The Game with Alex Hormozi - I Helped 6 Business Owners Overcome Their Fear of Failure | Ep 653

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

“It's not about how hard you can hit, but it's about how hard you can get hit and keep going forward.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) answers questions of entrepreneurs as they share their personal experiences, obstacles, and solutions faced in their respective entrepreneurial journeys. Key topics include dealing with the fear of failure, handling self-doubt, managing transition from in-person to online services, and coping with the loneliness that often accompanies success.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(0:30) - Overcoming fear and analysis paralysis in self-publishing(6:11) - Dealing with personal loss and maintaining composure(12:44) - Navigating business challenges and making impactful decisions(19:22) - Starting a business with a grand vision & the importance of starting small(23:40) - Enduring the loneliness of success(29:34) - Struggling to return to a 9-5 job(32:49) - The power of promotion in entrepreneurshipFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

What are you afraid of? I'm scared that I'll fail at the goal. Then you can judge how successful you were by how much you adhered to the actions that you committed to. The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. This podcast, The Game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to building acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe someday soon, partner with us to get to $100 million and beyond. I hope you share and enjoy. I run a writing company.

I write for celebrities and CEOs because I took your advice and I started writing for people that have more money. And gosh. Solve rich people problems. They pay better. Yes. But I also publish my own books. And I've traditionally published with publishers. And I've done it really well.

But in the future, going forward, I want to publish my own books. Self-publish my own books. But I have analysis paralysis because there's so many options to execute a strategy. Sometimes I don't know which option to pick to just execute the strategy. from my next book. And my first goal is just to sell a thousand e-book copies. Nothing is even grand. Yeah. Okay. And then when I settle on a strategy, I get scared because I don't know if it's going to work. So two questions, real quick. So when you say you have so many different strategy you can pick from, we're talking about different topics for the book. Is that what you're saying? I know the book topic,

but different options to execute a plan. So I can use quick click funnels to execute a plan to sell a thousand copies. Yeah, just selling it. Yeah, just selling the thousand copies. That's my goal. I want to be able to sell a thousand copies for my next self-published book. Have you read the book yet? Have you written the book yet? No, but the book will be your, that's an easy part. I'm a writer, so that's an easy part. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, you're asking the universe for a guarantee that it will never give you. And you're waiting for a response in order to move forward from a universe that stays silent. And so you're just talking to dead people and waiting for response. So like, the thing is, the person you should be talking to is the marketplace, because they will always respond.

Like when you knock, they will open the door and they will tell you to fuck off or they, you know, open the door and they'll let you in. But either way, they'll open the door, right? Let's play this out the other way. What are you afraid of? Because, like, you seem very upbeat and you see, like, obviously you've written this, you've written stuff before. And so, like, I'm not worried about your writing still given what you've said so far. So like, what are you afraid of? Okay, so let's, let's play it out. So let's play it out. So let's say you have your book and you pick path one. It doesn't even matter what it is. Pick Path one. Okay, so what happens. So you put it on Amazon. You're like, I'm just going to put it on Amazon and see what happens. All right. That's the easy path. Okay, then what? Yeah, I'm scared that I won't reach my number. I'm scared that I'll fail at the goal. And then what happens? But then I still won't know how to do it. And I'm also scared because I have self-published a couple books in the past that didn't reach my goal. And I know that feels like I don't want to feel like that again.

Yeah. So let me do this then. Let's reframe this because I have a lot of experience with setting goals. All right, so I feel pretty confident to talk about the topic. make the big goals that you set things that you could absolutely control. Like, you cannot control how many people buy your book, but you can control the amount of actions that you're willing to take that would make it unreasonable that you don't sell 1,000 copies.

And so then you can judge how successful you were by how much you adhered to the actions that you committed to. And so if I were to say, you have to sell 10,000 books, not 1,000 books, 10,000 books. You have to, or you lose your life in 12 months. You just die. That's it. You die. What would you do?

Knock on every door. Okay. You have the leads book, right? There's eight different ways to advertise, right? And so you know that the more people find out about your stuff, the more people buy it. And you know, there's only four things you can do, right? You can talk to people 101. You can make content.

You can run ads. Right? Or you can get other affiliates. You can get referrals once they read your book. Or you can get agencies. Or you can get employees that I'll be out. That's what you got. Yeah.

