How to Start a Profitable Business Without Money, Experience, or Connections!

You already have everything you need to start a profitable business. 99% of small businesses you can start with next to no capital. It's more about effort. Resources are never the problem. It's a lack of resourcefulness. It's why you fail. I believe the greatest talent that you can draw a line through all the people who have won, all of them have in common, they develop the talent. And yes, it is a talent. It is a skill of not quitting. Your phone, your time, your skills, and your willingness to learn are more valuable today than startup capital has ever been. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. I think I spend probably 50 or 60% of my time learning. Learning is a lifelong thing. You should spend as much time as you can acquiring a diverse set of skills and stacking them up vertically. Think about it like this. Steve Jobs became obsessed with calligraphy, AKA letters and types and fonts, and Scandinavian design, which is why all the Mac products are gorgeous. If you don't use those advantages now, someone with less talent but more action will build the business you keep dreaming about. Strategy is not words. Strategy is action. It's why I'm an innovator. It's why I'm fast. It's why a lot of good things happen for me, because I realize just the doing is actually more efficient than the thinking about it. You can choose a life of ease and comfort, or you can choose a life of service and adventure. Which one of those, when you're 90 years old, are you going to be more proud of? In the next 3 hours, you'll discover the businesses, mindsets, and strategies that can help you build real income even if you're starting from absolute zero. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. You do not need money to start a business that makes $10,000 a month. I would say these days you do not have to have money to make money, which is incredibly powerful. The biggest lie the system feeds you is that wealth requires capital. But today Your time and hustle are the only currency that actually matter. For those who are older, who have no more passion, they're burnt out, they're exhausted. It is the highest form of currency. Because it's not about what you know. You don't need to know the secret formulas. You don't need to have secret connections. If you just get your behavior right and your thinking right, you can do well. And if you keep waiting for a perfect moment or some rich investor to save you, you will stay trapped in the exact same financial struggle for the rest of your life. Let's look at John Paul DeJoria. He was completely broke and living in his car. He only had $700 to his name. He didn't let his empty bank account stop him from building his business. So my car was my home where I'm going to live. Got a blanket, a pillow in there. And then to eat, I figured out a way to eat off $2.50 a day. Paul Mitchell was $700. My partner threw in $350. My mom put in some money, not even knowing that's what she was doing. I put a little bit. He partnered with a friend and they started selling hair care products door door. They knocked on doors every single day because they had no money for marketing. I filled my car full of our products and drove right up Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, it was full of salons, and knocked like encyclopedias, okay, door to door to door selling my product, right? I had challenges. One, no distributor, no advertising money. So I went out and it took me a week to get 12 salons to buy my product. And today, John Paul Mitchell Systems makes over $1 billion a year. He proved that you only need hustle to get out of poverty. Now, you're probably thinking that door-to-door sales is dead and you don't have a physical product to sell anyway. Don't let that be your excuse. Today, the internet is your neighborhood and your digital skills are your products. You have access to billions of people right here on your phone for free. So here are 10 specific businesses you can launch today with $0 to start making real money. Number 1, AI operations consultant. Small business owners are terrified of falling behind, but they have absolutely zero time to learn how artificial intelligence actually works. They see the news, but they do not know where to start. And this is where you step in. You can become an AI consultant using just your computer and free tools. Recent data shows that 64% of businesses expect AI to increase their productivity. You do not need a computer science degree to do this. You can use free platforms to write their marketing emails or automate their customer service replies. You test a few prompts, you track the hours it saves them, and you optimize their daily workflow. When you take the stress off an entrepreneur's shoulder and give them their time back using AI, you are providing massive value. So reach out to 10 local business owners today. Tell them you will automate their inbox for free to prove your worth. When you show them how much time you save them, they will happily pay you for a monthly retainer. Number 2, custom AI assistant builder. Every company wants their own version of ChatGPT trained on their specific data, but they have no idea how to build it. You can build custom AI systems for businesses without writing a single line of code. Harvard Business Review explains that anyone can now build custom AI models using simple text instructions. You simply take a company's training manuals, upload them into a custom GPT builder, and give them a chatbot that can instantly answer any employee question. Don't let the lack of cash be an excuse. You can use your time to learn this free skill and then charge businesses thousands of dollars to implement it. It is a skill, and you can get better at any skill if you put in the reps. Go to 5 local plumbing or HVAC companies, ask them what their most common customer question is, build a free chatbot that answers that exact question, and send it to them. Number 3: High-ticket remote sales. If you want to make $10,000 a month quickly, you need to sell expensive things. You do not need to invent the expensive thing. You just need to sell it for someone else. High-ticket remote sales means that you take phone calls, Zoom calls for experts who are selling $5,000+ coaching programs or software. Entrepreneur Magazine notes that remote sales requires zero upfront cost and offers massive earning potential. You don't need to build a website or run ads. The business owner already does the marketing. They just need someone to close the deal. So you get on the phone or Zoom call, you ask the prospects about their problems and you offer the solution. You get paid a 10% commission on everything that you sell. If you close one $5,000 deal a day, you make $500 a day. You have to endure the learning curve. You'll be terrible at your first 10 sales calls. Expect to suck at the beginning, but your 11th call might completely change your financial reality. Number 4, short-form video strategist. Every business knows they need to be on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. The problem is that most business owners are stiff, boring, and have no idea how to hook a viewer. You can become a short-form video strategist. HubSpot data shows that short-form video can have a high return on investment. You do not just edit the videos. You tell the business owner exactly what to say. You write the hooks. You can use free AI tools to add captions and fast cuts. I hated my first 350 videos. I could not watch them back because I was so embarrassed, but I kept putting in the reps. You can use your phone to film a local real estate agent and give 3 tips for buying a house, edit it for free. When that video gets them a new client, they will hire you to do it every single week. Number 5, email list monetization. Most creators and businesses have a list of past customers sitting completely ignored in an email database. That is pure cash waiting to be collected. You can offer to manage and monetize their email list. Campaign Monitor reports that email marketing produces an average return of $36 for every $1 spent. So you go to a business and you say you will write one weekly email to their list for free. You tell them you only get paid a percentage of the new sales that come directly from your emails. This becomes a no-brainer for the business owner because there's zero risk for them. You use AI to help you write engaging stories and practical offers, and it costs you $0 to start. Number 6, B2B lead generation. Business-to-business companies survive on leads. If an agency sells a $10,000 service, they desperately need to talk to qualified buyers. You can build a business simply by finding those buyers and setting up the meetings. G2 reports that lead generation is the top priority for marketers, but over 60% struggle to find high-quality leads. You do not need to be an expert in their industry. You just need to be relentless on LinkedIn and email. You find the target audience, you send a highly personalized message, and you book the meeting on the agency's calendar. You charge a flat fee for every qualified meeting that shows up. Your purpose comes from your pain. If you know what it feels like to be broke, use that pain to motivate your hustle. Reach out to 50 marketing agencies today and offer to book their next 3 meetings for free. Number 7, no-code automation architect. Businesses lose thousands of hours every year doing boring, repetitive tasks. They copy data from emails into spreadsheets and then from spreadsheets into billing software. You can eliminate this manual work by becoming a no-code automation architect. Zapier highlights that no-code tools allow anyone to build complex software integrations without knowing how to program. You connect your different apps so they talk to each other automatically. You are giving people their time back. Wealthy people will gladly pay you to get their time back. And you can learn these platforms for free on YouTube. The best teachers in the world are on YouTube right now. So look at a local accounting firm, see what manual data entry they do, build an automation that does it instantly and show them how it works. Number 8, YouTube click-through rate specialist. If a YouTube video has a bad title and a boring thumbnail, Nobody will click on it. It does not matter how good the video is. Creators are desperate for higher click-through rates. You can build a highly profitable business by designing thumbnails and writing titles. YouTube officially states that 90% of the best performing videos have custom thumbnails. You can use free software to design the graphics. You study the psychology of what makes people click. You find a YouTuber with 50,000+ subscribers who gets terrible views. You redesign their last 3 thumbnails for free and send them over. When their views double, they will hire you to do every video going forward. So stop worrying about looking successful and start doing the unglamorous work that actually pays. And bonus tip for anybody who's really trying to take YouTube split testing seriously, I built a software, it's called Brandlytics.ai. We'll link it up in the description below. That's the tool the big YouTubers are using to be able to identify the videos that are underperforming and run the split test to improve their performance. Number 9, paid community manager. The biggest trend online right now is private paid communities. Creators are launching groups where members pay $99 a month to learn, but these creators do not have the time to actually run the community. Influencer Marketing Hub reports that the creator economy is now worth over $100 billion, driven heavily by direct community monetization. So you can step in as a community manager. You welcome new members, you host weekly video calls, you organize the content. You are the glue that holds the group together. Find a creator that you already follow and love. Message them and offer to moderate their communities for free for 2 weeks. When you increase their member retention, they will happily pay you a percentage of the monthly recurring revenue. And number 10, starting a YouTube channel. You have a computer in your pocket with a camera that connects you to the entire world. Starting a YouTube channel costs you $0. You just press record and you start sharing your story, your skills, your journey. Forbes highlights said building a digital audience is one of the most powerful, low-cost business models available today. The key is your titles and your thumbnails, and you have to hook the viewer instantly. So commit to posting one video a week for an entire year. You might feel like you're too shy and nobody will care about what you have to say. I'm an introvert and I struggle deeply with putting myself out there too, but I realized that quality of thought right here is more important than quality of production. So your lighting might be bad and your audio might be a little echoey, but if your message helps one person change their life, it's worth it. So stop overthinking the perfect setup. Take out your phone, look into the lens, and teach someone how to solve a problem that you have already solved for yourself. Your audience is waiting for you to step up and lead. So hopefully now your excuses are officially gone. You have the tools, the strategies, and the power to completely rewrite your financial future right now. Do not Let another day slip by wishing your life was different while you still are stuck standing still. Take the risk, do the work, and build the life you actually deserve. You're not broke because of the economy or bad luck. You're broke because you keep stepping into the same 10 money traps while other entrepreneurs are quietly getting rich by avoiding these mistakes. You might be repeating them without even realizing it. And if you don't fix this, a year from now, you'll still be stressed about money, hustling hard with nothing to show for it, wondering why you're not winning. Just look at the proof. Ever hear about lottery winners going bankrupt? Roughly 70% of big lottery winners end up broke within a few years. Jack Whittaker won a $315 million Powerball jackpot and lost it all in a few years. He even said the money destroyed his life. Why? Because money isn't the answer if you haven't fixed the habits that keep people poor. If you got $1 million today but carried on with the same bad behaviors,, that money would vanish. I had to learn this myself the hard way. When I was 19, I had my first company and was making $300 a month. Imagine working more than full-time and not being even able to afford rent. That was me. I felt worthless. I hit my breaking point at a family event and I told my business partner I quit. I broke down crying, snot-nosed, uncontrollable tears because I felt like I just didn't have what it takes. But the very next morning I woke up and something snapped. I realized I hadn't earned the right to quit because I hadn't tried everything. I thought, has someone figured this out before? And turns out Bill Gates had built a software company from nothing. So I decided to model how he did it. I stopped feeling sorry for myself and started learning from someone who'd already won. And you know what? Within a short time, I closed a $13,500 deal and jumping from $300 a month to a $13.5K check. In my head, I felt like a millionaire. But more importantly, I had proof that if I changed my approach, I could change my results. I went from almost giving up to finally getting momentum. Now, maybe you're thinking, Evan, it's not me, it's just, it's a tough market, or I already know this stuff. Wrong. That thinking is a trap by itself. I've coached thousands of entrepreneurs, and the ones who stay broke always point fingers at the economy, their competition, anything but themselves. The winners, they take responsibility. They look in the mirror and they fix what's holding them back. So drop the excuses, at least for this video, and really listen. Even if you think you've heard it all, I guarantee there's at least one trap on this list you're caught in right now. And if you could eliminate it, it could mean the difference between scraping by and actually building real wealth. So let's do this. Here are 10 money traps that will keep you poor and how to break out of each one. Trap number 1, scarcity mindset. This is the fear of spending money or taking risks. The impulse to hoard every dollar. You tell yourself you can't afford to invest in growth, so you do nothing. And ironically, that guarantees you'll always be short on money. Here is your truth. Money is a tool, not a trophy to tuck under your mattress. If you're too afraid to use it, you'll never have more of it. Think about it. If a farmer refuses to plant seeds because he's afraid of losing them, He'll never get a harvest. It's the same with your money. Sitting on it due to fear is a sure way to stay broke. Successful entrepreneurs have an abundance mindset. They invest in themselves and their business confidently. Even when I was struggling, I forced myself to invest in help. I hired someone for just an hour a day to take over tasks that he was better than me at so I could focus on higher value work. Did it cost money I felt I didn't have? Yes, but freeing up that hour led to more growth and more money. The scarcity-minded you would never have done that. That you stays stuck. So here's your action step. Next time you're scared to spend on something that could grow your business— a course, a tool, an employee— remember, avoiding calculated risks is the riskiest move of all. If you want this year to be different, you have to loosen the grip, invest in your growth, or remain forever a servant to pennies. Trap number 2: Believing money is not important. I don't care about money. I do it for passion. It sounds noble, right? It's also a recipe for staying poor. I'm all about mission. My channel exists to spread belief. But if you don't make money, you can't keep going. Some entrepreneurs wear burnout and poverty like a badge of honor, as if making money would taint their purity. That's nonsense. Money is oxygen for your business. If you ignore it, your dream dies. I had this blind spot myself at a mastermind. My peers told me, Evan, we want to pay you more, but you haven't given us a way. It hit me that I was so focused on service, I hadn't built monetization into my mission. And I used to say, I'll do it for free if I have to. And I meant it. But that mindset was holding me back from scaling my impact. I learned that money can't be your number one motivation, but it must be in your top five. If your mission really matters, you owe it to yourself to fund it properly. Think of money as the fuel or the gasoline that you have on your fire. More fuel, bigger fire. Does running on fumes make you a martyr? No, it makes you a struggling amateur who might have to quit their dream and go back to a day job. So your action step is start respecting money. Charge what you're worth. Create offers and products that bring in revenue, not because you're greedy, but because revenue equals longevity, equals impact. Money in your pocket means you get to keep serving, keep improving, keep living your purpose. Breathe life into your business by embracing profit not as the goal, but as the means to amplify your goal. Trap number 3: the get-rich-quick illusion. This one is deadly because it seduces you with flashy promises. Crypto schemes, meme stocks, guaranteed 6 figures in 30 30 days courses. If you're chasing those, you're running on this hamster wheel, right? The reality is almost nobody wins that game. Studies show that over 97% of day traders lose money over time. Did you hear that again? You think you're the exception? The odds say that you're not. Trying to get rich quick is like trying to sprint in a marathon. You burn out or collapse financially. Wealth built fast rarely lasts. Look at the dot-com bust. Look at the crypto crashes. Fortunes made in months disappeared overnight for those who didn't have solid fundamentals. And psychologically, the more you chase instant rewards, the more you wire your brain for short-term thinking. Remember the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment? Kids who resisted eating one marshmallow immediately to get two later ended up with better grades, better jobs, and way more success decades later. Why? Because delayed gratification is a superpower. It means you can sacrifice now for a greater payoff later. If you lack that, you'll always snatch at pennies and miss out on dollars. So your action step: commit to the long game. If you catch yourself saying, why am I not rich yet? I need a shortcut. Slap yourself, right? Figuratively. Decide to get rich for sure, but not to get rich quick. Build real value, develop skills, put in the reps. It might take longer, but when you get there, you'll stay rich. Every overnight success you admire took years of unseen work. Keep that in mind every time you're tempted by the next hot opportunity. Trap number 4: Stagnating your learning. The moment you think you've arrived or I know enough, you're done. The world is changing faster than ever. This year will belong to the innovators, the learners, the adapters, the tinkerers. If you're not obsessed with learning, you will be left behind. Maybe you've got a degree or some experience and you think that's enough. I'll tell you what I discovered. My business degree was practically useless when it came to real entrepreneurship. In my senior year at University of Toronto, I finally got a class on entrepreneurship, on small business. And the professor had never even run a business himself. While my classmates played it safe with case studies about fake coffee shops, I was out there running a real company at the time and struggling, and none of my professors could help me. I learned more from YouTube shows than an entire semester of lectures. That's how out of touch formal education was with entrepreneurship. And guess what? Today, the best teachers are on YouTube or podcasts or forums. People actually in the game sharing their up-to-the-minute insights. If you're not tapping into that, You're choosing ignorance. Meanwhile, technology is exploding. AI, social platforms, shifting market trends. You can't rely on what worked in 2016 or 2023. You need to be upskilling constantly. Read books, take courses, follow industry leaders, watch YouTube videos, experiment with new tools. The top CEOs read dozens of books a year, always hunting for one idea that gives them an edge. So your action step: schedule daily learning. Yes, daily. Even 30 minutes of reading or watching a YouTube video or tutorial. Adopt a beginner's mindset. Assume that there's always something that you don't know, because there is. This year, ignorance will cost you more than ever. But if you keep learning, you won't just make more money, you'll future-proof your success. Trap number 5: lifestyle inflation and looking rich. This trap is sneaky because society will clap for you while you fall into it. You make a bit of money and you immediately upgrade your lifestyle. Bigger apartment, nicer car, expensive gadgets, to look successful. After all, you deserve it, right? Here's the problem. When your income goes up, if your spending matches it, you're not growing wealth. You're just on a nicer treadmill now. I've seen entrepreneurs make $100,000 in revenue and spend $110K trying to appear like ballers. The math doesn't work. Even multimillionaires go broke from this. 78% of NFL players are either bankrupt or under serious financial stress within 2 years of retirement. These are people who earned millions per year, and 60% of NBA players are broke within 5 years of leaving the the league. How is that possible? Lifestyle inflation. They felt like they had to flex Lamborghinis and jewelry, spend like kings, help every second cousin and old friend who asked, and they blew their money. Wealth is silent. Poverty is loud. If you're spending money to prove to others that you have money, that's a fool's game. Real millionaires are investing into assets, not liabilities, to stunt on Instagram. They're not buying depreciating toys on credit. They're reinvesting in their business and stocks and real estate, things that make money while sleep. Meanwhile, the pretenders stay one hiccup away from complete disaster. So your action step: cap your lifestyle. Pick a modest baseline and stick to it as your income grows. Instead of a fancy car, get a fancy investment portfolio. Let your results do the talking, not your Gucci belt. This year, economic ups and downs will hit the flashy spenders hardest. Be smart now so you're not selling your luxury junk later to pay your rent. Remember, You're building empires, not trying to look like a king for a day. Trap number 6: Doing everything yourself. The one-person army, the solopreneur who refuses to delegate. That mentality will keep you broke and exhausted. You might think you're saving money by not hiring, not outsourcing, not partnering, but you're actually stealing from your own future. Why? Because you're capping your growth to the hours that you personally can work. There are only so many hours in a day. And if you insist on being the hero who does it all, you will burn out before you ever build real wealth. I'll share a quick story. I met a YouTuber with 6 million subscribers, had a huge audience, and he had just hired his first virtual assistant because until then he'd been doing everything himself. The editing, the thumbnails, the emails, all of it. This guy was a rock star on the outside, but behind the scenes he was drowning in busywork. It blew my mind and it reinforced one of my core beliefs. You have to build a team if you want to go from just hustling to actual enterprise. And I get it. Nobody does it as good as you, right? And paying others feels like a luxury when money's tight. But not hiring help when you're overloaded is a trap. Think about it. If you spend 10 hours a week doing $10 an hour tasks, that's $100 of value. If you paid someone $10 an hour to do it, that's $100 out of your pocket. But those 10 hours could be used to generate $1,000 of value or $10,000 doing higher level, strategy, sales, product development. So action step: identify the one task that consumes your time and someone else could do at half your rate or better. Outsource it this month, even for a trial run. Start small if you have to. Hire freelancer for 5 hours a week. Your future self will thank you as you find yourself with more time to make real money. Remember, businesses are built by teams, not lone heroes. You're not just an entrepreneur. Become a leader of people, even if it's one part-timer to start. Trap number 7, never asking for help or advice. Pride, fear of looking stupid, I have to figure it out on my own. These attitudes will silently rob you of your success. Listen, every great entrepreneur that you admire had mentors, coaches, advisors guiding them. Steve Jobs had Bill Campbell. Zuckerberg had Steve Jobs. Gates had Buffett in his corner. Meanwhile, you're over there Googling or ChatGPTing for hours, just flailing in silence because you're too proud or too shy to ask someone who's been there for help. And I struggled with this too. I'm an introvert. I don't like bothering people. For years, asking for help was my biggest weakness. Probably still is. I thought I had to do everything myself. Back to chapter number 6. But once I started seeking guidance, everything started to change. I joined the mastermind group. I reached out to entrepreneurs I looked up to, and very often people are willing to help. 84% of CEOs say that having mentors prevented them