Being An Entrepreneur vs. An Owner

You, as you operate your business, often forget about the customer behind it. And so you don't go out and get the resources to create a great experience for your customer. Instead, you put all of your attention and your resources into what's going to make you profitable in the short term. That's being an entrepreneur. That's not being an owner. Your job as an owner is to go get the resources so that the whole team can create a great experience that delights and and excites your customers. It takes one free person to create change. This is the show for them. We are the creators of the Free world. This is capitalism.com and we are the 1%.

Sup? Hey. Welcome to the 1%. It's capitalism.com and I'm Ryan. Danny Moran. And you are awesome. Cause you're an entrepreneur and you're a capitalist, and you create change. I know sometimes you think you just want to make money, but the truth is you want the money so that you can create some sort of change. And I see you for that change. You want to create that change might be that you want to wake up whenever the hell you want. That change might be that you want to invest in things that excite that change might be that you want to raise an amazing family. That change is very simply whatever you want to create in your life. I want you to know that that's why you want money. Now, I've done a lot of thought of this for myself, and I just like to play, and I love to play in business, and I love to create an impact and watch things grow really quickly. And money is simply an amplifier that makes that fun. And money is the thing that allows you to move fast and make mistakes and to just be the fuel for the impact and the change you want to make, the money is neutral. The money itself doesn't mean that much. The money is just the fuel for us to create the change that we want. I'll tell you that some of the most unhappy times in my life were when I made a lot of money. But there wasn't any reason for the money to amplify. There was no better life as a result of more money. There was more money. And my whole life had been about making money. So I wanted to make more money, but there wasn't a real amplifier to it. Now, I love money. I really enjoy playing with it and making it and spending it and investing it and blowing it sometimes. I love money.

It's fun. It's just fun. But when the game is to get more, because there is no driver, then it can be. That is when it is the root of all evil. The lack of pursuit, the empty meaning behind money is the root of many kinds of evil. But when you are deploying money, when you are making money, when you are creating change and money shows up behind you, man, there is nothing money more fun in my opinion. So I tell you all that because I know that you're in this game because you have some change you want to create, you have something different that you want to enjoy the creation of and money is your route to get it. I see you for the change that you want to create. It's why I love talking with other entrepreneurs like you today. I want to share with you the difference between being an entrepreneur and being an owner. Entrepreneur is a buzzword. Entrepreneur is a word that we throw around a lot. And we often confuse the word entrepreneur with the idea of being a founder. In today's Instagram world, we love to follow the Richard Bransons and the Elon Musk's and the Tom Bilyeus and the other entrepreneurs who are founders. But. But quietly behind all of the activity that we put in front of these founders, there are capitalists and entrepreneurs and investors who are worth billions of dollars that don't have a big social media following. Before he ran for president, Mike Bloomberg did not have a big raving social media following. He was building businesses and he was a public figure because he had been the mayor of New York. But he made his money building Bloomb LP, which made him now worth $60 billion. Do you realize that's 10 Donald Trumps? I love how the Democrats now the frontrunners are someone who condemns Trump for being a billionaire and the other frontrunner is someone who is 10 times richer than Trump. Oh, I just love the theater of a presidential election. It's so much fun. Fun. If you can take your ego out of it, there's no more fun show on earth. Michael Bloomberg made his money in business, not by being a public figure. The founders of most big companies don't have big social media followings. Most billionaires aren't public figures. They're not documenting the being a founder portion because most of them are capitalists, not founders. Even if we look at the most famous and successful entrepreneurs that we love to talk about, let's take Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg is worth some $70 billion, but he only owns, I believe it's 18% of Facebook. So yes, he was the founder, but he did not scale up Facebook all on his own. He's only a minority partner in that business. Jeff Bezos only owns some 20% of Amazon and he's the richest person in the world. Elon Musk only owns 30% of Tesla and his that 30% is worth $50 billion folks. So