In this Ask Evan episode, host Evan Carmichael reads a detailed email from Jason, a recently laid‑off worker from Sacramento who wants to transition into a career as a personal‑development, speaking, and relationship coach. Evan acknowledges Jason’s situation, emphasizing that a shift in mindset—believing he deserves more and overcoming limiting beliefs—is essential. He advises against jumping into generic network‑marketing schemes unless they directly teach coaching skills, recommending instead to seek opportunities that provide relevant experience. The core strategy is to find a job or mentorship within the desired niche (coaching, speaking, product creation) to learn the business while earning income. Evan stresses the importance of defining a specific niche or unique value proposition within the broad personal‑development space. He proposes launching the coaching business part‑time, using low‑cost service offerings to acquire clients, build a revenue base, and validate the model before quitting the day job. This phased approach mitigates financial risk, allows skill development, and creates a client roster that supports a full‑time transition later. Throughout, Evan balances empathy for Jason’s stress with practical, step‑by‑step guidance, urging commitment over a year or two to master the craft before scaling.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of my newsletter readers, Jason, who just lost his job and he's trying to get started in a new business and is wondering how to make money to be able to get going. So hopefully I can answer his question for you. So Jason wrote in saying, good morning, "My name is Jason from Sacramento, California. Just last week I lost my job. Yes, things are a bit stressful in the house, but surprisingly my wife has been very supportive. She knows that my passion and dreams are in personal development, motivation, speaking, and relationship advisor expert field, although I strongly feel the urge to rush and get another 9-to-5 job. I feel that now is the time to go for my passion. Well, I want to get started in this field and really make my passions realize. I love how you set the trail for others who have this passion too." Also, during this time I need to split my income, preferably at home. Do you have any knowledge of what would be available to do that? I see all these network marketing ventures, but they just give me the flags up feeling. What do you suggest? I don't want to live the rest of my life just making $30,000 a year anymore. My family and myself deserve a lot more out of life. Losing this job might be a blessing, as my wife put it. Now I have the time to really be all that I can be, and I would love for you to be a direct part in it. Any words of advice? At this time would be very much appreciated. And yes, just in case you're wondering, yes, I'm willing to really listen to what you have to say and implement it as instructed. Sincerely, Jason. So thanks for the question, Jason. A long email, but I thought it was worth reading because I think a lot of people might have similar situations. Sorry to hear about the job. It could be a blessing in disguise. I think for you, it's great that you have a passion that you're searching for. You know what it is you're looking at, and it's also great you have a supportive wife who wants you to be all you can be as well. You'll notice, at least that I found, when entrepreneurs really take off is when they make that shift in their mindset to feel like they deserve better. And I've always found that whatever holds people back, it's typically limiting personal beliefs. So you think you're only worth so much, and so that's how much you make. And when you finally feel like you deserve more and that you're worth more, then you find changes start to happen. You make changes in your life to go for what you think you're worth. So it's great that you're hopefully overcoming these personal limiting beliefs and you're able to take that next step with yourself and support your family as well through that process. In terms of what you should do next, I don't think I'd recommend going after the network marketing opportunities. Not to hate on network marketing, but I think what you want to do is try to do something that's going to teach you about how to be successful with your passion. So unless you're— you said your passion is about personal development and being a coach— unless there's something in network marketing that will teach you that, I would probably stay away. And I'd try to find something that will teach me about how to be a good coach in that field, or speaker, or create products, or whatever it is you see as your kind of end goal. If you're going to get a job, or if you're going to, you know, earn money that's not through your business, it's always better to do it to learn something, right? So I wouldn't try to jump on something that's really far away from what you really want to do just to try to make some money, because if you're not passionate about it, if you just jump on some kind of network marketing opportunity or other opportunities, if you're not passionate about it and you don't really see it helping people, you're not going to make a lot of money from it. You're going to spend a lot of time trying to do it. It's going to be frustrating because it's not what you really want to do, and you're not going to end up making some good money from it. So strikes on all, you know, all 3 cases, the better way to go in my opinion would be to try to find something where you can learn about your field. So if you don't quite know how you're going to make money yet as