014 What Level Entrepreneur Are You?

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This is the Affluent Entrepreneur show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money, and scale your life while creating a deeper impact and living with complete freedom. Because that's what it really means to be an affluent entrepreneur.

Hey there. Welcome back to this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur Show. In this episode, we're going to talk about this whole idea of what are the entrepreneurial levels? In fact, what level are you playing at? And. And before we even start, before we even start, it doesn't matter what level you're playing at. It just matters that you're aware of it. Because the mindset that you bring to that level will determine some of the things that you're doing. But some of the things that you're doing will determine the level of scale, the level of potential profitability, and the level of wealth you create. So let me give you a little bit of backstory on this, why I decided to do an episode talking about what is entrepreneurship? I mean, doesn't everyone know what entrepreneurship is? I mean, we should. You would think so. At least I did. Till a client of mine, one of my high level mentoring clients, we were having a conversation and she actually said to me, I actually don't believe I'm an entrepreneur. I don't see myself as an entrepreneur. And I said, what do you mean? Now, mind you, she has a coaching business, she does consulting, she does teaching and training. She does all kinds of different things, including products and programs. And she didn't see herself as an entrepreneur, and it just was a really interesting thing. And I said, so I put the question back on her. In fact, this is something you might want to try. You might not want to try it with your spouse, though, okay? But I asked her, I said, well, what do you see as an entrepreneur? How do you define an entrepreneur and why do you think you're not an entrepreneur? And her response was really interesting. She said, well, I look at myself more as a freelancer versus an entrepreneur because I believe an entrepreneur is someone that is building a business to scale it, to sell it for some big windfall. And so, and that's truly, truly the case that there's a lot of entrepreneurs that, that start businesses to build, to scale and to sell. Okay? And I've been in that game as an angel investor. I bought and sold businesses, I've built businesses, I'm still on boards, we're building businesses, I'm an investor in businesses. So I get it, that's part of it. But the interesting thing is that a lot of folks start to look at entrepreneurship through those eyes and they don't see themselves as entrepreneurs per se. Now I actually think, I actually think that the general definition of entrepreneurship is someone.

That is serving a need, that is improving the human condition while serving their own life and fulfilling themselves in the sense of creating fulfillment through their endeavor for a profit. So they're serving a need while creating fulfillment in their life for a profit. Okay? And I think that if we, when we get down to it, every entrepreneur's job is to improve from their business. Every business's purpose is to improve the human condition. Now does it matter whether you do that as what you call a freelancer or a side hustle or, or some big scale business? You know, I'm working with companies that are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Does it really matter? And I think the answer is no. I honestly believe that you're no less of an entrepreneur because you happen to be at one of the lower levels of the entrepreneurial levels. And I say lower levels in the sense of founder dependency more than anything else. I don't mean it that there's a, a lower level per se in the sense of ranking. So I don't think you're any less of an entrepreneur. No matter what you're doing. If you're out there with a service, with a product, and making a difference in people's lives and improving the human condition, creating solutions, then you're an entrepreneur. You're an entrepreneur. That's what they do. Entrepreneurs create something that improves the human condition. That's the bottom line. Now I. Are there different levels of entrepreneurs? Absolutely, there are different levels of entrepreneurs. And like I said, I don't know that any level is bad, good or indifferent. But let's talk about the levels first and then let's talk about what I think the characteristics are that all entrepreneurs have. Let's put it this way, all successful entrepreneurs have, all affluent entrepreneurs will have because it's how they move. But let's start off with, with understanding the levels. And so for those of you that are listening, I'm going to go to my iPad, but I'll make sure that the graphics that I'm putting up, you'll have in the show notes. So you want to jump over to the show notes so you can get access to them. I want you to visualize that. I'm actually going to draw this out in an upside down triangle and it's called the entrepreneurial levels and the highest level at the top. This is where a lot of people start. And I