How to Build Professional Independence Through Entrepreneurship

Welcome to episode 111 of Black Belt Startup with Feras. Thank you for tuning in. What's new in the world of entrepreneurship? Every July here in the US, we celebrate the freedoms that generations before us fought to preserve. But today, I want to talk about a different kind of independence, professional independence, because millions of very talented professionals spent decades depending on someone else to determine their income, their promotions, their schedule, their priorities, and sometimes even their own sense of worth. Now, there's nothing wrong with employment, but many people aren't choosing it. They're trapped by it, not because they're lazy, not because they're incapable, but because they never— they've never intentionally built the skills that create options for them, including entrepreneurship. So today I want to cover what professional independence really means, what keeps people from achieving that independence, and the practical steps that you can, you can begin taking right now. Now, before we jump in, as always, thank you for those who are following us on, on YouTube, on LinkedIn, uh, here, uh, joining us live, and then also for those who send questions ahead of these live streams. So if you have a question, if you have a challenge in your business, you're not sure how to plan to take the leap, you're thinking about the idea, you have a business idea and you think it will help you and your family and achieve your goals, financial independence, building, being your own boss, all these dreams, all these goals that you have, if you have the idea but you're not sure how to take that first step, let me know. I will give you hopefully practical advice and I'll send you a resource that will help you attack that take that first step. If you're struggling, you've already started and you're struggling in acquiring clients, or if you've acquired clients and now you're struggling in retaining clients, let me know. I love to hear from you, and I also want to hear about your wins— small wins, big wins. You closed a small deal, someone made an introduction, you pitched, you demoed, you presented, you you sent a proposal, you negotiated, you closed the deal. I want to hear about that as well. I want to share the great news with the community. So whether you're having a challenge, you're not sure how to start or how to grow or how to scale the business, or you are having some good wins, some wins, I'd love to hear from you. Leave me a comment here on YouTube. And if it's something a bit private, you haven't really told the universe that you are starting a business, and you want to just send this to me privately, you can email me at info@startupwithferas.com. I read all these emails. I respond to them either on these live streams or I send you a, a personal response, but I'm here to help you. My mission is that after building, starting 7 businesses, growing 2 of them in the consulting space to 7 figures, and also we've grown one company, Enor, a digital analytics company, to 8 figures, and then we sold it to Dentsu, the global media giant. My mission is to help entrepreneurs start a business on solid ground and grow and scale with less pain, less issues, less challenges. At least, at least you'll hear the mistakes I've gone through and that I want you to avoid. So don't hesitate to reach out and let me know if you have any questions, any comments. Again, during this live stream, for those of you who are watching Or listening live, and this for those who are watching later or listening later. Let me know. I'm here to help you out. So let's step on the mat, and I want to talk about the six things, the thing, the six beliefs, habits, roadblocks that I want you to declare independence from. So. What's the first one? I want you to declare independence from waiting until you are ready. Now, for those of you who maybe just joined, or you're still, you're still not sure about what professional independence really means, let me, let me just elaborate on this just a little bit before I jump into this, this misconception of waiting until you're ready. When I say professional independence, I'm not saying you'll be escaping work. I'm not saying you're escaping your boss. You might have an awful job. Unfortunately, you're in a situation where you're stuck in this mundane job that you don't like. You're not learning. You don't have supportive team members or a supportive manager. You have a, you know, you're trying to escape your boss. This could be the reality today, but I'm not talking about this concept that you often hear on, on YouTube, on social media— do this, do this thing, or do these 3 things, or these 7 things, and you will have financial freedom and financial independence. In the next 2 months, you'll be generating $20,000 a month of, of consulting while you, you are— while you're only working 2 hours a day. I'm not that. This is the wrong channel. If that's what you're looking for, this is definitely the wrong channel and I'm the wrong guy for you. But what I want you to think about when we think about professional independence, it means I want you to increase your options. I want you to have multiple ways to earn income. I want you to build skills that people will be willingly— will pay for you, will pay you for willingly. And establishing that confidence that when things and circumstances change around us, that you can adapt. That is the freedom I'm talking about. Entrepreneurship is not that rosy picture. I'm all for it. This is my 7th venture. I'm still counting, but entrepreneurship requires a lot of work. So if you're escaping hard work, if you're escaping challenges, entrepreneurship is not, is not the option for you because it's very challenging. Entrepreneurship is 5 times harder than most people think it is. It's going to take them. So, so, but it is this idea that I have a bit more control over what I'm building. I have a bit more control over where I want to take this ship. I have a bit more control about the future for my family, that I can hire people and build an amazing culture and have these lifelong relationships with, with the team that will help me get to 6 figures, to 7 figures, to 8 figures. It is this mindset that you'll have options later. Later you can have more free time as you grow to 6 figures and 7 figures. You'll have options where you can bring in people, you can delegate, you can, you can enjoy more time with the family and friends and just more leisure time. But initially, if you're escaping the 9 to 5 thinking that you can be your own boss working 4 hours a day, it's— that's someone— it's a big disservice, especially for our young, younger, um, audience. Uh, hard work is what will get you to where you want to go in place. If you— in, in this, in, in this, in this world, if you are planning on achieving big things, hard work, skills, and sacrifice is what will get you there. A little bit of passion doesn't hurt, but it's not all about passion. It's about picking up skills, about reinventing ourselves. It's about identifying problems that people have and then working, working really hard to solving these problems and then establishing a name for yourself in the market that people will come back to you for more business and will refer people to you. So, so this concept of financial independence or professional independence, it's again, not just about escaping a bad day at work or escaping a horrible boss or about working 4 hours a week. This is not financial independence. This is not professional independence. Someone is selling you a bag of goods. If, if, if— and unfortunately, it is all over YouTube. It's all over social media. But that's not reality. I've been— I've lived in Silicon Valley now for close to 30 years, and I've met many founders. Um, many have, have established their businesses. Many have failed a lot, like I did initially on a couple, couple, couple of initiatives, struggled really hard for the first couple of years, but then you speak with these founders who established 8-figure companies, who have exits in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and those who have built something worthwhile, I haven't come across one, one that— who has done it working 4 hours a week. Only on YouTube, you can become a millionaire working 4 hours a week. Trust me, this is not real life. This is not reality. So, so with that, let's jump back into those six beliefs and roadblocks, habits that I want you to declare independence from. And the first one is