BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 509: How to Build, Grow, Scale, and SELL Your Online Business

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

If you want to make money online in 2024, good news: it’s easier than ever! Just ask today’s guest, who had to bootstrap his online business before you could launch a business with little to no startup costs. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit and need a little inspiration to get your next business idea rolling, this episode is for you! Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Money podcast! Today, we’re joined by serial entrepreneur Omar Zenhom from The $100 MBA Show. For many years, Omar worked as a full-time educator while nurturing his fledgling businesseson the side. Naturally, many of them didn’t work out. But rather than letting these failures deter him from entrepreneurship, Omar applied each new lesson to his next business venture. Eventually, he struck gold with WebinarNinja, a software company he scaled to 30,000 users before selling his business and enjoying the spoils. Want to achieve financial freedom without being reliant on your W2 job? Stick around to learn the ins and outs of building a business from the ground up—saving money to get started, leveraging your network to scale the business, and ultimately, selling your company for a huge profit! In This Episode We Cover How Omar built, scaled, and SOLD a multimillion-dollar SaaS (software as a service) company How to start your own online business from square one Why teaching is the ultimate skill you NEED to develop for business The pros and cons of bootstrapping versus raising capital Leveraging your network to help grow and scale your company Preparing to sell your business (and how to exit successfully!) And So Much More! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Money Facebook Group Network with Other Investors on The Path to FIRE Through the BiggerPockets Forums Finance Review Guest Onboarding Join BiggerPockets for FREE Mindy on BiggerPockets Scott on BiggePockets Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Apply to Be a Guest on The Money Show Podcast Talent Search! The Digital Nomad’s Guide to High-Income Skills and Making Money Online Humphrey Yang: How to Save $100, Quit Your Job, and Build a Business How I Turned My Tiny Side Hustle into a Multi-Million Dollar Business Click here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/money-509   Interested in learning more about today's sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email us: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's show is about bootstrapping, running, scaling, and selling a business. Today, we're talking to Omar Zenholm from the $100 MBA about how he was able to start the software company Webinar Ninja, scale it to 30,000 annual users and successfully exit. Hello, my dear listeners, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen. And joining me, as always, is my never-sassy co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here.

And I always appreciate the way your turn. out these interests. We're here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else, to introduce you to every money story because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you're starting. Scott, I think we should clarify our little jokes today. SAS is Software as a Service, which refers to Omar and what he's talking about. And churn is just part of having software as a service.

It's the amount of people who cancel a subscription product. for example. But if you're in the know, that was really, really funny. Omar Zenholm from $100 MBA. Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. I'm so excited to talk to you today. I'm excited too, Mindy. Thanks for having me. Omar, before we jump into your entrepreneurial journey, can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing with regards to money? It's a great question. Upbringing. So my parents are immigrants from Egypt. They migrated in the early 60s. And moving to America, they had to relearn everything. They had to relearn how to get a job and how to find the local supermarket and the barbershop. And in fact, they had to redo their degrees because they didn't recognize their degrees from Egypt.

So there's that too and learning a new language and a lot kind of stuff. But, you know, one of the things I learned is, you know, you have to seek out opportunities. You know, it's hard to say no to things. You have to say yes to everything. And really, money was valued more than time. You just have to do as much hard work as possible. So there was that. I would say that my parents were very good at surviving but not thriving.

They were really good at making sure everybody's taking care of and pay the bills. Everybody's got clothes on their back. But it was almost like they didn't feel like they deserve to live beyond that point, beyond middle class, kind of just want to go beyond that in terms of financial needs. And I never actually saw what it means to be wealthy. Like, I never actually saw what that means. I have an uncle, my mom's brother, who is kind of the only entrepreneurial character in my family. And when I was younger, like 18, 19, every time he would visit, he would come over our house.

And the gift he would give me was be a book. And he would give me a book. The first book he gave me was Richie Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki. It's not the most brilliant book of the world, but it's a good book to get started with. And it changes your mindset. And next time he would visit, he would have a chat with me about what do you think of this book? And I'd be like, oh, yeah, I really, you know, I learned this, this and this. And then he's like, great, here's another book.

He would give me another book. And the second book he gave me was How to Win Friends and Influenced People, by Dale Carnegie. So that was kind of opened up this door of like what these other people do. And I found it really magical, this idea of entrepreneurship. Like, who are these people that have ideas in their head? And then they create it in the real world. That's like wizardry. Like, what is that?

