Zero to Hero: Why Lack of Capital Shouldn't Stop Your Entrepreneurial Dreams

What do you do when you have no money? Lack of capital, you want to go independent, you want to start a business of your own, but you feel like first thing you run into is I don't have any money. Well, please do not be shocked that you don't have any money. That's the whole reason you, one of the main reasons you're going to want to start a business of your own. You know, you're going to try and improve your financial situation. So don't stop simply because I say, you know, you say to yourself, I don't have the money. Of course you don't have the money. The whole idea is about getting the money. And so I'm going to try and put out a few of these shorts about getting your mind turned around for success so you can become an entrepreneur, you can become a can do person. And whenever you run into these obvious, these are obvious stalls in the path to becoming financially independent, lack of capital. The thing is it falls into some options. You know, there's options there. You got to figure out, get out a piece of paper. You got to start turning yourself into a business person rather than a dreamer, a screamer, someone's got a fan. This is a transformation from a fantasy to reality. And you say, okay, you know, I don't have money. All the other things you think I don't have money, put them on. What can I do? Well, and you start writing things down. What are your options? I can borrow from friends, I can start, you know, I can get a little bit out of my credit cards temporarily. I could go over here, I could go over there, I could get my family involved. I could work for a while and build up a nest egg. I could do it part time for a while, I could subsidize myself. You get start to get these things down on paper and then sooner or later a path, I mean, great empires have been built today with people that started the same way. They started piecing it together and they didn't have a big venture capitalist coming out of the sky just because they got an idea of starting a business and give them, here's a hundred grand, you know, child, to get you started. No, they had to piece it together and then they had to do things with it once they got it. So anyway, don't let lack of capital slow you down. I mean, this is where you start to transform yourself into somebody who can actually build a business and run a business. You start to get specific. If you're going to build a business of your own, you've got to get over the fears that knock people out, right. In the beginning. One we've talked about before, lack of capital. I don't have any money. Well, you're going to get money. The other thing is, I'm going to lose my steady income. Well, maybe you don't have to in the beginning. Maybe you can start a side hustle. Maybe you can get, you know, maybe you can get a job in another industry, in an industry closer aligned to where you want to go and still have income, make contacts and also learn the tricks of the trade and still be starting your business, but also getting more information and getting more trained and everything. So fear of use, something like fear of losing a steady income to your advantage. You know, you quit your job smart. You don't quit your job dumb. You always go as much as you can. You always go from strength to strength. You never, you know, it's always faith, it's always risk, but it's never jumping into the oblivion you know, you want to have. You do your due diligence. Like, that's a solid step. Just take forward and you check it out the best you can. And then, of course, it's risky to take the step. I may be, you know, I may lose something. But there's ways of getting rid of that fear. That fear is a good thing because it makes you think, makes you plan, makes you reposition yourself, possibly. So don't let fear of losing your steady income hold you back. You got to get through that, folks, and if you like that. This is Larry Wydell from the Big Hitter podcast, Big Hitter Community. Come see us. Who's got debt? Seems like everybody's got debt, but you can't let that hold you back. You know, you got student loans, you got credit cards, car payments. You're always going to have some kind of version of debt, and you're going to be accumulating more that eats into your, you know, your capital. You know, that's something you got to take care of, but that's just a normal obligation. That's something you got to deal with. And the fact that you've got debt pressure you got to use that is like a burning desire to build your new business or to move up in your career. You can't. You cannot let debt pressure hold you back. You got to be a fighter, folks. And that debt pressure is just something like, you know, and maybe it's your fault. Maybe you made bad decisions. Maybe something happened. You got in a partnership, the partner ran off and left you with big a Big debt. So what? It doesn't matter. It's just like this. It's kind of like it doesn't matter how you got there. It matters what you're going to do about it. So do not let debt pressure. You cannot allow debt pressure. You got to use it. It's like Michael Jordan in basketball. Any insult from one of his. He looked for things to get him pissed off and to make him play harder, be more intense. Well, look at debt pressure is something to make you mad, you know, to make you fight. You know, it's like say, I don't want to be under the thumb. I don't want to be under anybody's thumb or any situation, the thumb of any situation. I don't want to be on the thumb of pressure. And so use that to get your fighting spirit revved up, folks. Do not let debt pressure hold you back from doing what you feel is inside you to do. And so if you like this stuff, you know, you know, it'd be great if you, you know, left a like or a subscriber. This, that, and