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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 Ryan:
This is the employee to entrepreneur podcast, the podcast specifically for the failing man who's looking to leave his nine to five to escape the rat race so that he can jump into the freedom that is entrepreneurship so that he might be able to spend more time with his kids or retire his wife or maybe even leave a legacy. So if that sounds like you, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Brendan Ryan, and I'm making that transition myself. And today I wanna talk a little bit about my own journey into entrepreneurship. Because I was a guy that did not have entrepreneurship or business modeled for me growing up. My parents very much wanted me to go to school and become an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer. And I ended up becoming a pharmacist. Even though I knew in my heart that that's not what I wanted to do. In fact, I even thought about dropping out in my first year of pharmacy school. But my parents came. to town and they visited me and they asked me straight up, that's fine but what are you gonna do instead? And I did not have an answer prepared for them. So I stayed in and it wasn't until after farming to school that I started reading and learning about the things that I was genuinely interested in on a much bigger scale. And I dabbled in different things, I dabbled in poker, I traded some options for a while. And eventually though, in the year 2020, I finally became of the mindset that I wasn't going to keep doubling down on my career as a pharmacist. Prior to that, I had been doing a lot of things to try to make it work. I went through a residency, I got multiple certifications, which was something that not a lot of pharmacists actually did. And I even was selected for a leadership program at the hospital that I worked at. I was working in the ER and I figured that if there was anything in pharmacy that would get me excited about going to work, it would be that. But I still just could not get into it. I can understand why people like it, but for whatever reason, it just wasn't for me. I even tried to go on Twitter, go on the free open access medicine. Twitter and learn about that. I tried to watch different documentaries or shows like Code Black and try to get myself hyped up about it and just the passion just wasn't there. It just was not there and I always felt very powerless as a pharmacist to really affect change and slowly over time I would realize that one of the ways that I define success personally is my ability to make an impact. I think if you're making an impact on a really large scale if you're big problem for humanity, then that's success on a great, great level, right? But if you're not making any impact, I mean, I don't know. I believe that everybody has their own unique talents, their own unique perspectives, and they all have something of value to bring to the world. And that's why I really believe now that there should be more entrepreneurs, because everybody does have. unique talents and skills and perspectives that they can help bring to the world and solve problems because that's what entrepreneurs do is they solve problems and we have tons and tons of problems out there in the world. So anyway, back to the whole pharmacy thing. It was the early 2020. I'm still a pharmacist and I realized at that point that this was just not it. I can't sit in the pharmacy for the next 30 plus years of my life. There's just no way. I need to figure out a different way. And I was also worried about other things too, like employer mandates or inflation and my low ceiling as a pharmacist. You start out making a really good salary as a pharmacist, but you don't have a lot of opportunity to make more and more and more money like you would in many other careers. And all of these things really bothered me because 100K, 150K salary. now or five years ago or 10 years ago will not be the same purchasing power at all 30 years from now. Right? So I felt like I needed to be able to keep up. So I at least needed to get a side hustle of some kind. I at least needed to start generating some passive income somewhere. And so my true, what I would call my financial red pill moment, if you will, entrepreneurs would tell you the same thing is when I read Rich Dad Poor Dad. Now I'm a late bloomer so a lot of guys will have read Rich Dad Poor Dad at a much younger age I think but I was 30 years old when I read Rich Dad Poor Dad. In fact I didn't even really read it. It was actually I listened to the audiobook on YouTube for free and I remember the moment that it finally clicked for me that it finally was made sense and I realized that I was on the wrong path, that I was never going to really get to financial freedom doing what I'm doing. I was in the gym at the amenity center here in the community that I live in and listening to that audio book on YouTube and Robert Kiyosaki was talking about how you want to invest for cash flow and not a nest egg. And that true wealth is measured by how long you can continue to live if you just stopped working altogether. And that's when it finally made sense to me, right? And that's when I finally was like, all right, I made that decision right then and there. I'm going to figure this out and I'm going to get into business and I'm going to figure out how to generate cash flow so that I can get financially free, so that I can be able to retire my wife, spend more time with my kids, take my kids and travel all over the world and give them experiences that they wouldn't otherwise have, or at least if I continued working. in staying a pharmacist. And so at that point though, I had absolutely no idea about business. I never learned about anything about business, right? I didn't know about sales. I didn't know about marketing. I didn't know about business finances and operations. I had no idea. I didn't know what the first step was or anything like that. Now, remember this is 2020. So shortly after that, the CARES Act was rolled