MBA1019 How to Transition from Self-Employed to Business Owner

Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Because your business depends on you getting better every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and in today's episode, you will learn how to transition from self employed to business owner. And yes, there is a difference, a huge difference. Being self employed is basically creating a job for yourself. This is like being a doctor and instead of working at a hospital, you open your own clinic. Yes, you have your own business, but basically you created your own job for yourself. If you don't show up to work, the business doesn't function. Now I'm using this example, but you can see yourself or others in that example where if you don't show up for work, if you don't do the work in your business for a day or two, a week, a month, the business will just not function. What you really want to do is become a business owner, an entrepreneur. Now, entrepreneur is a big word and a lot of people will have mixed ideas about it. Basically, what you want to do is create a business and a system where if you're removed from the equation, things keep going. This doesn't mean you're not going to do any work. There are other things that you're going to do to create this business, to create the system and refine the system, but to maintain it, to keep it going, you need to put the right people in place to do that for you. So I'm going to show you some simple strategies to to make that transition. If you're self employed right now, if you're in the trenches, if you can't remove yourself from the business, if you can't remove yourself from the trenches, I'm gonna show you how to do so and transition into a business owner. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 MBA show is brought to you by Udemy, the largest marketplace for online learning. Whether you're looking to learn something new or just sharpen up your skills, udemy has over 65,000 courses starting at just $11.99. Students around the world choose Udemy to discover new passions, expand their skills, and even change careers. So if you're looking to improve and change things up, visit U D e my MBA or download the Udemy app to learn anytime, anywhere. I want to begin today's Lesson by giving you a quick warning. Moving from self employed to a business owner, removing yourself from the equation is not easy, but it's not impossible. Now why is it not easy? Because you actually have to change who you are. You have to change what you do every single day in order to make this transition. And it was probably the biggest challenge I had as an entrepreneur. I still go through this challenge whenever I pick up a new project, I'm always inclined to do it myself. And I have to remind myself, no, let's not slip back into self employment. So it all begins with understanding what your job is as an entrepreneur. Your job is to create value to offer to other people in exchange for their money, right? That's your job. Now how you create that value is where you get into trouble. Most of us want to create that value for ourselves. And you want to do everything else around it. The admin of the business as well, well, that's a recipe for disaster and a nervous breakdown. So what you want to do is start understanding. Your job is to orchestrate and to put the people in place to create that value. And one of the ways to do this is to understand that anything that you can do, somebody else can do. You're not special right now, don't get me wrong, I'm sure you're a special person and everything, but there are plenty of people out there that can do what you need to get done to offer that value. And the best way to look at this is that you're the coach. You're not the star player on the team. You're not supposed to be scoring the points on the court or on the field. You're supposed to show them how to score those points, give them a game plan and let them do the dirty work. You're supposed to stay in your suit, don't get into the uniform and roll up your sleeves. Now you might be thinking, why? Well, if you look at an athlete's career, it's very short, it's not sustainable, you can't do the work forever, but you can manage and put the right people in place for as long as you like. You also can't scale your business if everything's dependent on you. You just have a limited number of hours and it's only you, right? So your first step in transitioning from self employed to business owner is you're going to start delegating more and more tasks to somebody else. If you ever wonder what you should do with any kind of profits you make with your business, you're getting started Maybe you got to bootstrap it, maybe you got to do all that work for yourself, but you've self employed for a while now. What are you doing with those profits of that business you've built? Now it's time to build a business. Meaning you need to start hiring people with that profit, with that money to do the things that you are doing right now. So you're going to start outsourcing those tasks, take a look at all the things you do, list them down if you have to, and start making some hires. Even if it's just one hire, even if it's just a virtual assistant that's going to take care of your calendar, your emails, your customer service. That is a start. You want to start unloading things off your plate. Now the key is here. When you do that and you train this person right and they're up and running and they're doing their thing, don't take on more things. If there are more things you want to take on. What we do often is like, hey, I freed up all this time, now I want to get into Facebook marketing. No, don't do that. What you need to do is you need to take that idea and find somebody to implement it for you. You make a hire with that idea. And don't forget you have other tasks you still have on your plate that you need to outsource, you need to hire for. So start making the transition with one hire and the next hire and the next. And what's going to happen is that all your responsibilities, all your work is going to be placed on other people, people that are hired by you. And you're going to start managing these people and to start managing the whole project, the whole business. That's a different role. Now guess what? When you get to that point, you can find somebody to do that for you as well, to manage the day to day operations. Eventually. What you're trying to do here is you're trying to create a system so that you are in charge of only the things that directly impact the longevity and the projection of your business. So that means big decisions on the direction the business is going to, creative decisions that you want to make as well as the future of the business. Will you maintain it? Will you sell it? Will you actually expand it? You need to free up your time so you can free up your mind to make these important decisions and to really think big and to get bigger. You can't do it when you're bogged down with