MBA1989 How Your Job Can Help You Grow Your Business

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Hey oh welcome to the 100. No fluff, just the good stuff. 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and in today's episode you will learn how your job can help grow your business. Many of us might feel very frustrated, even deflated, having to work a 9 to 5 when you want to do your business full time. But I'm here to tell you that your current job is actually a great way for you to learn how to grow your business. Because where you work is a business, right? No matter how big or small it is, it's an organization trying to reach a goal, even if it's an institution like in my example when I worked for a state run university. There are a ton of experiences, opportunities and connections you can make in your current job right now to help grow your business. Whether you're doing it as a side hustle or something you're going to build in the future. I'm gonna give you real life examples from my own experience of how I was able to do this. This is not wasted time, this is actually some really leveraged time because you're getting paid and you can get a lot more out of it than just a paycheck. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good?

Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big.

It feels good to Geico. Many successful entrepreneurs and marketers like Seth Godin, Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings have recommended if you're an entrepreneur, want to be an entrepreneur that's going to start the next Twitter, the Snapchat, the next Canva, the next Atlassian. One of the best ways to learn how to do that is to work for Atlassian, to work for Canva, to work for those companies that you want to become or even compete with. Now, of course, a lot of these companies have a non compete clause when you work there, which means you can't start another business to compete with them or work for another business, but you'll still learn how to run an efficient business outside that market. And when you realize this, this is when you stop thinking like an employee and you start thinking like a entrepreneur, seeing this as your business school. For example, when I was a teacher and middle manager at the university I was working at, before I became a full time entrepreneur, the businesses I had on the side were very small. I was pretty much a solopreneur. I had a couple of assistants, but nowhere near the team that I knew I had to build. If I became a full time entrepreneur, one of the things you're going to have to learn how to do is run an efficient meeting and make sure that everybody stays on point. You stick to the agenda, you have algorithms. People know what they're expected of them, they know what their tasks are for the coming week. And this happens all the time at your job and you really just sit there and participate in your own role. But what if you had a little journal next to you and you wrote down, hey, how is this meeting being run? Who's taking minutes? Who's taking charge? Who's driving this meeting so that you can reproduce the same type of format when you run your own meetings in your own business. This is what I did. I was like, hey, I'm a noob. I don't really know how to run meetings. And I learned before the meeting. There's an agenda that gets built beforehand so everybody knows what to expect and what to bring. The person leading the meeting assigns somebody to take minutes, and then there's a rotation so there's actual documentation of what happened in the meeting so we can hold people accountable. Everybody has an action item. Everybody knows when the deadline for that action item is. The person leaving the meeting purposely calls upon everybody in the meeting to participate rather than just opening it up to the floor. And the dominant people always dominate the meeting. I took down all these notes. When you're at a job in an organization, there are opportunities everywhere to skill up and become what you need to become to be a better entrepreneur. For example, I wanted to know how to be able to create a website. I knew that this would be a handy skill when I had my own business full time. I already kind of knew this because I needed these skills in my side hustles. So now my organization was like, hey, we need somebody to be able to build our internal intranet site for this project that we're working on. And I was like, wow, that's an opportunity. I raised my hand. I said, I'd love to do that. I don't know how to do it yet, but would it be okay if I took a course? Would you pay for that course? And they're like, yeah, of course. You can go ahead and take a course to learn if you take full responsibility of building that site for the project. And I was like, yep. And I took this opportunity to learn for free how to create a website. Not only did I create the website, but I also documented the process of what it takes to create a website, all the things that I did, the mistakes I made, so that when I go ahead and reproduce it one day for some other project of my own, I have a standard operating procedure, and I add another skill set in my back. You have a wealth of knowledge in your own organization. For example, if you want to learn how to make better decisions, because you're going to make a lot of decisions as an entrepreneur. Email somebody who's in management, maybe even somebody high in management. Ask your company's VP of engineering or marketing or sales. Really admire what you do and all the decisions that you make every day. I want to learn more about how to make better decisions. Can we grab lunch sometimes? And you have a plethora of people in an organization to ask. So if one says no, another one would say yes. But in my experience, most people say yes to this request. One, no one dislikes lunch. Number two, it's a win win. They get to share what they know and feel like they're contributing. And by the way, this looks good. As one of those senior managers that don't only do a great job, but also train some of our juniors and they can pass on to their own managers. Hey, what did you do today? Well, I did this. I had lunch with this person in this apartment and we talked about decision making and I mentored this person for a bit. Kudos. You win because you learn a new skill. You learn about decision making and how to make decisions on a tight deadline or with a tight budget. And you can literally do this for every skill in entrepreneurship. You can go to the HR manager, say, hey, what are some of the red flags that you look for when you hire somebody new? And if somebody asks you, hey, why are you asking these questions? Why do you want to know? Tell them the truth. I want to broaden my skills. I want to learn more about how everybody does different things in an organization. And I'm interested free education. And you're learning it from the source, from people that actually do it every day and only do that skill. So they are specialists. Now, of course, many large organizations have a budget for professional development, like going to conferences or taking long extended courses. Like I mentioned, for example, when I was in education, my organization paid for my flight and hotel and tuition to go to a week long training called Tools for Teachers. And it was basically a teacher training training so I can go back and train other teachers now. Yes, this training was all about how to become a better teacher and a better classroom manager. And yes, I had to do this on my own time, not during work hours. That was just my own arrangement, meaning I did it during my summer break. But I learned a ton about how to put together a live event or a live training by just observing how Fred Jones, in this example, who ran Tools for teachers, ran this little event, this one week course. And I'm talking meticulous. Like, I would count how many people were in the room, and then come the breakfast break, I would count how many bagels were served for breakfast, how many tubs of cream cheese, how many bottles of apple juice and orange juice were on the table. I literally did this to cost out. How much would it cost to include free breakfast in an event like this? You might think that's a little bit nuts, but the point here is that it's free knowledge. Write it down. I might use it, am I not? I learned how to put together a schedule for a live event. I learned how to promote this live event because I looked at the merchant marketing materials, I looked at the products they sold in the back of the room, looked at their upsells. I understood that maybe one day I will run a live event and I will need to know these things. And even though the contents are different, the structure is the same. And in fact I did. We ran Webinar Ninja Live, which was our live event in San Diego. And a lot of the things I learned in that event, tools for teachers where I learned from my job, I was able to apply and use for my own event, Webinar Ninja Live when I was an entrepreneur. It's all about changing your mindset. When you go to these opportunities, these learning opportunities, these meetings, these lunches with your co workers, start seeing yourself as a learner, an entrepreneur in training, as somebody who can reverse engineer something that's in front of them so they can reproduce it later on in their own business.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's Expired.