from making costly mistakes, and 69% of them made more profitable decisions thanks to mentorship. Guidance. That's data. Even the top of the top lean on mentors to fast-track their learning. If the highest performers can benefit from advice, why on earth would you try to wing it alone? It's pure ego or ignorance. Both will keep you broke. So action step: swallow your pride and actively seek out mentorship. This could mean reaching out to someone in your field that, that you respect with a specific question, joining a local entrepreneur mastermind or meetup group, or even just posting your challenge in a community of your peers. Not asking is a guaranteed no. The worst that can happen is someone says they're too busy. So what? Move on to the next. When I was stuck early on, I could have saved so much time if I had just asked someone who'd already built a business for advice instead of assuming the bank would help me or suffering in isolation. Don't let your pride or your fear keep you ignorant. This year, make it a rule. If you don't know, ask. Save yourself years of trial and error. Your net worth will often depend on your network, so start building one that can guide and inspire you. Trap number 8: Waiting for the savior or a sign. This one's a bit counterintuitive. It's when you wait for an outsider to rescue you— a bank loan, an investor, the perfect moment— instead of creating momentum yourself. It's the mindset of, if only I had X, then I would succeed. And I see entrepreneurs fall into this trap all the time. They think a big investor is going to suddenly appear or write them a check, or a bank will just toss them tons of money because they had the courage to start a business. I made this mistake myself at 19. I walked into a bank. My head was held high and I said, "Hi, I'm starting a business. How can you help me?" Expecting them to be as excited as I was. And the banker basically laughed me out of the door. They told me no loan without 3 years of history or huge collateral. I left feeling crushed, like, Oh my God, I'm going to fail. This is ridiculous. For a minute, I thought maybe that was it. Maybe I wasn't meant to be an entrepreneur if even the bank didn't believe in me. But here's what I realized. Nobody's coming to save you. That rejection was actually a gift because it forced me to get creative. Many people would have quit right there. In fact, a lot of new entrepreneurs do quit after their first big rejection or failure. They take it as a sign that it wasn't meant to be. That's the trap. The truth is setbacks are normal. Rejection is normal. Waiting around for perfect conditions or someone else's money is a loser's game. If I had waited for an investor or kept begging banks, I'd still be waiting. Instead, I bootstrapped. I cut expenses. I hustled for sales. We made alliances. Remember the idea of modeling Bill Gates's partnership strategy? Eventually, I didn't need the bank's money. My business funded itself. So your action step, whatever you're waiting for, stop waiting, start doing. If you think you need funding, challenge yourself to launch a smaller version of your idea with whatever resources that you have right now. Prove that it works. Get some traction. If you're waiting for the economy to improve, find a way to serve people in this economy right now. If you're waiting for permission or validation from some expert, give yourself permission. This video is your permission. The only savior you need is the person in the mirror. No more waiting for someday or someone. Successful people start before they're ready, and they trust that they'll find out what they need along the way, not upfront. Trap number 9: Not managing your money. Look, it doesn't matter how much you make if you can't manage what you have. Plenty of entrepreneurs have high income and still end up broke because they don't know where their money is going. Ignoring your finances is a huge trap. Maybe you find it boring. Spreadsheets, budgets, taxes. So you avoid it. Or you assume your cash flow is fine because sales are coming in. That's a big mistake. According to a US Bank study, 82% of businesses fail due to poor cash flow management. That means almost 8 out of 10 businesses don't die from lack of ideas or even lack of customers. They die because the owners weren't on top of the money moving in and out. They run out of cash and boom, game over. You must know your numbers, your monthly expenses, your revenue, your profit margins, your, your burn rate. If you're burning savings, all of it. When I started making a bit of money, I hated accounting. So you know what I did? I didn't ignore it. I delegated it. One of the first things I let go of was doing my own books because I knew if I tried to handle it while hating it, I'd probably screw it up. I used Microsoft Money software to automate what I could. And as soon as I could, I hired a part-time bookkeeper. I kept an eye on everything, but I left someone who loves numbers handle the details. So that key point is I respected the numbers. You need to respect your numbers too. If you're not a finance person, fine. But the excuse, I'm not good at math, doesn't fly when your business goes under. So action step today, make a simple financial dashboard for yourself. Track your monthly income, the expenses, your net profit. At the very least, you can use a spreadsheet, an app. I don't care. Just have visibility on it. Set a weekly date with yourself— Money Mondays, for example— to review and update your finances. Find one expense to cut or optimize and one area to potentially invest more in. And please separate your personal and your business finances, right? Pay yourself a salary or draw so you're not constantly mixing your funds and losing track of what's what. When you know your numbers, you can control them. They don't control you. Master this and you won't wake up one day surprised that you're out of cash. Instead, you'll wake up building true wealth systematically. And trap number 10: quitting too soon. The only guaranteed way to fail is to give up, right? Cliché, maybe, but it's cliché for a reason. It's true, and most people still don't get it. Quitting early is the ultimate wealth killer. Every entrepreneur faces pain and doubt and darkness on the road to success. Those who push through eventually see light. Those who quit stay in the dark forever. And I nearly fell into this trap myself. As I told you, I almost quit my business in the first year when nothing was working. If I had stayed quit, you probably wouldn't know my name. I'd be working some job that I hate right now, and none of the impact I've had would exist. I was this close to that reality, and it scares me how many people's success stories end early because they walked away right before the breakthrough. It's digging for gold. Most people stop 3 feet from gold. Told because it's taking longer than they thought, I say keep digging. Often the breakthrough comes just when you're at your lowest and ready to quit. If you give it one more big push. After I decided to stick with my business and model Bill Gates, our first win, that $13,500 deal, it came in not long after. That wasn't a coincidence. It was my persistence being rewarded. And it taught me that a failure is just an event. It's not the end unless you make it the end by quitting. I try now to use my almost quit story to coach others that quantity leads to quality. You have to put in the reps to churn through the failures to get to the success. If you bail after a handful of tries, you never develop mastery. You never hit the tipping point where it starts to rain money. So your action step is make a commitment this year that you won't quit on anything important out of frustration or fear. If you're going to quit something, quit making excuses, but don't quit on your dream. Whenever you feel like giving up, remember why you started and picture yourself when a year from now if you keep going versus if you stop. And use the pain of potential regret as fuel, because if you persist through 10 failures, you might find success on number 11. But if you quit after 3, you've guaranteed failure. So keep going. Adjust your strategy, learn from the setbacks, reread chapter number 7 about asking for help, but keep going. Persistence is undefeated in the long run. Winners are just ex-losers who refuse to quit. And most importantly, don't just watch this video passively. Do the work to call yourself out and improve. Most people won't even admit they have flaws to fix. You are. That already sets you apart from the masses who will just let another year go by and live in the reruns of the same mistakes. Now it's on you to take action. Knowing these traps is step one. Doing something about them is step two. You've got this opportunity right now to set new habits, a new standard for how you handle money and success. So take it. Take it. Most beginners on social media won't win. You post a few times, you play it safe, you blend into the crowd. If you look like everyone else, no one will remember you. And if you are easy to ignore, you will be ignored. Think about James Dyson. For years he was broke and frustrated, working out of a tiny workshop while everyone told him that his idea would never work. He believed vacuum cleaners were flawed, so he set out to build a better one. What most people do not not know is that Dyson failed 5,126 times. Prototype after prototype did not work. Investors said no. Manufacturers laughed at him. Anyone else would have quit long before that, but he kept going. On attempt number 5127, the vacuum finally worked. That one breakthrough turned into Dyson, a global brand worth billions of dollars now. Dyson did not win because he was lucky. He won because he was willing to look foolish and persist when everyone else Boss would have stopped. If a man can fail over 5,000 times and still win, what is your excuse as a beginner? My own journey was no different. When I started on YouTube, I sucked. I'm not afraid to admit it. It took me 350 videos before I could make one without being completely embarrassed by my content. I couldn't even watch my first videos back. I'd hit play and cringe at myself. And the growth was painfully slow. In the first 6 years of YouTube, I gained 9,000 subscribers. 6 years, 9,000 subscribers. Because that's basically nothing by today's standards. I felt like a failure many times. I struggled with self-doubt every day, but I kept going. I kept making videos. I kept improving one tiny step at a time. And then things started to happen. In the next 6 years, those 9,000 subscribers grew to over 2 million. And those breakthroughs only came after years of struggle and persistence. If I had quit in year 5 or 6 because it felt hopeless, nobody would even know my name today. Now you might be thinking, okay, but Evan, I'm a nobody online. Who's going to listen to me? I'm not a leader. Listen, every influencer that you admire, every leader that you respect, they all started with zero followers. Nobody gave them permission to lead either. They decided to lead. They stepped up, they shared their voice, and they did the work long before they had an audience. Leadership isn't a title that you are given. It's a skill that you develop. And so by showing up consistently, by serving others, if you wait until you feel like a leader, guess what? You'll never post a thing. You become a leader by acting like one before anyone believes in you. So yes, even a beginner with zero followers, you can be a leader. In fact, that's the only way that you become one. So before we get into the how, I want to give a quick shout out to Jackie Wood from my school community. Jackie asked, as a beginner in social media, what would be your top 3 suggestions to stand out as a leader in your niche? So Jackie, I love this question. This video is for you, and I promise by the end of it you'll have a clear game plan to rise up up as a leader. All right, let's do it. Here are my top 3 suggestions for any beginner who wants to stand out as a leader on social media. Tip number 1: Share your story and be real. The fastest way to blend in online is to fake it. The world is full of all these cookie-cutter creators trying to be perfect, never showing any real part of themselves. That's exactly why you must be authentic and share your story. Nobody has your journey, your quirks, your voice, So lean into that. Be the real you, not the polished, fake imitation version of somebody else. So when I say share your story, I mean the real stuff, the struggles, the awkward moments, the things that you might be afraid to put out there, because ironically, those are the things that actually make people remember you. And so here's some proof. I once went to a fancy event in Los Angeles, VIP dinner, the works, and I hated it. I'm an introvert. Small talks in big groups, it drains me. So instead of schmoozing, I snuck off to a Subway across the street, got a sandwich, and ate alone in the hotel lobby. And I pulled out my phone and I filmed a quick video confessing how out of place and introverted I felt, and that it's okay to recharge alone. I posted it to my Instagram, I think on YouTube. You know what happened? The response was overwhelming. So many people commented things like, "Thank you for saying that. I thought I was the only one who felt like an imposter at those events." By sharing my vulnerability instead of hiding it, I made a deeper connection with people. People trust you when you're real. They see a leader who's human, not some untouchable fake plastic guru. Even science backs this up. So psychologists talk about the Pratfall effect. So basically, people actually find you more likable when you show your imperfections. One study found that authenticity and vulnerability build stronger emotional connections with an audience than trying to appear perfect, especially at the beginning. So your followers aren't looking for flawless, they're looking for relatable. So share that story about how you spilled coffee on your notes right before a big client call, or share the mistake that taught you a really hard lesson. Those moments make you stand out because everyone else is too busy hiding their cracks behind a pretty facade. When you share your story, two amazing things happen. First, you become impossible to copy, right? Competitors can steal your style or your topics, but they can't steal you, your unique life experiences. And second, you build trust. You signal, hey, I'm not here to impress you. I'm here to help you, warts and all. And trust becomes everything. People follow leaders that they trust. Remember, people don't buy from brands. They buy from humans that they trust. So show them the human side of you. Now, maybe you're still worried, won't sharing my flaws make me look weak? Weak. No, it makes you look real. It makes you look courageous. Brené Brown calls vulnerability the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. So being real is a form of leadership. Plus, sharing your challenges lets you flip them into lessons for your audience. So as a leader, everything you've overcome is a roadmap for someone who's coming up behind you. So your story might be exactly what someone in your niche needs to hear right now. And one more thing, don't hide yourself. In my early years, I was terrified to put me front and center. I figured I'll just share famous entrepreneurs' lessons and stay behind the camera. I told my agent, I have no desire to be famous. I don't like the spotlight on me. I'm introverted. But he pushed me and finally said something that really changed my perspective. So he said, the more people know you, the more people you can serve. And that really hit me. By staying invisible, I was actually limiting the impact that I could have. I realized that if I believe in my message, I have to be willing to be seen. So I'm telling you what I had to tell myself. Don't be afraid to share you. Show your face, speak in your voice, tell your story. It's not about ego or look at me. It's about service. If you can help someone with your story, then you must. The world needs what you have. Hiding helps no one. Sharing will make you stand out because so few have the courage to do it. Number 2: Stay consistent. Wanna know a secret weapon that 90% of beginners never develop? Consistency. The internet is littered with abandoned accounts and dead channels. The truth is most creators quit before they even break through. Over 90% of YouTube channels never reach 10,000 subscribers. Not because they aren't talented, but because they give up too soon. They post a few videos, they don't get the results that they hope for, they get discouraged, and then they just vanish. They disappear. Consistency is rare, which is exactly why it'll make you stand out. So if you simply keep showing up while others are fading away, you'll already be in the top echelon. So show up for one year and you'll be shocked at where you end up. If you show up every day for the next year, you won't recognize your life a year from now. But you have to last that long first. The first year is brutal for almost everyone. Slow growth, little to no money. The algorithm plays games with your sanity. It's basically a hazing process to get started. It's supposed to be hard. It's like a test to see who actually wants it and who's going to quit. Most people fail that test, but not you. Not now, right? You're here. You're listening to this. So I know you're serious. So I'm telling you now, decide that you will not quit no matter how slow it feels. Commit to consistency. Post that podcast every week. Drop a video every Tuesday. Whatever your schedule is, stick to it religiously. When your competition falls off in month 3 or 6, your consistency will make you shine. Remember my story? 350 terrible videos. 5 to 6 years of almost no audience. I could have said, this isn't working. I should stop. That's probably the logical, sane thing to do. I felt that way many times. But the difference between the people in the social media graveyard and the leaders you look up to that are still standing is that the leaders kept going when everyone else gave up. It's not about never getting tired or never doubting yourself. It's about continuing despite that. It's about being stubborn on your mission, but flexible on your methods. If one video flops, make the next one better. If you go 3 months and there's no growth, learn and adapt, but don't disappear. Most creators burn out because they try to sprint what is a marathon. They post like crazy for a short time and then exhaust themselves. Pace yourself, but stay in the game. So here's a pro tip: expect to suck at the start. It's okay. Give permission to yourself to be bad while you're getting better. I didn't want to accept that at first. I wanted my first videos to be great from day one. And when they weren't, I beat myself up. I've since learned to embrace the process. You heard the stats, right, from me? 350 videos until I made one that I could watch without cringing, and 700 until I actually made myself proud of my content. That's the reality behind anyone you see killing it online. There's a mountain of unseen, unimpressive work that came before. So don't compare your first steps to somebody else's medal. Your job is to just keep taking those steps. You are on the cusp of something great. Just Just a little more patience, a little more effort, and you'll get there. And it's true, the ones who win are the ones who outlast. Be the tortoise, not the hare. Slow and steady, consistently improving will beat the flashy sprinter who quits halfway. And one more thing on consistency. Make sure you actually enjoy something about what you're doing. Leaders have passion. You rarely see someone win long-term at something that they hate. If you despise making videos, maybe writing blogs or doing podcasts is more your style. So do that. Find a format and a topic that you love enough to stick with it when it's not giving you rewards yet. Passion is what fuels persistence. If you love the process, you can endure the pain. If you don't, you'll find excuses to stop. So create content around something that actually energizes you, that you care deeply about. That energy is infectious and it will keep you going. So for me, I'm a visual learner and I love modeling success. That's why I chose YouTube and profiling famous entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs because I genuinely find it fun and inspiring. 16 years later, it gave me energy even when the numbers were small. So figure out what aspect of creating that you enjoy and lean into that. It will make consistency so much easier for you. Number 3, serve your audience no matter how small. Leadership isn't about you, it's about them, right? The people you serve. If you want to stand out as a leader on social media, focus obsessively on providing value and helping your audience. Win. Too many beginners chase clout or vanity metrics. They ask, how can I get more views? How can I look like an expert? So just switch that mindset a bit. How can I make a real difference for every person who watches my content? When you approach content like that, you immediately separate yourself from 99% of the newbies. You're not just another person shouting for attention. You're someone who actually genuinely cares, and that becomes magnetic. It doesn't matter if you have 10 followers or 10,000. Serve those 10 like they're the most important people in the world, because to you as a leader, they should be. Don't get obsessed with who's not following you. Focus on who is in the room, no matter how few. I remember getting 50 views on a video and feeling discouraged. 50 views, that's nothing, right? But then I just mentally reframed it. If I was giving a talk at a library and 50 people showed up to hear, I'd be thrilled, right? That's a packed room for a newbie speaker. Those are 50 human beings who gave me their time. And that shift in perspective changed everything. I stopped seeing only 50 and started feeling grateful for every single viewer. So then I doubled down on serving those people, responding to comments and answering questions like this one. This is a, this is a question and answer video, making content that addresses their struggles. And guess what? More people came slowly at first, but they came because people feel it when you care. They tell their friends, they stick around. Loyalty is built one person at a time. So Evan from 20 years ago didn't understand this. I thought success was all about the numbers. And I was so ashamed when the numbers weren't there. I even hid my struggles. I was too embarrassed and too ashamed to tell my friends that I was failing and that I was broke. I put on a fake smile and I'm living the entrepreneur dream while quietly stressing out about how I would survive. I thought I had to appear successful, but I was wrong. What I needed was to ask for help, to be honest, and to focus on the impact, not my fragile ego at the time. And eventually I learned impact over ego. Forget looking cool. Just create value. Solve real problems. Encourage people. Share knowledge generously. Do it even when few people are listening and you'll earn a reputation as someone who cares and who delivers. That is leadership. Also, don't be afraid to engage and build community, right? Leadership on social isn't just a one-way broadcast. It can be a conversation. Reply to that one comment that you got. Thank people for watching the video. Shout out a community member like we're doing, you know, for Jackie right here. Make your followers feel seen. People, they crave connection. If you give them that, they will remember you. They'll see you as a leader with them, not just above them. So one of my favorite things to do is to feature members of Believe Nation, you guys, in the videos at the start of all the videos, right? There's a— leave a hashtag #Believe and we'll feature you here in a future video. We rise together. So even if your community is 5 people right now, engage those 5 like they're friends and allies. Service also means constantly asking, how can I help my audience more? So maybe that's through your content. Uh, maybe it's through a free resource like the worksheet that I mentioned here in the description below. Maybe it's just by listening to their struggles. When you focus on serving, two really important things happen. First, you never run out of content ideas because their needs and questions give you an endless supply of what to work on. And second, you position yourself as the go-to leader in your niche because people can tell you're in it for them, not just for yourself. The leaders who last are mission-driven. And so what I try to remind myself of is your purpose comes from your pain. The struggles that you've overcome equip you to help other people. I started my channel to serve the 19-year-old version of me who felt lost and had no guidance. I knew exactly what that kid was going through, and I was obsessed with trying to help him and others struggling like him, right? Not struggle as much as I did. And I wasn't thinking about the fame or the money. I was thinking, how can I make the journey easier for someone else? When that's your driving force, you stand out. People can feel the difference between a leader who genuinely cares and a selfish content creator just looking for clout. And hey, if you have the ability, then you have the responsibility, as my mom always said, to use it. If you can help, then you must. And that mindset will set you apart. Most people hold back their best advice or dilute their message because they're just trying to sell something or they're afraid of giving too much, but not you, right? Not now. You're going to give massive value upfront. You're going to share your best ideas freely. Why? Because you actually want to see people win. And what it does is build trust and positions you as a leader that people want to follow. The world needs what you have. Don't ever forget that. There are people out there right now who are praying for the solutions and encouragement and empowerment that you have locked in your head or your heart. Heart. So go give it to them. That's how you lead. That's how you stand out. So let me recap the 3 suggestions real quick. Be authentic— share your story, your flaws and all. Be consistent— show up relentlessly when others won't. And be service-driven— focus on helping your audience, not boosting your ego. You do those 3 and you will absolutely stand out as a leader in your niche, no matter if you're starting at zero today. I know it's not easy. None of this is easy, but it's worth it. You have something special to offer. And the beginning is always the hardest. Remember, the leader you admire is just a beginner who refused to quit. Keep going. I believe in you, but more importantly, I want you to believe in yourself. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn about the one tool every YouTube creator needs after 100,000 subscribers. If you have under 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, using YouTube Studio's A/B testing tool is a great choice. It's free, it's accurate, and it's a good starter tool you should be leveraging. If you're over 100,000 subscribers, then it's time to take your split testing more seriously and you need a professional tool like Brandlytics. Now I'm a split testing nerd. I've personally completed tens of thousands of split tests on my own YouTube channel. And when I showed YouTube what I was doing, they decided to write a case study on me. At the time, they were shocked that I took a video that was 4 years old and getting 100 views per day and took it to almost 15,000 views per day just by changing the thumbnail. Over the years, I've helped thousands of small and big creators grow their YouTube channels. And once you cross 100,000 subscribers, the channels that grow exponentially do so because they focus on their data as much as their art. They match the art of creating videos with the science of the algorithm. That's where Brandlytics comes in. I developed it myself just for my own channel. Because I needed a way to A/B test at scale. Then some of my big name friends wanted to use it and it was their secret weapon too. I didn't know if I was ever going to make it publicly available to everyone or just keep it for us, but I decided to open it up, at least for now. When we help smaller creators, the most important things are usually figuring out their content strategy, scripts, brand design, and hooks. When we help larger creators, the fastest way to generate growth usually isn't in new videos. It's by fixing the library of content. Content. If you have over 100,000 subscribers and hundreds of videos, adding one more video won't move the needle as much as fixing your old videos that should be performing better. You have gold in your library of videos that YouTube is trying to recommend right now, but people aren't clicking because you have a bad title and thumbnail combination. So how do you find those low-hanging fruit videos? How do you set up tests, track your data, manage your team, see your results, and continue to dominate? That's where Brandlytics comes in. For people who use YouTube Studio A/B testing, they usually do it at video launch. It's actually great for that. Set up your 3 variations and see what performs the best. With Brandlytics, we don't even let you run a split test on a video that is less than 7 days old because the data is too variable. But what do most people do next? They just leave the thumbnail that won in Studio up and focus on the next video launch. That's crazy. Like, Like very, very crazy. First of all, the audience that watches the video in the first 7 days is nothing like the audience that watches afterwards. How your core audience reacts to a video is often very different to how a colder audience reacts. Your videos live forever on YouTube and can bring in views forever. So if you want to take your channel seriously, you need to test forever. Just testing at launch isn't good enough anymore. How do you know what videos to test? How can you tell which videos are underperforming because of a bad thumbnail-title combination? YouTube Studio YouTube won't tell you, but Brandlytics will. Here's what we do. We sort your entire channel by the videos that are getting high impressions but have an underperforming click-through rate. This means YouTube is trying to promote your video because they think it's a good video, but people aren't clicking on it because your thumbnail and title suck. That's great news. It's much easier to fix a thumbnail and title than record a killer video that has great retention. Now, what makes for a good click-through rate? That's probably one of the most frequent questions I get asked. And the answer is it depends on how many impressions the video is getting. If the video only has 4 impressions and 3 of them are from your mom who clicked each time, that gives you a 75% click-through rate. By contrast, if you have a video with 1 million impressions and a 5% click-through rate, it doesn't mean that the CTR sucks because 5% is less than 75%. What it means is that as your video reaches more people, it goes to a broader and broader audience. Which means the click-through rate will drop. The number 1 video on a channel usually has a below-average CTR for that channel. That is normal. It's reaching new people, and those people won't click as much as your hardcore subscribers. So what makes a good CTR? How can you tell if a video has an underperforming click-through rate? You compare similar videos with similar impressions and see which ones consistently get lower CTRs. That's what Brandlytics does automatically for you. It runs through your entire channel. Looks at the past 28 days of data and gives you the videos that right now should be getting more views but aren't because the click-through rate is too low. Those are the videos you fix right now with a better thumbnail or title. YouTube Studio's A/B testing is a great tool for beginners, but once you start taking your data seriously, there's no comparison. How do you know what to test? The next question I then get asked is, okay, so I know I need to run a split test, but what do I test? A thumbnail or the title or both? Both. First of all, we don't allow users to test both the title and thumbnail at the same time. You need to be able to isolate why a test wins or loses. If you're trying a new thumbnail and title at the same time, you don't know which is the reason why it wins or loses. Next, Brandlytics will also recommend what to test next. After you load in your channel, we will give you guidance not just on what videos to fix, but whether you should update the thumbnail or title. You can ignore the guidance if you want, but I wouldn't recommend it. Let's talk about your testing history. This might sound super boring, but it's actually super important. If you want to run a follow-up test on a video in YouTube Studio, you have to delete all the data from the first test. What? How are you supposed to know what you've tested before? There are videos on my channel that we've run over 20 tests on. If a video is underperforming, we run an A/B test. If it loses and the video is still underperforming, what do we do? Run another test and then another. And then another and then another and then another until it's not underperforming anymore. For anyone who runs ads, this is normal practice. You keep running tests and always try to beat your best. When do you stop testing? Never. But if you have to delete a test on YouTube Studio to run a new test, how do you know what you've already tested? What thumbnails have you already tried? What title combinations have you already tried? You have no idea. Or you have to create a complicated system on your own. One to keep track. This is one of the main reasons why I built Brandlytics. When you click to run a test, it will show you all of the previous tests that you've already done on that video so you can avoid making the same test again and continue to learn from what works. Again, it's just about taking your data and the science of YouTube seriously. If you're only going to run a few split tests per month or only at video launch, then use YouTube Studio. When you're ready to turbocharge your back catalog and your channel growth, Brandlytics is the obvious answer. What else does Brandlytics do? Now, there are a lot more features we've got and are developing, but I don't want to make this video incredibly long. A lot of them, you don't even realize how important they are until you start trying to A/B test at scale. Brandlytics was specifically designed for people who want to scale. Can it work for smaller channels? Yes. I'd say the data starts being really valuable for channels with 10,000+ subscribers, but it turbo unlocks when you have 100,000 to millions of subscribers. The more videos and data you have, the more impactful it is. If your channel is smaller or new, I suggest using YouTube Studio's A/B testing because it's free and your path to growth is usually again more on content strategy, scripts, brand designs, and hooks, not A/B testing. One more thing. I can't finish this video though without also talking about the training that we do. I've coached thousands of creators at this point with their channels from pure startup to 8 figures in subscribers. And as a special bonus for Brandlytics clients, I go live every 2 weeks for 85 minutes to guide you on your growth. Usually we start each session with a channel breakdown. When you sign up for Brandlytics, you can ask our team to get on the list for channel breakdowns. I'll break down one channel with the channel owner, go through their YouTube Studio backend as well as their Brandlytics results, and guide them on how to grow the channel to the next level. That's the first half of the call, and you get to sit in on the consultation. The second half of the call is dedicated to your questions. I'll bring people up on stage in our Zoom room Zoom. You ask your question and I'll do my best to help. I've helped scale my channel to millions of subscribers as well as some of the biggest names in entrepreneurship to millions of subscribers, and it's one of my favorite things to do. The session alone is worth the price. You can think of it as getting the software for free or getting the sessions for free, but I want to see Brandlytics clients win. So it's a fun way to give more value twice a month. So I think that's good for now. Brandlytics definitely isn't for everyone yet, but if you got some traction already and are now ready to take your YouTube YouTube growth seriously, then Brandlytics is for you. I can't wait to help you out. Believe. Getting a bank loan to start your first business is the fastest way to ruin your life. There's more credit card and student loan debt, um, relative to personal income than there's ever been in the history of the United States. Avoid using credit cards if you have any credit card debt. Stop using credit cards. You're not free until you get out of debt, and you can't save anything while you're paying back interest. And often people buy a lot of crap they don't need. When you have $0, you're forced to actually sell something instead of wasting cash on expensive logos and fancy office space. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. I'm sure you must get asked this question a million times, which is, I have no money, I have no connections, but I want to start a business. Where do you start? Start online. You don't even have to have a product. You could have a drawing of a product and sell and make it once you get orders. I think that the products that are out there, the other coworking shared spaces, are amazing. I think that that's what you should do. Don't go out there and, and get a 5-year lease and all this kind of— go to a WeWork, go to a Regent's, go to those places, be around like-minded entrepreneurs. If you rely on borrowed money instead of your own hustle, you'll end up crushed by debt and forced back into a 9-to-5 job that you absolutely hate. As a general matter, as a one-people If I could give you a piece of specific financial advice, I would say, you know, avoid credit cards. Just forget about them. If you start revolving debt on credit cards, you're going to be paying 18 or 20%, and you can't make progress in your financial life going around borrowing money at 18 or 20%. If you're starting a business and you take out a loan, you're a moron. Half of all private sector hiring in America comes from small businesses, and they they are cracking under the weight of high debt. When I was 19, I had my first biotech software company. I didn't get a massive bank loan to rent a fancy office. I took 30% equity and made just $300 a month. I was dead broke. I had no marketing budget. But because I had $0, I was forced to figure out how to actually sell. So I studied how Bill Gates started Microsoft, and I used his exact strategy to land my first deal for $13,500. If I had borrowed $100,000 $1,000 to start, I would've wasted it on stupid things and gone bankrupt. Having $0 forced me to focus on the only thing that matters, getting a paying customer. And that is exactly what you need to do right now. Now, your biggest fear might be, Evan, what if I actually get someone to pay me, but then I don't know how to deliver the result and I ruin my reputation? That fear means you actually care, which proves that you aren't a scammer. But letting that fear stop you from starting is guaranteeing your failure. When someone pays you, the pressure will force you to figure it out. You can always refund their money if you completely mess up, but you can never refund the years you waste not trying. So next, I'm going to walk you through a foolproof method to guarantee you deliver massive value to your first clients, even if you're figuring it out as you go. Validate your idea with cash first. So you think you need to spend 6 months in a dark room coding a perfect app or building a beautiful website? You think you need to get everything 100% right before you show it to the world. That's the fastest way to go completely bankrupt. You spend all your savings, you finally launch your business, and then you hear absolute crickets. Nobody buys what you made because you never actually asked them what they wanted. So we need to flip the entire process upside down. You must sell your idea first. Find a painful problem, offer a clear solution, and ask for money today. If they pay you, then you build it. Data shows that 78% of startup companies remain completely self-funded because they learn how to generate cash flow from day one instead of relying on investors. Look at how some of the biggest companies started. They didn't hire a massive coding team. Noah Kagan built an $80 million business and he started over a single weekend with just $50. He found a software product he liked, got a discount code, threw up a free website, and sent an email to his friends. He collected cash through PayPal. Before he even built a real platform. You can do the exact same thing right now. If you want to start a coaching business, don't build a 10-week video course that takes you 3 months to film. Put up a free social media post saying you're taking on 3 private clients to help them solve their specific problem. If people pay you, you deliver the coaching live over free software like Zoom. You literally get paid to create your product. If nobody buys your offer, you just save yourself 6 months of wasted time and energy. Stop building things in secret Ask for the sale today, validate your idea with real cash, and build the product together with your very first paying customer. This takes the pressure off of you and guarantees you're building something people actually want to buy. You spend hours picking out the perfect font for your website because it feels like work, but it's actually just hiding. You're terrified of someone telling you no, but a no is the most valuable data you can get. A no tells you you need to change your offer. If you wait 6 months to get a no, you're dead. If you get a no today, you can fix your business tomorrow. So define exactly what problem you solve. Find 10 people who have that problem and offer to fix it for them right now. Do not wait until Monday. Do it today. And I'm going to show you exactly how to find those exact people who have money to spend in the next step. Start a business development show. When you have $0 in your bank account, your biggest problem is just obscurity. Nobody knows who you are. You don't have a reputation. And you don't have an advertising budget to go spend tons of money, right? You think you need to spend thousands of dollars on Facebook ads to get clients, but you don't. The fastest way to get attention isn't by buying expensive ads or posting random pictures on social media. It's by interviewing the exact people who can give you business. I call this a business development show. We teach this inside our Movement Makers program. You don't need a million subscribers to make a million dollars. You just need the right 50 people to know you and trust you. Imagine you're starting a marketing agency for real estate agents. Don't cold call them begging for work. Cold calling has a terrible conversion rate and it makes you feel like a pest. Instead, start a podcast called The Top Real Estate Secrets Show. Invite the biggest real estate agents in your city to be guests on the show. They say yes because everyone loves talking about their own success. You interview them for 30 minutes, you ask great questions, you build a real human relationship, you make them feel important and valued. And at the end of the interview, they'll naturally ask what you do for a living. You tell them that you run a marketing agency that helps real estate agents get more leads. Because you just gave them a platform and made them look like a hero, they'll think about hiring you or referring you to somebody who will. You can build a 7-figure business from a YouTube channel with only 200 subscribers using this exact method. This completely removes the sleazy feeling of selling. You're providing massive value first. You're making them a star, and in return, you get direct access to your ideal clients without without spending a single dollar on marketing. People want to do business with people that they like and trust. So when you spend 45 minutes having a deep conversation with someone, you build more trust than 1,000 cold emails ever could. You bypass the gatekeepers. You don't have to talk to the receptionist. You're talking directly to the CEO because you invited them to be a guest. All you need is a free Zoom account and the courage to send invitations. So make a list of 20 dream clients today. Reach out to them and say that you're starting a show highlighting the top leaders in your industry and you want to feature their story. A lot of times you're shocked by how many people say yes, and once you get them on the call, you need to know how to act. Which brings us to the ultimate shortcut to success. Copy the rise, not the result. You don't need to invent a brand new business model to be successful. That's a trap that often keeps you stuck in the planning phase forever. Whatever you want to achieve in your life, someone else has has already done something very similar. You just need to find them and copy their rise, not their current result. Don't look at what they're doing today with their millions of dollars and huge teams. Look at what they did on day one when they were totally broke, just like you. You constantly look at your heroes and try to copy their 4-hour morning routines or their massive ad campaigns, but that's what they do now that they have money. You need to know what they did when they were desperate. And I was struggling with my first software company. I was making exactly $300 a month. I was ready to quit. I was tired. I was frustrated. I was feeling like a complete failure. But then I decided to study Bill Gates. I didn't look at what he was doing now as a billionaire philanthropist. I looked at how he got started. I looked at how he got his first contract from Microsoft. He called the company and sold them software he hadn't even written yet. He promised them a solution. And when they said yes, he locked himself in a room and figured out how to build it. I used a similar strategy with my company. I called the company, pitched a solution I knew they needed, and I landed a $13,500 deal. I already had the software, didn't have to build it from scratch. But by finding an industry hero, you read their early biographies, you watch their oldest interviews, scroll all the way back to the very first videos on their YouTube channel, figure out exactly how they got their first 10 customers and do exactly what they did. If they knocked on doors, you knock on doors. If they sent 1,000 sent 1,000 emails, you send 1,000 emails. Success leaves clues. You don't have to be some creative genius to make money. You just have to be a great student and a massive action taker. So study the masters, figure out the very first steps, and execute those steps with complete blind faith. When you do this, you remove all the guesswork. You stop wondering if your plan will work because you're using a plan that has already been proven to work. So find your mentor, study their origin story and get to work before you waste another day guessing. Create unstoppable momentum. The biggest thing people are missing right now is just momentum. Planning doesn't count as momentum. Reading another business book doesn't count as momentum. You have to go and do something in the real world. You're sitting on a great idea. You've got a huge heart and a deep desire to serve people, but you haven't started because you're waiting to figure out every single step. You want to know exactly how step 100 is going to work before you take step 1. That fear becomes paralyzing. So instead of worrying about getting to 100% of your goal, you need to just focus on the 2% difference. Just start with the first 2%. Don't worry about the end goal right now. Just care about getting started. If you want to write a book, the 2% difference is writing the first page today. If you want to start a YouTube channel, the 2% difference is recording your first messy, ugly video on your phone today. It's going to suck, and that is completely fine. More important than planning how to make a perfect video is just doing the things so you can build momentum. When I decided to write my book Momentum, I didn't spend months outlining it. I had the idea, and 4 minutes later I was writing the first chapter. I wrote for a few hours, and then I figured out the next step. Action creates clarity. There's a saying that you can't steer a parked car, right? You have to start moving, even if you're going in the wrong direction. Because at least then you can correct your course instead of staying stuck. Momentum is the ultimate cure for overthinking. When you're moving fast, you don't have time to doubt yourself. You don't have time to worry about what your friends from high school think about your new business. You're too busy executing. So stop telling yourself all the reasons why your idea will fail and give yourself permission to say yes to the opportunity. Commit to an immediate action today. Text a potential client, record your first video, or build a free landing page. Just do something that pushes your dream forward into reality. Leverage free technology and barter. Having $0 is absolutely not an excuse to look sloppy or unprofessional. You live in a digital age where the best tools in the world are completely free. You can build a massive, highly profitable company using only a free email account and smartphone. You don't need to pay a fancy web designer $5,000 to build your site. You can use a free website builder to make it a clean, professional landing page in just an hour. You don't need expensive payment processing software to take people's money. You can use free platforms to accept credit cards today. Right now I'm working on a massive project to dub 8,000 of my YouTube videos into 75 different languages. I'm not hiring a massive, expensive agency to do it. I'm testing out open source AI tools because they give amazing results without huge server costs. You can use free AI tools to write your emails, your social media posts, and your video scripts. Research shows that using AI tools can increase your business productivity by up to 40%. And if you desperately need something for your business but you can't afford to buy it, you can simply barter for it. You have your time, you have your energy, you have your unique skills. If you need a graphic designer to create a professional logo for you but your bank account is empty, find a graphic designer who has a terrible website that you can help with. Reach out to them and offer to write the copy for their entire website in exchange for a free logo. You're trading value for value. No money needs to change hands. The barter system is how countless successful companies got off the ground when cash is tight. So make a list of 3 things you desperately need to launch your business today. Then make a list of 3 valuable skills you can offer in return. Reach out to 10 people today and propose a fair trade. The strategy forces you to network and build deep relationships with other hungry entrepreneurs. You're helping them grow their business and they're helping you grow yours. It costs you $0 out of your pocket. Every single barrier to entry has now been removed. The only thing standing between you and your first paying customer is your own willingness to do the hard work. Expect to suck at the beginning. So the biggest reason why you haven't started your business yet is because you're terrified of looking stupid. You're a perfectionist. You want everything to be flawless before anybody sees it. But perfectionism is just fear dressed up in a fancy suit. You have to give yourself complete permission to be terrible at the beginning. You have an unrealistic internal expectation for how good you should be on day one. You look at people who've been doing it for 10 years and then judge your day one against their year 10. That's a guaranteed recipe for depression and failure. When I started making videos, I completely hated my first 350 videos. I was so embarrassed by them that I couldn't even watch them back. My lighting was awful, my audio wasn't great, I was incredibly stiff, I was boring on camera. I just kept posting. I committed to the process instead of obsessing over the outcome, and it took me 700 videos—public videos—until I finally made something that I was actually proud of. Your first product will be deeply flawed. Your first sales call will be incredibly awkward. Your first website will look cheap and basic. That's exactly how it's supposed to be. If you aren't totally embarrassed by your first version, then you when you waited too long to launch. You only get good by doing the reps over and over again. So you have to start making a massive mess today so you can clean it up and become a master tomorrow. Don't delete your old videos. Don't hide your early struggles. Your audience wants to see your growth. It's an inspiration. They want to connect with a real human being who's figuring it out, not some fake corporate robot. When you embrace the fact that you're gonna suck, the pressure actually disappears. You can finally just relax and do work. The only way that you fail is if you quit. And so if you keep showing up, keep putting in the reps, and keep learning from your mistakes, you'll eventually become an undeniable success. So embrace the suck, press record, and publish your messy work. Your purpose comes from your pain. When you're starting from zero, it's easy to get overwhelmed by trying to change the whole world. You look at massive companies and think, you need to reach a million people tomorrow. That pressure paralyzes you. Instead, you need to shrink the focus down and realize why you're actually doing this. I believe that your purpose comes from your pain, that whatever you struggled with the most as a human is exactly what you're meant to help other people overcome. I struggled so much as an entrepreneur in my first business. I wanted to quit. I did quit for a day. I felt isolated and alone. And I make my videos today for 19-year-old Evan and for all the people out there right now who are struggling to believe in themselves too. When you make your business about serving the person that you used to be, you tap into a greater source of energy. You stop worrying about your own fears and your own insecurities, the pimple on your nose, and your focus shifts entirely to the person who desperately needs your help right now. And psychology research shows that helping others directly increases your own happiness and reduces your own anxiety. If you wake up every day and feel like today doesn't matter, that's the path to depression. Depression. But if you feel like today matters because you're going to touch even just one person's life, that's the path towards fulfillment. So you don't need to change the entire world today. You just need to help one person who is stuck exactly where you used to be. Listen to their problems, offer your help, deliver a massive amount of value to them, and let that one success story motivate that