MBA1642 Can You Build a Business Alone? + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. All you got to do to enter our Free Ride Friday contest every single week is to leave us an Apple Podcast review. When you leave us a review, enter our weekly random draw every single week until you win. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on Apple Podcasts. Just listen in on Friday to see if you won. Just like today. It's that simple. Go ahead, take two seconds, pause the podcast and leave us an Apple Podcast review. You just might win next Friday. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey. Oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show packing powerful business insights into every single episode with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zedhome. 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 lesson we take on the question, can you build a business alone? No employees, no teammates, no freelancers? Just by yourself? Is this possible? What does a business like that look like? Can it be successful? We examine this question and this concept and give it an honest look and give you an answer. If you want to do it solo, is it possible? How would you do it? What are the trade offs and are there any limits to your success? We get into all that and more. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Can you build a business alone, totally by yourself? Well, the simple answer is yes. But what kind of business? You could literally open a lemonade stand in your front yard. And that's considered technically a business providing a product for a fee. You make the lemonade, you set up the table, you sell it, you collect the fee, done deal. But we obviously are not talking about a lemonade stand. We're talking about a business that can actually sustain your lifestyle and make it a comfortable one. You know, if you're going to go into business and start something and really work hard on it, you want to make sure it's worth your while. So it has the potential to make you financially free. Is this possible? Yes, it is. But there are caveats and I'll talk about what they are in a moment. This can be done. I've seen it done and I've done it myself. Where I literally ran the whole business by myself. No external help, not even a freelancer, no external services, nothing. Just software and my time. It was a services business. I was creating business websites on WordPress for my clients. And this is over a decade ago. And I did everything myself. The marketing, the sales, the service, the actual craft of building the website, the maintenance the customer calls, the invoicing, the financing, everything. And I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs start out this way. And this is what's called being self employed. This is not being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is somebody who leverages resources and time in order to produce results for their customers and to be free of the business. Meaning that they can step away from it for a month or two, not do a single lick of work, and the business continues to go because they have teammates, they have employees, they have people working on things. The system goes, they build the system, they make the right hires, they put in the assets, they put in all the things they need to do so that it runs by itself. That's what an entrepreneur really is. A self employed person is somebody who actually works for themselves. Very similar to what I was doing when I was doing my business consulting firm when I was building websites. This is very similar to somebody who's a doctor and running their own clinic, a chef that runs their own restaurant. They're the Business owner and the talent. And they're really the product, they're really the thing, they're selling the service. But it is technically a business. But one of the things I learned really early on, about 20 years ago, there's a big difference between a self employed person and an entrepreneur. I learned this from Robert Kiyosaki's Rich dad, Poor dad, his book. And he has this four quadrant system that talks about like you have employees, you have self employed, you have entrepreneurs and you have investors. And really these are the four ways people make money in this world. And the top two quadrants are the employed and self employed. And the bottom two quadrants are entrepreneur and investor. And you really want to be on the bottom quadrants because those two quadrants leverage time, leverage talent. They're not exchanging their time for money. In my business building websites for other people, but when I was not doing that, I wasn't earning money. There's no way I could step away from it because my clients wouldn't get what they paid for. So let's just flat out say, yes, this is possible, but you're going to have to do it as a self employed person because that's how it works. You have to hire somebody else, you have to empower somebody else to do that work for you in order for you to be free of that attachment to the business or attachment to delivering that service or delivering that product. Now having said that, that's still a business. Being self employed is still a business and you might enjoy that, you might like that kind of business. People that love, control and love their craft will love this type of business. Now I am of the opinion even if you love your craft, you're a photographer, you can benefit with some key hires, a manager, somebody who could deal with your finances, somebody negotiate your rates, somebody to build your website, all that kind of stuff. It's worth having people hired either as a freelancer or as an employee or part time to help you just focus on your craft as a photographer and not have to deal with the other logistical things. Because that's your magic sauce, right? That's, that's your special talent and you should focus on that as a service provider. But even if you didn't, you can still run that business. Now having said that, again, there's limitations. There's only so far. You can take that business. When I was building websites for my clients, I was pretty inexpensive in the beginning. But then I raised my prices, raised my prices. But even if I raised my prices to an astronomical amount, let's say, for example, I was charging 40 or $50,000 a website, I would need at least six weeks to create that website and deliver it to the client and receive my 50 grand. So even if I was charging 50 grand a website, I can really only bring on about eight clients a year, given, you know, holiday season, things like that. And that's not bad. But at the end of the day, I cannot make more than $400,000 a year in revenue, which is a great number. You know, that's not a bad number. That's a pretty healthy business in revenue. But that's basically my ceiling. I don't have any more hours in the day, I don't have any more weeks in the year. And if I don't want to leverage my time and I don't want to hire somebody, that's my ceiling. And I have to come to terms with that. The other thing I have to come to terms with is that that's my ceiling. If I max out my hours, that means I don't take vacations, I don't take long breaks, there's no wiggle room for emergencies. And of course, this is in the scenario where I am charging 50 grand a website. This means I'm a super talented website designer and developer and I'm really sought after. I'm like from the 1% of the 1%. Now leverage that with maybe a content business where somebody is doing group coaching, maybe somebody's selling online courses. The sky is really the limit. And building that kind of business with a little bit of help with a small team can easily get you to half a million dollars. And there's ways to scale your information, scale your knowledge one to many that you just can't do with a service business like I was mentioning, or if you're the only person working on everything. We haven't mentioned all the caveats yet. The other caveat is that you have to be willing to learn everything you need to learn to do everything in your business. That means you have to learn accounting, you need to learn finance, you need to learn website design. To build your website, you need to know marketing and sales and copywriting and a bunch of other stuff. Plus whatever you do to deliver your value to the marketplace, whether that service or product, whatever you're building, you have to do that too. The thing you're actually offering customers. So you have to be willing to be patient and be willing to actually learn the things you need to learn to be able to do every you need to do. And I'm here to say I did that at one point in my career and it is extremely time consuming and what happens is you eventually burn out about 18 months in and realize there's gotta be a better way to do this. But that was my experience and maybe it's not gonna be yours. But the point here is that you can do this, but everything has trade offs and everything has a cost. So can you build a business alone? Yes, of course you can. But what kind of business? And if you're going to get into business, is it worth it for you to box yourself in and say it's just going to be me, my way or the highway and limit your success, limit your time off, have everything reliant on you. Think of the pressure that puts on you. Or you could say I can build a small team that can help me achieve my goals. Because in my experience, even just having a small team of three or four or five people to do a lot for you can really leverage your business to another level and build more importantly a lifestyle that you can enjoy. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

