Are You Ready to be Your Own Boss?
Are You Ready to be Your Own Boss?
- Henry and David share their experiences with making the transition from the corporate world (working for someone else) to the small business world (working for themselves).
- Their motivations included a desire for control and freedom. The freedom of time, location, relationship, money and purpose.
- David, in particular, has been inspired by the teachings of Dan Sullivan and is a client of Strategic Coach.
- The delusion and false sense of security that came with their corporate jobs was harder to see and appreciate at first, and certainly in hindsight they now understand that was part of what kept them working for someone else.
- Some of the emotions we experienced when we were in the corporate world included being controlled and oppressed. There were aspects, however, of their jobs that they enjoyed and still miss to an extent.
- They were both frustrated with the politics of the traditional work environment.
- Henry expresses it as “you are either okay with creating for others, or you have to to create for yourself.”
- There is a big need for products and services in the world. The world is full of opportunities outside of the corporate world.
- Fear is what held them back, but now that they have made the leap into entrepreneurship they realize the limitless possibilities.
- Risk can be used as an excuse. Although there is certainly the real risk of financial failure. But the real risk that holds people back is the risk of personal failure and the embarrassment that results from that.
- Henry mentioned this quote from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in the book “Bold”: “Many people misperceive what good entrepreneurs do. Good entrepreneurs don’t like risk. They seek to reduce risk. Starting a company is already risky…so you systematically eliminate risk in those early days.”
- Read the transcript of this episode here.
Resources:
Books mentioned in this episode:
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Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis
Related Episodes:
Since the release of Episode 1 “Are You Ready To Be Your Own Boss”, we have released additional episodes on this topic including the following series of three episode which break down the topic into Ready, Willing and Able. You find links to these related episodes, focused on helping you start your first small business, bellow:
Transcript:
The following is a full transcript of this episode. This transcript was produced by an automated system and may contain some typos and some other minor inaccuracies.
Are You Ready to be Your Own Boss?
0:00:05.3 Henry Lopez: Welcome to this special episode of The How of Business. This is a re-release of episode number one, which were originally released in March of 2016, I have edited some to make it tighter and more concise, but it’s still great and relevant information for you, if you’re at a position right now where you’re thinking about becoming your own boss, if you’re in the corporate world, for example, and you’ve been thinking about it, dreaming about it, just you’re at that point now where you just can’t take it anymore and you’re ready to make that transition. And this episode is to help you think through some of the reasons why myself and my co-host, David Begin, decided to make the transition from very good jobs in the corporate world to starting our own businesses. So here is now the re-release edited version of episode 1, are you ready to be your own boss?
0:01:14.5 Henry Lopez: So this episode, to that point is about that transition in that question that both David and I had when we were working in a corporate environment of… Am I ready to be my own boss? So this episode is really targeted at those listeners who are still in the corporate world, thinking about making the transition, our thinking… I’ve been thinking about it maybe for some time or asking yourself that question, you think you might wanna do this, but you’re not sure you have questions, you don’t know about the risk. So this episode is for you. It won’t be the only episode that we record on this topic, but this will get this conversation started and we’ll share some of our ideas, some of what we went through and our stories as to how we got there because we were not born entrepreneurs. We took the corporate route initially in our careers and then transitioned into becoming our own boss, so… That’s the topic for tonight. Good. Yeah, so we’re gonna start off with how we transition from corporate America to being your own boss… Yeah, I’d like to start with a story. One of many. So for me, certainly that motivation, as we shared in the initial episode and we introduced ourselves, that motivation was always there for me, but I didn’t know how to get there, I didn’t know how to get the opportunity to become an entrepreneur was always a desire, but then I was very fortunate to go into and end up in a career in sales in the high-tech software industry where I was making very good money, certainly for…
0:02:46.1 Henry Lopez: Compared to what I was making previous… So I was very fortunate in that regard, was had really early success and continued success, but even throughout that, there were moments in particular, and one I recall very vividly is I was at a software company where I had done very well, and in fact, myself and the primary sales guy that I worked with, we were a team… We were named number one team number one sales and pre-sales person that year, and had a phenomenal year. I worked a very hard travel all over the country to get to that level because you know how it is, you gotta touch enough deals, you gotta work enough opportunities, I’d worked extremely hard, but we were at the point both… My friend Mark is who I’m referring to and myself, were at the point where we were ready to move on to another opportunity that would compensate this more, and I remember when I turned in my resignation, one of the owners of the company who happened to office out of my same office called me a great person and I really had a lot of respect for him, and at that point, all of a sudden they were offering me a significant increase in salary, a promotion and position, a whole different pay scale, significantly greater money.