belief that you can go get your next customer. Everything changes when you stop focusing just on making money money and start focusing on making a difference. The money naturally follows as a result of the value that you provide. You have a unique message inside you that the world needs to hear. So stop holding it back. Step up, share your story, and go serve your audience. Your time is now. You already have exactly what it takes to build a life of total freedom. Money is just a tool, but your courage and your hustle are the real engines of your success. So don't let another day pass by Why? When your greatest ideas stay locked right here inside your head. Imagine this. You're a consultant or coach who hasn't signed a new client in months. Revenue swings wildly. One month, $10K. The next month, $35K. Then nothing. In desperation, you consider launching cheap courses or ebooks, hoping a low-price offer will bring quick cash. Stop right there. This spray-and-pray approach is actually a trap driven by fear, and you're not alone. Studies show that fear makes people choose safe diversification that don't create real value. In this video, I'm gonna share a focused strategy to break outta that feast or famine cycle and consistently land high-ticket clients. You'll learn how to leverage two tactical content plays, a biz dev interview show, and buyer breakthrough videos to generate $30K+ deals backed by data and real examples. No chasing vanity metrics, no endless low-ticket hustle, just actionable steps to grow your business. Let's do this. Don't let fear derail your strategy. Keep the main thing the main thing. When business dries up, fear kicks in and whispers, lower your prices, create a cheap offer, cast a wider net. It feels safe, but it can sabotage your success. Research confirms that fear-based decisions often lead to conservative moves that don't actually drive growth. In our case, it's like abandoning your premium service, the real solution you offer, to chase a low-ticket product you think more people will buy. Creating low-price offers is not easier for an expert like you. You'd need to sell hundreds or thousands of cheap units to match just a few high-ticket clients. High-ticket programs lets you focus. One industry expert explains that high-ticket offers bring significant income per customer, so you don't need a huge audience or tons of leads to hit high revenue goals. Fewer clients, less complexity, but higher value delivered to each. That's a winning formula for a small team or solo business. You can pour your energy into what you do best instead of juggling funnels and ads and support issues for a low-price product. As another coach puts it, high-ticket success isn't about luck. It comes from clarity and connection, whereas low-ticket ventures often devolve into endless tech tweaks, and refund headaches. That's the not-so-glamorous side of selling at scale. High ticket beats low ticket. Here's the proof. Still on the fence about focusing on high ticket? Let's back it up with some evidence. High ticket services are not just anecdotal wins. They're economically smarter for many experts. Consider profitably selling a $30,000 consulting package once can net more profit than selling a $300 course 100 times. In fact, business strategist observed that just 5 high-paying clients can outperform 100 low-paying customers in revenue with far less stress on you and your team. High-ticket models often mean higher profit margins per sale, a smaller, no team, and simpler delivery. Meanwhile, low-ticket models rely on sheer volume and complex funnels. One sales expert bluntly calls low-ticket offers a hamster wheel hustle that drains your energy and steals your time. Ouch, but true. Think about it. With low-priced products, you'd need robust marketing to reach masses of buyers. If you're not already an online marketing whiz with a huge audience, that's an uphill battle. As entrepreneur and friend of the channel Jenna Kutcher noted, to make $50,000 from a $50 product, my marketing would have needed to be a lot broader, meaning a big ad budget, affiliates, or viral content. That's essentially building an entire marketing machine. Webinars, email sequences, customer support for all those buyers, maybe even handling refunds. Do you really want to manage all that? Probably not. And you likely don't have to. Now, on the flip side, high-ticket consulting or coaching lets you laser target a handful of ideal clients. Your marketing can be more personal and direct. In fact, many high-ticket service providers stay fully booked just from referrals. No flashy marketing at all. You can deliver great results to a few clients and generate case studies and word of mouth that bring the next clients in. It's the classic quality over quantity play. But here's the key: to sell high ticket consistently, you must build trust and relationships. High paying clients rarely buy impulsively or from a random click on an ad. They buy when they trust you. As a business coach on Medium put it, high ticket clients don't buy on impulse. Else they buy from trust. So how do we quickly build that trust with the right people? Let's dive into the first big tactic. The Biz Dev Show. Turn content into relationships and clients. One of the fastest ways to build trust with high-value prospects is what I call the Biz Dev Show strategy. Here's how it works. Instead of chasing clients through cold calls or generic ads or hoping a video goes viral, you invite your ideal clients or key referral partners to be interviewed on a content-rich show. The magic is in the format. You're giving them a platform to share their expertise, not a sales pitch. It's disarming, it's flattering, and it starts with a genuine relationship. Why is it so powerful? Because referrals and relationships drive business. Approximately 65% of all new business comes from referrals and recommendations, and a staggering 84% of B2B decision makers say their buying process starts with a referral, not a Google search, not a cold email, but a referral. By hosting a biz dev show, you're essentially manufacturing referrals and warm introductions at scale. You spend 30 to 60 minutes talking one-on-one with someone who could either hire you or refer you, all under the friendly pretense of content creation. It's networking on steroids. Now, a few pointers to make this work effectively for you. Number 1, target the right guests. These should be people who either are your ideal client or have access to many of your ideal clients. For example, a VP in a company that could use your consulting or a well-connected individual in your industry. We call them your Money 50. Make a list of 50 high-impact people you'd love to build a relationship with. Next, keep topics safe and valuable. If your guests are C-suite executives or experts with sensitive information, don't ask them to spill company secrets Secrets. Instead, discuss general but insightful topics around their leadership, their vision, industry trends. For example, if you're talking to VP Sales, ask, what's your philosophy on building visionary teams? These kinds of questions let them shine without any NDA worries. They'll appreciate that you're highlighting their expertise and you sidestep any confidentiality issues. Remember, the interview is about them, not you. You're showcasing them as an expert. Next, build rapport and listen. During the interview, be genuinely curious. People can tell if you're just waiting to pounce with a sales pitch. Instead, actually enjoy the conversation. Compliment their insights. Dig deeper into their stories. This is where your trust is formed through authentic human connection. By the end of the 30-minute conversation, you'll be amazed how much goodwill you can earn by simply listening to people well. Next, sneak in one strategic question about your domain. This is a pro tip. Midway through the interview, ask a question that relates to the problem that you solve. For instance, for that VP of Sales, you can say, I often help companies develop their next generation of leaders. In your experience, what's a common challenge in grooming new leaders? The guest's answer will likely reveal a pain point, or at least get them thinking about that need, and it suddenly establishes your expertise. You mentioned that you help companies in that area after all. Next, the off-air ask. Once the recording is over and you thank them, don't just say goodbye. This is the crucial moment. Transition to a casual conversation about the topic they touched on that intersects with your services. So, uh, for example, you mentioned struggling to groom new leaders. That's exactly what I specialize in. I'd love to offer a few ideas or even hop on another call to discuss how we could tackle that if you're open to it. It's a soft invitation framed as a helpful follow-up, not a hard sell. Since you've spent time providing them value and showcasing them, you've earned the right to ask. Often they'll be receptive either to explore your services or to introduce you to the right person at their company. Next, ignore the vanity of views. This strategy is about quality, not quantity. Maybe only 10 people watch the interview on YouTube. It doesn't matter. The one person who mattered was your guest, and now you have a warm lead. Plus, you can repurpose the interview clips for social proof or marketing later. But That's the cherry on top. As a general rule, don't obsess over likes and views at this stage. They are vanity metrics that can distract you from your real goals. As one marketing expert put it, every minute and dollar spent on chasing vanity metrics is a missed opportunity to focus on metrics that matter. In our case, the metric that matters is how many genuine conversations you're having with potential $30K+ clients not how many random people liked your YouTube video. Now, if you're worried, won't a longer interview bore people? Shouldn't I make it super short? Think again. When the content is valuable to the right person, they will absolutely engage, even if it's long. Podcasts are a great example. 93% of people who start listening to a podcast episode stick with most of it or all of it. These can be 30, 60, 90 minutes long. It's not about the length, it's about relevance. If your interview is insightful, your guest and any genuinely interested viewers will be hooked. So don't cut a great interview short just for the sake of making it snackable. The more time you spend building rapport, the stronger the relationship will be. By the way, doing this weekly, say one interview per week, means 52 warm connections a year with exactly the people who can grow your business. So ask yourself, what's the likelihood that yields at least a few high-ticket clients or deals? If you're still hesitant, remember that referrals and personal connections outrank any other lead lead source and closing big deals. You're engineering those connections systematically. Many consultants running high-ticket businesses rely on exactly this method. We've taught many of them. It works because it's human and it's direct. And because trust is the currency of high-ticket sales, you're essentially printing money by investing time in relationships. Buy Breakthrough Videos, content that converts, not just content for content. Content's sake. Now, while you're executing the biz dev interview for proactive outreach, there's a second tactic that covers the inbound side. I call these buyer breakthrough videos, BBVs. Think of BBVs as your on-demand sales assistant. These are focused videos that answer key questions and objections your high-ticket buyers have before they hop on a call with you or your team. They break through the mental barriers that might stop someone from contacting or hiring Hiring you. Here's why bio breakthrough videos matter. Potential clients are likely checking out your website or YouTube, quietly doing their homework on you. When they land on your site and see generic buzzwords like innovative solutions or a list of services with fancy names, they might think, huh, I'm not exactly sure what that means. If they're confused or unsure, they leave, right? Bye-bye lead. We don't want that. We want to capture and convert that interest. While we have it. Here's a quick stat for you. Adding a video to your landing page can boost conversions by 86% on average. Why? Because video engages visitors and makes your message clear and memorable. Viewers retain about 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to just 10% when reading text. So if you need to explain a complex service or build trust, video is your best friend. To create buyer breakthrough videos, follow these simple steps. Number 1, identify your buyer's top questions or hesitations. Think about the past sales calls or client meetings that you had. What did people ask? What did they need clarified? Maybe it's how exactly does your process work? What kind of results have you achieved? Or what does whatever jargon word really mean in practice? Also, look at your website services or programs page. Every bullet or term there is a candidate for a buyer breakthrough video. Video if it's not self-explanatory. For example, if you list Knowledge Accelerator program as an offering, you must have a video that says what that is in plain language and why it's awesome. Don't assume a clever name just speaks for itself. Next, keep each video focused. You're not doing a full webinar or giving away the secret sauce. The goal is to educate and intrigue the viewer enough that they think, this person really knows their stuff and I understand how they can help me. Maybe I should talk to them. For instance, a consultant could record a video called How to Smooth Out Volatile Monthly Revenue, where you explain common causes of feast and famine income. If that's the pain your prospect has, you've just hooked them. Next, place these videos where your warm prospects will see them. Your website is number one. Embed the relevant video next to the text about that service or the topic. If someone's reading about your leadership coaching program, have a video of to describing the program's approach and outcomes. Also consider sending buyer breakthrough videos directly to leads. Let's say someone downloads your PDF or inquires by email. In your follow-up, include a link. By the way, I made a video answering this common question. I think you'll find it useful. It feels personal and adds a human touch. Next, leverage YouTube strategically. Upload these buyer breakthrough videos to YouTube as well. The reason is you can easily embed them on your website and share links, and you can start building a content library. Over time, some will get discovered by people searching for that exact question, bringing you bonus organic leads. But again, view counts here are not the goal. Conversion is. If a video only gets 300 views, but 10 of those viewers schedule a call with you, that's a huge win. Let me give you a real example to illustrate the impact. I reviewed a consultant's website for our Movement Makers program. Link to check it out in the description below. And he listed services like knowledge accelerators as a bullet point. Impressive term, but to a new visitor, they'd be scratching their head. What does that mean? So we recommended he turn each of those concepts into a video explanation. Why? Because if a potential client spends even 5 minutes watching him clearly explain his unique approach, that client is far more likely to trust him and reach out. Right now, with just text, people were likely bouncing off the page confused. We're losing money every time a qualified prospect leaves the site unsure about what we offer. A video fixes that. It's like having a mini consultation with every site visitor 24/7, and it can dramatically increase your lead-to-client conversion. The data already told us videos make people convert more. And beyond just the stats, it just makes sense. People feel like they know you after seeing you speak on video, and that familiarity breeds trust. So brainstorm your buyer breakthrough video topics. A good rule of thumb is to have videos for the big outcome or the value prop you deliver, the key components of your methodology or services, and any major objections that you frequently hear. For objections, maybe it's, uh, I don't have time for this. Make a video, how to get ROI from leadership coaching even if you're busy, or is it worth the investment? Uh, maybe a video, why high-level leadership coaching pays for itself with some data or examples. You get the idea. One more thing: quality. Do you need fancy production? No. Use a decent webcam or smartphone, ensure good lighting and clear audio. Speak as if you're talking to one client, not reading off of some script robotically. Authenticity and clarity matter more than your slick production. In fact, um, conversational tone can build more trust than a perfectly polished corporate video because it feels personal. As long as you address the question head-on and show you understand they understand their problem and how to solve it, your job is done. Focus on what counts and avoid the shiny objects. By now you can see a theme. Focus. Focus on your best clients. Focus on building relationships. Focus on content that directly leads to sales. In practice, this means tuning out a lot of noise and vanity that can sidetrack entrepreneurs. Don't obsess over social media followers, viral videos, or posting every day. Hey, these are nice-to-haves eventually, not need-to-haves to land high-ticket clients. Case in point, many consultants quietly making 7 figures have tiny online followers. They're not TikTok stars or YouTube celebs, and they don't need to be. They double down on direct relationships and targeted value. Remember, referrals built the business world long before likes existed. If 84% of big B2B purchases start with referrals, your energy is better spent cultivating referrals through biz dev conversations and stellar results than chasing internet fame. Next, phase 1 versus phase 2 mindset. I often tell clients in our Movement Maker program to separate what I call phase 1 and phase 2 in their growth plan. Phase 1 is all about getting revenue, getting that consistent $30K, $50K, $100K per month coming in. These tactics we've— we're discussing— biz dev, interviews, buy breakthrough videos focused on conversion— those are phase 1 tactics. They might not make you internet famous, but they will make you money and build a foundation. Phase 2 can be the broader thought leadership, starting a big YouTube channel, launching that online course, scaling to a much wider audience, right? Being the face of your industry. Those are great goals, but only tackle them after Phase 1 is stable. Trying to do both at once usually means doing both poorly. As the saying goes, chase 2 rabbits and catch none. It's okay to say no to certain projects right now. You're not killing your dream, you're sequencing it for maximum effectiveness. Next, track meaningful metrics. Since we're being tactical, here's what I suggest you actually measure in this strategy. One, how many biz dev interviews are you doing per month? Two, how many of those turn into follow-up sales conversations or proposals? And three, your close rate on those. Also track, four, how many buyer breakthrough videos have you created? And five, any uptick in inquiries or conversion rates on your website after adding them. These are metrics that matter.. If you see your number of meaningful conversations going up, that's a clear leading indicator your revenue will follow. Vanity metrics like website hits or video views are often misleading. 10,000 views from random people in the wrong niche and wrong country mean nothing on a video. 10 views by CEOs who need your service means everything. Keep that perspective and you won't get discouraged by the wrong numbers. Finally, quick note on mindset. Don't let fear creep back in during execution. Fear might show up as a, maybe I should also do a $100 course for those who can't afford me, or I got a low response on my video, maybe this isn't working. Remember the research. Fear makes us pull right back when we need to push forward, leading to half measures that don't create actual value. Commit to this path for a few months and give it a chance to bear fruit. Plant enough seeds and the garden will grow. High-ticket growth simplified and supercharged. So here's a quick recap of your game plan to land high-ticket clients consistently. Number 1, focus on your core high-ticket offer. Don't dilute your value out of panic. As data and experience shows, a handful of big clients can out-revenue a heap of small ones, and it's a path that preserves your sanity and your impact. Next, build relationships through a biz dev interview series. Position yourself yourself as a peer and promoter of your ideal clients. It's the fastest way to create trust, and trust is what makes high-ticket deals happen. Aim for one quality conversation a week. Over a year, this network effect is enormous. Next, create buyer breakthrough videos to convert lurking prospects. Capture those visiting your site or checking you out by answering their burning questions via videos. This can dramatically increase your lead conversion. Remember, video can boost landing page conversion by 80%. And people do watch content that educates them, even long content, as long as it's valuable. Next, keep it simple and metrics-driven. In phase 1, all that matters is revenue generation activity, conversations, and conversions. Drown out the siren song of vanity metrics and shiny new tactics that don't serve this immediate goal. As one article noted, every minute chasing vanity metrics is a missed opportunity to focus on what what truly drives your business. So zero in on those relationships and conversion metrics. By making these shifts, you'll avoid the low-ticket hamster wheel and instead build a streamlined, high-impact business. No more random revenue swings due to luck or referrals falling from the sky. You'll be engineering a steady pipeline of high-paying clients. How would that feel to wake up each month knowing roughly where your $30,000 or $50,000 or is coming from and knowing you don't have to frantically launch something new to make it happen. This approach is evergreen. It works today. It'll work 5 years from now because it's built on timeless fundamentals, solving real problems, connecting with real people, and communicating value clearly. Whether you're an executive advisor, consultant, or any expert selling high-ticket outcomes, these tactics apply. I've seen it transform businesses that were on the brink the brink of burnout and failure into businesses that are enjoyable and profitable. And I believe it can do the same for you. Remember, high-ticket clients are not elusive unicorns. They are people with big problems that you can solve. Reach out to them strategically, show up with value, and ask for the business. You'll be amazed at how many say yes, let's talk. Ready to discover the skills that could skyrocket your success this year? These aren't academic theories, they're practical, in-demand abilities you can learn without a formal degree. Each skill taps into emerging market needs, offers entrepreneurial leverage, and has scalable impact. Let's dive in and imagine the possibilities each one opens up for your business and income. Skill number 1, AI integration and automation, turning intelligence into income. Okay, so what is it? Here we're gonna leverage AI and automation tools to streamline operations, create smarter products, or even launch AI AI-driven services. It's using machines to do the heavy thinking or doing for you, from chatbots that handle customer inquiries to AI systems that optimize your marketing or inventory in real time. Here's why it matters this year. The AI revolution isn't coming. It's right here now, and it's rewriting the rules of business. By 2024, 70% of organizations reported using AI in some capacity, up from just 55% the year before. Companies are pouring investments in AI at record levels, over $109 billion in the US in 2024, with nearly $34 billion globally into generative AI. And they desperately need people who can make it work. The catch? There's a huge talent gap. 94% of business leaders say they face AI-related skill shortages on their teams, with 1 in 3 reporting massive gaps in critical AI roles. What does that mean? Demand is way bigger than supply, and that means opportunities for you. Entrepreneurs who are AI savvy can step in and command premium prices for their solutions. This isn't just for tech companies either. From healthcare to finance, AI is being woven into daily operations. Even the FDA has approved hundreds of AI-enabled medical devices, and self-driving cars are logging thousands of rides right now. The world is racing to adopt AI, and those who can ride that wave stand to reap huge rewards. So how can entrepreneur's profit. Think of AI as a force multiplier for your business. An entrepreneur with AI skills can automate super boring processes, freeing up time to scale faster. You can make smarter products with better features. You can offer AI consulting and integration services to companies who are willing to pay for help. Uh, so for example, a small e-commerce founder might use AI to personalize their shopping experience for each customer automatically, leading to happier customers and higher sales. Or maybe you're launching a micro SaaS tool that uses AI, like a AI scheduling assistant or content generator. Even a one-person business can serve thousands of customers when AI is doing most of the work. The evidence is everywhere. Companies using AI report higher productivity and lower cost, and many have seen AI-driven projects boost their bottom line. Why Entrepreneur created an AI-powered copywriting service and landed hundreds of clients globally, essentially earning money 24/7 as the AI works for them. The key is that AI is practical and learnable. With countless online courses and tools, you can start applying AI even if you're not a programmer. Many AI platforms are actually plug and play. So this year, knowing how to harness AI is like having a superpower. It's not just about efficiency, it's about unlocking new income streams. From automating your marketing to building the next ChatGPT-like app for a niche industry, AI integration is a skill that can pay off almost immediately. So embrace it, and you ride the biggest tech wave of our era straight towards profit. Now, AI might be the brains, but data is the backbone. So next, let's look at the skills that turn raw numbers into gold. Skill number 2: data analytics and business intelligence. Profiting from big data. Okay, so what is it? It's the skill of collecting, analyzing, and drawing smart insights from data to drive business decisions. So data analytics is like having x-ray vision for your business. It lets you see the patterns and trends that normal people's eyes would miss. So business intelligence, or BI, goes hand in hand, focusing on those who are using insights to make strategic calls. This skill isn't about math genius. It's about knowing which numbers matter and how to translate them into action. So why it matters right now in this year: we live in a world that has tons of data. Every click, every purchase, every interaction, it can be tracked. But few people know how to turn that ocean of information into actual real value. And that's where you can come in. Companies have realized that gut instinct isn't enough. 