20 Years Of Business Knowledge In 24 Minutes (From A Multi Millionaire)

After side hustling for years, I quit my job and went all in with my business at 32 with absolutely nothing. No savings, no safety net, no rich parents. Just a decision that the life I was living wasn't the life I wanted to live. I believed I was capable of more. I just had no proof yet. 14 years later, I built multiple businesses. I ran two of them simultaneously for a decade. I lost money. I made money. I launched things that flopped. Things that did wildly successful. And I eventually sold one of my companies in an exit that changed my life. Today, I want to give you a gift. I want to give you what I wish somebody gave me at the start of my journey. I want to give you what actually matters, what you really need to know to succeed in business, all in just 20 minutes. So here it is. 20 years of experience condensed into 20 minutes. Let's go. Lesson number 1. Go where the money already is. This is the most important thing I have learned in my 20 years of doing business, both side hustling and full-time for over 14 years. And almost nobody talks about it. Listen, if you want to build a business that grows consistently without you fighting for survival, and I've been there, go where people are already spending money. I need you to drill this in your head because this is going to make your life a whole lot Easier. Find an existing problem that people are already paying to solve. They're already paying money to solve this, but you're going to solve it better. That's it. That's the whole formula. That's about 50% of all success in business. The problem is, is that people keep avoiding this truth and they try to come up with unique solutions to problems that don't exist. Listen, Netflix didn't invent movie rental. OK? Blockbuster existed before them. They just delivered it differently. First by mail, and then they started with streaming. Nike wasn't the first sports brand or sports shoe company. They just implemented the concept better than the competition. Facebook, not the first social network. There was MySpace, there was Friendster, right? They all existed before Facebook. The difference is, you guessed it, Facebook's implementation was just superior to the other ones. None of the most successful businesses in the world invented something from scratch. What they did though is they found a market that already exists. They identified how the current solution is falling short for the customers, and they built something better. Very simple. You don't need to be a revolutionary entrepreneur. The multimillionaires, the billionaires that I've met, they're not brilliant people, right? They're not exceptionally smart or savvy. They just know how to follow the rules of business. You need a real problem, a market that is already spending money on it, and deliver a better answer. That's it. And here's a little hint to make this a little bit clearer. Think about the things you experience every day that you complain about, right? You're complaining because they're not being done efficiently. They're not being done properly. And that complaint should result in a better solution. And there you go. Lesson number 2: Product beats marketing every day of the week, twice on Sunday as well. When I was starting out, I thought marketing was everything. I thought that if I had a good product and I just marketed it really well, then I'd be wildly successful. I used to think like 50%, 60%, 70% of business is marketing. Building something decent and then marketing it brilliantly. And there you go. You win, right? I was dead wrong. And I learned this the hard way. Now, don't get me wrong. Marketing matters enormously. I don't diminish it at all. And I'm a big marketer. But here's what I know for sure. This is a fact. A superior product that's marketed well will dominate the market, will dominate and crush all the competition. A mediocre product that's marketed well will do okay, but until a better product shows up, you're kind of like living on borrowed time. It's kind of scary. And when a better product shows up, all your marketing won't save you. Okay? Because people always choose a better product, especially when all things are equal. I find that if you want to really amplify your marketing and actually market on a budget without actually spending too much, the best product is the best way to do that. Word of mouth is what built some of my best companies like the $100 MBA, this podcast, as well as my software company, Webinar Ninja. Because, see lesson 1, the product solved the problem better than the competition. So here's the lesson for lesson number 2. Marketing gets people through the door. It gives you a trial. It gives you an audition. The product is what makes them stay. It's what makes them tell their friends about you. So you gotta make sure your product is brilliant. Otherwise, you're actually gonna be shooting yourself in the foot. Your product is what it's all about. Invest a lot of energy, a lot of talent, resources into creating the best product possible. Lesson number 3, the wrong hire will cost you everything. Literally, it will cost you your entire business. I once made a hiring decision that cost my business half a million dollars. Half a million. That's not from malice or corruption or embezzlement. It was nothing like that. It was my fault. It was from not taking enough time to hire the right person. Right? I was just doing as many interviews as I could and just choosing from the best candidate out of those interviews. That's not good enough for you just to give the keys to your business to somebody who has the influence to take it down, to cost you business, to cost you money, to cost you customers, to cost your reputation. Sometimes irreversible damage is done. You have to remember also when you're interviewing someone for a position, you're looking at the best version of them. You see none of their flaws, none of them. You can't see it yet. Now, I'm not saying this to scare you. And for you to never to hire anybody. No, you need to hire great talent so that you can scale your business. That's how you become a great business. And that's the differentiator between you and the competition is your team, is your talent capital. I'm telling you this because it's so important. You need to make sure that