Okay. And so if you know that you have to take those actions, then what you have to, wouldn't success be, so let's play this out a year. Let's say that you did absolutely everything on the plan, like your plan of advertising, of letting people know about it for a year and you did everything and you sold 999 books. Would you consider it a failure? No, that would be a win. Okay. Now, if you sold 90 books, I just want to reframe this because honestly, the thing that you're talking about is something that so many people deal with. And it's because you want to control things. You want to control the outcome and you're saying, I'm only willing to pay this price if there's this outcome,

but you're seeing the outcome as the outcome rather than the skills that you develop along the way as the outcome, because I can promise you this, this will not be the last book you write. Right. And so if you get to 100 sales instead of 1,000, then what's going to happen realistically is that you will figure out the one thing or two things that actually work to sell books, and then I'll say, do 100 times more of that. And you can either choose to do that on this book or you can choose to do it on the next book. But the idea of like, I'm setting this thousand, because you could have set a million books.

It doesn't really matter. You're just setting it. You're making up a number and saying, this I feel is reasonable for me. But instead of making the number reasonable, make the actions that would lead to that the reasonable thing. Like, what can you commit to four hours a day of promotion? Yeah. Okay. Then make that the commitment.

And I'll promise you that if you do that every day, one at the end of the year, you will feel accomplished because you actually did what you said you were going to do. and I will tell you that the marketplace will also always recognize someone who puts four hours of work every single day into one thing. Just what I need it. Thank you. Just promise me that you'll actually just commit to doing the work. If you do that, you do like, I have to sell 10,000 books. What would I actually do to do that?

Yeah. Find somebody who has an audience that is relative to the topics that you're talking about and reach out to that. Now it's okay, if I got one person, they sold 20 books, okay, how do I reach out to a thousand people? Do all have my audience? If you do that, you'll probably sell more than a thousand books. But you just got to do four hours every day.

Thank you. Thank you. Good luck with the book. I know how much work goes into that. So I have two topics that I kind of want to, you know, treat with you. And, you know, you titled This Advice for Hard Days. And it's been tough lately. About three months ago, my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer two months ago.

My girlfriend, the girl that I told, whether I was going to marry, kind of left. And then two weeks ago, I traveled to London to speak at Europe's biggest business event. And on the first day of my arrival, my granddad passed away. And so I had to basically speak in front of thousands of people and keep my smile and then travel back and bury him. Did you? So yesterday, I did. I did.

I did all of it. And so the question is, well, you know, yes. Yesterday, everything just kind of hit me because now I'm back in the office and I'm making the calls and I'm trying to deal with everything. But the question is, how do I maintain my composure and kind of stay strong? Right? Because it's a tough period. Well, first off, I'm sorry that you're going through that. That being said, honestly, you've got a lot of good stuff going for you.

So this is a, I feel like, almost a relatively easier one for me to take, given what you just said. Like, you just asked a question, how do I do something I've already done before? Which is you got in front of thousands of people and gave a presentation and had a small, mile and you crushed it, despite the fact that you had other circumstances, right? Yeah. And so you ask the question, how do I do something that I already've done? You've already done it. Like, what you're saying is, how do I, how do I keep living?

And you keep living by keeping living. It's the same thing with breakups, right? It's like, I've heard this quote, and I heard it from Layla, I think, the first time. Like, the amount of time it takes you get over someone, do you know how long it is? There's a math equation for it. there's a great math equation for it you'll love it it's exactly as long as you decide it takes and what i'm going to say is going to sound really dark right now so i want you to take this the right take you the way i mean it all right which is that you just had you had three deaths right

you had death of a life that you thought you were going to have with a girlfriend and then you had the death of two different grandparents right you have three deaths but well uh on the positive side my grandmother is still battling with it oh okay she's still bad well wait we're we're plus one all right so only two deaths now But sure, we can even play it out. All right? On a long enough time horizon, she will eventually pass away, right? It's going to happen.

Yeah. And the thing is, is that you are already standing it. Like, you're asking, how do I stand it? But you are standing here already. Like, you are evidence to the fact, you are, you talking to me today is evidence of the success that you're asking for. You're already one, dude. You're showing up and you're working every day.