0:03:57.1 Henry Lopez: And I thought to myself, We were… Was that a year ago or two years now, or three years that I’ve been working extremely hard, delivering for this company, and it really began to crystallize for me that regardless of how well I might be compensated, I’m always at the mercy of somebody else setting a ceiling for me, someone else determining my value, and that really helped us start to crystallize that in my head, no matter where I ended up going, and I did leave and went to another company and I was very fortunate there as well, but there was always that nagging at me of that. Someone else determining. Determining what my ceiling was. And that to me, was one of those moments that I remember very clearly. Did you realize at that point you wanted to own your own business or you just realized this wasn’t… This is something I didn’t wanna do anymore. Well, I definitely realize it at that point because that was back… At that point, I still owned on the side my Pizza franchise business, but I did so with a who managed it full-time, so I definitely by then new…
0:05:04.6 Henry Lopez: But this began to crystallize why it was that I needed to make the transition, it just… It was further proof, further validation that I needed to make the transition. But it was still very hard because I was making very good money, the pizza franchises were not making me enough money to leave the job I had, so I was caught in that trap, which I think a lot of people are as to when can I financially afford to make that leap. And so that’s where I was at that point. Interesting, so let’s talk about motivation and what are those things that we think are motivators to becoming your own boss, to taking that leap and taking on that risk. But I’m going to come back to that whole concept. What are some of those things… And I think you and I are on the same page and that we’ve crystallized that based on our learnings, our experience and others who have coached us and things that we have read, that it’s about control and freedom, and that might be one and the same, but it’s that freedom over how much you make… Freedom of time. Freedom of place.
0:06:15.1 S2: Freedom of relationship. And freedom of purpose. As I like to say, I wanna be able to choose what I do, where I do it, with whom I do it, when I do it. And for what purpose? And that’s whatever my personal proposes, right, is that in line with how you look at it?
David Begin: Absolutely, and I think these four freedoms came from Dan Sullivan’s book, The four freedoms, and he talks a lot as workshops about one reason people become entrepreneurs is because they look for these particular freedoms and you need to continue developing these freedoms over time. He’s got another one, the freedom of money, is what he puts in, he comes with the freedom time, freedom, money, relationships and purpose or the fore he uses. That’s one of the reasons why people take the risks, become entrepreneurs, but they also sometimes get themselves in such a situation where they don’t have any of these freedoms, and they backed themselves into something that wasn’t quite what they thought it was gonna be. I’ll share a quick story about my experience, so Henry and I have similar backgrounds in… Both had software backgrounds, working for software companies, doing very well, I sort of let the larger software companies and wanted to work for the startups, so I did a series of startups for about three years, I was working for one startup in California, commuting to California, probably three to four days a week.
0:07:34.8 David Begin: And I was also working on the car wash, and the product that we were working on wasn’t quite developed, people couldn’t quite get their heads around what it is we were selling or why they should pay any money for it. And so I sort of spent a lot of time at the same time working on the other business, the CEO was probably one of the most insane individuals, I think I’ve ever met, I got probably a handful of people, and he ranks up there in one of the top two or three, he had a big meeting trying to get everybody re-motivated and I said, You know what, okay, I’ll get motivated again, reconnect with what the company is trying to do and put myself back into it… That was like on a Thursday or Friday. I was flying back to California on Monday and got a call as I was walking down the concourse at the airport that they no longer needed me, they were gonna get rid of me, I just thought kind of re-dedicated myself to this particular company and this job I didn’t know where it was gonna go, but I was willing to put the time, energy and effort into it, and then just getting a call out of the blue saying When we no longer need you, and so don’t even bother getting on a flight.
