Epic Real Estate Investing - The Job vs Entrepreneurship Debate | 542

Episode Date: December 14, 2018

Today, we are laying out the pros and cons of being an entrepreneur and measuring them against the advantages and disadvantages of being a corporate employee. So, if like many people, you have ever had that job vs entrepreneurship debate with yourself or someone you know, stay with us and learn what impact either of these choices has on your level of stress, benefits and independence as well as why taking risks is better than playing it safe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whoa, hey, watch out. Here it comes. The Epic Intensive, the lead machine workshop, where you're going to get the secrets to building your lead machine and passive income streams. It's officially on the calendar. January 24th through the 26th in Las Vegas. At this invite-only live workshop, you'll be able to get your own custom lead machine

to work for you around the clock in your market. You can get help in real time. I'll be there. The team will be there. You can get feedback from others. You'll have the other participants and other people that are on the same path as you there. And you'll even get that damn lead machine finished. Heck, you may even make some new like-minded friends.

I mean, everyone in the room is a buyer, everyone in the room is a seller, everyone in the room is a lender or a partner. Everyone has something to contribute, and you can never have a like-minded network big enough, particularly in this business. So here's just a quick sample of what you can expect at this invite-only live workshop. It's going to give you the building blocks to build a lead machine that's comfortable and efficient for you to use, one that you will consistently use because you like using it. It's going to give you the kick in the butt you need to start generating consistent, motivated seller lead. There's a built-in deadline for getting your lead machine up and running. You're going to save a ton of time from working by trial and error. You won't have to do any of that.

I've done it all for you so that you don't have to. And you can finally stop worrying about how to create consistent quality leads, especially if you're new. We're going to pull the curtain back and show you what we're doing right here in our office to dominate markets so you can take it all back home to your market and crush yours. And you're going to get so much, much more. That's just a taste. So go to Epicintensive.com for all the details.

and reserve your seat. In fact, I'm so confident that this will be the event that gets you to your next level inside of your real estate investing business. It's going to take it over the top. I'm not going to ask you to pay until after the event. That's right. No risk to you. All the risk, it's on me. I'm going to carry that burden for you. So if you don't feel that the lead machine workshop was worth at least 10 times the price of admission, let me know, and you will not be billed. I'm going to make it super easy for you because you know that's how we roll around here. So how could you lose? You've got everything to get. gain. 10 times ROI is guaranteed. That's the promise. Don't miss this invite-only live workshop where

you'll finally get your lead machine finished and start using it to flip contracts for cash and hold properties for cash flow. Go to epicintensive.com and I'm going to see you in Vegas. This is Terio Media. Hey, rock star Matt here at Epic Real Estate and I got to tell you I don't feel like being here today. I'm a little under the weather. I've got a massive headache. It's cold outside. It's raining outside. The traffic is unbelievable. And I was just thinking as I was driving in, I was like, damn, it sucks being an entrepreneur sometimes. And as I was trying to figure out what the hell we were even going to talk about today on

Financial Freedom Friday. And I was like, well, there it is. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about the pros and cons of being an entrepreneur. We'll talk about the pros and cons of being an employee. So that's coming your way on today's episode of Financial Freedom Friday. So, I guess the big elephant in the room is, Matt, if you're so wealthy and you've got all this real estate and this passive income and you've got this financial freedom Friday, or excuse me,

you've got this financial freedom, you're on financial freedom Friday, why did you come in at all? So that's a good question. And the reason that's a good question is because that's probably what I would be thinking. And probably 10 years ago or so, I mean, I could easily just, you know, close down the I could let all the employees go and just focus on managing my assets and I'd be just fine. It'd be just fine for the rest of my life. And I did that probably or I achieved that about 10 years ago. And, you know, when you hit that point, at least for me, you can only watch so many movies.

You can only play so much golf. You can only drink so much wine. I did that all for a month and did it nonstop. And I thought that is exactly the life that I wanted. It's what I was pursuing. It's why I focused so hard and gave so much effort for getting out of the rap race in the first place. And I'd say about on day 28, I was like, I can't do this. I need something to do.

I got to get something to keep me busy. So Mercedes and I made this decision. Let's go ahead and let's go do something bigger because we had aspirations to do something bigger. We weren't done yet. and I think that's just kind of in the blood of entrepreneurs. You know, we think bigger and we want more out of life. So we did. And here we are, you know, a decade later.

