#TBT - How To Get To $1 Million With Zero Employees w/ Elaine Pofeldt

I think that we're getting pretty close to having more $10 million one person businesses because I noticed just in speaking with some of the entrepreneurs from the book, they're already getting into the 3 and 4 million dollars range and beyond. In some cases it's just a matter of time. It's such a great opportunity right now for people who are really smart about figuring out how to put all these trends to work for themselves to create a.

Hey capitalists. In traditional Throwback Thursday fashion, we're re releasing one of our most popular episodes that we've had on capitalism.com enjoy. Today I'm going to be speaking directly to those of you who are thinking about starting a business, who have been listening to some of the stories that we have featured here on Freedom Fast Lane. And you're like, hey, I wanna do that because I'm gonna be joined by Elaine Poffelt who wrote the book the Million Dollar One Person Business. So she's literally written the book on how small entrepreneurs can get to the million dollar point and beyond, which is something that I have personally specialized in. Several hundred million dollar businesses have come out of listening to the show and through the tribe and our training programs that we have@capitalism.com and freedom fast Lane. So I wanted to bring Elaine on to talk about some other business models that are working for entrepreneurs. And she also mentions members of our community inside of her book which was just featured on the Tim Ferriss podcast and Tim's website. So a bunch of our students are getting featured in big media, I guess. So I wanted to bring her on to talk a little bit about some of these stories because I want you to see that, that this stuff is possible, that this stuff is happening, that this stuff is an emerging trend. It's not too late, that there are still new opportunities coming down the pipeline. That there is better access to capital, that there is better access to talent and technology than there has ever been. And Elaine is a journalist, so she's been writing about these entrepreneurs for years and finally just decided to publish it into kind of a how to guide called a mill called the Million Dollar One Person Business. So she comes from outside of our world and she's looking at it like a journalist saying, hey, this is the next wave, this is where things are going and here's the roadmap to get there. So if you have been listening to the show or you've been kicking around other business ideas, this will help you see that it's possible. You'll see how it's possible and you'll see that you don't have to have it all figured out in order to get started and get to a million dollar business, even if you're starting with very little capital. And you are a one or two person show. So this podcast will help you to see that and help you take the next step towards building that. So enjoy this chat with Elaine Po.

Elaine, thanks for hanging out with us.

Oh, it's great to be here, Ryan.

So Elaine, you are the author of the Million Dollar One Person Business, which is right in my sweet spot. Over $250 million businesses have been started as the result of some of the things that we've talked about here on Freedom, fast lane and capitalism.com and I was reading the book going, this feels like an expose on all of all of our students and people in our community. So thank you for highlighting the one person business. But I'm curious. I want to start off. We all know that there is no money to be made on the Internet and the Internet's just a fad. So how many entrepreneurs did you have to interview in order to compile the book?

I came across these entrepreneurs in the course of my reporting. So I'm a journalist who specializes in writing about entrepreneurship and I interview hundreds of entrepreneurs every month. So they occurred in my life naturally. I wasn't really hunting for them. The genesis of the book came about when I was working on my Forbes blog and I noticed some statistics on non employer businesses. Those are businesses that employ no one other than the owner. So they could be a solo business or they could be a partnership or family business, maybe a husband and wife team, but they don't have W2 employees. And I noticed that there were businesses that were bringing in revenue from 1 million to 2.49 million that had no employees. And that seemed pretty remarkable to me because I knew a lot of freelancers and free agents and they weren't breaking a million. So I started digging around in the census stats and I noticed there were certain categories that were coming up in terms of their industrial code. So for instance, manufacturing businesses, retail, et cetera. And I wrote a blog about it and got a big response. People were very curious about exactly what they were doing in these categories. So I said, if you're one of these entrepreneurs in my next blog, write to me. I'd love to know what you're doing. I'd love to tell your story. So people started writing to me and then as I wrote more stories, other ones found me and that was how the book came about. Them for a number of different publications since then. And it's always interesting to see how they put their own spin on the one person business.

Well, Elaine, you say something really interesting that struck home to me, which was in chapter three, you recommended that you start with the lifestyle. And then you talked about Ben and Camille Ardenberg, who are neighbors of mine here in Austin, Texas. I'm supposed to see Camille next week for coffee, actually. So you brought this idea up of starting with the lifestyle. Why do you make that recommendation and do you feel like most entrepreneurs do that or do you see that as a problem that you needed to call out?

