How I Got Started as an Entrepreneur

Say a lot of you want to get, become a good entrepreneur, but you don't. You resist becoming good at selling because.

You don't like sales, you don't like what you believe sales is, or maybe you don't even like people. But the, but that's real. And the reality is, the reality is the master key to success in selling anything is to love the people you sell to so much you would never sell them anything that would do them harm.

For those of you who are wondering, how do I get started as an entrepreneur, or for those of you who've just recently gotten started as entrepreneur, I'd like to share my story, how I got started as an entrepreneur. And I always, I always say why. I got started as an entrepreneur when I was 25 years old selling insurance and investments. Well, that's true from the standpoint of getting started as an entrepreneur in the professional, quote, professional entrepreneurial space. But I got started as an entrepreneur long before that. How long before that? Probably When I was 19 or 20, I had my first accidental entrepreneurial experience. And, but, but the whole idea of entrepreneurship was introduced to me by my father who worked for other people and would go to work and literally work like a three legged mule as a plumber and working on construction sites. And like business owners, like the bosses that he worked for, the contractors that he worked for, they would always figure out a way or oftentimes figure out a way to take advantage of him. And he came home one day when I was from work when I was about 16 years old, and he said, I'm never working for anybody again. And I thought to myself, like, now I've got six brothers. And we, we ate, we ate a lot of food, like, you're never gonna, you're never working for anybody again. What we gonna do right? What are we gonna do right? And he proceeded to do the same thing that he was doing for other people for himself, and made more money doing it by himself, for himself than he ever made doing plumbing, working for other people. And I thought to myself, that's interesting, so you don't have to have a job. And I didn't think of it as a business, but you can do what you do for your job for yourself instead of doing it for somebody else. And a lot of people, when they think of getting started as an entrepreneur, that's what they do. They take the thing that they do as a job and they go and do that for themselves instead of for doing it for somebody else. And while that is a form of entrepreneurship, it's more, it's more being self employed than it is being an entrepreneur. But it is an entrepreneur like you don't have to have a job working for, quote the man, whoever the man is, right. So I found out that not only do you not have to have a job working for somebody else, but you can make more money having a job working for yourself than you can having a job working for somebody else. And that was not even a conscious awareness of it for me. It was more of a subconscious awareness awareness of it. So I went off to college and I had always had summer jobs from the time I was 14. And then when I graduated from high school, I had jobs. Like in the summertime I usually have two jobs, one during the day and one during the night. During the school year I'd have a night job even though I went to school during the day, like when I was in high school. And so I went off to college and I went to college in Indiana. And I did not realize that, that there were parts of the country that were like still in the Great Depression. And I know that sounds like an exaggeration, it's kind of an exaggeration, but not, not a big one. And, and like there were jobs were hard to find and they were all, because it was in the Gary, Indiana Chicago area. They were all industrial jobs, which means you had to be able to carry things or lift heavy things. And I could lift heavy things, but I couldn't them long distances. I could barely carry myself long distances. And so like, it was very, very challenging for me to find a job. That's when I got the job working on the sorghum farm for a whole day felt like an eternity. And I prayed that day. I got out in the middle of that sorghum field and it was like the middle of July and it was hotter than the blue blazes. And I'm like, God, if you will deliver me from this, if you'll just let me live through this day, because you know you're not supposed to tempt the Lord. I promise you I will not tempt you by coming back here tomorrow. Right? And, and I didn't, I didn't have any other prospects for a job and I didn't know what I was going to do to buy food. And I'm like 900 miles from my parents and I'm 19 years old and this is the only job I was able to find. But I knew that day God did not put me on this earth to be a farmer. Not me. No, not, not on a Sorghum farm. Pulling sorghum for eight hours? No, sir, not for eight. $8 an hour back then was a lot of money because this was in 19, this was in 1980, when $8 an hour was decent money, right? But I quit. And so anyway, I don't remember what all I did that summer, what else I did, but I just remember quitting that job, thank God, and I came home and it got me a summer job from that summer, and I bought a car. So in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, there's this little local paper called the Pakistan Herald, and it had classified ads, right? And so. So I bought the Paxtang Herald. I found this 1972 Buick Skylark.