And we've probably 10 times what we had at that moment. And at least, at least. And so why I'm here today is because I made a commitment to myself. I've made a commitment to Mercedes and my family. I've made a commitment to my employees, right? There's a lot of people that depend on me now. And so that's why I'm here. here because I have to be. I made that commitment. I said I would be and I'm here for no other

reason. Then I'm honoring my word and the show must go on. So here we are. So the difference the pros and cons of being an entrepreneur, he got me thinking about, because I had this conversation not too long ago with someone from, it was one of our cash flow savvy clients. We were sitting in traffic and because we live in Los Angeles. That's what we do here is we sit in traffic. And we read bumper stickers. And I remember seeing a bumper sticker and actually wrote this down because I didn't want to botch it up. But the bumper sticker had said, entrepreneurs are the only people crazy enough to trade a 40 hour a week job working for someone else to work 80 hours a week working for themselves. And we both got to chuckle out of that because I'm in the driver's seat as the entrepreneur

working the extended hours. And our cash flow savvy client is Mr. Corporate America guy. And, you know, we're building his portfolio on the side for him. And he's not necessarily interested in leaving his job. He's not interested in replacing his job's income at the moment. He just wants real estate and somewhere in his portfolio. So he's asked us to build it for him. So we got into a friendly little discussion on whose life was better, right? Myself as the entrepreneur and the business owner or him as the corporate America cushy job guy

with a really good paycheck. And so we ran down a bunch of stuff and I tried to take some notes to try and remember and what we talked about so I'll just go through this one part was the first thing that came up with stress the first thing that came up with stress that his position low stress but then he also admitted that is dull right it's the same thing it's a routine over and over again and I had no problem raising my hand we got a lot of high stress over here but with the high stress we've got we got excitement so depending on which one is more important to you those would be the differences

between the two. So the next thing was the hours that we work, right? He's got fixed hours, but he's kind of in a rut. Like he does the same thing every single day. He's got this routine and he's in a rut. And certainly as an entrepreneur, our hours are very flexible, but they're typically a lot longer. So we work a lot more hours, even though we have that flexibility. He works the same amount of hours with really no flexibility whatsoever. Then the conversation, of income came up, right? His income fixed, but it has limits. Our income, it varies greatly, sometimes a lot, but there's no limit. And that was one of the bigger attractions for me as an entrepreneur was, if I was going to work hard, I wanted to get compensated for my time. And if I

could work harder, I wanted to get compensated even more. And that was probably one of the more appealing aspects of being an entrepreneur, being a business owner to me. But I see his point. You know, you've got this nice fixed income that you can rely on. And there's some peace of mind and quote unquote security in that. And we'll talk about security in just a second. Another thing that came up, and this is just kind of what happens when you start conversating about things. But I was talking about what we actually do during the day. So he spends his time doing his job, right he does his job he spends his time doing and as an entrepreneur yeah we do but i would describe it more as selling right as an entrepreneur we're always selling he's got a department in his company

that does the selling for him that brings in the income and brings in the revenue and then they've got an accounting partner that disperses that to make sure everybody gets their paycheck over on the entrepreneur side you've got to do a lot of selling and once you get people to agree to what you have whether it's your product or your service, whatever it may be, you know, depending on how that goes down, you might end up doing a lot of collecting too and you do a lot of chasing. So it's kind of the doing as the employee, selling as the entrepreneur. We kind of identified that difference. Then the biggie came up for him at least because he thought he really had me on this

when we talked about work-life balance. We hear that, right? You've got this certain eight hours a day that you go and you work. You've got eight hours a day that you sleep. and then you've got another eight hours a day where you live life and you know if you are fortunate enough to have those three in perfect balance God bless you right I don't know too many people that have that figured out but he thought as an employee has a better grasp and a better hold on that than I do and I started thinking about like you know he goes to his kids

baseball games on the weekend and goes to their soccer matches and matches tournaments There goes to their soccer games on the weekend and you know and he plays softball during the week at night. He's in a bowling league. So he's got all these different things that he gets to do. So he gets to kind of, he gets to have a lot of fun, right, on a regular basis. The work life balance of an entrepreneur, I don't even know if it exists, not for a real entrepreneur. You know, we talked about it in the beginning. He's working 40 hours a week.

I'm working 80 hours a week. He's working for someone else. I'm working for me. And that's the trade. That's the exchange that we made. make. And that work-life balance, I've been divorced twice. And it's probably that work-life balance that killed those two marriages. If I look back at it and I just was going to put it in a nutshell, but third time's the charm. When I met Mercedes, you know, we had this united vision of being

entrepreneurial, having big dreams, having big aspirations, and understanding, we both understood that a job was never going to deliver what we wanted out of life. And we've got to be, He's seven and a half years old and we work a lot. We do, but we have fun a lot too. We do carve our time out for that. I don't know if they're perfectly in balance. It ebbs and flow. Sometimes we're working more than we're playing

and sometimes we're playing more than we're working. But work-life balance. Depending, I don't know if it really exists. I don't know if that's something you can pursue. I don't know if it's something you can achieve. But if you got it, God bless you, and if you enjoy it, that's even better. Because if you're happy, I'm happy.

