500: The 18 Most Important Lessons I Learned from $0 to $35K+ a Month

Welcome to the 500th but 1st BEST episode. The most important 18 lessons of the entire show condensed into a jam packed hour and a half.

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Hosted by Derek Videll

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's up, guys? Welcome to the Social Media Entrepreneurs Podcast, teaching how to become a full-time entrepreneur by leveraging modern social media strategies. I'm your host, Derek Fidel, and welcome to episode 500. I appreciate any of you who have listened to even more than 10 episodes so much for giving me this much of your time. And those of you that have listened to over a hundred, two hundred, there's some of you that have easily listened to over 300 episodes. You are my favorite people on this planet. So reach out to me personally if you haven't yet. Let me know how much you've enjoyed the show, listen to the show, whatever it may be. I would love to formally greet you and thank you. Let's get right back to what's most important. This isn't about my accomplishments, this is about making you a full-time entrepreneur. And for episode 500, I've put a lot more effort into this episode than I typically do. This is 18 lessons that I needed to go from $0 per month to $35,000 per month. When was I at $0 per month? Kind of when I started the podcast. Not exactly though, because I already did start an e-commerce business at that time. It was probably selling between five and ten thousand dollars per month, mostly on Amazon. If you know e-commerce numbers pretty well, you know I was basically making no money, and all of the money I did make was going back into the business. But because I was able to grow a following to 50,000 Instagram followers, that's why I had started the Instagram marketing secrets podcast, as it used to be called. But here are 18 lessons I learned to go from what would end up being a zero dollar per month e-commerce store when I eventually closed that one, to now doing $35,000 or more per month in revenue between my marketing agency and my new e-commerce company. I have started nine total companies in the last eight years. The first episode of this podcast came out in 2018, I believe. Yeah, 2018 in December. So I've been at it for eight years now, guys, and uh it's been awesome, and I'm so glad to be at episode 500. So without further ado, let's get started with perhaps one of the most impactful podcasts that I've ever made. The first lesson is that if you don't start your business the day that you decide that you want to, you'll never do it. And no one has ever proven me wrong on this. It's not something that I want to be true, I just care about what is true. But if I've ever heard someone say, I really want to start a business, me and my friend have been talking about it or doing a podcast. That that's something I want to do someday. They've never done it. They've truly never done it because it wouldn't make sense if they hadn't started yet, it would be very illogical for them to all of a sudden work up the courage later. It's like standing on a diving board. If you are gonna jump off a 50-foot diving board, what's the best way to do it? To just go out there and jump or to go look over the edge and stare down at the water and try to reason with yourself of why it's not that far down and you'll be okay and you probably won't get injured, and a lot of people are watching, and oh wow, this could go bad. And the best way to do it is to just jump off. And this is a mentality that entrepreneurs need to have. And today you're gonna get the opportunity to start it anyways, because I'm giving you your last call on starting your business, starting that podcast, starting that YouTube channel. And the great news is all you have to do is take one step. Open your Instagram account. Go see if the Instagram name that you even want is available. If you want to change later, that's no problem. You can just change it later. But go start that Instagram account, go start that Facebook page today. That's all you gotta do. Go buy the domain name. Go see if the domain name is even available. Maybe you just start there. Just go see if the domain name is available. Go to namecheap.com and see if the domain that you want is available. If it is, you can probably buy it for twelve dollars. Probably not a bad idea. So what if you're out twelve dollars in the end? You need to get started. Go buy the LLC from your state's website. Don't look up how to buy an LLC on Google because you'll be directed to a company that will middleman the process. Go to your Secretary of State's website in whatever state you are in, or how to do it in your country, if you're outside of the United States, and start your LLC or whatever your official corporation is called, and it will probably be less than $50. Go do one thing at all. You want to be a YouTuber? Grab your phone as soon as you're done with this podcast and film your first video, even if you don't post it. Go film your first podcast, go record it, and even if you don't post it, go do that. And if you don't do that, you should just know that you'll never be an entrepreneur. And it sounds harsh, but the goal of this show is to teach you how to be a full-time entrepreneur and not to make you feel good about yourself. So I will tell you what I've seen to be true time and time again. If someone did not start it or just take that first action, the reason would be that they feel like they need to first question themselves before beginning. And if that is you, someone who's like, all right, I've got an idea, but I don't know if I can do it, you will always lose to someone who doesn't do that. And most entrepreneurs, including myself, that really know what they're doing, we don't really question ourselves in the way that it's like, oh, maybe I should question myself before I've even taken a single action. You need to ditch that right now and never look back. And you need to know how serious I am about this first tip. I was thinking of ending with that one, but I was like, you know what? I need to start here because you need to hear this now, and you need to know that as you are listening to this episode, that as soon as you are done, you are going to start your business. Or I'd even encourage you to pause this episode now and go take one action and come back and do not delay any further. Go make that Instagram account, whatever you gotta do, and then come back to the episode. Lesson number two. Don't ask friends and family for advice with how to start your business, with if they think your business is a good idea, don't run it by them for their validation to start. You don't need anyone's support in order to do this. That's number three. I'm gonna combine lesson two and three into one. You don't need anyone's support, and you can't need anyone's support. Your friends and family, unless they are business owners, will not be able to give you good advice. And here is the sad reality of it. When you start a business, you will learn how much of your friends and family, and even your partner, maybe even your brother or sister, your cousins, your mom, your dad will project their failures onto you when you start doing something that they wanted to do, or that you start doing something that is out of the norm to them, that seems dangerous to them, that seems like something that you might not be able to do, and they don't want you to fall flat on your face, and that it will sound like that, but in reality, you'll learn that a lot of them don't actually want to see you succeed. And the reason why is because if you succeed, you will be a constant reminder to them of the life that they were never never able to take advantage of for themselves. A lot of people want to be a business owner, a lot of people would really like to work for themselves and make it happen. They've been working their corporate job for a long time and they're really sick of it. But rather than doing something about it, they've gotten so used to their situation that they've stared at the water from the top of the high dive long enough that they're never gonna do anything about it, and they know that. And then when they see you willing to jump from that high dive, it will cause a knee-jerk reaction that a lot of them are not even familiar with why they're doing it exactly. And it's that deep down they know that if you're able to be bold with your life and it will pay off, that you will be a constant reminder to them of the boldness that they were never able to enact in their own life and create it for themselves. And it's very sad because this will be the closest people in your life. When I started, it was my girlfriend at the time that she doesn't really have an issue with feeling bad about not starting a business, although she was in her master's program in school, so she was very committed to the traditional career, and entrepreneurship is really not in her blood, anyways. But she didn't want to deal with the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, and she didn't want to believe in me. So that's the other thing, is a lot of people you'll realize that they don't believe in you, slash they don't understand how to do anything hard in their life, and they will