waiting until you are ready. And that's I want you to be ready. I want you to have skills. As I said earlier, I want you to do some planning. I don't want you to wait. 6 months to develop a 100-page business plan? No. Um, reading, planning, training, watching YouTube videos, that's all great. Buying a course, that's all fine. Learn for a while, but at one point you have to— as I always say, you have to step on the mat. And the problem is it— is it— the problem is that readiness usually happens after you take actions. Not the other way around. I mean, there's no amount of theoretical knowledge and data that will help you build a sales muscle until you start knocking on doors, until you start going to events and speaking with people, going to a networking event at a local conference or local meetup, or even setting up a— some sort of cold email, cold outreach sequence. And then at the end of the day, you have to work with clients. You have to get on the phone and speak with people or meet them in person. So your first set of clients, they're not going to come from planning or from research or from asking ChatGPT. All those things are important and they play a role in helping you get ready, but declaring Independence from waiting until you're ready will happen when you take action. So confidence is built after you take action. So a quote I recently— I'm trying to remember which book I read that from. I think it was in Hidden Potential by Adam Grant. He says there are different types of courage that we need to have. When we're when we are reinventing ourselves and when we're doing what we want to establish big things, and he says putting yourself in the ring before you're ready—that is really important. And second, the second type of courage, and that's that's really important, especially for new founders who struggle with sales and marketing like I did. I I didn't know. I never never sold. To a small business owner. Never had to go and sell a $1,000 project to a business owner and having to go and visit this person 5 times to, to get them to sign a deal and pay me, pay me a $100 down payment. I never— I had to do it. I had to learn it. So, so those of you who are struggling in taking that step and going out and speaking with people, or, or, or just you're new to marketing, and there's so many ways you can market market the business. I get it. What Adam Grant said in his book, he said the second type of courage is to make more mistakes than others make attempts. So, so think about it. Making mistakes in business, in martial arts, in, in, in a hobby that you're developing, all that's part of learning. If when I go to practice, even now after decades of martial arts, and I go on the mat and I am a 4th degree black belt in Aikido, for those of you who follow the channel, you know that, and when I go and train, we have our senior teacher, the teacher of teachers, Shihan, he comes around and says, Feras, you're not moving your center. Enough, you're using too much power, the angle is wrong. So it's annoying in a way that I'm still making mistakes after all these years, but that's how I learn. You have to have that mindset of, if I don't step on the mat, if I don't go out, if I don't send a proposal, if I don't send that email, if I don't get feedback from my audience, I'm not learning. I'm not sure if I'm doing— if this is— I'm not getting signals. So getting a good signal, that's great. That someone, yeah, I like your proposal. Let's discuss your timeline and the price. That's great. But if they say, you know what? Your proposal came way, way too high, or the timeline is way— the deliverables are way too far out in the future. So these are all signals. You can learn from that. and fix the proposal for the next pitch. You can fix, um, if you're not sure how to speak with people and you're stumbling the first time you go to a networking event or you're on a maybe virtual meetup, that's okay, but you got to practice. If you don't practice, if you don't, if you don't have this deliberate practice, you will not build those muscles. That readiness muscle happens with action before it happens It doesn't happen in planning. So again, for those of you who are just joining now live, we are— I'm covering the 6 habits or the 6 mindsets or the 6 roadblocks that I want you to declare independence from. And the first one was on waiting till you are ready, until you're ready. You have to take actions You have to do a little bit of preparation, a little bit of planning, but not, not waiting months till my 100— to my 100-page business plan is ready before I take that first action. Readiness happens with, uh, with you taking the steps. So that is— let me see if we have any comments or any questions. Again, don't hesitate to leave your question or comment. All right, no comments at this point, so we'll move on to the second thing I want you to declare independence from. Declare independence from perfectionism. And we all have some elements of this in different ways, in different aspects of our life, but perfectionism Looks responsible that I want to produce a quality pitch, a quality proposal, a quality website, a quality YouTube video. That's great, but you're sacrificing progress if you're just waiting and keep delaying and delaying, delaying delivering something till it is perfect. So while it might feel productive, In reality, it's really that fear of wearing a business suit or picking up the phone and calling someone or sending that email to the old friend of yours to tell them about your business. So I want you to obviously, obviously, I want you to have a professional website, a professional LinkedIn profile, a professional page. So some preparation, some learning is required, and I have a number of tens of videos and a number of playlists on every aspect of the business. So if you're struggling with pitching, just go. If you're struggling with writing proposals, I have the Ultimate Guide on Proposals. I'll walk you through the channel in a little bit and point out certain videos that will help you overcome some of these challenges. But I don't want you to wait and keep reiterating, iterating on your website to make it perfect, because it will never be perfect. Websites are living things. You keep adding to it, you keep improving it. Your offer doesn't have to be perfect. Your pricing definitely won't be perfect the first few times. That's okay. Your first proposal will be— will have major holes in them. That's okay. Again, That's what I experienced. Um, my first proposal was awful, so I created the Ultimate Guide to Writing Proposals, and I have an actual template that you can use. And I have 2 AI assistants, one in, in the ChatGPT environment and one in the Google Notebook LM environment, that you can provide input to, and then it gives you a, a pretty thorough proposal that will avoid the major issues That I typically see in proposals. So don't wait for the first proposal to be perfect. Even if you use ChatGPT or Claude and you ask it all the questions, you'll initially, when you're starting a business or if you're struggling with sales, there's still many areas of the business you're not aware of. You're not— they're the known knowns and the unknown unknowns and known unknowns and all of that. So there are areas of the business you don't even know what to ask ChatGPT about or Claude about. So, so improvements again in here, in, in this— if you suffer from this, the perfectionism, you, you really have to ship before things are final or before because they're perfect. Don't be sloppy. Don't take my words out of context. I do want you to give it your best to make sure what you're putting together is professional. There's no excuse if you have typos or grammar issues in your email or in your proposal, especially today with AIs everywhere. I've got all these pop-ups in whichever environment, if I'm in Google Docs or Google Spreadsheet, like all these AI buttons are now coming up, they want to inject themselves for me to use it to make sure my email is properly written, so there shouldn't be any issues that. If you send an email to someone or a proposal that has typos and grammatical issues, that's on you. But once you've, once you've developed it, you run it through AI, proofread it, all that good stuff, then send the proposal. As I said, your pricing, your timeline, the way maybe you scope the project will have gaps, but you'll get signals if you send one proposal a month, you're going to get one signal. Maybe it's a positive signal. They sign on that proposal. That's great. But it took me 20 proposals to close one deal early on. Later, after years of practice, our close rate collectively with the sales team we had was 1 in 3. So we went from 5%, 1 in 20, to 33%. And this spans Small businesses, mid-sized businesses, Fortune 1000, Fortune 500, Fortune 50. We had Google, we had Salesforce as clients. Those were in the Fortune— I think they were part of the Fortune 10 at one point. So you get practice, you practice and you get signals from the industry, from your clients about what you're pitching, what you're proposing, and then you can take that and improve the next one. That is really the core of today's session is, is on collecting, on taking actions and then getting feedback and then acting on that feedback. That's how we improve. So the good thing here is that if you've got something going, you think it's 95% ready, send it. As, who was it? Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, he said, he said, if you ship If you're not, if you're not ashamed of your first release of your product, then you've shipped too late. So if, if you think it's perfect, that means you've been perfecting this product. Same thing applies to services, to consulting. Then you've shipped too late. No matter how complete in your own mind or how perfect in your own mind the proposal is, people will still critique it. So, so you want to get that, those signals. You want to go get those reps in as soon as you can. Again, don't keep my words— take my words in context. I want you to do some preparation, some planning. Use AI, use the tools I provide, use the assets I have, but then don't wait for this to be perfect. You have to build that muscle of not waiting for perfectionism and acting, acting a little bit before, before you're ready. And I, there's a story that, what was his name? Adam, Adam, Adam Lyons, I believe. Yeah, Adam Lyons, who had this great business idea, but he didn't have any capital, no funding. And, and he wanted to, to really, he believed in the idea. So instead of waiting for introduction or for permissions, he started to email people and he emailed, he cold emailed Mark Cuban, and the hook said, are you ready to disrupt the insurance industry? So that was the catchy subject line, and then Mark followed up with him, invested, the company eventually reached— it was a unicorn, I believe it reached over $1 billion in valuation. So what's the worst thing that could happen? They don't open the email, they say no, I was listening to a book, a book called Super Founders recently, just finished it, and one of, one of a founder who built several companies including one unicorn, a billion-dollar company, and he's now an investor, and he says he reads every email he gets. Highly accomplished founder and highly accomplished investor. He said, I read every email, and he said, if the email, if the founder who sent this email If they've done their due diligence, they understand the industries I invest in, they understand the type of companies I invest in, and they understand my preferences, which is available through following this person on LinkedIn and see what he published. If someone has done that, I always reply, and more often than not, I meet with them, I get on a call with them to understand what is it that they have to offer and if it's something I want to invest in. But if someone sends this cold generic email, hello there, I have this best idea since butter and sliced bread and I want you to invest in it, he said, I won't reply to those. Those people just are lazy. So the idea here is that don't wait for things to be perfect, act on what you have, whether it's a proposal, whether it's a pitch, whether it's a marketing campaign, whether it's a website, whether it's a LinkedIn profile, a YouTube video, you have to put in the reps. So that is the second point that I want you to declare independence from. The third point is on— it's a bit more tactical, but it has to do with the mindset, with, with, with, again, with action. It's— I want you to declare independence from The fear of selling. Now, I speak with 2 to 3 founders every week on the average, and I go to events and a lot of founders approach me, and I get comments on the YouTube channel, on the videos, and on LinkedIn. And a lot of founders who start consulting businesses, they come from technical backgrounds. Some of them are on their own, some of them have co-founders. but depending on what stat you look at, but anywhere 60 to 70% of founders who start a business don't have a technical background, in consulting, that is. They don't have, sorry, they don't have a sales and marketing background. They're technical. They know their space. They know HR, they know IT, they know financial services, they know home care, whatever consulting you're doing. So, They start a business, they're very good at what they do, but they have very little or zero background in marketing and in selling. And they think just because they're great at what they do, business will come their way. And I've seen this more often than, than I can remember, but they spend a lot of time— these types of, this type of founders They spend a lot of time perfecting their website. Go back to that second point I just mentioned. They spend a lot of time on the LinkedIn profile, business card. All these are, are good to have, but that will not bring you sales. It used to be many years ago, 20, 25 years ago on the internet, build it and they will come. Now it does— it hasn't worked for 15 years. You have to build it, but But then you have to go out and get people to come and visit your website or follow you on LinkedIn and see the value that you add with your content, with your ideas, with your case studies, with your white papers, whatever it is that you're working on, people have, oh, this person is an authority in HR, this person is really useful in media and marketing, again, whatever consulting area that you're in, in workflow automation, in implementing AI, for our sales processes. So the technical skill itself, the domain knowledge that you have, it's a prerequisite. If you want to be a consultant, you have to have the know-how. Obviously, if you're a sales and a marketing person, you can partner, you can have a co-founder who's technical, and then both of you will complement each other, and then you go out and sell. But if you are a technical founder, or maybe 2 co-founders, one is really strong in operations, one is in back office, one is very strong in the technical area of the business, but none of you, you haven't done sales yet like me and my co-founder early on, you have to build that sales muscle because as I always say, no sales, no revenue, no revenue, no business. And unfortunately, the the survival rate and and and the the success rate of businesses is very low, and that discourages people. Some stats say 50% of the businesses within a few years, within five years, they're they're they're they're just gone. They close. Other stats actually bring it up to like 95% of businesses fail. And a lot of you out there technical, knowledgeable. Experts, and you know you can offer a solution and help clients, but you're hesitating because you hear these stats and people failing in business. And you know, you know, a lot of people maybe in your, in your circle that have tried something and failed, and that, that adds to the fear of starting a business. But a lot of these failures happen because people did not do what they were supposed to be doing. Of course, there are external factors. Sometimes it's regulation, sometimes it's something like a pandemic, sometimes it's shifts in the markets, technology disruptions. All of those are external factors that could impact, that negatively impact a perfect plan. I get that. But a lot of entrepreneurs, they don't take the time, the effort to do some level of business planning, some level of vetting the business idea, and then go out and speak with potential buyers. I'm working with an entrepreneur now and he's building something, which is great. I want you to build, don't just wait. But at the same time, they haven't done any validation. They've spoken with a couple people and that's it. You can't— you cannot build a business based on what you think is, is, is good for, for society or for your target audience. So it is imperative that you start talking to people. And the best, the best way to learn how to sell and how to pitch, as I said earlier, is that you take action. So I remember when I first started, my business partner and I sat down and said, okay, let's do