0:08:45.0 S2: And I think that might have been the moment for me where I said, You know what, I’m not gonna put myself in a situation like this again, where this illusion of working for somebody, you trade a lot for that, and you do trade that illusion of security, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, but that was probably my epiphany moment… Yeah, that’s a tremendous story. And I’ve been in similar situations as well, so for us, fortunately for us, we were fairly relatively speaking and playable, in other words, you could have next week, the following week, and you probably did call a head hunter or reach out to other people in your network and gotten another job, right. So that wasn’t… So we were fortunate in that way, however, it just… I’m sure I just brought it home for you as to how arbitrary, how subjective and how at the whim of someone else you always are when you are working for someone else, regardless of how much value you’ve added, how much you’ve brought to the company, it doesn’t matter at the end of the day, you are just a part of it, and as soon as you’re no longer needed…
0:09:51.0 S2: Everybody is dispensable. Absolutely, absolutely, and corporate America is very good about creating that family environment, then we want to be part of… Would give you a lot of perks, which we had to talk about later on is what are some things you miss from corporate America, we all miss some things about it, they do create this environment to make you think that you’re part of a family. Yeah, yeah. And so I think that’s all… Like you said, it’s all created so that we buy into that, and for a lot of people that’s created, and if you’re listening to this and none of what we’re saying resonates, then you’re not ready… That’s what this episode is about, is about helping you understand that those feelings, if any of this resonates with you, then you are where we were at that point, you’re on that path, you are, and so what we’re hoping to accomplish with this episode and everything that we do with Levante [Business Group] is to help you through that process from the beginning of it from right now, where it’s an idea, where it’s a thought works of feeling all the way through you’ve started your business and you wanna grow it.
0:10:55.9 S2: That’s what we’re about. So if this resonates than you, that’s where we were, that’s where we were the same place, having those same thoughts, trying to separate ourselves from what we know now very clearly is that myth of job security, because that’s what we were indoctrinated to do. Our parents did, our society did, our schooling did that. What we were supposed to do was to get a good job. And for us, we were very fortunate, we had good careers, we were very employable, we got compensated very well, and yet nonetheless, these things were eating at us, eating at us and motivating us to move forward towards becoming your own boss. It’s like walking through the matrix, I think of how to describe it, but once you get on the outside of the matrix, then your eyes open and you see what things can be like on the other side, but when you’re in The Matrix, sometimes it’s difficult for you to see what things could be, but if you were to describe the way you felt… For me, I think about what were the feelings I had while I was working for corporations, what were the feelings that you had? ’cause I think something…
0:12:07.1 S2: You say people aren’t ready. But sometimes people are gonna have difficulty identifying what’s wrong… I knew there was something wrong when I worked in a corporate environment. There’s something… Something just didn’t sit well, I didn’t know what it was, but I just felt like something was wrong. Did you have any feelings like that or how did you feel or the… It’s a great point because that’s exactly what we’re trying to do in this first section, is lay out how we felt, and if you identify with this, then what do we do next is what… We’ll get to the women. But yeah, I felt all kinds of things. I felt like I felt when I was young, a kid at home in a not so great relationship with my father, and I felt controlled and oppressed… Sick of the whole thing, right? But on the flip side, I greatly enjoyed in that and what I did in my career… You mentioned what did I miss? The OSI, one of the things I always tell people that I miss the most about when we were in sales is two things, one is working with highly intelligent people and getting to be around those people and then challenging me to be better, and second was being on stage, I loved…
0:13:14.2 S2: And that’s why we still do a lot of that, I loved getting in front of an audience and presenting a concept, presenting a way of doing things and convincing that audience, and that’s what they needed, I got a charge out of that and love that. I still love that. So those things, I definitely miss, but everything else, the politics, the arbitrary control, the power games from one moment to the next, I might be part of the power group, the next moment… If somebody got fired, I was out. All of that was exhausting, it made me feel hopeless sometimes, it made me feel out of control, which is something that I do not like at all. And again, I always was the type of person that I needed to be able to dream about a bigger future, and so I felt like there was this ceiling, this cap on what I could do. I felt like I was always having to be worried about how someone was going to judge me, whether they were gonna value completely… When I could bring to the table, I always had to prove and sell myself, and that’s not who I am, so it was just an all-around feeling that would go anywhere from feeling depressed and hopeless about it, to thinking, Well, you know, I do enjoy this, so it was a lot of confusion as well, I think that’s how I felt.