You're coming here to ask questions to actually still trying to grow yourself. Like, the stuff that, the stuff that you're, you go through become the stories that you will someday tell. And no one likes epic heroes without epic monsters. And so you have to go through the rocky cut scene. You have to have those periods of time where you doubt yourself, where everyone else doubts yourself, where the walls are crumbling around you because have you ever read Shoe Dog, Phil Knight's story about Nike? Even if you haven't, the entire story is just him getting kicked in the nuts for 30 years. That's the whole story. And then he's like, oh yeah, and then I built Nike. Right. And now if he had just said, yeah, I started this company and everyone

loved it and all my suppliers were on time and I just scaled straight and as the money came in, I just bought more inventory and then we just went public. No one would care because it's not relatable. And the thing is that when you die, the only thing that will remain is the story that people will tell of you. And so wouldn't you want that to be an epic story? Yeah. And so the things that you're going through are required for the person you want to be and for the goals that you have. And how you are acting in the present already proves the thing that you're claiming that you want. tomorrow you're going to wake up and you go to work. And the next day you're going to wake up and you're going to go to work.

And then you're going to text and it's going to say that your grandmother's cancer is getting worse. And what are you going to do? You're going to get back to work. You're just going to keep doing the stuff. Like there's no magic bullet. You just keep going. Because either you keep going or you die.

And if you don't die, you succeeded. I would just say stop. Just don't judge yourself on how you feel. Judge yourself by what you do despite how you feel. So you can feel shitty. You can wake up and have a terrible day and still show up with a smile in front of the 1,000 people. And so if you can do it with 1,000 people, you can do it with 1.

And that first one is the person that looks at you in the mirror in the morning. And now when it comes to business, I just have a real quick question. So I've built an Instagram audience to over 100,000. I speak about sales and marketing. I've been doing it for the past two years. I've been posting kind of like every day. I know the content game, but the one thing that I'm struggling to balance is,

you know how you say, give, give, give until they ask. And, you know, I love it, but sometimes it takes a while until they ask, right? And cash flow still needs to come in. And I run a service-based business. And so how do I balance it out without tiring my audience? Because I also, my community is known for,

you know, really being in the comments, chatting with me and being there for me. So how do I do it? So if you want to have a one step away from like just giving forever, right? Is that you you give in public, sell in private, which is when people respond to your stories, right? When people DM you, like those are conversations that they're usually asking or they're like they're basically asked when people ask questions there. You can still define a scope and say, hey, like at a certain point, I have like I've given you all this value.

Use all the free stuff. If you want more than that, I'd be happy to hop on a call and see if I can help you more. right so it's not it's not like everyone buy this thing right now right you're not you're not like getting super aggressive about you still publicly just keep pumping all the goodwill and the value that you are and that'll grow your audience and increase goodwill and all of those things that's what you want you're going to keep doing that it's just that you could still have a call to action that's just in the in the in the in the comment section or put a story up that says hey by the way if you need help with that thing i'm happy to help like those are those are very light touch things because i understand

you got to pay bills. I understand that. And so you can put those things out without necessarily damaging the goodwill that I think you're that you're obviously building. To hang in there, you'll be fine, you'll get through it, and then it'll be a story that you'll someday tell. Yeah. And thank you for everything that you do, not just for me, but for everyone else. Because I think you're marking a new path. And that's kind of cool. I appreciate you, thank you. What's the one question that you wish you would have asked yourself earlier in your entrepreneurial career when faced with a little bit of uncertainty and direction. 90% of my business is in person. Online,

that's the kind of the direction of whether or not I really want to go towards. More specifically, you know, creating almost like a Wadify version of kettlebells, just trying to figure out what the next step is going to be. So me asking myself a question is always going to be different than you asking something for you because we're different people, right? And we have different goals. And so everything usually ladders up to like, what's the goal? What's the why? And so, Like right now, do you have like a monetary goal? Do you have an impact goal? And believe me, I have no issues if you're like, I just want to make a certain amount of money. Like I get that. Because any of the businesses that you just mentioned, so whether it's the brick and mortar business or you want to start doing training for those people online or it's doing the Wattify version, which is basically no service and just providing workouts and whatnot. All of those are potential businesses, but pursuing all of them at the same time will virtually guarantee that you don't succeed at any of them. And so the biggest issue when you're starting out is just picking the path and being willing to commit to it with the uncertainty that comes with it. Because every

