I want to welcome you to a new mini-series part of the Servе No Master podcast.
This is called “to be your own boss series”, and this is part one.
I have always been afraid to start my own business. It took 29 years of my life to finally become confident enough and did it. Even when I decided that I am doing it, I still had my doubts If I could really be a successful entrepreneur.
When you are working for yourself one of the biggest benefits is that you can make a lot of money, but there can be times when you make nothing. From the outside it might seem to you like working for a big company is safer, like you have guaranteed job security, but the truth is you never really did and never really will.
Now that we are done with the introduction it's time to take the first step towards building your own business. That is being able to operate without a net. Operation without a net is more of a mental step that you need to take. You need to realize that you are all in and if something goes wrong it’s up to you to solve it because there’s no one to blame but you.
I had a bad experience with my previous banks and then I found Novo, the only bank that really appreciates me as a client and doesn’t overcharge me in fees and hidden costs. You can read more about their benefits on servenomaster.com./novo
It is very important to choose a business model that you can see yourself doing even 10 or 15 years from now. You need to feel ready and excited to take this journey and see what gets you more excited, the process, or the promise? Is it the steps you need to take to get that financial reward or is it just the money? When you really think about it, can you really have one without the other?
One of the easiest ways to start working for yourself is freelancing. Anything you can, writing, editing videos, recording videos, podcasts, whatever your heart desires you can start, and as time goes by you will start making money, and you will become better and better and then you can move on to coaching, recording courses and sell them, and sooner than you think you are already well on your way to become completely free and independent.
Thank you for listening.
▶️▶️▶️▶️
Resources mentioned:
Leave some feedback. We would love to hear from you!
Connect with Jonathan Green and Serve No Master:
Connect with Jonathan Green
I want to welcome you to a new mini-series part of the Servе No Master podcast.
This is called “to be your own boss series”, and this is part one.
I have always been afraid to start my own business. It took 29 years of my life to finally become confident enough and did it. Even when I decided that I am doing it, I still had my doubts If I could really be a successful entrepreneur.
When you are working for yourself one of the biggest benefits is that you can make a lot of money, but there can be times when you make nothing. From the outside it might seem to you like working for a big company is safer, like you have guaranteed job security, but the truth is you never really did and never really will.
Now that we are done with the introduction it's time to take the first step towards building your own business. That is being able to operate without a net. Operation without a net is more of a mental step that you need to take. You need to realize that you are all in and if something goes wrong it’s up to you to solve it because there’s no one to blame but you.
I had a bad experience with my previous banks and then I found Novo, the only bank that really appreciates me as a client and doesn’t overcharge me in fees and hidden costs. You can read more about their benefits on servenomaster.com./novo
It is very important to choose a business model that you can see yourself doing even 10 or 15 years from now. You need to feel ready and excited to take this journey and see what gets you more excited, the process, or the promise? Is it the steps you need to take to get that financial reward or is it just the money? When you really think about it, can you really have one without the other?
One of the easiest ways to start working for yourself is freelancing. Anything you can, writing, editing videos, recording videos, podcasts, whatever your heart desires you can start, and as time goes by you will start making money, and you will become better and better and then you can move on to coaching, recording courses and sell them, and sooner than you think you are already well on your way to become completely free and independent.
Thank you for listening.
▶️▶️▶️▶️
Resources mentioned:
Leave some feedback. We would love to hear from you!