0:14:36.8 S2: Yeah, I enjoyed it as well. There are a lot of things, there were the perks, obviously the travel, the trips you could take, so a lot of times the sales trips were tremendous, you got to go on some great vacations, but for me, there was that feeling like I can’t figure out how to navigate the organization, I can’t figure out how to get promoted up the organization, I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know who to talk to, I didn’t know how the politics were, so I just threw myself into work. I said, Well, if I could be the very best, then maybe I’ll get promoted to manager, maybe I’ll get to run a region, but that ever happened, and we were the best and points in time, and yet there was still owes that feeling and not just a feeling the reality that at any point in time, it was over, someone could decide, we don’t need you anymore. And that was it. So those are some of the things we felt… Some of the questions we were asking ourself at that point, I’ve said this various times in other episodes, but one of the ways that I’ve crystallized it when I chat with others and when I try to express it as I have come to look at it, is you either are at a point where you have to create for yourself or you continue to be okay with creating for someone else, and by create, I mean everything that means created could be creating work, creating art, creating wealth, whatever it might be.
0:16:03.0 S2: I just wanted to be in a position where I failed or succeeded based on my own merits without anybody else arbitrarily deciding what my limits were, and being accountable and responsible for where I went and how much I achieved, and I was willing to take both sides of that of that on meaning the potential to fail as well as the potential in the hope to achieve great things. And there have been times when I have made less money as a business owner than I did at the height of my sales career, but I’m okay. More than okay with them, it’s a completely different thing because I was in control, I had those freedoms that we talked about, so it was a completely different thing once you ended up on the other side of the matrix, what did you… So looking back at what it was like when you thought about being a business owner versus now being on… So now that you realize the matrix is out there, what’s different, what’s different for you, I’ll share mine and then you can share your… We will continue with this episode of The How of Business podcast in just a minute, but before we do, let me ask you a few questions, do you wanna be your own boss and start your own business, do you aspire to be an entrepreneur and enjoy the freedom of time and location.
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0:19:05.1 S2: What’s different about how I feel about the corporate environment, so what… Not, you’re a business owner. There’s that, I think what happens is there’s that fear right there, that wall of fear that everybody has, who has worked in corporate America to say, you’re not gonna go do my own thing, so now that you’ve gone through that and what’s different in the new world… What’s different in the new world is it’s a realization for the most part of everything that I wanted, which is, Yes, I’m still accountable in certain regards, I’m accountable to my partners, to my family, to my employees, to any other stakeholders in what I do, but I embrace and I really, truly enjoy the fact that it’s on me, me and my team, me and my partners as to how far and get… So only I set limitations for myself, and that’s a whole another conversation, there’s lots of limitations that I set for myself that are self-imposed that I’m working at breaking down, but it’s only me that sets… Or provides those limitations? I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but that’s one I think. Yeah, that’s good. Okay, good.