I tell you all of this because we often get romantic about the idea of being a founder who works 20 hours a day and bootstrapped the whole thing and also owns 100% of the business. But in the real business world, in the world where or building multimillion dollar or a billion dollar companies, all of that is kind of child's play. It's silliness. Why would you even need to own 100% of a business when your job is to build the biggest pie possible? Your job isn't to be the sole founder and bootstrapper of a business. Your job is to be the owner of the business, to own as much of a pie as possible. I'm sorry, let me say that differently. Your job is to own and create the biggest possible, not to own the biggest slice. Now, in our world where we hang out and listen to podcasts and talk about making money on the Internet, it's really easy to confuse the cash flow game with the building a business game. But they're different. Cash flow is the short term results of a business. The business itself is the asset behind it. If you're a capitalist, if you're an entrepreneur, you're building assets. And we often fall in love with the game of creating short term profit at the expense of building a real asset. A real asset can be scaled and sold. A short term profitable side thing can set you financially free in the short term, but it doesn't make you an owner. I harp on the difference between an entrepreneur and an owner because in my opinion, an entrepreneur is someone who is simply willing to do whatever it takes to to not work a 9 to 5 job, which is also the mentality of a homeless person. But an owner is someone who collects the resources and holds them for a long period of time, giving them real freedom. An owner doesn't have to work 20 hours a day. An owner doesn't have to work at all. Warren Buffett doesn't work at all. And Warren Buffett never went through a period where he was a big hustler. Warren Buffett is an owner. Warren Buffett buys stakes in businesses and he has people who give him the money to buy those businesses. He's a steward of resources. He is not a hustler, or might not even call him a founder. You Might not call him an entrepreneur, but he certainly is an owner and a capitalist and one of the wealthiest people in the world. Very few of the world's wealthiest people got there simply through work ethic. Now, you all know I love Gary Vaynerchuk. He's one of my mentors from a distance, and we have a decent relationship. But what most people misunderstand about Gary's philosophy is that Gary is excitedly and happily working on things 16 hours a day. He is not working for the sake of work. He is not in there founding the next thing. He has moved over to more of an owner role. And he loves it. And he also loves the grit and the grind. It's play to him. It's fun for him. And so most of us see that and say, well, the secret is to work 16 or 18 hours a day. And that is not the case. The secret is to own things. Naval Ravikant has a great quote on this. He says, if you want to get rich, you have to own something. You have to own a piece of a business that when it performs, can make you wealthy. And in the same way, we take those profits and we put them into other things that we own. Those are investments. That's why the two steps to get rich that we talk about at capitalism.com are build a business and invest the profits. You make your money by building an asset that pays you money, something that hopefully can be scaled or sold. And you take the profits of that and you put them into other investments of which you own. And the result of that is that over time, you own a collection of assets that are paying you money for a very long period of time. Being an entrepreneur often means long hours for short term profits just so we don't have to work a 9 to 5 job. An owner is somebody who sits more in the owner's box and puts the resources and assets together to have an asset that pays him or her money for a long time. I'm a baseball guy. My dream is to own the Cleveland Indians. So we'll use a baseball analogy to illustrate this. I would never want the owner of the Cleveland Indians to go pitch for the team. That would suck. We would suck. The team would suck. The I want the owners sitting up in the owner's box going and getting resources like more money to go sign the players that put a winning product on the field. You see that? I would never want the owner producing the product. I want the owner to go get the resources to make a great product. I want the owner to go build the team to have a great product. Now, when I show up, I don't really care who owns the team unless it's me. I don't care if it's Larry or Paul Dolan, or if it's Dick Jacobs, or if it's any of the previous owners of the team. I just want to see the team be good. I want to see the city come together and rally behind this thing that I'm excited about. I want to have fun rooting for my team. I want the players that I root for to be successful. I want to see us win a championship and watch the city come alive. That's what I want. I don't care who the owner is. And in our Internet entrepreneurial