the huge upside to being a business owner and entrepreneur. And that's the thing I say this often about.
Speaker 2:You know, I ask people do you think you know your success is a result of luck or hard work or a combination? And you can get really deep and just say, well, I was lucky just to be born in America. I was lucky to be born with parents that you know, that raised me and loved me, because a lot of people aren't. But getting to America, it's that we have this culture where you know the entrepreneur. Uh, you can fail many times and people don't frown upon it. We're, we're risk takers. Yes, you know the, the land of the free home of the brave right. That's true, you know. That's why the risk takers are rewarded. And listen, you're a young guy. You know you started off. You know a young guy, you went to college and, unlike most of your friends who went to college and then got a job, you bucked the trend and that was very courageous to do and it's great. I love interviewing people like you, especially people that maybe are on the younger side compared to the you know, the 50 plus guys.
Speaker 3:What are you relatively young.
Speaker 2:What do you guys call me a boomer? Is that what I am, you know?
Speaker 3:I mean listen, you're, you're, you're only, as you're only as old as you feel, my man.
Speaker 2:Exactly, man, I got an 11 year old. I don't feel old at all. There you go Now, Justin.
Speaker 3:This is great, you know let's go through how people would reach you, how they'd find you, sure. So you know, obviously the easiest thing would be to contact Optimum Moving at 855-315-MOVE. We also have an Instagram account at Optimum Moving, my personal Instagram at jrokach, and then also, if you wanted to check out some of my other businesses at elitelivinghealth and at CJ Investment Group and, yeah, be happy to take any questions you can call either my business or actually my direct cell phone with any questions at 201-982-6504. I'm always happy to entertain business ideas. Uh, or, again, as I said, I do love to motivate young entrepreneurs who are looking to grow, uh, in any field. Um, just to kind of, you know, share my experience and also you know what.
Speaker 3:Real quick, before we hop off, I just want to mention one thing we talked about.
Speaker 3:Um, you know just that that difference between the entrepreneurship and you know the, the regular person that's working nine to five is you.
Speaker 3:The regular person that's working nine to five is, you know, when you have, when you have your own business, you have a level of accountability where you don't necessarily have that when you have a job right, because if things are not going well in your business, you have no one else to point at.
Speaker 3:You know, and I think that that's also a huge thing when you talk about, like, what is your reason for success, I think a lot of people don't know how to take accountability, and being a being a business owner forces you to be accountable. You know, we're not making money it's my fault. We are making money. It's also my fault, right, and just knowing that on a day-to-day basis, when things are going right or things are going wrong, it's because, directly because of the things that you are doing. I think that once you get comfortable with that, it really helps you to kind of grow and run and crawl and do what you need to do to succeed, knowing that every action that you do has a reaction in your business, and I often say that because I've given talks to other entrepreneurs that are in my line of work and I use Spider-Man's line of with great power comes great responsibility.
Speaker 2:Oh, you want the freedom of being your own boss. Well, there's a lot that goes with it, but the other thing that you're saying is that when you work a nine to five or corporate America, you could work, you know, for months or a year at a time and you don't really know if what you're doing is being valued, if it's making an impact. You wait for your 3% raise or whatever it is. When you own your business, what you put into it, you get out of it, and it's an immediate feedback loop. Right, exactly that you know, like you just said, you fail because of you.
Speaker 3:You succeed because of you, I mean listen, every business, every corporate business let's just talk about failing businesses they have their star employee and that star employee is probably incredible, a great mind, ambitious, doing everything that he can, working from the minute he wakes up to the minute he goes to sleep. But it's a failing business. And is it his fault that the business is failing? No, he's doing all of his work and the business is still failing. Right. If I put that type of effort and had that kind of brainpower, if I took the worst company corporate you know, call it Fortune 500 company and took that company and took his best employee and placed him here where I am right now, this company would thrive right. And so that's really what I'm talking about is like if you put in that work, you will get results. If you don't put in work, you will also get the result that you deserve. And that's just kind of like you know how it works and it's it's an incredible feeling to know that you are in charge of your destiny.
Speaker 2:That's great. That's a great way to end. Well, justin, thank you very much. Bear with us. We're just going to have Chuck take us out and you and I will be right back.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpbergen. com. That's gnpbergen. com. No-transcript.