EP2: Day One Unemployed — No Weekends, No Excuses

Welcome back. Today is day 1 of unemployment. So what do you do? Where do you even start? Where do you even start if you're unemployed? Well, let me tell you what you should not do. I know a lot of people will say, hey, you know, take some time for yourself and, you know, really reflect and think about, you know, what you're going to do next. You should have already been doing that by the time you got here. You know, whether you were fired, um, hopefully you weren't fired the same day and like left the same day, but you probably had some sort of transition, maybe 2 days, 3 days, week, 2 weeks, whatever, right? You should have figured that out. It's time to get to work. There is no weekends off. So if you're a 9-to-5er and you're really comfortable with, you know, spending time with family Saturday and Sunday, guess what? Like, that's over. Okay? Like, you gotta make peace with that. If you are going to get to the next level, you need to get up off your ass and get to work. And that's what I'm doing today. So today's Saturday, it's day 1. Yesterday was my last day and I'm back at it. So I got 2 screens open right now. I'm actually working while I'm recording this. And that's a big lesson within itself of multitasking. You need to reverse engineer what is your goal. Okay. And if your goal is I got to produce X amount of money each month, you need to dissect what skill sets you have, first of all, and then how you can essentially reverse engineer into that goal. So starting at whatever that goal is, $10,000 a month, or whatever. In my case, it's $20,000 a month. Okay, well, what skill sets do you have to be able to generate $20,000 a month? That's what you have to figure out. And so before I jump into my normal weekly schedule, a couple days ago I sat down and mapped out, okay, what does my schedule, my calendar look like? I know I cannot achieve what I need to achieve in terms of income goals and getting to that $20,000 a month unless I am hyper-focused on my schedule and where I'm allocating my time. Every second counts. So in my case— oh, that's cool, my internet went out. Maybe I was meant to spend more time focused on this podcast. In my case, every second— or in your case, every second counts. You have to attack every day with massive action until you reach your goal. And whatever your goal is, it's going to be 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 times harder than you think it's going to be to actually achieve it. Maybe you might be thinking, okay, now is my time to start posting on social media. One post a day is not going to get you to where you want to go. I'm looking at finding a way— how can I get to 10 posts a day? That's what I'm trying to get to. How could I go even beyond that? Can I get to 20? Can I get to 30? I don't know. But where I'm starting at is, okay, first goal is I need to get to 10 posts a day on social media that's blasted out to all these channels before I get to my normal weekly schedule of what I have planned out for my normal flow every day, Monday through Sunday. There is no days off, no days off whatsoever. I have mapped out, you know, the family time that I want to spend which is going to be more than I was previously spending, but every single day work must be done if you're going to get there. You cannot afford to sit on your ass on the weekends and do nothing. You just can't. Before I get to my normal schedule, I am 3 months behind on some property management accounting for a couple of properties on a portfolio. And so that's unfortunately, it's not going to generate any money. And you, that's another thing you have to think about. You need to evaluate how much is your hourly earning potential or what the marketplace says your skill sets are worth. If it's $50, $75, $100, $20, whatever, whatever that number is, you need to really take a hard look. At the task that you're doing and ask yourself this question. Is this a, let's say, you know, for me, let's, let's just pick a number. Let's just say, um, you know, $100 an hour is what my time's worth in the marketplace. Okay. I'm just picking a round number. Well, anything less than $100, wouldn't you think the argument is you probably shouldn't be doing it? You probably shouldn't be focused on that task. Now, that's easy to say, hard to do in terms of delegating and offloading that, especially when you have no income, right? If you're making this transition, like, how are you going to hire someone? Well, the answer is you can't. You're gonna have to suck it up and grind and that should be probably one of the first things you look at. You need to be building momentum and building actual dollars in your bank account and generating income for you to unlock yourself from those lower-level tasks. I don't know what that looks like for me. Me personally, I am going to start looking— this is just me, you know, this isn't the right move for everyone else. I am going to start my search now to find someone that can do bookkeeping and can do jack of all trades stuff. Let's take this for example. So I'm going to be doing bookkeeping probably for the next couple of hours. Let's just say 2 hours and let's just say, you know, $100 an hour is what my time's worth. If I was going to be like contracted out or something like that, I think it's worth a lot more, but let's just use that. So that's $200 an hour, $200, $300, how many hours I spend on accounting, that's my earning potential that I've sacrificed. Don't you think you could hire someone to do bookkeeping for less than $100 an hour? Yes, absolutely. So that's one of the things I'm going to start my search now. I'm also while I'm starting that search, I also have, you know, 2 screens in my office. I got a laptop and then I got an extension screen. Now I'm going to be using multiple— you must use multiple screens in my opinion to get more done. You got to be operating at peak efficiency and you got to get your environment set up. So