I Analyzed 50 Failed Businesses Here's What Killed Every One

Almost every business that dies gets killed by the person who started it, not the market, not bad luck, and not by the economy. Unfortunately, one does have to be focused on the short term and money coming in when creating a company, because otherwise the company will die. Apple suffered for several years from lousy engineering management. I have to say it. And there were people that were going off in 18 different directions doing arguably interesting things in each one of them. Good engineers, lousy management. Successful businesses have to satisfy a real need, a need that people will actually pay to have fulfilled. Now, you may have an idea, you may love your product, you may love your service, but if that product or service doesn't fix a specific problem, your business will fail. Nearly half of new businesses fail within their first 5 years, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 22% of business startups fail in the first year, and 50% of new businesses fail within the first 5 years. And what's really on the line here, it's not just your business, it's the years of your life that you're about to pour into it and whether they add up to something that lasts or disappear like it never happened. Take a wild success like Airbnb, everybody knows about. Well, that company was famously passed on by many smart investors 'cause people thought no one's gonna rent out a space in their home to a stranger. Of course, people proved that wrong. But one of the reasons it succeeded, aside from a good business model, a good idea, great execution, is the timing. That company came out right during the height of the recession when people really needed extra money. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. So I went deep on 50 businesses that died, and I kept coming back to Sam Walton. Before he built the biggest company on the planet, Sam was a nobody running a single Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas, pulling in about $20,000 a year. He worked harder than anyone in town. He obsessed over low prices and treating customers right, and he turned that little rented store into one of the most profitable shops in the whole region. He did everything right, and then he lost it all. Sam didn't own the building. He only rented it. And when his landlord saw how much money that store was making, the man refused to renew the lease to Sam and handed his entire business to his own son. Just like that, the best store in the area was gone, and Sam Walton had nothing to show for years of work except one pretty brutal lesson. You have to own the land. You have to own the building. You have to own your foundation. Anyone else might have walked away right there. Most people do, but Sam didn't. Your purpose comes to your pain, I think. And Sam's purpose got forged the day he lost that store. With his wife Helen pushing him to start over in a new town, he sold what was left, moved to Bentonville, and in 1962, he he opened the first Walmart. He built it on everything that loss taught him. Today, Walmart pulls in $648 billion a year, and about 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store. Your setbacks do not have to be permanent. It's only permanent if you stop. Sam turned the pain of losing one store into creating 10,000 more. Okay, so here's what you might be thinking. Your business might be different. You know, your idea is better, you care more, you'll outwork everyone around you, so those 50 dead businesses have nothing to do with you. I get it. But here's what hit me when I studied them. Almost all these founders thought the exact same thing. They weren't lazy people. A lot of them were brilliant. A lot of them were working 80-hour weeks. What killed them was not a lack of effort. It was a blind spot. One weakness that they never saw coming. Exactly like Sam Walton not owning his building. Effort doesn't save you from these blind spots. Seeing it does. So let me walk you through the blind spots that killed all 50 businesses so you can find yours before it's too late. 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. Believe. Killer number 1, running out of cash. The first killer is running outta cash, and it took down more of these businesses than anything else. Here's the part that scares most people. You can run a business that looks profitable on paper and still go broke because profit and cash are not the same thing. Profit is a number on a spreadsheet at the end of the month. Cash is what's actually in your account on Tuesday when your payment is due. Your expenses show up fast and on time, your payroll, your rent, your ad spend, your software, they all— they get paid with clockwork. They're showing up. Your customer payments, they show up usually slower, 30 days, 60 days, sometimes 90 days later. That gap in the middle is where businesses often bleed out, and you can be growing the whole time it's happening. It gets worse when a founder hits one good month and treats it like this is the new normal. I've watched people spend tens of thousands of dollars on fancy equipment after a single strong week and then get wiped out the next month because they had a slow month and because they kept zero reserve. I watched a coaching company hit almost $4 million a year in revenue and still have to shut its doors. Almost $4 million. They ran outta cash because they spent too much on ads, paid the team too much, built a structure that they couldn't sustain, and never looked deeply at their accounting. And if you're trying to build the whole thing on $87 or $99 a month product, listen, because the capital burns out before the idea burns out. Low ticket models often need massive scale. They need huge customer service and they get hammered by refunds and chargebacks. So here's what you can do. Watch your cash, not just your profit. Keep at least 