257: From Employee To Entreprenuer - Step By Step - #GrowYourLife

Thank you for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Gracowski, and on this podcast we show you how to grow a online course, coaching, mentoring, membership, business. For those of you I haven't met yet, I've been in this industry for 21 years, have built multiple businesses over $20 million, and I want to walk you through, step by step, how you can produce results in this business, whether you're just starting out, how to create your first 5,000, 10,000, $25,000 per month, growing an email list, running Facebook ads, building an audience, and beyond from that, to have a sustainable business that you only have to work five to 10 hours a week to be able to run so that you can quit your corporate job. And that's what we're talking about here today, is how to quit your corporate job. Let's dive right into it. I am excited to share this with you because I, while I've been in the industry for 21 years, for those of y' all that don't know, my full background on this is I actually was working for other people in corporate jobs in this. And I'll tell you, they're as corporate as it comes when it comes to even in this industry, as far as that goes. I started as a video editor, but then quickly rose up as a marketing director and then became a consultant to a number of companies, which is kind of like running your own business, but you're still subject to what other people want you to do. Now, to this day, I have total time freedom, financial freedom, not have to worry about when I need to do things. I can decide to do anything whenever I want with whomever I want. I don't have to take a client if I don't want to, though. We would love to work with people that want to grow a business, whether it be an online course, a membership coaching program, things like that. We'd love to work with you and help you scale to 10, $20 million if you want to, or just make your first five to $10,000. Okay, so of course, of course that's all about me, but what does any of this have to do with you? Well, how do you actually quit your corporate job to be able to do this? Well, here's the thing. When you work a corporate job, they wire your brain to be very easily controlled, to be somebody that does what they say. And you will literally do things working a corporate job that you would not otherwise do simply because your boss asked you to. How many of y' all have known that you've done that. Now there is a rising up of people that are choosing not to do those things. And of course, you know, ethically, morally integrity or legally, you don't want to do certain things because you can actually be liable for those. And unfortunately, a lot of corporations, they know that and they can manipulate people to be the fall guy for that type of stuff. Okay, now we're not going to go like that dark into this, but what I want to share with you is this is how do you get out of the prison? Because that's what it is. It's a mental prison. It's a mind prison. You become a mindset slave to somebody else where they pay you just enough to keep you working, to numb you out so that you stay and serve their vision and don't go after your goals or do very little to do so. So inside of corporate America, inside of corporate in general, your brain is wired against you being successful on your own because they want to keep you on the hook, to keep you coming back. It's like a cult. It's like what a cult does. Now here's the thing, it's legal. Nobody's gonna call it a cult because our economy is ran on these things. But if you really like break it down, it's basically you. You, you, you are exploiting people to produce results, to pay them just enough to then make a profit. Now here's the thing. I have a corporation and I have people that work for me. Now I do, as somebody who has worked in a company, I encourage them to have their own businesses. I encourage them to, even if they don't want to work with us anymore, how to do. That's what I have found is that I was always encouraged in that. But then secretly, that's a topic for another time. What I want to tell you is how you can get out of this thinking that they've wired your brain towards. They've wired your brain to please people. They've wired your brain to perform. Your brain has been programmed to only do what you are certain of out of fear of losing your job, a performance review, making less money or being chastised. So can I tell you this? You have to rewire that part of your brain in order to be successful. Now here's one of the things that I tell everybody when they start building one of these businesses, and I wish I knew this sooner, and I wish that somebody would have told me this sooner. Start your own thing and where you notice conflicts in your mindset between starting your own thing and how you operate in your corporate job, you need to integrate those things. And what's going to happen is this. You will not fit in at your corporate job long term. You may actually be able to use some of the mindset to rise in the ranks and increase your pay temporarily. But at some point, the breaking point is going to come where you. And this is what happened to me. You get offered a CEO position, this happened multiple times to me. And then they realize, oh wait, you have other vision for things because you're actually not there to serve the company, you're there to serve yourself. And that's not a bad thing because that means you're unemployable and you want to be unemployable. Okay, so already what I'm saying here is you have to establish a level of healthy selfishness if you are going to be able to go into building your own business. And nobody says this because it's just not sexy. And, and it goes against what we're taught in culture and in society. Don't be selfish, don't be self centered. They've actually done research. Who's they? Right. But there's some research. I was listening to a few podcasters and I did a little bit of some Google searching on this on my own. Basically what they found is that the best people that contribute to society and run companies are about 60 to 70% selfish, 30 to 40% unselfish, meaning that 30 to 40% is what they do for others. And that's where the value comes that we give. Right. When I'm here in my company, I'm giving value for you, but it's ultimately to help my company grow and to build connection as far as that goes. So one thing that you got to realize is it's actually healthy to get a little bit more selfish than you have been with things. Okay. And then the next thing is this is to stop trying to manage, maintain and control what other people think about. You realize that as you start building the skill set to go out there to build your own business, you're