How To Choose Which Business To Start?

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If you're sitting on 3 business ideas and can't pick, or maybe you have no ideas for your next business, this episode is for you. Here's today's biggest takeaway right from the top. Choosing the right business is not about the perfect idea. All right. It's about providing exceptional value using your existing skills and experiences that you already have to people in a way and in a product that people want. So you're leveraging your skills and experiences with a product that people actually need. And we're going to talk about how to implement all that in today's episode. But that's really the whole answer. We're going to talk about how to actually implement this strategy In today's episode, as today is Q&A Wednesday, we had a question from one of our listeners, and I have with me my co-founder, my executive producer of the podcast, and my wife, Nicole Baldino. Nicole, welcome.

Hey Omar, happy to be here. Hey, I'm excited for today's question because I think it's one that people are quietly stuck on.

Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhom, where I deliver practical business lessons 3 times a week. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much.

Today's question comes from Grace. Grace asks, I really want to start a business, but I keep going back and forth on what it should be. How do I actually decide which business to start? Wow. Omar, where do you even begin with this one?

Grace, I really love this question because most people skip this concept. I'm also very fascinated by this concept of a lot of us, we do a lot of long-term things with very little time to decide those things. So for example, A lot of us, we took maybe a couple weeks, a month to decide our major in university, and it wasn't like a dedicated month. It was like here or there. And then we spent 4 years studying that subject. So it's actually a good idea to spend a little time, a little more time than it feels a little bit comfortable to make a solid decision before you start a business so that you invest the next 3, 4, 5 years, 10 years on the right thing. But more importantly, this is something I talk about a lot here on the podcast, and that is business is hard. I don't like to sugarcoat it. It's challenging, especially your first one. And with your first business, you're gonna make mistakes. We all make mistakes when we're learning something for the first time. You pay what I call an ignorance fee, right? You have to pay it off. There's a cost to learning things that you just can't learn without experiencing it, without actually doing it. And it's unavoidable. Everyone pays this fee. So my goal isn't to avoid difficulty, right? My goal here is to give you some advice to increase your likelihood of success as much as possible, to stack the deck in your favor as much as possible so that your business can survive your learning curve, right? Despite the fact this is going to be hard and despite the fact that you're going to be making mistakes, it's good enough to sustain itself and move beyond all those kinds of challenges. So the right choice, the right business doesn't make it easy, but it makes it survivable. It makes it worth your while. It makes it easier for you to be able to stay in this business, to see some success. We love a good framework. So I want to give one of my favorite frameworks when it comes to deciding which business you should start, whether this is your first business or even your next business. It's a 3-part framework that I believe these 3 elements are critical for you to be able to succeed in this business. So we're going to stack these 3 because all 3 of them are going to really just tilt things just enough for you to be successful if you have everything right. So element 1 of this framework is you want to leverage the skills and the experiences you already have, not the skills you plan to learn, not a skill that you're hoping that you can learn through a course or some coaching before you start your business. We're talking about something that you're already doing, something Something you're already getting paid for. And we all have some skills that we've picked up, whether it's in school, whether it's in our jobs right now, in our careers, even if it was just for part-time work. I did some telemarketing when I was in university, which was a part-time job, and I was selling long-distance services. That was back in the day when that was separate. It was with MCI. And I learned a lot of sales skills so I can leverage some of those skills in a business. So my point here is, is that you don't have to start from scratch. You're not starting from scratch.

Yeah.

You're starting with things that you already have, things you have attained. You just wanna Parlay those into something that you want to build.

I think part of the exercise or that time that you were talking about investing in the thinking phase could be spent just even listing those skills. I remember early on when we were starting out and I was trying to carve out my way into the business, what role I would fulfill and what the business needed. I remember doing this exercise where I listed all the things that I had done, whether it was volunteer work, part-time jobs, My career as a teacher, all the skills that that brought with it, with teaching. And then I think I did this other exercise where I asked you or a friend. This was such a long time ago.

What are my strengths?

What are my strengths? What do you know me for? What am I good at? And I think just spending time listing and it kind of brings you back to all the things that you've done that you've forgotten about. I recalled like a summer job that I had done taking a bunch of students from, who'd come from Japan on a tour around Sydney and, you know, interspersed with like English lessons. I was like, oh, that's a little bit of tour guiding there that I'd totally forgotten I had done. Whether that's a skill that I would then parlay into business is a different story, but you start to see then some threads coming out.