this, right? I couldn't land a job after 7 weeks of sending resumes and, and, and being very, very proactive about getting a job after I was laid off. I didn't— I couldn't get a single interview. It was a very, very dry market, job market. So we decided to start this business, and we started it, and we sat down, and for a couple weeks we put together a plan, a financial plan, a marketing plan, a 5-year vision on what we want to take this business, where we want to take that business to, and after the first week or so, we noticed that we were finding excuses not to be out there, and we had to encourage each other, and we had to muster the courage to go out and talk to people, so we started with our own warm network, And that's, that's how I learned sales. Like, I went to, to a friend of ours and I said, hey, I know, I know you know a couple of restaurant owners and we are building websites. And this was 2003 and people needed websites and it was a new thing at the time, so people weren't sure if it was a good thing for small businesses. So, so, so he made those introductions and actually he was nice enough, he was kind enough to go with me to one of those meetings And I stumbled and I struggled and I stuttered and I didn't know what to say exactly, but there was that channel or that trust support from my friend who knew the owner really well, and he said, he talked to me, he said, this person is reliable, they deliver on their promises, so my pitch wasn't perfect, but with that introduction from my friend, a mutual friend, it helped bridge that gap. So, so I went back to our home office at the time, and I spoke with my business partner. I said, you know, that was awful. I was sweating. So, so I documented, I took notes. Okay, here's what, here's what I said, here's what I should have said. And then we were taking actually some sales courses. We, I, we had a set of CDs at the time. I was actually taking a lot of notes, and I would, I would practice all of those statements and questions and how to answer objections and how to handle rejections, like all of that was theoretical, theoretical knowledge. But then as soon as I started to go out and speak with people, that's when I put that to practice. And that's when people start to give feedback. Some said, come back next week. Some people said, no, no, we don't need this. And others said, sure. Took us a couple months to close that first deal. But it took also a lot of practice, a lot of rejections, and the practice was at home initially, the theoretical practice, but then you have to test it out in the field. So if you have a fear of selling, you can do it gradually. And in psychology— and I know we have a comment here, let me just see. Uh, um, yeah, I'll just— I, uh, just want to acknowledge I have the 2 comments I'll get to in a second, but let me just finish this part. So, so, so in psychology they talk about The anxious brain, the fears that we all have, some of it is primal fear. There are 2 ways to handle these fears. Either gradual, you start to desensitize yourself from whatever you fear, or there's something they call flooding where you just do it right there. So just go to an event where there's 100 people and have a goal of speaking with 20 of them. But if you're not that type, you don't want to just jump in the water right away. You want to do it gradually, dip your toes in. Then you can start, maybe go to a virtual event, and maybe the first time don't speak, just listen. The next time participate, and the next time go to a very small gathering in person if you can. And then you can get more comfortable being surrounded by strangers and then talking about your, your business. You're not pitching, you're not selling Initially, so that fear of selling, I get it because we have we hear all these issues. We see we have perceptions of salespeople. They're sleazy. They they they're trying to cheat you. They're trying to sell you what what you don't need. As a consultant, you're not that. You are a trusted advisor. You are solving a problem. So so you you have to overcome. Kind of erase all these misconceptions about sales and you're there to solve a problem. And initially, especially in a B2B sale, it usually takes a number of meetings. It takes anywhere from 2 to 8 weeks if you're selling to small businesses. It could take 3 to 4 to potentially 9 months according to some stats out there if you're selling to large enterprise. So one thing at a time. If the fear is of me speaking with people, do it gradually in a meetup, virtual meetup, then go in person, then practice on the way there. And then when you're on your way back, okay, what did I say? What, what could I have said better? They asked me questions I didn't have answers to. That's okay. Those are not mistakes. You've learned. Those are, those are not failures. Those are lessons you learned. The trick here is that to learn from those experiences so you can apply it in your next event. So let me see, we have, uh, some comments. So this is from That One Guy. Thank you for being here. And let's see, do you formulate an offer first or have validation calls with your target market? If the latter, how do you get those conversations started? So that's a very good question. Uh, thank you for being on, on the live stream and for asking the question. So I mean, you have to have some idea. Let me let me say, you know, we consultants we say it depends all the time, right? So so it depends. But if you have an idea of what you want to sell, let's let's just take an example. Let's say like an AI example. I've talked to very I don't know five founders in the last couple weeks on they want to do something with AI. Not technical AI, more helping. companies adopt AI. So if you know, let's say you have, you've worked for 5 years in HR and you've worked with mid-sized businesses, so now you've, instead of saying, I want to sell my services to the world, like I want to do process automation and AI implementation to the universe, you're very, I want to do it for HR departments in mid-sized companies And if you've worked, you have experience, let's say, in finance or in tech in that sector. So you've already done 3 things. You've went from the universe to mid-sized companies to HR departments in, let's say, in the healthcare industry. So you've already niched down enough, I think, to start identifying people you can speak with about your idea. So some level of, we call it niching, market audience or target audience definition, your ICP, ideal client profile, some level of definition I think is really helpful, enough to, I think as Rob Fitzpatrick in his book, The Mom Test, he said enough where I know I can find places where these people are. So if you're selling fitness, I think that example he used in his book, to let's say you want to go after sort of offer a premium service in wellness, potentially you can subscribe to a fancy gym somewhere in the fancy part of town and go there for a month and then you can get to meet people and start those conversations. So I think some level of definition is required initially, And then you can start that validation calls or emails. And I have a full video on a 10-step system to validate an idea. And I believe last week's livestream was on, like, don't go to people and say, do you think this is a great idea? Most people, especially people who know you, your parents, your siblings, your family, they're too polite. They're too nice. They'll say, yeah, yeah, great. They want to encourage you. So you don't want to say, is this a good idea? You want to ask about, have you run into these kinds of problems? So ask about the past. Have you— how have you solved these problems? Did you have workarounds? Did you hire people for it? So ask, dig into how people— if people had those problems and then how they've solved and how they've looked into it, maybe there's a very cheap workaround, and then whatever idea you have to solve this problem just won't make sense because they can do it very cheaply, right? So, um, very inexpensively. So, so that would— I would, I would prepare. I would first define the audience and where, where are they? Are they online, on Facebook groups, on LinkedIn groups? If you happen to live in a, in a city where they have local meetups, I'm a big proponent of being out there meeting with people. Um, you learn so much, you establish connections, you find your future employees. future customers, and you get to practice, so to the extent that you can be out there connecting with people, I think that, and ask the right questions, and