Don't Start A Business Unless You Can Handle This BIG Problem

This is going to be contrary to what most motivational speakers, gurus, and business coaches tell you. But listen, not everyone gets to win in life, okay? Not everyone gets to be Gary Vee. Not everyone gets to be Alex or Mosey or Grant Cardone. Those are your elite of the elites, okay? Because there's so many people I've worked with over the years who have gone into doing something like YouTube or starting a business. Did you know that within the first year of starting a business, 20% of them, well, go out of business? All right? Can you believe that? So 20% of the businesses that are being start today will go out of business by the end of the year. It just goes to show you it's hard to make it in business. But I want to tell you that, you know, not everyone needs to make hundreds of millions of dollars, okay? Not everyone needs to be a Gary Vee or an Alex or Mosey. There's some people who are just like, listen, if I can make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, that would be life changing. And that's a more realistic goal for a lot of people. And, you know, there's a quote, I think it's, you know, shoot for the stars and maybe you'll hit the moon, okay? And it's good. You should have big goals. You should have big goals. But I also want you to understand that the amount of output that you have to give in your business has to match that goal. So if you're someone who wants to have a $20 million a year company, or someone wants to have $100 million a year company, you have to put in $100 million a year and effort, okay? And for me and how I want to build my life and my lifestyle, that's not what I want to do, okay? I want to say, hey, I want to do my one video a week over here on YouTube. I want to build some website articles. I want to be able to take a month off and go to Iceland or go to Scotland or Ireland or wherever I want to go. I want to be able to do that and not have to be beckoning, calling to my work, okay? I really firmly believe that you should build your life or build your business around your life, not your life around your business. Because a lot of people do that. You know, they say entrepreneurs, you know, they're. They're the only people who give up a 40 hour a week job to work 80 hours a week instead. So you're basically training one job for another job where you work overtime. And in the beginning you're going to have to, because it takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of sweat equity to get the momentum going. All right, for those of you who don't know my YouTube journey, my YouTube journey, it took about three years, three years for my first video to even take off and get going. Okay. I didn't really make a lot of Money my first three years in business on YouTube. Fortunately, I had a brick and mortar business that I had started that that was making money. So I was able to support myself there. The thing is, it takes a lot more time than you think and people don't calculate that in. That's why so many businesses fail in the beginning, because people get into it and then they're like, wow, this is lot of work. They realize, you know, that they have to get customers, they have to do sales, they have to do marketing, and now they have to hire people. So they have to manage people. Okay. And I will be honest, I'm horrible at managing. I'm not great at managing. I like people. I manage people the way I want to be managed, which is, this is your job. Here's the work. Go get it done. Put your head down and don't talk to me. You know, that's kind of how I manage and that's not a great way to manage. That's why I have other people who help me because I know that about myself. I'm just not a great manager because I'm the type of person who puts my head down and gets the work done. But at some point, if you want to get more out of your people, you do have to learn to communicate with them, set expectations and you know, don't be afraid to create systems to help them help you. Because eventually, you know, if you want to build the business around your life, you can't be doing everything. There's a lot of great solopreneurs out there. You know, my online business is, I don't want to say it's mostly solopreneur because I have so many people who help me now. I do have a full time admin that works 40 hours a week for me and I have three virtual assistants who help me as well. So that's a team, alright? That's people. And you will get further with people than you will on your own. And the thing with delegation and having a team is that you can step away from the office and not worrying about your business falling apart and crumbling. Okay. So, for example, the way I've built my online business, I could take a month Off. I could take two months off and it wouldn't really impact the business because I have people to handle the customer service. I usually batch record the content. So we're already recording content for right now. I'm in the month of March, it's the end of March. We're already recording content for May and June. Like, we're so ahead of schedule right now that we are trying to create that content. Because I got sick and tired of being in the grind of like, okay, I gotta get a video done this week. Okay. Get a video done this week. Okay. I wanted to create my business to flow better with my lifestyle, my online guitar teaching business. We were doing like two or three videos a week for a very long time. We did two videos a week, every week, Every week. And it just got to be exhausting. And I was like, you know, I don't want to put that much energy into it. I just want to do one video a week. And people would be like, that is so against the grain. Like, you're supposed to be putting so much content out. You're supposed to be on YouTube. You don't really need to. On Instagram, TikTok, you know, that stuff you could post like two, three, four times a day and it's worth it. But on YouTube, you know, posting two, three, four times a Day really isn't going