Jeff Dudan | On the Homefront with Jeff Dudan #46

Hey everybody, Jeff Duden here. I wanted to take a few minutes and share an experience that I had this last weekend in an Uber traveling from West Palm beach to Miami, Florida. So I had two speaking engagements to do. The first one was at the Titus center for Franchising at west with Palm Beach Atlantic University. And I was the keynote speaker there. Had a great event and instead of coming home for a day, I had a day to kill in between. But look, it's South Florida. It was really cold back home in the Carolinas, so I said, well, I'm just going to stay here. So ended up taking an Uber down from West Palm beach to Miami to a conference with the franchise consulting company down there and doing the business there that I needed to do. But on the way I said, well, I got two, I got two options to get to South Florida. I can either one, take the Brightline train, which would have been kind of fun and exciting, but I would have had to Uber over to the Bright Line, take the train down and then Uber over to the hotel, or I could see if somebody would drive me this know, hour, hour and a half ride in an Uber. So I popped Uber and somebody was willing to pick me up, a guy named Dazlin. So Dazlin shows up and I jump in there and immediately very personable young man starts asking me questions about what I was doing here and why I was going to Miami. I shared with him that I'm enfranchising and he shared his story with me. So Dazlin is from Haiti. He came over with his father maybe 15 years ago, I believe. Said he currently has four children. He has been a mechanic. So he got certified as a mechanic, but he doesn't do that anymore. He's a pastor of a church, so he has a service, two and a half hour service. I don't know what kind of church it is, but that's a long time. Two and a half hour service on Wednesday and then two two and a half hour services on Saturday. And he also has some side hustles that he does to make money in addition to the Uber. He pressure washes, he mows lawns, he does some cleaning and things like that. He, he saved up 10 to $12,000. And here's his question for me. Is there a franchise that I can get into for 10 or $12,000? And changed my life. He goes, I'm ready to do it. I've been working hard. I know that I need to have my own business. And I wrecked my brain. And there are some Very, very low cost franchises. But I really, especially home front brands, you can't get into that for 10 to $12,000. You've got to have some working capital. So here was my advice to him. After thinking about it and enjoy conversation with Dazlin, I said first of all, what are you reading? What are the books that you have that are speaking into you? Because my experience in life is that until somebody's exposed to something, it can't really be part of their thought process. There's a known universe to what we think about and what we know. And unless there's been some exposure to a person, to a mentor, to a family business, that's where we get our ideas and that's where we get the constructs around like what's possible for us. And, and if he hasn't had that, then the best way to get that would be books. So I recommended a few books to him. Obviously my book discernment has a reading list in the back and oh by the way, if you want a free copy of the book you can go to dudenext.com give me your information or there should be a link connected with this video. It's going to cost your email. That's all it is. You send me your email, I'll send you a free copy of my book electronically immediately. $14.99 value. But the information's priceless. So I recommended three books to him. I said the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Michael Michalowicz. Fantastic book. Talks about taking your money first out of the business, how to build really scrappy businesses. And the concept is like how resourceful can you get if you're in the stall and you've used the restroom and there's only two pieces of toilet paper left and that's not enough. Like now, now you've got a problem to solve and that's what the thesis of this book is. It's a little bit gross but actually the book's fantastic and it talks about how to start businesses up for really, really low cost. Make sure that you're getting paid first and you don't make some critical mistakes. The second book I recommended was the Highest Calling by Larry Janeski. Larry Janeski is the founder of Basement Systems, really smart business guy and he wrote a book that I found to be excellent for small businesses. And it talks a lot about the math of marketing and lead gener these types of things. Very customer acquisition oriented and a great little fable style story. So easy to read again. And then of course the E Myth by Michael Gerber, how to take yourself from a technician mindset to a manager mindset. And those kinds of things help you scale your business. So those things, in addition to discernment, are really great for somebody to read and inform their journey and start thinking maybe a little bit differently about what they're getting ready to do. The second recommendation I made to Daslin was, oddly enough, see if he could join Cutco Knives. For those of you who don't know what Cutco Knives is, it's a direct sales model and oftentimes they recruit kids to do it. So I have three kids. They have friends. The friends would go to college, they'd come home on break for the first summer, and I would get calls from two or three of them. Hey, Mr. Duden, do you have 30 minutes? I've got a great opportunity for you. And I'm like, oh, here it comes. It's Cutco Knives. You know, I have a cabinet full of them. So anyway, but what. What Cutco Knives does, it's got great sales training. So if you can go. If you don't have the money to pay Sandler sales, you know, $4,500 for a quick start or whatever they charge now or, you know, all of that, you can go get some free sales training from Cutco Knives, I believe. Never done it, but get this excellent sales training and cut your chops. Then you put that on your resume and you can get a sales job. You can sell yourself into other opportunities because people are. Look for