Connect with Jonathan Green and Serve No Master:
Connect with Jonathan Green
The first step to starting your own business in today's episode.Today's episode is brought to you by SEM Rush started in 2008 with one mission. Tomake online competition fair and transparent with equal opportunities for all. To find out how SEM rush can help you compete with the big boys go to serve nomaster.com/semrush today![00:00:21] Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss, and start living your retirement dreams. Now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep presented.[00:00:41] Live from a tropical Island in the South Pacific by bestselling author, Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. I want to welcome you to a new mini-series пart of the servе no master podcast.This is called “the be your own boss series”, and this is part one. Hello, neighbor rooster, as you know, I'm in the garden, there's a bird singing,[00:01:00] there's one dog at my feet. My kids were just out here, but they were going crazy on the volume, so they're playing inside while we have a little time together andI'll do my best to move away from the noise. It's almost impossible. You think when you move to an island that it's going to be so quiet, but you never really realize what quiet means until you want to record something.[00:01:16] And then it becomes something impossible to achieve by trying to record inside the fan and the air conditioner they're so loud then I can't record, or if I turn them off, I'm sweating so bad. Then I started to see stars by the end of the recording, so I appreciate you bearing me with me as we work through this happy medium, you might have even just heard my youngest son there going super loud.[00:01:34] They're excited. They love to hang out together. The first thing we want to talk about is the idea of high-risk high reward. When you're your own boss, it's like operating on a trapeze without a net. You have total responsibility for your destiny.And this can either be a great boon or something very terrifying.[00:01:50] I've always been afraid of starting my own business. You wouldn't think that because I've done it so many times. In fact, this business when I started when I was 29 years old, a little over 10 years ago, and I did it because I got fired and I thought, how could I ever be an entrepreneur? Looking back at my life, I began dabbling in entrepreneurship around the age of[00:02:08] 12 years old. So I guess you've always played around about Europe trips, started a side business, but never thought I could run my own business. I often used
my side businesses to get hired by someone else. I started multiple tutoring agencies in the hopes of getting hired by someone else to work for their tutoring agency[00:02:21] And I would just become a tutor for someone else, but because I came in and it kind of was an independent contractor, they'd pay me a higher amount, but I never really thought: you know, this is something I can totally do, that I could totally operate without a net, so I understand that fear, and it comes from the way our country educates the way most of the Western world educators, it trains us to just to be employees. The main things you learn in college, if you really talk to the high-level people is that you learn how to turn stuff in on time,[00:02:44] you learn how to work projects on time, you learn how to show up on time.That's what they're trying to teach you. That's employee talk. Do you know what time I get up every day? When I feel like it. I get up twice a day because of where I live there's no internet during the daytime and it turns on right around midnight.[00:02:56] So every night my watch or my phone and my phone alarm, it goes off at12, and at 12:40. If I missed the first one, I have the second one, no one checks If I sleep through the whole night, I sleep through my alarm. There's nobody out there to call me or to check in on me or see what happened. When you are your own boss,[00:03:10] when you're in charge of your own destiny, when you have that level of control, you have freedom. You also have a responsibility, and that can be very scary because we're not an entrepreneurial culture anymore. Sure, we have a small segment of the population that dabbles in entrepreneurship, but you're not going to learn entrepreneurial in high school or in college.[00:03:28] Unfortunately, we're mostly taught how to work for other people. And part of that is that the majority of the jobs, the majority of our economy works based on large companies. Every market goes through shrinking and growth cycles. With that fragmentation have merging someone becomes the biggest company and[00:03:43] they buy everyone else. And it goes, entrepreneurs, employees, entrepreneurs, employees, and then eventually the company gets so big It might fracture again, and then reconverge, but we're in a cycle right now in a time in our economy where most companies are large conglomerates. The majority of our population works for that[00:03:57] and what we feel, the reason we like working for large companies is a sense of security. We get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside knowing there's someone looking out for me. I had an employee who didn't work out last year and she said: I don't like working somewhere where I know if we don't make enough money, we can't pay everyone's salary every week.[00:04:13] And that told me this was someone who'd never really paid attention.When you work at a large enough company, you don't see the connection between your work and the money coming in. What we have is a false sense of our value. You
might not know it, but at the top of the company, every person's salary, what they'relooking at is how much revenue are you generating.[00:04:31] If you're not in a revenue-generating part of the business they're looking at your work supporting the revenue parts of the business. Every company at a certain size starts to have an It department. I certainly do. And that's part of it. It's going well, they don't directly generate revenue, but they put the systems in place to generate revenue [00:04:46] and so we track all of that. I certainly do with my small company. When you're on your own, you can make a lot of money, that's the biggest benefit. You can also make nothing. When you work for another company, you have a guaranteed income, but you do not have security. If you go very back all the way back to the beginning of my blog post to the very first post I put on years and years ago, it was about, do you really think you have job security?[00:05:06] The answer is you don't. Most people are discovering and many more people discovered during the pandemic crisis that your company isn’t really looking out for you. People are getting furlough and people getting their medical insurance canceled at a time when they're most reliant on cause things could go bad and you discover that companies and businesses and bosses are selfish.[00:05:25] They look out for themselves first. We're all narcissists as much as we deny it. If you didn't want to be your own boss, if you didn't want to make more money, if you don't want to give your family and yourself a better life, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast. You wouldn't read my blog posts. You would have no interest in my books.[00:05:37]The mistaken belief that your boss cares about you is why so many people work for jobs where they're underpaid. They're passionate about the business, or they want to help their boss succeed, but they don't realize that it's a one-way loyalty.Very rarely in our society do we have two-way loyalty or chivalry anymore,[00:05:52] It kind of disappeared. So we get caught up in this belief system that: oh, you know what? If I work for this big company, they'll take care of me and then you get sick or there's a downturn. I've seen this happen at large corporations, a large corporation overall is losing money. The divisions that are profitable, will have to fire10% of their staff[00:06:08] just like everyone else. Even though they're making the most money, they're the most profitable division, I've seen this a lot in my lifetime. If the other company, the other divisions aren't holding up, they'll just fire 10% across the board, they'll say you got to fire 10% of your staff. If you refuse to do it, they fire you.[00:06:23] They say that to the CEOs and the vice presidents over their corporate structure. Think about that. You can be doing your job, doing it excellently, but because someone else around the world who you've never met, isn't doing their job, you get fired... even if you hit your numbers, this is how large corporations work.