project that onto you. So for some of them, it's not even the fact that they want to be a business owner, it's that you are choosing to live life on hard mode, and they weren't able to choose that version for their own life, whatever that may be. They see it and they're like, This sounds scary, this sounds not practical, and maybe they are just genuinely worried for you, although it will manifest in a way that seems like they are not very, they don't really believe in you. This is an issue that I had with my parents as well as my sister, is whenever I would be down on sales, rather than say, keep going, you got this, their natural inclination was to let me know, just let me know that there are jobs out there available, that they're this company down the street is hiring in case I want something secure, that my resume will probably look pretty good if I ever wanted to just go see what's out there. And they say a lot of subtle things like this that to you sound like they don't believe in you because that really is what's going on, but they are projecting their fear of living boldly onto you, and that's why you can't need anyone's support. And here's the great news once you make it, they will all support you and they will completely forget how they once acted when the going got tough for you. With when things were good, they're like, Oh yeah, I knew you could do it, and then when the going gets tough, they're like, Oh yeah, I would probably get a new job, I would probably take the safe route, I would probably go see what's out there. They will totally forget about that phase and they will be very convinced that they've just been in full support of you the whole time, but they don't really understand how to even support an entrepreneur, which is that when everything's going wrong, there's no lack of confidence. There's no, oh my gosh, that sounds scary. Let me increase the fear of your scenario more than it needs to be. As an entrepreneur, you know that you're just gonna go through a series of problems, and that's all life is, anyways. In entrepreneurship, you're just gonna deal with harder problems and ones that if you can't solve them, you will suffer from it financially. But that's also in the traditional world, too, right? They can just get fired, so they're just not used to it, okay? You you need to know that none of them will get it unless they've owned a business before, no one will get it. So you can you cannot need anyone's support. My family doesn't believe in me. Like, does not matter at all. Should she you should be completely unaffected by that? All that matters is if you believe in yourself. The fourth lesson is that you need to know that your primary job is sales. No matter what business that you open, you need to come to terms with this right now. If you want to be a chiropractor, your main job is selling chiropractic packages, and your secondary job is doing adjustments. If you want to be a health consultant or a nutritionist, you need to know that your main job is selling people your packages, and your secondary job is doing nutrition. If you want to be an artist, you need to know that your primary job is selling art and your secondary job is painting. And that's a group of people right there that really don't like to come to terms with that. So when you're starting a business, you need to know that sales and marketing is unavoidable and it's also amazing and it's awesome, and it's one of the most fun things to learn about. And sales is nothing high pressure, that's just a rep that it gets from inexperienced people. But anyone who really understands business know knows that it's simply an exchange of value, and after you sell them something, your customers will say thank you, and and you'll say you're welcome. It really is you providing them with more value than their money is worth to them. Otherwise, they wouldn't have bought it. So the customer is always gonna win more when you make a sale, otherwise, you're unless you're just like ripping people off, right? But otherwise, they wouldn't buy from you, especially time and time again, unless they thought, wow, this product is worth more than my money. So I'm going to continue buying it. So, really, it's not even a big deal that your primary job is sales. I would hope you would consider that with it as well. But if you do not, if you're not comfortable embracing the sales and marketing side of things and likely calling people, doing sales presentations, asking for the order today, giving them a bit of extra value if they sign up now instead of tomorrow, then you're gonna have a hard time because you could be the greatest artist in the world. But if you don't figure out how to post on social media and set up a website, then it's gonna be very difficult to just sit on the street corner and really become the famous artist that you deserve to be. The fifth lesson is that there's no such thing as a launch. And I want to say this early enough because a lot of people get stuck on this step of I'm getting ready for my launch of my website. All it is, like you make your website, you make it live immediately. You make your Instagram, it's live immediately. There's no countdown timer to when things are available. You just start trying to sell immediately. You just post all of your content as soon as you possibly can. There's no cutting the the red ribbon to open up your store after you've set up your store that you would do for an in-store business. This is literally just you just begin right away and you don't launch, you just make that first call, you just make that first offer, you just make that first post. Okay, you don't wait. So that's uh a very important aspect to just getting started. I'm doing these tips in order of when you're going to encounter them running your business, by the way. Number six is that getting a sale should be your first order of business. If you can pursue getting a sale before you've even made a website, you should do that. If you can pursue getting a sale before you've even made your LLC, that's actually a good idea too. And a lot of businesses think I need to get some followers, I need to set up everywhere, I need to buy some apps, I need to get some business cards, I need a logo that is perfected, I need a website that is perfected, I need all of these things before I go try to make a sale. But your goal should be to try to get product proof via selling something as soon as possible. And the way to get product proof is not by running surveys. I'm gonna tell you guys about my first business and why I was never able to get a sale, but it took me two and a half years to realize that my product wasn't gonna get a sale, and it's because I built an Instagram following to 50,000. I had a bunch of products selling on a website, uh, on my uh on Amazon, excuse me, that I was doing drop shipping for. So that was great. I was getting sales, okay, but I had done a lot of actions and I had collected tons of survey data before I realized after two and a half years that my original product invention was not going to sell. And although it brought me to creating this podcast and it brought me to the next thing, so it ended up all being good. I would tell you that this would be two and a half years that I could have spent trying to do something else. I don't regret it whatsoever, though, just to clarify. But my first product invention was the aquarium smart feeder, a way to feed your fish with an app or using the Amazon Alexa. You could say, Alexa, turn on the fish feeder, and it would feed your fish. You could also set up an auto timer while you're away. And the funny thing is, this is another reason of why you should never ask your friends and family for advice. This idea, a lot of people were actually really supportive of. Because when I told people that, they're like, oh wow, I can't believe it doesn't exist. But they didn't really understand that if something doesn't exist like that, there's usually a reason why, even though it doesn't mean that it's definitely not a good idea, there usually is a reason why this should be considered. And if it doesn't solve a problem, that would be enough reason to not come out with the product. So the problem with the aquarium smart feeder is that if you go on vacation for a week, you can go buy a $4 feeder block from Pet Smart, throw it at the bottom of your tank, and your fish will eat off of it for the next week, and you don't have to worry about any technical malfunctions, and you don't have to worry about spending $125 and downloading an app and creating an account and setting up the auto timers in order to do it. You also don't need to worry about maybe your machine getting clogged because that was an issue when you're dealing with water and it evaporates into the machine and it makes the fish flakes stick. There were so many problems like that with ours, and it was also just a technical nightmare. We were newer to it. It was me and my buddy who was a robotics engineer, and he was pretty good at making apps, but it was also his first app that he was making in full outside of a class assignment. It was the first robotic thing that he was 3D printing outside of a class assignment, and this one was trying to sell to the world, so there was a lot of learning curve to it, and