the other. I don't know if that even matters. But you want more of this stuff, you can come see me over my big hitter podcast. I'm Larry Wydell. Or you can even come check us out at our community. Hey, let's talk about needing funding, but not having access to funding when you're starting your business, you know, you, like, all of a sudden, it dawns on, I just have very. I'm limited in my access to this funding. You hear about all these, you know, everything in life. Everybody else is more beautiful, more talented, got more money, got more connections, this, that, and the other. And one thing they've got is they've got access to funding you don't have. Oh, it's easy for them, hard for me. Well, if it's easy for them, they'll probably blow the money because, you know, if you have to dig to get it, then you make sure you know how hard it was to get it. And so you don't go out there and throw it away because you know what you're going to have to go through to get. Get some more. You know, you make it count. And so don't be surprised. You have limited access to funding because you've never done this before. You don't have the credentials, you don't have the track record. See, it's just like building access to funding is something you have to build like a fire, you know, if you don't have a fire, you Got to run, rub sticks together and make it happen. It's just like every aspect of your business. You're not going to know, you're not going to have access to distribution, to this, to that and the other. But you've got to get it. And you got to say, that's not going to keep me back. I've got to get it, I've got to put it together. And in the beginning, it will be frustrating and slow, and it's kind of like boiling water. You can boil water in two or three minutes on a blazing fire, put cold water in a pan, but it seems if you're standing there looking at the water, that it's taking like hours before those bubbles start to come. In essence, yeah. But in reality, it's only a couple of minutes. And so, in fact, that's a good exercise. If you wonder about teaching yourself patience, about being an entrepreneur, go put a pan on, cold water on the stove, turn the burner up full, full speed, and just make yourself sit there and watch it heat up. It'll seem like a lifetime, but it goes pretty quick. And you'll find that this is just a stage. You go through that, you know, and there's no reason to worry about it until you need it. But when you need it, you solve it like you do everything else. You put your full attention on it. You start asking friends, you, you start looking it up on the Internet, you start checking out all your resources. You run around and it's like, you need fruit, go shake the trees and go to the grocery store. You know, you do the obvious things, ask other people how they got it, you know, and listen to podcasts on people how they got it. But don't let the fact that you don't have access to all this, the funding, you know, like, we need $250,000. What are we going to do? Well, you do what people in the past who needed $250,000 worth of funding did. You know, you do something similar, it's just another problem you solve. So anyway, don't let that hold you back. Just throw your energy behind figuring that out. It's just another problem to figure out, folks. You got great things. You got a burning desire inside of you. You got to let that, that out, and you do it progressively. So. This is Larry Weddell from Big Hitters. Come see us on the podcast. If you like what you hear, I guess click a button or something like that or subscribe anyway, go, go, go do something big. What is more important? Long term goals or short Term goals. You know, it's a, it's a thing that gets people tied in a knot. You got to have goals. Because goals, if you get the, you know, those are your targets. And people who do big things have, obviously they're organizing the energy of the people and the resources around them to accomplish certain things, and those things are goals. And so the thing is, as you move into a leadership role, management role, the question comes. I mean, I've had this question come up. What makes the difference between a great leader and a, you know, mediocre leader? The thing is results. You got your eye on the ball. You know, you can accomplish things. The reason you get promotions, big paychecks, big responsibilities, you can get things done. Like the Elon Musk of the world, the Jeff Bezos of the world that, you know, they get ideas and then somehow they're not perfect. I mean, they're human, they've got their flaws, but they make things happen. And, you know, they, they, they get the job done. And so, you know, big things, how does that play, you know, your daily, weekly, monthly goals? Art Williams one time, he said, more people, he said, everybody's got a goal of greatness. But he said where they fall apart is they never take the time to put together a string of small, achievable, daily, doable goals and targets so that they can have some wins. You know, you're gonna have a lot of disappointments along the way. And he said, if you have these little benchmarks along the way, let's get this done by 11, let's get this done by 10, let's raise this up by 1. You know, let's get more people doing this. You know, you have it step by step, progression, doable, achievable, doable. But there's still goals just because they're achievable and doable and not, you know, life changing at the moment. There's steps up the staircase. How many hundreds of steps are there up to the top of the Washington Monument? But if you each, you know, each step is not important, but in and of itself, but they all form a chain to the top. And so, you know, the chain and the weakest link and all that, you got to have a series of moves you go through. And that as you break that down, that's where