Avoid The Mistakes Entrepreneurs Commonly Make—What You Need To Know To Move Forward

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the Land Geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and today I'd like to introduce my guest because you probably know him from Best Passive Income Model. But let's not even talk about John Nastor yet because we have to properly introduce my co host, Scott Todd from Scott Todd landmodo.com and John Astor. If you're not automating your Craigslist postings, there's a site you need to go to. It's called posting domination.com TheLand Geek how are you, Scott?

Mark.

I'm doing well, how are you?

I'm great. I'm ready to Hack the entrepreneur John Nastor.

I see what you did.

I feel like, like, you know, like I've been hacking away and looking for a real way to hack away. So I'm looking forward to today's podcast.

Yeah, I mean, I almost want to just jump into John's brain and just massage it and just extract as much entrepreneurial wisdom as I can in the time allotted. John Astor, the host of Hack the Entrepreneur. How are you?

I'm absolutely excellent. How are you doing?

I'm great, I'm great. Do you want to just tell our art of passive income out listeners exactly what you do?

Yeah, for sure. I do several things, but the thing I'm known for now is Hack the Entrepreneur. So two years ago I was just over two years ago now, I was kind of bored out of my mind. I was one of those, like created some software businesses, then got bored of like traveling and sitting on a beach. You know, it doesn't seem like you would get bored of it, but I did get bored of it. So I was told by some people smarter than me, most people are, that I should start a podcast, kind of get out there, meet some people, talk to some smart people. It'll be fun. So I decided, okay, I've never interviewed anybody, But I'll do 30 episodes. It'll be fun, it'll be cool. And then they launched it and it kind of spiraled out of control and became sort of a full time business. And so, yeah, I've been doing 200, I think 77 episodes I think came out yesterday. So that's just over two years. And yeah, I'm part of Copyblogger Media's Rainmaker FM network. I also co host a show over there with them and co host a course with them, but basically I just talk into a microphone like 30 hours a week it seems for a living. So that's what I do. Wow.

Wow. That's crazy.

Less. But I just fascinated that I get to do so much of it. It's amazing.

No, I mean, I love interviewing and talking to these, you know, successful, accomplished people from all walks of life. It's, you know, it's a very selfish endeavor for me. I mean, how do you feel about it?

Yeah, it is. And it's funny because I usually say that I started just for selfish reasons. It was going to be literally to kind of get me off the beach and to talk to 30 people that I could. I came up with the list, like, instantly I knew the people I wanted to talk to. I've been following their businesses for a long time, so I knew, and I was like, if I can just talk to them, People probably won't just talk to me if I just email them.

So.

So it's like, hey, I'm recording a podcast, so let's do it. So I could pick their brain. And then it turned into its own business. But I just got off a call with Grant Cardone, which was like. I mean, he was just like, so just Grant Cardone. And it was an amazing interview. It was super fun. But I mean, that's like, to get to talk to. That is so cool. And like, to get to do that, that's. To me, that's. It is really, really awesome.

Yeah, that, you know, that guy has so much energy. It's. It's kind of nutty, actually. It is.

It made me feel, maybe feel definitely lacking of energy, but it was. It was a really fun conversation. And to get to do that, like, I get to do that four times today. That's pretty awesome. Like, Tuesday is my interview day. The day I do interviews. So it's fun, man. It's fun.

Well, that's awesome. That's awesome. So, well, let's get into it. Let's hack some entrepreneurs. John, can we?

Yeah, let's do it.

All right, so, Scott, Todd, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, right, what do you think most entrepreneurs struggle with?

I think that it's really the self confidence to go. Right? Like, I think it's the self confidence break free of their 9 to 5. You know, for years and years and years, most people have had a job, they've had this steady Eddy money coming in the door, and the thought of, you know, now I'm going to venture out on my own. They want it, a lot of people want it. But then they don't necessarily mentally prepare for, okay, now I'm going to go get it. You know, like I'm going to have to be on my own, I'm going to have to venture out on my own. And it's a scary place out there. It's scary. I think that self confidence holds a lot of people back. You start to second guess yourself. And I bet if I ask, you know, most people this question, you know, who have been successful is, you know, were you scared when you stepped out? I think that most people would say, hell yeah. You know, it's, it's crazy because if you work at it diligently and you just don't make bad decisions and you do something that is, is proven, then you can be successful many different ways.