if you're really, really early on, you're still in that vetting and validation phase, you're not pitching yet, you might have this urge to pitch, I would say if you're still early, early on, you want to get signals from the market, and if you speak with And I have, I'll share this in a second, I have this 10+5 worksheet and process where I want you to speak with 10 people and research 5 competitors, and the result of all this exercise will really give you what you need to know about a business, about the business idea, and if you get 10 people to tell you this is not something they'll buy, it's not something they have an issue with, It might feel awful to you that you thought it was the best idea and everyone is saying no, no, no. That's a gift, man. That's really a gift because you're not now— you know, that kind of signal will now prevent you from spending months of time and potential a whole lot of money on marketing of something that no one has a use for. Let me actually share this spreadsheet. I will put it in Um, in the description. Give me just one second, I have it right here. Uh, where was it? But I want to just spend a minute on it. Uh, it really helps with— and I know we have a couple— not my— hello, my computer. Okay, no, not this sheet. Give me one second. Okay, it's— does it show? It doesn't show. Let me share. Sorry, just one second here. I thought I had it shared. It's not, but it's right here. You should be able to see it right now. Yeah, so, uh, make it a bit bigger right here. So in this spreadsheet, and I'll include the description in, uh, I'll include the link in the description of the show, uh, right here. So talk to 10 people, you can— friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, roommates, you name it. Just list the people. And do you have a need for this? Have you hired someone to fix it for you? And And then I have some sample data. I think we use an IT example in there. And then also that you do the same thing, research 5 competitors, check out their social profile, check out their website, reviews, all of that good stuff. And here I have a tab on weak questions and better questions. So again, don't say, do you think this is a good idea? Would you pay for this? All these are, does this sound valuable? Should I offer this service? These are all weak questions. Again, thanks to Rob Fitzpatrick and his book that I read recently, kind of helped me fine-tune some of the ways I recommend to founders and ask better questions here about the past, about issues they faced, how they solved them, and then take copious notes. So this is on On validation, so I hope this answered your question. Back to let's see we have a couple other comments here before I go to the next point. This is from Raw Mosafi. Okay, so great stuff there. Thank you so much. A lot to learn. Who have been individual contributors or contracts wanting to slide into consulting? So the first question is, well, thank you, thank you for your comment, developing the sales muscle, so okay, I just talked about developing the sales muscle, so what I want you to do, Raw Mo Safi, is once you identify the customer, the ideal customer profile, as I said earlier, zoom in on the industry, on the company size, on the type of people you want to meet with, find where these people are, and you have to find creative ways to connect with them. Them. And then you just have to start doing, doing, start those conversations. So when I say the word pitch, some people, I don't know how to pitch. I'm not a salesperson. I'm a techie. It's a conversation starter. Okay. So, so that, so, so that's on developing the sales muscle. The second problem here. Okay. Let me put it here. It says, uh, if the issue isn't the fear of sales, Good. How to find these folks to talk to who are buyers? The ICP is for folks who want to do it all fully remote. This might be the lead gen problem. So that's a good point. If you— how do you find your ideal client profile? And I have the ultimate guide to sell— sorry, the ultimate guide— I have so many ultimate guides now, crisscrossing. No, the ultimate guide to starting a consulting business. It's like 50+ minutes. Breaking all this stuff down. So check it out. I'll put the link in the description. But if, if you live in a city, in a town where you have events, local Chamber of Commerce, you have events, meetups, you have industry associations, ideally, ideally you find people, HR managers, where they meet. You, you have, you have to identify your, your, your ICP, your ideal client profile, and then Where do they congregate? So that's one thing. Now, if you're doing things virtually, and I covered that in the video, how do I connect with these people? You can do cold outreach. I'm not against cold outreach initially if you're just starting out or if you're about to take the leap. I'm a proponent of reaching out to your warm circle first. Cold outreach has a place, has a time, but initially, if you're validating, if you want to tweak your messaging, to tweak your pricing, find people in your network who are the ICP, and then if that's not the case, do they know an ICP? So for example, let's say back to our HR example. So we said, I want to sell to HR managers or HR directors for mid-sized companies in the healthcare industry. So in your network, if you have, let's say, 1,000 people in your network on LinkedIn, Download, you can go to settings on LinkedIn, download that list, and then see which of these people work in mid-sized companies in healthcare. So from 1,000, you might have 20. So then how do I reconnect with these people? And again, in that video, I shared actually examples of emails you can send out, and basically you reach out, and if you've maintained a good relationship with these people, then it's an easier outreach, but if not, say, hey, we met at this conference a couple of years ago. Hope you're doing well. On my end, I started a business and I focus on this, and I'd love the opportunity to speak with you to learn more and validate what I'm doing. That's totally okay. A lot of people, most people want to help others. So initially, if you're in this validation phase, don't sell. It's hard for me to say don't sell. Always be selling, of course, but initially you really have to. Some signals. So do that for a couple weeks, but put a target. Identify ways to find, find answers to your questions, um, in person if at all possible. But if you can't, if you're in another country, or if you are in a small town, you don't have access to things, see if you can invest a little bit of time to travel to a place where you can meet people in person, or start doing active Outreach to people in in in in that you want to sell to, or people who can connect you and know about the problems you're trying to solve. So I hope this is helpful. The next one here is we talked about sales muscle. Yep. The next one is let me put it here on screen. If you were going to start from scratch and you wanted to validate B2B offerings for consulting, how fast could you get conversations to validate market? market pain points, assume no warm network, and how? Well, if you don't have a warm network, that's tricky. I don't want to, you know, you know your network better than I do, but I want to question that for a little bit, like you don't have anyone? If you're a student, I mean, I speak on college campuses too, I love helping the next generation of founders, the younger folks, And I tell them, even if you're a student, if you're a junior or you're a senior, you still have time to connect with your professors, with guest speakers, with people you meet at events on campus. And the funny thing is sometimes I speak to a class of 100 or 50 students, and I say, apply what I'm telling you. Go and set up a LinkedIn profile. A lot of them already have it, and then reach out to guest speakers. and connect with them. A lot of these older people would love to help the younger ones, the students, and the funny thing is out of a class of 50 students, maybe maximum 5 would reach out. Now, maybe I bored them to death and they don't want to talk to me, that's possible, but in many cases, I'm there to help you and free, no, no, there's no catch, I'm not selling, I offer a few slots every week, pro bono, no charge. A lot of people helped me along the way, and I— that's how I, I give back. So, so a lot of people don't ask. A lot of people are afraid of asking. A lot of people, they just— they're not ready, sorry to say. They're lazy. They're not putting the time to, to put— they're not putting the