3 to 6 months of expenses in reserve. So one slow month can't end you. Know your numbers cold. I know it's hard for some people every week, not just once a quarter, once a year when it's already too late and sell something with enough margin to actually fund the business. So I don't like decisions that make me feel weak and nothing makes you feel weaker than checking your bank account and realizing that the money is already gone. Killer number 2, building something nobody wants. The second killer here is building something that nobody actually wants. This one is pretty sneaky because it feels like progress, right? Your head's down, you're building something, you're quietly creating, and you add another feature and it feels like that you're being productive because you're busy and you're busy and, and you're shipping. And then you take it out to the markets and like nothing happens. And I did this with my very first software company. I spent months building a feature that I thought was incredibly cool, right? We took it to the market like, Nobody wanted it. Nobody. All that time, all that work was gone because we built in a vacuum and never asked a single customer if they actually needed this thing or not. The fix here is so simple that it's almost embarrassing. It hurts. Go find a customer first, then build around what they actually need. So talk to 10 real people in your market before you build anything. And don't ask them if they like the idea. Ask them the problem that keeps them up at night and what they've already tried to pay to solve. Then sell it before you make it. Take a deposit, pre-sell the spot, get a real credit card payment for the promise of the If real people won't pay you for the promise of it, they won't pay you for the finished version either. It's a lot harder and you just saved yourself a year. Get honest about the problem that you solve, because if you don't solve a real problem, you do not have a real business. Entrepreneurship is about solving problems. You have an expensive hobby. And one more addition here, chasing small broke customers and hoping they grow rich with you. They won't. Pick customers who can actually afford you right now, who have the budget to pay you what you're worth today, right now, and build for them. Killer number 3, the right things in the wrong order. Okay? The third killer here is doing the right things in the wrong order. A lot of these businesses, they didn't die because the founders were doing dumb things. They died because they were doing smart things in the wrong sequence. And I see it all the time. A founder with no steady revenue, uh, decides to build a massive global brand or launch a low-ticket online course before they've ever built a simple high-ticket engine that brings in real money every single month. So they spend a year on logos and funnels and fancy websites and content while your bank account slowly drains and not one of those things is actually paying your bills. The order matters more than the effort. So Phase 1 is something higher ticket that generates steady cash. One offer, a clear customer, enough money per sale that a handful of clients keeps your lights on. That cash funds the team and the systems you need to survive everything that comes next. Only once that engine is steady do you earn the right to go to Phase 2, the lower ticket courses, the products that end up scaling. And then only after that you build Phase 3, the big brand, the global audience. Get steady money coming in first, and everything you build on top of it gets so much easier because now you're building with money in the bank instead of running on your savings and investments. When you try to skip that first step, it's like you're, you're building a house and you're trying to create the second floor before you've even built a foundation. And you know how that ends. But before I keep going, I want to make sure that you actually use this. So if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to Go grab it and I'll see you there. Killer number 4, no systems, no scale. The 4th killer is having no system. A friend of mine, Nick Peterson, likes to say, nail it, then scale it. And this is also a powerful idea in the book, The E-Myth Revisited, which is that most small businesses fail and most franchises can succeed. And so think about why is that? A franchise runs on documented repeatable recipe that almost anyone can follow. Walking into any location of a big franchise and you get the same result because the magic is written down in a playbook that anyone can run instead of just locked inside one person's head. The average founder does the opposite, right? You keep shooting from the hip, you keep trying to do the entire business inside your own head. And if you never write it down, your killer recipe, then two things happen. And both of them can be completely fatal. First, you can't scale because you are the bottleneck for everything, right? Ever, ever feel that you're the bottleneck? Every decision, every fire, uh, every customer waits on you. And second, anyone you hire operates at a lower level because they're guessing at what you do instead of following a proven process. And then you decide hiring doesn't work when really you just never never gave people the recipe to follow. So I think being leads to doing. So start being the kind of owner who builds the systems even when it's just you. Write down exactly how you get a customer step by step, how you deliver the work step by step, how you keep them happy and get them to refer to you step by step. Turn the magic in your head into a checklist your team can run without you standing over them. The day your business can win without you in every single room is the day it stops being this fragile little egg and starts being worth something. Killer number 5, keeping the wrong people. The 5th killer is keeping the wrong people. This is