you find the best possible candidates for the positions you're hiring for because they can really take your business to a whole new level that you could never imagine and you can never do alone. As your business starts growing, recruitment becomes your number one skill set. The better you become at this, the better your business will become. And here's a little note: if you already have someone on your team who could fill a role that you are looking to hire, maybe like a promotion, the person that you're considering that's outside your company needs to be at least 30% better than the person inside your company. Why? Because of what I mentioned before. You know every flaw of your internal candidate, the person that you already know. You know zero flaws of the person that's external. What we like to do when we make any hire is we either start with a contract, like a contract basis, first, or we have a clause which allows us to have a short termination window in the first 6 months. This gives us a chance to have an extended interview, an extended audition for us to just see if they can actually work with our team under the conditions of our company. We like to give people a lot of autonomy, make decisions, to have ownership. Some people don't like that. Some people don't like working like that, and we got to be fair and give them a chance to say, hey, this is not a good fit for me. Vice versa as well. The lesson here is when it comes to hiring, slow down. You are seeing the best versions of everybody. Build a trial period every single time so that you can have an extended period of time. And listen, don't get discouraged if you go through a bunch of interviews and you just can't find a good candidate and you want to settle. No, don't settle. Keep trying. Put that job post back up. Keep on interviewing. Keep on giving them little projects, a little trials to see how they do. We always do like a little project too, like a 48-hour project before we actually agree to hire them and go for that extended 6-month trial period. Now, just keep doing that. Don't get discouraged. This is too critical for you to just settle. Lesson number 4, and this one is all about what success actually looks like. Listen, when I started, my definition of success was embarrassingly small. Okay, we're talking tiny. I wanted just to replace my teacher's income and I would be happy. I wanted a business that paid the bills and let me do what I love, and that was pretty much it. I didn't know what was actually possible. I didn't know what was out there in the world and what were my limits, right? I had a limited view, to be honest with you. And here's what I believe about success now. After 20 years of chasing success, okay, and reaching different versions of it and redefining it for myself, what I find is that real success is really freedom from money because rich and wealthy is very abstract. But when you say to yourself, I don't need money anymore. I don't need to chase it anymore. I can do work because I want to do good work and not because I need to do the work to survive. In my opinion, that's actual financial freedom. I'm talking about having enough chips off the table that you can live comfortably for the rest of your life without the business that you're running, because only when you reach that level, in my opinion, does something profound shift. And this is what happened to me, the fear goes away. You don't have this kind of, um, survival mentality, which is very hard to shake because this is the environment I grew up in. My parents were immigrants from Egypt to the US, and survival was our middle name. But when you get to this point, you stop creating from anxiety, which is a very bad place to create. You really can't be free. You start creating instead from genuine desire to put something great in the world, something that can actually impact people in the world. And that's when the work gets really good. When I eventually sold Webinar Ninja, my software company, it was one of the first times in my life I felt that kind of freedom. And it changed how I showed up to everything I create now. I don't feel like I need to prove myself to anybody anymore. Uh, and at the same time, I feel like I am producing work for myself now as much as I'm producing it for other people. Yes, I am conscious of the fact that we have an audience and we serve the audience, But at the same time, I'm looking inwards to figure out what do I need to express that is of value to other people? This is why I'm a big believer. And this is the lesson for this lesson, by the way, of chasing financial freedom. You got to get there because it's way better than financial comfort. The difference between the two is the difference between your life you manage and a life that you actually own. Now, I want to just say really quickly before we move on, a lot of people think this is like such a grandiose number, like hundreds of millions of dollars. $100,000. It doesn't even need to be that much money. If you actually do the math and think about if I had X amount of money and I invested that money into something like real estate or, you know, this is not investment advice, but you know, you had money that was making money for you. You know, this is what people don't understand until they get to a point where they can actually do this, where they have the problem of, okay, I have this money now. What do I do with it? Well, what smart wealthy people do that have financial freedom is that they let money work for them. Rather than they work for money. You have an asset now that you can leverage, which is capital, whether that's investing in other companies or in the stock market or whatever it might be. But the point here is, is that that money that you've earned is now working for you, and therefore you don't need to work for money anymore. Now you're working for yourself and for your own enjoyment, your own fulfillment. A lot of people don't really understand that that number is not that much. Okay. And that leads me to lesson number 5: Know your numbers every single week. Most entrepreneurs that I have worked with, spoken to, have no idea what's happening in their business financially. And it's very sad because in my opinion, business is money. They have a feeling of what's happening, but feelings are a lie. Okay. They're not