But it's good just to dump it all and then you can decide later. You know, you know that this happened and sometimes we undervalue ourselves. We don't really highlight some of these smaller kind of experiences that actually can augment our ability to do well in business. And just to kind of be really meta, we can use the example of this podcast as all 3 elements are hit. And if you kind of reverse engineer our success of this podcast and our business, The $100 MBA, it's because of these 3 elements. And the first element we're going to talk about is, you know, leveraging skills. So here at The $100 MBA on the podcast, we do a lot of teaching.

Yeah.

And a lot of people know that, know my story. I was an educator for over 12 years in this classroom. I literally taught 5 days a week, 5 lessons a day for over a decade. So, Like I have a lot of reps of taking ideas, concepts, boiling them down to the simplest form and trying to communicate them to my students. My job, my paycheck depended on it. So I got really good at that. So using the skill of teaching really helps me have some sort of advantage in this world of podcasting, in the world of business education. Element number 2, and that is to serve a market or a group of people you genuinely Understand. Ideally, you're a member of this group. You understand the lingo, you understand their needs, you understand their wants, you understand them because you are them. And this really helps cuz this gives you a bit of an unfair advantage of people trying to come from outside a market and try to understand their needs. They're gonna really be relatable. People get you cuz you get them. And this is why I believe with this podcast that we were able to kind of, uh, resonate with our audiences because we're business builders as well. We built our software company for 10 years.

Mm-hmm.

And shared the journey as we're building this podcast. We understand how to be a beginner. Like one of the things I really try to tap into, and every time we do an episode, is what it's like to be a listener. And I try as much as possible never to forget the struggle of getting traction, the joy of getting your first customer or your first sale, all these milestones you have to go through in the business journey. And we understand business people because we're around them all the time. All our friends are entrepreneurs. We understand the lingo. We understand that there are really no days off, constantly thinking about it. All these little nuances really make you understood and you understand who you're serving.

And it's almost like what companies do when they go into market research or conducting surveys, I guess, also to a certain point, um, running interviews and customer interviews. It's almost a way to fast-track getting that information because you're already in it. You speak the language, you understand the vocabulary, you understand where people are coming from. You're seeing things from their perspective. Without having to do this kind of formalized outside research.

It's not only quicker, but one of the things I want to emphasize is these companies have a really hard time building trust with their audience because it's so easy for you to build trust because you're one of them, right? You know, and, and you're walking the talk and people see themselves in you and like, I could trust this person because, you know, they actually ran many businesses. They've had a successful business. You know, one of the reasons why people listen to this podcast is because We share so many stories from the businesses we've run and the activities in the business we're running right now. And it's like, okay, these people are credible, they're authentic. It's not some sort of, uh, university that's out of touch. It's not a corporate entity that's trying to just make money off people's, uh, you know, need to learn business. There is some trust that's already innately built because you're in the community.

Yeah, absolutely.

Element number 3, probably the most critical element. They're all critical, but this one is kind of non-negotiable, and that is you need to solve a significant problem, a significant pain. Pain that they cannot ignore. Your audience needs to have something solved. I'm not interested, especially in your first business, in solutions to nice-to-haves. Okay? We're not looking at nice-to-haves. We're not looking at like small inconveniences.

Mm-hmm.

We're looking at a problem that's costing them time, that's costing them money, that's costing them maybe even night's sleep. It's keeping 'em up at night. It's keeping their mind occupied, right? The more painful the problem, the easier it is going to be for you to sell your product or service because they're in such a need for a solution. They will try anything. I mean, one of the things that comes to mind is like when you're on holiday and you get the sniffles, you have a cold, you get the flu, you're willing to go to the pharmacy and like buy whatever. Like, you know, like, does this work? Okay, I'll try this. I'll try this. I'll try this. Like, you're so desperate to have some relief so you can enjoy your holiday. That you're like trying all this different medication with the hopes that it's going to help.

And so do you think you need all 3 to make this viable? I'm thinking, so you mentioned 3 elements, leveraging your skills, understanding or being a part of the group and solving like a true pain point that people are willing to pay for. Is it possible to start with just say 2? I have an example that I want to get your, your thoughts on, a real example. As you know, I've been going to yoga every Sunday. Wonderful class, wonderful teacher. She's 20 years practicing yoga, and she also happens to be an actress. And the class is great in terms of the yoga practice that we do, but also in the way she weaves the storytelling, myths, philosophy— all of that is woven through the practice, and you're really hanging on every word throughout the entire hour. And I know that now she's parlayed that into a business package that The skill that she has in communicating, telling stories, being present, controlling the nervous system, all that stuff that you get from yoga, and also the skills that she has from the acting world, whether it's vocal training, pacing, delivery, all of those skills, married those together and is offering now packages to help people deliver better pitches, rally their team, sales calls, all of those things. And so there's the question I have for you, which ties into Grace's question. She's got the skills, no doubt about that. I've witnessed it in terms of understanding maybe this corporate world or this landscape. If you've given that, maybe you've been involved in a different world, whether it's acting and yoga, now going into a corporate world. And then the second point being her ability to— is it really a pain point? I think your third element.