That I bought for $50. It didn't have any hubcaps on it didn't have any carpet on the floor. It was just the plain Jane. It's good. It's gonna go to the junkyard or I'll sell it to you for 50. I bought it for $50. I drove that car all summer. And then.

A friend of mine wanted to buy it because it wasn't going to make it back to Indiana. A friend of mine wanted to buy it from me before I went back to college. He offered me 300 for it. I took it. I was like, I bought that car for $50. I drove it all summer. I sold it for $300. I made $250 on that car. Wow. That was my very first entrepreneurial endeavor where I discovered, but didn't even realize that profits are better than wages.

And. And then I later learned from Jim Rome, profits are better than wages. So fast forward, I go to back to Indiana and I start working with this guy Elijah, and he's buying these old raggedy cars and fixing them up, fixing them up, but he didn't know how to fix them up. But I knew how to fix them up because I knew how to do body work. I knew how to work on engines, I knew how to work on transmissions. Like, I knew I like anything with a car, I could do it, I could fix it, right? And so I can put. Do a tune up on a car, change the oil, whatever. So he had this Volkswagen Beetle and then I did this body work on it, and he fixed it. He bought it cheap, and then he. And I fixed it up. I did the bodywork on it, and then he sold it. And then he paid me some money. I was like, oh, you can buy cars and fix them up and sell them. So I started buying cars for, you know, 100, 200, $300. Fix them up, sell them for 600, 800, $1500. And I started buying and selling cars. And so he introduced me to this other guy named Paul, Paul Gaudy. And Paul was really good at bodywork. And Paul and I became friends, and. And so Paul taught me some of the stuff that he was doing to work on cars. And so I literally, all I did for a living from the time I was 20 till the time I was 25, even 27, till I got my job driving a trash truck. When I was 27, all I did was bought cars and fixed them up and sold them. Now, the reason I'm telling you the story is because I realized as I was thinking about it this morning, I realized that when I. Not this morning, but last week when my wife was telling me this story. I'll tell you that in a minute. I was thinking about how the reason entrepreneurs today think all the simple stuff you have to do to make money is so hard is because they've never done anything hard.

Right? So here's what I would do when I used to sell cars. So if you're going to sell cars, you have to have some inventory. You have to buy cars. And I'd only do one car at a time. It's not like I was buying 15 cars at a time. I'd buy one car at a time. But sometimes I needed to buy a car, but I didn't have the money. So what do you do if you want to buy the car but you don't have the money? See, you're worried about talking to somebody about your. About your.

Social media ads agency, and you're worried they're going to say no. You're. You're concerned, well, if I write this book, what if nobody buys it? Like, I didn't have any money.

I get married to this beautiful girl, and I make her all these promises, and all of a sudden we're married. And like, okay, now what do you do? Because marriage math says that if you're having a hard time taking care of one person financially, it's twice as hard to take care of two people. And so here I am, and we're like, okay, so what I would do is I'd go knock on somebody's door. They'd have a car that I'd drive past it, and I'd see that car sitting there for weeks, and it doesn't move. And I'm like, hey, do you want to sell that car? Well, I've been thinking about it. Okay, how much do you want for it? Well, you Know it needs a transmission. Okay, well, how much do you want for it? I don't know.

$200. Tell you what, I'll give you $300 for it.

If you'll let me pay you for it. After I fix the transmission and sell it, you keep the title. Let me take the car. I'll give you my address, I'll show you my license. You'll know where I live. I'll take this car to my house, I'll pull it into my garage, I'll change the transmission, I will fix the transmission. I will sell the car. When the person comes to buy the car, I'm going to bring them to your house. You're going to sign the title over to them. I'm going to give you the money. You're going to sign the title over to them. They're going to give me the money before I get here. I'm going to give you the money that you want for the car, and then the car won't be here, the junking up your driveway anymore. I'll make some money. You'll make some money. And somebody else have a car.