[00:06:37] They're soulless. This is why we talked about the idea of corporate raiders.People will buy a company, fire a ton of the staff to make it seem like the company is more profitable and then they'll quickly sell it. They go, Oh, look at how much we've increased profits. Of course, then the company collapses a few years later, all those people lose their jobs[00:06:52] because someone else just bought a company that can't sustain itself. The reason it looks so profitable is that they didn't have any staff. There's just as much risk in entrepreneurship. There isn't any other form of employment. We've just been educated and miseducated to believe that it's something different, but it's not.[00:07:07] They're the same, the risk is still there. There are so many things outside your control that can kill your income stream when you work for someone else. We just don't think about it. And all those safety nets, whether it's the health insurance, the life insurance, the legal support, all those things they[00:07:20] just disappear If you become a liability. If you're not sure if I'm talking about you, let me ask you a question. Imagine you go into work tomorrow and your boss says: hey, I just found out that one of us has to get fired. I can either fire you, orI can subtract your salary for mine and take a massive pay[00:07:34] cut.... what do you think your boss is going to do? If you think your boss isn't going to take that pay cut... boy, I want you working for me cause its hard to find people that are that gullible. I promise you, your boss does not want to pay you out of their own pocket. In fact, businesses are built out of various simple strategies.[00:07:48] The goal of every business owner, every boss is to keep their employees in a perpetual state of anarchy. They want to keep you in between hope and fear, the hope of a raise, fear of getting fired. They have to give you in between those two numbers. If there's no hope or no possibility of a raise, you'll look for jobs somewhere else.[00:08:07] If there's no fear of getting fired, you'll ask for raises all the time. I'm actually dealing with that right now. Sometimes people ask for a raise at a really inappropriate time or in a way that doesn't come across right. And so then you have to figure out how to deal with it. And it can be complicated because you want to take care of everyone on your team.[00:08:23] I find hiring people to be a very time-intensive process, you know, posting the ad, going through the applications, putting people through all the tests, my entire hiring process. We've talked about in a previous episode. Yeah, we have it all in place. And then once we hire someone which can take about a month, it takes three months to train them properly.[00:08:37] You guys if you hear some ball bouncing noise in the background, that just my oldest son having a bit of fun in the garden. Certainly don't want to stop him from having a good time. Just part of Island life. Your boss will never pay you what
you're worth. If a boss paid every single employee what they're worth the company would be breaking even, there'll be no profit[00:08:53] cause you would simply divide it up evenly or based on percentages for what people have done. We'd be operating as a pirate ship and on the pirate ship, the captain has a specific share, then each person below them has a share and they're all divided up in different ways, but there's nothing left over for operating funds.[00:09:07] So if you sink, you're getting paid, what you're worth, you're not, you can do the exact same thing, and if you work independently or as a contractor, you'll get an immediate pay raise. If you don't know whatI'm talking about look at any government employee. Whether you're a soldier, whether you're a spy, whether an analyst, the second you leave the governmental employee, and take a job still working for the government[00:09:24] but as a consultant or through a private contractor, your pay will double or triple. The exact same soldiers are fighting the exact same battles around the world, but as soon as they change out of the federal government's uniform and into a private uniform, their pay gets doubled or tripled. Now, a lot of people in the military,[00:09:37] sure, they looked out on that. I totally understand that but what I see is that our regular soldiers and our regular federal police are underpaid. Why should someone get paid more when they're not working for your company with their contract? It's just the way it is. So when you work for yourself, when you become a consultant, a coach, a private employee, or an independent bookkeeper, whatever itis you're doing, as soon as you stop working for someone else, your pay goes up because now you don't have to give your boss that percentage they've been taking.[00:10:00] The difference between you and hope you actually get paid what you're worth. Now, I want to take you through the first steps of starting your business. Now that we've done that long introduction, the first step is to be ready to operate without a net. This is an emotional mental decision. To realize that there is no one else there that if you make a mistake, you can't blame someone else that if things go right wrong, you can't rate another department or ask your boss or your employees to help you.[00:10:21] You're on your own. You have to start operating in a completely different way. And this is something you'll go through like a phase. and the first phase is where you're doing something on the side, whether you call it a side hustle or a side job, or you're starting your own side business. It's just you, you're a solo player[00:10:33] you're operating alone. So you have to learn how to operate without anyone else there who's on your team. That's the first phase. Then you have to start building a team behind you and it's very, very different being a part of the team and leading a team. Responsibility and stress are different.