John Astor, what do you think holds people back?

I wanted to say self confidence, but took it on me. I'm going to say lack of the indecision, let's put it that way. So I think if you fail to have that ability to make decisions quickly throughout your day and throughout your life, you are incapable of being an entrepreneur and creating things because most of it is just making decisions quickly with any information you have at the time and just going with it, knowing whether it works or not. You can iterate, move, change your mind, go on to the next thing. But I see people struggle with the most basic decisions all the time. And it's like, well man, you should, you should really just keep your job because let the boss make all the decisions because you can't like you struggle with what coffee to order in the morning. And I think it's that just knowing how to just split, split, split second, make decisions and continue on and take.

The feedback that's, you know, that's really interesting. But if we reverse it, what do you think the entrepreneurs you've interviewed, John, what traits do they have in common that makes them successful?

I'm going to say it is that confidence. And so the confidence, it's not always just self confidence in a sense because lots of us lack sort of self confidence as an overarching sort of like we don't consider ourselves extroverts sometimes and all these things that people see as self confidence, but it's the ability to make a decision of what you're going to do today or this morning or this afternoon or tonight, confidently act on it. So 277 people I've interviewed now I asked the exact same first question to every single one of them. Not one person has said the same thing that is their one thing of why they're successful. But every single person has answered it confidently, even Though they contradict. I'll interview four people today and they'll all contradict each other. What the best thing is. Like, I'm terrible at details, I'm amazing at details, all these things. But they do it with confidence. They execute with that confidence to know that whatever it is they're doing right now is the right thing for them and their business today. And there's no other way that they could do it. And I think that you can take all the hacks, you can take all the tricks, you can take all that stuff from anybody else you want, but if you don't just internalize and be like, all right, this is right for me today, here I go, you'll just. There, you'll never do anything.

I think that John hit on a good point mark. And that's the fact that you've got to execute, right? Like you can, you can build up all the self confidence that you want. I mean, you can go and you can go through courses and be like, oh yeah, this one thing is holding me back. But unless you have the self confidence in yourself to execute and make decisions and keep moving the ball forward down the field, then you're never gonna, you're never gonna move forward. You know, like, you have to not only believe in yourself, make, make good decisions, but you have to execute with discipline. Every single day. Every day you've got to get up and move that ball down the field.

So John, when we talk about executing with discipline, right, which I agree with Scott 100%, and this is one of the reasons, if not the reason why we are shelving the investors toolkit and going strictly to a straight coaching program is because if left to our own devices, I don't think people will execute. We're just too busy. But if you go into a program where we watch you execute and you have to execute, you execute, right? Which is why, you know, the information products have like a 3% success rate compared to coaching, which has like a 97% success rate. So John, what things, what tactics do you see the entrepreneurs doing that help them step back, prioritize their day, not get lost in the weeds and actually focus and execute just in time.

Learning to me is the thing, right? So you're talking about things, people in courses, right? So somebody gets a course and what do they do? They skip through the whole thing right now, even though they're at step one. And to me it's just in time learning. Like, there's so many people that I talk to that are worried about like, like, how could I make possibly take my business, like, what will happen when we go public. It's like, dude, you haven't even, like, started your business yet. You're worried about things that are so far down the line and it's stopping you just in time. Learning, to me, is the execution of only needing to know what I need to do right now, what's my next step? And I don't need to learn what I need to do next week. I don't need to learn what I need to do next month. I need to learn what I need to do right now, and then I'll worry about the next thing next. I think that's why coaching works so well, because the coach will just slap the person, be like, dude, why are you worrying about six months from now? You're not going to get to six months from now if you don't execute on today. And here's what you have to do. Do it, okay? Because everybody wants to jump ahead. We all want the trick. We all want the tactic that's going to take us and make us not have to put in the work for the next six months. And there aren't any. The trick is you have to put in that work to get there. Like, hey, John, how do you get, like, a podcast that, like, pays you to just podcast for a living? It's like, well, you do it for two years and you talk to hundreds of people and you just work your ass off. That's how you do it. There's no trick to it. And I didn't even know how to interview somebody. But if I would have stopped, like, in that July, being like, well, I just want to be like, where I am now. But it's like, I've never, like, if I was worrying about the wrong things, all I was like, I need to figure out how to ask questions that don't sound really stupid. I need to, like, figure out how to create artwork or at least go on fiverr and find somebody who can create artwork for a show. That's all I was worried about. I wasn't worried about three months or six months or nine months down the road. That's why coaching works. But you can do this yourself if you just worry about just in time, literally, what do I need to do today and execute on today. And if you have to learn what that is, then learn what that is. But don't worry about what you have to do next week, because you're not even ever going to get there if you don't worry about today.

