149: Transitioning From Corporate Employee To Entrepreneur - #GrowYourLife

Hey everyone, thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Krakowski. And on this podcast we talk about ways for you to grow in your life and your business to make more money as an entrepreneur. And some of you, like me, worked in the corporate world. I worked in the corporate world from 2000. Oh, gosh, what year was it? 2006 until 2018. So that was 12 years. Yeah, 12 years in the corporate world and now building my own business. Before that, I did a lot of freelance work. Been doing what I'm doing, helping business owners for the last 18 years use technology, websites, funnels, video for the last 18 years to get more sales. But I was a corporate employee from 2006 until 2018. And so I had to go through a mental transformation to be able to be successful as an entrepreneur. And right now we are making hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our income is growing every single month. We are so excited. We're helping businesses go from six figures to seven figures. Helping people go from just starting out to making their first six figures or even their first $500 in their business. But what did it take for me to successfully go from the corporate world working for somebody else? I did video editing, created landing pages, wrote copy, and did a lot of marketing, email marketing, basically full stack marketing, CMO type work. A lot of people are learning today. I was doing that from almost from day one a little bit. I started mostly just video, but learned quickly a lot of the skills of marketing and applied those things. And so I worked corporate doing that. And I learned a lot of success strategies in corporate that made me unstoppable, made me an invaluable employee that made sure that, you know, everybody I worked with benefited from me working for them. And so I had to unlearn some success strategies that made me really effective in corporate to become an entrepreneur. In fact, the way that you succeed in the corporate world, the way that you have success in corporate America, goes absolutely opposite of what it takes to be successful as an entrepreneur. And this is a huge nugget. Like, I want you to get this. The way that you do things in corporate doesn't work as an entrepreneur. And this is why a lot of people that go from corporate, go from working for other people, struggle to make that transition into entrepreneurship into business ownership is because they have to unlearn the very things that got them the most success in corporate. The very things that got them the most praise, the most raises of their income, the most everything they ever wanted does not work as an entrepreneur. It does not work in the business entrepreneur world. And so you have to take the truths that you've been holding to the things that you believe. If you worked in the corporate world, the truths that you believe made you successful in corporate, and you have to literally rip them out of your brain and unwire them completely from your head for you to even have a minus, a minuscule, tiny chance of succeeding in entrepreneurship. And then from there, you got to grow in the skill sets of entrepreneurship. And so this is why I think a lot of people who go from corporate to business struggle is because the very things that made them the most successful in corporate are the, the worst possible things that they could do as an entrepreneur. And yet they're convinced that these are success strategies. So you see like the, like the thing, like imagine if you will, a baseball player that was successful in basketball and says, no, I'm just supposed to throw the baseball through a hoop. I always have thrown stuff in hoops and that's how I made the most money. Then they're in a different sport. It's literally what it's like. And they're like, no, you got to hit the ball. And they're like, if I hit the ball in basketball, I'd get kicked off the team. I don't want to get kicked off the team. I'm going to keep throwing the baseball into hoops. That's what people who go from corporate into entrepreneurship, it's like, it's literally like that where the thing that you did the most in corporate, that got you everything you ever wanted, the most success the most, praise the most increases in your income, if you try to bring those into entrepreneurship as a business owner will make you broke and keep you broke and keep you struggling and wondering why, even though you're doing all the right things, nothing's working. And so that's what I want you to get. And I want to help you transition and I want to help you if you've gone from corporate or worked in corporate or and are struggling to make money in your own business, if you're struggling to make money as an entrepreneur and you came out of the corporate world again. You may think that you're not going to learn anything new from what I share with you right now, but please, just trust me, stay with me till the end of this before you make that judgment call that there's nothing for you to learn in this. Okay? That's all I'm asking. I'm asking for you to stick with me through this before you decide that there's nothing for you to learn in this training. Okay? One of the main success strategies that makes you powerful in corporate America is being able to do what people want when they want it and not rocking the boat so much. If you rock the boat too much, you'll get stepped on. If you want to go up the chain, you gotta a little bit, but you gotta make sure that you please everybody, that you do all the right things, that you don't make mistakes, that you, that you always follow the rules. Okay? And so that's a success strategy in corporate, that if you do all the right things over time, you start to make more money. Business. The biggest thing as an entrepreneur is, is that you have to do trial and error and you have to make mistakes and you have to mess up and you have to make messes. So in the, in the corporate world, that wasn't allowed, that wasn't possible. It wasn't safe for you to do so. It wasn't something that you would even think about doing because of the risk of even possibly messing up or making a mistake. What that