It's a good question. And my honest answer is that you need 2 solid of the 3. The 3rd one, which is the pain point, is non-negotiable. So you need at least one of the first 2. But if you're asking my personal opinion, all 3 is required because I want to, again, stack the deck in your favor, make it as easy as possible. There are some challenges that you don't perceive, right? We just watched The Odyssey. Yeah. And there's going to be some monsters out there that you're not expecting.

No spoilers, but—

Right. You're going to see a Cyclops, your own version of the Cyclops. You're going to see these giants are going to be chasing you out of your business. You can see competition, right? So this is why I'm saying like you, all 3 helps fortify your business a little bit. Now, in this particular example, I don't know her whole story. I don't know all her skills, but she definitely has the skills to deliver this type of product or service. So that's great. She's got number one. She doesn't really understand the corporate world if she's done yoga all her life, if maybe that world, or she doesn't have a network there yet.

Mm-hmm.

So that one's a little bit weak. Brings us to the third one, which is, is it a real pain point? And the way I filter pain point, if this is a real pain point, if this is a real need, is that If there's an economic downturn, if we are in 2008 again and it's a financial crisis and companies are slashing budgets, is this one of the things that they just can't slash? Mm-hmm. And my guess is probably no. Probably like helping people become a better speaker presenting is probably like a nice to have and it would, it's a good investment for the business. Mm-hmm. But when people are just trying to like, how do we make sure we only spend on things that help us deliver our products and services to our customers? Mm-hmm. And that's really, I would say, a must-have, uh, where like she's actually providing something that they must have or otherwise the business doesn't run.

Um, it could be audience though, right? It could be maybe the audience isn't, it could shift to individuals.

It could be. I mean, but I'm just giving the, yeah, given the example you're saying corporates, you know, if, if it's public speakers, if it's keynote speakers, that's how they make their money. Mm-hmm. And they, they need this ongoing training so they can get better and better. That's different. Like that's how they make their money.

Yes.

You know, so yeah, so I would be as critical within yourself and your business of all 3 so that you can improve your odds of success. Today's episode is supported by Hostinger. I don't know about you, but I got way too many logins for all the tools I need to run my business. And here's the thing, the website is rarely the whole problem. The problem is everything around it, the domain, the email, the marketing, the SEO, the landing pages, and figuring out what to do next. That's where Hostinger comes in. You bring the idea, Hostinger's AI builder turns it into a business-ready website in minutes with your domain, email, and marketing tools all in one place. That's why 5 million customers around the world already trust Hostinger. Hostinger's AI agents help with those jobs too, acting like a built-in specialist for SEO, website copy, email marketing, sales outreach, and more. Hostinger is not just where a website gets built. It helps run the online side of your business. Plans start at just $2.99 a month, and they come with a free domain and email. So instead of duct taping a dozen tools together, start building from one place. Go to hostinger.com/mba. Use promo code MBA for 10% off. That's hostinger.com/mba. Promo code MBA for 10% off. You spent money to get that customer's call. Ads, referrals, word of mouth, doesn't matter. The moment it rings out unanswered, that's not just a missed opportunity. That's a sunk cost walkaway. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss a call. With Quo, all your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place, so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. Set up in minutes on any device, keep your existing number, and add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. And Quo's built-in AI agent handles after-hours calls, Answers questions, and even books appointments so you never miss a lead, even when your team is offline. One of the reasons I attribute any success I've had in business is great customer support and service, and Quo makes that easy. Money's on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/MBA. That's quo.com/MBA.

Bringing it back to what Grace might be thinking, she is really good at something. What if I am really good at something? How much do I weigh up that skill set versus is there really a need for it or much demand for it?

