Start a Business with Nothing - How to start a new business in a new field

How to start a new business in a new field. So I got a great question from one of my newsletter readers— love you guys— Mike, who wrote in to say, Evan, what can I do to start catfish farming, grass cutter farming, and snail farming in Nigeria? How do I raise the funds? How do I get the knowledge? What website can I go to? Hope reading from you soonest. Kind regards, Mike. Okay, Mike, this is a great question, and I am not gonna lie to you, I don't know anything about starting a business in Nigeria. I didn't even know snail farming was an industry, but it doesn't matter. Here's why: if you want to get started in an industry, and this applies to anybody, you want to start a new business, you want to get into a field that you, you have no experience in, the best way to do it is to model success. You have a goal that you want to accomplish, and maybe the people in your life You know, they don't support you. Maybe there's no family member to guide you, right? When I started my business, I didn't have family members who are entrepreneurs. I had nobody to look up to and say, "Oh, here's how to do it." Instead of trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing, which is two things: it burns all your resources, it burns your time and money, but it also limits your time, right? Like, you only have so much of a window to make this thing happen in your life. That you're burning years making this thing, trying to get it to go and doing all the wrong stuff, right? Trial and error is not the way to do it. Model success. Find someone who's already done this and model what worked for them, apply it to your business. There's a few ways to do it, okay? The first is to read. This is what I did in my very first business. I read the stories of famous entrepreneurs who I look up to and I realized I'm not the first guy to try to sell software. That was my first company. I'm not the first guy, so I looked at I looked at the founder of McAfee, of Intuit, how they got started. Zero to $1 million. How did they do that? Because that's what I want to replicate. And I learned their strategies and made it work for my business. And within a couple months, I already started seeing results. Okay? So whoever— who's doing snail farming that you can read up about? Learn their success stories and apply it to your business. Okay? Second is get a mentor. Find somebody who has done this, who may be retired, who's looking to give back, who has some experience, who can help you, even if it's just once a month going for coffee or lunch. You're buying it, right? Just find a mentor to help you along your way, because again, you're taking the experience of someone who's been through it, who can shortcut your path, who, who's done all the mistakes that you're about to make, right? I don't want you to go take out a huge loan to start a snail farm in Nigeria and it doesn't work out for you, man. That's like debt for the rest of your life. Get somebody who's gone through it, who can give you experience, give you ideas, you can bounce ideas off of. And a lot of times older people who have gone through it, they're willing to give back, man. If you are curious, if you are showing that you're going to apply their knowledge— I love helping out and giving back, and entrepreneurs tend to like to help other entrepreneurs, but you got to show that you're willing to actually implement the advice. And so reach out and find people who have done this and get their feedback. It's really important. This helped save my business too in the early days. That first company, I had a guy named John who was my mentor, who had built and sold technology companies, and he knew what to say and how to act and who to talk to. And it would have taken me years, or maybe I never would have figured it out by myself, but by connecting with him, boom, he shortcutted my path to success, and we were able to build the company quickly and eventually get acquired. The third thing is get a job. And you might be saying, you know, Evan, you're the entrepreneur guy telling me to get a job, but yeah, absolutely. A lot of the most successful entrepreneurs If you look at their history, they started with getting experience working at a company. And the great thing about it is you're getting paid to learn. This is— you're still modeling success, right? Go find whatever the best snail farm is in Nigeria and offer to work for them, even if it's for free, but start to work for them, right? Ideally, you're getting a part-time job or even a full-time job because here you're getting paid to make mistakes. They're paying you to learn and to make mistakes. So when you go in there, you know how the business works, you know, you know how they make money, you know what metrics to look at to grow the company, you know who the clients are, you know how to run a business, you've made the contacts, you've made your early failures, all the meanwhile getting paid to do this. It's like going to Snail Farming University, but instead of you paying, they're paying you. So that when you're ready to go and launch your business, You know exactly what to do, you know who to hire, you know how you're going to sell, you know how you're not going to make the mistakes, you know how to get the capital. Everything you need you've already learned by working at that company. So model success. For everybody watching, guys, it's so important. You don't know about an industry, don't just launch in and blow your energy and your dollars and your time because it's going to take you so long to figure it out all on your own. You don't have to come up with all the answers yourself. Most of the challenges have already been figured out by somebody. You just have to leverage whatever already works and then add your spin to it. That's the difference. That's the key. You do that, you'll take off so much faster and have such a bigger impact and make way more money and be more fulfilled and happy and have a movement behind you. So model success. Find people who have done it in books, in mentors, in job opportunities. Learn from them, apply their knowledge to learn the business, know it inside out, then launch your company. And when you do, you'll hit the ground running and build a massive empire that you can be proud of. Believe. For those of you watching, I'd love to hear if you've had a mentor, people who you've modeled success, that you've gone after and said, I like that person, I'm going to research their story, and it made it work for you. Share it below. I'm curious, and it's also going to help inspire other people. So please leave a comment underneath. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. I love doing these videos for you, so please give it a thumbs up. And you want to see more videos like this, click on my face, subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much. I'll see you soon.