basically it came to us needing to invest over a hundred thousand dollars to create the proper injection molds and everything. What I can say, luckily, is that I did invent the world's first aquarium smart feeder. It was my idea, but my buddy Marc Bourgeois, I got to give him credit, he was the one who 3D printed it, made all the other uh the web app, all of that stuff, and we were able to make it work. We were able to make it work with Alexa, where we said Alexa, turn on the fifth feeder, and then we could press a manual feed button on the phone as as far as we got. We didn't get to the auto timers and everything, but there was so much problems with setting the auto timers, and then if you go on vacation, then your clock changes, and we need to make sure like there's just 10 times the amount of work with any software or pretty much any business task then you can possibly see when you are new, especially. But we spent two and a half years to finally get something that was actually sellable, and then when we finally said, Alright, guys, debit or credit, no one bought. And the reason why, despite having Hundreds of surveys telling us this is the best product ever. I would post to my 50,000 followers, hey guys, we're about ready to come out with it. Go ahead and fill out the survey. Do you think this is a good idea? Yes, I do. It's incredible. How much would you pay for this? It's gotta be worth like a hundred bucks. What what would you be buying it for? Oh, all the reasons. Oh, it looks so cool. Okay, cool. Debit or credit. Oh, I can't afford it right now. Well, yeah, I I'm not going on vacation right now, and also it's a little bit too much money for me, but I do want it eventually. And it doesn't matter if people said that it was a cool invention in a survey. It only matters if they speak with their wallet. So, what you can do instead of two and a half years of building an audience, surveying that audience, coming out with it, investing thousands of dollars into your idea, that it would be a good idea to just come out. If if I came out with that idea today, I would have ran Facebook ads, I would have created a mock-up of a product page, I would list it as 50% off pre-order pricing. I would make like a mock-up of the entire thing that looks like it's ready to go. I would say that this is a pre-order, it will be ready in a few months. And if you order now, you get 50% off. I would make sure that a couple people bought it, and then I would refund those people and say, hey, we are a little bit more backed up. It is gonna be a bit longer. But I would take it as even one sale outside of friends and family is better product proof than thousands of survey data telling you your idea is amazing, then every one of your friends and family telling you your idea is amazing. One person outside of friends and family buying at all actually tells you that your market does exist. Because things either sell or they don't. And if you didn't get a s if you can't sell to anyone outside of friends and family, like get that first sale, like it it's basically over. But if you do get one sale, the chances that you found the only person in the world who was gonna buy is zero. You there are absolutely other people in the world. I don't know how big your market is, I don't know if it's really gonna be a long-term business, I don't know if your profit margin is gonna be great, but you will be able to get sales, and that's something that I could have figured out in my first week of operating that business rather than in two and a half years. And part of the reason why is that I didn't want to know if it was a bad idea. I was determined to think that it was a good idea because I still thought that my success in business was purely up to my belief in myself. But there is a part of it that if you're selling something that doesn't solve a problem and that people don't want to buy, there's no amount of belief and motivation that will ever make it sell. So don't be an idiot when it comes down to trying to sell something that the market has spoken about. Take that into account and don't worry about it, just move on. The seventh lesson is that your first business probably won't work, and that's totally okay. There's a stat that who knows how accurate it is, but is probably decently accurate that 90% of first businesses fail. And also second the 40% of second businesses fail. So 90% chance to fail the first time, but only a 40% chance to fail the second time. When you hear something like that, here's how you should think about it. Okay, cool. I've I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna try to make my business work the first time. If I can be part of that 10% as I plan to be, I will be. But if it doesn't work, no worries. I've got like a much better chance to make it work the second time. So I'll just start a second business. Because never giving up doesn't mean never giving up your first business idea, it means never giving up being an entrepreneur. And even if your first business crushes it, there's a very strong chance that you're gonna be opening a second business and maybe making a complete pivot within five to ten years. Very rarely do businesses last more than 10 years. Almost every idea has a finite limit to how long it will grow. And we'll talk more about business growth in a bit here in a few tips. But you need to understand that just because you come out and that first business doesn't work, I want you to know how important that is to your story and how important that is to even making the second business. Because what was my second business? It was this podcast. How did I start the podcast? Because I grew 50,000 followers from my first business, so I figured out Instagram. I figured out how to grow on Instagram and Facebook organically, and then I started teaching people that, and then one thing led to another. I opened up a bunch of other businesses. I started doing some consulting, which kind of showed me some other ideas, and then I started a third business and a fourth and a fifth and a sixth and a seventh and an eighth and a ninth. And now I've done nine businesses in the last eight years, and today I'm running three of them. And the other ones, guess what? They weren't failures. When I tell people the story of the aquarium smart feeder, even though I never sold an aquarium smart feeder, while we were making that product, along with growing my social media following, what else did I do? I started buying fishnets from China, and I would slap my logo on them and I would list them on Amazon and I would sell them and I would and we bought another original product from a Chinese manufacturer, and I learned all about working with China and sourcing products and ODM and EDM, which is original design manufacturing and original engineering manufacturing. I learned about private labeling and how to make product packaging. I learned how to set up my LLC. I learned how to create a website, I learned how to turn on Facebook and Instagram ads, which later led me to my biggest business opportunity. But if I didn't ever start for my own business, I certainly wasn't going to just start running ads for other companies as my first order of business, at least not with any confidence. So at least I was able to learn from running it to my own business first. And we sold over $100,000 worth of product. Would selling over $100,000 worth of product be a success or a failure, or just it is what it is. It didn't need to be a wild success to be a success. And also, when you fail, quote unquote, as it's typically talked about, if you really uncovered what happened in those stories, you wouldn't call it a failure. You would say, Oh yeah, they opened a business and then they they pivoted later because they realized the market wasn't big enough, or they ran into some limitations, or there was just things that they couldn't plan for until they got started. However, the skills that they learned and the opportunities that life started giving them because they were bold enough to pursue their dreams unfolded and led them to their next path. And that is what will happen for you. It doesn't matter if your first business fails. In fact, looking back, I can tell you businesses, business owners that first business doesn't work are a lot more stable entrepreneurs than the ones who were a success on their first business. Because what happens is they get Midas Touch syndrome, as I like to call it. They think everything they touch will turn to gold. And they come out, their first company, they sell a product that people bought. People really liked their product. And the problem is they thought they were an incredible marketer. They thought all of the advertising, the way they were wording things, the way that their website was set up, the way they did everything, must have been correct because they got all these sales. However, if you just simply choose the right product at the right time, you're gonna get a ton of sales even if you suck at marketing. So for all they know, they just did a really bad job at everything else apart from product selection. But they won't know this until they get into their second business and fall flat on their face. But they usually got so bullish on it that they threw so much money into it and they overcommitted