factual. And what do I love about numbers is that they're black and white and they're facts. Revenue can often feel like success, but it isn't always success. Cause you're not working for revenue. You're working for profit. This is why I always say that you, as an entrepreneur, the founder of the business, need to have a simple profit and loss sheet that's reviewed every single week. Take a look at your profit and loss sheets, literally a Google Sheet where you see all your expenses, you see all your profits, and you see where you are heading. Where is the trend? What's happening right now? How much money is in the bank? And, but also how much money are you making and growing every single month? It will tell you the truth more than any other person in the world. If you don't have one, don't worry. You can download it. We have free templates that you can download. Just go to 100mba.net/templates. In the template pack is a profit and loss sheet, has all the formulas. You can go ahead and just download it for free. Choose one day a week and spend 5 minutes reviewing your P&L sheet. Make sure everything is on the up and up. I choose Monday. I call it Money Mondays. Every Monday, I open up a P&L sheet. I look at what came in. I look at what went out. I look at the margins. I update any kind of expenses that are not there, you know, through the accounting. Team. And if they're all green, fantastic. If things are kind of in the yellow, or I'm not really happy with the way they're going, we have a meeting with people that need to hear about it. It's easier to correct things before it gets really bad when you look at it weekly. And here's something that people underestimate completely: overhead walks on two legs. Cost creep. Every quarter you need to look at your costs and cut ruthlessly anything you're not using, or it's not directly tied to business growth. Cut it. The lesson here is you can't manage what you don't measure. Okay? 5 minutes with your P&L sheet every Monday will protect you from any slow bleeds or a sinking ship that you don't see coming. Okay? Lesson number 6: Don't follow your passion. Fall in love with your work. I am not a big lover of this phrase, follow your passion. I think it's one of the most dangerous pieces of advice ever given to entrepreneurs. I think it's Not really a good thing to tell people because passion alone doesn't really create a market. Okay? You could be passionate about something, but if no one wants to buy what you're passionate about, then you don't really have a thriving business. Makes total sense, right? Again, see lesson number 1. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do what you love, but you have to keep in mind that you might love something, but it's just not a good business. Okay? You can have hobbies. For example, I love playing the piano. I like trying to play the piano. I'm not good at all. But if it took me 5 years to get good enough to build a product anyone would pay for, you know, with my piano skills, whether it's a piano course or even a piece of music. And even then, is there a market for what I'm offering? Okay? I need to find that out first. The question you have to ask is not what am I passionate about? Okay. The question is, what are people already spending money on and how can I bring my skills and my genuine interest to serve that need? A simpler way to put it is the market doesn't care about your passion. They care about what you can offer them, the value that you can add to their life. Okay. So what kind of value can you add to other people's life that you actually are interested in? I'm going to say something very blunt and It's for your own good. Business is about the customer. Always. It's not about you. It's not about how you feel about your product or your service or your team. Without customers, you have no business. Your customer is your biggest stakeholder. So build for them and not just for yourself. So the lesson here is don't chase passion. Find a market, bring your best skills to that market so that you can add value to it. If this episode is giving you something that you need right now, make sure you subscribe to the show because later in a very near future, we're releasing an episode that I can't wait to share with you. It's called "Are Successful People Just Lucky?" How much does luck actually influence success? We dive really deeply into this topic. I can't wait to share with you. I'm putting the final touches on it right now. Hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode when it comes out. Lesson number 7: Your circle is your ceiling. This one can be a little bit uncomfortable for people, but it's completely true. You will rise to the level of the people you spend your time with. Whatever limits they have, they become your limits. OK? And by the way, this goes with anything, not just in business. Life, health, physical activity. For example, I'm training to play in the FIBA Master Games of basketball in Greece. And I'm now training with some really high-level basketball players on my team. And I automatically play better. I'm sharper and faster because I'm rising to their level. Now, one day a week, I do play with some of my friends that are not at that level. And I guess what? Play worse on those days. Whatever limits the people around you have, they become your limits. Why? Because as human beings, we're very tribal. We don't want to really go outside the limits so that we are accepted. So if you want to break through to the next level in your life, in your business, in whatever you're doing, you need to find people who are already operating at that level. And spend time with them. Now, I'm not telling you to abandon the people you love, but you need to be deliberate to seek out relationships with people who have already achieved things bigger than your current achievements. Have lunch with them once a month, uh, go on holiday if you can with them. I've done this several times with people that I feel like were ahead of me, and I wanted to figure out what are their problems, what are their ambitions, what's their life like. And guess what? I would come back from those holidays, I would come back from those lunches or dinners and feel like I leveled up. So the lesson here is your environment is not the backdrop to your success. It's actually the engine of it. It's