I think a lot of entrepreneurs are very passionate about their businesses and that passion can sometimes overtake them to the point that they're living a very unhealthy lifestyle. By unhealthy, I don't just mean physically unhealthy, but I mean they don't spend time with their families and friends, they don't make time for their community because they just get so consumed with the business. And then all of a sudden they wake up one day and they hate the business and they hate their life and they wonder why they even started it. And that's not the idea of starting a business. So I think it's important when you start out to think about what do I really want out of life? Because the business is a means to an end. It isn't the reason to be alive.

Right.

And so I think if you can sort of keep that in mind at all times, which is hard, you'll have better results overall. And what I found is that a lot of entrepreneurs come to that realization after a few years in business. Sometimes they get a scare of some sort, a health scare, or they just realize that they're unhappy and then they course correct and build time in to do meditation or spend more time with their spouse and kids or whatever it may be that helps them recover, connect with the person that they are and then they become better entrepreneurs for it because they can step back from the business and bring some perspective to it.

Well, Elaine, I'm just going to use this opportunity to get some free consulting advice from you because you are describing me to a T.

I just posted the podcast a couple of weeks ago about my health scare, about the fact that, you know, after an exit and we'll talk about selling these businesses in a second. But after exiting a business, after working myself to the bone for more than a decade, my numbers came back on a blood test that alarmed me. And if you missed that episode with Anthony Balduzzi I'd recommend you go learn the lessons that took me 10 years to learn. And now I'm doing exactly that, getting more clear on how I can step away from the business and I'm becoming a better entrepreneur. I am curious, in your experience in interviewing all of these entrepreneurs, have you found that entrepreneurs are capable of setting up the lifestyle beforehand, or do they have to go through some pain before they realize that they can structure the business however they would like?

I think it really depends on someone's personality. Some people just naturally have a tendency to block out time for meditation or yoga or running or whatever they do to relax, and then other people just have a hard time doing it. It might need an accountability partner. I think sometimes having a friend keep you honest about these things or a coach can be helpful. If you have a tendency to be really relentless, which a lot of entrepreneurs are, it'll just kind of keep you on track because, I mean, let's face it, there are seasons of in an entrepreneur's life, if you're doing an exit or you're doing something big in the business, you may have to work long hours for a while, but that's okay as long as it doesn't go on for 10 years. That's when you start having health problems. It is very hard for people to realize they're overdoing it. But I recommend they listen to your podcast about that because I think you're right by hearing the stories of other entrepreneurs who have been through it. It may be helpful in terms of just stopping, pausing, and saying, hey, what can I do starting this week to try to carve out a little time for myself to have more inner peace and more distance from the business and more time for strategy. In fact, Ben and Camille Arneberg, who you mentioned, they set aside time during the week to think about the high level of the business and work on the business, not in the business. And I think that it's really important and it's very hard to do.

You mentioned in the section about Ben and Camille. Hi, Ben and Camille. By the way, when you talk about them, you said you were talking about the startup costs of a business, and you mentioned how they compared it to their cost of education, how we spend all of this money to go get educated so that we can get a job. And then we balk at the idea of a $5,000 investment to build a real business. I started my first physical products business.

With $600, scaled that to eight figures, sold it for eight figures. So I was hoping that you could speak to that risk reward ratio, or at least what you have seen. Most of these entrepreneurs start with and how they navigate that question of justifying education. But then they don't justify a few thousand dollars to put skin into their business. Would you comment on that?

I think that was one of the most interesting perspectives in the book. And it's something that I've come across in other entrepreneurs, too, this idea of your investment in your business as being an investment in your own education. I think everything comes with a cost. And I hear from entrepreneurs who are trying to start a business with no money of their own involved. They like to bring in an investor right away. And you really do have to put skin in the game, because who will bet on you if you're not willing to bet on yourself?

Amen.

And not willing to bet on your own education? Because we can all learn and grow. And I think thinking of it as education when you're investing in a startup is a good way to frame things in your mind so that you can deal with the risk. Because there always is risk in any business. You can invest in things that don't work out, and that's just part of being in business. And if you can find a way to accept that and live with it and be happy with it, then you'll be more motivated to continue with the business if something you experiment with just doesn't work out. Because a lot of the things you experiment with will work out and you'll never have tried them if you're afraid to invest.