time to reach out to people. So, so I want to question, you know, or at least, you know, assume no warm network. I want to question that assumption Because even if you're a student, there should be— you should be able to access a network. And then if not, I mean, go deep into college, high school friends, college friends, people at the gym, people in a previous job, vendors, suppliers. You know, there's just— there has to be some— someone around you you can bounce off ideas. Now, the one thing I want you to avoid is to talk to people who've never done entrepreneurship or who have no idea about business. If you ask these people for feedback, you're going to get bad and wrong signals, and getting the wrong signal is worse than getting no signal because that— a wrong signal, a bad signal will send you off on a tangent away from from your goal. So I would say it's never too late to start a network. I remember early on, before we had Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups and Reddit, we had these things, Yahoo Groups. These were forums. They're still available, and people would ask questions, and then you have people within the forum answering, and I remember I added I added that on my calendar. Every day I would go and read all the questions and wherever I could offer value, I would provide no charge. I would just give my feedback, my thoughts, and eventually, and that's when we pivoted and started to focus on analytics, and I started to offer some useful tips. Eventually, people would email me privately with questions and I still, I was generous with my time answering questions. questions, and that led to numerous deals over time. I never, not once, not once I pitched on that forum. I was always answering questions. So you have to kind of, if you can't do it in person, uh, because you don't have a warm network, as you mentioned, 2 things I'm asking you to do, I'm recommending that you do, build a network, 3 things. First, build a network. Second, dig deeper and identify people that you can reach out to and speak with. And third, find where these people are and become an active participant in that community. If you can't do it in person, there are virtual online options. All right, so, so, um, let me, let me go to the next point and then I'll come back. I know we have a couple other comments, but let me, let me, let me go to the next point here. Uh, actually, let me answer that last question we have. So your first started years ago, I believe it was data analytics, and did really great, thank you, and what would you offer today based on your market experience to B2B versus B2C and how connecting to Black Belt journeys? So yes, I mean, my first business was back in 2003, we struggled a lot for 2 years, so I think a lot of the lessons are still very applicable, At the time, web design and online marketing were cutting edge. I mean, imagine now we take it for granted. You go and search Google or you search Google as a verb now. People didn't know what Google was. People laughed when I said Google at the time, or we go on ChatGPT or Claude and we ask the question and we get the answers. So, so when we were going around and saying you can sell online, that was as new and as novel as sort of AI for business today. So, and I mean, I struggle. I mean, I've said this on many videos. Initially, the first 2 years were really, really painful. Exhausted all my savings, but we figured it out. So initially, we were selling web design, online marketing. Later, a few years into it, we pivoted to analytics and then dropped everything else and niched down on analytics and became one of the Google certified partners, later became one of the top global partners. Eventually, we were the number one Google certified partners on analytics, on Google Analytics. So I think the mindset, the type of service, and the pricing might have been different, but I can tell you with the 7 ventures that I've started, and I've always started with co-founders, so I use the word we most of the time because it wasn't just me, but with the 7 ventures, That process is the same. So the first, it took us about 7 or so, 7 to 8 years to reach 7 figures in our first business. And then we did learn. And then the second business in consulting, it took us about half the time, about 3.5 years to reach 7 figures because you learn a lot. I still didn't do it in 6 months as people claim on YouTube. Maybe I'm not smart enough. I don't know. But I know it takes a lot of hard work, especially in consulting. It's not like you're building software. So I think in terms of what to do today, what to offer today, I do have a video, recent video on 26 ideas for 2026. So if you really want to have your own business and be your own boss, but you're not sure What path to take yet? Check out this this video on the 26 ideas for for 2026. Let me let me let me share. I think I have the channel open here. Let me just share that with you here so you know which video I'm talking about. Here, yeah, there's a couple of videos I want to I want to share here. If you go to the channel at Startup with Ferris, Ferris spelled like my first name F E R A S. Um, this is— so yeah, this is the video I mentioned earlier, how, how to know if your business idea will succeed. This is on vetting, a 10-point system. And then this is here, quit your day job. That's a bit more aggressive than I usually— I usually have thumbnails, but it's 26 profitable business ideas for 2026. So, so check that out, um, if you, if you have questions about, about what what idea to pursue. But with that, I want to say ideas are a dime a dozen. There are always ideas. So you have to do some validation, but the best thing is to map your skills. So the market demand has to be there. Data entry may be not the best thing to get into these days, right? With AI. So there has to be a market demand, but you want to You want to have the optimal way if there's, and I cover this in detail in The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business, think of it as a Venn diagram. There's what the market is looking for, the demand in the market, problems people have, and then the skills that you have to solve these problems, right? And then the third circle, and that's really important, people have to be willing to pay for this stuff. A lot of times people just are not willing to pay for it because they can solve the problem through a shortcut or there's not enough pain or urgency. For them. So I would say map, do a mapping of your skills, and I have, I'll add a link in the description to identifying your soft skills, your hard skills, and then mapping that to what problems you can solve, and then who is it that, which group of the population has these problems, and then you want to reach out to them. Because then, I mean, you're not building software. I speak mostly on consulting and services, so people always need accountants, people always need IT consultants, people always can use process automation, and they can— and they can— they like to— companies want to save money and make more money. They want to make more money, they want to save on cost, they want to improve employee satisfaction, they want to improve client satisfaction, These are always, always in demand, and that's what companies are for. They want to make money, they want to save on cost, they want to improve customer satisfaction, they want to improve employee satisfaction. So if you can tie the problem to one of these categories, then, and then the way you're framing it, the way you're differentiating that you can deliver maybe faster, or you can deliver cheaper, or you can deliver on time and you're responsive, You are the go-to resource, you are reliable, you offer 24/7, whatever differentiates you, I think that's what you want to validate. In a consulting space, it's different than software, and if you're trying to disrupt healthcare, that's a different discussion altogether, but in consulting and services, it's what will make you, the consultant, unique, and it's the skills, the hard, the soft skills, the way you approach things, That's what you want to build some traction around. So I hope that's helpful. Let me know. You can leave a comment if you have more questions, or you can email me at info@startupwithferus.com if you have something more specific. Good. Great. So now, on to the 4th point I want you to declare independence from, and this is really, really critical. It is declaring independence from imposter syndrome. I think we've all experienced it. Some of us might admit to it. Some