out. And the CARES Act did a whole bunch of different things. But one of the things that it enabled was that it allowed people to take a withdrawal from their 401ks early without having a penalty. So I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. But so I saw the opportunity there to access some of my own capital to be able to invest in something or build a big business or, yeah. So that's what I did. I took $50,000 out of my retirement account. Penalty free because of the CARES Act. It was fairly easy to qualify for it. All you had to do was demonstrate that your hours were affected by COVID. And so again, that was very easy to do because I actually did lose hours as a pharmacist because of COVID. One of the clinics that I worked in closed. It was no longer open, so I lost those hours. So my income was genuinely affected. And that enabled me to take the withdrawal. There was no limit to it. So I took 50K out. And at this time, I'm researching, okay, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna generate the passive income or the cash flow? And this is in 2020. So everybody was getting their stimulus checks and everybody was buying things online because you couldn't really go out in public because of the pandemic. And so Amazon or e-commerce in general was really, really, really hot. And so I saw a lot of people making a lot of money on Amazon. And at the time there was a lot of these Amazon automation services popping up. There was all kinds of video advertisements that would come across your YouTube channel and things like that. And so I started looking into it. I talked to them. I talked to them many times actually. And I was genuinely worried that the whole thing was actually a scam. Um, and. That was one of the things that I was really considering doing. The other thing that I found was a course called job killing, and it taught you the rank and rent model of lead generation. Now this was a great opportunity about five to 10 years ago. Don't go ahead and try to do this now. It really is not the same opportunity. It's still possible, but it's just not nearly as good as it used to be. But the idea is essentially this. You build a website, for a particular niche, preferably home industries, home service industries, because those work really well, in a locality, right? So an example, I live in Jacksonville, Florida, so you could do Jacksonville Plumbers. You build a website for Jacksonville Plumbers, and you SEO, search engine optimization, just optimize that thing as much as possible so that it ranks really high in Google. So that if somebody... in Jacksonville, typed in Plumber near me, or Plumber Jacksonville, or Jacksonville Plumber, you would be one of the top results, if not the top result, preferably number one, because most people don't scroll. Most people won't even scroll beyond the fold, really. They'll only click on the first one, three, four, maybe, of the results that they see in Google. And so that's why the money is up at the top, and that's why SEO is actually a pretty powerful skill. It's kind of a frustrating skill because Google changes what they reward all the time. But anyway, you rank the website so that it's getting views and you put a tracking phone number on there so that people can call if they need a plumber in Jacksonville. And once you start getting those organic calls, then you go out and you find a plumber that would like the leads. This is the rank and rent method. So you rank the website, And then once it starts getting the leads, you rent it out to a contractor, the rank and rent method. Now, again, it used to work a lot better than it does now. Google has very much caught on to that whole method and there's a lot of people trying to do it. It's much more competitive than it used to be, so it doesn't work as well anymore. But point is, when I did it, it did work. It did work fairly well. I was kind of late to the game, but I invested $5,000 into this job killing course. And it was great. It taught me all kinds of things. It taught me about SEO. It taught me about building websites. It taught me about basic ads and marketing, whether that's Facebook ads or Google ads, especially Google ads. And it even taught me or introduced me at least to sales. And so I invested 5K in myself, did this course, and I struggled for sure. I definitely struggled in the beginning. And... didn't know what I was doing and really sucked at it first, failed a few times, but for whatever reason, I stuck with it and definitely recovered that 5K and then some I've made much more awful lead generation than that, right? So I got my ROI and then some on that venture. Now, if you recall, I was talking earlier about the Amazon automation services. That was the other thing that I looked at investing into. And my thought process at the time was that this could be something that I invest in and because it's automated, meaning they do everything for you, it wouldn't take up any of my time. And that's why I could use that 5k to invest in myself with job killing course because that would be something that I used my time for to generate passive income. Now the investment for the Amazon automation services $45,000, right? Chunk of change, a lot of money. Because at the time, One of the things that they did was buy somebody else's store. And you can still do this. If you go on bizbuy.com and type in Amazon or FBA, you can see all kinds of people's stores up there that you can purchase. And a lot of those stores are very valuable. They go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. But long story short, the idea was that they were going to buy somebody else's store for me, run it for me. And then there's a profit share, meaning that they take a portion of a profit, whether it was 30% or 50% or something like that. And that's how they make money on it because they're doing all the work. And then you make the passive income. And it was great also for credit card points because it's essentially dropshipping where you're buying the products on a credit card, selling it to a