entrepreneurial path has uncertainty. And that's what makes entrepreneurship part. It's literally the not knowing and the pain of suffering consequences for ignorance. For things that you've learned now that you're like, if I had only known then what I know now, and that's every entrepreneur until the day they die. And it's just wishing that it were different that causes a lot of the struggle. So which of these things of the three that I just mentioned, like, which of those is the one that lights you up the most. I mean, in-person training, obviously, like, we live in a small beach town community where everybody knows everybody and it's fun, it's family, it's convenient. I will say there's that comfort factor that it almost in one scope is very beneficial because it is so comfortable,

but in reality, too, like comfort is the enemy of achievement and growth. So it's like, I know like the comfortable side is the in-person and it's the community and it's fun, it's family friends, whereas the uncomfortable, more challenging, but also very big picture wise would be the online going full tilt that side. Now, I've breached into the gap of like three day launches, four day launches of small ticket, low ticket offers. But in terms of, you know, trying to scale and make an impact on the world. The world's really big. So that's always really hard. Because I remember I had, we had an event with gym owners and somebody stood up. I said, what's your mission? They're like, I want to impact one million lives. I was like, did you have

a brick and mortar location that has like 200 members? Like let's, like if you really want to do that, then you would actually just, you would, you would approach it very differently, or you'd have a time rise and that's the rest of your life, right? It's like one or the other. If you're like, I want to do that in three years, you wouldn't start with a brick and mortar location. And so the thing is that what you said earlier is like you feel comfortable and it sounds like you want to grow. I just want to make sure that's correct before I like, you're like, it's correct. I'm assuming it's correct. I'm assuming you're like an underlying assumption, at least that was unspoken. And I just want to draw attention to it, which was, you're like the brick and mortar thing is comfortable. It's family, it's friendly, it's fun. I'm assuming it's profitable. I'm assuming you're making some money doing that. The thing. The thing is just doing more of what you're currently doing and saying like, how do I open a second location or how do I, you know, like how do I open like five locations over the next five years or whatever it is? That would produce probably just as much of a challenge as going online would, except you already have two years of learnings on how to run that business where you have none in the online space. You always just want to stack knowledge within a specific vertical so that you just go deeper and deeper on it because that's where the compounding returns happen. Like the richest

people that I know have been in the same space for 40 years. They just know everything there is to know about the space. And like, that's how they've made their money. You can either open a location that's not necessarily a beach down and test your metal and see how good you are at actually scaling a team, you know, hiring somebody else, seeing if somebody else, if you can actually incentivize people, build a culture so that people want to work for you, that you can recreate the success. And that'll show you whether the success that you had was because of you or because of your ability as a, as a businessman, right? Because like you can be a charismatic, razzle-dazzle, dancing bear. in any brick and mortar business, and it will work. It'll work. Service of the smile always works,

right? And it's just hard to scale because most people don't care as much as owners do. But if you can create the model that has the incentives and the training in place and the procedures that can consistently create that five out of five experience that allow a second location to have the same amount of success as your first location, then you have something that absolutely can scale and create lots of enterprise value over time. So I would say either scale that or, you're going to basically dial down your in person to as little as humanly possible of your time and then go all in on the online thing. But trying to do both will be very hard because what will happen is you'll start to do some online stuff. You'll start to subtraction. Your gym will start going down, but that's your

main source of income. Then you'll hop back to the gym. The online will dip and you'll go back and forth. And so that's why I'm so big on just committing to whatever thing is because any of them would work, but you'd have to be all in on it. The one pillar that I guess I failed to mention was the freedom and flexibility. As being a a seasonal town where I'm at. It's like being able to essentially create a life where it allows me to own and be at the brick and mortar for say four months out of a year and then from there being able to live elsewhere and then from there because at the end of the day, I don't have much responsibility here aside from just the gym. I don't have anything else really that's time me to home.