And I just got sort of enchanted by this idea. I would love to go back to your career journey. I'd love to hear a little bit about that journey and kind of how that progressed in the early years out of college. Yeah, it's funny. My dad was in sales. He was a car salesman. So think about like the typical salesperson.

It's a car salesperson. So he sold cars. And growing up in that environment, you know, sometimes we had money. Sometimes we didn't. Like, you know, sometimes, you know, summer vacation was in Disney World. next was the backyard. So growing up in that environment, I was like, I want a safe, steady job. I don't want to have this fluctuation and this instability. So I went into teaching. I became a teacher. I was an English teacher for the first five years of my career. And then I was a head of

department and the chair of the department at the university I was working at. So for a good 12 years, I was an educator. That was my career. And the funny thing is that through those 12 years, 10 of them, I was side hustling, building businesses on the side, experimenting, learning how to be an entrepreneur, really, through trial and error, through the internet and through my different businesses. But one of the things I love about my first career is I really believe that teaching is the ultimate skill. I believe that there's so many skills I got from that experience.

One, like communication skills. And teaching basically sales. It's like, I have to sell these 30 bodies in my room that what I'm teaching them is important enough for them to pay attention. And if they don't pay attention enough, they're not going to pass their tests and I'm going to lose my job. So there's so much pressure to get this to happen. And I have to do this five times a day, five days a week. So in a lot of ways, I love the fact that that was my career. And I used a lot of those skills into when I run webinars, when I teach content, when I do the podcast, whatever it might be. So during that phase, as a teacher here,

what does your wealth accumulation journey look like? And I'd love to hear about how, you know, the dollars and cents rack up, whether they're saved or invested, and whether anything's being plowed into these side businesses that you're starting. This is a great question because I was teaching in Dubai. I was teaching in the Middle East. And the reason why I was teaching there is because the money was great. So I was making like three times as much as a teacher. And then when I was an administrator, I was being like four or five times much, like probably the equivalent of like $150,000 a year, something like that as a teacher. So, and all my expenses were taken care of. So like they would give you housing. They would give you a ticket back home. They

would give you health care. So for the most part, a lot of that got saved. Now, obviously, there's living expenses and there's like, you know, living life and holidays and all that kind of stuff. But I would say about 80% of the money I saved, I invested in my businesses. So some of these, you know, I got a return on investment and some of these I totally lost all my money. But I learned a hundred lessons along the way. I learned so many things of how not to, you know, invent the light bulb, as Thomas Edison said. So I would say most of my money was putting there. And then the rest I just basically put into savings.

I just kind of, I didn't know about like the idea of like, how do I invest this put into the stock market? I just kind of just said, too hard basket. I'm too busy right now trying to build my businesses. I'm going to just throw into savings. Awesome. So, you know, I, I subscribe to the philosophy that nine out of ten businesses fail. And so the logical conclusion of that is to start 10 businesses. How close is that to this journey over 10 years for you?

No, I started around 20 businesses, about 20 businesses at the time. But I would say, out of the 20, three of them really, uh, took off and really, I would say we're heavily profitable, like over 200% profitable and were kind of self-sustaining and I was able to kind of run this business and it had its own value and I was able to kind of like, you know, sell it at some point. So it was that that was something that I learned the hard way. Now, luckily, out of those 20 businesses, you know, I would say maybe about 12 or 13 of them that failed, I didn't invest a ton of money into it. it probably we're talking between 20 to 30,000 dollars in terms of capital now that's a lot in

my opinion today's day and age because you can start a business for far less like i'm starting with you know there's no PayPal there's no WordPress there's there's nothing right like I had to get a merchant account i had to build my own websites i had a you know there's a lot of expenses just to just to build a business but now you can pretty much get started for less than 100 bucks or something like that like in terms of just getting the wheels in motion um so yeah that that was a bit of a bit of a loss or you know with those businesses but um i i i've made so many connections so many relationships along the way a lot of people don't talk about this like when you build a business you you learn so many uh things and you only meet so many interesting people

along the way that you can later you know tap into talk to help network with you know partner with later on despite the fact that the business didn't work out we're going to take a quick break but when we're back we're going to learn more about what it takes to to bootstrap a software business. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing. And if you're like most folks, it can be a little eye-opening.