what causes you to be successful is the people around you. Lesson number 8: Communication is the master skill. If I could give one skill to every entrepreneur starting out, it would not be sales. It would not be marketing. It would not be finance. It would not be product development. It would be better communication. I spent 10 years as a teacher before I became an entrepreneur. And the most valuable thing I took from that decade was not patience or dealing with, you know, rascals in the classroom or even curriculum design, you know, which I use right now in, you know, the 100 on B and the podcast and everything else we do. It's the ability to communicate clearly. Business is about communication. Your sales page is communication. Your emails are communication. The way you speak to your teams in meetings, is about communication. How you make an offer, how you give feedback, how you hire, how you fire, how you inspire your team on the hardest days. All of it is communication. If you know how to communicate clearly and honestly and in a way that builds a genuine connection with people, you're going to have an advantage in every room that you walk into. The lesson here: invest in your communication skills more than almost anything else, because it's going to pay dividends every single area of your business and life. Lesson number 9: The hard seasons are the real education. Okay, the toughest period of my business life was a stretch at Webinar Ninja, my software company, where we were not growing, we were stagnant. Competition was closing in, uh, costs were rising. It was inflation in the market and in the economy. We couldn't afford the talent that we actually needed on our team. We felt like we were fighting forces we couldn't see or control. And here's what that season in my business taught me. You cannot control the forces around you. You can only control what you do with them. Okay? So we focus entirely on what was within our reach, what we can actually influence. The team we already had, the time we already had, we invested in this team. We invested in our product. We sharpened it. We improved it. We focused on what we can control and we got through that period. The company got past that plateau. We surpassed our goals when it comes to our customer base and revenue, and the company eventually got bought in 2024. We got acquired. And I gotta say, it was a bittersweet moment when that happened because it was over. A chapter that I lived for a decade ended, and it left me with a question: will I ever build something like that again? And the honest answer is, I don't know. I have to wait and see and try, but the journey's been great. But I know that hard season, that tough time made me who I am and who I became in the process is worth more than the numbers in the bank account. The lesson here is the hard season. The hard times are not interruptions of the journey. They are the journey. Lesson number 10. Final lesson. Success is doing the work when you don't feel like it. Here's what most people spend their entire lives not understanding. Success is not about talent. It's not about timing. It's not about the right idea, the right market, or the right network, or even working hard. Okay? It's about doing what you need to do every single day, regardless of how you feel, regardless of your mood, regardless of what's happening around you, whatever. Now, listen, I don't want you to ignore your feelings. Feel them, acknowledge them, but then do the work anyway. Because it's easy. It's easy to show up when everything is great and you're motivated and the momentum is good and everything is flowing. Okay, the real test is whether you can show up on the days when none of that is happening. That's when the separation happens. That's when the gap between the people who make it and the people who almost made it is created. When people show up regardless of how they feel, they do what they need to do regardless of what's going on. So the lesson here is that motivation is a feeling. You don't want to run your life on feelings. Discipline is a decision. You got to make the decision to be disciplined because success is built on that decision, not a feeling. Before I go, I want to leave you with this, and I want to leave you with a question. Do you actually want this? Not the idea of it, not the lifestyle that you think that this is going to create for you. I mean the actual work, waking up at 2 AM in the morning because you have an idea and you have to implement it right away. The rejections. The team problems, your phone blowing up in the morning with, you know, things that you have to solve, the willingness to sleep on somebody's couch so that you can invest in your business, sacrificing the comfortable version of your life for the possibility of a really incredible one with your business. Because here's what I observed in 20 years. The entrepreneurs who build something great, I mean, genuinely great, they're not the smartest, they're not the wittiest, They're not the most talented. They're the ones who couldn't help but do that. Listen, great writers, they wake up and they have to write. They are compelled. They have— that's all they know how to do. Great athletes, they go to practice when there's nobody watching. And great entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs because they cannot not be. They have to strive for greatness. They want this more than anything else. So the question is, do you really want this? If this episode gave you something to think about, I'm glad. Uh, my job as your mentor from afar, hopefully I could be that for you, is to get you thinking, is to get to change your perspective a little bit. And hopefully just by me sharing some of the things I learned in my experiences, your journey is just a little bit easier. Now, if you want to continue to learn with me, there's an episode that I highly recommend. It's called The 5 Silent Killers of Success and How to Avoid Them. We just recently published it, so you should find it in the feed in whatever app you're using right now, because everything I talked about is about discipline, is about self-belief, is about willingness to keep going. And you're going to need to know what's going to stop you along the way so that you can avoid it. Go ahead and check it out, and I'll check you in the next one.