think this is where, where my client was actually thinking. It's what I call a gig preneur. Okay. These are the folks that, that are being driven. They're, they're actually going from gig to gig, okay. From job to job. I mean, it truly is a job. You're, this is the freelancer. This is someone that has a skill set and uses that skill set to earn money. Okay. But here's the thing. The mindset of this gigpreneur typically is skill focused. In other words, their avenue. Their avenue. Potentially the way they see their avenue for additional revenue to make additional income is to up level their skill set. So they're skill focused versus scale focused. Hopefully that makes sense. I kind of did this when I first started out as a CPA and starting to do the valuations and litigation. So for instance, I had my CPA license. I got my CPA license. I passed the exam while I was still in college. And then I had to serve my time, if you will, two years under the tutelage of a CPA firm going through the specific tasks. So I got my CPA license, but I wanted distinction in the marketplace and I wanted to be able to be seen as valuable in the marketplace. And so one of the things that I started to do and I wanted to do, do valuations. And so I started to find valuation credentials. Valuation credentials. So now I, I've. After my cpa, I got my cva. Okay. Then after that I thought, oh, but you know, if I got one credential, maybe another credential would be good. So after I got the cva, I got the asa, the accredited senior appraiser. Then I got the abv, the accredited business valuation. So I got all these Credentials that I was putting after my name because I was thinking about it saying skill focused, doing work on a project by project basis. And that would raise my value in the marketplace. Which it did. It did. It positioned me in a way that allowed me to command more fees and charge more in the marketplace. The problem is that there's a ceiling to that. Okay, first off, at some point, the, the value of increasing your skills, depending on what that skill is or, or credentials starts to shrink down. So, so you, you lose the economies of it. You. The effect, the incremental effect of it isn't as great. And second, I think that you run the risk, and this I've seen a lot. You run the risk of procrastinating your way to, through credentials, through education, through skilling up and not getting your stuff out there. So imagine this for a moment. You're sitting back and say, I just need to take one more course. I need to learn a little bit more about marketing or email marketing or copywriting or the technology. And so what ends up happening is you don't put stuff out there. You don't get your product out there, you don't get yourself in the marketplace, you don't put yourself out there. And, and I gotta tell you that the challenge is that when you don't put yourself out there, you've got no ability to earn. If you're not out there making offers to the people you want to serve and serving them with your content, with your products, with your services, you're not making money. So we need to be careful at this stage. The gigpreneur typically goes from gig to gig. I've watched this happen with a lot of my colleagues and friends when I was part of the National Speakers association, they saw themselves as a speaker. And so the only way they earned money was speaking. And so they would go from one speaking gig to another speaking gig to another speaking gig. And this may be you, you might be dealing with some of this a bit yourself. The problem with that is one, you're confined to one way of making money because. Not because you. That's the only way. And it's because that's the only way. You see. And the challenge is that I watched some of my Speaking colleagues travel 200, 220 days a year just to make ends meet. Gig to gig to gig to gig. And then when 911 hit or the pandemic hit and people weren't doing conferences now, it was worse than 911 because we didn't have the virtual element that we have today to be able to do that. They couldn't go from gig to gig. There were no gigs to go to. They weren't making money. So put them at risk. Because the. And why I believe this was a challenge is because they were seeing it through the eyes of a gigpreneur. This is the way I make money versus seeing it through the eyes of an entrepreneur, seeing it for the eyes of a business and saying, how do I do this as a business? How do I do this as a business? Now, this is what happened with me. I was going from project to project to project, but in order to get the projects, I literally was speaking for free. I was teaching for little to nothing. I was writing for free. I was doing all these different things so I could get the gig, get the project, get paid. Now, the projects and the gigs that I got were high dollars. So it was pretty good. Until I realized, wait. The right thing to do, the business thing to do is to look at and say, can I get paid along the way to the gig? And that's when I started to look at this as a business. That's when I started to rethink it and say, it's not just the gig that gets me paid. I might get paid along the way. And so I started looking