Here was another one. Benefits, right? As an employee, your employer, your benefits. You got the doctor, yeah, the medical or the dental. You got vacation time. You got sick time. So those get paid for as an employee. As an employer or as an entrepreneur, you got to pay for those yourself. There are no sick days that are compensated. There are no, there's no compensated vacation times. We've got to pay medical insurance. I don't even have dental insurance. I just pay cash. Just had a root can now. and had to get a cap placed on top of it.

It was like $2,000 in cash that I had to pay. And I was like, wow, I've never had to do that before. And so as far as benefits, they're provided to you as an employee, but as an entrepreneur, you've got to pay for those benefits. Another one, talking about expenses, expenses versus what we call overhead. Right. So as an employee, your expenses, it's your day-to-day living, right? It's mostly your personal expenses.

And if you have any business expenses, it's typically covered by your employer, by your boss, what they call those expense reports or a per diem, something like that. As an employee, you get that. As an entrepreneur, we've got something we call overhead. And that basically means you pay for everything. And if you're not bringing in the revenue to cover everything, there's nobody else there to cover it. And, you know, as overhead it covers obviously the office space. It covers all of our personal stuff.

It covers our vehicles. It covers all the electronics and the computers and the phones and the communication and all that stuff. It covers the video camera that we've got right here and the maintenance on everything. And then it covers the employees. I've got eight employees part of my overhead. I've got 12 virtual assistants. And that can be really overwhelming. I think about what my overhead is right now.

My overhead per month is more than I was making. in an entire year 12 years ago. And that just blows my mind. So there's, with the expenses of as an employee, a little less stress, a little less to cover there. As an employer, yeah, an employer, an entrepreneur overhead can be very overwhelming sometimes and very scary sometimes. So as our conversation went on, we're kind of going back and forth and we could see each other's

point. I don't know if we swayed each person to the other way or not. It's I think it really all depends on where your values are, but here, there were the last two that we talked about was they were just kind of non-negotiable for me. And the part was dependence versus independence. You know, as an employee, you are told when to be there. You are told when you can leave. You are told when you can take your lunch breaks. You are told when you get to take vacation or if you can even take vacation.

and if you don't do what your boss says, you probably aren't going to have a job. So you are dependent. You are at the mercy. I don't know, that might be a little bit of a strong word, mercy. But you are dependent on that company for your survival, for your livelihood. And as an entrepreneur, however, you get something that's called independence. And this is a non-negotiable for me.

I know it's not for everybody. but I don't do well as an employee. I don't do well with people telling me where to go, what to do, when to be there. And so I will take all of the stress and the volatility that can come with being an entrepreneur in exchange for my independence. My independence is, for me, it's not for sale.

It's a non-negotiable. And so we started narrowing down this conversation and I was like, no, I'm pretty happy where I'm at right now with all the complaining that I tend to do about the stress that can accompany what we do here. It's the independence. It's worth everything. The last one was the idea of regret versus risk.

And he started to share with me how he's been at this corporate job for 20 years. And he knows it backwards and forwards. There's not a question. You can ask him about his job that he doesn't know. He's got a really high level of comfort there. and he shared with me that he thinks about some of the things that he's given up, some of the things that he would have liked to have pursued, but he didn't in exchange for this comfy job, for this steady paycheck.

And he shared with me he's got some regrets on things that he never did, all because he didn't want to take on the risk of pursuing them. And on the other side as an entrepreneur, I mean, I don't know, I think risk is entrepreneur's middle name. And some of us have different levels of risk tolerance for that. If you look at the successful entrepreneurs that you know, I can almost guarantee whatever they're succeeding at right now was not their first venture. There were some failures that preceded that. But they took risks and eventually the risk paid off. And I think in the world that we live in with society changing so quickly, information changing so fast.

The technology, I mean, just what's new today, it's old tomorrow. Just stuff is moving so fast and life is evolving probably faster than it's ever has. And I think avoiding risk in this type of environment, in this world, trying to play it safe is probably the biggest risk of all. My perspective. And so those were the two areas right at the end where the conversation kind of ended. And I think we both left thinking a little bit. So the grass can really appear to be greener on the other side, whether it is or isn't. I guess that's just in the eye of the beholder.

So when we finish that conversation, which one was the winner? Well, I guess it just, it really depends. It depends on one's values and what they hold more important. and where they place their priorities. So with all that said, which way do you lean? You know, do you lean more towards being an employee or more towards being an entrepreneur? If you had the opportunity to graduate high school

and start all over again, which one would you choose? Which direction would you take? All right, so if you like what you heard or if you know somebody that would be my guest to share it with them, I would be eternally grateful for that. It's the only way that a podcast grows, at least to this point in time, is the age of podcasting is where it is right now,

the maturity of podcasts and gotten to where it is. It's 100% word of mouth. So if you enjoy this show or you know somebody else that would and you share it with them, thank you so much. And that's it for today. I'll see you next week on another episode of Financial Freedom Friday. Take care. This podcast is a part of the C-suite Radio Network.

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