MBA2117 Passion or Money? Which Comes First? + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Powerful business lessons delivered 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 today is Free Ride Friday where we give away a lifetime membership to one of our program. If you want to win a free ride, just go ahead and leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like today to see if you won and you are in the draw every single week until you win. So make sure you listen in every Friday. In today's lesson we discuss the topic Passion or money? Which one comes first? When you start your career in entrepreneurship, should you go after the thing you love the most, that gets you pumped, that gets you going every single day? Or should you go after the thing that you can be able to build a business that gets you the most revenue, the most cash? You get the bag first and then you go after what you're passionate about? I have some pretty unconventional opinions when it comes to this and it just comes out of my own experience and what I've learned from other highly Successful entrepreneurs that have built amazing businesses and incredible wealth. I'm going to show you some examples and some arguments that might get you thinking about where you should get started. What is the priority? Is it chasing the thing you love doing, or chasing something that's going to give you financial stability and options? If you choose to go after your passion later on, this one's a hot one. 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. There's a lot of content out there on this topic. People saying, go after what you love, go after what you are passionate about, because if you do so, you won't work a day of your life. Build your around your passions and you can't go wrong. I'm here to say that I actually don't advise that. I have a more practical point of view when it comes to building your business and then building your own professional wealth so that you can be able to move up, scale up, and become a successful entrepreneur and investor in yourself. I'll explain a little bit more what I mean by that later in the episode. But first I want to say that when you are starting a business, when you are getting into business for the first time, especially in the first few years, it's going to take some time for you to just be good at business itself. It's a skill in itself to be able to be a good business person, to be a good business owner, to be a good leader, to make the right decisions, all that kind of stuff. And many people argue that you should start your first business around what you love, because then it'll be easier and it'll motivate you and you'll like going to work. That's not necessarily true. There's a lot of people that would argue that it could actually ruin what you love because it gets really hard when you start trying to monetize your passions. Ask somebody who's a freelance musician or writer if they're not doing well financially. It's really disheartening in a lot of ways. Now, I'm not saying don't do something that you enjoy. What I'm saying is the priority, in my opinion is getting traction, making revenue, having a profitable business and building your wealth. Why? Because in business and in life, money opens doors. Money gives you opportunities. It gives you chances for you to have options. Let me give you an example. Billionaire Mark Cuban, right? He owns the Dallas Mavericks. All his life he has loved basketball and he bought an NBA team, right? But that was his original goal. He wanted to get into basketball. He loves sports, but he, he didn't build a business around basketball. When he got started, that was his end goal. He wanted to own a sports franchise. But to get there, he knows he needs money. It costs him hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the Dallas Mavericks. So instead he focused on his strengths. He focused on how much value I can add to the marketplace. Where can I add value the most. And for him it was sales and his knowledge of it. His first business, actually, when he was a young man, was selling garbage bags door to door. Garbage bags. What does that have to do with basketball and his passions? Nothing. But he understood that it can earn me money. It could be a profitable business. It's not sexy, but everybody needs garbage bags. He took the money he made there and then invested in other opportunities, created businesses and sold them, and did this over and over until he had enough money to buy the Dallas Mavericks and go after his passion. And Mark Cuban is one of countless examples of entrepreneurs that are wildly successful that started with very humble beginnings. Selling things that are very basic, that are not sexy, things that they're not crazy about, but they leverage their skills to be able to build the business around something. They can add value to the marketplace. The second reason why I think money comes first, meaning you should start thinking about how do I build a business that can add a lot of value to the market I can contribute to, that I can be able to earn a lot of profit from, is that money is important for business, period. In the beginning, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. You're going to miss a few things, you're going to miss opportunities. You're not going to do everything perfectly. But you know, what is the best cure for that? Having a surplus of revenue, right? Having enough money to kind of COVID those mistakes. You might over hire, you might overspend, but it's okay if you're making enough. And that's why money is so important. Especially in the beginning, is to build a business that's high revenue, that's making you cash, even if it's not scalable. Meaning let's say you're doing a service based business and you have to do all the work yourself. But hey, if you could charge a premium and make some good revenue, it's gonna allow you to have basically a war chest of revenue that you can use then to then build other businesses, other profitable ventures, other investments that are gonna lead you closer and closer to things that you enjoy. Think about the things you enjoy doing. Whether it's travel, whether it's camping, whether it's skiing or cinema, all the things you enjoy actually require money. Okay? Your things that you want to do require you to have time. I'm just talking about hobbies here, right? So imagine you're trying to build a hobby business. It's going to cost you even more money. So you need to make sure you have that money starting out so you're not stressed out about that. And that leads me to the next point. Lack of money, lack funds, lack of revenue that's coming in, cash flow is a huge stress and a huge problem for you as the leader. It's going to cause you to make bad decisions because you're under a lot of pressure. You need to alleviate as much stress as possible because business is as stressful as it is by leaving the financial stress. This is something that not a lot of people recognize. And do they focus on just trying to build the business around their passion or the things that they enjoy and they forget that they're going to have a lot of fun when they're making a lot of money, that it's going to give them more time and more flexibility and less stress and allow them to think more creatively when they don't have the burden of bills coming in they don't know how to pay for. In my opinion, when you're building your first business or two or three, your goal should be maximizing your revenue, making as much money as possible. And you do that by looking at your skill set and your experiences and seeing how you can turn those experiences into value and offer it for a premium. Let me give you two scenarios. Here's scenario number one. You're only working on things you're passionate about, the things you absolutely love. This narrows your opportunities and therefore it's going to be slower and harder for you to be able to maximize your revenue. I'm just speaking out of experience here. And you may eventually get to the point where you are Financially successful, but it could take a decade or two, and honestly, it could never happen. Now, scenario number two is, how about we focus on where we can add the most value? Now remember, when you're good at something, when you could add value, that's kind of fun, too. It's not like you hate it. And you look at how you can turn that into a business model that can be profitable because you're trying to maximize revenue and make enough money for you to be comfortable in your business and take those dividends and reinvest, let's say your business outgoing gangbusters. But you're doing like 50% growth year over year. And after three years, you made so much money, they have a little nest egg where you can start your passion project with plenty of cash for you to be able to use the skills you learned from the first business, where you cut your teeth learning business and do things right, and you don't squander your passion project opportunity. You got to learn the skills, you got to build a profitable business that's making you money, that's a cash cow for you. And then you go ahead and three years later have a product or a business around your passion. It's a cheat code and it's a way for you to get funding on something that works. By the way. Let's say you build a business that's profitable, that's bringing in revenue. Three years later, you want to start a new business and you have all these great numbers to show that you know how to run a business and you know how to make a profit and your business is growing tremendously and you want to get investment. Those investors out there, they're going to love you. They're going to be like throwing money at you because you've proven you know how to run a business successfully and make money. You could start apart business with investors around your passion. So much easier to get yeses when you have the data to prove that you can pull it off.