I'm gonna try to put this as simply as possible. There must be a demand for what you are good at, right? There must be a demand, full stop. There's no way around that. All right. And the best way I could put this is You can sell pretty bad food to starving people, okay? People coming out of a late show and there's nothing but like a kebab shop open. It's not the best food in the world. It's pretty bad, actually. Greasy, not really, you know, presented properly. And people will buy it because they're really hungry and there's nothing else open, okay? But I can't sell the best food in the world, the best cuisine in the world, to a group of people that are fasting, okay?

Mm-hmm.

They're not going to eat. All right. That's just, there's no demand here. So your skill really only matters if people are hungry for it. And this is kind of hard to absorb sometimes, because sometimes we're like, maybe my skills are not wanted. But what really you need to look at is like, who needs your skills? Sometimes you just need to change your audience and that really changes everything. So your skills are really just the starting point. Then the finish line is how can I fulfill a demand with those skills?

And are you going to get to how much of a demand? Because I would argue in all of these cases, even the yoga teacher example, or let's say Grace, who's really good at something, there is probably some demand.

Yeah. We're going to share some exercises that you could do even just this weekend to figure out, is there a demand in the market for what I have and how much of a demand? And if it's worth you actually spending your time and money and energy starting this business.

I'm excited to hear your answer as, and what possible things people can do. And then I always think about the fact that there's that ignorance fee. There's that time in the beginning of a business journey where you are experimenting, where you're learning so much that even in this process that maybe you might not hit the nail on the head with the first business idea, you're getting so many other benefits and so many other skills.

Yeah, 100%.

In that process.

I think I just want to touch on this ignorance fee thing. A lot of people don't understand what I mean by this. You are probably very good at your skills or whatever you do. Like, I have a very close friend. He's a photographer, right? I've known him for years and he is very good at what he does, but he's horrible at business. He doesn't know how to sell his products and services. He doesn't know how to get gigs. He doesn't know how to, you know, get testimonials. He doesn't know the exercise of making money. So this is the ignorance fee. Like, how do I actually sell the thing I have and utilize my skills and build new skills as a business owner?

Mm-hmm.

So there's some things you're gonna stumble upon, some things you're not gonna be great at in the beginning when it comes to business. And that's fine. But if your skills are highly sought after and you have a demand and you understand that audience very well, this is going to be enough for you to overcome some of these, uh, you know, small mistakes along the way. If this episode is helping you get unstuck, subscribe to the show. Why not? Or hit subscribe on whatever app you're using right now, whether it's Apple, Spotify, YouTube. I want you to hit subscribe because we have an upcoming episode. Nicole and I are doing a Q&A Wednesday episode on How do I know if my business is failing or if I should keep going? You know, a lot of people are not sure, like, is this a dip right now? Is it just about to get successful or is this just a disaster and I should just quit and start a new business? So we actually explain what are some of the signs, what are some of the signals, what are some of the things that will tell you in black and white that, hey, this is failing. You need to shut it down, start something new, or no, you're on the right track. Keep going, keep persevering. You're almost there. So hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode. It's coming soon.

All right. So we've touched on being very good at your skillset and using that as the foundation for a business. You've talked about this before. I think it comes up in this question as well. Passion. Where does the follow your passion advice fall into this? Because I think you've talked about this on the podcast before. You had a clothing business called Zenhom Designs. And you was profitable, was doing really well. There was a need. All of that hit all of those. Well, let's see if it hit all those elements because you closed it down. Right.

Right.

Because you hated it.

Yeah.

Let's be honest.

Yes.

Tell us about that.

Yeah, that's a great catch. And let me be precise about this because I believe there's a few rules you need to follow. Rule number one is that you have to be valuable. That comes first, regardless of how you feel about the business. If you enjoy the business, if you don't enjoy the business, It's not really a successful business if you're not providing value to other people. Like, a lot of us, we want to believe that if I'm passionate about something, then other people will be passionate about it. That's not always necessarily true. So you have to always be valuable. Passion doesn't really pay anyone. It doesn't really add any value to anyone. It doesn't matter how passionate I am about gummy bears. If I can't really take that passion and package it into something that people actually like, making it funny, making it entertaining, making it something, Then there's no real value for other people. Okay. Rule number 2 is you need to find the value and the enjoyment in what you do. Okay. So, and why you have to find some sort of personal value, some personal enjoyment, because business is a long road. Mm-hmm. It takes a while to get successful. There are challenges, like I mentioned, there's gonna be some Cyclopses in your world, right? Coming at you. So it has to be enjoyable enough so that you don't quit.

Mm-hmm.