of us might not, but almost every successful entrepreneur has experienced imposter syndrome, whether you're doing a pitch, you're doing public speaking, you're publishing a blog post, You're going to an event. Do I know this stuff? Am I capable enough? Can I deliver? Can I sell? Are people going to laugh at me? Do I speak funny? All of that. So the difference between successful founders and those who struggle is that, as I said earlier, the theme of this livestream is taking actions. Confidence is built through evidence. You're not going to be perfect, as we said earlier. You're not going to have— be 100% ready, but every conversation, every proposal, every new client, a new delivery, every successful project, that's where confidence compounds. So declaring that fear of imposter syndrome is not saying it doesn't exist, is not negating or saying, hey, I'm courageous, I'm brave, I'm strong, I'm confident. No, no, no, I get it. We all— it comes to us and to our mind depending on our upbringing and the way we look at the world and if we've done it before or not. If I'm doing a demo, a martial arts demo, sometimes, you know, they have senior teachers watching like What are they thinking about my techniques? You know, it happens even even after years and years of training. Same thing in business. So so I think it's important to recognize it that hey, I've done my homework. I've prepared. I have five years, ten years of experience. I've researched the client's industry. I've researched the typical objections. I've done some competitive research, so I've done my homework. That preparation should help you, should help you mustering the courage to overcome this imposter syndrome. Don't— it's there. We, we— it comes to us in different ways. It plays with our mind. But to overcome this fear, um, you know, you, you just, as I said throughout this whole livestream, it's, it's about Taking actions—that's really what's going to help you overcome that. So, but but preparation—I think it was Eisenhower who said—the the the plan—the plan is nothing and planning is everything because the first time you put that plan into action, something will go off. You know, Mike Tyson—you know—the fight plan goes out of the ring, out of the window after that first punch. Then you come back to whatever you trained yourself. When, you know, in martial arts or, you know, if you're doing some light sparring, you're practicing a specific— how to defend against a specific kick or a specific punch or a specific move, you and your partner are working in a specific structured way. Now, when you go into freestyle sparring, You don't know what's happening, so you're going to you're going to go back to whatever your training is, your mindset that I can deal with this. You're not going to stop breathing. You're not going to run away. You're not going to be stiff. You're going to to the extent that you can breathe and let let the muscles that you've built do the work for you. There's just not enough time to think. And the same thing in business: you do you do your preparation. You prepare your pitches, you research the event that you're going to. If you're going to a conference of staying with our HR example, if you're going to a meetup or a conference for HR managers, just research the heck of the needs of HR managers this year, right? Mid-sized businesses, what sort of challenges? Probably they don't know how to adopt AI. How do we— there's so many tools out there now. To screen candidates and to optimize the whole hiring process, but people are not happy with it. We're doing— we're very efficient in collecting resumes and screening resumes, but we're not finding and hiring the right talent. So you can come in as an HR consultant and help solve that problem. All right, so good stuff. Moving on, we have 2 more points and habits that I want you to declare independence from. And number 5 is declaring independence from believing that expertise alone creates opportunity. As a consultant, you have to have some experience, you have to have some expertise. Ideally, you've built a few years, you have a few years, ideally you have a few years under your belt with the technical area of your domain knowledge, your domain knowledge spans maybe again HR, IT, automation, consulting for dental practices, then consulting in healthcare, in finance, in streamlining billing processes, whatever it is that you have experience in, that is foundational in consulting. Now you don't have to be a top expert. You don't have to be an author and you've published 3 books on the topic. No, you have to know, you have to be a couple of steps ahead of the customers you're serving. So I speak with a lot of people who want to get into AI, AI as in applied AI, as in helping companies adopt AI. So you can look at what I tell people, look at what McKinsey, the McKinseys and the PwCs and the Deloites are doing for large clients. You can, and that's all public information, you can take that and refine it and take parts of it and apply it to small businesses because businesses of all sizes want to get on this AI adoption wave. Some of it is hype, some of it is real, so you can be the consultant who can come in and help the HR manager, again, using that same example, optimize their hiring processes, optimize their employee performance processes, and identify things that can be automated and things that cannot and should not be automated, dealing with people issues, making sure people feel they're heard, having one-on-one conversations, educating managers on how to deal with awkward situations and how to provide feedback, constructive feedback to to their team members. Those are things that can be facilitated by AI, but you still have to train those new managers on how to deliver the message, right? You can't— AI can give you maybe what to say and maybe how to say it, but you still have to— you have to have that empathy to show it to— for the managers to truly believe that they want to help their team members, right? So you as an HR consultant, you can come in and do all of the above. So you have to have experience in that area. And, but you don't have to be, 2 things, you don't have to be a top expert, you can have zero experience and sell consulting, unless your co-founder does have that experience, but you don't even have to be, you don't have to be a top consultant. With that in mind, that experience is not sufficient for you to to start a consulting business. Now you have to put on that learning mindset or that learning hat and that beginner's mind where I am a top expert, I'm very good at what I do in HR consulting or IT consulting, but now I have to humble myself and learn how to speak the language of the client, so positioning and differentiating and how to start doing the outreach, how to— maybe, maybe I have a bit of a budget and I've done— I've exhausted all my warm, warm, uh, warm outreach, and now I want to do a paid ad campaign. That's fine. At the right time, paid ads work really well. I want to maybe start going to larger conferences. I want to have an exhibit at a conference. So those, those things I wouldn't recommend day one. Day one, week one, month one, maybe the first couple months A lot of one-on-one conversations, but later with the experience and the expertise you have, you have— the next thing is to learn marketing, networking, sales, client delivery, referrals. If, and if you struggle with client delivery, I have this ultimate guide on service delivery. I think it's an hour and 4-minute video on just A to Z, how to do it from before. What do you have to do before sale, before you close the deal? You have to do certain things before you close the deal for the delivery to go smooth. Certain things you do before you sign the deal will make the delivery journey terrible, horrible for you and for the client. So check out that video. I'll put the link again in the description so that you have access to it if you're struggling with delivery. But none of us were born knowing all this stuff. We might have spent 5, 10, 15, 20 years in one industry, in one— domain, but part of entrepreneurship is learning these other aspects of the business, okay? So that is the 5th point. That was the 5th point on— I want you to declare independence from, and that's the imposter syndrome. So the 6th and last point is on building the capabilities that create this independence or this freedom. And it's really— I want to emphasize this, I said this at the beginning— it's not about overnight success, it's not about overnight independence and financial