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net worth, and future planning together in one dashboard on your phone or your laptop. Feel aware and in control of your finances this tax season and get 50% off your Monarch subscription with the code Pockes. What I personally like is that Monarch keeps you focused on achieving, not just tracking. You can see your budgets, debt payoff, savings goals, and net worth all in one place. So every decision actually moves the needle. Achieve your financial goals for good with Monarch, the all-in-one tool that makes money management simple. Use the code pockets at monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off at monarch.com code pockets. I love Matt, said no one ever. Nobody starts a business thinking,

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We're back and we're talking to Omar Zenholm from the $100 MBA about his journey starting and scaling a software company. But first, we'll learn how Omar used sidegigs as a stepping ladder to his first successful business venture. Do you start these businesses with the intention of selling them, like growing them to a certain point in selling them? or do you start them with the intention of keeping them? I always have the intention of keeping them, but I'm going to back up a little bit. And this is something I like to encourage the people that we teach at the 100 Lombia, and I like to just even talk to my friends and family about thinking about starting a business.

I always just try to tell them, forget about starting a business. Some people are just too in love with their ideas. They're so in love with this concept like, oh, I got this great idea for this muffin business. And it's just like, just back up a little bit. I really believe in choosing entrepreneurship like a career, just like if you wanted to become a doctor or you want to become a mechanic or you want to become a sales professional or a consultant, whatever it might be, right? When you're in these fields, you're not thinking about, you know, a particular job. You're like, oh, it would be great if I can do sales for Google in this department.

No, you're just thinking like, I just want a sales job to get started, right? So think of it as a career. I want to be a successful entrepreneur. So maybe my first job, my first business is not going to be perfect. It's not going to be something I'm so passionate about. But maybe it's something I can add value and just learn in the process and get better, get some skills so I can get a promotion, which is a better business that I could start and use those skills into the new business. But the point is that my end goal is to be a successful entrepreneur,

not to have a successful a business or a particular idea I need to see its fruition. And I think through all those failures, I learned that not everything is in your control. The market is going to dictate a lot of what's going to happen to you. So you have to kind of experiment and see and figure it out as you're going along. You know, a lot of people say like, you know, entrepreneurs, they jump out of a plane and they build a parachute on the way down. I'm not that extreme. You should do some preparation and do some market evaluation and ideal validation, all that kind of stuff.

But there is some truth in the idea that. the market is going to tell you which way to move. And sometimes you have to be flexible in the beginning and change things up. So maybe in the course of me building this business, I realize, okay, actually to be a market leader in this market with this idea, with this business, I'm going to need an investment. I'm going to need to be able to hire X amount of people. And maybe I don't want to do that. So if that's the case, then maybe I should just pack up and leave right now and sell it and do that.

But I may not know that in the beginning. So maybe my intention. So the answer your question, you've got to. be flexible. You can't just go into there and be like, be hard-headed. So, you know, I think we've got a really great picture of what's going on here, right? We're living in Dubai. We're making great money. We are starting up a couple of businesses. In 2014, I believe the next pivot comes for you with your big business, Webinar Ninja. Can you walk us through the transition to starting that business and how that began in early stages? Yeah. One of the other trends that maybe those who are listening

or picking up on is that most of my successes start with a failure. Like, I always fail first, and then I learn from it, a pickup, and then I realize, okay, this is what I need to do. And the same thing happened with Webinar Ninja. I was running webinars in 2013 to grow our community and sell memberships to the $100 MBA, which is a business that I have, which is an online education for people who want to start a business. And with that, I was running webinars. I loved running webinars because my teaching background, I felt comfortable. But I hated the tools that are out there. At the time, there was just like, go-to meeting. And it was just really meant for meetings and not for teaching and workshops and interaction was like, okay, let me see how I can build all the pieces together

to try to put together a great webinar. Because to put a webinar together, you have to have a landing page. There's all these marketing pieces like landing pages and registration pages and opt-ins. And then once they register, how do I make sure there's a chat, how to make sure I record it and then send the replay to somebody else. Like, there's tools for you. with us now that do this seamlessly, but at the time, there wasn't. So I actually created a course and a guide to show people how to do this. It's called the DIY webinar guide. Hey, if you want to run webinars easily and you want to do all the marketing pieces, I do this every single week. It takes me two hours, but I'm going to show you how to do it so that it's simple. I worked on this thing