world, where founders are celebrities, we often confuse the people knowing that we're an entrepreneur with us being successful or us being an owner. You are a successful entrepreneur when you've created a product that people are excited about. When you've got your focus on serving your customers so much that they excitedly show up to do business with you. I buy tickets to go watch the Cleveland Indians. Selfishly, I'm doing it because I'm having a great time. Sometimes I'll have a hot dog at the stadium and pay $8 for a hot dog because I'm having a good time. That's actually kind of a lie. I haven't had a hot dog in a long time. I'm much more likely to get like a burger, hold the bun with a salad. But you know where I'm going with this? I'm buying a ticket to watch the Cleveland Indians because I wanna watch the Cleveland Indians. I'm not buying them because of who the owner is. I'm not buying them because of their TV ads. I'm buying cause I'm having a great time because I enjoy going to the games and being part of the team and being part of the experience. But you, as you operate your business, often forget about the customer behind it. And so you don't go out and get the resources to create a great experience for your customer. Instead, you put all of your attention and your resources into what's going to make you profitable in the short term. That's being an entrepreneur. That's not being an owner. Your job as an owner is to go get the resources so that the whole team can create a great experience that delights and excites your customers. What does that look like? It means you going and making sure that the company never runs out of money. It means that you set the overall vision for the company and that the team has the talent and the manpower to be able to carry out that vision. That's what you do as an owner. You cast the vision, you get the money and you get the team to implement that vision. It's not the owner's job to ensure that every little detail happens. It's the owner's job to ensure that the company has the resources and able to be able to turn a profit long term. And the crazy thing is that takes less time, takes more thought, but it makes more money. So it takes less time. Especially once things are going off the ground and it's building a real asset that somebody else wants to buy. That's the secret to building a company you can sell. If you sell physical products on Amazon or Shopify, it's easy to fall into the short term trap of optimizing for algorithms and sales and rankings and getting the short term profit. But if you're the man or woman at the helm, then that is not really an asset that you can sell. Whereas if you are an owner and you go and get the resources, whether it is you're funding the business or you're getting a loan, or you have investors and you build the team in place and set the vision to be able to carry out that vision, now you have an asset that might have exposure on Amazon or Shopify or influencers or retail. You've got the resources to go hard into creating an experience that delights and surprises your customers. Doing that is a lot more fun than being involved in all of the day to day problems that entrepreneurs face. That's when you can finally relax. It's when you can finally be free without having to work 80 hour weeks so that you can make money while you sleep. You can make money while you sleep right now by being an owner. Now, the humble pie that a lot of entrepreneurs don't want to accept is the idea that if you are taking this approach, you might have to give up certain points of the business. You might have to raise money and thus give up a few equity pieces in the business. You might have to give upside to the right CEO who wants to be rewarded for what he or she produces. You might have to create partnerships with audiences or influencers in order to have the traffic and exposure that you want. You might have to take on a partner and give up 50% of the pie. And a lot of entrepreneurs are romantic about the number of points that they control rather than the overall pie that they have. I have made a recent relationship here in Austin, Texas from somebody who Runs a really cool business that he's really excited about. And this person has been on Shark Tank and this person has raised money and he's built this business that is a nice seven figure business. It's not an eight figure business, but it's a seven figure business. Yet he's raised a lot of money for it. And he has a partnership with.

He has a partner and then several other owners in the business. And so his equity on this seven figure business has dwindled quite a bit. And I said to him, I was like, how do you manage this? How do you manage your desires? When you went from owning 100% of the business to owning actually a small stake in the business, you're not even the biggest shareholder anymore. And he looked at me and he said, you know, I'd rather own 20% of something that is $100 million than to own 100% of something that makes zero. And he ran the numbers with me on the current business that he was building and its valuation and.