Now, that's way harder than selling somebody on your social media advertising. I did that dozens and dozens and dozens of times, right? I'd go to the auto parts store if I didn't have any money. I'm like, I buy stuff from you all the time. If you'll let me get these parts that I need to fix this car, when I sell it, I'll come pay you and see, you think, like, y' all watch me and you think, oh, Myron just, you know, he just sweats money. No, he doesn't. No. Like, you cutting me bleeds money. No. Myron had to figure this thing out just like everybody else. And so my wife was. She takes. She takes boxing lessons. So do not mess with her. She's very dangerous. If you ever come see me, come in here and I got makeup on my eye, you'll know what happened. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, so. So my wife takes boxing lessons. And her boxing instructor.

Said, so what does your husband do? And she told him, he's a speaker. He's this author, whatever. She said, he's a speaker, I think. So what she said? She said. He said. And he said, do you have a picture of him? Yeah. She shows you a picture. He goes, what? That's your husband? That's your husband? Oh, my goodness. And so he goes, starts figuring out, he said. And my wife says to him, do you know what my Husband used to do when we first got married. He used to buy old raggedy cars and fix them up and sell them. I thought to myself, I did used to buy raggedy cars. Now, the hard part wasn't buying the car. The hard part sometimes was fixing the car. The hard time. The hard part most of the time was selling the car now. And this is how I did it. This was like before I ever thought about selling insurance or thought about selling investments.

I would. I would get this car. I would figure out how much time it was going to take me to get it to where I needed to be. If I thought I was going to have the car ready on Saturday, I would make sure that it came out in the classified section of the paper In Gary, Indiana, where me and my wife first lived. When I first got married, I made sure it came out in the paper on Sunday morning. I mean, on Saturday morning. And when I put the price in the paper, I would always put it in the paper. Like, if I wanted to sell the car for 700, I would say.

Whatever the car was. 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle, $769.73.

And people would call ring, you know, back when phones used to be tethered to the wall, right? And I'd answer the phone, yeah, I'm calling about the car. Yeah, for sale. Yep, I still have it. Well, if you want to come look at it, you better come look at it now. Because I got three other people on the way. And I did have three other people on the way, so. Because people would call about the car, so they say, let me ask you a question. What's up with the 73 cents? I said, you called, didn't you? That's what's up with the 73 cents, right. It created curiosity. And so. But sometimes, because the car was coming out in the paper, and I already got the engine fixed and I already got the transmission fixed, but I hadn't painted it yet. So sometimes I would be out in my garage, like all night long, preparing, masking off, sanding, doing the last finishing sanding and spray painting a car in Gary, Indiana, where, like, the windshield factor sometimes is 80 below zero, with kerosene heaters heating up the garage. So I got kerosene heater fumes and paint fumes in my garage. I'm painting this car. Cause somebody's coming to look at it the next day. This ha. And by the way, when you paint cars in the wintertime and all you have is kerosene heaters, you have a lot of runs okay. And a lot of sags. But anyway, so that was the beginning of my entrepreneurial endeavor. So when I got to the place where I found out that I could go and I could get a license and talk to people about insurance and investments and all I had to do is have a conversation with somebody and if they bought something from me, I'd get a check. I was like, shut your mouth. And what.

Say less. Right. Only I didn't know that I wasn't good at sales. And I wasn't like. So you imagine I'm 20 years old, 21 years old, 22 years old, 20. All the money I made. Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you my most favorite part. So back then. So we would reward ourselves when we sold a car because that's when we got paid. And sometimes we'd sell two cars a month, sometimes we sell three cars a month, sometimes we'd only sell one car a month. So sometimes the paychecks were few and far between. Right. And so, so when we'd sell a car, we'd always celebrate. We'd go shopping. And so we'd go to either Amvets, Salvation army or Goodwill and buy like a new outfit, like a suit or a suit and tie, or my wife would get a dress. Like literally we would go shopping at Ambet, Salvation army and Goodwill. That was how we treated ourselves when we sold a car. So, so then one of my former college professors says to me, hey, Myron, do you want to make some money? Do you want to make some money? Is Santa Claus a big fat phony?

Yes, I want to make some money. Sorry. He said. I said, yes, I want to make some money. He said. He said, well, my brother in law got started with this business opportunity and I don't really care about any of that. Yes. So. But his brother in law lived in Texas and I was in Indiana. He said, well, let's look it up in the phone book. I'm not exaggerating. We look up this company, Al Williams, which later became Primerica, in the phone book. The closest office was in Lowell, Indiana. I called this guy, this guy named Bill Travis answers the phone. Hello, this is Bill Travis. This is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah office. Hey. Yeah, this is Myron Golden. I heard you guys are hiring. Yes, we are. Okay.