[00:10:45] The hours I work, I'm still getting used to it. Most of what gets accomplished my company within serve no master is not done by me at this point. How could itbe? There are 11 people that work for me. By the time you're hearing this, that number might be higher. So how could one person do the same as all that?[00:10:59] So even though what I do is the highest value things I can do, whether its setting up partnerships, setting up deals, creating promotions, recording these episodes, creating content, creating products, all of those things are high value, but more and more tasks that I used to do I pass on to someone else.[00:11:12] And then we're going to talk about SOPs and how to push tasks down to your team in a later episode, but the first thing you have to really think about is that it's all on me. That if something works, It's a massive success and I get the cheering,and if the stuff does work and it falls down It's all me. There's no one else looking out for me,[00:11:26] there's no one else to blame and that's hard. A lot of us, we don't like to take the blame. We want to be in a situation where we can enjoy some of the success or suffer the emotional turmoil of getting blamed If something is wrong. The fear of failure and not the fear of actually failing, but if you're how we'll feel, if we fail, holds us back from taking action.[00:11:43] So you have to overcome that mental barrier. The second is you have to separate the way you perceive entertainment of business. If you're listening to this right now and you're entertained, that's not good. That means that you're a hobbyist and that you're in the wrong mindset that you see this as a game or entertainment budget.[00:11:57] I have a friend, I told this story before and it still blows my mind. This happened quite a few years ago. He had a two-bedroom apartment. He had a really big job, he made a lot of money, certainly more money than I'd ever I'd make. Turned out I was wrong, but yeah, the second bedroom. I went to stay at his place.[00:12:10] I go: oh, I'll just stay in your second bedroom. I walk in there and there just a pile of infomercial fitness equipment and boxes of DVDs. And I said, what happened? I'm talking hundreds of DVD boxes and I started going through them, I was so curious, I go: what is all this stuff? I started looking through things and it was things like, you know, that exercise machine, you stand on, it just shakes you?[00:12:29] I don't know what it's actually called, but I call it a shaker. He had one of those and he had some other stuff as I'd seen in infomercials, but obviously, they'd never been used and almost every single DVD was still in the original plastic wrap. It was still protected from the environment.[00:12:43] So we had all this information that he'd never absorbed and that's because he saw it as entertainment. Some of the content in there was really good. I actually went through one of the DVD series is in there while I was staying with him. Boy, I learned a lot. It was really cool. Some of this stuff was really, really good.
