SNM205: Start A Biz While Working Full Time

205-StartABizWhileWorkingFullTime [00:00:00] Want to start a business while working full time? Find out how on today's episode! Today's episode is brought to you by ConvertKit. Your email list is your greatest asset. Put your business in the only hands that I trust at servenomaster.com/convertkit. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? [00:00:18] If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now, then you've come to the right place.

Welcome to serve no master podcast, where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical Island in the South Pacific by bestselling author, Jonathan Green. [00:00:39] Now, here's your host. It's a beautiful afternoon. Here on my Island and I'm in the garden. Well, actually I'm upstairs so I can have a little bit of a wider view and the birds are singing. Unfortunately, half those birds are roosters.

One of the neighbors is burning leaves and all the neighborhood kids are making loads and loads of noise, but I just couldn't wait to spend some time with you guys. [00:01:00] I'm going to do my best to remove all that background noise and let you in on a little secret, I try to resay anything that has allowed roost or a kid shouting in the background.

So if you ever want, wonder why every once in a while I say the same thing twice as it slips through past my editor, [00:01:16] now, you know the secret. I do my best to give you guys a clean recording but, golly... it seemed quiet until I turned on the microphone. Suddenly it seems so loud. Today we're going to talk about starting a business while working full time. And this is the situation most people are in.

I know that there are plenty of people that are living with their parents or they're still in college [00:01:35] they would start a side business, but that's not who I'm talking to. If you're out there, you're like me. You're an adult, you got responsibilities, you've got bills to pay. You can't just take off six months or a year to find yourself or start a business. You got to keep the money flowing because you need to eat, [00:01:49] you got to pay rent or your mortgage.

Maybe you got some kids on the scene. You have responsibilities and that's exactly where I'm at. What I'm going to share with you is a powerful process that's going to set you on the road to being your own boss. And this is part four of my "be your own boss" series. [00:02:04] The one to put you in the driver's seat, the secret begins with a declaration.

Whether you say it out loud or say it to your spouse or friend, or you write it on a big poster, you have to make a statement that I am going to do this, I'm all in now. This is how most transformation has to begin in any area of your life. [00:02:21] The first time I made a dramatic change in my life when I was 17, I realized I had no friends. High school was tough for me.

I couldn't figure out where I belonged; I couldn't find my place in the world and when I was 17, I realized I didn't have any friends and I could do something about it. And I told this story before but if you haven't heard it, I found someone and I studied him. [00:02:39] I found him a person who was popular and nice and I just studied it. I reverse engineered how he treated people and that's it. I became massively popular from one simple process.

It came from that moment where I said, I don't know how to make friends. I had to look in the mirror and say, I'm a bad friend, I don't understand friendship, [00:02:55] I don't know how to make friends, I don't know how to keep friends and the people in my social circle don't really like me. Painful, but true. That declaration is often painful, but not always. In this case, your declaration is I'm not happy with my full time job.

I don't want to do this forever, I'm not getting treated the way I want to be treated, [00:03:10] I don't have control of my destiny that I want to have control of. In our next episode we're going to talk about the benefits of being your own boss, but you already know what they are. You already know it's something you want, or you wouldn't be listening to this episode. And so you have to make a statement that this is my moment. [00:03:23] I'm going to start now.

If we don't have a starting point, we'll never hit an end point. You may have listened to over 190 of my previous podcast episodes, read hundreds of blog posts, read dozens of my books, but taking no action because you're waiting for that starting moment. Don't do that.

Make now your moment, you can make a declaration right now, the louder your declaration, the more likely you are to stay the course, and this can be sharing it in a Facebook group, [00:03:48] this can be telling someone in your personal life...don't tell anyone at work. Don't need to do it there, right? But you just want to say it out loud or write it down so that it becomes a moment that you can remember.

So you go, this is the moment where I'm starting in it and it activates something in our brain [00:04:02] that says the race has started. It's like hearing that starter gun, and it means that you'll start taking this seriously or more seriously than you have. It's very, very different practice and real. When I was younger I was in a few plays, I was very artistic. I like painting, pastels, coloring books, acting.