0:20:17.9 S2: Yeah, for me, I think it’s more… I realized there’s a big world out there of things that need to be done, there’s not enough people to do them, I’m always looking for a good electrician, a good graphics designer, a great web builder, a good attorney, a really good bookkeeper and accountant. There’s lots of things that need to be done, done well out there, the world’s full of people needing things to be done, once you make that leap into becoming your own boss, you’re gonna realize there’s a big world out there of goods and services that need to be exchanged at that level. And so if you’re really a good accountant and you’re working for a corporation, you might wanna open up your own accounting practice, or… I was just talking to my accountant today about opening up a bookkeeping shop, he said, You know what I thought about that, I got just… There’s a massive need for really competent bookkeepers, go hire them from college, people that graduated from junior college with an accounting degree, they’ll train them to use QuickBooks or whatever the tools are that need to be used, you could charge two or three times what you…
0:21:23.6 S2: What they’re making… You know there’s… The world is full of opportunity. It’s just, it’s chock of opportunity, and once you get out of that corporate environment and you sit back and you look at it, you realize there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity out there for people, the fear of making that leap goes away quite a bit. My neighbor up the street was working for our corporation and now builds at apps. He builds apps for iPhones. He told me that something I told him made him decide to go ahead and quit his job and… Yeah, I said sometimes you just gotta take the leap and do it, it’s not gonna feel 100%, but you just have to just jump off the cliff and take the lead, so I was kind of proud of myself that I… That’s another person. Yeah, I see where you were going with a question, I said When you do get to the other side, what you find is that there is an abundance of opportunities, especially if you apply yourself and you surround yourself with the right people, and you keep opening yourself up to those opportunities, they’re there, if we allow ourselves to get their good there and then to realize those opportunities…
0:22:28.1 S2: Right, and so that… I think that segues to this whole thing of risk, and people will use that, I think to an extent as an excuse now, there’s a legitimate risk, certainly there is when you quit your job, and that’s the way you pay your bills and the way you get your medical benefits and all of that good stuff. And you’re gonna take some of that money and you may tap a 401k, the start of business. That is a real risk. I get that if you lose everything, it’s going to be a problem for your family, so I get that, but there are other ways, there are other ways to start a business, we certainly recommend… We won’t get into the details of it in this episode, but we recommend that you typically have your own financial house in order first, but I think the real risk is used as an excuse to really say, I’m afraid to fail. What are your thoughts on… I agree with that, and I agree with that, and risk is in the eye they beholder, and one of the questions I think you brought up is, Is jobs, we’re all taking a risk, whether we work for a corporation or whether we work for ourselves, and I would contend that working for yourself is less risky than working for a corporation, because you never know when you’re gonna get the call on Friday afternoon and you’re gonna be into the bank box and say, go put your stuff in the box.
0:23:42.0 S2: Today is your last day, and you get escorted out of the building that’s risk, and now you’ve built a lifestyle based on that money that you were bringing in as most people do. They tend to spend a little bit more than what they make. And so when you do lose that job, then you’re in a world of hurt, I have to say, and this might come across a little harsh, but I think there’s a bit of laziness as well, that we tend to fall into a comfort zone, because one of the myths certainly are becoming a business owner, is that it’s less work, I’m going to work less hours that I’m working now, it’s going to be easier. And that couldn’t be farther from the truth. At least certainly for my experience, so I think that it takes that effort, that gumption, that desire, that energy to say, I’m going to go do this, and it takes all… I was gonna take all of my faculties and abilities because I no longer and going to come in Monday and someone else has thought of what widgets we’re going to sell, what markets we’re gonna get in and out of how we’re gonna sell them.
0:24:48.4 S2: I just typically will execute and maybe I have a little bit more responsibility, but for the most part, I’m executed on someone else’s plan… Right, right. And if that plan fails up, so I’ll get another job, I fortunately… But when it’s on you, when you are the owner, all of that falls on you, and that’s a tremendous responsibility, and I think that’s where people then think, Well, that’s risky, but it’s a different way, like you said, of looking at risk… I’m reading a book right now, it’s the follow-up to abundance, and it’s called Bold by Peter Diamandis and Steven called Kotler, and it’s a quote from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and he says on this topic of risk, quote, Many people mis-perceive what good entrepreneurs do good entrepreneurs don’t like risk, they seek to reduce risk, starting a company is already risky, so you systematically eliminate risk in those early days, so in that last sentence, that code and that last sentence, he touches on what we just talked about, which is… Yes, starting a business is risky, especially if you’ve put down a chunk of money and that money is money you really can’t afford to lose and you’ve given up your job.