Scott Todd, I think John Astor is the first person that I've ever interviewed in all these years from the Land Geek podcast, the best passive income model podcast, the art of passive income model podcast that's used the phrase just in time learning. Have you heard this before?

No, I haven't. But I'll tell you, like, I'm. I'm smiling because I think that that's where. Like, when I. When I think about people who are successful, that's what happens is they just start taking action. They do something today, and they don't try to build the whole. Learn the whole thing. Right. Right now, like, oh, I got to know all of the answers. I got to see all of the stairs. Stairs. You know, Martin Luther King has the famous quote that says, you know, just make the first step and the rest of staircase will appear. Right. Just keep making steps and you'll start to see the whole thing. And, you know, I think John's right. I mean, you know, if you're worrying about, well, what's. What's going to happen six months from now, or how do I do this thing? Or, man, I need to get my LLC set up before I do anything else. I mean, that's not.

That's.

That's the wrong priorities. You know, like, it's. You're playing business, you're not in business.

Yeah. John, how often do you see people struggling because they're playing in business and not getting to the actual hard work, the essence of what their real business is like? In our business, we have two things that really move the needle. It's mailing and marketing. That's it. That's really it. What do you see as far as the other entrepreneurs that you've hacked?

Yeah, that's. Everyone's looking for sort of the next thing, right. So anytime I've consulted someone or worked with them, and it's always like, all right, John, I want to. Like, I'm at X and I want to go to X squared, right? I want to just double everything that I do. It's like, so what can we do next? Just tell me what the thing is. And like, all right, what's the one thing you do right now that gives you the absolute biggest return? And they'll be like, oh, that's easy.

That's this.

Like, well, let's do more of that. Let's do twice as much of that, and you will double your revenue. There you go. And it's like, but I want to do new stuff. It's like, but you found out what works. Just do more of it. If it's mailing and marketing, do more mailing. You'll increase your revenue. Why do you want this new thing that probably won't work, but people, they want to look for this crazy outside. Like, what is possibly this new thing? It's like, just do more mailings. Triple your mailings. Keep your conversion rate the same. You'll triple your revenue. Boom. That's wow. And it's like, it's not like you've maxed out your potential source of, like, customers at this point. Just send more mail if that's what works for you. And that seems to be like, the biggest thing for people is that they don't want to just double and triple down on what they do and do it well. Just do more of it. Don't worry about doing other things. Just do more of that.

I also. I also. I'm laughing because I also think that another thing that I see a lot is there's like, there's every. There's. In every aspect of life, there's things that you love to do and there's things that you hate to do. You know, like, even. Even in a job, you know, there's things that you're going to like, and there's things that you're going to dislike. And what I see is, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs are quick to say, well, I don't like that part of my business, so I'm going to, like, outsource it immediately. But it might be something that's very, very core to their business. You know, like, it's like they don't like it, they feel uncomfortable doing it, so they want to outsource it, but yet it's the number one thing, or it's one of the top five things that they should be doing. But because they don't like it, they want to outsource it. And I think that that's a problem.

John, how often do you see that happening?