themselves, and they will learn either way. You can either have your second business fail and then your first one succeed, or you can have your first business succeed and your second one fail. There's very rarely an opportunity where every business you ever do will be as w wildly successful as you ever dreamed, and nor would you want it to be. Because now looking back, I love my aquarium smart feeder story. It was difficult in the moment to swallow that pill to say maybe the last two and a half years weren't wasted, but I need to just give up. I need to just stop posting. And I did, I had 50,000 followers, I had just hit it. I had like just finally hit it 50,000, and I realized there is no possible way I can continue being in this market. And that leads me to my eighth lesson. I'm gonna I'm gonna lose track of the numbers, by the way, guys. Um markets are much smaller than you think. This is a very hard lesson for a lot of entrepreneurs to realize. The aquarium market, the reason why, overall, despite my invention not being good, and we said, okay, well, let's pivot, let's just sell things to the rest of the market. The actual reality is that the aquarium market is not big enough to generate a successful e-commerce business from, unless your idea of success is making 10 grand of profit per year. Unless your idea of success is making less than 50 grand net profit per year and being glued there forever, no matter what you do. You can spend your whole life just coming out with oh aquascaping tweezers, and now we're coming out with chemicals, and now we're making our own filter. You can do all of that stuff, but the reality is most of the market is people buying a goldfish or a beta fish for their child so they can learn some basic responsibility. And then the ones who actually have a lot of money is the saltwater market, which is just a lot smaller, and outside of selling coral and selling fish or running a in-person store to do so, there's not a lot of money there. There's not a lot of inventions that need to come out for taking care of fish, and it's just something that there's not a lot of money in it, and you can say, Yeah, well, I know a lot of people who have one, and there's a lot of it's it's not big enough. It is not big enough, is the only answer that I could tell you about the aquarium market, and that is for a lot of businesses. I have a client right now that is in the woman's hormone space, and she has a single product that she sells those customers, and we're running our Facebook ads, and they've been going great, great, great, great, great for a long time until eventually it kind of just ran into a hard plateau. And in order to get over that plateau, the natural response of a lot of entrepreneurs is to throw some more fuel on the fire. Well, throw some more money into the advertising. Well, I guess let's go crazy with the UGC content, let's get start thinking way out of the box. We can't have any limiting beliefs out of this. We need to just find more market. How come we just can't sell to more people? Aren't there more women out there? You can't sell to anyone who doesn't have the problem that your product solves already. You can't sell to anyone that doesn't have the problem that your product solves already. You can't do advertising that tells people to have a problem that they don't have, is what I'm saying. And you need to realize this, and a lot of people think that the goal of advertising is to persuade people to buy what you're selling. You can't actually do that. This is the extent of advertising and marketing as far as getting sales right now from your efforts. You can find people at the right time when they have a problem and they're looking to get it solved. You can show them why they should buy from you instead of your competitors, and you can show them why they should buy today instead of tomorrow. You can't do anything else. This is a very beginner and also intermediate fallacy that if I just pour more money into the ads and I make better ads, that all of a sudden people are gonna want my product. And 80% of your results has to do with your product selection. If you're not getting sales easily from running ads, then your market doesn't really care about what you're selling, and you need to just point the finger there because you should pivot. And also, there's a point that you will run into a massive plateau because I won't even say that markets are small or markets are big, but what I will say is that every market is finite. There's so many people in the world. Wait till you try to run ads outside the United States and you learn that other countries don't really buy things, okay? And this is a massive problem, by the way. Everyone outside the United States, you need to be more participatory in the world commerce. You need to start buying things from people more and just make sure your money goes to the right places. Make sure it goes to your fellow people in your country, fellow people that aren't BlackRock, right? You can make sure that your money isn't going into the bad hands as much as you can help it, right? Limit your buying from Amazon, limit your buying from big companies that you think don't have a positive effect on the world. So it's not even that your money is going away in a bad place, but unless everyone adapts that mindset, it's very hard to really build an economy that is stable. Because in the US, we just buy stuff that we want, but everyone does it. So the money flows back to us. If you just own a business, then the money will flow back to you because we buy stuff. A lot of it is on credit, but a lot of Americans actually can totally afford it. You probably think we're this rich country, and America is the easiest country to get rich in that ever was, and is by far right now. I'm talking to you as someone who has been to 16 different countries and I've experienced the cultures of commerce there. And I also have millions of dollars of ad spend to show you of trying to sell things outside of the United States is 10 times harder. So I hope other countries adapt this, but you need to know that your business probably is actually just refined to selling in the United States, even just for the fact that shipping costs are so much more, regulations are more. If you're trying to sell supplements to a country outside of yours or other things, maybe you go through customs, there's other holidays that other countries have that will delay your shipping. It's very difficult to work outside of the United States. And even if you do scale, you should know that less than 20% of your sales will come from outside of the United States, all in total. You will still be totally reliant on the United States. So you're already limited limited to 330 million people, and then only like 70% of those are over 18, probably, right? And are not like over 70. So, like on between 18 and 70, that's probably like I don't know, 70 to 80% of people. So there's a bunch capped off right there. Only so many of them are on social media, only so many of them are on social media actively, only so many of these those people have disposable income, only so many of those people don't already have a brand that they are happy with buying from and are even considering buying from you. Only so many of those people actively have the problem that you solve. Your market is a lot smaller than you think. And it's better to go into big markets that are quote unquote saturated and just get your piece of the pie there rather than try to make a small market big. Even if you own 100, or we'll say like 50% of a small market, 25% even. I mean, that's a big chunk. You you come in, you like I'm 25% of aquarium's sales and in total, 5-10% is still even more like the the actual number. I mean, aquare like 1%, right? Like it's better to come get like 0.01% of the big market than 1% of a small market. It still is more, and you actually have a company that you can grow. You that you actually can grow. I'm gonna give you another lesson here that is very essential to that, is that your goal is to be the best at whatever you do. Because that's all there is space for anymore. So if you want to start an aquarium business, that's fine as long as your goal is to be the best aquarium products out there. And it's not even that crazy. I know it's like like look, it's the pursuit of this, okay? Like, you don't there's no objective like competition to be like they are the number one products. You but that's your goal, okay? So don't set out unless you're willing to accept that my path is the pursuit of being the best product in my space, the best service offering in my space for my area, for my specific niche. Whatever it is, the path that you are carving out with your business, you are either pursuing being the world's best, or you do not have the right mentality to even be starting that business. I believe we're on lesson nine now. The best part about entrepreneurship is how many people can't do it. This also goes with any prestigious career out there. What's the best part about being a doctor? How many people can't do it? Because if a lot of people could do it, there would be so much competition, it would be way harder to get a job, it would be way easier to lose a job, and your pay wouldn't be nearly as good. And