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The podcast for aspiring entrepreneurs who have families. If you're a dad looking to escape the rat and quit your 9 to 5 while keeping food on the table for the family in the process then this show is for you. We discuss the challenges, tips, tricks and hacks to help you make the leap into freedom.
Brendan:
This is the Employee to Entrepreneur podcast, the show for the family man who's looking to escape the rat race. So if you're a husband or a father and you're looking to jump into entrepreneurship so that you can take your time back and actually show up to that soccer practice for once, then you're in the right place. I made this show for you because I am you. I'm your host, Brendan Ryan, and I am making that transition myself today. I want to talk about something I've been really reflecting on quite a bit lately. about the missing step in the transition from employee to entrepreneur. And it's something that is kind of a revelation for me as well. Something I didn't realize until quite recently. And so to give a bit of context, if you're already familiar with Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, then this might not be news to you, but he has the cashflow quadrants, right? So if you imagine four quadrants. So one quadrant being E, one quadrant being S, one quadrant being B, and one quadrant being I, right? Just four quadrants. They stand for employee, self-employed, business owner, and investor, right? So he usually talks about these cashflow quadrants from a perspective of taxes, right? And he states that the self-employed pay the most taxes, which is true, 100% true. Whereas the right side of the quadrant that has the B in the I on it, the business owner and the investor, those people pay the least amount of taxes because the government incentivizes business owners and investors because they do things like create jobs. A lot of people in certain political parties will jump on the rich because they don't pay many taxes. But fact is the tax code was actually designed to be that way, right? They are incentivized using the rewarding business owners to create businesses that make the economy flourish. So, but I was thinking about that quadrant and I was on, um, Alex Hermosys book launch the other week. I didn't watch it live. Unfortunately, I wish I was there live because it seemed like an amazing event. If you're listening to this podcast and you didn't check it out, the replay is available on his YouTube and I highly recommend you check it out because the guy is just an absolute master of business in general, sales, marketing, you name it. And so he came out with his much anticipated lead generation book, which would have been something that would have been super duper excited for a couple of years back because that's what I did at the time. I got started in lead generation before I moved. gradually more and more into sales, which is what I'm doing full time now. And so still very exciting event. He absolutely killed it. There was something like, there was literally hundreds of thousands of people on the live stream and he gave everything away for free. Everything away for free. Cause that's his style. He likes to give, keep giving until your. prospects, your potential customers are so overwhelmed by the amount of free value that you're giving out that they're like, what can I do for you? And so he has his, he calls it hermosy law that the longer you can keep from asking, the bigger ask you can make. And so that's his game. He's playing a very, very long game and he can afford to do that because he's a millionaire, right? Like he's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So he can give quite a bit of value before he ever asks. to ask anybody. But even if you're a young gun getting started in business, it's still a pretty decent model to emulate to a degree. And what I mean by that is, say you want to be a fitness coach or something like that, like he was. What you do in the beginning is you find some friends, some family that are willing to be your clients for free in exchange for some case studies or testimonials. And then over time, you take on more clients. get more case studies and testimonials because that social proof is really, really important. And gradually you start upping your price because, especially when you're in a service-based business like that, you're really limited by how much time you have. And so anyway, come back to the missing step from employee to entrepreneur. When you're an employee, when you're on that left side of the quadrant, when you're a W2 guy in your nine to five job, you're thinking about going to the right side of the quadrant, that B, right? The business owner. And you can definitely do that right away. You can definitely, there's ways to go about that. A lot of guys like myself will start some type of online business, whether it's drop shipping, like e-commerce stores, or in my case, I started a digital marketing agency, a lead generation agency for home services industries, you might be into video editing or whatever, right? You start your little business, your side hustle, if you will, a micro business, some people call it. And then you slowly. Try to build that business to the point where it replaces your income, or at least mostly replaces your income as a W2 worker. And then you can make the transition from employee to entrepreneur. At least that is what is commonly thought as the game plan, right? And that was my game plan as well. But when I was listening and remembering Alex Hermosy story, he said something about his story that I missed the first time around. And that made me think about the missing step from going from that E quadrant to that B quadrant. So if you rewind far enough back after Alex Hermosy graduated from school, he actually had a corporate job. You know, he was in the, the suits with the guys, great 401k benefit plan, all that kind of stuff. I don't think he was in it that long, but he eventually left it to go become a personal trainer, which was his passion. Right. And so he became a personal trainer. So he actually went from that E quadrant, not right to the B quadrant right away, but he went from E to S. And this is the missing step that I'm talking about. And it, um, it was quite the revelation for me because that's actually what I kind of ended up doing on accident. I was trying to go right from E to B by building up my lead generation agency. realized eventually that I didn't very much enjoy the fulfillment of the marketing aspect of it and that there were some other things that made it such that it ended up not being as scalable as I had hoped in the beginning or at least that it was when I first started it. But so what I did is move from E to self-employed. So I'm a 1099 remote closer. I've done it for a few different