tough. This one is hard because it's personal and it costs you twice. Founders hold on to underperformers, the team members who are barely treading water, the friends you had from high school, the people that you might have started with. You hold onto them long after you should have let them go because firing usually feels cruel and hiring again feels pretty exhausting. But every single day you hold onto someone who's just okay, you give up the chance to bring in somebody great because A players are in limited supply and you've got a seat filled with someone who's just the wrong person. A B player doesn't just do B-level work, they block the A player who could have had that seat. And the other side of this is maybe even worse, putting good people in the wrong roles. If you take someone whose gift is starting new creative projects and bury them in, uh, monotonous, boring, repetitive grind work, they're gonna burn out and fail and it's not their fault. You put them in the wrong seat and then blame the person. So match the work to the person's natural strengths. Give the starters, the new projects and the finishers, the systems, and be brutally honest with yourself about what's actually moving the business forward and who's just kind of still being busy. That's a good start, but now I want you to go further than good. We build a team where every single seat is filled by someone who is excellent at that exact job and watch how much lighter the whole thing gets carried. Killer number 6, the best kept secret. The 6th killer is just being the best kept secret in your industry. You can have the highest quality product in your entire market and still lose to a mediocre competitor who just simply cracked the content code because because best known beats best every time. If nobody knows you exist, your quality literally does not matter because they can't buy what they can't find. And this might be a little uncomfortable. A lot of founders hide behind their branding, their funnels, the logos, the pretty websites, because all that work feels like work while letting them avoid the one thing that actually pays the bills: asking for the sale and collecting the payment. It's so much more comfortable to redesign your homepage for the 80th time than to look someone in the eye and ask for their credit card. I watched a friend of mine spend $70,000 in a single year on polished thought leadership content and get basically zero results to the point where he almost quit creating content completely. The content alone didn't save him because without a clear ask, it's just, it's just expensive time that you're putting out every week. So put yourself out there every single day. Tell people exactly what you do and who you help, and then make the ask. The money is on the other side of the ask, and the only way you get good at asking is to ask more often. Killer number 7: built on rented land. So the 7th killer is building your whole business on land that you don't own. So remember Sam Walton losing that store because he only rented the building? The modern version of his mistake, it's everywhere and is— it is deadly. You build your entire business on top of one thing that you don't actually own, like one social media algorithm, one marketplace, one big client who makes up 80% of your revenue. When I looked at those 50 failures, more than half of them were dangerously concentrated on a single platform or a single customer. And the day that the algorithm changed or the terms changed or that one client walked away or went under, the business that took years to build was gone in a week. It feels completely fine when it's working, right? You're on top of the world, which is exactly why so many smart founders miss it until it's too late. The platform giveth and the platform taketh away, and you don't get a vote, right? So own your foundation, own your email list, because that's an audience nobody can just delete or take out from under you. Own the direct relationship with your customers, not just the, the followers on a page that you've rented. Spread your revenue so no single channel platform or client can end you by changing their mind on a Tuesday. Build on ground you actually control the way Sam Walton swore he would do the day he lost that first store. Killer number 8: quitting right before it works. The 8th killer— oh, this is so tough— it's quitting right before it works. When sales slow down, founders panic and fall straight into a scarcity mindset. They start slashing prices, offering payment plans they can't afford. Uh, chasing any customer with a pulse and making desperate decisions that dig the hole deeper instead of actually helping them climb out. And a huge number of them give up the exact moment that success was just around the corner. MrBeast, Jimmy Donaldson, made 130 videos before he ever cracked 10,000 views. 130 videos. Imagine a version of him who quit on video 129, one away from the breakthrough, convinced that it's just never gonna work. That person never becomes MrBeast. It shows up in small ways too. You send one email, you don't hear back, and you decide, oh, they're not interested. When the The truth is the win was 3 follow-ups away with just a busy person who doesn't hate you. They're just busy. Success lives in the consistent repeated effort, the boring follow-ups that everyone else is too proud or too scared to do. I think if you have the ability, then you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. So when that voice shows up and it's telling you, hey, you should quit, treat it as a signal that you're close and push for just one more time. So just build a little momentum and protect your belief like it's the most valuable asset that you own. So here's what I really want you to hear. Every one of these 50 businesses died from something the founder could control. That's not bad news. That's actually awesome news. It's the best news that you'll get all day because it means survival is in your hands. Not, not the market, not the government, not the president. I love this quote about a bird on a branch isn't scared of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. So trust your wings. Go find your blind spot and fix it before it finds you. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn if I started a business this year, what exactly I would do. If I lost everything tomorrow and had to start a brand new business this year with no audience and no savings, I wouldn't panic because starting a business has never been simpler or cheaper than it is right now. There's never been a better time to be an inventor and a pioneer than right now because the world is on fire with new ideas and with AI and space opportunities. We're in the middle of multiple golden ages right now. This is the best time ever in the history of technology, ever, period, to start a company. 99% of small businesses you can start with next to no capital. It's more about effort. Americans filed a record 5.67 million business applications in 2025, the most in history according to the U.S. Census Bureau. So while everyone online keeps telling you the dream is dead and the economy is rigged, more people are quietly betting on themselves than at any point ever. The US is marking Small Business Week, and new data finds more Americans are jumping on the small business bandwagon. Data is showing us that last year a record number of people applied to be small business owners. This isn't just about business, it's about taking back control of your time, your income, your life. And I'm going to walk you through the exact steps I'd follow in order to do it from scratch. Where are you going to spend your time and your energy is of the most important decisions you get to make in life. I am in control of everything that happens to me. Everything. Everything that will happen in my life, I will be the master of. One of the most important things you have in your life is time. It's one of your greatest assets, or it's your liability. When I was 20 years old, I had a little software company and I was making $300 a month. I was so broke and so ashamed of it that I lied to my own friends and pretended I was I was living the hustle lifestyle when the truth is I couldn't even afford $20 for a night out and beer. One night I was sitting there crying, ready to quit, completely convinced that I just wasn't smart enough to pull this off. And then something hit me that changed the whole direction of my life and my company. Somebody had already figured this out. I don't have to be a genius. I don't have to have the skills or information yet, and I can model someone who has already done it. So I went and studied how Bill Gates built Microsoft. He had a software company. I had a software company. Everyone assumes Microsoft blew up because of genius piece of code, but it didn't. It blew up because Gates made a deal with IBM, the number one computer maker in the entire world at the time, so that every single computer they shipped came with Microsoft software already loaded on it. But here's the part that almost nobody talks about. Microsoft was already a $7 million company before that famous IBM deal ever happened. And when I dug into how Gates got from zero to that first $7 million, the answer was the exact same word: partnership. He did not work everyone, although he worked very hard. He partnered with people who already had what he needed. So I went back to work the very next morning, copied that one single idea, stopped trying to do everything alone, and closed my first deal for $13,500. Bill Gates kept me in business, and I never once met the man. Right now you're probably thinking it's easy for me to say all this because I have a big audience today. But if you took every single follower away from me tomorrow, tomorrow, I promise you I would not start by trying to go viral on YouTube. Building an audience from scratch, it takes 3, 5 more years, and most people run out of motivation and money and quit long before it ever pays them anything. So forget about followers at the start, forget about the perfect logo, forget about waiting until you feel ready, because ready is not the truth. And so here's exactly what I would do instead, starting from absolute zero, step by step. Get to $96,000 with just 4 clients. So the first thing I do is ignore almost everything you think a business needs. I would not build a website. I've personally helped launch multimillion-dollar companies that didn't even have a website when they signed their first clients. So website is not the thing standing between you and your money. It's just a comfortable thing to hide behind, feeling like you have to get this thing done. Instead, I'd lock onto one piece of dead simple math and let it run my entire life. I need to get 4 people paying me $2,000 a month. That is the whole goal. Not 400 customers, not some giant viral launch, not a warehouse full of inventory. Just 4 people who get enough value for you that they will pay you $2,000 every single month. 