81% of businesses now believe data should be at the heart of all decision-making, and they're willing to pay handsomely for those who can deliver results. Why? Because data-driven businesses simply perform better. They're more productive and more profitable on average than their less data-savvy peers. Companies that truly embrace analytics have seen efficiencies boost as high as 60 to 80% in operations. It's not just about giant corporations. Even small startups benefit when they can quickly identify which product feature is a hit or which marketing channel brings the best ROI. And this is a very clear trend. The global big data analytics market is massive. It's over $270 billion in value and still growing. Growing, and there's a shortage of professionals who can wrangle data effectively. Executives are literally hungry for insights. A recent survey found 88% of business leaders rank data analytics as a top priority for upskilling in the organization. So this year, being fluent in data is like having a secret weapon in your market. You base decisions on facts, not guesses, which is a recipe for winning. So how can entrepreneurs use it? Data analytics can make you rich in two ways. First, by applying it to your own business, you can pinpoint your most profitable customers. You can find inefficiencies to cut. You can test pricing strategies with actual hard evidence. For example, Netflix famously used data analytics to save $1 billion a year by recommending exactly what viewers wanted. So imagine bringing that kind of insight into your business decisions. Secondly, you can sell this skill as a service to others. Many companies, especially smaller ones, they drown in data but have no idea what to do with it. You could come in as a freelance analyst or consultant, turn their data into a clear action plan, and charge premium fees for delivering growth or savings. So picture telling your client, I found a way to boost your sales 20% by analyzing your customer behavior, and then actually doing it. There are real case studies of entrepreneurs doing just this. One startup founder used business intelligence tools to optimize her inventory and eliminated over $100,000 in annual waste waist, directly padding her profits. Another built a consulting agency that helps local businesses set up simple dashboards and KPIs, and within a year he was booking 5-figure contracts regularly. The bottom line is data analytics is practical and learnable. There's tons of online courses, YouTube videos, tools that are now drag and drop. Master it and you can either supercharge your own business or become the go-to data guru who turns others' confusion into cash. So in this year Data, it's a new oil, and knowing how to drill for it is an extremely high income skill. Now, having great data is pointless if you can't attract customers. That's where our next skill comes in. It's time to cash in on the art of getting noticed. Skill number 3: digital marketing and growth hacking. Scaling visibility into wealth. So what is it? Digital marketing is a skill of getting customers for people's businesses online through channels like social media, through search engines, through email, through to LLMs and more. Growth hacking is a trendy way to say creative, fast-paced marketing experimentation, right? So finding clever, low-cost tactics to drive growth or sales for your business or other people's. This skill is about making your business impossible to ignore on the internet and turning that attention into revenue. So covers everything from running targeted ads, optimizing a website to rank on Google, or GPT crafting viral content, analyzing campaign data to tweak for better results, making YouTube videos to spread your message. Why it matters this year is you could have the best product or service in the world, but if nobody knows about it, you don't make a dime. This year, digital marketing remains one of the highest skills for entrepreneurs because online attention is the currency of our kingdom. Just look at the numbers. Global digital ad spending is projected to hit $843 billion. Yes, with a B. Companies large and small are pouring money into Facebook ads, Google searches, TikTok videos, wherever their audience Audience lives online and they need experts who know how to navigate this landscape. The job outlook also reflects that demand. Marketing roles are expected to grow by 10%, faster than the average for all careers. And in particular, there's surging demand for people skilled in areas like marketing analytics, content creation, and SEO, SEM, because every business wants to rank number one on Google and decode the algorithms of ChatGPT. The beauty of digital marketing is that it's practical and learnable. No MBA required. Just practice, creativity, and keeping up with the trends. We're also seeing new frontiers like AI-driven marketing. Over 50% of businesses are already using generative AI to improve their operations. All this means that entrepreneurial marketers who stay sharp can out-hustle their bigger competitors. So in this year, if you know how to get the right message to the right people at the right time online, you basically have a license to print money. So how can you use it as an entrepreneur? Digital marketing is often the make-or-break skill that determines if you scale or if you stay stuck. And so if you master it and you can acquire customers on demand, you can enter new markets quickly. You can even build a personal brand that multiplies all of your opportunities. Take, for example, an online fitness coach who leverages social media marketing by mastering YouTube and Instagram. She grows her audience to hundreds of thousands and launches a fitness app that earns 7 figures online. Or think of a small local business owner who uses savvy Google search ads and SEO to dominate local search traffic, right? Their store goes from unknown to the go-to place in town. And these aren't hypotheticals. These things are happening right now all around us. As an entrepreneur, you can also sell digital marketing expertise. If you're great at, say, SEO or Facebook ads, you can freelance or start an agency. Businesses are eager to pay because they've seen the ROI. For every dollar spent on email marketing can yield $36 in return. As various studies have shown. So a skilled email marketer is worth their weight in gold. Another real-world use case: an entrepreneur growth hacked his startup by creating a referral program that went viral. So think Dropbox's free storage for referral strategy, acquiring millions of users without a massive ad budget. That's growth hacking in action. So digital marketing lets you scale up quickly. An ad campaign can reach millions of people overnight. A piece of content that catches fire can bring in floods of traffic. You're not limited by your local area, your storefront. And with analytics tools, you can measure every penny and double down on what works, like truly data-driven marketing. And the emotional side, it's pretty thrilling to see your business blow up because of a campaign that you created. The control is right here. It's in your hands. With consumer attention shifting every year— today it might be YouTube or LinkedIn newsletters, tomorrow who knows— entrepreneurs who have the skill will ride each wave and outpace pace their competition. Digital marketing and growth hacking are high-income skills because they directly drive revenue, and mastering them means you can virtually write your own success story in this digital age. So now you've got the customer's attention. Now we need to convince them to open their wallets. The next skill is all about the art of persuasion, and it's one of the oldest and most profitable tricks in the book. Skill number 4: persuasive Communication and Storytelling: Selling Anything to Anyone. So what is it? This is the skill of conveying ideas in a compelling way. So that's through sales pitches and marketing copy, or even everyday networking conversations. It includes sales and negotiation, right? Convincing a customer or partner to say yes. Copywriting, which is writing words that sell, from ads to landing pages. And storytelling, crafting a narrative that hooks people in emotion It's how to talk or write so people listen, trust you, and feel motivated to act, like clicking the buy now or signing a contract. Why it matters this year is no matter how advanced technology gets, the power of a good story and genuine connection never goes out of style. In fact, as automation rises, those human-centered skills become more valuable. This year's marketplace is hyperstimulated. Consumers see thousands of ads and posts a day, so the ability to cut through that noise with a resonant message message is pure gold. 68% of consumers say that a brand story influences their buying decisions. People remember stories up to 22 times more than plain facts. That's huge for entrepreneurs trying to build a memorable brand or pitch to investors. And yes, we see evidence that storytelling and communication translate to better results. Marketing campaigns built around a narrative can boost conversion rates by 30% or more. On the sales side, companies are actively looking for leaders with strong strong social influence and communication skills. Even the World Economic Forum highlighted leadership and social influence as a top skill for the future. Why? Because a person who can rally a team, win over a client, negotiate a profitable deal— they are invaluable. Also, let's talk money. Jobs like sales executives or copywriters are often high-paying because they directly bring in revenue. A top-performing tech sales rep, for example, can earn a six-figure base salary plus another six figures in commission. Copywriters who crack the code of persuasion are similarly rewarded. Many freelance copywriters charge $100+ an hour, and businesses happily pay because one killer sales page or email sequence can generate hundreds of thousands in sales. Words are powerful, and this year, those who can wield that power expertly will find that it translates into serious income. So how can you use it as an entrepreneur? You're always selling, not just your products, but your vision, your brand, even selling yourself as a trustworthy partner, persuasive communication turns this into a superpower. Mastering storytelling means you can craft a brand narrative that makes customers feel something and remember you. So for example, instead of just saying, uh, our shoe is comfortable, you share the story of a customer who, thanks to your shoe, ran their first marathon pain-free to honor a loved one, right? Now you're not just selling a shoe, you're selling inspiration. You're selling identity. That's the difference that makes people lifetime fans. On a more practical side, entrepreneurs skilled in communication, they'll just close more deals. So imagine you're negotiating with a supplier or an investor. If you can clearly articulate your value and persuade them effectively, you'll likely get better terms, maybe tens of thousands saved or gained in one conversation. If you sell services or high-ticket products, strong sales techniques like consultative selling or solutions-based selling is is key. Today's customers expect you to understand their needs and tailor your offer. Being able to do that can literally double or triple your closing rate. So for example, you can monetize a skill by offering freelance copywriting or sales consulting. Great copywriters are in short supply, even with AI writing tools around, because someone has to give the AI the right emotional direction. Businesses will pay top dollar for emails and ads that actually convert. One excellent sales page can be worth millions to a company. So paying a writer $10,000 a craft, it is, it's a no-brainer for some companies. Skilled copywriters routinely earn over $150,000 a year once they built a reputation. And don't forget content creators and influencers. They are essentially storytellers too, turning authentic communication into followers and income from ads and sponsorships or product sales. Emotions drive decisions, and if you can tap into emotions with genuine communication, communication, you can drive decisions in your favor. So this year, mastering persuasive communication and storytelling isn't just a nice to have. It's often the difference between the business that just fizzles out and one that actually becomes a phenomenon. We've covered brains, data, marketing, charm. Our final skill might not sound as glamorous, but it's a massive moneymaker in today's world. It's all about protecting the wealth that you're building., and it's an area where demand is exploding. Skill number 5, cybersecurity and data protection, guarding the digital gold mine. Okay, so what is it? Cybersecurity is the skill of keeping data, software systems safe from hackers and breaches. It's being the, uh, digital bodyguard for businesses. This includes understanding how to prevent attacks. So think malware, phishing, ransomware, knowing how to plug vulnerabilities in networks or websites and making sure that companies follow best practices so sensitive information like consumer data is not stolen or compromised. It's deeply technical for those who specialize, but at a high level, it's very learn-by-doing, problem-solving field, and you don't need a PhD to get good at it, just solid training and experience and a curious mind. Data protection goes hand in hand, so think dealing with proper handling and compliance, like the laws of the land. So for an entrepreneur, having cybersecurity skills means that you can both protect your own venture, but also potentially offer security solutions to other people as a business. So why does it matter this year? One word: risk. As businesses digitize every aspect of their operations, the risk of cyberattacks have skyrocketed, and so have the costs. The average cost of a single data breach hit an eye-watering $4.9 million globally. So for a small or mid-sized company, that kind of hit can be fatal. That's why firms are desperate for cybersecurity expertise and why it's become a high-income skill, high-demand skill. We're in a situation where there aren't nearly enough cybersecurity pros to go around. The global cybersecurity workforce is millions short. One recent study showed about 4.8 million cybersecurity roles are unfulfilled worldwide. There are millions of openings and not enough people with the skills, a gap that widened by 19% in just just one year. So talent shortage is actually the number one obstacle companies face in securing their systems. This kind of supply-demand mismatch is exactly what drives up incomes for those who have the skill. So companies have even started to prioritize this in budgets because they simply cannot afford the alternative. Companies without adequate security staff end up paying on average $1.76 million more per breach due to slower response and damage control. But just beyond like corporate IT departments, Every entrepreneur with an online presence needs at least basic cybersecurity savviness. Cyber threats this year are more sophisticated. Yes, hackers are using AI too. So on top of that, customer trust and regulations require more solid data protection. You don't want to be that startup that leaked user data and lost credibility overnight. So from ransomware attacks shutting down hospitals to small businesses getting scammed from phishing, the threat is universal. This urgency is driving a huge market for cybersecurity products. Products and consultants. Global spending on cybersecurity is rising every year, tens of billions of dollars annually, as businesses effectively say, please take our money and keep us safe. If you can step in with the skills to do so, you will be richly rewarded. So as some evidence, top freelance cybersecurity experts report rates of $200 to $300 an hour, and experienced security consultants can make over $500,000 a year by serving multiple clients. So it's no surprise that And when the stakes are this high, companies are willing to pay for peace of mind. So how can entrepreneurs use it? If you're building your own company, cybersecurity skills are like an insurance policy and a selling point. You can save a ton of money by implementing security measures yourself instead of hiring some expensive firms and avoid disaster that could derail your business. But also being more security-minded from day one can be a competitive advantage. You can use that in your marketing. Customers and partners will feel safer dealing with you. So for example, e-commerce entrepreneur who knows how to secure their payment systems and protect customer data not only avoids costly breaches but can market their store as ultra secure, which gains more customer trust and extra sales in an era of privacy concerns. On the other side, cybersecurity is also an amazing service and a business opportunity. So given that huge talent gap, you could start start a consultancy or freelance as a virtual CISO, as Chief Information Security Officer, for multiple small companies that can't afford one in-house. They get your expertise part-time, you get a hefty paycheck. Some entrepreneurs are launching cybersecurity startups. So whether that's, um, developing a niche security software tool or you're offering specialized training, there's even demand for things like ethical hackers who companies pay to test their defenses. We've seen solo consultants charge retainers in the thousands per month per client just to be on call for security incidents. And with new data privacy laws popping up all the time, like Europe's GDPR and others, businesses are scrambling for guidance, which is another avenue for advisory services you could offer if you're well-versed in compliance. So the key point is this: threats are growing and talent is scarce. If you equip yourself with this skill, you become part of a highly sought-after elite group of people. Not only can you command higher fees because preventing a multimillion-dollar breach is essentially worth a high payout, but you also carry the confidence that you can protect the empire that you're building too. In a time where a single hack can wipe out years of effort, the entrepreneurs who understand cybersecurity will safeguard their wealth and even turn security into a profitable service for others. It's truly a high-impact, high-income skill for today's age. So each of these 5 skills— AI integration, data analytics, digital Digital marketing, persuasive communication, and cybersecurity hits the sweet spot of being practical, learnable, and immediately valuable this year. They align with the biggest technology shifts and market needs that we are seeing right now. AI is everywhere. Data is the king. Online growth is non-negotiable. Human connection still seals a deal, and security underpins it all. The best part is you don't need a fancy degree to get started with any of these. There are YouTube videos, bootcamps, online courses, communities for each skill that you can start learning right now. Entrepreneurs who invest time in mastering even one or two of these will position themselves to generate wealth in the short term. We're talking within a year or two, not decades. And it's all backed by trends and numbers that I've already cited throughout this entire video. The market is hungry for these abilities. So ask yourself, which of these skills speaks to you right now. The entrepreneurs getting rich this year aren't necessarily the ones with the most funding or the fanciest ideas. Often they're the ones who have the right skills at the right time and execute relentlessly. Now you know 5 of those right skills. It's time to choose, learn, and leap. Here's to your success, because this year might be the year your hard work and high-income skills make you the next next great success story. Your financial situation has absolutely nothing to do with how smart you are. Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. The big secret behind disruption is not having any idea how it's supposed to be done. I had no idea how it was supposed to be done. There's literally one thing, my one trait that you want that's going to allow you to accumulate wealth. It's the lack of FOMO. Research shows that poorer households that believe they control their own choices build 40 to 60% more wealth than those who blame their situation on outside forces. Watch and read high-performance people and you will see that they always take responsibility. When their life goes to, to garbage, it's when they quit taking responsibility. The best thing we can do for ourselves is to focus on what we can control. We can't rewrite the past, we can't predict the future, but we can take ownership of our actions today. So we create a culture of progress, of just moving forward at your pace. Mastering this mindset is not just about buying a nicer house, it's about finally getting the freedom to spend your time exactly how you want. When you actually realize everything's your fault, it gets really good out here, because when you think your boss's boss controls your shit, when you think somebody down the street in a building controls your shit, then you get real sad because you feel helpless. When you realize you control your shit, things go. Delaying gratification is an absolute superpower. You have to put yourself in a state of perpetual discomfort in order to manifest your greatness. You've got to reach outside of your comfort zone. When I was 19, I had a massive choice to make. I had a 6-figure bigger investment banking job offer on the table. That was the smart choice to take, that it was the safe choice. But instead, I chose to own 30% of a startup company and made $300 a month. My friends thought I was crazy, and logically it didn't make sense, but I knew that true wealth and freedom, they don't come from playing it safe in some cubicle. I had to rewire my brain to take the risk, and it led me to building and selling a biotech software company. The psychology of taking that leap is exactly what gets you from zero $5,000 to living on your own terms. Look at Sara Blakely. She was selling fax machines door to door and kept getting the door slammed in her face. She had absolutely $0 in business funding and no background in fashion. But growing up, her dad used to ask her at the dinner table, what did you fail at today? He completely rewired her psychology. Instead of fearing failure, she feared not trying. She used $5,000 in savings and that unstoppable mindset to build Spanx into a billion-dollar brand. She didn't have more knowledge than the competition. She just had that bulletproof psychology that you can build too. Then there's Ronald Reed. He spent his life fixing cars and sweeping floors at JCPenney. He wasn't a Wall Street genius, but when he died, he left behind an $8 million fortune. On the flip side, Richard Fusconi was a Harvard-educated executive at Merrill Lynch. He had all the smarts and connections in the world,, but he went completely bankrupt. Why? Because Reed mastered the psychology of money, patience, and delayed gratification while Falcone let his ego destroy his bank account. Wealth is a behavior. You just have to learn the right behavior. Now you might be shaking your head saying, Evan, this is just motivational talk. My problem isn't my mindset. My problem is my empty bank account and the terrible economy. You could blame the economy or your boss all you want. Want, but that won't put any more money in your pocket. People are getting rich right now in the exact same economy, starting with the exact same $0 that you might have. The only difference is what's happening here inside their heads. So here are the exact mindset strategies you need to stop playing small and start building real lasting wealth from nothing. Take control of your results. Getting rich from $0 starts with a psychological concept called your locus of control. This is the exact belief system that dictates how you view your own power in the world. People with an external locus of control believe that outside forces determine their success. They blame the economy, their boss, the algorithm, their bad luck. They think wealth is something that happens to lucky people. But self-made millionaires have a fiercely internal locus of control. They believe their actions and only their actions dictate their financial reality. So if you want to make millions, you have to adopt this exact same mindset today. You have to take 100% responsibility for your empty bank account right now. It isn't your parents' fault. It isn't the government's fault. It's your responsibility to change it. When you take full ownership, your brain stops looking for excuses and starts looking for solutions. A major study found that people with a strong internal locus of control save significantly more money and accumulate more wealth over time because they actually believe that their actions matter. So I want to hit 40 million subscribers on YouTube. I can't reach that massive number by hoping the algorithm magically favors my videos. I have the power to control the process. I have to make better content. I have to test new ideas. I can take extreme ownership of the results. You need to do the same thing with your finances. If you want to get rich, stop giving your power away to outside circumstances. Decide right now that your future is in your own hands entirely. You are the director of your life. When you face a setback, don't ask why the world is being unfair to you. Ask yourself what you can do differently next time to get a better outcome. It's a psychological shift that changes everything. It turns you from a victim into a creator. It forces you to look at your daily habits and realize that every single choice you make is either building your empire or taking you down. You have to look in the mirror and accept that nobody's coming to help you, right? Nobody is going to hand you a check for a million You have to go out into the marketplace and you earn it through your own value and your hard work. Start small today. Take ownership of your morning routine. Take ownership of your spending habits. Prove to yourself that you control your destiny. This internal belief is the absolute foundation of all self-made wealth. Until you believe that you are in control, you'll always find a reason to quit when things get hard. Embrace total control and watch how quickly your financial world world begins to transform. Master the art of waiting. The next psychological trait that you must develop is delayed gratification. This is your hidden financial superpower. When you start with $0, the urge to spend your first bit of profit is incredibly strong, right? You finally make $1,000 and you want to buy some nice clothes, or you want to upgrade something on your car to show people that you're succeeding. This is exactly how people stay broke forever. People who get rich from zero master the ability to delay their rewards. They choose their future self over their present desires. They take that first $1,000 and invest it right back into their skills or their business. They understand that waiting is part of the price that you pay for massive abundance later. Right now I'm developing a software, it's called Brandlytics, and we'll link it up below. Requires a massive amount of time, energy, resources up front. I could easily take that money I can spend it on immediate comforts, but I'm delaying my gratification because I know building a real asset will create infinitely more value in the long run. You have to approach your wealth the exact same way. If you can't resist the urge to buy things that you don't need right now, you'll never have the capital required to build real wealth. Experts point out that financial success rarely comes from a single dramatic decision. It comes from hundreds of small decisions decisions made consistently, like a ship that's guiding you. The