no one would care. You wouldn't even be, oh, you're a doctor, yeah. Who isn't? Right? There's there's no prestige in it for whatever that's worth to you. But unless it is something that few people can do, there's no money in it. And you want to make a lot of money, guys. Do not buy into any of this crap about money can't buy happiness. Absolutely, it can. Money can't buy lifelong fulfillment, money can't buy your salvation religiously, but money can buy happiness because happiness is temporary and that's fine. But yeah, if you were given $10,000 right now, if you want it, you'd be so happy. For most of you, you're the only reason you're not happy is because you don't have money. So don't buy into this billionaire propaganda that they like to tell poor people about. Oh, yeah, we're not we have a lot of money, but I mean we're not happy. Like, it's so annoying just riding the jet skis out on the lake every day, and then coming back and having a barbecue on our world-class grill in our world-class kitchen with all of our friends, and really not having much trouble about what we're gonna do in life as far as affording things financially. There they're plenty happy, okay? Happiness and money are like directly tied, and that whole thing about oh, their happiness doesn't really increase after 70k a year. That was an old statistic. So, even by that same math today, if you do the inflation on it, it's gonna be more like 110, and that's per person, okay? If you're a family, like you want to make like 160, it is like really where you're like, we're killing it. Okay, you want to make 10K a month. Let's say that. Right now, at this time, you want to make 10K a month because you want to be putting money in investments. You want to be doing all the fun stuff. You can go on vacation when you want to, even though traveling outside of America is total propaganda. You actually don't need to travel outside of the United States. I know for my European audience, they're like, What are you talking about? Yeah, trust me. You guys need to come here. We don't need to go there. We have a lot more amenities. It's a lot more put together. It's the new world versus the old old world. You don't need to travel outside of the United States, okay? It's complete propaganda. And the the food in America is way better as well. Who are you kidding? I'm just speaking honest facts here. Oh, but the in Italy the tomatoes are better. Yeah, in in July and August, and that's it. Otherwise, you can get better pizza in New York and Chicago than anywhere in Italy, okay? It's complete propaganda. So you don't need to do any of this stuff, anyways, okay? But you do need to make at least $120,000 a year. And if you're a family, you're gonna want to make a bit more. And that's the beauty that entrepreneurship allows you to do. And the only reason that it allows you to do so is because most people won't be able to do this. Most people would not ever even consider start starting a second business if their first one failed. A lot of those people have an idea for a business in their mind, and they've had it for years, and they've never even taken step one. And that's too bad for them, but it's also not your responsibility. And you certainly don't need to feel bad for them because they're doing it to themselves. So you don't you're not responsible for encouraging them because even if you did, it wouldn't work because why? You can't need anyone else's support. You will not be able to be an entrepreneur unless your own support and your own self-motivation is enough for you to to to act because you won't have it every day, anyways. You can't need it on every single day of the week. You have to be completely self-sufficient. And if they are not, there's nothing you can do about it. There's nothing you can do to help them, I promise you. As someone who's a business coach, I cannot even possibly help someone who is not willing to pay for my advice. If I try to give advice to someone without uh consent, that's not the right word. If I if I give unsolicited, that's what I'm trying to say, unsolicited advice to someone, it will fall on deaf ears. They don't care who I am, they don't care about my accomplishments, unless they are coming to me, I cannot possibly help them. And that's a very difficult lesson that I had to learn because I spent the first like 28 years of my life trying to help everyone in my life that I thought I could. But unless they come to you, you really can't help them. So just find joy in that because that's awesome that you are someone who has above average confidence, above average skill sets. It's how the world is, and unless we're going to do enforced communism and the flattening of all hierarchies, which doesn't work out for anyone in the end, then there is going to be hierarchy that happens with income in a capitalist society, and people that can afford homes and people that can't. And as long as you spend your time feeling bad for all these other people who are willingly not taking action in their own life, then you're gonna be not taking action in your own. So just worry about your own life. Be proud that you're able to do something about it and you are doing something about it. And if everyone could do it, it wouldn't even exist to begin with. Lesson number 10. Don't conflate your goals with your expectations, especially at the beginning. When you come out and you open your business, you probably will have a goal to I'm gonna quit my job within the first year. That's a great goal. Don't let it be your expectation because it's really not based on anything. You don't know. You don't know what's gonna happen. Maybe this is that first business that doesn't work, and then you open the second one and then it does. But you don't may maybe this is the first business that works. Maybe you're gonna retire in six months. Maybe you're gonna leave your current job in six months, is what was gonna happen. You don't know yet. So it's not your expectation. It's important to set a goal so that you can have a direction and have a plan and then start to work out your weekly actions that would ideally create that result. You need to have this goal, right? This is my goal. I'm gonna save this much money this year, I'm gonna travel here by by this time, I'm gonna put this much money into an ETF by this day, and if you hit it, great, and if you don't, great. Because it was just a goal to give you direction, it wasn't the make or break on your confidence. It wasn't if I can hit this, I'll believe in myself, and if I can't, I won't believe in myself. That's not what was happening, and especially in those first couple years of setting goals. I I don't even set goals at the beginning of the year anymore. I don't do the New Year's resolution, I have uh a weekly action plan that I'm committing to, is what my beginning of the year goals are. But around September, October, I'll do an episode on this too. So if you're not already, I would hope you are subscribed and have reviewed the show. But I will I always talk about it every year because that's when I set a goal. That is when you actually know your pace for the year. That is when you can actually break your goal down into numbers and say, all right, here's my must-do, could do, and could potentially do numbers. Here's my exact plan, here's the pivots that I'm going to make based on the rest of the year's data. That's when you can actually set a quantitative goal and it means something. It's actually a decision for you to hit that goal or not. But over 12 months, things could change on a dime. You could get your new biggest wholesale client, you could get your new biggest marketing agency client, all of your numbers could change, or that doesn't happen. You can't, you just don't know. So your goals are not your expectations. If you hit your goal, awesome. If you don't hit your goal, no worries. Like you're just gonna reset a new goal and you're gonna totally hit that one. Didn't work, no worries. You're gonna set a new one, you're gonna totally hit that one. Goal your success in business comes down to your fro to your ability to move from failure to failure. I say in air quotes, because we already talked about how it doesn't really even look like a failure looking back at it, but without loss of enthusiasm, everything just motivates you. Oh, that business didn't work, but I totally understand why now, and I have all these extra skills, and I'm so much more experienced. My next one's gonna be amazing. That didn't work, I totally understand why, at least, and I'm so glad to have learned that because that was a necessary lesson. Thank you so much. Here's probably where my competitors quit. That's what I look at failure as. That's what I look at setbacks and business as. Oh, I bet a bunch of my competitors this is where they quit. And it's a good thing because not everyone can be an entrepreneur. There's only so much space at the top of this mountain. It's a pretty frail and uh small peak. So I'm glad that I'm gonna keep going. But yeah, unless some of these other hikers stop hiking, then we're not all gonna fit up there. So it's all good. They'll they'll uh live a content life any anyways without it. But for me, I'm gonna make it to the top. So I'm gonna keep going. I'm not gonna worry that I didn't