freedom. It's about a collection of capabilities. So professional independence, to get to your goal, to your dreams, it's a— it's, it's picking up and learning these skills. I mean, I read a lot after all these years. Just in the last, I think, 3, 4 months, I read 4, 5 books on founders and the founder's mentality, the founder's dilemmas, the super founders, the mom test. There's a book on shoveling stuff. So it's family-friendly show here. So, um, all of it about— yeah, I know a lot of what's, what's said, but it's, it's good to validate some of your thinking. It's good to hear other perspective on things. It's good to see, hear other people's experiences. So even after all these years, all this gray hair, um, I'm still learning about entrepreneurship. And when I speak even with young folks, young students or young entrepreneurs or people who are just older entrepreneurs who want to go on to their second mountain or their third mountain, I am all ears and I sometimes find the tendency of I have so much to share at times it feels like, but I want to understand their situation, their environment, the struggles they're going through because then my comment or my recommendation will be more applicable, more valuable. So learning how to run back office, learning how— learning enough about accounting, but don't do your own accounting, find a bookkeeper. Learning enough about legal and then get a lawyer. Learning about how to run, um, how to, how to, how to, um, deliver a service. All of that is capability. And one thing for those of you who are— who haven't taking the leap yet, and there's data on this. If those who make it big, especially if this is for tech and software, but the same idea is applicable to consulting and services, a lot of— one of the differentiating factors between those who make it to a unicorn, to a billion-plus dollar company versus those who don't is that a lot of 60-plus percent of them have done some sort of startup before. They founded other companies. They might have failed, they might have done well, but they had that experience. For those of you who are— who have time and have some bandwidth, because if you've just laid off, it's a different setup. I'll talk about that in a second. But if you're working in corporate today and you really want to be your own boss and you really want to have your own business and you want to be, be a millionaire in a few years after, after you set up that business. The perfect time, the most optimal time to start a business is to dedicate time while you are working full-time to plan for this new business. So, so the 6th point here is about building capabilities. So while you are walking— working full-time, if you're serious about starting a business Spend an hour a night, a couple hours in the evening, half a day or a day on the weekend to dedicate it to this idea that you want to turn into a business. If you can do it, I'm not a big fan of side hustles, long-term side hustles. If you need it for a short-term because you need cash right away due to life circumstances, if you need it to just as a hobby, that's okay. If you want to do it to learn business skills, that is the most optimal way, is that I'm building the skills that I need so that when I decide to start and go full-time on my business idea, I've already done it a little bit. But if you're laid off, you don't have that luxury. You do have the luxury of time, although being laid off is awful. I went through it. It's very difficult. So you have all my support, and I have a lot of resources on what to do if you're laid off. Check out the YouTube channel. But if you're laid off, you have a financial runway. It could be a 2-month or a 3-month or a 6-month financial runway. So you have to act very, very quickly. But the one advantage that you have that the rest of us don't have is that you have a lot of time on your hand. So, and if you're still not sure about starting a business or going back to corporate, Even after you were laid off, you can dedicate 4 hours a day looking for a job and then 4 hours a day for, for, for, for validating your idea, and then maybe a couple hours a day, 3 hours a day picking up skills and staying, staying current so that whether you're applying for a job or you're starting your own business, you're also building the skills that you need. And if you add, add up all the hours, they add up to more than 8. Yes, because if you're serious about life and serious about starting a profitable business, 8 hours a day will not cut it. You have to put a lot, a lot more time. And if your life circumstances— family, aging parents, sickness— don't allow you now to, to put 10, 11, 12 hours a day initially, maybe that's not the perfect time for you to start a business. You cannot start a business and be successful at it putting a few hours a day. It just doesn't work, no matter what you hear on YouTube, no matter what you hear on social media. Fake news. It doesn't work. It does require— no matter what system you use, even if you use all of the tips and all the recommendations I have, it's still going to take you a lot of hard work initially. I'm not saying you work 12 hours a day for the rest of your life. You, you could do that and you'll be achieving great things, um, and bigger things than you probably ever dreamt. But at times you could be satisfied with what you've accomplished and you can Dial down what you're working on and then hire people to help you grow and scale. But initially, there's no escape. So take the time, whether you have a full-time job and you're doing this on the side, or if you're laid off and you want to have your own business, take the time to learn new skills, the skills, the gaps that you have to help you cross that bridge or cross— take that leap into entrepreneurship. Whether it's a sales gap or a marketing gap or just a confidence gap, doing something on the side without obviously— while taking care of your employer and doing all your obligations, so doing something on the side which will eat up time, the time that you have for leisure, for watching TV, for watching soccer, you know, the World Cup or whatever you're watching, the time has to come from somewhere, and typically, It comes from leisure. I want you to, and I'll end with this, I want you to maintain all the important relationships in your life, whether it's your spouse, your life partner, you have siblings, you have friends, you have a community, you volunteer, aging parents, those should not be sacrificed at the expense of entrepreneurship. You can always Those relationships are key, they'll give you the emotional, psychological support that you need on this journey of entrepreneurship. The journey of entrepreneurship is hard, is long, is difficult, so if you have issues at home, and you feel there's a lot of challenges at home, then you can't really perform at your best at work, so always, always take care of your relationships. And then let everybody know that you are serious about entrepreneurship, then you won't have as much time to maybe spend with them, but you can do the bare minimum to maintain these relationships for the first few months, for the first couple of years, and later, those who supported you, those who sacrificed with you, take care of them, spend more time with them, shower them with gifts, whatever it is, but always, always maintain these key relationships, so you just have to give up on— on hobbies, on sports, on, on leisure, while maintaining your sanity and doing some physical activity and staying healthy. So enough on that. We covered 6, 6 different ways to— or things I want you to declare independence from. We covered waiting until you're ready, perfectionism, needing permission, fears of selling, imposter syndrome, and then believing that expertise alone can create opportunities. And then the last but not least here, the one I just mentioned about, about building those capabilities. That's really what it takes. Skills, skills and sacrifice is what's required. Passion is optional. All right, so if you have any questions, let me know. Leave, leave a comment here. For those of you who've been on this live stream, thank you so much for being there. I appreciate a like, a share. If you're not a subscriber, subscribe to the channel. And if you have a specific question, you don't want to put it out there publicly, you can email me at info@startupwithferus.com, and I'll be more than happy to answer. See you next time, Tuesdays at 3 PM Eastern, at noon Pacific. Come with your questions. Happy to be of help. Thank you.