That happens a ton. That happens a ton, right? We think that because we're now the quote, unquote boss that we only have to do things that we think are fun. And it's like, but that's not how business works. Businesses, like, somebody has to know and have their hands into the numbers really, really deep. Yeah, but I'm not a numbers guy. Well, then you should go work for somebod is right. But if you're not willing to step up and we get so obsessed with, like, the only do what you're good at, that's it. It's like, really? And ignore everything else in business. So you should, because you were not, quote unquote, a numbers guy, you should never, like, sit down with your accountant and be like, I need to know how this works. I need to know these balance sheets work. Because you need to know that as an entrepreneur who's going to go and build big, cool things. So it's cool to know, like, what you're good at and what you're not good at. But you should also take the time to make what you're not good at and get better at it. Because there are core aspects of a business that you need to know as the person in charge. Because you want to be an entrepreneur, you are in charge, and it's. It's required that you know these things. But if you don't want to do that, that's totally cool. You can make a ton of money working for somebody else. Maybe you should go do that. We don't. We're not all cut out to be entrepreneurs. That's totally cool. Right now in 2016, it seems like the whole thing around it is that everybody should be an entrepreneur. We've all got it within us. It's like, no, we don't all got it within us. That's just not how it works. That's terrible English, but you know what I mean? But it's like, there's more to it. And if you just want to do that aspect that you're really good, like, I'm a really good, like, direct marketer for this company, so I'm going to go do direct marketing for myself. It's like, well, that's. You should be a consultant maybe, and work within other companies as a consultant, but don't try and start your own business because you're going to be terrible at a ton of other things. You have no idea how to do customer support. You have no idea how to create products. You have no idea how to. You know what I mean? It's so fundamental, and I think we're obsessed sometimes with everybody becoming an entrepreneur. We can't all become entrepreneurs because none of us could build big businesses because none of us would have employees if we were all entrepreneurs. It's okay to work for some people sometimes and to, like, grow yourself and learn other aspects of businesses and then maybe make that step into the next realm of entrepreneurship. So definitely people fail because they refuse to get good at things that they suck at.

Yeah. I mean, I think for a lot of people, it's even just identifying, okay, these are the key components that maybe I'm not Strong at it. But I can't. I can't outsource them. Like, I talked to a coaching client the other day, and they were getting lost in technology, and I'm like, well, this doesn't really move the needle in our business. You don't need to know how to. How to upload things into Wistia if that's not something that, you know, is, you know, a core piece of your business. You can go on upwork, and for $2 an hour, you can hire a general tech person to bridge that gap. But, like, what you're saying, John, like, you can't outsource knowing your numbers. Like, you've got to dig in and figure it out. And if you're not a numbers person, then, you know, spend more time learning numbers. There's books out there, there's courses. Maybe you spend a couple hours, you know, a month with your CPA or your bookkeeper, and they explain it to you and how it all works. You go on upwork. You have somebody go through cash flow analysis with you and create a spreadsheet like you figured out. Like, you dig deep, like, you don't put your head in the sand, is basically saying, right, yes, exactly.

And I'm not telling you that you should be like, the one gathering up all the receipts and putting them into spreadsheets and doing all that. You should outsource things so you can leverage your time and scale. Of course, but don't be so dependent on other experts that you have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to, literally the cash aspect of your business that is so fundamentally important. You might not need to know how to upload to Wistia because that probably doesn't move the needle. You're exactly right. But you do need to know the fundamentals, Right? You need to know sort of, I think, how customer acquisition works in your business. You need to know how the cash flow is sort of running in your business. You need to have a sort of a projection of where you want to go with your business. Those kind of things need to be run by you. You can't just outsource that stuff. So you do just need to suck it up and learn.

Yeah, I love that. And Scott, you know what's interesting is he brought up fundamentals, and I'd be curious about you, like, how often do you go back and look at your business and just like, okay, how well am I doing the fundamentals of this business?