The numbers that some other people had quoted their business was worth. And when we ran the numbers, that business was incredibly valuable. And the amount of shares that he owned would dwarf what most people would dream of ever being worth. Now he could only do that. He could only have that success by the very nature that he was willing to build the biggest pie rather than he was trying to get the biggest slice. That's such a huge difference. Entrepreneurs hustle and grind and work away and sweat in order to be financially free. But they're never time free. They're very often, in my case and with among my peers, they're tired and stressed, looking for the next dollar to make. But owners also own their time. Owners get to do the fun parts, they get to cast the vision, and they get to make the final decisions without being the bottleneck, without being the person who has to come up with, carry the financial burden of the company. They get to do what's fun. I want to be an owner. I want to be a capitalist. I'm kind of graduating away from just being an entrepreneur, meaning the whole hustle for the next sale doesn't interest me so much as much as being an owner and a capitalist allows me to own lots of different projects and do lots of different things without having to give up the other project that I'm excited about. What it does require me to give up is the idea that I might own 100% of everything. I can create the partnership with the person that I want to do business with and get to sit in the owner's chair with them and create a much bigger pie than we would ever have on our own. That is when you're not only financially free, but you get to really enjoy your life and you have full control. It's when you get to play with the pieces rather than be one of the pieces. Entrepreneurs tend to run themselves into the ground, carry enormous amounts of stress and to hustle their way to success and never really feel the fruits of their labor because they followed an ineffective strategy. Because they went alone, they went on their own, they took all of the risk and all the stress on their own. It's no wonder why we feel competitive against one another. We feel divided against one another. We hide the intimate details of our business from one another. And we feel alone and stressed most of the time. Time. And we worry about money. Even though everybody else thinks we're killing it, or even though we run a seven figure business, we know we can't sell the business because we are the business and we're tired most of the time. So we want to sell the business. The way out is to be an owner. An owner produces resources and creates assets. An owner gets to enjoy the fruits of the labor without having to do all of the labor. An owner gets to cast the vision and to set to the direction of the business without carrying the stress of the business or being even wholly responsible for the resources that it needs. So you de risk the business. This is my thesis right now moving forward on how to enjoy being a capitalist, enjoy starting businesses, to enjoy having multiple projects without having to take on more stress, more time, more commitment, which is already stressed, stretched thin for so many of us who are entrepreneurs. One of our core focuses inside of the tribe is a focus on building seven figure businesses that you can sell. And that requires you to be an owner. If you want to sell a business for a huge amount, you have to think like an owner, not like a founder or an entrepreneur. I have a written PDF that you can find@Capitalism.com tribe and it's a write up of the difference between an entrepreneur and an owner and the difference between a hustler and an owner. And how if you use some of the moves, some of the habits and strategies that owners use, and you put them into your existing business, you can relax, make better decisions, make more money and build a bigger pie. And that's what we're all trying to do. We want to own a slice of the biggest pie possible, rather than all of a pie that's worth zero. If you are an entrepreneur, and you're feeling that stuckness of not having enough time, not having the resources, not having a business that is scalable or one that you can sell. I'd love to help. You can hang out with us over@capitalism.com tribe and you can download that PDF and also see how we help entrepreneurs build businesses that you can sell. Also, if you just want to hang out with other capitalists who are on the journey of multiplying resources and creating wealth, I'd invite you to join us over inside the 1%. And you can do that over at capitalism.com1. It's an honor and a privilege to serve you because you create change. We talked about that at the top of this podcast that you don't really want money, you want to create change. And if you pride prioritize the change that you want to create, I can almost guarantee you that money will show up to be able to fund that change. Because money is just energy and it flows to your energy. And when your focus is on whatever change you want to create, money follows. That money is attracted to movement. And the more you move in the direction of the change you want to create, the more money will automatically show up in your experience. So I see that version of you that has change that you want to create. And I'm confident that if, when you realize it, when you realize the change and the impact that you want to make, even if it is in your own life, if you have a driver behind that, the money shows up way easier than when you're trying to pound your head against the wall trying to fix a financial problem. We're here to serve you here@capitalism.com and I'd always love to hear your thoughts. You can DM me on Instagram. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.

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