people that have some sort of a sales training. So I thought that would be a good way for him to change his thinking, get around some different people and also, you know, make some money selling these knives. And of course, you're. If you want to make the most money possible in your life, you want the biggest percentage of what you do to be variable compensation. You know, bases are fine and they need to meet your needs, but if you really want to, you know, sell for value and create value, I thought he could find himself into a sales job that could be highly commissioned and he could hustle and improve his place in life right there, make the bigger bucks. The third recommendation I gave him, which I think is going to be the one ultimately that he's going to pursue, as I said, you've done these side hustles. Tell me what you've done. He says, well, I've done cleaning. I've worked for a cleaning business. I've done a little bit of that as a side hustle on my own, I've done some pressure Washing and I've also mowed yards. I'm like, okay, those are great, scrappy, entrepreneurial, first time businesses. I'm a little disappointed based on my background that he didn't include painting in there because painting is the ultimate. You get a brush, you get a ladder man, you're in business. Make the customer pay for the paint and do that. Maybe I'll follow up with them and make that recommendation to them. But I said, do you know anyone in these businesses that you are excited to maybe start or join somebody that might be older, somebody that has an established client base, has a small inventory of equipment, don't do any advertising. They just, it's all word of mouth and referral. He goes, I actually do. I've actually talked to a guy about trying to find a way to take over his business. The guy had it. There's somebody that he knows that has a lawn service that has a client base that is exactly what I described to him. I said, okay, how old is the guy? He said, He's 70 years old. I said, okay, you think he wants to get out of the business? And he said, I think he probably does because we've been having these conversations. But he says, I don't have the money to buy the business from him. I said, all right, why don't you consider giving him a small down payment and a royalty 10% of the business for some amount of time, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, or 10% of the business up to a certain dollar amount. If it doesn't work out, he can get the business back, he can monitor it, but you can transition that business. Because businesses of that size are very difficult to sell, especially if they're just, they're not a franchise, they're not branded to any particular company. If they're just that person's business, they're very difficult to sell because bas basically you're just going to move right in and create a job for yourself there. So should be very reasonably priced. And he said, wow, a royalty. I had never thought about that. What a great idea. And he goes, I actually think this guy would go for that. So ultimately. And I said, all right, Daslin, you know, this is. And we get to the end of the 90 minutes and we've had this great conversation and I said, look, I'm happy to send you a copy of my book. I gave him my email address. He sent me an email and wasn't sure if this was just a, you know, Uber tip hustle or if he was legitimately interested in what we were doing because it was a great conversation and I enjoyed it. But, you know, he was. He was hustling me. Could be just hustling me for a tip. Well, I did give him a great tip, by the way. But other than that, two days later, this was on a Saturday. On Monday, I get the email from Dazlin. Thank you for our conversation. This is just a reminder to send me a copy of your book, which ultimately I sat down last night, wrote him a nice email, I typed up all of these recommendations, I put them in the email. I sent it back to him, attached a copy of my book for him, and told him to keep in touch with me and let me know how he's doing and if I have any questions, if he has any questions that I can answer for him, that would be great. So as I think about people that are in this situation, people that are really, really hungry to do something, but they don't have a lot of resources and maybe they've got obligations. Here's a couple of my experience that I'll share with you about starting up businesses. First, rush the first dollar, okay? You need to be focused on revenue. And don't get ready to get ready to get ready. Like cut and go straight at it. Go straight at the customer. First things first is revenue. Second things never, because there is no outcome without income. You've got to generate revenue before anything is ever going to fall through to your pocket or to the bottom line. So the minute you decide to do a business and the minute you're capable to provide the service or fulfill it, you walk right out, take a right, and you just start walking down the street and you just say. And you go selling yourself into it. You want to maintain mve minimally viable expenses. Look, you might need QuickBooks, and it might be $13 a month or $15 a month, and that's fine and probably a good investment for you to keep track of your books like that. You may not even need to start with that. But don't be so silly about reducing expenses that you spend four hours to save the $15. But you get what I'm talking about. Advertising programs that are going to have a low return rate that if you were a bigger business, you could afford, don't spend. If you got 10 to $12,000, don't do a $10,000 advertising campaign. You don't get much out of it the first time around because you got to continue to show up for people. And now you've taken all your dry powder and you've wasted it so minimally viable expenses. Start performing the service and make sure that you're making money and putting money in your pocket right away. It is a ground game. Like I said, walk out the door, figure out who is the customer and go directly to that customer and tell them your story and ask for help. I will always help people who are hustling, knocking on my door, hey, I just started this