this personal development coach, maybe it's one-on-one coaching, maybe it's online, maybe it's creating products, if you're not quite sure what you're going to do and how you're going to make money from it, I would try to find an opportunity to work with somebody who's already in your space. So find somebody who you look up to, you respect, who's doing what you want to do, and try to go learn from them. And that may be getting a job, it could be doing something part-time from home, or it could be something full-time even. But the idea here is you're learning the skills about how to run the type of business where you feel you need to be, and you're making money at the same time. So you're learning how to run the business while still making money, getting paid from somebody else. The next thing that I want you to try to think about is what is your specific niche or value-add gonna be? So personal development, huge space, relationships, huge space. What is it that you can specifically bring to an audience that's different than everybody else. And you may know that, and that's great. If you do, then whenever you're talking to somebody, if you're emailing me or whoever it is, you want to be really clear in that extra value that you add. If you don't know it yet, that's cool too. As you're starting up, you don't know a lot of the things about how you're gonna position yourself. So that's part of the self-discovery, and if you're working with another company, you'll learn about what you're really good at, and you'll kind of explore that a little bit more. The end goal is to be able to have a highly successful business, to hopefully make a lot of money, and to add a lot of value to people's lives. And that's the key. If you're looking at how much money you're gonna make, it's gonna come from adding a lot of value to people's lives. So what can you do as Jason, the coach, who can add a lot of value to people's lives? And from there, you're gonna be able to make a a lot of money. So working for somebody else teaches you the process of how to go through that, and you just gotta make sure that it's in that industry. The next thing I would try to do, so you've gotten some employment or a job working for somebody who's doing exactly what you're doing, you're starting to figure out how they do things and also what niche you could potentially do. The next thing is to start part-time. So it's great to quit your job, or in this case you got fired or laid off, It's great to kind of go cold turkey and jump into a business. The challenge is a lot of times it doesn't work out because you run out of money too fast. You run out of money, you put 3 months into it, and then you're out of cash. You got mortgage to pay, you got food to put on the table, and so you end up having to go back and get another 9-to-5 job, which you hate just as much. So the key here is if you're working at a— in some kind of job or opportunity where you're learning, Then you can start the op— your new business opportunity, your own business, part-time, and then you're still making money from your current company to be able to support your family and your lifestyle. So you start part-time, start going after client after client. Ideally, you're starting around some kind of service because it's low cost and you get close to your customer and you learn more about how you want to work with your potential clients and you build up from there. That's how I would probably do it. Ideally then you're able to build a roster, you're able to get to the point of survival where you're able to put food on the table and support your family, and then from there you can quit whatever job you're at, go full-time and explode your business. And you know it's going to work because you already have a little bit of a stable roster of clients who are supporting you. So that's how I would do it. Again, I know it can be hard when you've just been laid off to think clearly and be calm and collected and cool and do what's in your best interest. Sometimes emotions kind of run wild and it's got to be be a really tough situation I'm sure that you're facing right now. But that's what I would do. If that's your long-term goal, you really want to be successful as a coach or in that personal development relationship expert kind of field, the next step is to learn from somebody who's already doing it. And this is your, your long-term goal, right? It's not going to be, you know, tomorrow you're going to be the expert. You got to commit to doing this for a year or 2 years or whatever it is before you are able to really become that successful entrepreneur, go work for somebody else who's doing what you want to do, learn from them, figure out how you're going to market yourself and a specific value that you can add that's unique to you versus everybody else. Start part-time, build a small scale of, of clients, build an income base coming from your part-time business, build this to the point where you're able to get to that survival line and support yourself, and then from there Leave the job, you've learned what you need to learn. Continue expanding your business full-time, explode it, become hugely successful, be the expert that you wanna be, and tell me about your success, report back, I wanna hear it. So hopefully that helped. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. If you have a comment or something to say to Jason, or if you have a question about your own business, please leave it in the comment section below. I always read those and I try to respond to everybody who writes in. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.