for four months. I was so excited about it. I launched it. I got two sales. And one of them was a chargeback. So it wasn't even a real sale. And the other one was like a sympathy sale from her friend, John Lee Dumas. And it wasn't really, you know, a big success, even though I invested so much time and effort into it. And then I was like, okay, that didn't work. At the time, I was like, okay, let me just forget about this for a second. Let me step away from it and I continue to do the webinars. And when I was doing the webinars, I started to like get sick of putting these pieces together and I started to build a little tool for myself to run the webinars, a little software tool. and I know a little bit of PHP, HTML at the time,

and I kind of put this slap this thing together, and I started running my webinars with it, and the attendees on the webinar were like, hey, what are you using for this webinar? This looks cool. And I said, oh, it's just something I slapped together. Anyway, let's go on with the workshop, and they're like, hey, hey, wait a minute,

can we buy this thing that you're using? And I was like, oh, I don't know, let me see you. And after that webinar, I was like, is this even an idea? Should I do this? So I put together a landing page to pre-sale the software. I had no concept.

The one I was using was like really hacky and not ready for commercial use. And I'm not a great developer. I just put it together through trial and error. And I just put a sales set up place together. I pre-sold it on the promise that it would fix this problem. But the problem was so painful. People hated running webinars and all the marketing elements were really hard and all the automations. So when we pre-sold it, we sold the first 250 spots in, sorry, the first 150 spots in the first 150 spots in the first.

the first 48 hours, and then 24 hours later, we sold another 100 spots for a total 250 spots. And at that moment, I realized, okay, this is such a huge pain. I didn't have a big email list. I had like, less than 1,200 people on my email list. And I was like, wow, okay, this is really a painful problem. People are willing to put money down on a promise that I can solve this problem for them. And the learning I got was like, no one wants to actually do the work. They want a tool to do the work for them. And that for me was like, oh, light bulb moment. Like, I'm, I'm a expecting everybody to be like me and do all this hustle and do all this like painless, you know, painful process. But for me, it was a great moment because then that was the birth

of Webinar Ninja and we started that software company and we iterated. And I know those 250 beta members by name. Like, I know them by heart. These guys are like, you know, in my heart forever, because they give us so much great feedback and they helped us out. And we went from 250 people to 300, to 30,000 people using the platform and over 3 million people have attended a webinar and webinar Ninja. So what a journey for us. But yeah, that's the origin story. So tell us a little bit more about the business. What do you charge for this product that has 30,000 members? And, you know, what was the journey like to get from 300 or 250 to 30,000 to take a year, two years, five years, 10 years? Thought us a little bit about that. Yeah, sure. So I'm going to go

through the journey, but just keep in mind those who are listening, I just sold the business They got acquired for a difference. So these prices might change. So we've just been acquired by ProProft, which is a great company. But when we first got started, we had, I'm a very big believer in keeping things simple in the beginning. Because like I mentioned before, you're going to have to pivot. You're going to have to change.

And if you, the more complicated you to make in the beginning, the harder is for you to untangle that later. So in the beginning, we just had two plans. We had a monthly plan and an annual plan. That's it. You got all the features from monthly and annual and that's it. And in the beginning, we just did live webinars. And then we started to do automated webinars.

And then we started to add different automation features and different marketing features. Then we started doing hybrid webinars. And we started doing series webinars. And as we built up, we realized, okay, some people value these features and some people don't. I was lucky enough to get to know a good friend of mine named Patrick Campbell who ran and sold profit well. And he's like a pricing expert. and he got on calls with me and we had chats and breakfasts and guys, brilliant.

And basically he has this idea of it's called like a value metric where it's like some people are really willing to pay for certain features and they will spend a premium. And some people don't really care about those stuff. So with those things, make them either add-ons or make them, you know, part of another bundle or another tier. And that's kind of what we did. Let's go back to the beginning. You had 250 members sign up for the beta.

What did you charge those customers for the beta? So what we wanted to do is we wanted to get some people that are committed. So those people actually got a lifetime deal and we charged them $300. It was a very appealing deal for people. And I did this on purpose because I was like, I need people that are invested and would be able to give me as much feedback as possible because they're like, hey, I'm going to use this for as long as possible because I only paid $300 for it. That's $75,000 if I'm doing the math there.