0:26:01.7 S2: All of those things are risky, but the way that we look at it is we look to mitigate the real risks, and we’ve analyzed and looked at this, and we see this as a lot less risky than working for someone else, that’s really the shift that are absolutely it just came to mind. Think about all the employees at Enron in Houston. He worked there and put most of their money in a 401k, through the encouragement of the company, actually invested a lot of that money and run stock when the rug was pulled out from underneath that company, most people ended up with nothing. And people who had worked there for 20 or 30 years, I happened to have called them back in my software, then they really did think they were the smartest people in the room, by the way, at least that was my… It might have been after when we had called on them, but in their late 80s, we never a customer wars. So that also brings to mind a proud moment for myself, a couple of years ago, McKenna mentioned that the dinner table McKenna is my daughter, she mentioned I was referring to one of her friends, fathers had just gotten laid off and the stress that that created and the angst and he’d been looking for a job for some period of time, by the time we had this conversation, they were looking at having to relocate to another city because he wasn’t able to find a job here, and she made a comment, a paraphrase that data.
0:27:24.9 S2: I’m so happy you own your own business because you can’t get fired. I that… Wow, she gets that. He gets that. That’s certainly I have… My businesses could fail, we could still… I have to go look for a job, but she gets… And she was reflecting to me that… That’s the big difference right there. Right? Is that no one else is gonna tell me that my day is over, that my job is over. I’ll make that decision myself by mistakes that I might make or decisions that I don’t make, or chances that I don’t take or things that I don’t do, but it’s on me, it’s because of me, not because anybody else decides that and what was it like if you think back when our parents were working, if they got laid off, it was a vast… Devastating, absolutely devastating. You know, kids nowadays, I mean, even in our generation, to some extent, getting laid off wasn’t that big of a deal, we can sort of knew we were probably gonna have a number of… But the stigma of being laid off, even for us kids, if somebody goes to… Parents got laid off, it was like a death.
0:28:27.8 S2: He didn’t talk about it. I reflected on them and on the family, so I think that’s moving out, I think it’s kind of that whole stigma sort of moving out of the generations now, but you know having… We still feel it’s embarrassing, you have to come home and tell your family you got laid off, your wife, your kids don’t really understand what that really means long-term, whether you’re a wife or a husband, or a man or a woman, providing for others. There’s a lot of uncertainty that comes about. Now, a curious point is that both you and I did, we transitioned to business ownership and we started a business while we still kept our day jobs through… So that’s one way that we did it. Yes, and that helped, certainly for me, it helped to make that a financial transition now, I very clearly always make this point to those of you who might be thinking about doing the same thing as one mistake I made was sharing that with everybody at work, including my boss. And so what I found, and maybe this was just unique to my experience, but what I found is that while people will nod their head and say, Oh, that’s great, really…
0:29:39.5 S2: What a corporation wants is for you to at least pretend and make it seem like you are dedicated, fully and completely to your job. They really don’t wanna hear that. You’ve got something else going on. You created for me, I made that mistake, I was naive. And so I thought, I’ll share this and to see this as something I’m doing, that’s good for me, but it doesn’t matter what it created for me at that point in time was certainly some resentment and jealousy from others, perhaps, and then the biggest thing in the most detrimental thing is, my boss has looked at it as well, are doesn’t really need or isn’t really dedicated to this job because he’s got that other thing going on. Sure. Did you experience any of that or did you kind of handle it differently… I did, I probably was a little more vocal when I was starting my business, but at that point I really didn’t care, so… Okay, yeah, so I was probably a more vocal about that, but I think it’s interesting how many really good and talented people that we know in corporate America talk about wanting now in their own business, but never really do it as That’s…
0:30:43.8 S2: Feel pretty comfortable where I’m at, I’m getting paid pretty well. And again, if it’s not, if it’s something you enjoy doing and you feel like you’re making good money and you’re good with all that, and being a small business owner isn’t necessarily the thing that you’ve gotta do, and we wouldn’t really recommend for you going into it, met we’re really trying to communicate more toward people who, like you said… That pit in their stomach that says, Right, this isn’t where I’m supposed to be. This isn’t what I’m supposed to do. I need to start looking for something else. So absolutely, if by this point in the conversation, if we’ve lost you, if this is not you, then you may not be ready, or at least our examples of being ready don’t resonate, so that’s why we’re having this conversation because for you listening now, if you are in a corporate environment or in a job somewhere, if this doesn’t resonate with you, this pain, this angst, this desire, this… All of these different things that we’ve expressed, these stories that we’ve sera, if none of that resonates, then you may not be ready if it does resonate, if you can see yourself in some of those stories, if you have some of those same feelings, then you probably are like us, and you need to start thinking about How do I plan for becoming my own boss? And that’s what this is about.