Could I come in for an interview? Sure. Now, I don't know why I asked this question. It's such a weird question to ask, but I just gotten married and my wife didn't have a license at that time. And I said, can I bring my wife with me? They said, sure. I'm like, okay, cool. So we drive down to this, this Al Williams office in Lowell, Indiana, and Bill Travis shows us this video. And I don't remember what the whole video was about, but I remember this part of the video. There was a guy who, who saw the presentation of Al Williams and then he fell asleep on his couch and he dreamed he was making $10,000 a month. Now you got to understand the words $10,000 a month. Five words I had never heard in a sentence in my life.

Right? I did 10, $10,000. Like I did not know. I'm not, I'm not exaggerating. I'm 27 years old. I did not know that there were people in the world that made $10,000 a month. $10,000 a month was not something I could fathom. I did not even make $10,000 a year in 1980, 85, when I was first married. $10,000 a month. I'm like, what does that even mean? But as God would ordain in his sovereignty, Bill Travis, this soft spoken, kind, white bearded elderly gentleman, to me he's probably 45, but to back then, to me he looked old, right? And, and he was making 10,000amonth.

And he had plaques on his wall to prove it. I'm thinking to myself, if this joke is making 10,000amonth, I know I'm fixing to get rich.

Right? And so, so, so I signed up for the company. You had to pay 50 something dollars for an application and then you had to study for your insurance test. And I did all of that stuff. And then finally I signed up in October of 1985. I passed my insurance test in December of that same year or January of the next year. And I did a bunch of presentations and nobody bought anything until I did not make a single. I mean, I did dozens and dozens and dozens of presentations, prospected hundreds of people, and everybody said no. And I know what you're thinking, probably, I don't know, this is what I'd be thinking. Well, why didn't you quit, right? Anybody think of that? Well, why'd you keep going if everybody said no? Well, this was the only arena I had ever seen anybody talk about $10,000 a month. This is the. Bill Travis is the only person I had ever met who was making $10,000 a month. Like, I didn't know actors made 10,000amonth. I didn't know athletes made 10,000amonth. Like I was like that. I grew up poor 10,000amonth was not a concept that made any sense to me at all. Right? So my mind was, there's no place else I can go. There's nothing else I'm going to do where I even have a chance. I don't want to guarantee that I'm going to make $10,000 a month. I just want a chance. And if you give me a chance, I'll figure out how to make it work. And so, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna hang in there. And guess what? After. So we're talking about October, November, December, January. I mean, November, December, January. To that, 1985, January, February, March, January through December 1986. January, February, March, 1987. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I said, what did you say? She said, yes. And I remember I sold my very first insurance policy. And I remember the check. I remember what it looked like. It was because it was like a life changing moment for me. It was $125.66.

This is 18 months in the making. And I showed this check to my wife and I said, baby, we are going to be rich.

Now that, that probably doesn't make sense to anybody else, but it made perfect sense to me. I knew when I saw that check, this works.

Within a couple of months, I was top salesperson in our office.

Those were the beginnings of my entrepreneurial endeavors.

By the way. I never got to $10,000 a month in that company. I got to three, $4,000 a month. And most of that was because of my own sales. It wasn't because I built a team, because I did recruit people. But the people that I recruited who could sell didn't never pass the test.

And the people that I recruited who passed the test couldn't sell.

Okay, I got some people resonating with me up in here, right? And so. But. But I didn't lose hope because I learned good. I learned some of the most valuable entrepreneurial lessons during that time that I've ever learned in my life. I believe the most valuable lesson that I learned, the most valuable lesson that I learned during that time was I learned how to stop working for money.

It is very, very hard to get rich if you're working for monies.

Now you say, myron, what do you mean you learned how to stop working for money? See, if you're so addicted to a paycheck that if you don't get paid, you stop doing the work, you circumvent the process of becoming the person who can do the thing. And so you never develop the skill that will build that long term wealth. My first 18 months in Al Williams where I made no money is where I developed the grit to become the person who could do the thing that made me, that gave me the ability to stay here where I am right now.