But that's where I guess my North Star has been for a long period of time. Let me just give you step one here. I own a ton of brick and mortar locations as is. Like right now I've got 70 stores that I have own between different companies that are brick and mortar locations. I'm not in any of them. And so like the idea that you need to go online in order to not be in person is a fallacy. That's not true. Like you can own your gym because like if you were to open a second location, you wouldn't be there either. Right. And so the easiest way to test this 1.0 test is like if you can step out and just not go to the gym for a year, then maybe you can do the other thing. And if you haven't gone to the gym for a year, then maybe you'll do the you'll do a second gym. And so I think no matter

what path you do, this is probably a perfect end for this, which is you either are going to do the online thing after you figure out how to outsource the gym or delegate it and hire people who are awesome, or you decide you're going to do a second location. Either way, you're going to have to start with outsourcing the first gym. Hey guys, love that you're listening to the podcast. If you ever want to have the video version of this, which usually has more effects, more visuals, more graphs, you know, drawn out stuff. Sometimes it can help hit the brain centers in different ways. You can check on my YouTube channel. It's absolutely free. Go check that out if that's what you are into. And if not, keep enjoying the show. Let's say I want to start a business. I can have a very

grand vision of the business. So like Apple or Microsoft, they had this vision of like changing the whole world. How do we keep working on this business for years when we're worried that it might get outdated because of a new AI or a technology? Or in other words, what do we do when we think our project might not be useful in the long run? I mean, what you're talking about is strategy. Like, these are strategic decisions that we have to make. Like, you make a big bet on where you think the market is going to be, not where it is today, if you're going to go after something that's that big.

But do you have investors right now? I'm an entrepreneur, if you say that. If you look at the companies that you just referenced, right? Like, you look at Bezos with Amazon, you look at Zuckerberg, you look at Microsoft. every one of those guys started well off and well capitalized. Okay. So Bezos was an investment banker from Wall Street. Bill Gates' parents were really well off and he was well off and whatnot.

Zuckerberg went to Harvard. Same deal. If you want to really go after that, you would have to try and recreate the conditions. And I think that right now, the likelihood that that happens, given your current situation, is low. And I'm not saying that to dissuade you. I'm saying because I want to be realistic with you, which is that you need to get your own head above water. Because like right now, if you're, if you don't have the ability to make money on your own, right, from a entrepreneurial perspective, like you need to get your head above water. Because the only way that you can stick with something for the required amount of time in order for it to become world changing, like we're not talking even a decade.

I mean, those companies, they're, you know, Facebook's 20 something years old, right? Just like context. And so the only way to get there is be able to breathe while you're going. And so I think that from a one-on-one perspective, starting a simple, starting a simple. business that you can generate income on that you know you can you can learn the basics of business before trying to take on the biggest competitors in the most well capitalized arena absolutely on your own i see not to say that that's impossible it's just incredibly improbable given the circumstances that you just laid out right it would be really romantic for me to be like dude

go chase your dreams go do that but like i also would rather have you in a year making money on your own so that you can breathe because you might find out that if you actually start making money on your own you might just like that Because right now it's just the idea of the status of the dream, that like it's an amorphous idea. But the amount of pain and suffering that you have to be able to put up with and not make money through that whole period time, really tough. Wouldn't that cause another issue where because you decide to choose to solve a problem that is small, like smaller than the grand vision, then you won't be able to scale much? That's not necessarily true. And also, every one of those companies starts small.

Like Facebook wasn't like, we want to be the social media platform for the whole world. he wanted to map colleges. So they start with a niche and then they expand outwards. And so you'd want to much more narrowly define your problem before you go attack it because what you're going to try and do is build something that's going to be everything for everyone and it's going to be nothing for nobody. Strategy is prioritization. It's allocating limited resources against unlimited options. And so you have unlimited options, but you have very limited resources. And so in order to be successful, you have to narrow the problem that you're trying to solve so that you can allocate the small amount of resources you have to adequately solve that problem completely. And then from adequately solving that problem completely, like Amazon started with books and Facebook started with colleges, right? You've solved and then you can go adjacent. Right.

So right now it just sounds exciting to say this, but like it's not reality. You have to pick one problem that you're going to get really good at solving and that's it. And then you can have an idea that in the future, but real, real, so many things are going to change between now and then. And there's so much luck that has to concur. Because if you think about this zooming all the way out, the biggest companies in the world have super well capitalized people who are the best in the world. made a good call and had luck. Because if you're number one, you have all the things plus luck. Like if you're number one in the whole world, it's all of it plus luck.