Yeah, so, you know, I look every, like, every day. As you said, the fundamentals here are mailing and marketing, right? So every day I need to mail X number of offers. And if I'm not gonna do it every day, then I'll do it once a week because I'm more batching right now. But when I started was every day. Every day I visited the mailbox. I became intimate with that mailbox. You know, dropping in 20 offers a day. It was a sense of pride and accomplishments, almost like my workout. And even today, I go back and I look at, okay, what are. How many ads have we ran and how many ads that we run yesterday and are they sticking? You know, what's my stick rate of the ads on craigslist? Thanks to postingdomination.com thelamgeek but I'm looking at those basics, mailing and marketing, every single day. And I know, like, that's what's gonna move the needle. It's not, you know, it's. I can't. I can't. I can't make a seller accept my offer, and I can't make a buyer call me. But what I can do is I can put ads out there and I can mail. It's those controllables that I focus on.

John, as far as your fundamentals, how often do you go back and like, okay, let's look at the fundamentals of this business, which, you know, if you're running a big podcast like you, there's really a few fundamentals. It's creating good content, it's getting it out there, and then it's. It's finding advertisers. Correct?

Yes. Yes. And so advertisers I've taken back control of because I think felt like I lost control and I had outsourced it too quickly. The numbers themselves. It's funny, I'm like, talking about somebody learning the fundamentals of their numbers, because I didn't. I didn't for a long time. Every business I've been in up till now, I've had smart partners who were really good with the numbers, and I was the marketing and product side of it. And I know that stuff. And so, like I said, hack the entrepreneur wasn't supposed to be a business. It was just a selfish endeavor that turned into a profitable business. And so I hired an accountant who's also like an accounting coach for me, and we sit down once a month, and we literally started at the basics of the numbers we need to go over. And I read a brilliant book that was told to me by him, which is called Simple Straight Talk, Big Profits, I believe by Greg Crabtree. Brilliant, brilliant book of really dissecting business numbers into like a really manageable way to figure it out. And so now we do, we go back quarterly and then going ahead, we go every month where I have sort of like a lesson and a sit down session where it's like learning another big chunk of the numbers. Because this is something that I've learned through talking to so many people and now not having partners that this is fundamental to my growth and of where I want to go.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. So we're kind of at that, that point now in the podcast. This has kind of gone fast.

Scott Todd this one's fast.

I love it.

Really, really fast. So John, you know how this goes, right? We're going to ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something actionable where you can improve the art of passive income model listeners, lives and businesses. What do you got?

Yeah, it's a book. It's a book that everybody needs to read called what Got yout Here Won't get yout There. He analyzed and worked with, consulted with hundreds and hundreds of CEOs and high level performers through his whole career. I believe he works at Harvard. And then he wrote this book. And it's a brilliant to me mindset shift of where we think because it's really something that I'm at Hack the Entrepreneur, which is like I wanted to just interview these people, build sort of an audience and I wanted to get to where I am, which actually I didn't want to get this far. But I mean, I have like hundreds of thousands of people that listen to me every single month. And I was always thinking that I need to just do more of this, right? And like we said, like double down on what you're doing because that will get you to that double stage. But then when you want to get there, which is somewhere completely different sort of to the next playing field beside you, you have to change who you are, you have to change how you think, you have to change how you act. So what got you to here is awesome. And push that as far as you can, but it's not going to get you to there. It's literally coming out of your Little League place that you might be like, I can hit home runs every single time in this Little league field, but now it's time to move into the big leagues. And it's that whole shift and it's brilliant, brilliant book.

I love that. Scott Todd have you read that book?

I actually did read that book in Fact, I read that book when I had my corporate job and.

I got.

Promoted from director to senior director. And I realized, okay, what got me to a director position or even a manager position isn't going to get me above that. And it really is. It really is a mindset shift because, you know, you're there, whether you're an individual contributor or a manager. The role changes as you become, you know, an executive. And, you know, you've got to shift your mindset in the way that you approach people, the way you approach problems. And it was a really good book.

Yeah, I've read another one of his books just recently about change. Marshall Goldsmith. And when I say ready, when I say read, I didn't really read it. I listened to it on Audible. John, are you an Audible guy?

No, I'm a reader. I read.

Okay. It's triggers. It was Triggers.

I read Triggers.

Yeah.

Mark, I would have thought that you just had people read to you, you know.

Well, I mean, Scott, technically, I do have people reading to me.