[00:12:57] A lot of it's from people that are my contemporaries or my competitors, some of it's Nadia and staff across the whole spectrum. Everything from how to start a business, how to be better at conversation to wreck healing, and everything in between. He had a whole wide range of interests. And what happens is when you're not using your business mind when you're using your entertainment budget, you approach money differently.[00:13:15] When I'm thinking about going to a movie, I look at what the movie costs, can I afford it? When I'm spending business money I say, will I get the money back on this investment? Right now I'm actually thinking about this piece of software that I use. $250 a month. That's $3,000 a year. I'm thinking to myself, can I downgrade that software right now?[00:13:33] Thinking about it, I'm on the fence, but I'm constantly thinking, am I getting a return on my investment? And it depends. We're actually testing some things. It might become something that's crucial, It might be something we can downgrade.And I'm gonna have that conversation with Paris, I forgot to bring it up this morning.[00:13:45] If you don't know Paris is, she runs most of the company right now. She started off as an intern and now she's my number two. She only works with me half of the week cause the other half of the week, she's her own boss. She's building her own company parallel to working with me. She's learning while working with me and she's building something, getting bigger and bigger, bigger. It's okay[00:14:00] you can be an entrepreneur while working for someone else and you can grow, but you have to separate your entertainment from your business budget mindset. So every time you're investing, whether it's time, money, resources, knowledge into a project, you have to see it that way. When I was young, I bought my dad a shipping a bottle.[00:14:15] He did not think that was funny. I was like, Oh, my dad needs a new hobby. He never finished it. Why? Because it was in the hobby category, it was in the entertainment category. It's the same thing with people who buy Lego sets and never finish them, or whether you do or you don't, it doesn't affect your bottom line, or does it affect how you feel.[00:14:28] There are a lot of these video games now that are walking simulators or delivery simulators. And what you do is you walk across the wasteland and walk around the city, delivering packages, guess what? That's a real job. But people get a false sense of accomplishment by playing these games and they're usually aware of it. It's not that they don't know, but they like it, right?[00:14:43] It's a form of escapism from a regular job because at least there are no consequences, which brings us back to number one, right? Where people operating without a net, there are all these consequences, now we can pretend to start a business and there is no net. I played a game mid early to mid-nineties where you were a stock trader during the late 1930s, before black Tuesday when the stock market collapsed and you knew what it was coming[00:15:03] so you do all these strategic things, and as you would make more money on your deals, you could make your office look nicer and nicer and nicer, and obviously that's what happens in a lot of games now, like Sims games and investing games and stuff. It's fun to play poker or to invest without using real money.[00:15:16] It's all artificial, but you have to turn off that entertainment mindset. You have to think of every penny you spend as something coming out of your body. So when I spend money every week, here's how it works. I have a whole bunch of automated bills. I have a whole bunch of things that are automated is actually on the phone last night with my bank, because they were like, we want to[00:15:31] interview you about how you use our bank cause they're trying to expand, they wanted some feedback from me. So I had like a zoom call with three people at the bank and the marketing department and the project managers department in the growth department, and the tech department and they were asking me all these questions because I'm a very, very active user. My bank it's Novo,[00:15:44] I'm a big fan of them. I had a really good experience with them and I'm going to talk about banking in a later episode of the “be your own boss series”, but I don't want to make you wait for a later episode to find out the answer. So the bank I use is Novo, N O V O. If you go to servenomaster.com/novo, they're going to sort you out take really good care of you[00:15:59] cause they'll know you came from me. So I'll use my relationship to make sure they watch out for you. But just switching to that mindset means that what I spend money on the automated payments or what I pay my staff every week that money comes out of me, it comes out of the business account. I look at it that way and then I pay my own salary into my separate account, my personal account, but I watch all of that stuff[00:16:16] and it's very, very different. I don't think of that money as entertainment money. I don't take business account money and go to the movies with my wife, which does bring us to step number three, which is to start a business bank account and fund it. I have two business bank accounts right now.[00:16:28] Originally I was using Chase, terrible experience, always getting totally drilled on fees. They were charging me thousands of dollars every year in fees, really bad experience. I would have to call support anywhere from 10 to 20 times a week because they kept forgetting that I live internationally. And I found this company Novoand I had a really good experience,[00:16:43] so I use Novo and I have a backup business account with Mercury and you can go to servenomaster.com/mercury and check them out. Those are the two banks that I use primary and backup. So I was like: oh, if I'm going to close my