get to the uh one of the summits or one of the uh you know campgrounds to stick with the mountain example here at the exact precise time that I said I would. I was a couple days late, it's all good. Onward and upward. You still go anyways, it doesn't affect your confidence. Lesson 11 is that everything matters. The greatest thing about entrepreneurship is that everything in your life will now matter. What you eat, you have to eat healthy in order to run the best business that you can. You have to monitor your sleep and get optimal sleep performance. You do want to do sauna, you do want to do cold plunge, you do want to do a bunch of things for your wellness, you do want to do some breath work, you do want to wake up at a good time and go to bed at a good time, you do want to work out, you do want to put uh effort into your appearance so that more people want to work with you and you don't look like a slob. You do want to put effort into all the things in your business, but you want to make sure that all the habits and negative habits are in control in your life too, because all of those directly impact your income. How good you are at making relationships and keeping friendships, that also will impact your success. Everything matters, and that is why I love entrepreneurship. I love that if I get fat, I mean, people won't even realize what they're doing subconsciously, but they're probably not gonna subscribe to me because all disciplines affect each other, and they can say, I probably don't want to listen to this guy. This guy that's trying to tell me how to live my life. I mean, he's quite overweight, so maybe he's good in this area, but I can't really trust him. And it might be subconscious, right? I have to have everything dialed in, and I love having everything dialed in. And why wouldn't you? That's so much better to live happy and healthy. Lesson 12. Branding doesn't matter in business nearly as much as people think it does. So it's kind of funny because my last one was everything matters, but I wanted to follow it up with a little bit of nuance to it, is that there are a lot of things that people think matter a lot more than they do. Another one would be vanity metrics, like, oh, I don't have enough followers on my page, or I don't have a quality enough camera to start, things like that, right? You gotta be aware of those too. So wisdom is really important, but you can't get wisdom unless you just start, so it's all good. Just keep going, you're gonna figure it out. But branding is one of the things that actually doesn't matter that much in business, and the reason why is because let's take Coca-Cola, for instance, and we'll talk about Budweiser as well. If Coca-Cola had the best commercial ever, and they were just doing a crazy discount on Coca-Cola, but you don't like their soda, are you gonna buy it? No. Well, what if what if they have like really cool fonts? What if they what if Coca-Cola comes out with a new bottle design and their fonts are really awesome, and they also hired uh Miley Cyrus to do their last commercial. Now, do you wanna buy their soda? And just for this example, just assume that you're uh a Pepsi fan. No, you're not gonna buy it. Okay, your branding, 95% of it, is whether people like your product or not. That's that's your branding. The red the other 5% is like scaling from a billion to two billion, kind of like stuff, right? It's like we need to maintain our customers, we need to make sure that we don't look bad, and we gotta make sure we don't do a BP oil spill, right? Like shit like that. Is BP doing fine? Yeah. That's a great example, actually. Hey guys, did he start stop buying BP oil as soon as that BP oil spill happened? You you you've sworn off buying from them since, right? Oh, that that person on that United flight that got dragged off however many years ago, or those other clips that you've seen of people getting uh uh unlawfully dragged off of United flights. You've never bought a United flight ever since then, right? Uh no, you probably have, and you don't really care anymore. There's actually an SNL skit that talked about that, where he said customers have sworn off buying United flights unless there's a cheap flight to where they're looking to go. They don't care. Like, oh, they got a good flight. I I'll take my chances, it's a good price, like it's when I want to leave. Like, they're gonna buy the product, is still doing like 95% of it, even if they have a bad perception of your branding, even if they you have terrible reviews and stuff like that, like Spirit Airlines, eventually Spirit did get what's coming to them, but that was more of a profit problem, right? And people just knew like that flight is gonna be a rough one, they're gonna upcharge me for a bag. That was just an overall bad customer experience, right? So it still was the product, but for most people, when they buy a United flight, for instance, they they got what they wanted out of it. So just because someone else had a bad experience, they don't really care. Just because they had all this negative publicity doesn't really matter to them. If you don't like drinking Budweiser, and then they have the best draft horse, whatever those uh Clydesdale horses are, they have the cutest Clydesdale commercial at the Super Bowl this year. It's not gonna switch you from Cool's light to Bud Light, okay? You just don't like their beard. So your branding doesn't matter that much, and a lot of people get so stuck on that aspect that they actually really limit their brand voice, which limits the amount of customers you can appeal to. It's better that you have a different brand voice for the different markets that you are trying to reach, rather than be like, we have to stick to our brand voice and our colors and everything has to mean remain consistent. It's okay to be more of a chameleon when you're selling things. Okay, when I was selling knives across all of Colorado, which is a very diverse state throughout it, if I'm selling to someone who's politically right, politically left, religious, not religious, uh Chinese versus American versus Indian, whatever, I am a chameleon, baby. I'm exactly who you want me to be. I'm still I'm still Derek. I'm just the version of Derek that would appeal to them the most and would and would be the most agreeable and we'd be the most friendly and is gonna make the best relationship. And that's not even a fake thing to do because it still is who I am. I'm not gonna like sacrifice my moral compass or my core values, but you can still just be that version of yourself that sees their their their way of life and adjusts to it and it it assimilates to how they are. Okay, and the same thing goes with your marketing. You need to be able to assimilate to the different markets so that you can sell to more people rather than trying to pigeonhole yourself as one brand. Number 13 is that there's nothing reputable about reinventing the real the wheel. And this is a problem with a lot of business owners, is they are very stuck, like they'll they'll reach out to me about coaching, and they they're not even interested in investing because they're so interested in doing it themselves. Like they had a couple questions for me, maybe. I mean, a lot of these people I don't even ever talk to, right? The ones who are truly only wanting to do it themselves, I'll never even talk to. No one will ever talk to them. But a lot of them don't even become a success eventually. I'm gonna pick on this one girl who was at my co-working space a couple weeks ago. She was sitting right next to me and she said, Oh, all right, finally, my ads are out. And she said that to her friend. And I was like, Hey, do you mind if I asked, like, what kind of ads did you just publish? She said, Oh, I just published meta ads. I said, Oh, that's awesome. What kind of business do you have? And she told me what kind of business she has. And I said, just so you know, meta-ads is what I've been doing for the last eight years. I'm really experienced at it. I spend like a hundred grand every month on running meta-ads. If you want me to take a look at them real quick, I'd be happy to see if there's anything that I can point out because you know she was brand new, she had just launched them for the first time, and she said, Oh, well, I'll I'll see how they do, but thank you. And if the tables were turned, if this inexperienced person asked me, a very experienced person, it maybe they're cocky and they said, Oh, hey, I'm I'm pretty good at running those ads. Like, you want me to take a look? I would 1000% say yes. I'd be like, Yeah, tell me what you see. Absolutely. Even if I take zero of their advice. But I see how they talk about it, I see their first reaction as uh a brand new potential customer that is looking at my ads for the first time. It's so valuable to watch someone's reaction to my ads that is brand new to them. I need to see that first-time experience. So, of course, I would say yes. But this was a girl that was more concerned, in her case, I would say, about being a boss babe. I'm just trying to do this on my own. I just want to have the story where I could say, Yeah, I did it all on my own. I didn't need any help. Okay, my cousin is another people, one of these people where uh a few of them, like they