And that's what happened to me. I quit because I got burnt out and I was doing it because I was making money and it was successful and I liked the winning of it. But that gets old very quickly if you're not actually enjoying the day-to-day.

Yeah. It gets you to a certain point, right?

Yeah.

That you can enjoy the success of being an entrepreneur, but the day-to-day, you gotta wake up feeling like inspired, happy, ready to go to work.

Yeah. Well, I woke up this morning, I went to the gym. I knew that today I'm gonna be doing these episodes with you. We're gonna record 2 episodes today. Have some discussions about things I love. I love talking about business. I love sharing what has worked for me, what has not worked for me, helping other people. Later, I'm going to be like reviewing a script for an ad read we're going to be doing. So like all the stuff I enjoy, it's not painful. I get personal satisfaction at it. So I'm able to do this every day. And in order for you to get good at anything, you need to be consistent. And if you don't enjoy it, it's hard for you to be consistent. So you mentioned Zenhom Design, my clothing line, my custom tailored clothing line that I had. The business was successful. I mentioned this in a previous episode, products sold really well. Customers really loved what I had. There was real demand for it, like almost too much demand. I couldn't fulfill all the orders. Most customers were actually more passionate about the products than I was, which was a big sign for me that like, I don't know if I'm in the right business. And I closed it down because I was really burnt out. I was in a full-time job as a teacher. I was a chair of department at the university we were working at together. And I was also running this Quite busy and successful business, and I just got burnt out. The truth of the matter is, if I really enjoyed the day-to-day, if I enjoyed creating new products and making new styles and geeking out on what sold well and what didn't sell well, working with models, like human models, to shoot these new lines of clothing and putting them up on the website, all that kind of stuff, I enjoyed that. I'd probably be like, hey, I'm gonna quit my job. I'm gonna do this full-time. This thing is doing well. It's selling. And that would be like my exit out, but I actually would escape to my job because I enjoyed that more than the business. So that was a big mistake. That was a big mistake for me for picking a business that I wasn't passionate about, something that I didn't really enjoy. Passion is like a very loaded word. I would say like, you just enjoy it. Like it's, it's not a pain to show up every day at work. You actually look forward to it.

So what drove you then to keep going with that business? Was it the business skills? Was it, what else was it giving you?

Well, I think it's because I had a lot of small businesses on the side leading up to that, some wins, some losses, and this was like the first big win I had. And it's like, I'm a very competitive guy. So like when I play sport, when I play any kind of competition, even business, and I had a win, I was like, well, I can't just quit now because I'm winning, you know, like this is great. I love the feeling of being significant, of providing value, of Being successful at business, but that doesn't last forever. You know, at some point it doesn't serve you and it's like, okay, this is great. Now I'm just a slave to my customers. Right. And yeah, that's the lesson I learned very early on.

Something to look out for, for sure. Well, that brings us to a really good point about the wrong reasons going into business for the wrong reasons. So maybe can you give Grace and the viewers a bit of an insight into what are some of the wrong reasons that people pick? a business or go into a business for the wrong reasons? Yeah.

3 come to mind, 3 big wrong reasons to start a business. The first one with the bullet is because it's working for somebody else. A lot of people see somebody else being successful and they're like, oh, I'm going to do that because it looks like I'm going to win. I'm going to be able to be successful with that kind of business. You saw somebody crush it in some sort of online course or running this type of physical business, whether it's like a, you know, a retail store, Maybe they got into like crypto and they're like, oh, the crypto is where it's at. So I'm going to do that too. Just because it worked for somebody else doesn't mean it's going to work for you. Why? Because everything we talked about today, like that person has a particular skill set, has a particular set of experiences that fuels that business. There's circumstances, there's luck involved. Like we can't forget that that is a thing. Luck is a part of the thing. Timing, you want to call it whatever you want, serendipity. This person might have a better network than you, whatever. Like, this is the thing about business education that is challenging for me is like, there are some fundamentals I want to share with you. There are things that I know work, but at the end of the day, you have to try it because you and your circumstances is different than me and my circumstances. So you have to be very careful about taking advice and just, you know, not taking it with a grain of salt, just taking it for face value. So that's reason number one, which is just because it worked for somebody else. I think is going to work for me.

I want to stay on that one because it's a bit of a sticky one for me, because I think we've heard this advice where if it's working for someone else, then it's a proven product. It's a proven service. That means there's demand for it. Right. So let's leave that for a moment because that, that exists. But I see where you're coming from with a real example from my life. Actually, I haven't shared this before, but as you know, My dad worked a lot of pizza shops in his day. He was a blue-collar worker. And just before he retired, he worked at a pizza restaurant and he passed away.