Chase accounts, I want to have a backup in place. And even though I have closed my Chase accounts, they're still a little bit annoying me.[00:16:57] And I'm like: I just want to end this relationship, guys. I just want to stop working with you because everything about the experience has been overpriced.Sure, I'm sure it's great If you're a multimillion-dollar company and you have, you know, $50 million in the bank account, then you want that level of banking.[00:17:09] You're doing all that sophisticated stuff, but I'm not buying and selling apartment buildings. So for small and medium-sized businesses, this new level of fintech companies is really, really useful. And the beauty of starting with a place like Novo or any of these smaller things is that they're designed for startups.[00:17:22] They're designed for small companies, they have small amounts of money, can't afford to pay for all the fees cause it really crushes their business.Imagine if you just had to pay 4 or $5,000 in bank fees every year. For most of us and it would be devastating for me, that's like another employee, that's someone else that I could give employment to.[00:17:36] And so by switching from a bank that takes advantage of me, and what's good about this is there's no minimum balance. The reason why I love these two banks is that there's no minimum balance. You can put a hundred dollars in there, whatever your fee is and you go: okay, this is how much money I can afford. Maybe you can say: every month out of my paycheck, I could put a hundred dollars in his bank account.[00:17:49] And now you have a real budget. Now you're going: this is what I can afford to spend, whether it's on courses, training, software, technology, tools, training, whatever events, all that stuff, you now have a business account and you feel different. When you spend business money, when you have a business bank account card, it feels different, right?[00:18:02] That's an entirely different process and that's really, really important. Step four is to track your time. There is a very, very important question and this is something I've struggled with for years and that is what is an hour of your time worth?I charged $500 an hour for one on one coaching. So that's what I built for an hour of my time,[00:18:16] that's what I feel like an hour of my expertise is worth. And yet, sometimesI'll sit there and go, shouldn't I just format this blog post? I could pay someone else to do it, significantly less than $500 an hour. And so sometimes we look at: oh, I'm saving, I'm saving $10 by doing the small task myself and this is a scaling issue,[00:18:32] I've talked about this in some previous episodes, but when you don't have a really clear idea of what your time is worth, you're going to have a lot of problems in growing and scaling your business. In the beginning, you have to start by tracking your time. Do you have to see how much time do I put into my business?
[00:18:45] How long does each task take me to perform? So before you know what your time is worth out in the world, you can say: okay, my day job, let's just say you get paid $15 an hour. Keep it simple, you get $15 an hour in your day job. You're at home, there's a task working on your blog, It takes three hours to complete this task.[00:19:01] That's $45 that you could have made if you'd spent the exact same amount of time at work, okay? 15 times three is $45. If you paid someone else to do it that would be $5 an hour so it would cost you $15 an hour. So you didn't save $15, you lost $30. That's hard. That's hard. That's hard. That's hard for me, even at this point in my career to think of it that way. I'm working on tasks all the time[00:19:20] and I go: why am I doing this? Yeah, my employees have a range of salaries depending upon their level of expertise, how long they've been with me, how many hours they work, all of those things. We have a really complicated structure because everyone gets hired in a different way, based on their experience and qualifications and all of those things, as I'm sure you can understand.[00:19:34] And sometimes I push tests down and go, oh, I don't want to push it down to the most expensive employee because the best job means the fastest. That's the reason it's the most expensive. So sometimes I'll push it down to someone who's a little bit less expensive per hour and then I regret it. I'm like: oh, they took two hours where he would have done in one hour,[00:19:47] so actually that's how this decision calculus grows. You have to track your time. How much time are you putting, investing in your business? I use this software called Time Doctor to track my team because how else do I know what 11 people are doing all week, how I was going to say how many hours they work, and pay them?[00:20:00] And it also lets me kind of manage it all within their dashboard. It's really,really good, really helpful. And as always, we have a link to anything I mentioned in the show notes, so you can see what I'm talking about and they have an option to track your own time usage. The issue with that for me is that most of my time I'm in this business is time[00:20:14] I spent not on the computer. How can I track time of what I'm doing right now when I'm outside in the garden, recording into my phone, right? So I do anywhere from 25% to 50% of the day is on the computer. The rest is all off the computer, but it can be when you're starting out, you're doing a lot of computer time.[00:20:28] Find some system to track how many hours you're putting in. Because if you don't know, then you can't grow. Knowledge is so powerful as we go forward in this series about being your own boss and how to take control of your destiny is that the more data you have, the more you understand where money and time are going, the easier[00:20:43] It is to succeed. It’s the people that have no idea that fails faster. I don't want that for you. Step number five is to choose a business model and make logical decisions. In the previous series about generating more sales, we talked a lot