at, how can I get paid for speaking, I can get paid for writing. How do I get paid for teaching or training or workshops or facilitation? And so now, all of a sudden, I had five different ways to get paid for the same knowledge, the same service, and the same work on my way to get the big gig. And so that started to shift me from gigpreneur to a different level. And when we went to that next level, this is where we call them the solopreneur. Most people have heard this. Solopreneur and the solopreneur level, now we're starting to think like a business. Now we're starting to think like a business. But. And this is a big but is that as a solopreneur, we tend to think like a business, but still do it all. Okay, so in other words, you're thinking like a business, but you are the business. You're doing everything in the business. You're doing the delivery, you're doing the creation, you're doing the marketing, you're doing the selling, you're doing the operations, you're doing the bookkeeping, you're doing all of the tasks because you're a solopreneur. Now, once again, once again, your thinking is moving up, up the chain. Now the idea here is that as we go down this, this, this ladder, as we go down this funnel, if you will, this, this upside down triangle, the dependency on you starts to get reduced. When the dependency on you starts to get reduced, your ability to scale goes up, your ability to leverage your time back in goes up. And when you have the ability to leverage your time, you have the ability to get one of the critical outcomes of the affluent blueprint, which is a richer lifestyle. See, remember what we said. If we cannot command our time, if we do not control our time, it doesn't matter how many commas you have in the bank account, you are going to live a poor life because you're not in control of your life, you're not in control of your time. I've done some things on this. We'll do more on it in other episodes where we'll really break this down, but at a solopreneur level. We just need to understand that, great, we're thinking like a business, but we're doing too much of the business. And so we need to start to transition. And as, like I said, as we go down this hierarchy, this is the dependency on the founder, the founder dependency goes down. And so when we start to move, then there's two other levels to look at. When we start to move down this, this funnel, this triangle, the next level that I see a lot of, and we see it a lot in today's world, in, in the virtual environment and today's world and everything. And this is what we call a personal brand. So now personal brand is great. It's great. But this is a business that's based simply on the person, okay? On you. And there is nothing wrong with this. I have a personal brand. It's the Mel Abraham brand, okay? Tony Robbins has a personal brand. Do you believe it or not? Richard Branson has a personal brand, okay? You know, Elon Musk has a personal brand. There's nothing wrong with a personal brand. The difference, though, is to understand if you're running a personal brand and it is totally focused on you, and you have no other avenues of income, and you haven't leveraged it out in a way, then what you're creating is something that may be scalable to some extent as a brand, but probably not sellable as a brand, okay? And that. Which is totally fine because not everyone's there to try and sell a business. I've not created my businesses for purposes of sale. I've created other businesses for purpose of sale, not the ones that I'm in Right now, although the affluence blueprint may get set up in a way that I could transfer it if I choose to do so. But I will never transfer a business. This is just personal. My personal perspective. I'm never going to transfer a business if it's going to jeopardize the mission, the vision, and the purpose behind my business. Okay, so we look at things in that, in that context. Look as a cpa, my valuation business, my consulting business, this, my litigation, my testimony business, all of that was built around me. It's a personal brand. When I stop working it, it stops rolling. Could I have built it into something bigger than that? Yes. And I've leveraged it. So don't think that I'm doing everything in the business. It's not operating as a solopreneur. I've got people that, that do. Do stuff for me and work would work with me, work for me. And, and we work together on things. So it's leveraged. And, and I'm not in the business of. On a regular basis, but the business itself is built around my reputation, around my name, and around the things that I do, all the messaging that I put out there. Your business could be a personal brand. This happens a lot in the coaching space, in the speaking space, in the consulting space. When we start to build it around our personality, when we start to build it around our expertise without creating the expertise in a way to be able to duplicate it, replicate it, and get that value through other channels, then it tends to be a personal brand. And like I said, nothing wrong with it. Just know that in many cases, a personal brand isn't something that is necessarily sellable. And that leads us to.