4 clients at $2,000 a month is $96,000 a year, which means you have an almost 6-figure business built on just 4 relationships, and it gives you the survivable cash flow you need to build everything else on top of it. So the only question that matters on day 1 is simple. What can you do that's worth $2,000 a month to somebody else? And this year, that list is huge. You can set up AI systems and automations for companies that they're drowning in their busy work. You can run ads on their social media. You can consult in a skill that you already have. Pick the one thing that you're best at and can start delivering this week and price it at $2,000 a month or more so the math works fast and you're not grinding to make 100 tiny little sales. You do not need 1,000 customers. You You need 4 yeses. And when you stop thinking that you need to build some massive company and you realize you just need 4 people to say yes, the whole thing stops feeling impossible and starts feeling like something you could go and do this week. Mind the network you already have. Here's where almost everybody freezes. They think they have to go find total strangers and somehow convince them out of thin air to buy from you, right? No, to land those first 4 clients, I would start by auditing the resources and the people already sitting in my phone, in my contacts right now. I don't want you throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, answering fake questions in your own head about whether you're qualified or whether you're ready. I want you to go out to the people you already know. If your brother and your sister run chiropractic clinics or your friend owns a med spa, you go straight to them first. You don't reinvent the wheel. You offer to run their ads or handle the service for them, even cheap or free at the start. So you can learn the industry from the inside and walk away with your very first real testimonials and case studies to share. Those early wins are absolutely everything because proof is the thing that lets you walk into the next conversation and charge full price with total confidence. Being leads to doing here. The moment you decide that you are the person who solves this problem, you stop researching and you start reaching out to the people who already know you, already like you, and already pick up the phone when you call them. So you're not starting from zero connections right now, even if it feels that way. Your network work, not your wallet, is your real startup capital. And the good news is you already have one. You just never asked it for anything. Make your first offer impossible to turn down. So when you reach out to those first few people, the worst thing you can do is show up sounding desperate or trying to sell some big, vague, expensive package. Instead, I would lead with a clear result and almost no risk for them at all. So pick one specific painful problem that you already know how to fix and offer to fix just that one thing. Tell them you'll do it at a low starter rate or even tie your pay to the result that you get them. So the only way they lose is if you don't deliver. That one move, it melts their fear away because now they aren't gambling on you. They're just saying yes to an outcome that they already want anyway. So don't pitch them a long list of features and deliverables because features confuse people and a confused person, they don't buy from you. So pitch them the after, paint a clear picture of exactly where their business will be once their problem is finally gone and let them feel it for a second. Second, right? Then the very second you get them a real result, you ask for two simple things. You ask for a short testimonial in their own words, and you ask them who else they know that has that exact same problem. That becomes a flywheel for you. That one happy client instantly becomes both your proof and your next referral source, and you use that momentum to raise your price a little bit and go land the next one. You're not trying to close 1,000 deals or be everywhere at once. You are just trying to make your very first client so ridiculously happy that getting your second, third, and fourth starts to feel almost easy. So get that first yes this week, overdeliver like your life depends on it, and from there you let the proof do the selling for you. Build your Money 50. So once you get that first bit of cash flow coming in, you stop hunting one client at a time and you start scaling through relationships instead of ads. I would build what I call my Money 50 list. This is what we teach inside our Movement Makers program. Program. Here's how it works. You pick 5 different categories of people and then you go 10 people deep in each category. So you end up with a written list of 50 names. These are people who, if they did know you, if they did like you, if they did trust you, could each be worth 6 figures or even 7 figures to your business every single year. And here's the key that most people miss. These usually are not your current customers. They're referral partners. They might be CPAs or lawyers or property managers, agency owners, the people who already have a deep, trusted relationship with the exact audience that you're trying to reach. One single CPA can send you 30 clients without you even spending a dollar on advertising because their clients already do whatever they recommend. So write those 50 names down on one page. You put it where you see it every day, and you treat that list like, like it's made of gold, because getting in front of those 50 people is the entire game. You don't need a million customers. You need a handful of powerful relationships. The person with the best relationships wins every single time, and relationships are completely free to build if you're simply willing to give first before you ever ask for anything. Start a biz dev show. Now, how do you actually get in front of your Money 50 list when these are busy, important, successful people? Here's the mistake most people make. If you email them and ask to grab a coffee and pick their brain, they will ignore you every time because everybody on earth wants their time and attention. So you flip the whole thing around. You start a simple interview show, what I call a biz dev show, and you invite those exact 50 people to come on as your guests. Almost nobody ever asked them for an interview before, so they say yes because everybody loves being treated like the expert. And here's the beautiful part: you don't need a fancy studio, you don't need expensive gear, you don't need a big audience, because going viral is not the point, and the view count doesn't matter at all here because they're telling their story