Rest in peace.

About 10 years ago. Thank you. And one of the things that he used to always come home after a shift at the pizza, the restaurant, was he would tell me and my brother, we have to open a pizza shop because he would see the place was packed. It was a, it was a restaurant in Sydney that was Always packed. If you drove past it, there'd be lines outside. He was really good at his job. He could make pizzas better than anyone. And so he saw, well, this is like free money. I mean, he saw the profit margins, he saw the customers, he saw how busy it was all the time. It's like, why not open a pizza store, a pizza restaurant? And my brother and I were like, no, Dad, we have zero interest in this business. But I could see from his perspective that he could see this wildly successful business. I know how to do elements of it. It's got to work for me. And so to your point though, what I think he was missing, and I realized this years later, is that he's not seeing all the other things that support a business. He's seeing it from an employee perspective or someone who's driving by. And he's not seeing what goes into the infrastructure, the team, the hiring, the reputation, the marketing, the sales. The engine that really supports that business is not immediately obvious, is it? I can understand where he was coming from, but it's not that obvious to everyone. So, can you go a little bit deeper on this point?

Yeah. I mean, your dad wasn't completely wrong, but he was a little bit a victim of success bias. He just happened to work at a very successful pizza restaurant. There's a lot of pizza restaurants that go out of business that he hasn't seen, and he doesn't know why they went out of business. There's many reasons why this pizzeria is probably successful beyond, you know, what we could see, you know, and it could be location, it could be word of mouth, it could be as simple as like this person has opened like 10 restaurants before and knows exactly how to create the perfect menu that's not overwhelming. Like there's so many little things that we don't see because we're not in the business itself. We've never done that before. But most importantly, I think that sometimes we just get into businesses because we feel like we want the result. But are you actually going to enjoy the process of serving people day in and day out in a pizzeria? Because the journey is really what we have, you know, like a lot of us were just like, well, that makes money. Like, well, that's not the only thing we got to consider.

Yeah. So you're seeing the success and you want to copy that, but you're not seeing the day-to-day and imagining the day-to-day. I think it's such a great point. It's such a, it's a trap. I think that people fall into.

100%. And that kind of leads me to wrong reason number 2, which is the business doesn't really fit your life or what you Imagine your life to be or the lifestyle that you want. No one really thinks about this a lot of times when they start a business. They see an opportunity, they just think like, hey, this looks like a good idea. Some businesses require constant travel. Some businesses require you to be on a 2:00 AM call. We had an all-hands every month when we ran Webinar Ninja. We had a global team of 30 people across the world. So we used to do shifts and every 3 months somebody would have to get up at 2:00 AM to attend this.

Yeah.

You know, all hands. And that was sometimes with us, you know, and if you have kids to look after, if you have to get up early, if you have, you know, maybe an elderly parent you have to look after, maybe that doesn't fit your lifestyle. And maybe having a global team and a startup and all that kind of stuff is just not what you want. You maybe want the success of a startup, but you don't really want the lifestyle. And this is the thing, like I look at Webinar Ninja for 10 years, we built that company, right? The success of that, the exit was fantastic. And that moment of celebration is fantastic. But really, if I look at that moment in comparison, that was like, maybe we celebrated for a day. Versus 10 years. Like I decided to spend 10 years of my life doing that. I better enjoy the process. And luckily we did. We'd love building a team. We'd love building a great product. We'd love doing the webinars. It was enjoyable. I look back at those 10 years. Yeah, there were some struggles and some hard times for sure, but it wasn't like a waste of 10 years because of the way we really enjoyed every moment, you know? So yeah, there is the success, but that's not the only thing.

I can't help what's coming to mind right now. And I wish there was something like this for adults and I suppose adults can do this, but As students, I had this experience too, and we get this experience in Australia. In year 10, there's a period of time where you're deciding what careers you can do and you get an opportunity to go and it's not like work experience.

10th grade.

Yeah. In 10th grade, it's not like work experience, but you get an opportunity to go and be part of a work that, or a career that you may be thinking of doing. And at the time, I know this is going to make everybody laugh. I wanted to be a police officer. And so I went and did a few weeks. following around the police officers in their day to day. And wow, was I not ready for what I saw on TV compared to what they actually did day to day. The forensics, the— all the ghillie.

You see the worst of society.