So is that how you funded the company? Was the company bootstrapped the whole way through? Exactly. So we got that 75 grand before we even launched the software. So it was pre-sold. That's kind of how we funded the company. You start this business. You got 75K. We know it scales to tens of millions of dollars, 30,000 customers times, even if it's a thousand bucks a year. I don't know what the average average was there is a huge business, 30 mil, some give or take, I'm imagining. Is that close? I can't actually reveal because of my NDA, but yeah. We did well. Awesome. So we're in that phase. Let's talk about going from X to Y. How are you doing that? Is there a word of, are your customers coming from word of mouth? Did you figure out your lifetime value and get a paid acquisition stream going where you're, you know, in a lot of software businesses because that payback isn't in the first year, the first month, that is a cash drag? How did you handle the scaling there, both from scaling your organization and from the customer, um, at

The first three years, it was very content-based marketing. To be quite honest with you, a lot of the success of all my businesses has to do with my network. I invest, and I hate using the word network. Really, they're my friends. These guys are my friends. I've met these people at conferences. I met them at birthday parties. I met them at dinners. I met them at, you know, events that happen around the world. And I just made a lot of effort, even when I didn't have a lot of money to go to these events, these local meetups to conferences. And there's one conference in particular that we went to in 2014.

It was January 2014, like six months before we launched Webinar Ninja, called New Media Expo. It was like, conferences that exist anymore. But it was in Vegas. And, you know, we met so many interesting people who were just kind of getting started. at the time and we're all kind of hungry for success. And it was interesting. The vibe of that group was just, you know, kind of like, how can we help each other? So in that group, we met people like Lewis Howes. We met Amy Porterfield. We met Chris Ducker and, you know, Pat Flynn and all these people that are in our space that were kind of just getting started. Convercats founder, Nathan

Barry, who met him. I remember having French toast next to him at breakfast. Like, And now these people are like our friends and our colleagues and we talk to each other regularly. And the thing is that because we're all kind of coming up at the same time, we all were hungry to help each other out. So after that conference, I had all these contacts. I have all these Twitter handles, all these people that I met that were just like super nice people, generous and doing interesting things. And then when we were launching webinar ninja, I just reached out to every one of them. And I'm saying every one of them. I literally emailed in my Gmail account like 120 people.

And I emailed them and I said, hey, I'm launching this thing. This is what it's called. Here's the landing page. If this is something that would interest your audience, not them, their audience, because their audience is really valuable to me because they have more reach with those people. One sale is not better than, you know, 50 sales. So I said to them, if this interests your audience, can you share with them either with a tweet or in your email or in your PS or whatever?

If not, cool. Hope you're doing well, you know, and something personal like, you know, go Celtics if they're from Boston, right? And the point is that I would do that. and some people responded, some people didn't, but about 30% of them actually shared it with their audience and put it in their newsletter. And it got a lot of reach.

And a lot of people were like, cool, this sounds great. I'd love to sign up for the waiting list. And then when they got on my email list, then I emailed them and that's kind of how we got our first members. Literally from that conference, that's how it happened. The power of networking is huge. You could email me three weeks ago and be like, hey, Mindy, can you do this?

Yeah, probably not, because I don't know you. But now we've had a conversation. You email me, I am happy to do something for you. And when you're at a conference and you're just talking to these random people, you're just having a conversation. You're not trying to sell them your services. You're just talking to them about what's worked for you. They're telling you what's worked for them.

It's a collaborative effort at these conferences. So then a few weeks later, hey, it was so nice to meet you. By the way, would you mind mentioning this? Hey, I remember, Omar was super cool. I got this awesome tip or I just really enjoyed having French toast with him at breakfast. I would love to help him out. People give back even for nothing in return. Yeah, but you have to be genuine.

When you come across as salesy and hey Omar, I sure want to be your friend because I want you to help me out, it's going to come across as so smarmy and gross and you are not going to want to help that person. I don't want to help that person either. But when you're genuine, when you are just genuinely having a French toast with Nathan Barry and not trying to hopefully get on his good side so he'll help you out. It comes through. Like when you're salesy, you're not fooling anybody.

And successful people get this all the time. So their radar is fully on. Like they're like, oh, what does this person want? You know, and they're constantly worried about that. So I'm not saying this to discourage people, but I'm saying this to really try to just make friends and try to see how you can help them out. Like how can you can support them? You have maybe a smaller audience, but they'll still appreciate the fact that I remember when I went to that conference later on, I wrote a blog post and I mentioned all the people I met and I, you know, hyperlinked to their websites and I, you know, gave them shoutouts. And even that small thing, people would email me say, hey, man, thanks for doing that.