consumer for a greater price and then paying off the credit card and collecting the difference. So it's just simple arbitrage really, if you will. And so This was back in 2020, lots and lots and lots and lots of people were trying to do the same thing. It was highly, highly competitive. And shortly after that, Walmart became a very trendy thing to do in e-commerce as well. So they actually switched me into a Walmart store. Took months and months and months. It took almost a year for them to actually get a store for me. And during this time, I'm incredibly frustrated. right? Because I had opened up the business bank accounts. I had got multiple business credit cards with plenty of credit so that we could run the store well. And I had to invest in $45,000 into it. Right. The other thing about the withdrawal from the 401k that I did through the cares act is that when you take that out, that counts as income for that year and you have to pay taxes on it. So I felt like I was up against a wall that I needed to make some ROI on this money to at least pay the taxes that I took out on that. And they're dragging their feet. I think this particular company, I'm not going to say who they were. There was multiple out there that got in trouble with this, if you will. But they bid off more than they could chew. They took on more clients than they could really handle. And quite honestly, they didn't really know what they were doing at the time. I heard retrospectively once everything was said and done that they were actually buying products off of Amazon with the business credit and then shipping it to Walmart customers, which created all kinds of confusion as you can imagine because the Amazon boxes would show up with their door and they'd be confused because they don't have Amazon or they didn't order from Amazon. So they returned tons of them, lots of complaints, lots of bad reviews. And what happened was... Because of that, Walmart actually issued a slew of suspensions. It was around August or September of 2021, and they terminated and suspended hundreds of stores. It wasn't just for that particular service that I was using, but everyone got affected, including my store, of course. So I got suspended, I got terminated. because they had actually got it up and running for a moment for like a couple of months at that point, there was a bunch of money locked up in there that we couldn't get out, right? So I actually lost even more money on this investment. Now this service, you know, they had a lot of heat on them because I wasn't their only client and they passed this off to a different e-commerce automation service. Again, not gonna mention any names. but it was for a Facebook drop shipping service, which is another drop shipping method. And that did work, but there's really not that much money to be made in Facebook drop shipping. If you've ever tried it, you could make a couple hundred bucks a month or something like that if you do it well, but it's really not very lucrative. But at the time, people thought that it was gonna be the next big thing, like the Walmart idea. And it turned out that it really wasn't. And so... After that company realized that Facebook dropshipping wasn't lucrative, they basically gave up. I was of the mindset that I was never going to give up. Now I had this Facebook dropshipping store and what I did was I hired a VA, a virtual assistant from overseas, to start running it for me, which was actually not very hard to do. It was pretty easy to locate these people. If you... Nowhere to look online jobs.ph is a good place to start, but you can even find them on Facebook. It's them itself. And so he started running that for me, made a little bit more money, never even came close to recovering the whole thing. But eventually that VA approached me about, Hey, do you want to try an Amazon store? Which if you recall is what I originally signed up for. Now this is just a VA from overseas. He's not the Amazon automation service that I paid $45,000 to, but I thought, yeah, why not? Let's try it. You know, what, what the heck, what do we have to lose? Because that original Amazon service never signed up for a store for me. So I was still able to go in with my LLC that I created and apply for an Amazon store. And I got approved relatively easily. And so the next few months, my VA starts working the store. and he's profitable immediately doing over 10K in revenue on the very first month, month one, with just one VA from overseas. I'm not doing anything. And so it kind of blows my mind in retrospect because for whatever reason, I never, never gave up on e-commerce. I was never something that I was personally interested in the sense that I wanted to go and list the products myself and do all the product research, win the buy boxes. I never found that interesting. I found it. I still find it kind of boring to be honest with you, but I was always interested in it as an income source, a passive income source. And so this particular VA still runs my Amazon store for me, months and months, years later, and still does great. And so now I have an Amazon store because I stuck with it, even though that Amazon automation service failed me. And I actually still haven't recovered. all the ROI from the 45k. It'll be a while before I do. That was a lot of money, a lot of money to lose. But the lesson here is essentially this. When I started out, I took $50,000 out of my retirement account. This is not something that I recommend anybody would do. Don't do this guys. Don't do it. If you really need access to capital, if you really have a good idea, there's all kinds of business funding that you can get. I've had guests on the show. that you can do that with where you can get money from the bank at 0% interest. And I would highly recommend you just go that route instead. But I was young, naive, I didn't know any better at the time. Again, I didn't know about business in general at that time. And so I took $50,000 out and I took 90% of that and I bet on somebody else. I bet on passive income. I bet on somebody