You see the worst of society. And I was like, okay, this is like absolutely a no. And I know that's a, that's a pretty extreme example, but it really hits you when the day to day is so different to what you imagine.

Yeah.

I don't know if we can tie that to Grace's question, but my perception of what being a cop was, was not the reality that I experienced.

Yeah.

I think that's where it breaks down.

Didn't fit in your lifestyle. You experienced it and thought, oh, I don't want to have this kind of life, you know, and go home with all these problems, you know? So it's good to actually not just fall in love with the idea of the business, but to maybe even like, you know, intern, go get a job at a startup or whatever you want to do, or even like just Ask a buddy or a friend that has a business like that. I'm like, hey, can I just like hang around that day and to see how it's like, you know, you might realize, oh, most of it's boring. Most of it's not actually that stimulating.

Yeah.

There's a third reason that I want to share that it's the wrong reason to start a business. And it's a funny one. And it's a little bit off script, a little off notes because it's something I kind of hesitated to share because it's a little bit hard to understand. But a lot of us, we have dreams, we have business ideas that we've had for years. Some people have for decades. They've had like, I've always wanted to start this type of business, right? And it's going to lead to the next thing we're going to talk about is like, that is really not a great business to start now, right? Like it was when you first thought of it, right? Like, you know, like you had the concept, you had the idea, but you've been sitting on it for like 5, 6, 7, 10 years. Things change very quickly in the marketplace. And you know, you're just like, I got to do this. I've always wanted to do this. And you just go in without validating. You go in without thinking that's going to be successful because like you've been thinking about it so big in your head, but the world has changed since then.

Mm-hmm.

And it's kind of hard to kind of like come to terms with that because it's kind of like you're— I'm not going to get to fulfill my dream. And this is why I always say like the goal should always be to be a successful entrepreneur, to have a successful business. How you get there is all dependent on a lot of things outside of your realm of influence, like the marketplace, like, you know, your circumstance, like your skills and all that kind of stuff. So you want to make sure That you set a goal that is actually attainable, which is like, I want success in business, whatever way that looks like, you know, whatever business that is.

And that's always the flip side of people who jump on trends. Like they see something that's hot right now with what's frozen yogurt places jumping on those trends. It's the, it's the flip side of that, which is why I think this, this episode and this question is so good because from either angle it can look like a great idea, but if it doesn't hit all of those 3, You're missing that thing that's going to make the business sustainable and viable.

Right.

Viable and sustainable. It should be that order.

Yeah.

Yeah. All right. So Grace has now narrowed it down to say 2 or 3 ideas. What if there's a tiebreaker? Which one does she go with?

I love this question because one thing that business has taught me in 20 years is to be humble. Right? You have to— it humbles you, 20 years of business. Why? Because you learn that you don't know what you're talking about. You don't know what you know, right? You think you know. Stop trying to decide. Stop thinking that I have to choose and I'm so smart and I'm gonna know exactly which is the best one and it's up to me. It's not actually up to you. Let the market decide. It's very good to be humble and innocent about what you think is going to work. And this is why experimentation's so integral in success in business, right? You're gonna think one way or the other, but if you can't decide, run a pilot.

Mm-hmm.

Test it out. One of the lightest ways to do this this weekend is to create a waiting list. It could be a simple landing page where you could just like, hey, I'm launching this new product or service. Would you like to get on the waiting list? By being on the waiting list, you'll get like a discount or you get first access or whatever it might be. And the whole point of this exercise is to see if there's demand. And you could just create a one-page landing page or website and it has an email capture and you could just send traffic to it where you run some paid ads. You can throw $50, $100, $200 on Meta ads, Facebook, Instagram, where you are just targeting the demographic, the audience that would be interested in this product or service. And you want to see, are people actually willing to just put their name and email address down? And are they interested in what you have to offer? They're not paying anything, but it's some level of interest. If no one is signing up, then you know that there's a problem. But this is an easy way to just like spend a little bit of time to validate before you spend the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years trying to make this business work.

I'm wondering if depending on where Grace is starting from, and I think there could be different levels, if having launching a landing page and a website could be a bit of a stretch. Is there any way of doing that on social media of putting together or on LinkedIn or on Facebook or wherever, you know, You kind of are on social media, uh, may, you know, outlining that offering.

