What I Learned About Financial Freedom and How to Make Wealth (not just money)

Starting a business while working another full time job can be challenging, but it's definitely worth it. There's low risk ways to actually test the waters and see if your business idea is viable. And it does require careful planning, organization, time management and just the ability to actually balance your life. But if you do it the right way, you can build a successful side hustle while working your job. Now to make it easy for you, I've gone ahead and built out a plan in this video where you can build your own side hustle and do this all while working a 9 to 5 job. So the first thing here is for you to assess your financial situation. Understand that starting a business can be costly, especially in the early stages. Now this ways to bootstrap a business. By the way, bootstrap just means to go ahead and actually start a business with your own money and in a low cost way. And there's ways for you to do it with pretty much nothing in your bank account. But if you really want to dive all in and take your business and focus on it, oftentimes there is startup costs associated with it. Maybe a website, maybe having coaches or courses to learn from, or maybe some kind of freelancers or partnerships or stuff like that. And so in the beginning you should have some access to capital in order to get started. It's also a good idea to have a financial plan in place to help you manage your money and stay on track. A financial plan is just an important tool for any business to be able to make sure that they know where their finances are coming in, how much they're spending each month. So for example, if you sign up on Google and you're using Google, it could be 12 bucks for you to have just one account on their email. And so you should know like, do you have 12 bucks to spare? Maybe you're going to have to go out and cancel Netflix in order to pay for this. But if you want to go ahead and start a business, you need to understand that sacrifices will have to be made. And if it's Netflix, well, you can just go watch YouTube, it's free. Now once you understand the finances of starting a business, you got to choose a business idea. I'm a little biased because I run a marketing agency and I found that to be the best business model. But for you choose what you're passionate about, what you think can work. The great thing about running a marketing agency is you can tie it to something you are passionate about. For example, I liked real estate, so I went into real estate marketing and maybe you don't want to do that. There's other options too. You can start merchandise companies on T shirts, you can work with influencers, you can do a content creation business. But if you're interested in starting a marketing agency and using the system, the exact step by step process that I use to build my business agency box is linked below this video and you can check it out for yourself. But when it comes to deciding a business model for you, reflect on your personal interests, the skills, your values, and consider what you're passionate about and excel at. All this together will help you to choose a business idea that's fulfilling and sustainable for you in the long run. After that, you want to make sure that you can understand the market and research to know what the customer wants. You can go out there and run surveys, test out your audience, your demographic, and find out like, what's the thing that they need. Don't just go out and spend all this time building something with the idea that people will want it. Because you necessarily think is like the solution doesn't mean that's what other people are going to buy. You want to make sure that you're actually going ahead and validating your idea, meaning finding out that it's something people want to buy. And from there, map out the plan of your business. There's a document called a business plan that people talk about using. It's effectively a written document, outlines all your business goals, targets, all that stuff. I mean, if you're just starting a business, you don't need to have a whole business plan that's like, you know, something, the bank asks for you to actually go ahead and build for them to prove the viability of the business. But in today's day and age with the Internet, you don't even need that stuff. You can start a business like this and there's courses and other people and YouTube videos that show you the whole process. So when I first got started, my first business, I was trying to get business funding from a bank and they told me to write a business plan. Did I work so hard on that? It took me probably two months. And I, I mean, I don't know anything about business at the time. I didn't know how to make this happen. And so for me it was impossible. And I spent all this time and then I ended up bringing it to them and they asked for more stuff, financial projections. I'm like, holy crap, I'm never going to do this. So I ended up just taking out a couple of credit cards and putting, and putting my My startup expenses on those rather than building this whole business plan. But that said, you do need to have a plan, like, what are you going to do? And so for me, it was, let me buy this inventory, let me go find a place to promote it and let me sell it, as simple as that. And then next you have to decide how you're going to legally structure the company. Like, do you want to legally structure it? And a lot of times people start out, they don't want to go spend another. They just spent whatever on a website and all the other stuff. They don't want to go spend another 3, 4, or 500 bucks to create a legal company with the government. And so in the US we have something called an llc. It basically just stands for a limited liability company. It provides a little bit of legal protection from you. For example, let's say someone came and they weren't happy with the product. Or let's say you were at a, you know, let's say a trade show and the banner fell down and fell on someone and broke their leg. If you're operating under the company, that person can't sue you personally for whatever they're claiming. They're, you know, you owe them. They would have to go after the company. And so it provides protection for you individually. This is especially important as you get old, like older, and you build a larger portfolio and net worth, where there's more for people to go after. But when you're starting early on, you got to determine, like, what's right for you. You don't necessarily need a company for your first few deals. So, you know, my thought on this is I'm, you know, I'm all about, like, let's just prove the concept. Let's start as lean as possible with as little cost, and then let's see how it works. And there's no point in building this whole amazing infrastructure if we don't even know we can get a deal from it. Like, you should just make sure you can actually go out, get one or two clients, get some people to pay you, and then at that point, you can go ahead and create the company. And then let's look at how we can grow the business. I think one of the best ways for anyone to grow our business is by building their network. A lot of times people say it's not about what you know, it's who you know. And I believe that to be incredibly true. You can find people and build relationships, the people who can connect the dots and make things happen in your. In your life. And so for you, go out and network, find people, look to add value, go to events and conferences, join meetups and online groups and just build your network so you can start knowing about what else exists out there. And then there's probably opportunities for other people to start sending you business too. Once you've done that, you got to look at balancing your life. The first time I sat down with a cpa, an accountant, he said, dylan, you got to slow down, you're going to burn yourself out. And I said, no, Don, I'm 19, 20, I'm good, I've got more than enough energy. But what ended up happening after about a year and a half, I hit a wall. In order for this business you're building to be sustainable, you are going to have to balance it. Now I'm not saying go play video games all night long every night, but if you need to find a balance of working in your 9 to 5, building the business on the side, and then also like managing your own personal life and your personal well being, you can set some boundaries and actually chunk out your time in your day so that you have time to rest and recharge. While doing this, try to get your friends and support system around you to actually back you up. It's important for you to have a team and a support system around you because when things get hard, who's there to back you up and who's there that you can actually fall back on? I think it's important to have a support system of friends and family who are actually behind you every step of the way. Alright, so hopefully some of the things I've talked about in this video give you that framework for you to actually go out and build a business While working a 9 to 5, understand that you're going to be working hard because you're going to be working your job and then you're after job, job and then you also have your personal life and managing a balanced life. So it's going to be hard, but if it was easy, everyone would do it. And so for you, just go ahead and take that action step, start something you know as soon as today. There's no reason why you shouldn't just stop this video right now and dive into actually going and starting your business. And all that said, the last question is like, all right, Dylan, well I'm starting a business, I have my other job, at what point should I stop my job full time and just go ahead and dive into this business? And I think that once you get to the point where you, you're making pretty much enough to cover your expenses on a monthly basis and you can see it consistently. That's when quit your day job and dive into this full time. Because once you can prove the concept, see where it's going, be making enough money to cover your bills and you actually dive into this full time. Imagine if all your energy and all your focus went into this, how much more successful it could be. So that's my thought on it. Don't quit your day job but start a side hustle while working another job. Hopefully this video gave you the framework to build a business while working at 9 to 5. For those of you that don't know, my name is Dylan, I make these videos because a lot of people lost their shit and shirt during COVID and I make these videos so hopefully you can build a life where you don't have anything like that happen to you in the future. So subscribe. I make videos like this about once or twice a week and hopefully I'll see you in another video.