MBA1713 Guest Teacher – Adii Pienaar – How to Build a Business That Profits Your Life

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Welcome to the 100 RMBA Show. Helping you build the business you believe in 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 today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today we have a very special guest Ad. Pinar Ad has built some successful businesses. He is one of the founders of WooCommerce and WooThemes and Convergio, both with amazing exits. He's seen a lot in his entrepreneurial journey and he wants to help you build a business that profits your life. That's what today's lesson's all about. We sacrifice so much as entrepreneurs for the sake of success of our business. But we shouldn't be sacrificing our greatest asset, our time, our life on this planet. So in today's guest teacher lesson ad is going to teach us how not only to have a profitable business, but a profitable life in the process. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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I am fortunate enough to call Eddie, a friend of mine. I've gotten to know Eddie for the last two years or so. I learned a lot about his journey as an entrepreneur. He shared some really tough times in his life, in his journey as an entrepreneur, in our personal conversations. And he's learned a lot of hard lessons the hard way. He wants to help you avoid those pitfalls, those pains Our business means so much to us. It affects so many aspects of our life. Without us realizing it. Many of us look back at the last few years as we're building our businesses and ask where did the time go? What did I do in my life when I was building my business? How has this journey affected my personal life, my family, my relationships, my health, my well being, my happiness, my personal goals? Too many of us put all the chips on the table and forget our business is just one aspect of our life. Now, like I mentioned at the top of the episode, AD has gone through two big major exits. He's built incredible businesses and sold them for profit. Now, before he jumped into his third business, he took a pause and he decided to write a book to help other entrepreneurs in their journey in making sure not only their business is profitable, but their life is as well. That book is called Life the New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success. You can pick it up right now@lifeprofitability.com it's only $0.99 actually on Kindle right now until February 2nd, so I would grab that right now. I normally don't plug somebody's book at the top of the episode, but I wanted to make sure you knew about it as soon as possible because this book is going to help you. Adie's walked the walk more than he talks the talk. So when he does have something to offer like a book, you want to snatch that up as soon as possible. Now I'm going to pass it on to AD to teach his guest seizure lesson. But I'll be back to wrap up today's episode, give my takeaways, and share some stories of my own that apply to today's lesson. So for now, take it away.

Adam hey everyone, I'm adpynnaar and I've built and sold two software businesses. I'm building my next one now and I've also just published my new book called Life the New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success. In my hundred dollar MBA lesson today, I'd like to teach you how to build a business that is not only financially profitable, but more importantly life profitable as well. I'll be talking about how we should rethink what work life balance means, how it's risky to take the short term pain, long term gain approach to building a business, how to realign your business to yourself, and the next steps to take to start to create more life profits today. Before I get into that, let me share a bit of my personal journey and how I came to define this idea of life profitability. I started my first business with themes and Woocommerce straight out of university. Even before that though, I was constantly working on business ideas in favor of just being a student, for example. And once I exited Woocommerce years later, becoming a millionaire in the process, I was supposed to take a break, a sabbatical of sorts. But I got stuck into my next business pretty much immediately because I needed to prove that I was not a one hit wonder. I went into building my second business believing that it should be easier. I had some capital, I had experience, I had a network, I had new skills. But about two years in, things started unraveling both in my personal life and in business. And pretty soon I almost lost all of the things that were most dear to me. I realized that I'd been on this accelerated path, my own little rat race that had caused so much collateral damage along the way. Regardless of the business or financial success that I had achieved, it was in that moment that I realized that I need a better way of building my business and life going forward. The philosopher Henry David Thurau shared a powerful idea in his book Walden that helped me find this new path and ultimately coin the term life of ability. He says, the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run. I'll just repeat that for a second. The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run. When we do anything in life, the thing we're paying with is our life. It's our time, our attention, and all of that is finite. And when we as entrepreneurs build businesses, we pay expenses not just with money, but with a part of our life. And if you're anything like me, you know how demanding A business can be at times, and this whole idea was so counterintuitive to the things that I actually valued outside our own business. My family, for example, represents my highest value, but I was so often just not present with them because my businesses were demanding so much of me. And that's what life profitability aims to