Would you comment on any of the entrepreneurs who had a failure out of the gate? We have a lot of. We love to talk about success stories. And one of the reasons I try to talk about my failures as much as possible is because I think so many people are afraid to fail. As if there is some sort of devastation on the other side of failure. I have found that my greatest successes come on the other side of failure. So did you speak with any entrepreneurs who had a big bust and then they tried it again and they had a different result?

Pam and Camille are actually a really good example of that. They are both athletic people and they like to run. And one of their first businesses involved selling compression sleeves. It's a running accessory and they thought that people would love it and it flopped. And instead of giving up, they then went on to start Willow and Everett, which is a business that they have on Amazon where they sell home decor and entertaining items, so decorative decanters and that sort of thing. They both love entertaining and that Took off and both of these things were passions for them. This actually speaks to the whole idea of follow your passion. But they didn't work out equally well as a business and they were willing to take the chance that maybe they wouldn't work out and that ultimately, like in your case, ended up with success.

I am literally looking at a Willow and Everett product in my house right now as I am recording this, which is fun. And I mentioned to you, what is the product? It's their standing mat that I'm on right now. So yeah, they're friends of mine and so I have their products in my house. You mentioned in the book one of the people that I really respected as I was growing up in this business, which was David Farrelly. You mentioned him in the book as someone who has bought and sold a whole lot of businesses, which is how I cut my teeth in kind of the one person business game. I was hoping that you could comment after speaking with David and some of the other entrepreneurs that have exited a business, what the sellability of some of these small, lean, profitable businesses is and what you see as either the viability of selling one of these businesses or what some of the traits of these entrepreneurs who have sold businesses have had in common.

That's a really good question, right? Because one person businesses are notoriously difficult to sell. I'll bet the vast majority of them will never be sold. And that can be changed by the entrepreneurs if they are proactive. So one entrepreneur in the book, Dan Fagella, who is a martial artist and entrepreneur, sold his business for more than a million dollars. It was a million dollar, one person business by positioning it for sale. So before he put it up for sale, and just to explain what it is, it's called science of skill and it was a martial arts community where it had video lessons on martial arts and equipment and self defense types of things. He hired two employees to run it so that they could run it without him and demonstrate to a future owner that someone else other than him could run it because he had some Internet fame, because he's a guy who beat a much larger competitor in a fight. And the video went viral and it built a lot of respect for his site very quickly. So the person who bought it might not necessarily be an entrepreneur, was actually bought by a group of software. I'm sorry, might not necessarily be a martial artist was bought by a group of software entrepreneurs. But he proved that someone else could run it. He also was very rigorous about keeping his books and could speak to every single thing in his bookkeeping system, if anyone had a question. So there was no concern about sloppiness or replicability of what he was doing. It was all there in his QuickBooks and he invested in a bookkeeping service to speak with him every week to make sure the books were in ship shape. So I think that's important too.

David Fairley, the business broker, is a great source on how to position a business to sell. And there's actually some information on that in the book for people who are thinking about doing that. But these are the types of things that he recommends. Also, it's also important to build up a unique brand around what you're selling. So if for instance, you have an E commerce store, how are you going to compete with Amazon? It's often by curating a product in a way that really builds a following and building a sense of personality around the brand. And he talked to me quite a bit about that because it's very hard as a very tiny business to stand out. And so you really need to put some work into that.

I want to ask you about the ramp up period of having a product or a business out in the marketplace because I have found that kind of the linchpin to getting to the million dollar point is how fast can you get enough adoption of the product to carry your momentum. And I was curious if you've seen a trend in any of these entrepreneurs and these small businesses of how they get the adoption rate to accelerate. How do they get the product to market quick enough and selling quickly enough to where they have something to scale and they know what to focus on? Have you seen any strategies be able to accelerate that path to that million dollar point?

That's a fantastic question, Ryan. I bet a lot of people would like to know the answer to that. I have seen a common strategy and that's pay per click advertising. So a lot of them have invested in that on Facebook, for instance. It depends on where their customers spend their time online. But they are not hesitant to invest in that to accelerate things. They really had different patterns in terms of how long it took to ramp up. Not all the businesses, by the way, were E commerce. So some of them were professional services or manufacturing or personal services like fitness coaching, things like that. So each of those types of businesses has its own pace. But for E commerce businesses, what some of them would do would be to introduce maybe four or five different products on a very small scale on Amazon and then see which ones were selling and then double down on the ones that were doing well and sort of discontinue or discount the ones that didn't do well.