This last level, if you will, as we go into it. And that is what I call a product brand. Okay? And now a product brand. This is really built around your products, your services, your offerings. It's built around the solution that you provide to a problem. And so what you get known for is the solution. What you get known for is the product. What you get known for is the services. Okay? Now what we've done is we've taken the founder and removed the founder out of it as much as possible, and we've leveraged it. Now, all of these are entrepreneurs. There's just different levels of entrepreneurs. And like I said, it doesn't really matter where you're at, except if you want to be at a different level. If you're looking to build something to sell, then you can't be a gigpreneur, not for Long. If you're looking for something to sell, you probably can't be a solopreneur, not for long. Can you sell a personal brand? Yeah, some of them have been successful. To sell, we just got to set it up right. We've got to operate it right. We've got to optimize the profits. We've got to minimize the involvement of you. And it's got to be built around your person, your notoriety. But when we remove you, does that affect the business? But when we build a product brand that's built around the services, the solutions, or the products you create, the certifications, the programs, the solutions, then that's what we're selling is the cash flow stream off of that. Now, it doesn't mean that all of us want to sell, but we just need to understand that this is the difference in entrepreneur levels. But I don't ever want anyone listening to this show, anyone of the community, the family, or the affluent entrepreneur nation to ever think, I'm just a solopreneur. So I'm less than hell? No. Because the person you serve, the person you serve, the solution you bring to them, the change you make in their life, they're not looking at you less than they're looking at you as the solution provider. They're looking at you that you changed their lives. So take it on for what it is. And if you choose to operate it as a gigpreneur, solopreneur, personal brand, product brand, that's totally up to you. It's a conscious choice. I've made a conscious choice to operate some of my businesses simply as a personal brand, simply as a gigpreneur, simply as a solopreneur, and some as a product brand. So the key in everything we do, when it comes to wealth building, when it comes to money, when it comes to business building, is the awareness and the intentionality of what we do. So I hope this helps you start to understand this and really look at how I look at entrepreneurship, the eyes that I look to, because it's not some narrow thing of. Of create, build, scale, sell. Okay? No, it's a thing of we have a solution that improves the human condition. I'm going to do it because I love it, and I'm going to be able to make a profit at it. And I am not sugarcoating profit, because without profit, the business fails. Without profit, your message dies. Without profit, the movements can't go on. Without profit, the missions can't be pushed forward. Profit has to be there. And it's not some Dirty word. It's not some disease, it's not some horrible thing to have. Because when you operate from a sense of purpose, those prophets are for a purpose and not for profit, simply. So let me give you some, one other thing that I want to walk you through to kind of help dial this in, because I think that there's four characteristics, four things that exist for every entrepreneur, no matter what the level is. And these four characteristics are what I call the business journey matrix, if you will. And so when we look at this, the business journey matrix, the very first thing, and I'm making a general statement here, but most businesses, most business owners, most people that start businesses, start businesses because they're looking for a solution. They see a problem in the marketplace. They see a problem in the marketplace and they're saying, there's got to be a better solution.