I am operating out of my basement and I got a nice little office studio that, you know, if you have ever watched any of my YouTube content, you'll see that's you know, my new office every day. So you got to get it set up right now. My office is a complete mess, just stuff all over the place. Like, when you see my content, it looks like it's clean, but every square inch of the office that's not visible in the camera is a mess. I gotta get that clean because I have to have a very clear focus, and it's really hard to think clearly when you're living in clutter. So I need to declutter, I need to get that stuff squared away so I have a good, fresh, clean environment to operate in so I can operate at peak efficiency. Any tools that you need, you know, you should be looking at— again, this is all dependent on your skill set. Obviously, if you're in blue-collar field, then this isn't applicable, you know, to go and look at things to maximize efficiency and look at AI and stuff like that. It's just not a thing, right? But for me, a large part of my value I'm generating is behind a computer. The path for me to get to $20,000 a month looks like this. I'm going to be all in on software development and I'm going to be all in on content. So I'm going to be doing both at the same time. I'm going to be doing developing while I'm working on social media and content and editing content and doing and all these sorts of things. And hopefully we're going to get to the point here in the next month or two, because it may take me a month or two to find someone for bookkeeping. I want to outsource that out. I want to have someone doing bookkeeping, and then I have— want to have someone doing some like light general administrative stuff, email box management. I may even find AI that can help me do that. I'm going to be scouring every resource available to maximize my efficiency so I can focus on the value-added tasks that are going to produce revenue. Everything else I should not be working on. Like this bookkeeping, I'm not excited to be working on this, but it must be done. I'm 3 months behind on it and I need to get it caught up. You know, it's just one of those things I just gotta do. I need to have financials being reported timely. That's part of the reason why I had a Well, I guess it wouldn't really change the outcome. I had a pretty rough year on properties, just a ton of breakdowns, tons. But I think what probably would have changed is if I was keeping up with the bookkeeping, I would have been able to forecast sooner when I was going to hit the wall and when I was going to like really need to start generating more income to cover losses on repairs and all that stuff based on my run rate. And that was a mistake. So, you know, mentally I kind of knew what was happening, but I didn't know the exact number. So I really need to get on top of the numbers so that way that can be managed. You know, what gets tracked gets managed. I don't know if you've ever heard that. So that's the game plan. Quick recap, you know, if you're sitting there, just lost your job, or you just quit, and you're looking to, you know, leave W-2 and go out on your own, the things that I'm doing day one may not— it's not gonna happen today, but the things I'm thinking about on day one is cleaning my workspace, getting a nice clean environment, setting up my workflows, figuring out the skill sets that I have. I've already figured that out and how I'm gonna monetize And reverse engineer your way into that goal. How many reps in whatever you are doing do you need to take in order to achieve your goal, right? Um, now some of mine is a little harder to gauge as far as like, there's, there's not really a way to say, hey, when you make 10 posts a day, it's going to produce X amount of dollars. That's just not how it works. I just know the power of branding and social media The more volume I put out, quality volume, that's very key, the more that I receive. So if you know that, and if you had this magic watering pot that you could water any seed and you knew that seed was going to grow into something very large that is gonna be essentially your desired outcome, right? You know, this magic seed that is your desired outcome, and all you had to do is water it. How many times a day would you water it? And that's kind of the same thinking. If I know social media is my key to get to the right outcome that I want, which is $20,000 a month, why am I not watering it as much as humanly possible, right? So that's the game plan. Hope you enjoyed that. That's it for me today because I have to get my ass to work and get after it. So stay tuned. Again, hang in there. You know, you're probably, probably going through a really tough time, you know, mentally, emotionally. You know, for me, I This was— I don't know exactly where it fits on the ranking, but definitely top 5 hardest weeks, you know, I've had emotionally that I can think of. And it's not easy, you know, spent 10 years working at one place and that was, you know, that was my career and a lot of people there are my family and it's hard leaving that. You know, it's, you get there and you're like last day and it's like, wow, this is the last time I'm going to be having this conversation, having a conversation with this person in this room and doing this and doing that. And it's a lot of, a lot of mixed emotions, you know, it's, it's hard. So I get it. And that's what the purpose of this podcast is. I am here in a real, time. This is not someone who has made it and they're reflecting on, you know, their prior failures and they're missing a lot of the details in between. They just remember how hard it was, but they, they can't remember the intricate details of being in it. You are hearing the intricate details of me being in it. I am in it right now. But you don't have time to feel sorry for yourself. Get off, off your— get off your ass and get to work. So that's exactly what I'm going to be doing, and I'll see you guys next episode.