I always thought that that's the path I would go down. [00:04:22] The one thing I learned is that when you do a dress rehearsal, it's nothing like the real thing. When there's an audience in the room, you act different, even though the words are the same, the patterns and the clothes are the same, dress rehearsal it's not the same. When you turn on the cameras, when you turn all those real lights, everything's different.

There's some more on the line [00:04:38] and we want to activate that part of your brain. Second step in this process, once you've made that declaration is to clear the runway. Your runway is how much time and treasure you have available to invest in your business. And there's two ways to measure this. This can be an absolute, you can say I just got fired and I got a severance package for my work, [00:04:57] so I have enough money and time to do this for six months.

That's a firm runway and that's pretty standard. I get those emails sometimes from people who see the opportunity to go, okay, I lost my job, I don't need to be scared, I don't want to go on vacation.

Instead, I can use this as an opportunity to build something great. [00:05:13] But if you're working full time or situation is far more likely measured in time and treasure per week, and it can be something small, you might have an hour per day, or four hours per week and a hundred dollars per week. This is really another way of building a budget.

We can call this a time budget and a money budget, but I like to call it runway, [00:05:31] cause I like to that my own terms. So we're creating a budget. For every project, you go: okay, 4 hours available this week and $100 dollars. How am I going to invest them in my business as wisely as possible?

Imagine that there's a task that takes you 4 hours, or you could pay someone else $20 to do it based on what you have available. [00:05:49] You should invest money rather than time in that particular task. And that's how we're going to assess. The more you implement that thinking, the more you strategically deploy your resources, the faster you'll build that business and be your own boss while you're still working your full time job.

This process doesn't go away. [00:06:06] I've talked about this in some previous episodes about how I do that within my business, and it's exactly the same process every single week. The only difference is that my board is a little bit more complicated.

Every single week I have to deploy my team and I look at how I'm spending their time, and that means how I'm deploying financial resources as well. [00:06:25] Whenever we're paying for outside resources, how much money are we gonna spend on paid advertising this week? How much are we gonna spend in content this week?

How much are you spending on research and video creation and production and software, all of these other tools and the sooner you start treating your business like a business and budgeting your time and your resources, the better. [00:06:42] I have to budget my time and 10 other people every single week. And this is what I spend most of my time talking to my team leaders about, what's the most efficient way to deploy these resources?

And if you wait until you have a team, well, then it's going to be a lot harder. The longer you wait to learn this process, the harder it will be to learn it. [00:06:57] That's a mistake that I learned the hard way. I want to teach you guys how to be your own boss right out the gate. You can create more runway once you realize the value.

An example, if you're anything like me when I was in my twenties and early thirties, you like to go out. I remember when I went to college, most of my friends didn't. [00:07:15] They matured faster than me because they had to get jobs and start spending money wisely. They had to allocate for rent, for entertainment and everything in between. And most people say most of my friends at the time were like we need a massive entertainment budget.

He was terrible so you want to save as much money as you can to do things that make you feel good [00:07:34] so that the work you do that you hate you can overcome. If you were like me and you've heard that and that's what I did. I used to go out all the time and what can happen is you're now spending time and money at the same time. If you reallocate that time and say, okay, you know what?

Instead of going to the bar four nights a week, I'm going to go three nights a week, [00:07:50] now you have an extra three hours and whatever you would have spent at the bar that night, you have a double win. So we're looking for areas where you can improve. Another place is to really look at how you spend time after work. There are certain things that we do without realizing it.

One of the reasons I don't like that television is that there's no beginning and there's no end. [00:08:07] Even in high school, I got into Netflix more than 20 years ago because a movie, even though it's longer than a television show, it ends and yet to take the DVD out and put a new one in.

