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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 podcast for the family man who's looking to escape the rat race. So if you're a husband or a father or both, and you're looking for a better life for you and your family, then you are in the right place. I created this podcast for you because I am you. I'm your host, Brendan Ryan. And today I just want to do a quick monologue episode, give an update on my own personal journey. from employee to entrepreneur, which has been a work in progress for the last three years. I'm a late bloomer. I've always have been. Was 20, 20 when I read Rich Dad Poor Dad. And I consider that my financial red pill moment, if you will, when I realized that the path that I was on was not the path that I wanted to be on, that was going to get me to where I wanted to go financially, freedom wise, just lifestyle wise. It just was not Not the, uh, it was the slow lane for lack of a better word, right? It was the financial slow lane and none of us are guaranteed tomorrow. None of us are guaranteed a better future 30 plus years from now. And I was also really, really restless and unsatisfied with my own job as a pharmacist. And on some level, I, I always knew that I knew that when I was going through pharmacy school, even that. I didn't want to be a pharmacist and I even thought about quitting back then. But my parents came to Gainesville, Florida, where I went to school, the University of Florida, when I was contemplating quitting and just straight up asked me, that's fine. You know, if you want to quit, but what are you going to do instead? And I did not have an answer for them. And for that reason, I didn't quit. I kept going and I graduated from pharmacy school and started working as a pharmacist. After I became a pharmacist, I went to residency. That was a really grueling year, by the way. Pharmacy residency is for real. It's probably not quite as insanely difficult as a medical residency, but it was intense and you don't get paid anything. After that year, I landed a job in an ER. I was pretty excited about that. I thought a pharmacy that I would like, it would be that. It'd be something I could get excited about. But it turns out that even that I wasn't really excited about. And I even really genuinely tried to be excited about it. And what I mean by that is that I was watching all the documentaries, I watched Code Black, I was on Twitter learning about the free Open Access Med education. And on some level I could understand why some people do genuinely love it, but I just could not. force myself to love it. I knew what it was like to be passionate about something and that just wasn't it for me. It never was. And so after that, I started actually reading and learning about the things that I was genuinely interested in. And I dabbled on a few different things. I played a lot of poker. I learned about trading options. But eventually I stumbled across Rich Dad Poor Dad. and then started reading more entrepreneurial books. And it was in 2020 when the whole world was crashing down, then I decided, you know, I need to do something different. I need to start building a better life. And I opened up my first business, my first LLC. I created, and it was a digital marketing agency, lead generation company for home services businesses. And I did all types of different home services businesses, but we kind of eventually... focused more on concrete in remodeling businesses. But regardless, point is I realized pretty quickly that I didn't really enjoy the fulfillment of those marketing services as much as I did the actual sales process. And so slowly over time I started doing more and more sales, not just only for myself, but also for other people. And ironically, funny enough, in the very beginning, I actually avoided selling my own lead generation services. I actually outsourced it to somebody else who actually ended up being a really good friend of mine, a business partner, if you will, almost a mentor of, of kinds. And we're still friends to this day, but I was afraid of sales in the beginning. I was, I didn't think I knew anything about it or would be good at it. And I didn't want to do it. And so I put it off in the beginning and I wish I didn't, but I think that's a really common mistake. is that so many people don't want to do it because it gets such a bad rap. But we fast forward to now when I'm doing more and more sales, start the podcast and you know, now I'm doing a lot of sales and things are going really, really well. Like in April and May, the Amazon store was doing really well as it made like $6,000 in April, I want to say. And, um, I got to the point where I decided, okay, I'm going to need to, this is finally it. It feels like the end. I feel like I'm right where I need to be to make the leap to be able to kill my job. Because my job is some serious golden handcuffs, right? As a pharmacist, you get paid really well. In 2022, I think I made $184,000 as a pharmacist. And you know, you have benefits on top of that, paid time off. Etc. So it's a good job, very genuinely good job, lots of job security for sure. Lots of job security. And so this has been the struggle, right? It's kind of a beast to kill. It's a beast of a job to kill, but it's also, you know, a challenge that I'm willing to rise to a challenge that I'm never really going to give up on. And my thought process is that if I can kill this job, I can help people kill any type of job. And that's really my dream is to be able to help you guys support you guys, inspired guys, educate you guys about how to do the exact same thing, to make the transition from employee to entrepreneur. Hence the name of the show. And so it's a heck of a golden handcuffs, but I have to figure out a way to break these golden handcuffs, to melt these golden handcuffs. And I finally felt like I was right there. Like I was gonna happen. Like everything was set up. the Amazon store was providing me with a nice baseline of income. And then I had all the sales that I was getting, um, selling for other people as my, my exit, right? It might to make up the rest of the income. And so, okay. You know, I, um, I actually found an even better sales offer to get on at that pretty much at that exact same time in early June. So This is June 24th when I'm recording this. Um, it is, yeah, basically June 1st. Um, then I found the new, the new offer. And so I'm like, all right, I'm going to do it. I'm going to take some time off. I use all my PTO at my job, my paid time off at my job so that I have three whole weeks to be able to focus on this and see if I can't make it work. And so right from the beginning, the, my Amazon store got suspended. And so I don't. I actually don't run my store myself, so I don't even really understand particularly why my store got suspended. But it is kind of part of the, the landscape for doing these types of things, unfortunately, um, because Amazon can even deactivate your lock you out or shut you down for reasons that they won't tell you and are actually literally not your fault. And I know this for a fact because I've seen it before. But anyway, point is my story gets