change. It shifts the perspective to growing a business that serves you and serves your life every single day. It's about building a business that generates life profits instead of only accumulating life costs. So let's get into a few ways in which you can start building a business. Whether you're starting from scratch or you're tweaking your existing business to be more life profitable. My first recommendation is to rethink this whole idea of work life balance. This is a commonly held goal for many people, and whilst it's not a bad goal per se, I do think it's flawed. The problem with the idea that work and life can keep each other in balance is that it proposes that work and life are two separate, independent things. We all know that a bad day at work spills over into our home life easily. Just as an argument with your spouse in the morning influences your mindset throughout the workday. To start moving towards greater life profitability, we need to acknowledge that work is merely a part of life. So a new pursuit of balance should mean that we rather hold our work, our businesses in balance with all the other things that are important to us. Whether it's families, lovers, friends, hobbies, passion projects, or maybe just our health. Just like you would balance an investment portfolio, so should you balance your life portfolio that should include all bits of those things that are important to you. And your work and business will just be one of the stocks or one of those bits in this personalized life portfolio. The second idea I'd like to share with you is a bit of a caution. As generally ambitious individuals, we're conditioned with this notion that short term compromise and sacrifice eventually leads to long term gain and reward. That kind of proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We tell ourselves that once I just make that extra $100,000 or I am able to afford those two critical hires in my team, I'll take the time off to go on that family holiday or finally take up those piano lessons for which I've prepaid ages ago. The risky run in sequencing major life events like that is that the outcome, the actual reward bit, is never that guaranteed. And we especially don't know how much time we need or have to get to that outcome. In his book When Breath Becomes Air, acclaimed neurosurgeon Paul Kalaniti writes, my life had been building potential, potential that would now go unrealized. I had planned to do so much and I'd come so close. See, Paul had always wanted to write a book and have children, but delayed those things as he was ambitiously building his professional career. He eventually only started writing his book after he was diagnosed with lung cancer when he was 36 and his only daughter was only 8 months old when he tragically died the following year. His wife ultimately had to write the last chapter of his book before it was published. A Life Profitable business means that the business empowers you to integrate the most important things into your life with a regular cadence. It means taking that trip, reading that book, or spending time on that passion project sooner rather than later. The next thing I'd like to do is is to ask you to just take a momentary pause regardless of where you're at in your business journey. Maybe you've been running this business for 10 years, or this is your third attempt after two previous failures. Or maybe you just had the idea to start your business last week and are now planning its launch. Before you can take the next steps though, and pursue greater life profitability, it's important to be aware of of a universal truth. As you take these next steps, you will be the only common denominator on your journey. All other things can change. The business or the idea or the product can change. Team members come and go, divorce happens, right? And families can change. You can move to the other side of the world, make new friends. But regardless of any of those changes, you will still be there. You will be the one on this journey you're taking. So in this momentary pause, I'd ask you to think about who you really are. What are those things that truly, really matters to you? And what are the goals, hopes and dreams that you have in this moment for your future? If you can't reconcile those things in this very moment and at least find partial clarity, no amount of next steps can fix that discontent or incongruence. Whatever your next steps look like, they need to be in true alignment of who you already are. Yes, you will change and evolve too, as you learn and continue on your journey. But many of the things that make you uniquely you in this moment will not change materially. Life profits will flow from your ability to honor these things as you take your next steps. The final part of today's lesson is about how to take those initial steps to Start Pursuing Greater Life Profitability I'm sure that you too have sometimes felt like you have a never ending to do list and that the tips and tricks and hacks proposed in self help business books just added to that lengthy list, which generally is just overwhelming and demoralizing. I sure have been there countless times. The good news about life Profitability though, is that it doesn't require you to make 180 degree turn on where you're at in this moment, in your life or in your business. Instead, it's an incremental process that aims to find some existing space, leverage that to create more space, and then redistribute that additional space to make further investments in your life portfolio. If you by the way, wanted to do this exercise, you can download the Life Portfolio assessment worksheet@lifeprofitability.com worksheets. The assessment has four components that will help you find that initial space. First, you should really do a deep dive on your personal values because your next steps should be in alignment with those. It's naturally easier to find space