want to start businesses, they never ask me for advice. Your cousin is a world-renowned marketing and business coach who would happily coach you for free, and I charge like over 400 bucks per hour for the coaching, and I would totally give it for free, which I do a free call, by the way, guys. So you can still get the free one. Um, but yeah, I would I've just given them unlimited coaching calls, and they know this too, but they didn't care because the business wasn't about helping customers, it was about being able to say that they started a business and they did it on their own. And if you're like this, you're not gonna get anywhere because you're really just trying to reinvent the wheel and then pretend like you did something. Just seek advice. Even if you're like, eh, I don't really agree with that advice, you can still seek it out, you can still hear people's opinions, but for the most part, especially if you're new, like it's probably gonna be a better way of thinking about things than you're currently doing. And this lady, I could have fixed her ads up real quick. I wasn't trying to sell her anything. Maybe she thought I was trying to sell her something, but either way, I mean, I've made it pretty clear. Like, I will just take a look at them for you. That's fine. Why wouldn't you be curious as to what an eight-year veteran has to say about your ads rather than just say, no, this is my first time. I just want to fall flat on my face, thank you. So it's just a very weird thing to do, and that's a very egotistical thing to do. I wasn't being egotistical, by the way, if you're comprehending this wrong by me offering free advice. I don't get any buzz out of doing that, but I do love helping people either way. I didn't need her validation that my advice was great or anything, obviously. But I was just like, hey, I literally am like a doctor that knows how to do heart surgery, and someone next to me was like, Oh, my heart is aching and I have a I'm having a heart attack. And I'm like, I'm a heart surgeon, I can fix it. And they're like, No, no, I feel like my palpitations are gonna my self-palpitations will be fine. Thank you. Go away. Okay, it's it's super weird to just refuse advice, especially when a true professional is offering it to you. Lesson are we on 13, guys, or 14? You can't care about your customers too much. It is impossible to care about your customers too much. And originally I worded this tip saying care about your customers more than anything, or like customer service is peak, uh, you know, importance. Like, I I need to let you guys know that 100% of you don't care about your customers enough. It is so rare I meet anyone who cares about their customers as much as I do. And I can give you examples from last week, and I can give you examples at any time that most business owners would never do. Okay, I bend over backwards for my customers' happiness, and I want to make sure that every person who ever gives me money is glad that they did, because in business, as soon as someone gives you money and they wish they didn't do it, you'll never see them again. And the world is finite, and you need to be very careful with your brand name and your reputation because it really is true that a lot of course sellers of the past, Kevin David, Tanner Chidester, Kevin Zhang, to name a few of them, not to call them out, but I mean they're they're non-existent now, they can't sell anything, they've sold too many courses and products to people that wish they didn't buy and they will never buy again. And there's only so many entrepreneurs out there. There really is only so many entrepreneurs out there. So you don't actually want to be like abundance, there's a billion customers. Like, there's actually a finite amount. So you gotta be really careful about it. So care about your customers. Genuinely. Here's two examples from last week. A guy that I run ads for that is a home renovation company. He had two of his employees quit in one week and he's super backed up on leads. I offered to call his leads for free for him. I said, I will set aside two hours while you uh try to hire someone and I will call your leads for you. It's not part of our contract. I will make money like if the leads eventually close, but I'm still blocking off two hours of my own time to do this completely unrelated part of our contract. I am always trying to do services that are not in the fine print that are not in the contract. I want to do as many possible things that I can and be as giving as possible. And you can say, Derek, you got to be more careful with your time. You got to value your time. You got to charge what you're worth. Hey, they're gonna make you do stuff, you gotta charge them for that. I understand, and a lot of times when it's fair, like I will charge them, but I will never not take the opportunity to earn a customer for life by going above and beyond for them. Another example is I have a client that launched ads and he did not have enough money to buy my full coaching program. He only had enough to buy one coaching call. I stayed on with him two and a half hours, even though he bought a 75-minute coaching call. I stayed on with him for two and a half hours. Don't try to take advantage of me and and ask for this same thing, guys. But this was someone that I really wanted to help because he was really down on his luck financially. And I gave him double the amount of time that was agreed upon because I wanted to do that for him. And then he's been asking me a lot of questions since, and we really need to get back on another coaching call. So I said, I don't care about the money, I just care about your success. Let's get on a coaching call and you can pay me whenever you get a chance. How many coaches or just businesses in general do you know that are willing to do stuff like that? And I will tell you, because I do stuff like that, I earn customers for life. You should be constantly looking for a situation to go above and beyond for a customer that will make them tied to you doing business with you forever. Because how could they possibly even consider working with someone else when you provide them with that much extra value so willingly and so graciously? That's just exam two examples from the last week. I have a multiple examples every single week, and so few businesses operate with this. This is probably the most unique tip that I'm giving to you guys. Although a lot of people tell you be customer service folk focused. I'm saying go above and beyond any chance you get. The 14th lesson. And a lot of people like to talk about middle of funnel and top of funnel marketing. And this is kind of like the part B of the lesson here. Middle of funnel and top of funnel marketing is a lie, it's not profitable and never will be profitable. You cannot sell to someone who does not already have the problem that your product solves. And what middle of funnel and top of funnel is, it's not that it's worthless, it's that you should never divert specific attention to it. Okay, so what that would be, so I do, or you shouldn't throw money at it, okay? When I run ads for people to buy my marketing agency services or my marketing consulting services, I can only sell to bottom of funnel. I can only sell it to people who actively need help with that right now. Middle of funnel and top of funnel will just naturally be happening because some people will say, Oh, cool, good to meet this guy, good to see this guy for the first time, good to kind of register Derek Fidel, and that's cool that he's a marketing agency, and I am now scrolling on. You can't sell to these people, you're not profitable. Your ads are gonna naturally find them, your organic posts are gonna naturally find them, and so middle of funnel and top of funnel marketing is always happening with every effort that you put towards bottom of funnel. But unless your effort is at bottom of funnel, then you're not ever gonna be profitable. Okay, if I was running ads, hey guys, listen to this podcast on how to start a business or 18 lessons that I learned from zero to 35k, and then you will listen to that to that, and then you'll consider quitting your traditional job, and then you probably won't, but you might, and then if you do, you'll start your business and then you'll try to remember my name, and then you'll come back, and then and then you'll want to run meta ads and then you'll buy from me. Like it just does not happen. It does not happen at a rate that will ever be profitable to spend money on that customer journey. You are only trying to do bottom of funnel as far as advertising go because it's the only thing that will turn into profitable ad spend. Only massive companies that are trying to like top of funnel marketing for Star Wars. I'm gonna say, like, they do all the kids' shows, right? It's not even top of funnel. Never mind, it's bottom of funnel. Like they their parents will go out and buy them the action figures that week. The parents will subscribe to Disney Plus that week because they like Star Wars, okay? Like, it still is all bottom of funnel marketing, all marketing is just trying to sell to people who already have some interest because there's nothing that you can say, there's no deal that you can give that will ever make someone buy something that