I have found that my secret sauce and all those of you who are listening who are going to pick up Elaine's book and are thinking about going in this direction, you can have this piece of advice for free. The fastest thing you can do in my experience is is there an audience that you control that you can release the products to, whether it be an influencer or it be spending enough on pay per click or having a Facebook group? If you can release the product to an audience, that adoption rate happens really, really quickly. Elaine, I wanted to ask you about the opportunities that you see in the marketplace right now. With a name like capitalism.com I constantly have to fight battles of people saying that there are no more opportunities, that capitalism is a mess. And I sometimes just don't understand how individuals can't see all the opportunities staring them in their face. So it's easy to read other people's success stories. But in your analysis, do you feel like there are more opportunities coming up or that there are less opportunities because there's, quote, more competition now?

I think there's never been a better time to run a business, especially if you are starting out very small without venture capital or a lot of resources. It's so much cheaper than it used to be to launch a business. You don't have to buy a server. You can do everything in the cloud. It's very easy to find talent. There are a growing number of freelancers and people who love to be freelancers. This is their business that you can access through giant platforms like Upwork and Freelancer peopleperhour. They're very, very easy to find. So I think there's more opportunity than ever. There is a lot of competition from the big players, but sometimes you can exist symbiotically with them. So for instance, you can have your own e commerce store, a freestanding store, and then also have a store on Amazon and do both of those things in tandem and do quite well. I think E commerce is one of the areas where a lot of people can do quite well and find opportunity. I noticed when I have been reconnecting with some of the entrepreneurs for further coverage beyond the book. Some of them have scaled well beyond a million dollars and still have not added employees. And some have gotten to the point where they had to add employees to continue with the momentum that they've built and they've found a ton of opportunity. I think when you're starting out with limited resources, you have to think really hard about where the gaps in the marketplace are and what you can bring to the table that is unique and that is not easy. It's easy to say it is not easy to do. But what a lot of people in this book did, and what I've seen with successful entrepreneurs in general is a lot of times they tap into a knowledge of something that they have built over many years. It might be a hobby or sport that they're really interested in. It might be something they just know about from work, but they have a rich repository of information just from being alive. And when they really listen to themselves about what is missing, what do they need that no one is providing, they can come up with great ideas. And it's never been easier to market your ideas. It is so easy now for someone in a very small business to have a global reach through marketing online. People sometimes don't appreciate it because we've gotten so accustomed to that. But if you think about it, 15 or 20 years ago, entrepreneurs did not have that. It would cost a lot of money to have the reach that even the smallest business can have right now.

Yeah, I 100% agree. You mentioned entrepreneurs going beyond a million dollars. One of our backroom Mastermind members is a husband and wife team. They just went to market at $75 million.

Oh my goodness.

Just a husband and wife team started four years ago. So it's not like there's a ceiling to this. I'm of the opinion that this is, dare I say, E commerce is the one sector growing faster than cryptocurrency. We're still in the second inning of this and we're seeing private equity groups move in and chasing us solo entrepreneurs saying, what are you guys doing that we can't figure out? The fact is that when you are a small, nimble team with access to talent and capital like Elaine is talking about, you're able to be nimble and make those decisions quickly. And. And because we're open up to the world, customers are everywhere. You mention in the book, Elaine, you have this quote that I loved, which is that you can't stop growth. That once things start to grow, it's almost like something takes over and then the problem becomes capacity of making sure that you can support the growth. I was hoping you could comment on a little bit about what you meant in the context when you say you can't stop growth. And how do you ensure that you're set up to support it once a product takes off?