0:32:02.2 S2: So we’ve touched on some miss, but I wanna touch on a couple of one of them quickly and touched on the fact that people think, Well, if I’m my own boss and I don’t have to work as hard, we know… And I think anybody that we’re speaking to probably gets it, that that’s not the case, you actually wind up working harder than you ever have in your life. Would you agree with that, Tyree? But it’s a different type of work. So stim doing it for myself. And it’s something I enjoy doing, so I’ve been able to find some things that I really enjoy doing. I don’t think about the number of hours I put in like I did when I was working for someone else. Yeah, because as you’ve put it before, eloquently, we don’t longer look at that at it as trading work for pay… Right. Time for effort. Time or effort. That’s not the way we look at it now. We’re creating for ourselves and for our families and for the people that mattered to us, we’re creating… We’re building our business, and so I find that I have ongoing energy and enthusiasm… Sure, I hit hard spots, I had down times, I had times when I’m exhausted.
0:33:06.8 S2: But by and large, I find the energy, the point is that it’s harder work than you will have ever done before, but it’s for you, it’s for your own thing, and so the motivation is… And so I would say if that motivates you, if you find that motivating than that would be a good indicator that you’re probably ready to start a small business, if you don’t find that motivating… If you still feel the same way that you did when you worked in a corporate environment as far as putting in long hours, then it’s either the wrong business or it’s the wrong time, interesting statistics from the Small Business Administration that 67% or the majority of businesses are successful after four years, only 33% fail. So there’s also this somewhat of a myth that businesses mostly failed, certainly there are segments like the restaurant segment, food business that we have been in, and then we still are in, that has a higher failure, but that’s simply not true. That most businesses fail now, certainly, they’re still a good percentage to do, but it ties back to the point you had made, there are opportunities out there, there are plenty of ways through which you can deliver value that others will pay you for it.
0:34:17.7 S2: It’s just a matter of finding those ideas, finding where your skill sets match those, and then having a plan to move forward and through that barrier of perceived risk and fear… I think that’s what it is. I agree, I agree. The takeaway, the big takeaway from this episode, David, to me is what I want you to ask yourself to the listener, if this resonated with you, if you’ve been asking yourself the same questions, if it’s been tearing you up that you want to be a business owner, but you also have asked yourself the reality check questions, Why is that is… It’s not because I think it’s going to be easier. It’s not because I think I’m gonna be accountable to nobody, because while you do gain all of these freedoms, you’re still accountable, but it’s about now it’s on me and you have to be willing to have the courage to take that on, to have the courage to fight through the fear and the risk. And it’s about realizing that your corporate job is not safe now, again, if you were fortunate like David and I were, and you were very employable, that might be okay for you, I do have this one belief, you are only ready to make this transition when you’re ready I know that sounds simplistic and simple, but the point is, nobody can pull you there, nobody can even motivate you to get there, you have to be ready for it yourself.
0:35:36.2 S2: Yeah, absolutely, agreed. And if this excites you, if you’re getting the feeling like this excites you, when you think about it, then that might say you’re ready as well.