and they don't get a lot of attention typically. Typically, the only metric you care about is the relationship. You spend a full hour, you make them look great, you tell their story, you're genuinely curious about their work, and somewhere in the middle of the conversation, you ask one strategic question connected to what you do, just to quietly plant a seed in their mind. And then the moment you stop recording, you make your move. You tell them that you'd love to be their second opinion or their go-to person in case any of their clients have an issue that obviously you know how to deal with. In one hour, you just turn a complete stranger into a warm potential partner who wants to help you, and it costs you exactly $0. There is no faster way on this planet to earn someone's trust than to put them in the spotlight and champion them before you ever ask for a single thing back. Trade your time for a piece of the upside. The next move is the one that truly changes everything, and it's the one that I'd be the most aggressive about this year if I'm trying to build my business. When you're first starting out, it's totally fine to charge a flat monthly fee. But the real wealth is never in trading just your hours for dollars. It's in owning a piece of what you help actually build. So the second I had proof of what I could actually get for results for people, I would stop just being a hired hand. I would walk into an established business that's already making money and say, hey, give me a percentage of the company and I'll come in and be your growth person and your sales engine. If you really want to scale your upside, you take X percent of a business in exchange for driving their growth instead of just giving them a flat rate every month. Month. I had this exact same thing with a bunch of agencies I started. I taught them everything I knew about YouTube. I took a 25% split, they had the other 75%, and today they've built up and run 7-figure businesses. I didn't need money to make that deal. I needed a skill that got results and the guts to ask for a percentage instead of just a paycheck. Most people, they're too scared to ask, so they stay employees of their own business forever. If you can deliver real results for someone, then you have the responsibility, I think, to ask for some real upside. If you can, then you must. Let AI be the team you can't afford yet. The last thing I do, and honestly the biggest reason there has never been a better time in human history to start a business than right now, is to lean on AI like it's an entire team working for you for free. When I started out, I couldn't afford a designer, I couldn't afford a writer, an assistant, or a developer, so I did a lot of it myself. Myself badly, painfully, slowly, and it held me back for years. You don't have that excuse anymore. Do you need your offer written, your emails drafted, your brand design, your research done, a simple tool built for a client? AI can do a strong first draft of every single one of these things in minutes, and your only job is to add your judgment and your taste on top of it. That's exactly why setting up AI systems for other businesses is one of the best $2,000 a month offers you can possibly sell now because every business owner on Earth knows they need this and almost none of them have any idea how to actually do it. So don't use AI to replace your thinking, use it to delete your excuses, right? Every single time you catch yourself saying, I can't afford to do that part, stop and ask whether AI can do that part for you. And in this year, the honest answer is almost always going to be yes. The person who wins today is not the one with the biggest budget or the fanciest university degree. It's the one who's actually willing to roll up their sleeves and use the tools that are already there in your pocket. Your first move is the one that matters. So that's the entire plan. And I want you to notice that not one single step required money, a degree, or permission from anybody. It just required you deciding to start and being willing to model the people who have already done it instead of trying to be a genius all on your own. You don't have to figure it all out today. You just have to take that first step before you feel ready. Now listen to 10 Money Traps That Keep People Poor. 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 It's 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 of 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 stay 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 away.' 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 5. 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 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 end 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, is 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. 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 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 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 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 they 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. Wealth. 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 doing $10 an hour task, 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 yourself 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 struggle 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 trap number 6. But once I started seeking guidance, everything 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 mentor 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 I went into the 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 one 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. 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. If you want to learn the 10 businesses you can start with $0, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. 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.