Well, I think businesses like a lot of things that people start that are Creative in nature, have a life of their own. Once you put your product out there or your business's name out there, the world will interact with it and often for the good. So you do have to be prepared for it to grow beyond what you think it may reach. And that actually brings up an interesting issue that sometimes people ask me about when they hear that I've written about the million dollar one person business. They think that I will somehow disapprove of the fact that they hired employees at some point. And it's not a religion to run a one person business. That's a state of being at the moment that some businesses are in. But businesses are dynamic. They evolve and they grow. And there may come a point with a one person business where it just makes sense to put someone on payroll. And I think that's great. If you reach that stage, fantastic. You should run with it. There's some jobs that because of labor laws need to be W2 jobs. They should not be done by contractors. You don't want to have labor problems. So really be mindful of what the laws are. But sometimes you need somebody who's always there at certain hours and maybe it would be hard to find a contractor who could work those hours. So you have to do what's right for the business and be prepared to make those decisions. Some people do make a decision that they don't like being an employer. They don't want to manage a team. Maybe they manage a team in corporate America and they just don't like having employees. If that's how you feel and you would like to travel light in your business and you decide, okay, well, I'm going to sort of keep the growth to a certain level. You can do that too. I mean, you can't stop growth entirely, but you can make decisions. I'm not going to invest in doing X because I don't maybe I'm going to keep my market in the US I'm not going to try to go global or make decisions like that where you can sort of slow growth or you can do things like bring in an equity partner to help you manage the business. I know one of the entrepreneurs in the book, Sol Orwell, runs a business called examine.com that publishes reports on nutritional supplements. And he loves to travel the world. This is what he loves in life and travels three or four months out of the year. So he brought in someone who is a contractor who manages the business and has a small amount of equity so that he has benefit if the business grows and is appropriately Motivated to grow it. And that's worked out really beautifully for who?

Funny. You bring up soul. I'll be in Mexico with Sol in a couple of weeks. We talked about Ben and Camille. We talked about David Fairley. You also mentioned Justin Goff, who's here in Austin, Texas. Who.

Yeah, he just moved there. Yeah.

And he sells ebooks and writes copy. And the reason I bring up all these examples is because those are four very different types of businesses. In fact, they're completely different industries. One sells products on Amazon, the other sells ebooks, the other reviews nutritional supplements. The other buys and sells businesses. And so often I hear new entrepreneurs want the model. They want the thing that will work. What will get me to the million? And we just highlighted rapid fire. Four people with four very different businesses. So, Elaine, do you think that there is a right or a wrong way? Do you think that there's a better way? Is there a specific model that you see working for a lot of entrepreneurs, or is it something else? Is it just a matter of putting something into the marketplace? Would you comment on that?

I address this a little bit in the book. There's some exercises for people to help figure out what business is right for them. Because this is a common question. Every time I talk about the book to someone I don't know, they say, I would love to do that, but I just need my business idea to get me to a million dollars. And I think that you almost have to go in reverse and think about, okay, what am I interested in? What am I interested in that could potentially be a business? So, for instance, Camille does photography and she likes to paint, but she doesn't want that to be her main business. She, especially the painting. She said that's something private that she likes to keep for herself. You know, just as something to enjoy. So entertaining is another interest for her. And she decided that's something that she's willing to turn into a commercial enterprise for herself. So you have to think about that too. You might love yoga, for instance, and maybe that's just something you like to do personally. But you don't want to start a yoga school because it would ruin it for you to commercialize it. So you have to think along those lines too. One thing that sometimes helps people is to think about talents and skills that they have that other people compliment them for that they have never thought about turning into a business. There are a lot of people who, you know, the people in their community will say, you're great at X. And then that can lead to a business or Think about things in a corporate career that you did that you know could be done better. That's another way to find things. So there's not one exact formula, but this is a general way of thinking to get to how you create your million dollar one person business.

And once the product is in the marketplace or your services is out there, you have this phrase in the book that I really enjoyed, which was amplify what works. And as entrepreneurs we so often say, hey, this worked. Now I'm going to go into this completely different direction and put my.

Right about that.

It's so common and I find myself doing too. It's just what I'm doing is working and then I find somebody else who's killing it in a completely different area. And I say, well, now I need to shift my entire focus to what somebody else is doing. When I was consulting with someone once, I said, so what you're telling me is you're going to take your attention away from a business that's doing a million dollars a year and you're going to turn your attention to a new advertising channel that's doing zero. You could just go from 1 to 10. How about we do that? So would you comment on the idea of amplifying what works, on doubling down what has gotten you to a million, or do you think that it's okay to kind of diversify your efforts? How would you answer that?