Now Netflix is like an app so it's just as bad as television, but when you're watching a movie you know before you started how long are you gonna spend watching that movie [00:08:25] they tell you the run time right at the beginning, it says, it say an hour and 30 minutes or an hour 45 minutes, two hours and 10 minutes. It doesn't matter. At least you know when you're going to stop.

When you're watching television or you're watching like a TV series on Netflix, they're doing everything they can to get you to roll it to the next show. [00:08:39] And while at the beginning of the night, you would have said oh, two hours watching a movie, that's so long, you end up watching six hours of television. And I know this from experience. So look for how you're spending your leisure time and see if you could find opportunities.

If you're still watching regular television, regular degular television there's commercials... [00:08:56] if you switch to watching older shows or shows you've recorded, you can stop watching those commercials. Right now, and this is crazy, a television show is now 20.05 minutes.

It used to be when I was a kid 26, and then it was 24, and I just read this in a recent article 9.5 minutes out of every 30 minutes, you're watching TV is commercials. [00:09:17] Maybe you flip between two shows like I used to do, or you do picture and picture and all that stuff. But just think about time you spend doing something inefficiently. How much time do you spend commuting? You can use that time officially, say how can I use this time better?

Look for opportunities to be more efficient or to use your timer to build more runway. [00:09:34] And here's something important. You only need an hour a day. If you can get an hour a day, you could build something really amazing. With an hour a day, you'll be more efficient than if you have four hours a day. When we have really small amounts of time, we force ourselves to be lean mean and efficient.

So once you've established your runway, the next step of the process, is to activate your business spending. [00:09:52] And I've talked about this recently, I'm a big fan of Novo. That's why my bank account with now I switched from one of the big ones. There's no minimum. So you can put a small budget into your business account and just by spending out of that account, you'll feel differently.

When you pull out that black debit card, instead of one of your other ones you go, this is as a business expense. [00:10:10] I expect to earn this back. Every time I spend money from that account, whether it's paying my team, paying for software, paying for advertising, I expect a return of that investment. It changes how I think about it.

When I spend money from my white card, my personal account card is white, I don't expect to ever see that again. [00:10:26] I don't go to a movie pay 20 or $30 to bring me in my family to the movies and expect at the end of the movie to get that money back. So we want to activate that other part of your mind that this is still business time. You can enjoy what you're doing. I love my work. I like what I do.

I like recording podcast episodes, [00:10:42] I like working on my blog, I like designing my website, I like coming up with product ideas, I like teaching... I like what I do. My problem at this phase of my life is I like it too much and I'm dangerously close to falling into working all the time cause I like it and not just for the source of affirmation, but I enjoyed the process. [00:10:59] I enjoy coming up with ideas, I enjoy outlining.

I like outlining almost more than I like writing books or editing. It's crazy. So we can easily fall into a place where I do too much work, but I know you're at the beginning of your journey. So when you're starting to be your own boss, the process is slightly different. The earlier [00:11:16] in this process you established structure for how many hours you work, how you create efficiency and how you spend your money, the easier it will be for you, as you have more time available.

Every time you spend money or time, every time you listen to this podcast episodes, it's an investment. And think about how you're spending that time, how you're allocating that resource and what the return on that investment is. [00:11:37] What is the return turn on your time and financial investment.

If you buy one of my books for $7.99 or $9.99, that needs to go right that account because if you buy a book for me for $10 and you don't earned $10 back from that book, then it wasn't a good expense and that will change how you periceve things. [00:11:53] Most people buy business books and they get excited by the idea and they never implement it. I'm just as guilty. This is not me preaching from the top of the mountain.

I'm still on page one of this new management book that my friend convinced me to buy two weeks ago. And when I say page one, I mean, I bought it and [00:12:06] I accidentally opened it on my Kindle once and I closed it and jumped back to base Marine book that I was reading. I want to be super real with you guys. Once you start spending from a business account, your whole mindset will change. It will start activating that thing.