It wasn't that I made so much money in Al Wa I did. Then I went on to a different network marketing company, sold something else and then another one sold nutritional supplements. And, and, and those companies, the most I ever made in network marketing back in those days, in my early days was like 7,000amonth. And but I noticed a trend for me that I didn't like is like I believe that network marketing can be a viable business opportunity. But the biggest problem with network marketing companies from my perspective is network marketing company owners generally are past distributors and they're not good business people. But. And so they oftentimes do things to destroy the opportunity for the people who are coming behind them. Not always, but oftentimes I've seen very few exceptions to that scenario anyway. So when I got tired of doing network marketing, I realized something. I realized that there is a big pool of people out there who still love to do network marketing, who still believed in the vehicle of network marketing. And I believe there's a great training ground and I believe it can be a great business model if you're in the right company. But I don't know what that like, I'm not going to start naming companies. I don't know. You have to figure that one out for yourself. Right. And so I decided I'm going to start teaching network marketers. Now here's what a lot of people would say. Well, but you only made $7,000 a month. I know, but 97% of people in network marketing have never made $7,000 a month and still don't. So I knew that the pool of people in that arena needed what I had more than they needed what their upline had. Because if a person's making 50,000amonth and they're talking to somebody who's making $50 a month, there is a huge communication gap between where they are and where they are. And this person says something and this person down here translates it into their language and it doesn't say end up meaning the same thing that the person intended who said it up here. Just because you're good at doing a thing doesn't mean you're good at teaching a thing. Unfortunately for me, I had spent more time with these people listening to these People and I knew the stuff these people said that didn't make sense to me when I was down here, but it made sense to me when I was right here. So it gave me the ability to translate the things they were saying to language these people down here could understand. And I became one of the most sought after network marketing trainers, like in the country. And that afforded me the ability to learn other new skills like writing books and doing seminars, et cetera, et cetera. And so those were the beginning of my entrepreneurial days. But fortunately for me, I lasted through the learning curve and kept working on what wasn't working for me, but was working on me until I became the person for whom it could work. And that is why we all are here today. You on YouTube, you in this room. The reason we are here today is because I lasted through the learning curve and allowed myself to become the person by not like by learning how to stop working for money and developing skills. So I told you two skills. I said several skills. One was I learned the skill of, I learned that. I learned the valuable lesson of not working for money. But I learned this other lesson. I learned that if you get good at selling, you can write your own paycheck. And see a lot of you.

Okay, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna go ahead and say it. A lot of you want to get, become a good entrepreneur, but you don't. You resist becoming good at selling because.

You don't like sales, you don't like what you believe sales is, or maybe you don't even like people. But the, but that's real. And the reality is, the reality is the master key to success in selling anything is to love the people you sell to so much. You would never sell them anything that would do them harm. So that's how I got started as an entrepreneur. It was like.

It was a long journey. I got started when I was 20. But like in professional entrepreneurship. Professional entrepreneurship, right. I got started when I was 20. So I was 20 in, in.

1981.

But I started insurance and investments in 1985.

And I didn't have my first six figure year until 1999. Some of you, that's, that's a long time, right? But here's what you fail to realize. The 14 years or 19 years, depending on how you calculate it, was going to go by anyway.

So I might as well go ahead and become the person. The time it's going to take you to become the person is going to go by whether you become the person or not. And if you decide that it's too long and it's too hard and you decide not to become the person then the time goes by and you have nothing to show for it. But if you decide you're going to become the person and you go ahead and skin your knees and you bloody your nose and you allow yourself to stub your toe on your inability and bump your head on your insufficiency and if you will do that long enough to develop a skill called selling, then when the time goes by one day you'll look in the rearview mirror and you'll wonder why you ever thought it was so hard. So hopefully my.

Like beginning days in my entrepreneurial journey, maybe that'll help you somewhere in yours and be a blessing to you in your life. Myron, what's the point of this message? Don't give up. You're closer than you think. Stay blessed by the best and we'll see you on the next video. Peace out.