rudder, right? It's guiding your ultimate direction, making improvements all the time. Mastering this requires completely changing how you view money. So you stop seeing money as a tool to buy status and start seeing money as a tool to buy freedom. Every day you delay a purchase, you're buying a piece of your future independence. You're giving yourself options. You're building a fortress around your life so you never have to take a job that you hate just to pay the bills. It's deeply psychological. It requires you to sit with the discomfort of wanting something and actively choosing to say later. You have to fall in love with the process of building, not just the rewards of spending. When you train your brain to wait, you develop an incredible level of discipline that bleeds into every other area of your business. You'll have the patience to stick with a marketing strategy when it doesn't work on day one. You'll have the patience to build a loyal audience audience over 5 years instead of just chasing a viral trend. Now, we're not trying to deprive ourselves of any joy. We're just trying to have strategic patience. The people who make millions from zero, they don't have magical willpower. They just have a clear vision of their future so that it's exciting, that it makes ignoring the short-term distractions easier. So build your vision. Make it so powerful that skipping that expensive dinner today feels like a step in you building your big financial empire. Break your familiar patterns. Your brain is literally wired to keep you poor. This is because of a psychological concept called status quo bias. Human beings vastly prefer to stay exactly where they are, even if their current situation is terrible. The known struggle is always more comfortable to your brain than the unknown possibility. So you might hate being broke, but you know exactly how to survive being broke. It's familiar. Building wealth from zero requires stepping into the complete unknown., and that terrifies your nervous system. So you have to violently break your familiar patterns if you ever want to reach the next level of success. Wharton Executive Education explains that people resist change because they fear losing what they have more than they value gaining something new. So you have to fight this natural instinct every single day. You have to become comfortable with the deeply uncomfortable. If your daily routine, it feels safe and easy, then you're not growing. Going. You aren't pushing the boundaries of what your potential actually is. I'm currently working on a project to dub my 8,000 videos into 75 languages. Like, it's a massive leap into the unknown. It breaks every pattern of how I usually run my channel, but I know that sticking to my comfortable English-only strategy will eventually cap my growth, and I want to serve the world. I have to shatter the status quo to reach a global audience. So look at your life and identify where you're playing playing it safe? Are you staying in a dead-end job because it provides a predictable paycheck? Are you avoiding launching your business because you're afraid of looking stupid to somebody? Realize that playing it safe is the most dangerous thing that you can do, right? The world is moving too fast. If you stay still, you will get completely left behind. You have to train yourself to aggressively seek out change. Make it a habit to disrupt your own life before the market completely comes after you. So it means trying new marketing channels. It means pitching bigger deals and bigger clients. It means investing in new skills, even if you feel completely unqualified for it. Rich people don't wait for the perfect safe moment to make a move. They act despite uncertainty. They know that the only way to transform their financial reality is to break the mold of their current existence. So you need to stop defending your limitations. Stop protecting your comfortable little box that you built for yourself. Break down the wall, falls, expose yourself to the risk of failure, because that's the exact same place where massive financial success lives. Your future millions are hiding right behind the changes you're most afraid to make today. Heal your hidden money wounds. This is a big one. Sometimes the reason you can't get rich has nothing to do with your business strategy, has everything to do with your deep hidden money wounds. Many aspiring entrepreneurs carry financial trauma trauma from their childhood without even realizing it. If you grew up in a house where money was always a source of stress and arguments or fear, your nervous system learned to view money as a massive threat. You might subconsciously sabotage your own success because getting rich feels fundamentally unsafe to your brain. So we have to heal these hidden psychological wounds before you can ever hold on to any kind of real wealth. Therapists explained that financial anxiety is often a nervous system response, not just a budgeting problem. When you view money through the lens of trauma, you either hoard every single penny in absolute terror, or you blow it all immediately because your brain wants to get rid of the stress. Neither of these behaviors will make you a millionaire. So you have to rewire your psychological response to money. You got to move from a mindset of deep scarcity to mindset of abundance with money. Scarcity tells you there's never enough, so you have to fight everyone for a tiny piece of while abundance will tell you that money is simply a— it's an infinite resource that flows to people who give immense value. So you have to start telling yourself a new story about what you deserve. You aren't destined to struggle because you saw your parents struggle. You don't have to carry their financial anxiety into your own future. So start paying attention to the words that you use when you talk about finances. Do you constantly say that you can't afford things? Do you feel intense guilt when you spend money on yourself? These are symptoms of a broken money mindset. And so it's actively challenging these thoughts. Replace them with the belief that you're highly capable of generating more income. When you finally heal these wounds, making money stops feeling like a battle for survival and becomes more fun. It becomes a creative game. You stop making decisions because you're afraid and you start making decisions because of opportunity. You'll easily pitch to high-ticket clients because you actually believe your service is worth it. You'll invest in your business because you trust in your ability to generate a return. Healing your psychology becomes a key to unlocking the potential of your finances. Follow your curiosity instead of a plan. There's a massive myth in the business world that you need a flawless 10-year master plan to get rich. Most people stay at zero because they overthink every single detail before they even take the first step. They want guarantees, they want the perfect map map. But the truth is, self-made millionaires rarely start with a perfect plan. They just follow what makes them intensely curious. They lean into their interests. They take messy action. They figure out the rest along the way. You have to stop planning and start actually exploring. Experts highlight that greatness can't be rigidly planned, and the best opportunities come from meandering, curiosity-driven steps. When you follow your genuine curiosity, you naturally work harder and longer than anyone else. You don't need some artificial motivation when you're deeply obsessed with the problem that you're trying to solve. This obsession is what pushes you past the early rough stages of entrepreneurship when you're making absolutely no money. If you just chase a trend because you think it's going to make you quick cash, then what happens is you, you burn out and you quit as soon as things get difficult. But if you follow your genuine interests, you create unique expertise that nobody else can easily replicate. You spot connections and opportunities that the purely profit-driven people are gonna completely miss. Your weird passions are actually your biggest competitive advantage. So you have to give yourself permission to experiment, to try, to taste, try new projects that might fail, launch the weird service you've been dreaming about. You don't need to see the whole staircase, as they say. You just have to take the first step. You just need to follow the immediate spark of excitement excitement. One small curious action naturally leads you to the next. Before you know it, you have a completely unique business model that fits your complete unique strengths. So stop letting the pressure of this perfect plan paralyze you, right? People are, are just procrastinating because they're afraid. The market changes too fast for a 10-year plan to be accurate anyway. So speed and curiosity are infinitely more valuable than perfect preparation. Start pursuing those interesting ideas in your head right now. Embrace it. It's going to be messy that you're going to fail. The path from zero to millions is never this straight line. It's this wild, crazy, unpredictable journey that is fueled entirely by your willingness to explore the unknown. Build your margin of safety. When you're trying to escape $0, a single bad decision can completely wipe you out. This is why mastering the psychology of risk is so important. People who build lasting wealth understand that they are not perfect. They know they're going to make bad investments. They're going to hire the wrong people. They're going to launch products that completely fail because they expect to fail. They build a massive margin of safety into their lives. You have to plan for disaster if you want to survive long enough to experience your future incredible success. In the book The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel explains that leaving room for error is the most underappreciated part of wealth building. If your entire financial strategy relies on everything going exactly right, you are guaranteed to fail. Fail. You have to assume that projects will take twice as long and cost twice as much as you initially expect, or triple, or 10x. You need to build a buffer. This isn't about being negative. It's not pessimism. It's about extreme psychological resilience. When you have a margin of safety, a business failure just becomes an expensive lesson, right? It's not the end of your entire company. You don't panic when a client drops you or a marketing campaign doesn't do well. You've already built in the cushion to potentially absorb it. This creates emotional calmness and allows you to think clearly and make rational decisions while your competitors are freaking out and making desperate mistakes. So you build a margin of error. How do you do it? By living below your means, by keeping some cash reserves, and not risking everything on one single unproven idea. So you have to protect your downside. It's not just about making money, it's about making sure that you never get forced to close down your business. Survival is the foundation of compound and wealth. You have to be around long enough for the money to be coming in. When you know that you have room for error, you actually have a lot more freedom to take risks. You can swing for the fences because you know that one strikeout, right, it's not going to destroy your entire business. It switches you from not playing to lose, and now you're actually trying to play to win. So embrace that reality that it's going— you're going to mess up, you're going to screw up, it's not going to be perfect. Build the financial and emotional shock absorbers that you need And that's a psychological shift that gives you a lot more power to outlast the hard times and ride the waves to massive wealth. Master the art of consistency. The final psychological key to getting rich from zero is the most boring, but also the most powerful. It is relentless, unbreakable consistency. You can't build a multimillion-dollar empire in one just big, giant, dramatic leap. Wealth is built through tiny, unsexy, Daily repeated actions over years. Most people fail because they want the overnight success. They put in intense effort for 3 weeks, see no results, and then quit. Self-made millionaires understand that intensity is useless without consistency. Experts confirm that wealth isn't built through perfection, but through consistency and how you respond when things don't go as planned. So you fall in love with showing up every single day, especially when you don't feel like it. You don't need to be the smartest person in your industry. You just need to be the person who absolutely refuses to go away. You separate your daily actions from the immediate emotional feedback. You can't judge the success of your day by the money that immediately hits your bank account today. You judge your success by whether or not you executed the daily habits that you set for yourself. Did you make the sales calls? Did you create the content and the videos? Did you improve your product? If you did the work, it was a good day. The financial results eventually follow, but they're— it's always a lagging indicator. They fall behind the effort. Effort comes first, then the money. It requires an immense amount of mental toughness. It means pushing through boredom. It means ignoring shiny object syndrome that distracts you from your core mission. I want to do all these things. You have to put your head down and do the repetitive work that actually moves the needle forward. So build a routine that is so that's so simple and powerful that you can execute it even on your worst days. Design for your worst day, not your best. So look at your life right now. What's the one daily habit that if repeated for 5 years would completely guarantee your financial success? Identify it, protect it, do it every day. Your future millions won't come, uh, from a magical lottery ticket, right? You build them brick by brick, habit by habit, every day. So let your consistency become your competitive advantage. In a world full of people who quit too soon. Step into your greatness. You have everything it takes to build an incredible life from absolutely nothing. It all starts with a simple choice to change your mindset today. So stop waiting for permission and start proving to yourself that you're truly capable of achieving. I believe in you. You do not need a million-dollar tech idea to build massive wealth and finally quit your day job. The fastest shortcut to hitting your financial goals is buying an unsexy business like a laundromat or plumbing company that already makes real money. Ironically, the businesses that don't crash are the ones built on trash. They solve real problems, they get paid, and they last. Something that most people overlook: the less exciting the business, the less competition there is, and the more reliable the— right? So it's, it's a foolproof business. Biggest factor into going into boring businesses is the fact that it's recession-proof, it is not seasonal, and it's something with recurring revenue. If you keep telling yourself you are not ready to be an owner until you invent the next big app, you will completely miss the greatest wealth transfer in history and stay broke. Sometimes you don't need to upgrade the business idea. The boring version already works. You're not just running the boring businesses, you are building a modern empire. Warren Buffett is the greatest investor of all time, but he does not build tech startups. He buys boring companies. He bought a candy company, a furniture store, and a paint business. Look at them. If somebody came in and offered us the entire business, and then we try to think, what is this place going to look like in 5 or 10 years, and how sure are we of it? He realized early on that buying a business with a proven track record is the easiest way to guarantee a massive return on your money. You skip the risky startup phase and go straight to collecting the profits. And we go and somebody comes to us with a business that's done phenomenally for 10 or 15 or 20 years, or maybe for 50 years, and we've seen how, what their batting average is. We've actually seen they bat at .350 or whatever it may be, and we just make the assumption that we won't screw it up by hiring them. And we buy the business. That's far easier to tell great baseball batters after you've seen a couple seasons of their batting than it is to go to even college baseball teams or high school baseball teams and pick out the superstars. Now, right now you're probably thinking you need millions of dollars to buy a company. That's exactly what the startup world wants you to believe so you stay stuck working your day job. The truth is retiring owners are desperate to sell, and you can buy profitable business using seller financing or small business loans with almost zero down. I'm going to show you the exact types of boring businesses you can look for right now. The $10 trillion generational wealth transfer. A massive 90% of all startups fail entirely. Many of these startups fail simply because they build a product that absolutely nobody actually wants. Months. Another massive group fails because they just completely run out of cash. You end up spending years of your life draining all of your savings and maxing out your credit cards just trying to prove that your idea works. You stay awake late into the night worrying about how to pay your bills. You pitch to hundreds of investors who just tell you no. You spend your weekends tweaking a pitch deck instead of living your life. You sacrifice your health and your relationships for a dream that has a 90% chance of failing. Now, if that's what you want to do, awesome, go for it. But you do not have to do that. You can skip the hardest part of business. You can skip the long years of making zero profit. You can just buy a business that already works and already prints cash. When you buy an existing business, you start making money on the very first day. You do not need to guess if your customers will buy what you sell. You do not have to build a brand from scratch. The customers are already there waiting for you. So right now, it's a massive shift retiring in the global economy. About, uh, 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every single day. They control about 2.34 million small businesses in the United States alone. These retiring owners hold an estimated $10 trillion in business assets. That is trillions of dollars of wealth that is expected to transfer over the next 10 years. This is the biggest financial opportunity of our lifetime. They run the local hardware store, the neighborhood bakery, and the regional trucking company. These are businesses that have deep roots in your community. They have real customers who pay real money every single week. And when these owners retire, their knowledge leaves with them unless someone steps in to take over. But here's the crazy part that you need to pay attention to right now: more than 58% of these owners have no documented transition plan. Their kids do not want to take over the family plumbing company. The kids want to work in tech or do something completely different. They do not want to fix pipes or manage employees or drive trucks. The owners are tired and burnt out. They just want to sell the company, retire comfortably, and play golf. They are literally waiting for a hungry entrepreneur exactly like you to walk in and take over their life's work. They want to see their legacy continue in good hands. So your first action step is to look around your town and notice how many how many older owners run the local shops. Make a list of 5 businesses you drive past every day that look like they've been there forever. Skip the struggle with an SOWS business. Now, you do not want to buy a complicated tech company or a trendy restaurant. Trendy restaurants fail fast when the hype dies down. Tech companies, they require constant updates and massive teams of expensive engineers. Building a brand new company like I'm doing with Brandlytics, man, it takes a massive amount of intense daily focus. Side note, if you want to split test your thumbnails and grow your YouTube channel, Brandlytics is awesome. Might just be for you. You have to manage developers, fix bugs, and run endless marketing campaigns. But you can buy boring business instead. There's a framework for this called SOWS. It stands for stale, old, weak, and simple. You want a business that is stale, meaning it does not need crazy disruptive technology. Technology or viral marketing to survive. People just need the service no matter what year it is. A plumbing business or a roofing company will never go out of style. People will always have leaky pipes and broken shingles. You want it to be old, meaning it has survived for at least 5 years and has a proven track record of making good money. An old business has loyal customers who keep coming back every single month. It has survived bad economies and Sessions. You want it to be weak, meaning the current owner has terrible customer service or bad marketing. You can easily step in and beat the local competition just by answering the phone on time and having a clean website. Most of these older owners do not even use email properly. They miss phone calls and lose money every day because they refuse to use any kind of modern tools. And finally, you want it to be simple. You need a business model that is incredibly easy you should understand on day one. If it takes you months to figure out how the product works, you should walk away, unless again you really love it. You want a business where you can explain exactly how it makes money in one single sentence. Sometimes the simplest strategy is the most effective. A vending machine route is the perfect SOWS business. It is completely simple and totally weak in competition. You pull up, you restock the snacks, and you collect the cash. You do not need to hire a massive marketing team to convince people to buy a bag of chips. You just place the machine in a busy building. You just buy the route, implement some basic inventory software to track your sales, and you instantly increase your profit margins without inventing anything new. You could run special promotions or put card readers on old machines to double your revenue. If the old owner only accepted coins, you'll see a massive spike in sales just by accepting a credit card swiper. So your next action step is to write down 3 unsexy businesses in your neighborhood that fit this exact SOS model. Go talk to the owners and ask them how long they've been in business. The secret to buying with almost $0 down. Now you're probably sitting there thinking you need a massive bank account or rich parents to buy one of these companies. You might think you need millions of dollars in cash just sitting in a vault, right? You do not. You can literally buy a profitable business using the cash flow of the business itself. The most powerful way to do this is called seller financing. Because these older owners are desperate to retire and nobody else wants to buy their unsexy business, they will actually act as a bank for you. So they will hand over the keys to the business and you pay them a monthly payment out of the profits that the business is already making. You do not need to go to a traditional bank for this part. You avoid all the crazy bank fees and the months of waiting for your loan approvals. You just negotiate the terms directly with the seller so you can ask for a low interest rate or a longer time to pay them back. You can even structure the deal so you only pay them more if the business grows. It creates a win-win for everybody involved. The seller gets a steady stream of retirement income and you get a business with almost no money out of your own pocket. Now, the seller will not finance the whole thing. You can use government-backed bank loans loans. The SBA 7 loans typically require only a 10% down payment. You can easily raise that small amount from private investors, friends, family. You can use the money you save from your day job. When Nina and I walk around Toronto, we see dozens of small shops that are ripe for this kind of buyout. We see dry cleaners and corner stores and local gyms. You could take over a million-dollar company with almost none of your own money. The business pays the bank loan back for you every single month from its own revenue. You just sit at the and manage the system. The bank takes on most of the risk because they know the business has a history of making profit instead of just some startup that doesn't have track record yet. So your action step here is to start practicing how to talk to owners about seller financing options. You can search online for local businesses for sale and call one broker today just to see how many sellers are open to financing. You will be surprised by how many say yes. The best The best boring businesses to target right now. You need to target businesses that provide essential services that people need no matter what the economy is doing. You want recession-proof companies that print money in good times and bad times. So take a look at laundromats. 