We've all been there. You hold on to 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 to wrap up today's lesson. What I'm trying to convey to you is that money actually has a lot of value in the marketplace and your professional career. It's going to make things a whole lot easier for you to build the business of your dreams when you have a few things. One is the cash. Number two, the experience and the learnings that you have learned through building other businesses that are higher value. Three, the audience that you've built around your other businesses. Four, the reputation that you have now as a credible business owner so you can get investment if you wanted to. Five, the network you've built along the way as you built those other businesses that are high wealth. You get the point. But I know there might be a question in your head right now saying, but Omar, can I build a high revenue, highly successful, highly wealthy business around my passion? And here's my answer. In business, you need to prioritize and you need to optimize. And what I mean by that is that when you build a business, you have to optimize for a singular goal.

Why?

Well, let me give you an example. Mark Zuckerberg. When they started Facebook, all they did is optimize for growth. All they cared about is growing and getting new people on the platform. When you have your business, you need to have a singular goal. You have to optimize for something. So if you say this is your passion and that's a passion business, you need to then say, I'm optimizing to make sure my passion, my love for this thing is number one priority. You can't have more than one number one priority. Right? You only have one priority versus saying my number one goal is to be the most profitable business, high value business I possibly can, using my skills that has a different optimization. You're going to make different decisions, you're going to make different moves and choices to build that kind of business. And what I'm saying to you is that when you build your businesses in the beginning, your first or second or third business, and you optimize for that, it leverages a lot of opportunities, allows you to have some cash on hand so that when you do choose to have a passion business that you absolutely love, just like Mark Cuban with the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, you don't have to sacrifice your passion. He doesn't have to sacrifice. His dream is to own an NBA basketball team because he had enough cash. He didn't say, well, I don't have enough money. So now I guess I'll just, just buy, you know, I don't know, an Australian National Basketball League team instead. No, he didn't compromise his passion because his passion was priority number one. And he was able to do everything he wanted in that passion project because he had the revenue, he had the connections, he had the network, he had the experience. You get the point. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now. By hitting subscribe, you get access to over 2,000 episodes in our archives and you get our next episodes automatically. So go ahead and hit subscribe or follow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you're at. Now it's Free Ride Friday. We gotta give away a lifetime membership to easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course over at easycourse co. It retails for $500, but today somebody's gonna win it for free. If you wanna win a free ride, just go ahead and leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday just like right now to see if you won't. And the winner is. Lindsey Cabrera. Lindsey Caberra from Canada says informative and educational, five stars. A well produced podcast with informative and educational tips. I like Omar's personality as a host. Episodes are not too lengthy or long. Great for me. Well, thank you Lindsey for that great review. Your mission is to email me over at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with a lifetime membership to Ezcourse. Hey, if you want to win a free ride just like Lindsay did, go ahead and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you in advance for showing us love and being part of our community. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I'm just at the point in my career where I really don't care if people disagree with me too much. It's okay, they can disagree. But in my experience, money really matters, okay? It opens a lot of doors, it helps you do a lot of things. And not only that, your experience and your skills you build along the way are super helpful when you need the most. So I hope that my maybe not so popular, controversial views on this topic were helpful in some way. But I'm here to tell you that in my experience, if you build it, they will come do your do what you love and everything will follow. That's just not true, okay? For the most part, it's not true. It takes money to build. It takes money to grow. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Of.

We've all been there. You hold on to 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.