would mean you getting fired or something like that. As a business owner, you absolutely have to be willing to try things out, experiment, make mistakes, and be willing to fail and make a mess along the way. To be successful, you have to be willing to make big mistakes on a regular, consistent basis. In corporate, that is like the worst advice you've ever heard in your life. Nobody would even think in their right mind of doing that. And that's why most people struggle when they go from corporate to entrepreneurship, is they're operating based off of that old framework that says that is the last thing in the world that you should do. But to be successful as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, you're going to have to make big mistakes on a regular basis, try things out just to see what happens, even if it fails horribly, and make that a regular part of your daily activities every single day. And so this goes against the success strategies of corporate America. This goes against the success strategies of what you do in corporate. Now the next one is this. You're not going to be liked by everybody. You have to actually embrace rejection from other people. People rejecting you as an entrepreneur is a very good thing. You don't want to be validated and have people that just like you and seeking validation and liking you all the time. Rejection is a good thing. You're saying no to things is a good thing. In corporate, that's career suicide. You get rejected by the wrong person and you're never gonna Work your way up the ladder or even get into a competing company. And so the very thing that makes you successful in corporate, not upsetting people, not rocking the boat too much, being liked by everybody, not being rejected. You have to embrace that as part of the exact blueprint of what makes you successful as an entrepreneur. Okay, let's go. I have a list here I wrote down, like, a couple months ago. Back in almost a year ago, actually, this exact topic came up and I went over it on my blog, and now I'm actually doing a podcast on it off of that blog post. You have to be 100% okay with not having all the answers and not being the one that gets the credit. Okay? So in corporate, if you get the credit, you can climb the ladder better. If you have all the answers and know exactly what the right answer is at all times, you'll get called on more often. People will like you more. In the business world, you have to completely remove that part of that desire almost to need to have all the answers, to know all the right things and be 100% okay with it. What you want to focus on is what you're really good at, naturally, and have other people do all the stuff that you're not good at. And realize that in the beginning, before you can hire people, before you have the cash flow to hire people, you don't need to do those things or even worry about them. See, a lot of people think that they have to have 100% of 100% from day one, but you don't. Again, that's a mindset that comes from corporate, is, is that you have to have it all figured out before you get started or you'll get punished, you'll get demoted, you'll get in trouble, Something will happen. That mindset, you can't have that as an entrepreneur. You have to be okay with saying, I don't really have the answer to that. I don't really do that. I don't really know. For you to be successful and be okay with it and realize that that's actually going to make you more money by focusing on what you're good at. And the last one, taking uncertain, risky actions, even without a plan, and creating the plan as you take the risky action in corporate, you could actually get sued for that. You could actually, like, get really in trouble for that in corporate, taking risky, uncertain action without a plan. As an entrepreneur, that's just another Tuesday. And if you're not doing that on a daily basis, you're not setting yourself up for success. And so there's these mental strategies that we have to break free from, that if you came out of corporate, that made you successful in corporate, that you have to break free from operating in and doing and really go the complete opposite of it. Embracing rejection, being okay with taking risky, uncertain action without a plan and figuring out the plan as you go, Making the plan while you're jumping out of the plane, even if you crash land and die, that's entrepreneurship. And it takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of guts to do that time. Most people fail at it because they don't have the courage to do it. They just don't. You're not going to have all the answers. And you have to be okay with making regular big mistakes as you test things out. And so in corporate, not doing all those things makes you successful. If you, if you never did those things in corporate, you would climb up the ladder and be the most liked person and, and probably make the most money in the corporate world as an entrepreneur, even doing one of those things will almost certainly assure that you won't be successful. And so you have to flip your brain. You have to rip out the, like the programming. You have to reprogram the beliefs of what you have been told your whole life is what will make you more money, what will make you more successful and reprogram them the exact opposite if you want to go from corporate to entrepreneurship and running your own business. Okay, now the next part of this is this. And this is more, more strategic. That was more mindset based, right? This is more the strategy side of it as you transition out of corporate. And this is what I did. I'm going to share my blueprint with you. I left corporate and what I did was I found what I've done for 12 years corporately. I found six people that needed the same service done in their business. And I got six jobs that paid me two to five thousand dollars a month. Was instantly making six figures in one month after I left corporate by getting these jobs, by approaching people, by saying, hey, I have these skills, do you need this? And finding people to hire me for the same thing that I had at work. But I was working for myself. So what this was, is this paid the bills, this allowed us to stay in our