16% of American households do their laundry at a laundromat. People will always need clean clothes. Even when the economy crashes, people still have to wash their shirts. Laundromats bring in a median annual revenue of $219,878,000. They are essentially self-service. The customers do all the work by loading and unloading their own clothes while you collect the coins and credit card payments. You do not need a huge staff to run them. You can hire one person to clean the floors and wipe down the machines. You can upgrade the machines to take mobile payments and make even more money. You can add vending machines for soap and snacks to boost your profits. You can even add a wash and fold service where people pay you extra to do the laundry for them. Another incredible option is self-storage facilities. So storage facilities are extremely low maintenance because you do not have to deal with broken toilets or crazy tenant complaints like you do with apartment buildings that you're renting out. People just leave their stuff in a metal box and they pay you every month. If they stop paying you, you just auction off box. The self-storage industry has an average profit margin of 36%. You can add automated locks and online booking to make it a completely passive income stream. You do not even need an employee to sit at the front desk. Customers can rent a unit on their phone and get an access code instantly. It's hard to focus on your health and your family if you're working 100 hours a week for a boss. But when you buy a boring storage facility that practically runs itself, you get your time back. You get your time back to focus on your health, to go salsa dancing, to be with your family, to build your next big thing. You can also look into commercial cleaning services or property management. A property management business can easily bring in between $50,000 and $1 million in average annual revenue. You just oversee the rent collection and handle leases for other property owners who do not have the time to do it themselves. It's a steady, predictable recurring revenue that hits your bank account every single month. You can hire a few contractors to handle the repair repairs and maintenance. Also, HVAC companies, plumbing services, landscaping routes are all printing cash right now because they are services that a robot or app simply cannot replace. You cannot download an app to fix a broken air conditioner. A real person has to show up and do the work. So your action step here is to pick one boring industry and learn everything you can about how it works. Read books, listen to podcasts, watch interviews of people who already own that type of Also explore local service niches you might not have considered yet, like mobile pet grooming or specialized medical transport, which can also yield high returns. Overcome the fear of buying. Many people freeze when they think about buying a business. They think they do not have the skills to run a company. They worry that the employees will quit or the customers will leave. That fear is completely normal. Every success successful business owner felt the exact same fear before they signed their first deal. The key is to rely on the systems that the old owner has already built. You do not have to reinvent the wheel from scratch. You just have to keep the wheel turning. So you'll spend the first few months just learning how the machine they built works. You'll talk to the employees, ask them what needs to be fixed. You can listen to the customers and find out what they love about the service. You slowly introduce small changes to make things run smoother. You do not have to make massive changes on day one. You can take your time and learn the ropes. The old owner will usually stay on for a few months as well to train and introduce you to the best clients and the team. They want you to succeed because their name is still attached to the legacy of the shop. Now, if you're worried about making a mistake, you can hire an advisor to look over the financial records before you buy. You can bring in an accountant to verify the revenue and the profit margins. You can talk to a lawyer to make sure the contracts a business had, that they're solid. You do not have to do it all alone. You can build a team of experts to guide you through this process. So your action step now is read one book or watch one video about buying a small business this month. You'll see that the process is pretty straightforward once you understand the basic steps. You realize that ordinary people buy businesses every single day. Adopt the CEO mindset. Now, to pull this off, you have to completely change the way you view entrepreneurship. You have to shift from just being a startup founder mindset to a CEO mindset. Startup founders are obsessed with creating something new totally from zero, and if that's you, awesome. They spend years guessing what the market wants and burning through their cash. They constantly worry about running out of money before they make their first sale. They wear every single hat in the company and they often burn themselves out. But a CEO focuses on running, improving, and scaling a company that already exists and already has customers. A CEO looks at the big picture and finds ways to make this machine run faster. In my Movement Makers program, I teach successful entrepreneurs how to scale their impact by stepping into this exact leadership role. You have to delegate the small tasks so you can focus on the massive growth you have ahead of you. You have to stop acting like the hardest worker in the room and you have to start acting like the smartest leader in the room. You have to trust your team to do most of the heavy lifting. You have to give them the tools that they need to succeed and then get out of their way and trust them to do their job. You will never scale a business if you insist on making every single decision yourself. You have to build systems that run without you. So when you acquire a business, you get instant infrastructure. Pressure on day one. You inherit an established customer base, a proven business process, a trained team, and existing cash flow. Your job is not to do all of the daily grunt work. Your job is to lead. Your job is to look at the boring business. You find the bottlenecks and you fix them. Maybe the old owner did everything on paper and kept receipts in a shoebox. You just bring in an iPad and some basic scheduling software and suddenly the business is 20% more profitable. You set up a simple digital marketing campaign that the owner was too afraid to try. You can also hire a great manager to run the day-to-day operations for you so you do not have to be there every single day. You are buying the past performance, but you are building the future. This is how you engineer real generational wealth. You build wealth through ownership, not by grinding away 100 hours a week for a boss who does not care about you. So now you have the exact roadmap to buy your freedom instead of suffering through the startup struggle. So you're actually Action step is to stop acting like an employee and start making decisions like an owner. Audit your own life and find 3 areas where you can start acting more like a CEO today. The ultimate shift. You are fully capable of running an empire, so stop waiting for permission to become a true leader. It's time to step up, take the reins, and trust your ability to learn on the go. No one is coming to hand you your success on a silver platter. You have to go out and be willing to take it. You have to be willing to do the things that other people are too afraid to do. And the only thing standing between you and your freedom is your willingness to take the leap. So take that first step today. Start looking for a business or sale in your area. Contact a broker and start a conversation. You do not lack discipline. You just have a terrible daily environment. They say we're creatures of our environment. You believe that, Post? Yes, I am a creature my environment. You're the boss in your apartment, right? No matter what, no matter how little it is, if it's a— whether it's a big house or a little house, that space right there, you're the boss. That's what your business is. That's what your life is. You create the space so you can control it. You control your environment, but you have to architect that. The space you choose to work in can seriously impact your productivity and your mood. Structuring your surroundings to make good choices automatic is the real secret behind every millionaire that you admire. You don't have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it. Your brain is a record of your environment. Who you surround yourself matters. What content you consume matters. If you keep fighting against a broken routine, you stay stuck exactly where you are for the next 10 years. Growth requires deliberate habits. If you don't know your routines, how are you supposed to ever feel your best? No one can live without a routine. You just forget that. If you guys don't have a routine, I would recommend, like, you get one going. In 2006, doctors at the Massachusetts General Hospital wanted to improve the eating habits of thousands of staff members and visitors. They did not talk to anyone about willpower or motivation. They simply changed the physical environment. They added bottled water to every single refrigerator right next to the soda. Within 6 months, soda sales dropped and water sales skyrocketed. They proved that you often choose things not because of what they are, but simply because of where they are in your environment. Now, I can hear your doubts right now. You might be telling yourself that you've tried routines, you've bought the planners, and you always fall off track after a couple days. But your systems did not fail because you are weak. They failed because you design them for the perfect version of yourself, not the tired and stressed out version of yourself. When you build a system based on your actual reality, it does the heavy lifting for you. Let me show you how to structure your day so that success becomes completely automatic. Stop chasing goals and start building a daily machine. Goals are completely useless for changing your daily behavior. You have probably set massive goals for your business before, or you wrote them down, you felt a huge rush of motivation, and you pictured how amazing your life was gonna be. But a goal only tells you where you wanna go. It does absolutely nothing to help you take the physical steps to get there. When you only focus on the goal, you put yourself in a constant state of failure. You wake up every single day realizing that you are still not a millionaire. You still do not have a massive audience, and you are still struggling. And that gap between where you are and where you want to be creates massive anxiety for people. The most successful entrepreneurs in the world do not focus just on their goals. They focus on their systems. A system is just a repeatable process that guarantees you take action regardless of how you feel. There's a fascinating study, uh, from the British Journal of Health Psychology that showed how people build new habits. Researchers divided people into different groups to see who would stick to a workout routine. One group was just told to track their workouts. Another group was given motivational speeches to boost their desire to exercise. The final group was told to create a specific system. They had to write down the exact day, time, and location that they would work out. The results are pretty shocking. The motivation group only had a 35% success rate, but the group that built a simple system had a 91% success rate. You do not need more motivation to build your business. You just need to decide exactly when and where you are going to do the work. So when I started my YouTube channel, uh, I didn't have a goal to reach 4 million subscribers. If I'd focused on that massive number, I would've quit in, in the first month. Instead, I built a system. My system was simply to create and upload a new video every single week at the beginning. Training. Now we do every day. My first videos were terrible. I was awkward and shy and completely embarrassed to watch myself on camera. But my purpose comes from my pain. I struggled so much when I was starting my first software company. I wanted to quit. I felt totally isolated and alone, and I knew there are other entrepreneurs out there feeling the exact same pain. I wanted to help them. I wanted to help you. So I stuck to my system. I made 350 videos before I was finally not embarrassed inspired by my own content. I made 700 videos before I actually inspired myself. I did not win because I had better goals than anyone else. I won because my system forced me to put in the reps when nobody else was watching. If you want to finally break free from the cycle of starting and stopping, you must build a system that tells you exactly what to do every single morning. Your system will build your momentum. Once you have momentum, becoming successful is just a matter of time. That leads me directly into the the next system you need to build. Design your environment for the lazy version of you. You always try to design your life for the perfect version of yourself. You assume you will wake up full of energy, ready to crush your tasks, and completely immune to distractions. But that perfect version of you is not real. You need to design your systems for the tired, stressed, and lazy version of yourself. When you are exhausted, your brain will always choose the path of least resistance. If your guitar is in a closet, you will never practice. If your camera is packed away in a bag, you will never record a video. If you have to search for your client list, you will never make your sales call. You have to remove all the friction between you and the work. I want to share a powerful concept from an IT developer named Oswald Knuckles. He created a daily system called resetting the room. Whenever he finished watching television Evan Carmichael, he does not just turn it off. He puts the remote back on the stand, fixes the pillows, and folds the blanket. Whenever he takes a shower, he wipes down the toilet while the water is warming up. He does not view this as cleaning. He views this as preparing the room for his next action. He intentionally designs his environment so that his future choices are as easy as possible. You must apply this exact same system to your business. When you finish working for the day, Clear your desk, open the exact software you need for the next morning, leave your notes right next to your keyboard. When you sit down the next day, you will not have to think about what to do. The work will already be waiting for you. This is also how you protect your mindset. Lack of belief is the biggest problem in the world right now. It's what I believe. Your current environment is perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are. If you want to change your life, you have to radically change what you feed into your mind. Set up your environment so that success and belief are impossible to ignore. So every single morning I have a system where the very first thing I do is play a video of someone who inspires me. I call it my believe walk. Get up, go outside for at least 15 minutes, put on something that inspires you. I listen to Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Les Brown. I do not leave my inspiration up to chance. I manufacture my belief by designing an environment that forces me to think bigger. Your environment will always beat your willpower in the long run. So fix your surroundings today and your habits will automatically themselves tomorrow. But fixing your physical environment is only the first step. Now you have to clear out the mental clutter. The 10 Minute Mental Cleanse System. You are probably carrying hundreds of uncompleted tasks in your head right now. You are thinking about the emails you need to send, the videos you need to film, the clients that you need to get on and call, the bills you need to pay. This creates a massive amount of of mental static and stress. When your brain is overloaded with things that are not finished, you literally cannot focus on the task that's right in front of you. This is a psychological phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect. In the 1920s, a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik noticed that waiters in a restaurant could remember complex unpaid orders with perfect accuracy, but the exact moment the bill was paid, the waiters completely forgot the Your brain is programmed to constantly remind you of unfinished tasks until you either complete them or put them into a trusted system. To stop this mental drain, you need to build a mental cleanse system. Take 10 minutes every single evening to write down every single thought, idea, and obligation floating around in your head. Do not organize them yet. Just get them out of your brain and onto a piece of paper. This simple act tells your brain that the information is safe. Your brain will finally stop reminding you about these tasks and your anxiety will disappear. Once everything is written down, pick the one most important task that will actually move your business forward. Circle it. That becomes your only focus for the next morning. Everything else can wait. Now you're probably an overthinker. You get these bold, powerful, and courageous ideas, but instead of acting on them, you sit and think you analyze the risks, you worry about what people will say, and you let the idea die. You have to trust that great ideas flow through you for a reason. When you get a great idea, you must take one small physical step towards it within 5 minutes. Buy the domain name, record a rough voice memo, send an email to a potential partner. Lock the idea into reality before your mind can talk you out of it. When you stop storing your ideas in your head and start putting them into into the physical world, your entire business will transform. But even the best productivity system will fail if you do not have the right foundation. This brings me to the most important system of all: build a system that forces you to serve others. If your only goal is to make money, you will quit as soon as a process gets painful. Entrepreneurship is incredibly hard. You will face rejection, you will lose money, and you will have days where you want to shut everything down. In those dark moments, wanting a bigger bank account will not give you the strength to keep going. You are built to serve. You want to wake up every single day and feel like your life actually matters to somebody else. When you make your business about helping other people, you tap into this unlimited source of energy. Researchers at the Wharton School of Business conducted a fascinating study on university call center employees. These employees were tasked with calling alumni to ask for donations. The job was highly stressful and had a huge turnover rate. The researchers brought in a student who had received a scholarship funded by those exact donations. The student simply talked to the employees for 5 minutes about how the scholarship had changed his life. Over the next month, the employees who met the student increased their total revenue by 171%. They did not get better scripts. They did not get better training. They simply realized that their work was actually changing a human life. Money is incredibly important. You need money to hire a team, scale your impact, and take care of your family. Money can absolutely be in your top 5 priorities. I think it actually has to be. It just can't be number 1. Your number 1 priority must be the mission. You must have a cause that you would fight for even if you were not getting paid. You need to systemize your service, make it a mandatory part of your daily system to help help one person with zero expectation of getting anything in return. Answer a question in a forum, uh, leave a detailed comment on a small creator's video, or send an encouraging message to a client or a friend. When you focus intensely on who you are serving, your fear of failure goes away. You stop worrying about looking perfect on camera because you realize the message is more important than your ego. Your business will explode the moment you realize that your true true job is just to pull other people out of the same dark hole you used to be in. But even the best mindset will fail if you give up too early. Track your actions and ignore your results. Your obsession with immediate results is destroying your long-term potential. So you start a new routine, you work incredibly hard for 2 weeks, and then you turn around and realize nothing has changed. You still do not have the sales, you still do not have the audience, and your bank account looks exactly the same. So you decide the system is broken and you quit. But the system is not broken. You are just expecting to see the harvest while you are still planting the seeds. So in the science of continuous improvement, there is a concept known as the Plateau of Latent Potential. When you first build a new system, your results will flatline for a long period of time. You will put in massive amounts of effort and see absolutely zero external reward. This is where 99% of people give up. But your effort is not being wasted. Your effort is being stored. When I first started my journey, I tracked my year-over-year growth. After 5 years of making content consistently, I only had a few thousand subscribers. Most people would look at those numbers and call me a complete failure. If I had judged my success purely by those results, I would have quit like a thousand times over. But I did not track my results. I tracked my actions. I focused entirely on the fact that I showed up and I did the work I promised myself that I would do. You have to love the process of building your business. If you only love the reward, you will never survive the years of grinding in the dark. You must be completely stubborn about why you were doing this, but incredibly flexible about how you get there. Build a system where your only definition of a successful day is whether or not you executed your daily habits. When you stop obsessing over the outcome and start obsessing over the daily inputs, your success becomes absolutely inevitable. Your ultimate engine. You already have everything inside you to do something truly legendary. You just have to stop waiting for permission and start building the routines that guarantee your victory. Trust that your ideas matter and take immediate action on them today. I believe in you and know you can build the life you dream about. You want to start a business, but you're worried about the economy? You're not alone, and it is possible to succeed. In 2023, a record 5.5 million new business applications were filed in the United States. Even in uncertain times, entrepreneurs are taking the leap. The truth is, tough times can create tough entrepreneurs. But if you're not careful, certain mistakes can sink your business before it gets off the ground. So today I'm going to walk you through the 7 big mistakes new entrepreneurs make when launching during a downturn and how you can avoid them. From mindset and marketing to money management, leadership, and product development, we're covering it all. Avoid these mistakes and you'll vastly increase your chances of not just surviving but thriving. Let's dive in. Mistake number 1: Believing the downturn will doom your business. So here's a mistake First mistake: starting off with the wrong mindset, believing that the bad economy means guaranteed failure. It's easy to think the market is awful, maybe I should wait, or nobody succeeds in a recession. This defeatist thinking paralyzes you. If you're convinced you'll fail, you're practically defeated before you begin. Remember, your mindset sets the tone. A negative mindset in a downturn can make you give up at the first obstacle. Here's the reality check. Proves that downturns can be the best time to start. In fact, about half of all Fortune 500 companies, household names, started during a recession. Hewlett-Packard began in a garage during the Great Depression. Microsoft was founded in the oil crisis of the 1970s. Even Groupon launched amid the 2008 recession. Tough times forced these founders to be innovative and resilient. They didn't say, the economy is bad, let's quit. They pushed pushed forward. As a result, they built some of the world's biggest companies. So here's some science and stats for you. Research shows hard times can actually spark opportunity. One study noted that rising unemployment in a recession often inspires people to become entrepreneurs seeking to be financially self-reliant. Entrepreneurial spirit doesn't die in a downturn. It gets creative. And customers don't vanish either. Their needs just change. Some of the world's greatest businesses— General Electric, General Motors, Netflix, Airbnb— were born in recessions. Why? Less competition and new problems to solve. A downturn can shake up customer habits, opening gaps in the market that didn't exist in good times. Here's a motivational insight. When you start a business during a recession, you may have fears and doubts, says Timo Wilson. He's the CEO of ASAP Credit Solutions. But with careful planning, the right strategies, and the right attitude, attitude, you can turn a bad situation into a good opportunity. So your attitude really matters. If you believe now is a bad time, I'll fail, you will hesitate and miss chances. But if you believe now is my time to solve a problem and serve people, you'll find a way to make it work. So don't let fear kill your dream. Use that fear as fuel to plan smarter. Here's what you can do instead. Embrace a resilient mindset. See the downturn as an opportunity to build something lean and valuable. Focus on what you can control. That's your work ethic, your creativity, your ability to adapt rather than dwelling on scary headlines. Remember, if others could start great companies in hard times, so can you. Go in with eyes open, yes, but with the belief that your business can succeed. That confidence will drive you to find solutions when challenges come up. In a storm, mindset is your anchor. So set a positive, determined tone from day one. Believe that you can be the exception and then work to make it true. Mistake number 2 is trying to do everything alone. So the mistake is that you're wearing all the hats and refusing to ask for help. New entrepreneurs often try to be the CEO, the salesperson, the marketer, the accountant, the janitor all at once. You might think no one can do this as well as me, or maybe you don't want to spend money on help. Help. The result, though, is burnout and bottlenecks. When you try to do everything yourself, you quickly run out of time and energy. Important tasks slip through the cracks because you're stretched too thin. Plus, you limit your business's growth to the hours in the day. This lone wolf approach might feel heroic, but it's actually a recipe for disaster. So here's the reality check: even the greatest entrepreneurs don't succeed alone. Steve Jobs, who was the visionary behind Apple, famously He said, great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team. Think about that. The guy who built one of the most valuable companies on Earth is telling you he couldn't do it solo. Collaboration is key. Elon Musk might be a genius inventor, but even he doesn't build Teslas or SpaceX rockets alone. He surrounds himself with experts who execute his vision. Why? Because nobody is great at everything. Musk focuses on what he does best and lets talented people handle the rest. If iconic founders rely on teams, so can you. Also consider this: trying to be the Superman or Superwoman can blind you to your own weaknesses. You might be great at product development but awful at marketing, or vice versa. If you insist on doing it all, the areas where you're weak will hurt your business. Two heads or more are often Two is often better than one. Other people bring fresh ideas and skills you don't have. If you shut them out, you miss out on that value. So here's some signs that you're doing this. Are you working 12 to 16 hour days and still feeling behind? Do you avoid delegating because you think others will mess it up? Those are some red flags. Refusing to delegate because no one does this better than me isn't coincidence. It's a shortcut to burnout. The company is your baby, but you can't raise a baby alone. Alone. It takes a village. So here's what you can do instead. Build your support system. This doesn't mean you need to hire a huge team on day one. It means be strategic about getting help. Delegate tasks that drain you or that aren't your expertise. If you're not a numbers person, hire a part-time bookkeeper. Struggling with social media? Bring in a savvy freelancer. Find mentors or advisors who have walked this path and can guide you. Their experience can save you from costly mistakes. Remember, Remember, asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of wisdom. As an African proverb goes, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Teams can accomplish what individuals can't. Even if you're a solo founder, you can't grow a business in a vacuum. You need customers, suppliers, maybe investors or employees. Embrace the mindset that partnership and delegation are strengths, burdens. You can practically start by listing tasks only you can do, like setting the vision, maybe product design, and tasks others can do. Then look at that second list and start outsourcing or delegating one by one. It could be as simple as automating your bookkeeping or having a friend or consultant give feedback on your marketing plan. Free yourself to focus on what you do best. That's how you'll grow. Great businesses are built by teams, so start building yours. It'll not only lighten your load, it'll multiply your capacity to achieve great things. Mistake number 3: Burning through cash too fast. So the mistake here is spending money faster than it comes in and not keeping an eye on cash flow. This is a huge pitfall, especially in a downturn. Maybe you splurge on a fancy