making money for me. and it completely and utterly failed. I lost more money than that. I lost a ton of money. It still hurts to think about it to this day. Whereas I took 10% of it, just 10% of it, $5,000, which I think is an amount that a lot of people could get access to relatively easily. And I bet on myself. And that worked so much better for me. I got way more than 5K. of a return on my investment. And what it really truly did for me was launch my actual business career. It taught me the things that I needed to know. And so if you're just getting started in arch andpreneurship, what you need to do is obtain skills, bet on yourself. There's so many things out there that you can go and learn, whether it's trading, whether it's video editing, whether it's SEO or whether it's sales, like I encourage a lot of people to do now. But the lead generation, the job killing 5K course is what launched my real business career. That's when I really learned all about business finances, how to market, how to build websites, and all that kind of thing. And I am where I am now because of that 5K course. I would have never, never in a million years thought that I would like or want to do sales, which is what I do now. I'm a remote closer. for a digital marketing agency. And I love it. I love talking to prospects on the phone or over Zoom. And I love how much sales has changed my life. I think it actually makes people a better person. But I would have never, never, never known that at the time. If you would have asked me five years ago when I was a pharmacist, hey, you wanna do sales? I would have been like, hell no. Why would I wanna do sales? But again, I didn't know anything about it at the time. And I think that that's the thing. You don't know what you don't know when you're just starting out. and what you think you're gonna do will often change. I've talked to many entrepreneurs that wanted to start building XYZ business and ended up along the way pivoting and building a totally different ABC business. So you have to start, that's the key. You gotta start and you gotta bet on yourself. Don't bet on somebody else, bet on yourself. Now ironically, it's kind of funny, I actually offer an Amazon automation service now, today. But I don't push it too hard because it's gotten such a bad rap because there were so many other services like the one that I had that failed people completely and utterly. So the objection I get all the time when I talk to anybody that doesn't trust me that doesn't know me from Adam is that it's a scam. And it's totally understandable why, because in effect, what happened to me was a scam. I don't believe that that company meant to scam anybody at all. In fact, I know that they didn't mean to scam anybody, but the ultimate effect of it is essentially the same, right? They might as well have just taken my money and ran off with it. And that's that. So I'm telling all of you this because I think that it's important for you. for you guys to realize that when you're getting started in business, A, it doesn't take a ton of money, not at all anymore. You can build a business for very, very little money, even less than $5,000. But secondly, you really need to invest in skills at first. Now, I think that there is something to be said for systems being actually better than skills. I've heard Grant Cardone say that actually. And I know exactly and I understand exactly what he's talking about. What, when you have nothing, when you're just getting started, you have to invest in something because if you're going to outsource the skill to somebody eventually, you need to be able to oversee it. You need to be able to management, manage it and know what you're talking about. So there's a lesson there, right? Bet on somebody else with a lot of my money, bet on myself with just a little bit of my money. and it ended up being that betting on myself with just a little bit of money was way, way better than betting on somebody else. So, hope this helps you guys. If you're thinking about getting started in entrepreneurship, you needed an example, you needed some support, some inspiration, some education, if you will. I hope this example helps you and. I'm always here. My DMs are always open on Instagram or Twitter. I'm on those two social media platforms especially. Please shoot me a DM if you need any advice, if you just want to talk. I'm trying to reach especially the fathers out there that aspire to entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurs, if you will, that have kids because I think that there's a lot of millennials that felt just like me where they felt trapped, beholden, if you will, to their job. and that they had to keep supporting their family with it. But there is options. You do have options. You can do this. It's not gonna be easy, don't get me wrong. It's very difficult to raise kids and it's very difficult to build a business. But it'll be worth it. And you wanna do it when you're young. A million dollars when you're 30 is worth so much more than $100 million when you're 80 because you have your health, you have your time. And those two things are ultimately invaluable. And so you don't wanna be on that slow path to riches, which probably is not going to really work anyway. You wanna be able to enjoy your life when you're young. So I highly, highly encourage you, hit me up in the DMs. We have a newsletter, we have a free Discord group, this podcast, and even sales coaching, if you're interested in getting started in sales. Shoot me a DM that says coaching and I would love to help you get started there. Never give up guys, never give up. If you are listening to this and you want to join me and jump into entrepreneurship, leave the nine to five behind, kill your job, escape the rat race and all that good stuff, do it. Do it guys, DM me, I'll help you. I'll get you in the Discord group. I'll get you signed up for the newsletter. We'll do some coaching or whatever you need. So join me and make the transition from employee to entrepreneur, and I'll see you on the other side.