The market moves in a direction that you never know, right? And so I would rather you just stick to a problem that you know you can absolutely solve given the resources you have. Learn the skills, make income. And then from there, you can go solve an adjacent problem or you might decide, you know what? I like this and I'm going to keep going with it. Thank you very much. That was really awesome. You bet you're on.

Good luck, Brad. All right. So my question is basically I've been an online fitness coach for last like three years now. And like even progressing from like the first 10 K month, three years ago, in like 25K a month a couple months ago. I kind of felt like I got a little near the more successful I got, even though I do have a pretty big audience now. Like maybe you went through something like that, something like that or maybe you haven't in that sense. I was just wondering like maybe how you got over that self-loomability because I feel like that's kind of holding me back. I want to make sure that I want to clearly understand your question.

So you're saying that being lonely is the thing that is holding you back. My lifestyle changes. Obviously, you're going to lose from the way the conversation is a lot different than events, but just like especially if I'm going in person and being a full-time, in-person training and going to line on top of that, just a lot more lonely kind of a lot of different aspects of losing that. You just have to join a community, man. Like, just straight up. Like you just need to get around people who are doing the same thing as you.

And so that might mean physically moving to a different area. Because right now I'm assuming online pays your bills, correct? Yeah, right. So if online pays your bills, then you can literally be anywhere in the world. And so where do you live right now? I'm Evanston, Alberta. I'm planning to move to Kelowna. It's more like a fitness town in Canada,

maybe two more in style. I would do that. And I would also join a bunch of online communities of people who are like trying to make money in the fitness space. Because you'll find a ton of other people who are doing the same thing as you that are on the path that are ahead of you, that are the same as you that are behind you and you, you can get a little bit of some, some fulfillment from helping out some of the people behind you, but you can also get help from the people ahead of you who are, you know, because you show that you'll execute and you'll do what they say, and you'll, and you'll grow. But this is,

the nice news is that this problem is super solved. Like, you just got to get around people and you got to be willing to be rejected. I mean, it's just like fitness sales. It's just like friend sales. It's the same thing. You go, you go on a bunch of dates. They're just friend dates, you know, go hang out, go get it lift in. I mean, it's, it's, fitness. So like just go ask a bunch of people to get a lift in and you'll see who's cool and you'll see who is in it. Worst case near you got a workout. Yeah. Have you ever just kind of experienced that? I had to kind of leveled up and leveled up. I know you are. As long as you keep growing, this is not going to stop. You're going to find new friends and if you keep growing,

you'll pass them. And then you'll find new friends that are above them and you'll pass them. And you'll just keep going. And so it just depends on how, like what you see the role of friends as in your life. And so, you know, for me, I just want my requirement for friend is necessarily that they make the same or more money than me at all is do they make me better do they make me better do they have my best intentions in heart just already two incredibly difficult things to pass but if someone passes both those things then they are a friend and so i would just use that as a limit test like is this person making me better and do they have my best you know incentive at heart yeah and how is making friends i guess now because obviously you're a higher level and things are different

with a social status and all that. I mean, for four is probably different. So do you kind of have the same status now. What is it kind of? Dude, it's harder for me than it is for you. No, for real, it is. But the thing is that most of the my closest friends don't live here. Like, don't live in the same physical area that I do.

Most of the closest friends that I have live all over. And so I see most of my friends once or twice a year. And that's it. And I work in the meantime. The thing is that, like, the higher up you go here, like, and I'll just tell you something like from my level, whatever you want to call that. All the friends I have, everyone completely, like, there is zero social obligations for anything. Like, none. And if I don't respond to a text for three days, there is zero drama.

It's not even acknowledged. It's just we know that busy people understand that busy people are doing shit. And so if everyone you have, everyone who's in your world understands that you're trying to take this hill, than if they're truly your friend, then they want you to take the hill more than they want you to respond to their text or come out with them for the weekend. Like, I just got invited to a seven-day thing

with a couple friend that Lela and I both really, really adore. But we'll probably not be able to do it because we have so much stuff that we were doing at that same time. And I really want to go. But I also really want to do this other stuff. And I know that I will feel worse about myself