tasks and to do lists that you can get somebody else to do, you have to see your business differently. You have to start looking and imagining. And I'm being serious here. You got to sit down, maybe go for a walk in the park or something and sit on a bench and imagine your business running without you. What does that look like? Who's doing what, what hires you have to make, get really detailed, maybe have a paper and pen with you. You're going to realize your business looks completely different than it does now. And you're going to start realizing, man, I'm doing a lot of things that just doesn't need to be done. Now, I know what some of you might be thinking, okay, I do this exercise, I imagine my business without me being working in it. And I have all these lists of hires that I think we need to make, but I don't have the funds right now. I don't have the profits, I don't have the money to make these hires. Well, that's not a problem because at least now you have a direction. You know what you have to do. You have a list of people you need to hire and you can do it one by one as your business grows. But right now you're not making any progress, you're not making any hires and you have no game plan when you're ready to make a hire. So it's better to be prepared. So. So as soon as you have that money, as soon as you're starting making those profits and you can invest in building that team, you can transition from self employed to business owner. Now here's a little secret, and this is what I learned building Webinar Ninja, a software company. One of the joys of being a business owner is working with superstars again. It's like a coach who has hall of famers on their team. People that are just incredible. And it's just an exhilarating feeling to work with great, talented people. That's part of the fun and the experience of being an entrepreneur. And what you realize is that, wow, there are a lot of people out there in the world that are a lot better at a lot of things that I'm not good at. Right? They're just better. They're specialists and they are very, very good at what they do. So let them do what they're supposed to do instead of you trying to be a jack of all trades. As I have more on today's episode, today's topic. But but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. A business is only as strong as its people. As we're mentioning in today's episode. So every hire matters. So don't settle for posting and hoping the right person will find your role and apply. Instead, choose LinkedIn. LinkedIn is more than just the world's professional network. It's also a better way to find great talent. Think about it. How often do you check job boards? For most people, it's a pretty occasional thing. But there is a place where people go daily to grow professionally, and that's LinkedIn. 70% of the US workforce is already on LinkedIn and 22 million professionals view and apply to jobs on LinkedIn every week in every industry. Just ask the hundreds of thousands of businesses who've posted to LinkedIn jobs over the past year. They rate LinkedIn jobs 40% higher than job boards at delivering quality candidates because LinkedIn considers skills, experience, location, and more to match and promote your job to potential candidates. If you're not using LinkedIn for your hiring needs, you're missing out. Go to LinkedIn.com MBA and get $50 credit towards your first job post. That's LinkedIn.com MBA for $50 credit today. Terms and conditions apply. All right, I want to add a few more strategies when it comes to moving from self employment to to business owner. In order for us to change, to change the way we think about our business and move and make this transition, sometimes we need some sort of motivation, some sort of information to push us to say, yeah, I gotta do this. And one piece of information that motivated me is understanding that businesses that grow, that have a team of people that are experts at what they do, instead of, you know, one person along with a few helpers, they're the businesses that last. They're the businesses that compete. And if you're worried about your competition, then you got to outdo your competition when it comes to your team. You got to have better talent and you got to remove yourself from the equation, from doing all the manual labor so you can focus on growing that team, managing that team, leading that team. Look at all the businesses that you admire, big and small. I guarantee they're not doing it alone. They're not doing it as a solo show. They have help. They have other people around them doing things. I know this because I was a solopreneur for a very long time. It's just not sustainable. Yes, you can make a healthy income. It's not impossible. But if you ever want to grow, if you want to take things to the next level again, things have to change. And in my experience and what I've learned over the years, Is that yes, you can make a healthy personal income if you remain a solopreneur, but. But you're going to be very busy. You're going to be super busy handling every single aspect of your business, constantly trying to make more and more money month after month instead of getting people involved, people to help you to do it for you. I also want to lastly mention that if you want to remain self employed, that's a choice. But understand, it's a choice. It's not that you're forced to do that. If you're that doctor that owns the clinic, you can hire other doctors or you can rent out your clinic to other doctors and make a profit that way. Understand that if you're doing this out of your own needs, at your own wants, out of your own preference, that's okay. If you want to run that clinic on your own as a doctor until you retire, that's fine too. But understand, it's a choice. It's a decision that you're making. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you're listening to, subscribe right now with all your might. Click that button that says subscribe. Subscribe on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, whatever it is. By hitting subscribe, you have access to all our archive episodes. It's over a thousand episodes. This subscribes you to our feed, which gives you access to all the past episodes. It also automatically downloads the next episode to your device so you don't miss a beat. Alright, before I go, I want to leave you with this. Changing who you are, changing your habits, not easy. It's like, you know, getting into the gym. That first day of going to the gym is tough. The first week is tough. But then it starts to get easier. The second week, the third week, by the fourth month, it's like a habit. You can't quit. So you just got to get started with this transition. Make that first hire, even if it's a part time hire, even if it's a virtual assistant. Get the ball rolling. Feel what it feels like to delegate and to do less. Get used to it so you can make another hire and another hire and another. Alright, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care, Sam.