your systems come through. That's where you allow your people to know this is how we're going to do great things, and this is your role in it. It's just like we're a train on a track. If everybody does what they're supposed to do, the train will keep moving down the track. And if you do a great job, maybe you can move up on the train into a position of higher responsibility and things like that. So it's a step by step process. Sandy Weil in. I would say my friend Sandy wild more. You know, I know, I know Sandy. I knew Sandy. But, you know, I. There was a time where I could call Sandy Weil up and say, I need to see you. And he said, come on for lunch tomorrow. You know, I fly into New York, have lunch with him. But Sandy weil, during the 80s and now I don't even know where Sandy is. But I would never say we were friends, but we knew each other. We were in business together. And Sandy, his story, unbelievable. In the 80s, he was the executive vice president of one of the greatest growth periods of American Express ever. In the 80s. And back then, when a million was a million, they had over a thousand people who work there make a million dollars. And he made a lot of people wealthy, in other words, during the 80s. But he ran into a thing where you had the corporate bias, racist this, that and the other. And they said, you know, Sandy Weil obviously has a Jewish background. SOB Said, a Jew will never be president of American Express. So in other words, there's no place for Sandy to go. He couldn't get promoted because of his. How he was born is ridiculous. And so they gave him a buyout. He went out and spent a year. And that's where Jamie Dimon, you know, Jamie Dimon today is the big guru at JP Morgan and has been big, you know, biggest bank in the world probably. And. But Jamie's came out of school because his dad worked his entire career with Sandy Weil. And Sandy knew Jamie. And Jamie went to harbor and all, you know, all of the Ivy League schools got the degrees. And for a year, Jamie went. It was just Jamie, one secretary in Sandy Weill. And they looked at business, they evaluated business opportunities. And eventually they found one little consumer finance company down in Baltimore. Down in, down in Maryland. Down in Baltimore. And they would fly down there four days a week. And Sandy assembled a financial dream team to fly down with him out of New York. And they turned that thing, I think it was consumer finance or something like that, and they turned that thing into, you know, just a powerhouse. It's unbelievable, but for, you know, so he was building his super team of advisors and then they took that little consumer finance thing and everybody said, you know, Sandy Wiles lost his frigging Mind, what's he doing down there? And they're going down to Baltimore, of all places. Well, anyway, he would go down flying Monday, fly back on Thursday night. But he was assembling his dream team. They were talking, they were planning, they were strategizing. And then during the 90s, step by step, they started buying other companies and merged with Travelers and then became the Travelers Group. And then they merged with Citibank, became Citigroup. And so they became, believe it or not, this is the end of the 90s, the number one by valuation, number one company in the world. So he had taken in about 11 years. He had gone from being fired, not fired, but, you know, squeezed out, let's say, at American Express. And the funny thing is American Express, as soon after they got rid of Sandy Weill, they wound up getting, I forget, I won't call his name. But anyway, he was of a Jewish persuasion himself. They let Sandy go because they weren't going to have a Jew run American Express, but then they brought in a Jew to run American Express. And so Sandy, things don't always happen the way they should happen in life. But that did put a burning desire inside of Sandy to do something. So maybe you got things happening to you right now that's creating a burning desire that will last you for a long time and give you motivation that you've never had, that most people don't have and never will have. But because of that, you know, that offense, you know, what was said about you, you know, how the door was slammed in your face or something, opportunities were stolen from you or whatever, if that creates a rage in you to do something great, that's more important than if they had given you the job because of what you're going to do with that rage. Well, Sandy Weil, for the entire time I ever knew him, every 15 minutes while the stock market was open for as long as he was running Citigroup, he would have someone come up to him and give him the stock price of his company and the stock price of American Express, because one thing was sure, they were going to beat American Express. And they did. And they got to the point they could have bought American Express if they wanted to. But the deal is, he became the number one, the CEO of the number one company in the world. And this is before, you know, the tech guys, Amazon and Apple and all those guys zoomed back up the ladder. But there was a time at the end of the 90s where Sandy Weil, you know, he climbed the ladder step by step. One company at A time, one day at a time. And so why did I tell you that? Story number one, it can be done. But the two is what did he have on his desk? Because we're talking about short term versus long term goals here on the Big Hitter podcast. You know, how can you sort this out in your mind? Well, I'll just, you know, figure it out for yourself. But it's like big hitters think long term and short term. I'll go right to the end of the story. Okay. You've got to do both. Well, and Sidney Weil had one cartoon, one of his New Yorker magazine cartoons, the kinds that never really made much sense to me for a lot of my career