if I don't have this other stuff done. And so we're going to say that I can't go and that's going to be it and they're not going to hold it against me. And so until you find friends who are 100% aligned with you achieving your goals who are making you better and want you to hit your goals, then you just keep looking. But the thing is like everybody goes through the period that you're at. Like I think I made a road a tweet about this, but like there is this lonely period that always happens when you start growing because it happens is that you're too big for the old

friend group, but you're not quite big enough for the group that you want to get into. right so you kind of have this path in the middle where you just kind of like keep trudging along but like every single person who's accomplished anything material has been in your exact same shoes and you just keep going and you keep going you keep networking you enter you go into the communities you see the people who are adding value to those communities and you message them you find the givers because givers recognize givers almost immediately you can see the people who are always giving more above and beyond and you can understand they get the game and so like in that first meeting if they're like let me see if I can do this for you let me like take care of you

care of this for you, let me help you in this way, rather than like, hey, could you help me with this? Like, wrong person. But if you just start by giving to a whole bunch of people who are where you want to be, you'll get more back, even if nine out of ten don't give you anything back. Provide shitloads of value. People will message you. And then be like, hey, let's hop on a Zoom. Let's grab a Zoom lunch, whatever. And so, like, you can have a ton of friend dates or whatever that you meet people and see if they have game. And if they have game, then you keep in touch. Because you're making them better too. I appreciate everything. You bet, brother. Kill the content games.

After doing full-time entrepreneurship for three years and, you know, raising a family, I got four small children all under the age of five. I found myself in a very hard position where I had to go back to a nine to five. I would say entrepreneurship is like, like you said, it's hard and I know what hard feels like. But after discussing it with my wife, like, I felt like this was like the right decision. after getting myself into business debt and other things like that. And I didn't never have a paycheck to live on, you know? So how do I know when it's like, like, how do I get back into entrepreneurship?

Like now I'm just running my stuff on the side. So, for example, right when I was laid off three years ago, I was doing taxes and I just doing like bookkeeping. Then I worked my way up starting to offer accounting services. And then I leveled up and I started looking at. going after higher leverage, like now I started doing CFO services. And I went through that Valley of Despair thing. And that's probably why I'm at where I'm at right now, you know, just being completely honest. I appreciate you being candid and upfront about it, because otherwise this wouldn't be very valuable because you tell me a bunch of fake information.

I'll give you a response to fake information. It wouldn't matter for either of us. So thank you for being honest. That being said, honestly, you're in a pretty good spot. And I'll tell you why. So you have a valuable skill set that will always be in demand because a lot of people don't want to do money stuff. So people don't do budgets, people don't do bookkeeping, people don't do CFO work, people want to do financials, projections, forecast. No one wants to do any of that stuff. And you do and you're good at it.

So presumably you're good at because you keep doing it. I'll leave it at that. I'm going to assume that for the sake of our call, right? So one, I think it was wise that you got a job because you have a wife, you have four kids. I think that was a smart noggin move. Okay. Now, that being said, there is going to be a conversation that you probably have to have to have to have to have your wife about what, because your nights and weekends either are going to have to go to family or they're going to have to go to the new thing. And so I think that you need to have a candid conversation with her and say, listen, my prime, and I'm putting words in your mouth here. So this is if I were in your shoes. I would say, as a man, my primary drive is to provide. And right now I feel like I'm failing you. and I want to lead our children by example so that when they are 20 or 30 and they're thinking about making that jump, I can speak to it because I wasn't afraid to take the risk again. Because in gymnastics, as soon as you fall off the pommel horse, even if you twist or break your ankle, you know what they do? They try and get you right back on the horse again. And they do that because if you don't and you take enough time off, you start developing these fears around getting back

on and you never get on again. And so they want you to get back on the horse. And right now, you got bucked by the entrepreneurial horse and that's okay it happens it's part of the game right like it's the it's the scene in rocky 17 or whatever fucking rocky it is where he's like it's not about how hard you can hit but it's about hard you can get hit and keep going forward right and so you got hit big you know big whoop everybody gets hit everyone fucking loses all the time i lost everything twice before this time right and so like you've lost everything once you still you still owe me one right You can tell your wife I said that. And so let's get into tactics.

All right now, in my opinion, the issue that you missed is you didn't know how to advertise. You didn't know how to promote. And so you have the service. You just got to let people know about it. And so you were full time as an entrepreneur, but you probably weren't spending four hours a day promoting. And so when you are... Right. And so that's what you need to do.