house to keep my Dodge Challenger Hellcat and my Corvette. I was able to do that, right, you know, in corporate, making over a quarter of a million dollars a year, like that's a great salary. I cut my income in half, leaving right away. But we were able to still live A great lifestyle by using the skill sets that I had and finding instead of having one boss, I did the same job for six people, right? So now I have six bosses and no time, and that's what ends up happening. That's the joke, right? I left corporate working 9 to 5 to work 24 7. Well, we don't want to get that way. In fact, I want to tell you this. As an entrepreneur, your goal is to get to the point where you're not working anymore, where you're not having to actually be the one that does the work, where you actually find other people to do the work for you, where there's actually other people that you hire that can do it better for you, and then you can focus on the things that you, A, want to do and B, are good at doing. Okay? And so that's the goal in entrepreneurship. But in the beginning, leaving corporate, I found now I got six bosses, and I have to deliver the same quality with all my old frameworks of people pleasing and struggling to make mistakes and all of that, it took a lot of time to do that. For me to do services, it was like hundreds of hours a week I was spending doing services, almost 120 hours a week just doing what I did in corporate. 40 hours a week to make half as much. Right? That doesn't sound like a fun thing. Well, now we're making way more than that now, which is awesome. And I'm not working more than maybe 20, 30 hours a week to do that. So how did I transition into that to where now I have time, freedom, to where now I'm not working full time making more money from that corporate strategy. I started to learn how to have boundaries, and I started to grow in my skill set and work on, okay, how can I change this mindset? Then I started to learn how to communicate more powerfully with people as a leader. So instead of being a corporate employee, I learned how to be a leader to lead other people and even to lead my clients. And how do I lead my clients? So I have a client that I'm working with. I have to lead them to a better decision to say, hey, it's actually better if we do something this way versus this way. Even if you're not going to like it, it's going to produce better results. It's going to save all of us a whole bunch of time. And. And that was able to help me make more money for my clients, remove myself from a lot of what I was doing so that they could actually hire staff to do Some of the roles that I was doing while not reducing the paycheck and contract that I had with them. Okay, so that was in a service based business doing that. Right. So I went from service based to service based business. But the goal is as an entrepreneur, you want to have your own products that you're selling. So throughout that, during that process, I started growing in my skill set, learning how to create my own products, creating a product line that could help people. And you can find those over at my website. I launched this podcast right here, the Grow youw Life podcast right over at episode 100. I think at 49 is what this one is. Recording that growing in my ability to discipline myself. And I think this is one of the number one things that comes in when you move from corporate entrepreneurship. Listen, you're not gonna, I don't have a boss that tells me you should be doing your work today. You're not gonna have a boss that's gonna tell you and hold you accountable. So you have to learn to hold yourself accountable or find ways to set yourself up for success, to hold yourself accountable and create an environment, whether it be your house or you go to a place to work, that can make you most successful. Okay. And so by doing this, you're able to set yourself up for success. So transitioning from corporate, if you're working at home, one of the biggest things that you're going to find is all the stuff that goes on at home is going to suck your time away. And people are going to look at, oh, you're not working a job, so you have all this free time, but that's not the truth. So. So you have to learn to say no when people want to suck your time away. Learn to say no to certain things. Learn to start to structure and prioritize if something's a good idea or not. Are you going to upset some people? Absolutely. Are you going to make some people unhappy? Absolutely. Are they going to be really mad at you? Absolutely. But that's part of the process. And so then transitioning from corporate to entrepreneurship, you're stepping out of people pleasing. People pleasing is literally the language of promotion in corporate America. In entrepreneurship, it's kryptonite. It'll kill you, It'll kill your possibilities, it'll kill opportunities before they even come your way is people pleasing and learning to have boundaries on what you are willing to do, where you're willing to put your time, learning how to prioritize your activities, learning to prioritize what you're doing each day so that you can discipline yourself to hold yourself accountable, to do the things that you need to do. And that, my friends, is the number one thing that once you start setting boundaries, a lot of time is going to open up. So how do you make sure that you don't want to waste that time? You discipline yourself. How do you make sure that you don't turn into a workaholic too and overwhelm yourself? You discipline yourself by taking free time, by spending time doing what's most important, by not finding your worth and value in what you accomplish. I had to stop finding my worth and value in what other people said about me and the praise that I got from other people and people saying, good job, you did a great job, and, and finding my worth and value in that and instead find fulfillment in doing the work every single day, the process and showing up and disciplining myself and developing self control instead of needing another person to be responsible for whether I do my job or not. Growing in personal responsibility is the number one thing in corporate. You don't have to be personally responsible