offers now, but I moved from E to S just like he did. Right? And they say, I know I'm sure you guys are sick of me telling you that sales is the gateway drug to entrepreneurship. But I a hundred percent believe that because I've seen it so many times guys don't just stay in sales forever. Even when you're a killer, like a just absolute brain maker, like a guy like Jeremy Miner, for instance, who is literally making millions of dollars as a W two sales guy, he eventually leaves because he's making so much money. He could retire early, but then he comes back. and starts his own sales training business. Oh, you know, sales to entrepreneurship, see it over and over and over again. And you see it with Alex Ramozzi too, because once he became a personal trainer, you know, he was really rough in it. He was sleeping on a friend's couch, worked in as a personal trainer teaching Nancy how to lose the last five for a while before he actually bought his first gym. And that's when he became business owner. And once he got his first gym, you know what his best skill was at the time? Closing. His best skill was at the time was closing. And I think he actually talks about all of this or maybe it was from other stuff. It might not have been in the lead generation book launch. I think he mentioned some of these things in the book launch, but anyway, he would have people calling for him. People texting for him to get leads to come into his business. And he would just be sitting at the desk all day closing, getting people to sign up for some weight loss program, sign up for a gym membership, whatever it might be. He was closing. That was his skill. That was his skill that he was most valuable at in the beginning. So even a guy like Alex or Mozi, even though, yes, he, you know, was skilled as a personal trainer as well. You could definitely count that as a skill. He, he used sales to get where he is as well. But this missing step I think is interesting because he even mentioned in one of the YouTube videos or whatever it was that I was watching. I don't think it was the book launch, but he even mentioned that when you go from employed by somebody else building somebody else's dream, right to self-employed, being a freelancer and independent contractor at 10 99. Yes, you pay a little bit more in taxes. There's ways around that. You know, you get yourself a good accountant. There's all kinds of things like that you can deduct like your phone bill, your home office. deduction and all that kind of good stuff. Right. But what you do get is more control over your most valuable assets, which is time. You get control over your time. You can work when you want. Right. In sales, I could work super weird hours if we wanted to, I could work overnight because I can sell around the world being in a remote sales job. So if I wanted to, I could sell European hours and be awake from like 3 a.m. and then sell until, I don't know, noon or something like that and have the rest of the day off. But I can work whenever I want. Really. Being on the East coast, I could sell West coast hours, make a three hour time difference. You get more control over your time and you begin to hone that skill. And in the beginning, when you're starting the entrepreneurial process, the most important thing is to hone the skills. And Alex Hermosy to his credit preaches this. He preaches, Skill stacking, right? You start off with one skill, master that skill, then add the other skill. I think where a lot of people go wrong is they start trying to master multiple skills at one time. I know I did that. And you end up not being that great at any of them, right? So like when I was doing my lead generation stuff, I had the skill of SEO. It was probably my strongest skill, which I have not practiced lately. So, and I don't really love the skill of SEO. I think the barrier of entry is too low. And I think that too much of it depends on Google's algorithm. They can change their algorithm at any time, but that's neither here nor there. Right. But the point is you master one skill and then you move on to the next one. When I was doing lead generation, I was doing SEO. I was building websites. I was doing media buying, which is running paid ads. There was a whole bunch of skills that I was trying to do at the same time. Copywriting. That was another big one that was involved in that whole venture. And so as a result, yes, I did develop those skills a little bit for sure, but I could have been great if I had focused on just one of them. If I had just become an SEO guy on Upwork or whatever, or on freelancer.com, even Fiverr, you know, if I would have just focused on that one skill, got super great at that, and then stacked that skill with something else. I think I made it real about this the other day. I think one of the things that Alex could. would be it would behoove him to preach along with the idea of acquiring skills or skill stacking when you're just starting out in entrepreneurship is also networking. Because the thing is, if you have skills but you have a weak or non-existent network, it's worth very little, right? And on the other hand, if you have a great network, you're a people person but you have no skills, you have no value to offer anybody. So you need both. You need the network and you need the skills. one of the best things I've ever done for my network is start this podcast. So if you need a network, we got a free discord group, by the way, please, I'll put the, the link for you to be able to join in the description of this, of the YouTube video or the podcast, wherever you're listening to this. So you can come join us, expand your network a little bit, meet some like-minded guys, some aspiring dadpreneurs who are trying to leave their nine to fives. And so I've been reflecting a lot on this and as time goes on, I might start preaching that as this intermediate step, as this missing step that a lot of people are going to overlook. And to some people's credit, if you can avoid it, if you can avoid being a freelancer, an independent contractor, maybe you should. That's okay. Maybe you've been working in your nine to five for decades and you've stacked up a ton of cash, right? You have a great 401k that you can borrow against. And maybe the best way forward for you is just to buy a business. That's something that Cody Sanchez, if you're not familiar with her, she's kind of a business influencer that she's all over every social media platform, but that's her big thing is go buy an already established business. That's a great way, a great way to get into business ownership, entrepreneurship, just stack up your cash and you don't have to buy it outright, right? You don't have to have necessarily a million dollars or more. stacked up in pure liquid cash to be able to buy a business. There's other ways around it like seller financing, SBA