Yeah. The reason why I say landing page is because you need a little bit of real estate to explain what you do and what you offer and the pains you solve and all that kind of stuff. But to answer your question, yeah, you can create a lead ad in Facebook or on Instagram where they can just put their name and email address right in the ad. But you know, it's going to be hard for you to explain it, but you can maybe do it as a reel. And then like the call to action buttons, like learn more or sign up for the waiting list, and then it opens up The opt-in. And that's probably the fastest way to do it. You could just do this inside and you can ask ChatGPT or Claude or whatever how to do this. This takes 2 seconds and doesn't make any sense for me to explain it right now because it could change tomorrow. So yeah, that's the fastest way to find out. And if you are hearing this right now and you're like, oh, you know, that seems like a lot of work, you know, like stop, stop. Don't do this business.

Mm-hmm.

If that's a lot of work, then you don't know what is ahead of you. Right. That's very little work compared to what you'll have to do if there is demand. If you actually have to fulfill customers, you have to give money to a supplier or to a service so that you could supply to the customer, collect money from the customers, give refunds, deal with people that are upset and angry. Like, this is what business is about. So this is a very small, easy step to get you going.

I remember with the yoga teacher, she announced it in class. And there's a captive audience there. We all have our email. The first, I think the first step before this program was even, or even launched or the website was even live was like, would anyone be interested? Email me. So there's different ways. If you're part of that community, like you said, if you're part of that membership group and you've got an offering, there's already people maybe that you could ask in that, in that community, in that group.

Yeah. And I think that you want to make it easier for yourself to get a response. Like I would even say that's a little bit of a weak attempt because like It's a lot of effort for me to remember her email and then to remember to email her and to say I'm interested. It's easier for her just to email me and say reply to this email.

Oh, I think maybe that's probably how it went.

I'm not trying to poo-poo her. No, no.

And I'm—

we want to make this as easy as possible for the customer.

I think it was more about like when you've got an audience, you're part of that community, announcing it to the community and somehow getting feedback from them.

So testing, trialing is A really good way to find out if this is something that people actually want, if this is a business that has legs. Don't trust your intuition, especially in the start. You know, right now you need to just see if the market wants it.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, I just wanna kind of wrap this episode up and wrap up my final thoughts when it comes to helping Grace and everybody else who's listening, who's trying to decide. And really to wrap up, like, you don't need to decide. The market decides for you, right? You don't need to, like, the only thing you need to decide is like, choose from the options that you'd like to do. You know, the things that you would actually enjoy, things that it would actually Skills you have. Yep. Skills that you have, all the things that we discussed. So that leverages the skills that you already have. Yeah. So I really think that a lot of us, we are trying to make all these decisions when you need to start getting into the habit where you just get data and those, the data drives your decisions. Right now you don't have much data. It's all in your head. Right. And maybe we asked a few friends, but friends just give you lip service. They tell you everything's good and that sounds good, but they're never actually going to buy. You need to find out in the marketplace if this thing has legs.

I think we covered a lot in this episode and in answering this question, but I think it's a big one and we want to— our aim is really to get people unstuck. And I genuinely feel that a lot of people are unstuck, are stuck in this phase of deciding. And so hopefully all of these elements that you outlined and all the examples we gave helps people get unstuck.

So the last thing I want to kind of leave everybody on is just on that point, like, and this might be worth the whole episode. And it's if you are feeling stuck in life in general, if you want to make a change in your life, the best thing you could do is to take action. Any action, even if it's the wrong action, right? Just take action and continue to take action. If you want to get healthy, just take any kind of action. Go for a walk, go for a run, do some push-ups, join a gym, buy some new sneakers, whatever. Like, just do something, right?

Right.

This idea of living in your head, nothing gets done here. It gets done in the real world by you trying and testing and really just experiencing what it's like to be out there. If you're not willing to put yourself out there and fail or succeed, then there's no real success. There's no real anything of value, right? If you're just playing it safe and just playing business and researching and doing it in your head and nothing really is going to happen either way, then— There's no value there. So just take action. Don't worry about like failing so much. It's okay. No one's watching. You're going to learn. You're going to be able to iterate.

Well, the fact that Grace has taken the first step, submitted her question, go Grace. And if you want to submit your question and have Omar answer it here on Q&A Wednesdays, go ahead, go to 100mba.net/q and submit your question.

Awesome. And if you want to continue learning, we have a recent episode that we published called How to Validate Your Business This Weekend. If you want to do that validation process we kind of touched on, if you want all the details, all the steps, all the frameworks, we cover it in that episode. It's called How to Validate Your Business Idea This Weekend. Thanks so much for tuning in. Thanks, Nicole, for joining me today on Q&A Wednesday, and we'll check you in the next one.

Bye.

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