they are not already interested in on their own. So, for that reason, your market has a limit. And a lot of people think that business growth is linear. Look at this growth that we're on, we're or exponential even. We're on this upward trajectory. Based on this trajectory, we're gonna be at two billion neck in five years. Your market is finite, okay? So plan accordingly. So, what this looks like is that at the beginning, you're gonna be a more revenue-focused and new customer acquisition focused business. Those are your KPIs. Once you realize I have hit a natural plateau on the size of my market, you need to divert your attention to total net profit. All decisions are made around net profit. We're just spending as much money as the ads will allow us to spend. We're doing as much marketing as the market will allow us to be profitable. And you are cutting costs, maybe you are delegating or automating more, and you're just realizing this is as big as this business gets. So on to the next business, and maybe I'll sell this one, but you need to know that you cannot infinitely grow a business, even if it's gotten you to a million a year, two million, five million, ten million a year, you will reach a point that it will it will reach a cap. It will reach a cap in time. And if you don't know that now, if you don't kind of know that like after a few years, it might happen. After a few years of running aggressive ads, you will likely see it happen. If I had to give you a quantitative metric, by the way, is that when your maximum frequency and ads manager hits about eight, is when you've you're starting to hit the true natural cap on your market, on your bottom of funnel, and you're probably gonna have to spend less money on ads. You are no longer gonna spend 15,000 a month on ads, you should spend 10,000 a month on ads, and then eventually you should spend 5,000, and maybe that's where you'll stay because that's how many people are coming and going from your market, but everyone else has already bought from you. They already have your thing and it hasn't broke yet, and it's sitting at their house, and they don't need another one. There is a finite amount to your market, and if you do not know that when you get to that phase, you're gonna let your I don't want to have a limiting belief. Let's scale this to the moon, let's keep going, keep going, and you're gonna waste all of your business's profits by investing in a market that has already heard of you. It's like spending money on breast cancer awareness. We're all aware, okay? Run a fundraiser if you want to freaking do a breast cancer awareness phase, then obviously you're money laundering because that's the stupidest marketing move ever. And you guys are definitely well-paid marketers. We're all aware. Stop spending money on top of funnel marketing, okay? That's just one example there. I'm I'm getting to the end, obviously. I don't know. I thought I had 18 lessons. I know I've been off. I've so let's not worry about the number anymore. But the next lesson, we only have I think we have one, or maybe we have two more guys. Oh, yeah, we have two more. The most important skill, what do you think it is? What is the most important skill that a an entrepreneur can have? A lot of people would say wisdom, but it's actually one thing further. It's memory. Your memory is actually the most important skill. Because what good is wisdom if you don't remember it? So I want to tell you guys this. When I meet successful people in any industry, I know that it is due to their memory. Why is Charlie Kirk a great political debater? Rest in peace. Because he memorized so many stats in so many books. He has his own opinions on them, but ultimately, if he doesn't even remember those opinions or remember how he's gonna talk about it, or remember what examples he's gonna use, or remember the Bible that he wants to quote, or remember what uh person that he wants to quote or what law, then he's just gonna get cooked, right? Same with every liberal debater, same thing. Dean Withers, he has a great memory, that's why he's successful. Everyone who's ever appeared smarter than you actually just had a better memory. Because if you remembered everything that you've ever been taught, you would seem like a very intelligent person. You'd seem like an insanely intelligent person. If you remembered everything that you'd ever been taught, and to the point that you could even tie these things together, tie these different knowledge bases together in a way that formed a complete knowledge base of the world around you. If all that you have is memory, someone a a 30-year-old with an extremely good memory is more wise than a 70-year-old with a weak one that has more experience. Because they don't remember it, they don't remember it to the point that they can teach it, and that's one of the things that I think separates me as a coach from a lot of other high-ticket coaches. I don't want to work with you, Derek, because this other guy is at 200,000 a month and you're only at 35,000 a month. Well, I remember what it's like to be you, I remember what it's like to be your experience level, and to remember what was difficult at your phase. And a lot of those really big guys are so far removed from what it's like to be the little guy that they can't even teach it anymore. But I'm pretty sure I'll be able to because I can tell you all of my friends' phone numbers from first grade until now. Okay, I have an insane memory for numbers, not for everything, but also in Cutco, I had 3,300 customers. I would have people come up to my booth that I hadn't seen in years, and I would remember their names, and that meant a lot to them. So I want to tell you that anything that you can do to improve your memory, you should. You should do memory training games, you should take GABA, uh, which helps your neurotransmission, and it's really great for a lot of other things. You should take supplements, you should get good sleep, you should take care of your brain as much as possible because as soon as your memory is gone, so is your ability to be an effective entrepreneur, and you need to know how important your memory is. The last lesson is that your ability to be a successful entrepreneur that never quits will come down to how much you despise a traditional career much more so than it comes down to how bad you want to be a successful business owner. Let me say that a little bit shorter. Your ability to never quit an entrepreneurship will come down to how much you would hate to be a traditional sales or a traditional worker or anything else, then it it will come down to how much you would love to be a successful entrepreneur because everyone would love to be a successful entrepreneur. A lot of people would love to be a successful musician, they would love to be a rock star. But the ones who would hey, I can't possibly go back to a corporate job, I can't possibly work for someone else, I'm not even considering that. It's not even an option. That's where never quitting actually come from comes from. So I would tell you that while you are trying to generate motivation to pursue your entrepreneurial entrepreneurial goals, think about how shitty it would be to work a traditional job. You're probably working one right now. Bask in all of that terribleness. Think about how much you hate working for your boss and being told what to do and having your salary capped and having to go to work every day and not getting enough vacation days and not making enough money to even use those vacation days to begin with. That is how you get through the phases where you're only making $1K a month, $2K a month, and then asking your mom and dad for some money, and then moving back in with your mom and dad, and then having to sell your precious Rolex watch that you won with your previous sales job so that you could get an extra nine grand so that you could invest that into your company, and you need more time. So you have to give up your beloved fantasy football in order to make it happen, and you have to break up with your girlfriend who didn't actually believe in you in the end, and you have to f let go of some of your friends that were your best friends that you thought, but once you started trying to become an entrepreneur, you realize that their friendship was never real to begin with. They only liked you when you were playing it small and that you were not serving as this reminder to them not accomplishing their goals. You're gonna have to lose friends, you're gonna have to work from home behind your computer tireless nights just to have none of your ideas work out. You might have to start a second, third, fourth business. You're not gonna do that because it would be cool to be an entrepreneur, you're gonna do that because you would hate not to be. So just know that that's gonna be part of it, and that's a healthy discontentment. Healthy discontentment is the prelude to progress. So know that that is not out of the ordinary if you just can't stand the thought of not making it as an entrepreneur. If that's you, you're gonna be just fine. It just might be a little bit. But don't worry, that time is going to pass either way. Thank you for listening to 500 episodes of the social media entrepreneurs podcast. I'll see you in the next one.