I think it's okay to diversify, but I would say give your original idea a chance and see how far you can take it as long as you're still enjoying pursuing it. Because that is what I found with justice and Golf. When he had his ebook, which had to do with fitness, it was sold on ClickBank. When he saw what ads were working, then he would increase the amount of money he put into the ads to extend the reach of his advertising campaign. And that was how he grew his business so quickly. I think it's so much easier if you already know something works to invest in it more than to try to do something brand new. So if all only for the reason of making your life easier, it makes sense to double down. But if you're losing interest, which sometimes is a problem, then I would say decide you're going to take it to a certain level and then maybe try some other things, because that can happen. You can burn out on something even if it's going well. Or maybe that's the point where you sell it, where you start finding that you're not super interested in it anymore.

And what do you think is the trend moving forward? Meaning do you think that we're going to see more businesses pop up like this? Do you think that we're at capacity? Would you put on your psychic hat for a moment and would psychic Elaine tell us what you think is coming for the million dollar one person business?

I think we're going to see a lot more of them. They have grown 33% since 2011. The latest census statistics were for 2015 and there were more than 34,000.

Non employer businesses that were in that range of 1 million to 2.49 million. And each year the number has grown and I think it just because of the availability of low cost technologies, things that make it easy to put up an Internet store or communicate with people around the world, or extend your reach through marketing. There's just so many free and low cost resources out there that people are just beginning to tap. Plus you have trends such as the decline of traditional jobs. You have a lot of big companies that no longer want as many people on payroll. So there are people that maybe would like to work for a company as a W2 employee but no longer can. And it's so common. We saw it in the recession, but it's just a trend that continues where people top out in salary and then the company lets them go. Well, they maybe have 15 or 20 more years to work and what are they going to do? So a lot of them turn to one person businesses and they find they would never go back to corporate America after they start the business.

So much more money, have a better lifestyle, they don't have all the stress of corporate politics, etc. And they're so happy that they were put into that situation even though they're unhappy about it at first. I've talked to so many entrepreneurs who would fit that category. Then you also have the growth of another trend which is the whole freelance economy. So if you don't have the budget to hire a W2 employee and it isn't cheap because you've got to pay the payroll taxes and you can't just hire somebody and then run out of cash and lay them off, it just isn't the right thing to do. So you have to have some money in reserve to make sure you can make payroll, hire freelancers and have the flexibility that you need without all the financial commitment that you might not be in a position to make yet. So all of those trends combined I think will contribute to tremendous growth in million dollar one person businesses. I think that we're getting pretty close to having more $10 million one person businesses because I noticed just in speaking with some of the entrepreneurs from the book, they're already getting into the 3 and 4 million dollars range and beyond. In some cases, it's just a matter of time. It's such a great opportunity right now for people who are really smart about figuring out how to put all these trends to work for themselves to create a better life.

Well, I will say, Elaine, I think you're right because we just had our yearly planning session for capitalism.com and we set a big hairy, audacious goal of what we call the trillion dollar mission, which is to help 100,000 businesses get to $10 million, which would be a.

Trillion dollar mission, which is what we're setting out to do@Capitalism.com you mentioned this idea of ramping up cash flow, of making sure you have enough in reserve. How do you see most of these small businesses fund the start and make sure they have enough in reserve to be able to support their growth? How much do you see them needing and where do you usually see that capital come from?

Fortunately, Ryan, most of them did not need that much startup capital because of the trends. I've talked to you that a lot of these things that they're using to grow the business don't cost much money. So I would say most of the businesses, not all, because some of them had inventory, but most of them started with less than $10,000 and there were some that started with $1,000. The people that didn't have a lot of startup capital would often have some other source of income. So maybe a spouse's income or partner's income or they had some savings because they had a job or they could have started it on the side. So one example of that was Laszlo Nadler who started Tools for Wisdom. He has two kids and a wife and he was the sole breadwinner. So he had to make sure he had an income coming in when he launched his business. It's an Amazon business that sells day books that are different than the usual planner filled with to do list. It's more oriented around what is the one thing I can do to move me closer to achieving my life's mission. And so they have a big following. He started it at home and he ran it until it reached six figure income while also working at his project manager's job at a big bank. And when he felt like the income from the business was steady enough, that was when he left and did it full time. And I would really recommend that approach. It was Hard. He told me he realized he had to change things when it was the holidays and he was sort of creating his own one man sweatshop, creating these planners and his whole family was out there celebrating. But you can course correct. But that way you don't have the stress of having to pull the plug on an idea before it has had enough. Runway, because people do run out of cash. I mean, that is a common problem with startups. They just burn through too much cash. So if you have some other source of income, that is not usually an issue.