for the outcome of the company, whether it makes money enough to make a paycheck. That's your boss's job, that's the CEO's job, that's the founder's job. As an entrepreneur, you're 100% responsible for whether money comes in or not. And so it takes a new framework of thinking, it takes a new frame of reference to be successful. You're going to have to learn to get up a little bit earlier. You're going to have to learn to, to do hard things and to make them habits in your life. When you start to develop the habits of an entrepreneur, you start to see the financial results of an entrepreneur. And so most people struggle to see those results when they leave corporate and go to entrepreneurship because they're operating on the same habits that made them successful in corporate. And those are the very habits that are not going to work as an entrepreneur. And so developing entrepreneurship habits, developing the habits to show up when nobody else is looking to do the right thing in your business, when nobody's going to hold you accountable, not because you're afraid of getting in trouble, detaching a punishment based framework from your mind. A punishment based framework is I'm going to get in trouble if I don't do the right thing as an entrepreneur. You have to rip that thing out of your head and do the right thing regardless of whether anybody sees it or not. And that's called integrity. And integrity produces the best results. Being authentic, realizing you're going to have to wear a lot of hats. You're going to have to be the sales team, the marketing team. In the beginning, you're going to have to do that work, you're going to have to find the customers, you're going to have to close new business, but it's going to be worth it. And the things that you're not good at, you can learn a little bit about. And my courses on my website and my podcast episodes teach you strategies, hundreds of strategies that you can find on my website@jeremiah.com for building a business and finding customers in an online business. And you're able to take those strategies and the stuff that you're not really good at that you don't enjoy, you outsource and you have somebody else that you hire do those things. So you have to be a person who doesn't find their satisfaction and being the one that's hands on, doing everything and realize that to go from corporate to entrepreneurship, you have to delegate and learn to let other people do the work, to let other people do the work. In corporate, if you let somebody do your job, you might lose your job tomorrow. So all of these strategies, they violate what the brain of somebody working in corporate thinks of. And so for you to be successful, you have to develop entrepreneur strategies and entrepreneur habits that go opposite of the habits that you developed in corporate America. If you're ready to do that, when you're ready to do that and you grow and you start to grow professionally and you start to say, you know what, I'm willing to operate a different way than I have learned, have been taught and told are the right things in corporate so that I can be successful as an entrepreneur. It takes a choice and it takes discipline and it takes holding yourself accountable every single day. Nobody's going to show up and make sure you're doing all the right things. Nobody's showing up at your door to make sure that you're doing the right work. Well, maybe your bill collectors might when you can't pay your rent. And so this is the process, my friends, the mindset, the shift, the transition that you have to make if you're, if you're somebody who's worked in corporate or is working in corporate. To be successful as an entrepreneur, you have to rewire what has made you successful in corporate and do the exact opposite in your business. And you will start to see success happen for you financially. The results that you want, the results that you've been hoping for that have seemed to escape you if you do this, all right, there's a lot more things and there's a lot more strategies and a lot more ways to grow and build your business and get more customers. And again, we break those down in my other podcast episodes in the courses on my website. But this is the framework of what you need to do to even begin to possibly have any little bit of success. Minuscule success as an entrepreneur is rewiring the, the corporate habits of corporate America, rewiring the truths that you have held to with your last dying breath in corporate America and do the exact opposite of those things as an entrepreneur to even hope to be successful. And I, and I truly believe that's why most people are not successful as entrepreneurs. They're not successful when they leave corporate America. They're not successful when they leave. What they've done for so long is because they're unwilling to change those habits. If you're willing to do what most are not willing to do, you can start to get the results that most are not willing to get or escape them and can't seem to figure out how to get. And what I've just talked about in this podcast episode will lead you down that path. All right, keep listening to this. If you're somebody that has worked in corporate America, this podcast episode, you can keep watching it, you can keep listening to it maybe next week to remind you, always remember why you started as an entrepreneur. Always remember your vision. Always remember the reason that you got started. Don't let that escape you. Without vision, you have no direction. And with vision, you have the direction to go into to start to make and develop the right habits. And so you have to develop the habits that are going to make you successful to reach those goals that you have. And that's what we help people do on this podcast. That's what my courses help you do. That's what my one on one coaching helps you do. Again, I'd love to hear from you, I'd love to see you, if you're leaving corporate, go from making good money in corporate to making 10 times that in your own business while working way less and being way less stressed out. All right, so this has been my journey and I hope that you start applying this yourself. Grow your life, everybody, and we'll talk soon.