about how to create an emotional buying decision. How I drive myself to make logical buying decisions.[00:21:00] When you're choosing a business model, what you want to look at is, is this something I could see self doing for the next 10 years? Am I excited by the process or am I excited by the promise? The process is the steps that will take you to get to the financial reward. The promise is how much money they say you can make[00:21:13] if you do really well. Here's the secret. If you don't enjoy the process, you probably won't receive the promise. There are other business models that I could delve into. I have opportunities, I could probably increase my revenue. But I wouldn't like doing it, which means I wouldn't put in the hours so then I probably wouldn't increase my revenue.[00:21:27] I was having a conversation with one of my friends the other day who really doing well with the Facebook ads campaign, but he's spending a lot of money.He goes: oh, to do testing you have to have this level of investment and I'm not there yet. I said: you know what? I'm putting most of my investment in these areas of my business, which is staff and content.[00:21:43] So it's not that his business model doesn't work, It's just not right for me, because what I'm trying to build is something a little bit different. Now I may open upa branch going in that direction sometime in the next year, but I have to deploy my time and resources in a very specific way, so I found a business model that I liked.[00:21:58] My logical decision is: it meets my needs, it's adaptable in the way that I need, it meets all the hydro business requirements because it is the core hydro business which means it's strong, it's unkillable, it's adaptable. So the things I look for in a business, the things that I talked about in our episode about how to adapt to, and have a recession-proof business, it's the ability to adapt to changes and surprises in the market.[00:22:18] That's important to me. So I see what my friend is doing and it's awesome.I don't see it as an entire business model because it has a single point of failure. If the platform where he is buying ads raises their prices or they stop letting him buy ads on there, then he's gone. And he has multiple branches in his business as well[00:22:32] but we were talking about different ways we're growing and he's doing one thing and I'm doing something else, but we do a lot of projects together. So you have to make a logical decision that looks at is this something I could see myself doing?Can I understand this process or is it something that just gets me excited?[00:22:45] I'd love to be making all that money and I haven't really paid attention to the mechanics. Every single business model is hard. I will tell you that right now.Even though there are a lot of promises out there that say: this is so easy, you don have to do any hard work, It's a push-button, It's not true. Every single business model has something about it
[00:23:00] that's hard or challenging, that's why there's revenue there. If it's really, really easy, then everyone would do it and the market collapses. What you experienced is a price drop. This is something that happened in my environment. At the beginning, my wife and I moved into this hotel in the middle of 2018.[00:23:15] We took over a hotel 9 days after the birth of my second son. We'd been negotiating it for months, we were out of town for two months to have the baby. We stayed near a hospital, which is not on my Island. We had our son, we came back nine days later and we took over a business. We ran the business for 18 months.[00:23:29] And what happened during those 18 months is we went from five competitors to 500. At our peak charging $20 a night and when we decided to close our doors was when everyone else was competing in a race to the bottom and charging $2 a night to $4 a night. So we reassess and I talked to my children. I said: hey guys, while it's cool to have this secondary business[00:23:46] we can either have a small hotel or really, really big family home. And I said, what we'll do is take the front room, the dormitory which had six bunk, I said, we'll take those bunkers and we'll sell them. And we did, we got back our entire investment with those bunk beds. I have done an amazing job finding a buyer in one day.[00:24:00] And we turned it into an awesome playground for my kids and now they have a slide, which they've always dreamed of. So we made this bigger decision, but it comes down to that barrier. When there's no barrier, then you can enter a market and the price collapses because anyone could do it, anyone could throw bunk beds in their house and everyone did,[00:24:15] so the price dropped 90%. So we exited that market. We may reenter when the price self collects when the market self corrects over the next few years.Unfortunately, my business is not easy to enter in the market. So you don't want to doa business model that's super easy because then anyone can do it,[00:24:30] and then the price will drop out of the market.Number six is to follow that plan until you hit your first goal. Now, I encourage everyone who encounters me and goes to my programs to read my books and to go through my live project, hydro training, to see if that’s the right system for you because I believe it's a powerful system that worked for many people.[00:24:47] And if you do choose that system, I encourage you to follow it to the end because you'll have big success. What I don't want you to do, even though it's cool for me as an affiliate is to buy five different really expensive programs then don't go through any of them cause then you won't have any success.[00:24:58] That's not what I want. I want to make money and for you to succeed, I want both things to happen. And so I want you to choose whatever your business model is. It doesn't have to be mine. 90% of the people who encounter my business models and the other ones that I share with them, choose someone else's, and that okay.