I mean, technically, yeah, Audible. But I mean, I thought you would have someone there in your office, like, reading the book.

Highlighting aspects for you.

You know, it's not a bad. It's not a bad model. Yeah, the Uber Reading On Demand readers, they come in, you're doing work, they're reading to you, they've got voices. I don't know.

Yeah.

You know, but kind of getting back to what John said, like, I can't outsource everything.

No, you can't.

Like, sometimes I have to do my own reading.

Right.

You know, but, you know, it's funny, John, is I do outsource a lot of webinars. I'll have people go on and just, you know, give me the best takeaways on webinars and then give me an outline.

Yeah, well, I mean, because you might need to know that right now, which is just in time learning. Right? Which brings us back to it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Scott. Todd, what's your tip of the week?

Okay, well, since. Since I'm sure that all of our audience is on the iPhone, like, all of them. Because frankly, if you're dealing with an Android, even though the new one does look good, Android, you're not in our audience, I don't think. But for my tip of the week, I am going to use. Let me give you the website. It's. It's actually called. What is it called here? It's called Instant Translate for imessage. Because, you know, in imessage now, you get. You can have apps for Imessage. And you can actually download this in the app store and it's called Instant Translate for iPhone. And essentially while you're in the text messaging imessage, you can actually start texting in different languages for people. So for those of you that, that you know are texting with Spanish buyers or sellers, bam, you don't need a translator. Just start messaging them from the, from your iPhone. But they have to have an iPhone too.

Okay, so Scott, I have instant message. I downloaded this. And when I go to my text, I don't see how to do that. This is automatically. Do it just by. Just put Ola.

It's in one of the. It's in the. The apps. It's me a little bit to find it, but it's. It's there in the, like in the apps, in the imessage.

Okay, I have to play with it with you offline. All right, so my tip of the week is learn more by subscribing. And it also helps if you rate them too, just like our podcast. If you subscribe to Hack the Entrepreneur with John Nastor, that is definitely going to be my tip of the week. And John, just real quickly, besides myself, obviously, top three entrepreneur interviews you've had on Hack the Entrepreneur. Who are they?

Top three I've had, I gotta say Seth Godin, I have to say Dame Stephanie Shirley, absolutely brilliant woman in her 80s from the UK. And missing. Dan Martell, Canadian entrepreneur, like me, brilliant, brilliant guy. And they're actually all. If you go to hacktheontrepreneur.com then you'll see the top 10 listed at the top. And they're all part of my top 10 series.

I love it. I love it. Before we end, I do want to ask one more question. John, do you ever read that book so Good They Can't Ignore youe by Cal Newport?

No, on my Kindle though, because I'm thinking about it and it's at 0% still. So I downloaded it, but I haven't read it.

Yeah, because it kind of gets to the essence of what we were talking about from a general standpoint, which is you don't have to love what you do. And following your passion doesn't really translate well into business. You won't love it when you first start, but if you just keep working at it and working at it, working at it and embrace the suck, you'll get good enough to the point where like, okay, you can't be ignored anymore. I love it.

I will definitely start reading that book.

So that's Also, another tip of the week. All right, so I want to thank all the listeners. Please subscribe, rate, and review the Art of Passive Income Model Podcast. Do so. We're going to get you the Passive Income launch kit for free. Also, if you're not automating your Craigslist listings, I don't know why you're not. Go to hostingdomination.com thelandgeek and, you know, give us some love. Go to thelandgeek.com landmoto.com frontierpropertiesusa.com and check us out. And of course, I want to thank John Nastor, hack the entrepreneur. John, are we good?

We're excellent. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Mark.

Scott, are we good?

We are golden.

And anything else we should plug?

No, I think that's enough today, John.

Is it too much plugging on the podcast?

No, man, you're doing good.

You're doing okay.

I'm taking notes.

All right, so I need. So I will tell you that today's podcast has been sponsored by Loan Geek. Learn more @Loangeek IO. If you'd like to get into the beta program, just email supporthelandgeek.com subject line, Loan Geek. All right, I want to thank everybody, and we'll see everybody next time.