car detailing business and this is the offer and this is what I've got. If they tell me who they are in their story, hey, I'm a student and I'm doing this over the summer and I'm trying to get money to go on a mission trip or whatever the story is that has an impact on me, on whether I want to give this person my money or not. I might not even need the service that bad. But if I can help somebody that's right in front of me and I believe that they're honest, then I will certainly do that. You know, people, there's a lot of charity work, and we certainly do a lot of charity work across the many businesses that I'm in. But don't step over the people that are right next to you to go help somebody that's 3,000 or 9,000 miles away. There's people right around you that you touch every day that need your help and pay attention to those things. I think you just do those things because those are the opportunities that you have to do well. And if you tell your story the right way, you will find other people that think the same way about that. Another point. Busy begets busy. Okay? If you tell people you don't have anything to do, then they're going to be like, well, there must be something wrong. But, you know, you, you make sure that you get busy no matter what, even if you're not making the full margin on the service that you want to. Because here's the hotel theory. If you own a hotel and you don't rent that room that day and midnight hits and you drop the price and you put it on Priceline, you put it on Expedia, and you didn't get that room rented yesterday, is gone forever, you will never rent that room on Tuesday, March 9, whatever the date was, it's gone forever. So don't have unsold inventory. When you're a small business. If you need to give. If you don't have anything to do tomorrow, you need to call people back that you've pitched that are on the fence, drop your price, get busy, do a good job for them. And then ask them for two referrals. So run a ground game. Make sure you're busy even if you're not making the margin right off the bat, because yesterday is gone forever. If you didn't bill anything and then ask for referrals. Here's the last thing I'm going to tell you, and I've shared this with several people, and it has probably made the biggest impact on their life to anything that I've ever been able to help anybody with. Put a dollar value on your time in terms of return. Okay. And there's two ways to do this. Are you trading time for dollars? Yes, we all trade time for dollars at a certain level. Okay, so what's the cash flow that you want to create in this year? And if you back that into an hourly rate, how much money, how much value do you need to be creating every single hour to hit that number? Okay. And okay, let me say this from. Let's say it was $500 an hour. You wanted to create $500 an hour of value over 2,000 hours. What's that, a million bucks? I think it is. So if you want to create a million dollars of cash flow that's going to back into $500 an hour, what do you need to be doing? What kind of team do you need to have out there making money for you to be generating back that $500 an hour to get you to your million dollars worth of cash flow? The other thing that I would say is you need to consider if you're building a business that could one day have market value and could have enterprise value, what are the drivers of that enterprise value? What are the assets worth that you're building? If you build them well, if you build them conforming to what buyers are going to be looking for, if you have a competitive advantage that you can articulate, if you can build systems, processes, people, customer base, data, all of these things, what's the value to the market of a job well done constructing a business, how long will it take? What's your horizon? What's the business going to be worth? And then back into that on an hourly rate based on the amount of time that you're going to have to give to that business. If it's a business that you're in 25% of your time because you have partners and you're advising, or you're a strategic partner, or you have some sort of a strategic alignment, something that you're valuing, then value it that way. You're only putting 500 hours into that business. So once you start doing that, it's amazing at how the decision making around your time changes and how you think about what you do now. You have to get above that place where you're paying your bills and you're surviving and. Right. So the first thing you have to do is you got to get stability and you got to establish that the next thing you're thinking about is, okay, well, what's next for me and what's the next level of it? And then I think the third level of it is, am I creating an enterprise that will one day have market value? The person I was talking to, I challenged them to have a $25,000 return on every single hour that they got invested. Because this person has built a lot of big businesses. They were well capitalized, they were mature in their space. And you say, all right, well, if you're going to spend five years building the business and you think it could be worth this based on what you're going to have to get into it. Now, that's a pretty extreme number that adds up pretty quickly. But maybe the number for you is $1,000 an hour, maybe it's $200 an hour, maybe it's $100 an hour, $5,000 an hour, whatever it is, when you realize that that is a construct about the way you're thinking, see how it impacts the decisions that you make around what you do, who you do it with, and how much time you put into it. Anyway, glad to share that story about Dazlin with you. I'm going to follow up with Dazlin. I'm going to send him a copy of this video for encouragement and make sure that I'm doing anything that I can to help them. And otherwise, if I can help you, Jeff Duden, reach out to me on LinkedIn. Effduden. Follow us on Instagram, of course, on the Homefront podcast has all kinds of content like this that we'd love to share with you. And if you have a business that you want to franchise or if you just want to get in touch with me, go to dudenix.com drop me a note. I'll see you soon. Thank you.