So now you're in a place where you've made a decision, the lights are on, you can feel that you're in the race. [00:12:22] You know how much time and treasure you have available. When you spend money, you spend it from your business account, not your entertaiment budget, so you take it more seriously.

You're able to make decisions and activate the lgoical part of your brain more often than the emotional part of your brain. [00:12:36] And this brings us to number four, which is the signal to noise ratio. There are a lot of distracting things out there. There's a lot of information. Even if you're only listening to me, you can, don't get distracted because I talked about a lot of different subjects that might not apply to you.

If you're building a business that's just around blogging, then you want to focus on my content that fits that. You don't need to listen to my training on how to do webinars yet, because it doesn't apply to you yet. [00:13:01] It will eventually. I want you to think of thi, like a flashlight that's focused on just ahead of you in the hallway. You only need to see the next 10 feet to keep walking. You don't need to see the next five miles.

So we just want to focus on what's ahead of us. And then once we hit that next goal, then we can start looking a little bit further ahead, a little bit further ahead, a little bit further ahead. [00:13:19] There's so many information out there that again, if we're just thinking about spending our time as leisure and not as an investment, that we won't spend it wisely, but I want you to think of time as something you spent.

That's something you use like a resource that you need to allocate. Every time you're listening to a business podcast or an educational podcast, or you're reading a business book, say to yourself, is this something that will help me to improve my business, [00:13:43] Is this something that matches what I'm working on? If it's not, there's a very good chance that you're suffering from shiny object syndrome, which is really, really dangerous and the number one killer of new, online businesses. Shiny object syndrome is very simple.

You get excited by each new business model. [00:14:00] Even if you buy an expensive course, this is really, really common. It's happened to me, it's happened everyone, you buy an expensive course maybe it's even a couple thousand dollars. You spend a few weeks on it and then you hear about this new thing that sounds really amazing, you jump on that.

And you watch that sales video and you go: this is even better! [00:14:13] That last one was so hard, I'm going to do this one and you spend another couple of thousand dollars and they start working on that program and a few weeks later you hear about a new business model. The problem is that most online business models work.

You can spend the next six months mastering YouTube marketing or Facebook ads or Instagram marketing or Twitter, or building a blog or email marketing or affiliate marketing, or selling any eCommerce or drop shipping, [00:14:36] or building an Amazon store or building an Amazon mini-review site...all of them work. And each of them works in a different way. The problem is not that you've chosen a program that doesn't work, the problem is that you keep getting distracted by things that aren't't good.

What you're doing is the same as a college student who transfers universities [00:14:53] every couple of weeks. Can you imagine if your kid transferred 40 times over four years in college? Well, I bet you're having heart palpitations like I am, now I'm afraid my kids would want to do that when they hear this episode, but that's really what you're doing. And when you put it in that context, it sounds unreasonable [00:15:08] doesn't it? It's too easy to transfer colleges when you're self-teaching, that's the problem.

It's so easy to jump to the next idea, the next idea, the next idea. And that's not what you want. It's very important that you find a path and then you stick with it. It doesn't have to be one of my courses. [00:15:25] There's a lot of things I don't know how to do online. Sometimes people approach me to do really cool projects and I go: I don't how to do that. I know about five ways to make money online, and there arethousands that work.

I don't know how to do drop shipping. I've never ordered something from China and resold it in America. [00:15:40] I don't sell physical stuff, I don't know how to do that. I do a little bit of that with print on demand, right, but I don't know how to sell something that's sitting in a warehouse. That's not my world.

It doesn't mean it doesn't work, It means that I'm not the right person if that's the path you want, nd that's absolutely fine. [00:15:53] The key is to find that one pack and then stay with it until you reach profitability. Each of these lessons, each of these points is built on the one before it.

If you're thinking of your time as something you invest the odds of you throwing away three weeks of investment are lower and lower, right? [00:16:09] Because now you're thinking of this as, Hey, I've invested three weeks, 15 hours of my precious time. I don't want to start back at step zero just because something else sounds cool.