That was really nice of you. Whether it's a nice thing I said or, you know, just shouting out their product or business. Yeah. Genuine interactions feel genuine and salesy interactions feel. interactions feel salesy and gross and nobody wants to be sold to. Stay listening. We're going to take a quick break and when we're back, we'll delve into the nitty-gritty of how to sell a company and make a lucrative exit. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole

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from the ground up. So speaking of being sold to, you just sold the business. I'd love to hear about the process of moving into the sale, like the sale. Like there was a sale here of moving the business. business in there. You mentioned, I imagine, I'm going to speculate, and I'd love to hear your take on this. There's a leadership team or management team you have to put in place. There's changes you got to make from the cost structure. We want to make sure that the financials present the way you want to present, all that kind of stuff. Was there an investment bank? I would love to hear about all this

stuff that you did to put the business up for sale in the process there. The first thing I want to say is that when you're selling a business, especially one that you've run for nine and a half years, the hardest part is the emotional element. It's not really the finances or the sale price or even the buyer or anything like that. So much of who you are is wrapped up into something that you've done day in and day out. Like it's what I thought about for 14 hours a day for nine years or nine and a half years. Come to terms of the fact that I have to say goodbye to this and this is not going to be part of my life anymore. It starts to, I don't want to say messes with you, but you start asking questions you never asked

before like who am I? Who am I if I'm not this business? Who am I if I'm not? And it made me realize, okay, I need to wrap my head around what's about to happen because I want to land on my feet. So I would say that's a part of the equation is just figuring that out because you're going to have a life after this and you got to be ready for it. But in terms of pairing for the sale, the sale process, filing a buyer, negotiating, I was very fortunate because I was part of Dan Martel's SaaS Academy. He's a SaaS coach. And one of the things that he teaches is prepare for the sale before you sell. So like one of the things that we did years in advance is have our business prepared from an SOP standpoint, like a standard operating procedure standpoint, from just

contracts, everything's organized, everything's easy to find, receipts, from a financial point of view, PNLs, all kinds of stuff, just having things ready and documented so that when you are ready to sell, you're not putting your data room together. That's what the data room is. If nobody's sold a SaaS company, basically it's like when you have a buyer, they want to look at your data room, which is basically all your numbers, all your information, everything they need to know to evaluate if they want to buy this business. And they need to see it very clearly. This could be like, your annual revenue, your monthly revenue, your churn, your, you know, cost for acquisition, all that kind of stuff. You have to know this like the back of your hand because when you're on these calls,

you know, this is what they're looking for and you need to have it presented very easily and neatly. So we had it all prepared before we even thought about selling. Why did we decide to sell? Well, Nicole and I often had milestones. And I say Nicole, Nicole is my business partner and partner in life. And we have milestones throughout the business. Like, we want to reach this milestone. We want to get to this level. We want to be able to reach X amount of users. We want to be a X amount of revenue. And we started to hit all these milestones and we started to do all the things we wanted to do. And one time we were just on a walk after dinner and we're like, I think I've accomplished

everything I wanted with this business. I don't think any other new mountain I want to climb here. And at that moment, I realized the best thing I can do for my customers, for the business itself, is to give it to somebody else who can see it to its full potential. If someone is trying to repeat the journey for entrepreneurship, I think a lot of people have in their minds that you got to raise capital from a VC fund or whatever with that. And that's not the story that I've seen most entrepreneurs take, honestly. More entrepreneurs go through your path and essentially bootstrap businesses from what

I've seen that then really raise capital there. Is that the advice you, like, is that what your experience is? One, and two, would you give people the advice of just accumulate a lot of cash and have that liquidity so that you have this option to bootstrap and start businesses? Yeah. This is a difficult question because I have seen success on both sides and I've seen failures on both sides. I've got to be honest with you. I haven't been comfortable from a work life balance and a financial life balance for a very

long time because I put a lot of my effort into Webinar Ninja, a lot of my own personal capital. Every time we made a profit, we throw it back into Webinar Ninja. We paid ourselves absolute minimum so that we can be able to keep growing the business. And that's what it takes when you boost trap. If you ask anybody boostraps a company, like Profitwell, they sold their company for, it was public, it was $220 million. You know, up until the last couple of years of the business, he was getting paid $37,000 a year. Like, that's the risk he's got to put into it so that he can have the feast later.