going to disappoint people. You're not going to have everybody be happy with you. And they're not supposed to be okay. So what you got to do is you got to start establishing new habits or you're going to start operating like a business owner. You start operating like one of those people who runs a company and doesn't work for somebody else and makes a ridiculous amount of money doing so. If you also think that there should be a limit in the amount of money that you can make, because maybe you don't need to live off of that much. You need to remove that thing out of your brain and realize that the only reason why you're going to make more money, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000amonth, $500,000 a month. Why would you do that? So that you can. So that you can help more people is what it is. That's actually an unselfish thing. It's more selfish to reduce your income to, to just your own basic needs. It's less selfish to actually create a ton of wealth so that you can impact people, so that you can have a team, so that you can have a company, and so that you now become the lender, not the borrower, and you become the one that is influencing and you become a pillar in your community and people look up to you. Okay, see, we don't talk about this type of stuff when we're working in corporate jobs. Sure, we might be able to in certain corporations where you have certain roles that are publicly facing. Like maybe a corporation like Tesla. You're a CEO of that. Well, okay, there you go. CEO of Tesla. Elon Musk, richest man in the world. But you're not Elon Musk. Okay? You might be smarter than him, by the way. I have met people that I'm like, I guarantee you they're smarter than you, Musk, but you're not doing the stuff he's doing. Okay? So what you got to do is you got to get realistic about where you're at today. Okay, then what are you going to build a business around? So we got different business models that we teach people on how to do. You can find that throughout some of the other podcasts. I got a bunch of videos on my YouTube channel as well. You can look up my name on that. But the one that I love the most is a membership subscription where people pay you monthly, maybe 100, 200, even upwards to 500 to $1,000 a month to get access to you and value. And what it is, is you're charging for the output that they're going to get. So if somebody invests $200 a month with you, they should easily be getting 2,000 to $5,000 a month of value out of that. A lot of my clients get above and beyond exponentially more than that. They get close to 20 to $30,000 a month, which means, like, I should be charging at least two to $3,000 a month just for the value that's produced. We do for some of Our higher level, one on one coaching stuff for our consulting, you know, we charge even more than that. With our consulting clients. We've been able to create value upwards of over a million dollars a month. I should be charging a hundred thousand dollars a month for those clients, 10% what they're making. And it's not unreasonable to say that because if they're bringing in a million dollars a month in profit, 10% of that, because I was able to produce that for them, the value is there. But here's the thing. I often offer things on a value level. Generally if a client is making maybe a million dollars a month, I might charge them, you know, 20,000, 30,000amonth. And I think that that's reasonable. That's an extreme discount. It's only 2 to 3% of what they're making over that. Okay? So, but as far as that goes, you got to change your mindset about what it means to make money and to be successful and how we interact with other people and realize that it starts with a vision of where you're going and what are you creating. Okay? So you have to have a vision that's big enough for everybody else to come into that's going to be in your sphere of influence. And your vision has to be longer term, possibly for the next 75 to 100 years. That's generational. Okay? I got visions that are way bigger than multiple generations for me and my family. And I'm excited to execute on them. And a big part of that is exactly this right now, helping you be successful in your own business. Okay, but what that's great in all to have your own business and have a product and have something that you're offering people, but how do you split your time and make enough money in the business? And how do you operate to be able to leave a corporate job? Well, what you got to do is you got to get clients and you got to get people paying you money. But here's the thing, is that when your focus is split and you're working a corporate job, your energy is going to. It's being sucked right into somebody else's pocketbook. And I'll tell you this, is that if you start to operate in a no BS attitude where you're not going to take guff from anybody, you're not gonna let anybody push you around, you may get fired from your job and it might be the best thing that's ever happened to you as far as that goes. And then from there you'll have the energy to be able to go build your business or you can make enough money in the business to leave. Nine times out of 10, what I see people do is one of two things they actually, I very rarely do. I see people making enough in their business to then leave their corporate job. And so I'm just gonna level with you here and tell you that that's the reality is you'll either be fired or you need to leave. Or cut your hours to part time as soon as possible in your corporate job. And that's what I would recommend. Cut your hours part time. See if you can get paid the same amount for working half as much time. Now you got half as much energy and you're in control 50% more than you were before. Okay. That's what I always did when I would transition out of certain roles and stuff like that. And I took the slow route. I wish I took this the faster route because I'll tell you this, is that the strategies, the energy, me showing up to the level that I need to for my clients was limited anytime I was also serving another person's goals and visions. And I've not had a full period where I've not been serving somebody else's goals and visions until very recently. And so as far as that goes, who am I serving? My clients who listen to this podcast, the people who are in my Grow youw Life community were that where I get to work with them to build their business, as far as that goes. But you got to realize that how you've been programmed inside of your corporate job is not going to serve you when it comes to building a business. And this is one of the biggest problems people have with leaving a corporate job is because they've been programmed one way. And then they literally got to rewire everything