It starts to change your mindset when you see what you do doing as investing as building a real business as a real path. [00:16:24] And for every rule, there are exceptions and certainly at phases in your career, you might pivot or add new branches, but for now, for the first six to 12 months, until you reach profitability, the first business model should generate enough revenue for you to quit your job.

Then you can start thinking about adding in new complexities or new structures, but focus on that one course first, and one of the most important lessons to starting a business while working full time is to keep your mouth shut. [00:16:51] Don't tell your coworkers what you're up to. They're not your friends do not put that out there because it puts you in a dangerous place. It's very, very important that you without external negative pressures.

What I mean is, if you start to tell your coworkers what you're working on, they're going to think, h, someone thinks they're better than me. [00:17:11] Someone wants to leave me behind, someone's planning on quitting. It's the same thing as saying you're planning on quitting as soon as you can the way your boss and your coworkers proceedyou will change because now they see you as someone who's disloyal. I can't stress this enough.

If you want to be your own boss [00:17:25] it starts with knowing who to talk to and when to talk to. I haven't tire community, I have an entire tribe, I have an environment, there's loads of people you can talk to about starting your business and building your life and moving on your job behind without putting your current revenue stream at risk, you don't need to go all in just yet. [00:17:40] It's okay to build a more runway, more or buffer before you do that.

It's just tempting. When we're excited to want to tell everyone how excited we are. I just know from experience every time I do a major life change, it's far better. If I wait as long as possible, let people know what's going on. If you wait until you have a success, then people can't say, Oh, that'll never work. [00:17:56] Cause you go it already did. Someone goes, Oh, Starting only businesses that work is all scam and they would make money online.

You go, Oh, I made a thousand dollars last month. Immediately shuts them up. Whereas if they told you that before you made any money, they could discourage you when you're at your most vulnerable, you're a butterfly in the Chrysalis. [00:18:09] And if you tell people who aren't on the same path as you, they will may say, and it can damage you. You're too vulnerable. Don't say anything just yet. No action is always more valuable [00:18:20] than planning.

You'll learn a lot more from trying and from doing than you will from listening and reading. So will I love you listen to these podcast episodes. [00:18:28] You'll notice that I try really, really hard to keep them down to 24 minutes. That's because when I started that's how long a television show now that I know the 20 and a half minutes without commercials, maybe I should be doing 20 and a half minute episodes, but I encourage you.

So move into the action saving process, even just to write down the points from this lesson to make a declaration, declare your runway to cheat your time and money as a resource that you're gonna invest in your business to only spend money from a business account on your business processes, to focus only on lessons and episodes that apply to specifically what you're working on right now, too. [00:18:58] Only follow one path to choose a course or program or process or business model and follow it until you reach some fruition, some profits, some success, and to stop chasing shiny objects and transferring colleges to just stick with one thing until it works, because that's the secret to success it's to stay and do the same thing. [00:19:15] [00:19:15] Assistant action over time.

Make success inevitable. There's no perfect time to start your business. If you're waiting for a sign from the heavens or a perfect moment, or a conflagration of events where you get a year's salary. Okay. And you lose your job at the same time. So you have a massive, magical buffer of huge runway, both time and treasure. [00:19:34] Don't wait for that moment. Please. Don't wait to get fired. Don't wait. You lose your job. Don't wait until you're vulnerable.

As we're going to talk about very shortly in one of the lessons, since it's part of this series right now is the perfect time to be your own boss. So stop listening and start taking action. [00:19:49] If this gets you excited. Please let me know in the comments below, because your feedback, it feeds me. I feed off your energy and I'm so excited to watch you become your own boss. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of serve know master. Make sure you subscribe.

So you never miss another episode and we'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and [00:20:10] tactics on how to escape that rat race, head over to serve no master.com forward slash podcast. [00:20:16] Now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller. Serve no master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday. [00:20:31] Are you ready to make your first dollar online? Grab my free guide, how to make $1,000 this month@servicemaster.com. Fred slash Kay.