And a lot of people don't talk about that. Like entrepreneurship is a lot of risk and it's a lot of like sacrifice. You know, people say, well, these rich people, blah, blah, but, you know, people that in jobs, they have a lot of security. I know, I was in a job. You got a lot of security. You get a city paycheck. You are guaranteed a certain amount of money. With entrepreneurship, you have to make the tough call.

Like, okay, maybe I'm not going to go on vacation for the next three years, and I'm just going to grind it out and pay myself as minimum possible. I have this family meeting with my wife and kids or my husband and say, hey, guys, we're going to be under the pump for the next few years because I'm starting this business. So sorry, no Disneyland and no eating out. And we're going to, like, that's hard. Like, who does that? That's what boost drivers do.

I don't want to kind of like say, hey, that's the only way. Because I've seen, because our office was out of fish burners, which is like a startup hub in Sydney. And it's an incredible place where it has a whole bunch of tech startups.

And I would say that 80% of them are seeking to get investment, seed capital or series A or something like that. And I understand why, because most of them are coming from a job and they're like, well, I'm not going to work for free. I need some investment so I can get paid and whatever. I understand how unappealing

bootstrapping could be when it comes to the reality of it. I didn't have the skills to raise capital. I didn't have the connections to know where to get, you know, investment or I didn't even know an investor. I didn't know any of this. It was, it was in my world yet. So I kind of just did what I had to do. Now, if I had to do it all over again, maybe I would consider getting at least a seed round for a low, stake in the business, just to see if the business will be able to, you know, take off. And then And then if it does, I didn't sacrifice so much and I didn't throw so much capital on the table. And then as soon as I start making some profits, maybe I could buy back those shares. Maybe I can, you know, increase my my own salary, your own revenue and take some money off the table.

One of the things a lot of bootstrap founders do, they don't take any money off the table at any point. They get addicted to reinvesting in the business because it's like, if I take this money and throw it in the stock market or I throw it into a bond, it's not going to get the return I see in my own business. So they throw it right back into their business and then they don't have any asset other than that business. So it's a little bit dangerous game. Omar, where can people find out more about you? If you found any value in what I said today, then maybe you'd be interested in my podcast, which is called The $100 MBA show. So if you go to that podcast, $100 MBA show, we have over 2,400 business lessons where I teach people how to hire their first hire to how to start with paid marketing to how to offboard a customer.

whatever it might be. But the point is, is that if you're interested in learning more about how to build and grow business, then that's where to find me a $100 BA show over at any of your podcast apps. Well, thank you so much for sharing your incredible experience here. And congratulations on the big exit. And I look forward to seeing where life takes you next, Omar. Thanks so much for coming on today. Thanks, Scott. Appreciate it. Thanks, Mindy. It was great chatting with you. And I loved your energy. Thank you, Omar. And we will talk to you soon. Take care. Holy cat, Scott. I really like this interview with Omar Zenholm from the $100 MBA and from Webinar Ninja. This was filled with lots of information about how to start a business, how to grow a business,

tips for what you should be thinking while you're growing the business. I really liked what he said when he said, maybe my first job isn't going to be perfect. My first entrepreneurial endeavor isn't going to be perfect or great, and I have to leave. But not everything is in your control, the market is going to change, et cetera. I love how he gives these life tips from actual real life experience. Yeah, I thought it was great. I loved how I was like, nine out of ten businesses fail, so start ten businesses. He's like, well, I started 20 businesses and three of them worked. I was like, that's pretty close, right? You know, that's, that's in there. So I think he, I think he did a, I love his journey. I love the way he approached things,

and I love the way he went all in on the business that really had the potential to scale. and you can tell based on that number of 30,000 subscribers, that was a big outcome. So congratulations to Omar. Hope he, you know, gets a yacht, all that kind of good stuff in the months and years to come. Yeah, I hope he gets a yacht too. All right. Scott, should we get out of here? Let's do it.

That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. Of course, he is the Scott Trench, and I am Indy Jensen saying, later, Tater. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple. And if you're looking for even more money content, feel free to visit our YouTube channel at YouTube.com slash biggerpockets money. BiggerPockets money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench, produced by Kaelin Bennett, editing by Exodus Media, copywriting by Nate Weintraub. Lastly, a big thank you to the Bigger Pockets team for making this show possible.