So nights and weekends for you is you log out of work, go home, kiss the dog, high five the kids. And then you spend four hours promoting. And promoting is you make content, you reach out to people, or you run ads. And given your financial situation, it's going to be making content and reaching out to people. That's it. Literally, if that's what you're, you start your timer, four hours, you make content, you reach out to people. And you do that for four straight hours every day.

You do that. You're going to have more business in the next six months to even know what to do with. That's it. That's all you have to do. Like, the thing is that you're in a good spot because you have the skill that there's already demand. Like, I don't have to test your idea. You're trying to provide bookkeeping services.

It's a commoditized service. If you do a good job, you're on time, like you are responsive, you deliver things on the first of the month, people will want to do business with you and they'll stay with you. And so you just got to let people know about it faster because I'm guessing that your rate was based on referrals.

You had one or two customers, maybe three, and by the time you get one new referral every two or three months, one would drop and you stayed there until eventually you couldn't. Right. I'm guessing that was the story. Right. So you just need to increase your sales velocity, which means you got to let more people know about it and you got to learn how to sell.

Because it was just you, right? Did you have any employees? No. I had a virtual assistant during tax season, but yeah, it was mainly just me. Yeah. Then you have the easiest business in the world because 100% of the revenue is profit. Right. It's just you for now.

And so you can absolutely get yourself to 10, 20 accounting clients. And you're going to be working like a dog at this point, but you'll be making way more than you are now. And then you'll have new problems because then your wife's like, I don't see you anymore. You're like, yeah, but now we're making three times of money and I will find a way to use the money to buy back some time. And you can do that. But ideally, like you're, like you already have the hard shit.

God. You're like six months away. Seriously. Like, I don't normally say that. Like, you're six months away. You got to, you got to reach out to, let's call it, let's call it 10,000 people. You reach out to 10,000 people, you'll have the, you'll have the business you want. Because I'm telling you right now, as a business owner, dude, the amount of crappy accountants and bookkeepers that are out there outnumber the good ones 100 to 1. Like, no one's stoked about their bookkeeper. So like, like, it's not hard. And like, think about it. Those guys don't, like, those guys suffer the same issue that you have is they don't know how to promote them. themselves. They're not business people. They're bean counters. And so like you've been you've been in being counter mode and you got to get in you got to get in promoter mode, especially as a solo entrepreneur. It's all promotion in the beginning. So would you suggest just mainly cold outreach or should I try to do content or just go straight cold outreach? You can do both. I mean, do one post a day.

One post a day. See who interacts with it. So who likes it, who comments on it. You can message all those people. And then you can reach out as well. But the thing is, is with your profession, finding someone who has an adjacent audience. So, you know, if someone who's an HR company or a recruiting company, right? Like, if you can figure out a way to just work with them, they already have a whole engine of people coming in and just see if you can just get off the backside and give them a kickback just for intros. Like, that's a super productive way of leveraging the amount of reachouts. Like, you can just reach out to 10,000 business owners and you'll get your nut.

But you can probably reach out to 1,000 B2B businesses and see if you can structure a partnership with them that they can refer you business and you refer it back to them. But yes, content and outreach. And real talk, the content is probably not in the beginning where you're going to get the majority of your business. I just want to just prepare you for that. But the reason that you're going to be making the content in the beginning is that so when you do reach out, people will go to your page and they will consume your content and then they will decide to respond based on the quality. So think about that stuff as lead nurture more than lead gen in the beginning. Over time, you'll get better at it. It'll start generating business, but it might take you a year or two. Like, it takes time to get good at that.

you've inspired me and that's the reason why I took the jump in the beginning. So I appreciate you. Well, I appreciate you for taking the jump. And I will ask you to trust me one more time, which is that four hours a day, have the conversation with your wife, 10,000 reachouts. And let me know in six months. She's watching. So she knows. All right. Let Celeste take his 10,000 reachouts. That's it. Like on the other side of 10,000 reachouts is you making the money that you want to make and having the skill of promotion and sales. That's it. I just want you to know. And I hope that Moses Nation exists here for this one reason, that like you were not alone.

There are other people going through it. And so despite that it may feel lonely, you were not alone. Keep being one of zero.