about almost their entire, like, personality when it comes to business to be able to be successful. And one of them is you cannot worry about what anybody thinks about you. You also have to embrace making mistakes. You have to become okay with taking risks and things not going how you thought they would or how you want them to and learn to let go of trying to control the outcome as closely as you normally would inside of a corporate job. And this is one of the number one things that people literally find impossible to do because they've been wired to do this inside of the corporate job. And if you're working a corporate job on the on side of this, it's nearly impossible to rewire the brain to be able to operate differently because you're operating in one way over here. And then you tell yourself you're going to operate in another way over here. How you do one thing is how you do everything. And so you're going to have to integrate your behavior, combine them together in both places where you're not business owner over here and then employee over here. Be the business owner. Let everybody know that you're doing that. And that's one of the things that I find people say, well, I. I can't let people know that I'm running my own business. Well, why is that? Why are you letting fear run your life? What are you trying to avoid? Well, I might get fired. Okay, well, then maybe, just maybe, we need to start a transition plan to get you out of that mind control that you've been under where you let a person paying your paycheck dictate what you're allowed to do with your life. Hmm. And I want you to realize is if you've been working a corporate job, what I just said violates what you feel is normal behavior. But I'll tell you this. There is nobody that could pay me enough to tell me what I can and can't do with my life. And you got to adopt that attitude and that mindset if you want to go to the next level in your business. Now, we're not going to be reckless or flippant, not be able to pay our bills or our mortgage or things like that. But it takes literally reinventing yourself as a person, saying, listen, I might have signed up at this job as this person here today, I'm a different person. And so if you want to work with the new version of me, here's what we're going to do. And it's going to work for both of us, or I'm going to go find something else, and I'm going to go focus on that. And that's one of the things I've always had that conversation inside of businesses is I've always started to see the idea of what I'm going to do. I've always started to talk about that. One of the biggest things that people say is, well, don't tell anybody what you're doing and build in secret, and don't tell anybody what's going on. So people can't kill your dreams. Of course, don't let silly people kill your dreams. Don't let people tell you that. But I'll tell you this. It becomes way more honest when you start telling everybody what you're actually building, what you're actively doing, especially if they start wondering what the Heck is wrong with you? They start wondering, what's going on? Why are you behaving differently? And you start being honest with that. You know, my life got changed four months ago, five months ago, when my wife came home and told me that she was pregnant with our second child. And I'm excited for that. But it set me on a path where I realized I got to change some things. I lost clients because of that. They told me I was taking my family too seriously and I needed to take their. Their business projects more seriously. And you know what I told them? Listen, I don't think we're a good fit to work together. And that's the attitude you need to have where you will not allow somebody simply because they are paying you money or because they make more money than you or they have more experience than you or more talent than you to be able to run and control your life. It's time for you to start to create and design your life how you want it to be. And that's one of the first steps to getting out of the corporate rat race and being able to have your own business that pays you is you got to start thinking like a CEO, start thinking like an owner, start thinking like a business owner and no longer like an employee that just does what you're told, but rather breaks the rules, makes the rules, bends the rules, and creates your reality instead of letting other people dictate what your reality looks like. You know, reality is actually what we create of it. And that's a topic, again, for another time. You have to work on what's between your two ears for this stuff to work. It's really all a mindset thing when it comes to leaving corporate and going into a business. I can give you all the strategies in our coaching program. We work with people through that. We got hundreds of podcast episodes that give you strategies. But if you don't get this mindset thing down where you're actually willing to put yourself out there and you make a decision, I'm not going to be under the mind control of another person or organization simply because they're paying me money. And you have that authority and you have that boundary, and you make that decision for yourself, you start carrying yourself differently, you start talking differently. Some of y' all might see the confidence and the conviction of how I'm talking is different than how it was six months ago. That's what I'm talking about. And that's what happens when people come into my space and they start listening to me, engaging with my podcast. They start joining some of the live events that we're hosting, upcoming events about building a business. They start watching my YouTube videos where I break down strategies for free for you to build a business. And they, they. They join my coaching program to actually have me come into their business and help them build it so that they're not doing it by themselves. So they actually have somebody who has a proven track record to work with them through all of this. That's what creates results. Okay? So I want to encourage you in this. You don't have to go about it alone. You don't have to try to figure this out on your own. That's why I'm here. I'm here and committed to help you. And I'd love to answer your questions on this. Listen, go to my social media, go over to my YouTube channel, go ask me some questions. Questions that you'd love to see us submit in future podcasts related to this topic to help you get out of that corporate rat race and start to live the life that you want. All right, if this episode has helped you pass it on to somebody, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with somebody. And I cannot wait to see you on the next episode of the Grow youw Life podcast. We'll talk soon.