Expired in 2012.

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. A couple more tips and a warning. Let's start with the warning. It's all good for you to take notes, to learn, to build your knowledge base and experience through your job. It is not okay for you to actually your business using company property. Meaning don't build your business website on your work computer during work hours in the workplace like the office. Don't even work on any business ideas or elements of your business idea, even the paper and pen when you're at work. Why? Because most companies, most organizations have a policy when you sign with them, when you work with them, that whatever work or ideas you produce at work on company property, using company property like a computer is company property. So all the things you produce is actually their property, their ip, their intellectual property, not yours, because you're using the resources. So it's okay to build skills and learn and become a better manager, organizer, meeting facilitator, a event organizer. Learning these skills is fine and documenting all these skills are fine, but nothing specific to actually your business. Do that on your own time, in your own place, on your own computer Another tip, and this is something that you just cannot be afraid to do. Okay. Because you'll be surprised by the response. See if you can get in contact with the founder of the company that you work for or somebody who is involved in the early days of of the business or the organization. For many of us, this is not actually that hard. This could mean just emailing that person's executive assistant or secretary and asking for the for their time, even if it's a 10 minute slot or even just an email correspondence. Why? Well, one of the fastest ways to learn how to be a great entrepreneur is to have a great entrepreneur as a mentor. And many great entrepreneurs or people that have achieved any kind of success are hungry to share what they've learned along the way. This is why I do this podcast. Because they know how hard it is and they want to help other people make their journey a little bit easier. Now, these people are incredibly busy, but what I found is that they'll try to make some time, even if it's just 30 minutes a month on a phone call or a zoom call or even just like I said, an email correspondence where just you flat out telling them, hey, I'm interested in being a successful founder entrepreneur one day and I want to learn from somebody who's already done it. Do you mind mentoring me? I have a bunch of questions. Maybe you can point me in the right direction. Recommend the books I should read. So many successful entrepreneurs, from Robert Iger to Tony Robbins to Jim Rohn have done exactly this. That wraps up today's lesson. I hope you found today's episode helpful, insightful. If you did leave us an Apple podcast rating and review or leave us a review on your favorite podcast, appreciate let us know what you think of the show. We always read every single review. Thanks so much in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. As long as you're growing, essentially you are helping your business, whether it's the one that you're running right now or in the future, grow as well. You are only going to grow as much as you grow, so try as much as possible while you're in a job. And this worked for me totally. Even though I was swamped in my job, I took full advantage of all the resources I have. So while you're in a job, try as much as possible to improve your value so that when you enter the marketplace as an entrepreneur, you're so incredibly valuable that you can add so much value into your products, your services and what you offer the world thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Q and A. Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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