office or hire too many people too soon or invest in expensive tools you don't actually need. New entrepreneurs sometimes act like every dollar is replaceable, but in a tough economy, fundraising is harder and customers are cautious with spending. If you run out of cash, your business is done, period. It sounds obvious, but so many startups burn through their runway thinking more money will magically appear. The mistake is not budgeting carefully and not planning for slow sales or emergencies. It's like you're driving a car with a gas leak. You're not going to get very far. So the reality check is this: cash flow is the lifeblood of your business. Here is a startling statistic: 82% of startups that fail blame poor cash flow management. That means 8 out of 10 failed companies essentially ran out of money or couldn't manage it properly. Even if you have a great product, if you can't pay your bills, your company is done. You might be making profits on paper, but if your cash isn't in your account at the right time, You can't operate. A classic example is Toys R Us, a huge company that went bankrupt in 2017, not because people stopped buying toys, but because they had too much debt and ran out of cash to service it. If a giant like Toys R Us can collapse from poor cash management, a brand new startup is even more vulnerable. So during a downturn, this is even more critical. Banks tighten lending, investors become picky. And customers pay slower or buy less. Money isn't flowing as freely in the economy, so your margin for error is thin. Every dollar wasted is a dollar you might desperately need next month. Some entrepreneurs think, "Spend now to grow fast and we'll figure out revenue later." That mindset has killed countless startups. Yes, you need to invest in yourself, but invest wisely and track every expense to be sure that it's worth it. So here's what you can do instead. Be lean and mean with your budget. Treat every dollar like it's gold. Create a simple budget for your business and track your cash flow weekly. Know exactly how much is coming in and going out. There are great tools, even basic spreadsheets or apps like QuickBooks, that help you see this clearly. Plan for the worst-case scenario. What if sales are half of what you expect? Do you have enough cash to survive a few slow months? If not, you may need to cut expenses. Expenses or find additional funds before you hit a crisis. It's advised to stash a safety net fund if you can— money set aside for emergencies. This could be personal savings or line of credit you don't touch unless needed. Also, prioritize spending that drives growth or is essential for operations and delay the rest. For example, paying for marketing that brings in customers is good, but paying for a luxurious office space is probably not, especially if you can work As one business expert put it, lavish office spaces, premature hiring sprees, and inventory mismanagement can leave your budget gasping for air. So in other words, skip the frills. Focus on what keeps the lights on and brings in revenue. Negotiate with vendors for better rates. Avoid taking on debts you don't absolutely need, and keep your personal expenses separate from your business finances. Most importantly, keep an eye on cash flow timing. I mean, a sale isn't real unless the money is in your account. If you invoice clients, some might pay you in 30 or 60 days. You must account for that gap. Plenty of profitable businesses have died because they ran out of cash while waiting for payments. Don't let that be you. In a downturn, cash is king. If you manage your money wisely and stay frugal, you'll be in a much stronger position to weather storms and seize opportunities others can't because they blew their cash early on. Remember, your goal is to stay in the game long enough to win, and that means not going broke along the way. Mistake number 4 is neglecting marketing and your online presence. Here's the mistake: believing that a great product or service will magically attract customers on its own. This is the "if I build it, they will come" fallacy. Many new entrepreneurs pour pour all of their energy into making a product perfect, then do little to actually market it. In a downturn, they might cut marketing first to save money. That's the big mistake. If people don't know you exist, you have no business, period. Neglecting marketing, especially online, is like opening a store and not putting a sign out front. No one knows you're there. Where is everyone's attention right now? Online. If you're invisible on the internet, you're invisible. Full stop. Consider this: your potential customers are on social media, they're searching Google, they're reading emails, they're watching YouTube videos. If you're not showing up in those places, they'll buy from someone who is. Some entrepreneurs also underestimate the importance of an updated website or active social media profiles. Oh, I'll get to that later. Later might be too late because a competitor who engages customers online will grab that market share. In a downturn, trust and visibility are even more important. People are cautious with spending, so they buy from brands they see and trust. If you're hiding, they'll assume you're not a valid option. So here is your reality check. We live in a digital age. 84% of consumers find new products, services, and businesses online through social media feeds, search results, or online recommendations. Let me say that again. 84% of people discover businesses is online. That means if you have no online presence or a very weak one, you're missing out on a huge majority of potential customers. As marketing CEO Yacine Abera puts it, you don't want to be the best kept secret, you want to be known. Look at it this way: during the last downturn, many businesses survived only because they had an online presence, online sales, social media marketing, etc. Those who didn't were left behind. Even big ventures can fail by ignoring marketing. Quibi, a short-form video streaming startup, had $1.75 billion in funding and big Hollywood names behind it, but it flopped hard because it failed to market effectively and couldn't get users. All that money and talent wasted because they couldn't convince enough people to care. The lesson is that no matter how great your product is, you must actively reach your audience. So here's what you can do instead. Make marketing a priority, not an afterthought. You don't need a Super Bowl commercial or a huge budget. Thanks to the internet, marketing can be extremely cost-effective. Start with the basics. Build a solid online presence. Ensure that you have a clean, easy-to-navigate website, or a simple one-page site with your information and what you offer is a great start. Make sure your business can be found on Google. Claim your Google My Business listing if it's a local business so people can find your address, your hours, and the reviews that you have. Get on social media platforms that your target customers are using. You don't have to be everywhere, but choose one or two channels like Instagram, like YouTube, like LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, wherever your audience hangs out, and show up regularly. Post content that provides value or insights related to your business. This could be tips, behind-the-scenes looks, uh, customer testimonials, industry news, etc. Engage with your followers, answer their comments and their questions, This builds trust and a community around your brand. Invest time in content marketing and SEO, search engine optimization, so that when people search for the problem you solve, they find you. For example, if you're a graphic designer, you want to come up when somebody searches for logo design for a small business. Maybe start a simple blog or a YouTube channel with helpful content. It can draw people to you. Also encourage happy customers to leave reviews online. Positive reviews can significantly influence new customers to trust you. During the downturn, many competitors will be tempted to pull back on marketing. If you can lean in, you capture their market share. Marketing doesn't have to break the bank. Using social media is free, and even small targeted ads can go a long way if done right. The key is consistency and understanding your customer. So ask yourself, where do my ideal customers spend time and what message would appeal to them right now? Then put your message out there again and again. Remember, people can't buy from you if they don't know you exist. So make some noise. Be proactive in spreading the word about your business. Share your story and what problem you solve. In a downturn, emphasize the value value and reliability you offer since customers are more value-conscious now. If you do this, you won't be stuck hoping new customers somehow stumble upon you. You'll be out there attracting them. The businesses that thrive are usually the ones that are seen and heard. So don't be shy about marketing. It's the engine of your growth. Mistake number 5 is skipping market research and ignoring customer feedback. So the mistake is this: you're charging ahead with your idea without checking if anyone actually wants it. This is like building a puzzle with missing pieces. Something important just won't fit. Many enthusiastic founders fall in love with their product or service and assume everyone will love this as much as I do. They invest time and money to launch only to hear crickets because they didn't validate the market need. Equally dangerous is getting initial customers but then ignoring their feedback. Basically sticking fingers in your ears to avoid hearing criticism. If you skip research and ignore feedback, you're essentially building your business in a little bubble, or worse, on false assumptions. That's a fast track to failure. Here's the reality check. Know this statistic: 42% of startups fail because there's no market need for their product. Let's let that sink in. Almost half of startup failures happen because they made something something nobody really needed or wanted. Why does that happen? Because the founders assumed instead of asked. Skipping the step of talking to potential customers is a huge mistake. You might have the most innovative solution, but if it's not solving a real problem people have, it's not going to succeed. Enthusiasm is not a substitute for insight. Ignoring customer feedback is just as bad. The market is always moving and customers will tell you what they like or hate if you listen. Think of companies that fail to adapt. BlackBerry was once a top smartphone maker from Canada, but they ignored the trend towards full touchscreen phones. They insisted people wanted physical keyboards and didn't listen to users who were drawn to iPhones and Androids. The result? BlackBerry went from dominating to basically obsolete because they didn't heed the feedback of the market. That's a billion-dollar example of ignoring customer signals. Now, on a smaller scale, if your early customers keep asking for a certain feature or complaining about an aspect of your service and you brush it off, you're pushing them away to your competition. Here's what you can do instead: do your homework before you launch and keep learning after you launch. Before you spend a dollar on building your product or opening your doors, Research. This doesn't have to be expensive or formal. Start by talking to people in your target market. They could be friends, acquaintances, online forums. Where are your potential customers hanging out? Ask if they have the problem you think you're solving. Listen to how they describe their pain points. Would they pay for your solution? How much? This is called validating your idea. You might find you need to tweak your concept to meet what people actually need. You can look at industry research, trends, trends, and even what your competitors are doing and where they might be failing customers. Observe the competition. See if there's something customers complain about in their offerings. That is an opportunity for you. If possible, create a simple prototype or a basic version of your product. This is often called an MVP, Minimum Viable Product, and get it in front of real people quickly. The goal is to gather feedback early before you've invested too heavily. It could be a demo, a, a sample, or pilot program. For example, if you want to open a food business, maybe start a pop-up stall or catering a small event to gauge reactions. If it's an app or product, make a basic version with core features and see if users actually find it useful. Once you have customers, even just a few, actively seek their feedback. Use surveys, invite reviews, have conversations. Yes, you'll hear things that are hard to hear sometimes. I didn't like this, or it's too expensive, etc. But this is gold. These critiques show you how to improve and what to change to really fit the market. Don't take it personally. This is about making your business better. If multiple people are telling you the exact same thing, like your pricing is too high compared to value, or a certain feature is missing, pay attention and consider adjusting. Be ready to adapt. Sometimes businesses have to pivot, which means changing direction to find the real demand. Here's a very famous example. YouTube started as a video dating site, then pivoted to general video sharing when they saw users wanted that instead. If the data and feedback point you in a new direction, don't be stubborn. Be willing to pivot your idea to meet the market need. In short, stay customer-focused. Your business exists to solve a problem or fulfill a need for your customers. Keep them at the center of your discussion. Regularly ask, is this what people want? What are they telling me? And how can I serve them better? If you build with the customer, not just for the customer, you'll create something the market truly wants. That dramatically increases your chance of success, especially in a downturn. Remember, feedback is a gift, even when it's harsh. Use it to refine your business into one that people can't live without. Mistake number 6 is scaling too Growing too fast, too soon. So here's a mistake. You're trying to grow your business at lightning speed before you have a solid foundation. This could mean hiring a bunch of employees, opening new locations, or spending big on advertising to get tons of customers right away. It's an easy trap. You get a little early success and think, hey, we need to go big right now. Or you might feel pressure to look successful because everyone glorifies fast growth startups, but scaling prematurely is extremely risky. If your product systems or team are not ready, growing fast can cause everything to break. You end up with unhappy customers, overstretched staff, and a business that can collapse under its own weight. Here is your reality check: growing too quickly is a leading cause of startup failure. Over 70% of startups fail due to scaling before they're ready. That's a huge number. It means a lot of businesses might have survived if they had had grown at a steadier pace. So why is scaling too fast so dangerous? Imagine you suddenly triple your customers overnight. Sounds great, right? But can you deliver your product or service at triple capacity with consistent quality? If not, those new customers will be upset and leave, and your reputation will tank. Or consider costs. Scaling often means spending money on inventory, on staff, on a bigger space. If you scale up your revenue slower than your expenses, you can through cash, which ties us back to mistake number 3. Many startups take on big expenses expecting future income that doesn't materialize in time. A famous example is Fab.com, a once-hyped e-commerce startup. They raised over $300 million in investments, which should have been plenty of fuel to grow, and they did— too fast. Fab.com expanded aggressively, hiring lots of people and spending big. Big, but they hadn't nailed down the sustainable business model or solid profitability. They grew users quickly but couldn't keep them, and their costs blew up. Within a few years, Fab.com crashed and burned, selling for a tiny fraction of its previous value. They're a case study now on how not to scale. The lesson: more isn't always better, especially not all at once. In a downturn, the temptation might be a bit less to overscale else, since you're cautious, but it can still happen. For instance, if you see a sudden opportunity, maybe a competitor went under and you try to grab all their customers overnight without preparing, you could choke on that growth. Also, chasing growth in a recession by slashing prices or overextending can backfire. Sustainable growth beats rapid, unsteady growth every time. So here's what you can do instead. Focus on steady, sustainable growth. Think of building your business like building a house. You need a strong foundation before you add extra floors. In business, that foundation is product-market fit and solid operations. Product-market fit means you're sure people truly want what you offer and you can consistently deliver value at a price that works. If you're still getting inconsistent feedback or struggling to fulfill orders on time, that's a sign to stabilize before you expand. Grow in stages. Set milestones. For example, when we consistently sell X units a month with good customer satisfaction, we'll consider expanding. Or once we have X amount in steady cash flow, we'll hire another salesperson. This way, growth is tied to real indicators that you're ready. Keep an eye on your metrics— customer satisfaction, repeat purchase rates, profit margins, etc. If any of those are dropping, dropping. Fix that before trying to scale more. It's like in a game— level up after you beat the boss at the current level, not while you're still fighting it. When you do decide to scale, do pilot tests. For instance, if you want to expand into a new market or release a new product line, do a smaller trial run. See what issues come up, learn from it, improve, then expand further. This way you catch problems early when they're easier to manage. Also, control the pace of hiring. Hire slow and intentional. Professionally, one good hire is better than 5 rushed ones who might not be the right fit. Each new team member should fill a clear need. And remember, more employees means more management needed. Ensure you have structure in place so people know their roles and responsibilities. And here's another tip: maintain financial discipline even more when you have more money coming in. Don't assume a good month means it will be good forever. As you scale, continue to forecast worst-case scenarios. Scenarios. What if that big client leaves, etc.? So you don't overshoot. Grow with purpose, not ego. It's not about bragging how fast you grew. It's about remaining in business and thriving years from now. As one startup advisor put it, build a solid foundation before expansion fever hits. Perfect your core business, then scale gradually, making sure your cash flow, team, and processes can grow together. If something starts breaking as you grow, don't be afraid to pause and fix it. A slower, healthier growth beats a rapid rise followed by a crash. Your business is a marathon, not a sprint, especially in a downturn economy. Pace yourself and you'll go much further. And mistake number 7 is giving up too soon. You have a lack of patience and persistence. So mistake here is expecting overnight success and losing heart when it doesn't happen. This is a mindset mistake that catches many new entrepreneurs by surprise. So you launch, you have big dreams, and when you hit your first serious roadblock or when sales slow down for a few months, you think, it's not working, I should quit. In a downturn, this feeling can be even stronger because progress might be slower. But the hard truth is most businesses take time to really take off. If you give up too early, you might be abandoning ship just before it starts to catch the wind. So here's your reality check. Building a successful business is a long game. Most small businesses take at least 2 to 3 years to become profitable and truly massive success, often 7 to 10 years to hit their stride. Those overnight success stories you hear are usually myths. Even companies like Facebook or Tesla spent years in development or had several slow years before things exploded. And behind the scenes, there were likely multiple near-fail moments. The journey is full of ups and downs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20% of businesses fail in the first year and around 50% by the fifth year. Why am I telling you this? Not to scare you, but to highlight that success rarely happens fast. Those that do make it are often the ones who persisted through the early tough years. A great example of persistence is Airbnb. Today, Airbnb is a huge company valued in the billions, but in the beginning, it struggled hard. The founders launched during the 2008 downturn, and at first barely anyone was using the site to book rooms. They maxed out credit cards and even sold breakfast cereal in election-themed boxes just to scrape by and keep the company afloat. They literally went door to door to get new users and investors. They faced rejection after rejection. It would have been so easy for them to say, this isn't working, let's quit. But they didn't give up. Eventually, they gained traction, got an investor after many said no, and the rest is history. If they had quit in those dark days, we wouldn't even know their names today. Their story shows that you might be this close to success without realizing it, and if you quit, you'll never know. As Thomas Edison famously said, many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. So here's Here's what you can do instead. Practice patience and resilience. So go into your business with the mindset that you're in this for the long haul. That means emotionally preparing for slow periods, for setbacks, and for many iterations. Don't interpret slow growth as failure. See it as learning. Ask any seasoned entrepreneur and they'll tell you stories of how long it took to get their first steady clients or to turn a profit. It's normal. You have to keep pushing and and keep improving. Think of entrepreneurship as a marathon, not a sprint. If you sprint too hard and expect to finish in record time, you will burn out. Instead, you keep a steady pace. And when things get tough, you dig deep rather than bow out. One way to stay motivated is to remember your why. Why did you start this business? Is it to solve a problem you're really passionate about? Is it to create a better life for your family? Keep that purpose in front of you, especially when when results are slow. That will fuel you to persevere. Also, set realistic expectations and milestones. Instead of "I must make a million in my first year," focus on achievable goals like gain 100 loyal customers or reach a certain monthly revenue that covers expenses. Celebrate small wins—each sale, each positive customer review, each improvement. This will keep morale up. Importantly, be adaptable when things aren't working. Not giving up doesn't mean keep doing the same thing, failing over and over and over again. It means keep trying new angles until it works. Maybe your first strategy, it's not hitting the mark. That's okay, tweak it. Persistence is about being committed to the end goal, which is a successful business, not a rigid path of how to get there. If Plan A fails, go to Plan B, Plan C, whatever it takes. Every time you encounter failure, treat it as a lesson. Ask, what can I learn from this? How can I do it better? And then apply it to the next time. Surround yourself with supportive people— mentors, fellow entrepreneurs, friends— who encourage you when you feel discouraged. Sometimes just hearing, hey, you're doing good, keep at it, from someone who's been there can bolster your resolve. And remember mistake number 2: you don't have to tough it out completely alone. Seek advice when you hit a wall. Lastly, keep an eye on the long-term vision. Picture the successful business you want to be in 5 or 10 years. Keep that vision alive. It can carry you through your rough days. In a downturn, conditions may improve by the time you hit year 3 or 5. You want to be there when the tide turns, having built your foundation during the hard times. The founders who persist when others quit are the ones who will be perfectly positioned when the economy picks up again. Don't quit early. As long as you still have resources and ideas to try, keep going. The only sure way to fail is to give up, because success Success might be closer than you think. Be patient, stay hungry, and keep believing in your dream even when it's not visible yet. Every big success story is written with chapters of struggle. Embrace yours and keep writing the next chapter. So we've covered a lot, from mindset and money mistakes to marketing, leadership, products, growth pitfalls. Avoiding these 7 mistakes will give your new business a fighting chance even in a downturn. Remember that every huge company started Start it small and face challenges. The fact that you're starting a business right now in a tough economy shows that you have courage and determination. That's something many people lack, so give yourself some credit for that. And now commit to following through with smart choices. Success in business isn't about never making mistakes. You will make some, and that's okay. It's about learning quickly and persevering. When you make a misstep, you correct it and keep moving forward. When you fall, you get back Yup. Each of these mistakes we talked about is avoidable with awareness and action. Now you have that awareness. You're already ahead of many beginners who dive in blind. Picture yourself a year from now running a thriving business. Looking back on these early days, the economy might be better. Maybe it's worth— doesn't matter because you built something that can weather any storm. Why? Because you had the right mindset. You built a strong team and network. You managed your money wisely. You continually reached out to your customers. You grew at the right pace and you never gave up. That is the path to success. So as you step forward, face the challenges with confidence. You know, the traps to avoid, stay focused on serving your customers and improving each day. Keep pushing, keep innovating, and keep believing in yourself and your mission. Downtimes create the best entrepreneurs. Those who can do well now will soar when things Things get better. The road might not be easy, but it will be worth it. Every setback is that setup for a comeback. Every mistake, a lesson that makes you stronger. You have everything it takes to build your dream. You have the knowledge, the grit, and now the insight into what not to do. So it's time to apply these lessons. Start your journey and make your business vision a reality. Don't wait for permission or perfect conditions. You have the power to create your own success story, starting today, even in a downturn. Go for it with all your heart and smart planning. And remember, the only way you fail is if you quit. So keep going, keep learning, and keep believing. Your success story is waiting to be written, so pick up the pen and write it. You've got this. Believe. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. To learn all of wealth building in 3 hours, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there. You will never build real wealth by doing more things. I would definitely advise a small startup company to be as narrow and as focused as is possible to be. Every day you're going to be faced with 100 things that you could potentially