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To wrap up today's lesson. Yes, you can build a business alone, but do you want to? I want to mention one other thing. It's a lonely place to build a business alone. You don't get to enjoy working and learning and managing other people when you're building a solo business. That's A part that's a big part of the enjoyment and the satisfaction and the reward of building a business is building a team, finding great talent, finding people that can do amazing things for your business, that can generate 5 and 10x their value in revenue for your business. But I'm not the kind of person to say there's only one way to do business. This is an option and it was an option for me at one point in my career. And for some people this might work for them. This might be exactly what they're looking for, especially if this is a side hustle. But if this is your full time gig, there's a lot riding on it when it's just on you and there's a lot of pressure and there's a lot to do. I do want to say there is one advantage to doing it alone, at least for the start. When you start out a business and you do everything and you learn everything, it's very easy for you to build a team around your business because you know exactly what every job, what every role is required to do because you did it right. You can write that job description easily, you can hire these people easily because you did it, and you can evaluate that person easily once they're hired because you know what the job entails, you know the challenges and you know what success looks like. So even if you just start out by yourself and start growing your team, there is a, you know, an advantage of doing everything yourself in the beginning. It's a hard one. You know, I don't recommend, you know, to everybody, but sometimes you have to when you're bootstrapping your business and that's one of the advantages. You know exactly how to do pretty much every job that you're going to be hiring for. Thank you so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Today's episode's not over though, because it's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Chi Ju Tsai from Taiwan. Chi Jusai says congrats from Taiwan. Five stars. This is amazing. I subscribed at episode 100 and I'm up to episode 600. Even living in Taiwan, I can gain a lot of INS insights and knowledge from this podcast. This is wonderful. I'm looking forward to more episodes. Well, Chiju Sai, you are in episode 600. You got another thousand you can consume and more coming every day. Thank you so much for the rating and review on Apple podcasts. Your mission is to email me over at Omar MBA Net so I can hook you up with the free ride to easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse co. But you just want it for free. And you can win it for free too. If you're listening and you leave us a Apple Podcast rating and review, you enter a weekly random draw. Just listen in on Friday to see if you want. It's that easy. Thank you so much in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the dangers of building a business by yourself for a long period of time is that once you start building your team, if you wait too long, if you, you know, do it for by yourself for a year to you'll start to build bad habits. What happens is that you don't collaborate when you start hiring people. You don't delegate, you don't empower people because you're used to doing everything yourself, making all the decisions. And you tend to stick to those old habits because you've done it for so long. So be mindful of that if you're making that transition, that building a team, that kind of business, total different dynamic. Your job is to empower your new teammates and give them ownership so you don't have to worry about it. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Of.

Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood. What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Tuxed data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile.

Just bring your number. $31 monthly, $25 after with autopay not available if with Metro or t mob 180 days.