When we look at why Redbox was created, why Netflix was created, there was a problem in the marketplace. The founder, the founder of Netflix got hit with a bunch of late fees from Blockbuster Video and, and decided, forget this lengthy stuff, I'm going to do something different. I'm going to turn this industry over. I'm going to change the way it was done. He was solving a problem. He was solving a problem. So what ends up happening is, I believe that almost every single entrepreneur starts with a view on a solution. They see a problem, they want to improve the human condition and they go after it. So the first, the first piece of this whole thing, this biz journey matrix is, is that they, they create a solution, they understand there's a need for a solution and they go out to try and create it. And the reason they do that is because they now have a vision of what the world could be like when they have the right solution in place. And they, that will. And if you, you question it, you can tell that the person is a visionary thinker. You can tell the person is an entrepreneurial thinker when all of a sudden they say, imagine for a moment. They use the word imagine a lot. But imagine for a moment, think about Elon Musk. Imagine for a moment where we could take and have cars self drive without impacting a carbon footprint on the planet, without being environmentally damaging to create something that's different than what is the norm in business, in society, in our communities today. He had a vision. And so what ends up happening is they see a problem, they're looking for a solution, that solution births a vision that things can change. And that vision births the third thing. And this is really about it. Creating A passion within. And all of the entrepreneurs that I have had the blessing of working with, they came with a solution. They had a vivid, emotionally compelling vision, and they had a passion wrapped around the vision, the passion to bring it to life. And then in the process, they then looked at and said, how can I make it commercially viable? How do I create compensation? And out of it so we can get paid, not just for us to live a wealthy life, but to sustain the vision, to sustain the solution, to sustain the mission, so we can continue to change society. So I look at the biz journey matrix and say the majority of entrepreneurs, at least the entrepreneurs that I attract and the entrepreneurs that I get to work with, frankly, those that are just profit driven, I don't attract those, okay, because we don't necessarily have the same values and we don't necessarily get along. And I'm totally cool with that because I want to work with people that want to make a difference, that they're driven not by just the dollar amount, but they're driven by the difference they get to make, the solutions, the improvement of the human condition. And in the process, let's make some money at it. So we can continue to sustain the vision, but at the same time create that life of affluence, that life of financial liberation to do that. So I believe that they work hand in hand. When money is the sole focus, that's when we start to compromise things. That's when we start to do things differently. So that's the thing that I look at. This is the lens that I look at with entrepreneurs. This is something that we'll talk more about as we go through. There's systems that all businesses, I think, should have. We'll talk about that, how to optimize profits and. And then how do we maximize our wealth through the business and all of that. But it was an interesting question that came up, and I thought it would be an interesting one to bring on the show to have a dialogue and a conversation around this whole idea of what's an entrepreneur. So I hope this served you. I hope this helps. And maybe you had a chance to look at the levels and say, oh, wait a second, I'm operating as a gigpreneur. I want to be more of a solopreneur. I want to be more of a personal brand. And now we can start to put some things in place to shift you, if that's what you choose to do. But we do it consciously with intent and awareness. So I hope that helps. I hope that you found this of Value. Listen, here's the deal. If you were listening on the show and not watching the show, do me a favor. You can get the graphics of what we have here on the Show Notes page. I'll make sure that they're there for you. And if you have not followed the show, subscribe to the show. Do me a favor, subscribe to the show, okay? It helps us out first. It makes me feel good, all right? Because then I, I feel like they feel loved. But at the same time, it helps us in the rankings and to keep the show out there because I want to get this in the hands of as many people as possible because I truly believe that financial independence, financial liberation is a birthright. We just need to go claim it. And as entrepreneurs, we too often get stuck on the treadmill. Calling us becoming a treadmill entrepreneur. And I want every single one of us, every single one of you, to be an affluent entrepreneur. And one other thing, if you want to join a community of like minded entrepreneurs like yourself, trying to live the life of an affluent entrepreneur, to build that wealth, to build it in the right way and have real conversations, frank conversations about money, about wealth, about life, about business, join my private Facebook group called the Affluent Entrepreneurship and let's have that conversation. In the meantime, I look forward to hearing from you. Any questions, any DMs, anything, let me know. I'd love to hear from you. Things you want to see on the show, guests you might want to see on the show. I'd love to hear from you. But in the meantime, till we, till we meet again, till we talk again, till we see each other again, you keep rocking, you keep making a difference and look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the affluent entrepreneur show. Cheers. Bye. Thank you for listening to the affluent entrepreneur show with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the Affluent entrepreneur Facebook group now by going to melabraham.com group and I'll see you there.

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