[00:25:12] These are certain things I'm not really good at. If you want to do dropshipping, if you want to do e-commerce, if you want to sell physical products on Amazon, guess what? I'm not good at those things. If you want to really get into traffic, arbitrage, and buying and selling traffic on Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, or other platforms, I'm not the right person.[00:25:26] My job is then to introduce you to the right person. So you know what, I'm not an expert, this is my friend who is. If you really want to get into eCommerce, then I would introduce you to my friend, Jack who's doing amazing eCommerce. He has really, really built this entire system and he has massive success[00:25:38] and we've known each other for 10 years. He was my first intern and now he's massively successful and it's very exciting! I love watching people that started their journey with me and are now just soaring like eagles in the sky. But the important thing is to not get distracted by other plans. Once you choose a plan, follow it, stick with the plan.[00:25:54] Now, not every plan works. Not every plan will work for you, but a big part of it is that most people quit in the first two to three weeks. We try something, we watch a couple of videos and we go: I know this, this isn't right for me. We don't really give it a full try. And that's unfortunate because you can have massive success when you do.[00:26:06] So those are the six steps to take when you decide to be your own boss, those are the first steps that I want you to take to put your mind in the right place and start putting a strategy in place. That is to be ready to operate without a net, separate entertainment from business, to start a business bank account and fund it, track how you invest your time, choose a business model and make a logical decision to follow it,[00:26:25] and then to follow that plan and to hit your first goal to where you see if that actually works for you. And as you're starting, your first step may have an intermediary step. You have to make a decision right now, and that is, are you going to be a freelancer or a consultant or sell stuff. One of the fastest ways to be your own boss is to say, here's what I do right now for a company I'm gonna hang up a shingle and do it on my own.[00:26:43] There's a lot to be said for hanging up your own shingle. This is what lawyers do. You can either join a really large firm, which has the advantage of they have tons of clients. And they have all this work coming in. The disadvantage is you don't get paid a lot, you have to spend years working your way up to partner, and then you have to work the senior partner and all of these other things.[00:26:58] So there's a process there. That can be good. It's the right thing for some people. But boy, if you take control of your own destiny, you open up your own office, then yes, everything is on you. Everything from the cost of paper and photocopying and electricity to your secretary or your assistant salary, the long-distance phone calls, all those pieces, all those separate bills are suddenly on you, but boy, when
you close a good client when you grow, you don't have to give 80 or 90% of that money to someone else. You're operating without a net.[00:27:21] Freelancing is a way to boost your income and give you a feel for what it'slike to be operating without a net, to be working on your own. The next phase is that when you go into consulting. Instead of doing you help others, people do it.Occasionally I do consult. I don't do a lot of consultants.[00:27:36] I do coaching. Consulting, in my mind at least, maybe you have a different definition is more when you work with a larger company, you kind of give them a whole bunch of things. My experience is that whenever I work with these larger companies unless I've massively overcharged them upfront, I'm disappointed by the relationship.[00:27:49] I don't like working with them. You find out the person you're talking to is not a decision-maker. I don't want to have conversations with three people before I'm finally talking to the person that they actually write the check or not. That doesn't interest me. I like to deal with decision-makers cause that's what I am.[00:28:00] So you can do the freelancing phase, which is where you just take what you're doing and keep doing it but you're kind of in control, the middle phase, the middle option, which is where you're consultant, so you're working with companies or individual people and kind of talking about what you used to do and giving advice based on your expertise and the third iteration, which is where I spend most of my time, most of my revenues, where you create products and services or pieces of training that you sell,[00:28:20] so your focus is almost completely on sales. If you look at each of these in the freelancing it's like 90% do 10% of sales, consulting is about 50 50, and then sales is about 10% do and then 90% sales, 80% selling it. So you can see where you want to fit on that spectrum and you may start like I did at the left and work your way to the right.[00:28:37] You say: I'm going to start doing freelancing, so I've started building revenue get used to being my own boss, see what it feels like to have a little more responsibility. And I'm gonna start taking what I do, turning it into processes that I can teach other people, and once I get good at teaching other people that I'm gonna record those training sessions and sell them.[00:28:50] That's how you go across those three spectrums, and that's how you can be your own boss, and those are the first steps you need to follow when you decide to start your own business.Thank you for listening to this week's episode of serve no master. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss another episode.[00:29:06] We'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to servenomaster.com/podcast now for your chance to win a
free copy of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No Master. All you have to do is leave a five-star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday.[00:29:30] Are you ready to make your first dollar online? Grab my free guide, how to make $1,000 this month at servenomaster.com/1K