to help you that much. You'll get a lot more content out there. But I think if you have a better quality content that is released on a weekly basis, that that would be much better, a much better strategy. Because I was starting to get burnt out. I was starting to get overwhelmed. And I'm like, okay, is this what I want to do in this particular business for the rest of my life? And I said, no, no, it's not. That's not what I want to do with the rest of my life. So I said, okay, here's how much money I'm making. Is that okay? Like, we always want to make more money as entrepreneurs, but I'm like, okay, if this was how much I was making and I made this for. For the rest of my life, would I be able to work with that? And the answer is yes, because there's enough extra money for me to cover my expenses, go on the vacation and do the kind of travel that I want to. Am I going to get a private jet anytime soon? No, I'm not going to get a private jet. And that's fine. I don't mind. I'll fly first class. That works for me. Totally fine. I don't need the private jet, but I do get to go away and do whatever I want, so that's fine. So for me, it was more important not to follow the typical business advice, which is like, grind out, make content. Make content. Make content for me. I wanted to pull back because I was feeling exhausted. I was starting to get a little bit burnt out. And I'm like, this, this is not. This is me making my life around the business. And again, I want to make the business around my life. All right? So I want to be able to, you know, record once or twice a month and create content for either the entire month or for two months. Okay. And then be done with it and be like, okay, I'm done with creating content and I can go relax, I can go for a walk. I'm actually, after I record this video, it's a beautiful day outside. I'm like, I'm going to go take the dog for a walk. I just want to be able to have options because to me, that's the most important thing. And you do have to make enough money to have those options. I would say, and this is me talking from personal experience and other people I've heard have said this as well, and a. About when you start making, I would say around $250,000 a year for yourself. Life changes a lot. I would say even, you know, and I made six figures years ago, even through, you know, my brick and mortar business. And even that is life changing. It gives you more options. But the biggest change came probably around $250,000 a year, and you just have so many more options. You can go to the grocery store and you don't have to worry about, you know, the G prices all of a sudden going up, you know, 100%. You know, when someone goes to war, you don't have to worry about the grocery price going up, right? The insure. Everything's going up, everything's going up, and you can still have enough left over to take care of yourself. I think that was the biggest change. That was the biggest change was I started investing in myself more. So about 35 years old, I started working out with trainers. I started, you know, just going for massages, just trying to take care of myself. Because up until that point, in my 20s and my early 30s, I was in the grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. And I was like, you know, I was gaining weight, I was getting stressed, and I was just tired all the time. And I said, something has to change, okay? I need to change the way I'm Doing my business. And that was the change I decided to make. I decided, hey, I'm going to cut back. And I understand by cutting back that means I'm going to make a little bit less money, but I make enough money right now. I'm very happy with the amount of money I make. And it's very strange. Very, very interesting thing is last year I cut back. So last year I only did. Instead of doing two videos a week, I did one video a week. And we actually made a lot more money last year than we did the year before when I was posting two videos a week. Now, I will preface that by saying it's not because I cut the work. It's because we focused on making better quality videos when we were releasing them. But also I have my backlog, which back catalog, which was supporting me. Okay. I had done the grind long enough that I could cut back a little bit. And, you know, we're seeing it. It's just like, you know, the YouTube channel is kind of doing its thing and it's kind of sitting around, you know, a million views a month. Ish. Plus or minus. And, you know, if it stays there, that. That's totally cool. You know what? I'd love to be, like, someone else who has hundreds of millions of views. Awesome. Because, like, that's more people you can reach. It's also more customers coming through your door. It's more customer service. So you always have to think about when you're creating your business. How do I want my life to look? What are the changes I'm going to make to align my business with my lifestyle and do those match up? Because if you want, you know, a $10 million a year lifestyle, you have to match your effort. You're not going to be able to do the one video a week. You're not going to be taking weekends off for a little while. I do. I did years of not having the weekends, and this is a Saturday I'm working. But it's like, you know, I worked a half day today and I'm going to take the rest of the day off, and that's totally fine. And that's what I want my lifestyle in. My wife's working at the hospital right now, so I'm going to work. If she weren't working, I wouldn't be working. All right. That's the great thing about options and building your business around your lifestyle. So if you're interested in learning more about my journey here on YouTube. How long did it take? Well, I go through year by year. In this video over here, the steps, and how long it took for me to go from making absolutely $0 on YouTube to making about a half a million dollars a year selling courses and stuff online. Super interesting video to show you how long it can take. Go watch that video right over there.