loans, which is a small business administration. And so the point is, it is possible to go straight from E to B. But for younger guys, young men, or even younger than that, like younger than young fathers, in your 20s or something like that, we don't have tons of cash stacked up. We don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars stacked up to be able to just go straight to that. So we don't have that luxury. So the path forward is acquiring skills. The best one is sales on hands down. No doubt in my mind, after exploring it, thinking about it, talking to people, looking at the histories of all these highly successful entrepreneurs. So many of them go through sales. If you don't go through sales, at least do marketing. The two go kind of hand in hand, right? You've got to, you can, the problem there is if you go marketing, I know so many marketers that are not good at sales, that you know, they're great marketing guys. They know everything about, they can do the market research. They're, you know, they're great. They're super good at what they do. But if you try to put them in a sales role, they're going to botch it pretty bad. Whereas if you have a sales guy and you put him in a marketing role, I'm not saying he's going to kill it right from the get-go, but he's going to have a much better understanding right from the get-go because he's been in different businesses already and he's seen what is good marketing and what is bad marketing. But maybe the most important thing that sales guys have as an advantage over marketers is that they're actually talking to the customers themselves. They're talking directly to them. So they know their pains, their struggles, their gripes and complaints. They know all of that stuff. And that you really have to know that. You have to know the psychology of your ideal customer to be a good marketer. And that's why marketers spend so much time doing market research, pouring through Reddit forums and Facebook groups and that kind of thing. You don't really have to do that if you're just talking to them, right? And that's the sales guy's job is to just go talk to them all day. So point is, guys, is there is a missing step there, I think that gets overlooked a lot. And I think that it's missing, not only because some people are able to go straight from employee to entrepreneur by just buying a business or something like that. or potentially, you know, growing their business on the side while they're working a job. Although that's hard to do. It's really hard to do when you can, you know, you're working 40 hours plus a week in a job to be able to dedicate enough time to really make a business thrive. It's, that's tough, but people do it. People do it for sure. I tried, didn't have ton of success. My lead generation agency is still around, but I'm not actively growing it at all. And it will eventually. decline and go away eventually. And I'm okay with that because it's not my focus anymore. That's not the way forward anymore for me. Um, but it's missing because I think also when you look at a guy's story, like Alex Ramozzi's, it's the least glamorous step in the entire process. And for that reason, I think I missed it. The first time I listened to his story, right? I know I've heard that before, but for some reason it did not click the first time that I heard it when he told his story and I was listening. He said that he became a personal trainer first. You went from the corporate job, became a personal trainer, personal trainer to gym owner, gym owner to licensed sore, basically kind of a franchise or where he was selling gym launch and helping people launch their gyms because then that became his skill. Not only the closing, getting people to sign up for your gym. But there's a whole lot more that goes into that, right? The marketing involved, kind of the backend ops and fulfillment and all that kind of stuff. So he was skill stack, skill stack, skill stack before he went from just gym owner guy to where he's at. Well, not now where he was at and now he's out just buying businesses, right? So, but it's the least glamorous step. And I think that that's why it gets overlooked. It gets overlooked for that reason. Plus, and, and maybe that's part of the motivation why so many people were we'll try to go straight from employee to entrepreneur without doing that step. But I think that it is the proper step. It is necessary. A lot of times, especially, you know, for a guy like me, whereas, you know, I'm, I come from a background of healthcare. I was a pharmacist. I had zero business skills, zero to start with. I was starting scratch, right? So I accumulated certain things, SEO, copywriting, marketing, media, buying. And now sales, I'm all in on sales now. Right. I'm all in on sales. In fact, the only thing that I really want to do the nowadays is just sell and do this podcast and this podcast is really life-giving for me because I really feel like there is a gap in the market here that there's just not enough out there for young men who have families who are trying to find that financial freedom to go from employee to entrepreneur so that they can get their time back because that's ultimately what it's about. It's ultimately about time, that most valuable assets so that we can spend more time with our families so that we can control when we go on vacations and that kind of thing, right? Retire our wives, leave a legacy. Because when you have a family, man, it seems like that becomes the purpose, that becomes the why for so many, so many guys. I've talked to so many dadpreneurs on this podcast. And that's what drives them. And that's what drives me. And I want that for more people. I think that the future belongs to entrepreneurs. I think we'll continue to see more and more people start online businesses. And I want to be there to support that. I want to foster that. I want to educate, inspire and support you guys to do that. And that's why we had the discord group that I mentioned earlier. Please join it. We have a free newsletter that you can join, right? It talks about just that. Both links will be down below. So please guys. Join us, right? Join the movement. Let's do the employee to entrepreneur movement. And if you're listening to this podcast on Apple, please leave a review, it really helps me out. If you're on YouTube, give it a like and subscribe. And if you're thinking about making the leap from employee to entrepreneur, please reach out to me. Join the newsletter, join the Discord group. You find me on Instagram or Twitter, those are probably my two main channels. Shoot me a DM, my DMs are open. Love to talk to you, love to get to know you. And I support you any way that I can. So join me, join everybody else that I've had on the podcast, make the transition from employee to entrepreneur, and I'll see you guys on the other side.