Meaning it could be started on the side from a job or from other clients to be invested in a thing that you're ultimately going to have take over your income. Is that what you mean?

Exactly. Yeah, you could. I mean, you could use savings. I think you always hear business experts saying you should save up six months to a year's worth of business and personal expenses in the end before you start a business. But I really don't meet many entrepreneurs or talk to them who have actually done that. It's just too much money for the average person. I would not hold off on your dream of starting a business until you get to that point. But you don't want to quit your job with no income coming in from anyone because that's just a recipe for severe stress. It can put a lot of pressure on your family if you have one, or your spouse or partner can. It's not really fair to the other people in your life to just sort of bail out and bring in any income if they're not prepared for it. So you have to plan around it. It's just reality. It's not the ideal situation. I mean, some people have the option of just not working and starting the business because of whatever life situation they have. But most people have to work around real life and that doesn't stop them from becoming successful entrepreneurs. They might just have to do it a little more slowly.

I work with so many entrepreneurs who are in analysis paralysis or information overload. And the biggest piece of advice I could give someone who is reading a book like this and thinking this sounds great, what do I do now is I always say just choose. Because all of the good stuff happens after you make a decision. Even if it's the wrong decision. A lot of good things can come out of wrong decisions. So Elaine, what exercise in the book or what exercise elsewhere would you recommend an entrepreneur go through in order to get to decision point on what type of business they're going to start?

One thing that can be really helpful is to talk to someone who knows you really well, someone who will call you out on your own BS and really talk about the idea that you're thinking about starting. Maybe, maybe you have four or five different ideas you're thinking about and have them hear you out and play devil's advocate. And maybe they know that you're not going to stick to this one thing because you've tried it before, but they think you're really passionate about this other thing. Somebody like your spouse or life partner or best friend, somebody who knows you inside out can be really helpful on this. And maybe someone who can nudge you if there's something holding you back, like fear of failure, who can kind of hold you accountable for taking the first step. Because if you don't take the first step, you'll never have a business. So maybe the first step is sending an email to somebody to ask a question about something or it's putting up a rudimentary website. But that person can sort of keep you honest. And if you're not doing anything, ask you why you're not. Because there can be valid reasons you're not doing something. Maybe your inner voice is telling you that there's some reason the business won't be successful and you should be listening to it. Sometimes there's a reason people hesitate. But if you're really pretty certain that there is a business here and you have the capability of pursuing it, you may just need somebody to nudge you a little bit.

Well, Elaine, the book has been mentioned by Tim Ferriss. It features a bunch of our students here at Freedom Fast Lane. So my question to you is, where would it be most advantageous for Elaine, for the Freedom Fast Lane community to go out and buy the book, which would help you get to bestseller status the fastest. So how can we support you and where can people find the book?

Well, thank you so much for that question, ryan. I think Amazon.com might be the best place to buy it and if people post a review, that would be even better. So I really appreciate your support.

You bet. Well, Elaine, I believe that entrepreneurs, even small single person, million dollar entrepreneurs, make a bigger impact in this world than any politician can or any government can or any policy can. And so I share in the mission that you have of getting this into as many people's hands as possible so that we can create more change that we want to see in the world. Thank you for having an impact on the world and thanks for inspiring so many entrepreneurs.

Oh, thank you, Ryan. I feel the same way. I think sometimes when we run very small businesses, we feel kind of tiny compared to the really big companies. But when you think about the people in your life, in your business life, who impact your day and your career and your results, a lot of times they are in one person businesses and they can have such a big effect on you. Think about maybe your accounts or your bookkeeper or your marketing person. They may be a one person business and when they're doing a great job, it really, really makes a difference. It really can add to your overall happiness quite a bit. So don't underrate yourselves. One person business, you really do make a difference and you contribute to the economy too. They pay a lot of taxes, they create jobs for themselves. And I think there are close to 29 million small businesses in the US. Those are jobs that people created for themselves and in some cases others that really makes a difference for the economy.

I would say I have to remind so many entrepreneurs that what you do matters. What you do moves progress in the world forward. It creates new opportunities. So what you do matters. And everything that you do has an impact on somebody else. And I think, I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to the world is your own success. So, Elaine, keep on changing the world. Thanks for hanging out with us.

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