within or close to the things that you already value. Next up, you want to tally all the assets that you have that may help you honor and prioritize those values. This can literally be anything from a good financial nest egg that you saved up to a great group of friends, to a mentor that you trust, or certain skills that you've acquired in the past. Then you want to ask yourself, where do I have any wiggle room to create a little more space? Perhaps you have a supportive spouse that can help pick up some of the slack in the meantime. Or you have a team member who can be promoted to take on some higher level responsibilities to free up some of your time. Or is it just a case of reducing financial expenditure in your life or business? The goal here is just to identify where you can eke out that x percentage, 5 percentage, single digit percentages kind of extra space or margin that you can then reinvest elsewhere. Small incremental tweaks and then finally you should dream big and define those goals and desires you are pursuing. Think about what you want for your business or your life and how that looks like in 10 years time, for example. Or what you want your legacy to be, right? That's an even bigger kind of aspiration or consideration. If you think about legacy or just simply look at where you're making sacrifices in your life today and want to actually eliminate those. By combining these four things, you can then start to shift to a holistic strategy that prioritizes your values, leverages your existing space. By combining these four things, you can then start to shift to a holistic strategy that prioritizes your values, leverages your existing assets, and wiggle room to really pursue those big life goals and desires. Break this strategy down into 90 day plans that doesn't overwhelm you, but instead focus on those daily, weekly and monthly incremental steps that will create more space within which greater life profitability can then manifest. Start finding your answers by embarking on your new life profitable Life. Finish your 90 day plan, commit to it, embrace it, embrace yourself and start achieving your first set of 90 day goals right now. All right, I was adpnour and if you want to continue learning about life profitability, you can head on over to lifeprofitability.com where my book is also available. Thanks again for joining me today. Now back to you Omar.

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Dang it. Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon. It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico. Love the Lesson by Eddie Pinar When I listened to this guest teacher lesson and learned about Eddie's book, I really had to pause for a moment and reflect and ask myself, do I have life profitability? Or at least do I have life probability to the extent I think I should? And if I'm being totally honest with myself, that answer is no. I have to realign my life a little bit. And hearing these reminders, hearing these lessons, reading these books, gives us the tools to do that. Full transparency. I've poured my whole life into my business. I'd probably say 90% of my time, my thoughts, my energy goes into the business. And in the meantime, so many things take a backseat as much as possible. I try not to have my health and my relationships take a backseat, but of course they do. And my personal goals, things that I wanted to achieve, things I wanted to do in life outside of business, have really suffered. So it's encouraged me to ask questions like to what extent do I prioritize growth at all costs or making more profit, making more revenue or increasing our user base? What if I grew slower? What if I had a smaller team? What if I had less expenses? How would that affect my day to day life, my stress levels, my focus, my free time? I encourage you to ask the same questions and to set those 90 day goals that 80 recommends. This is serious stuff, guys. This is your life that's going by. You cannot take it back. If you speak to anybody who's your senior, speak to your parents, speak to your grandparents. They'll tell you, life is precious. Life is short. The regrets of the aging usually don't revolve around spending more time at the office. It usually is about spending more time with friends and family, doing things you love. Travel, exploration, writing, reading, music. As entrepreneurs, we're ambitious. We want to go for gold, right? We want to keep pushing ourselves, and that's good. But you have to be aware of extremes in both good and bad in life. Everything is a trade off. Everything has a price. Make sure you're not paying your life in totality to reach your business goals. Thanks so much for listening and thanks so much to Ad Panaur for the great guest teacher lesson. Make sure you pick up his book Life profitability. It's 99 cents on Kindle right now. Go to Amazon.com or you go to LifeProfitability.com and grab that book. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You don't want to look back 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 years from now and say to yourself, man, I spent the last 10 years building something that wasn't worth it. That wasn't worth all this time that I wasted or invested. Let's say spending 10 years of your life doing things you love, being content, being peaceful, being calm, having less stress, having a bit less money in the bank is totally worth it versus going totally all in and trying to add zeros to that bank account. Find your balance, find your trade off. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Okay. Does this happen to anybody else? You sit down with a juicy QPC, some McNuggets and those golden fries from McDonald's. Then you take a long sip of your Sprite because you can still hear your mama saying, don't fill up on that drink before you eat your food. But you're grown now, so you do what you want.

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