anyway. That's why I used to read the Wall Street Journal for the cartoons. And I was real proud of myself when I started to understand them. But anyway, what cartoon did Sandy Weill have in his office right across from his desk on the wall, prominent place to keep himself centered. It was a cartoon of basically what we would call now a homeless person. Basically him was a bum and on the street begging. And the caption underneath, you know, underneath it, it said, here, here goes the CEO that focused all of his energy on long term goals and forgot about short, the short term, you know, and of course, this is not drop down, hilariously funny. But the deal is that the idea is if you're a CEO and you're for, you know, you're, you know, you got to cast a vision and you got to have a plan to dominate and, you know, climb the charts in the industry and bigger market share, but if that's great, you know, you're taking over Starbucks now. We're going to push it back up the ladder, you know, well, great. But the deal is what are you going to do today? Because you got to get there step by step by step. And he had that cartoon up there to remind himself that it was a day by day, hour by hour process. He took the books home every night. He looked at every line. He read everything. He knew everything was important and he knew the way they had to improve all of those line items step by step if they were going to be able to do and buy the bigger companies and merge. And it wasn't enough just to buy another company. They had to merge with it and then turn it into a success. And so step by step, they. That was his approach, a big vision. He had that thing, he wanted to knock out an American Express, he wanted to climb the ladder. He wanted to go back to where he was a, you know, A wolf of Wall street, more or less. You know, people were about. People would bow down when he went. But right now, today, it's because of this Carnegie Hall. You ever heard of Carnegie Hall? You know, the thing about how do you get to the job? You know, how do I play in Carnegie Hall? Practice. That's like if you're a musician, play Carnegie hall in New York. It's unbelievable. Guess who? Fun. If you go up there, you'll see Sandy and Joan Weill. They're the benefactors that kept it open, rebuilt it, you know, this, that and the other, restored it to its prominence. And so, and then the Sandy Weill hospital, you know, the Sanford Hospital, Weill Hospitals. And see that attention, big vision, plus attention to the daily short term goals gives you a chance to do things like that. And so it's. Is it short term, is it long term? Yes, it's both. It's like the answer is in life and it's like you want to make a ton of money, but like J. Paul Getty said, you want to be frugal, you want to watch the pennies. Because the thing is, he said, the frugal person, J. Paul Getty, richest guy in the world for a long time and all kind of legacy things. If you go to la, one of the highlights of LA is go to the Guggenheim Museum of Art and everything out there off the, what is it, i4 or something like that and Mulholland. It's been a long time since I've been in la. But anyway, what an incredible legacy. John Paul Getty left behind because he had success, but he was very frugal in how, you know, every. He wanted every. He wanted value out of all of his money, but he wanted value out of every hour everybody spent. And so that's where the short term goals come in because by being specific, you know what to do in every hour to where you can accomplish things that will move you closer to your goal. So anyway, that's hopefully that will. And when you're frugal, like J. Paul Getty said, the frugal person has a much higher odds of success because they have a greater margin for error. And as we know in life, we're always going to have surprises and things are not going to go, you know, you don't want to have to. You don't want to have the pressure on you to have to run the perfect play, the perfect plan to have success. And so like J. Paul Getty, you know, you want to build in margin for error inside your operation, inside Your thinking. And that way when you have the, you know, like you have time, a lot of time and money allotted to do a goal. If you have some margins for error in there, you can have a buffer, basically absorb some bumps where things take longer, it takes more money, and you still finish on time, under budget, things like that. And so short term, long term, these things play out. And so don't let yourself waste a lot of time trying to figure that part out. You gotta have a vision of greatness. You gotta have a goal of greatness, you gotta want to do something great. You gotta be able to inspire people to greatness and great performance. But then you got to have the rubber meets the road. What are we going to do right now to make that greatness, that dream come alive? And how do you do that? You figure it out. You do the next step. We all know what the next step is. I don't know what your next step is, but you got to do the next step and you got to keep moving forward like that. If you like what you've heard. I don't know if this does any good, but they say it does. Subscribe, hit like things like that, and then they'll send out things saying it doesn't matter whatsoever. But anyway, if you like it, you want to hit the button, you want to subscribe, great. I would appreciate it if you want to leave a review, leave a comment so we can keep the conversation going. Nobody knows everything. And I get stimulated by conversation with other people and especially on the way up, you know, you got all these questions swirling around in your head and you can express them in really interesting ways. And so it's really interesting to hear that. Get your feedback. Stay plugged into our Big Hitter Cut podcast. Come see me over on the website.