suspended, right? So boom, that baseline income that I told you about is gone right from the get go. And I'm like, all right, that's fine. You know, it's not fine, but it's not great. You know, let's need about five grand a month that it was hoping to be able to help me make that transition. And so that's gone. But I still have the sales roles. and they look promising. And so I go full, I'm still going full steam ahead. I'm still going to make it work. I still have a little bit of income from my, my lead generation business that, you know, I've made much smaller and put on the back burner, but, uh, there's really not that much there. It was like maybe probably, probably about a thousand months at this point. So anyway, the point is I need to make it work from just sales. And so the new offer that I told you about that I started onboarding ended up being, kind of a slow onboarding process, much slower than I wanted it to be, and then lost about a week. During that time, I was juggling onboarding the new offer and doing a little bit of the old offer, and I blocked off a lot of time on the old offer so that I could onboard for the new offer. And so during that week, I had very few sales calls, like maybe one or two a day. And I think I got like one. one close that week, that first week. And then after that, finally get up and running on this new offer. And I start, you know, actually taking more calls on the old offer because I'm realizing like, you know, Amazon's gone. I I'm not taking as many calls. Like I need to, I need to hustle. I need to make this happen. So now I'm second week. I'm kind of going, going ham, like filling up my schedule, doing as much as I can. But two things happen. One, is that the show rate has always been bad on the old offer that I'm trying to get off of, right? It's always been less than 50%, meaning that if you had a call booked on your calendar, there's less than a 50% chance that person was going to show up. And so it hovers around like maybe 45%. This month or this week, at least, it was even worse than that. It was like 30%, 30% chance that they actually show. So lots and lots and lots of no shows. I hit a dry spell. I hit a really bad dry spell. I can't close a book if it was in front of me type thing. And in fact, I'm still kind of in that drive spell right now. So the second week, I hit this dry spell, can't close anything and dip and I don't close anything. I don't close anything, nothing. Um, and that's, you know, in part because the show rate is so low, I'm only getting so many chances. So like, For instance, if I have eight calls booked on my calendar for the day, three of them might show, you know, and then of those three, one or two might be disqualified prospects. So I'm only making offers to one or two people a day, but I can't close those one or two people a day. And so now I'm really hurting, really hurting Amazon still suspended entering week three. Now I'm full bore, like juggling two offers and I can't I can't still can't close anything. And it was at that point that I, the, I saw the writing on the wall because I only had one week at that point before I had to go back to work. And so it hit me like a ton of bricks. Honestly, it really did because I realized that like it wasn't going to work. Not this time anyway, not that I was ever going to give up. It's never going to give up, but it hit me pretty hard that, um, that I basically took steps backwards during this time that I thought before this happened that this was finally going to be it. It was all going to come together for me and I was going to be able to finally melt these golden handcuffs, break free of this job, this nine to five, even though it's not a nine to five in terms of the hours. It was brutal realizing that right there. That probably affected my sales for the last week too. Just struggling. with the mindset portion because if you're not in the right mindset, when you get on the call with the prospect that's going to rub off on them and you're going to have a really hard time closing them. And so dry spell continues through week three Amazon store doesn't get reinstated. And I realized I had to, I can't kill it yet. I got to keep the job for now. And yeah, incredible disappointment for me. Especially because it's been like three years in the making. The last day that I walked out of the pharmacy, you know, no, you know, over about a month ago, I actually recorded myself on my phone because I thought it could be, I really thought it could be the last time that I ever did. It might've been the last time and I've dreamed about that moment for so long, walking out and being so happy. And, um, when it happened, when I was walking out and I was explaining, why I'm recording myself walking to the parking lot. And wasn't as happy as I thought I would be at all, really. I never posted it anywhere. I never posted that clip anywhere because in my mind I'm like, well, there's a chance that it won't work out. And of course it didn't work out. But I must have known on some level. or there must have been some lack of belief somewhere, some lack of expectation somewhere that didn't give me the confidence to post it anywhere. But also that somewhere, you know, in the core of my being I knew like he's cause the feeling wasn't there. The feeling was definitely not there as I'm walking out. I was, it was very dry and it was, you know, I always envisioned myself walking out the last day being so pumped, so relieved, so excited. And it was none of that. It was just like a regular day. And so it must have, you know, in retrospect, think back on it now, there must have been some level of lack of belief there. And I have to think like that affected the outcome. Some things are outside of my control, like the Amazon store. or whether or not a prospect shows up. But I wonder how much that affected the outcome for me in terms of my ability to close deals during those three weeks that I really needed to. I made mistakes, you know, I definitely did not execute like I wanted to during those three weeks. Didn't account for how long it would onboard the first offer. I thought I'd be up and running a lot faster. It was a really slow, painfully slow, honestly, on-boarding process where it was like a week of nothing. And then they just start trickling some prospects on your calendar, like literally two or three a day. And I'm like, come on guys, like I wanna get up and going. Let's do it, let's go. But yeah, so that's where we're at right now. That's where we're at. Man, I had to go back to work and... I'm so bummed. I'm so bummed man. But I'm never going to give up on this. I have a mindset that I'm going to do this as soon as possible, but also do it for as long as it takes. I am going to kill this job. I'm absolutely going to kill this job. And I'm never going to give up trying. I can't I just don't have it in me. I literally do not have it in me to give up on this job. Or to give up killing this job. Right? So that's where I'm at right now. I think that when you're finally right there, and you're finally about to make the leap and to leave your own life, I've heard some entrepreneurs say this, actually entrepreneurs that I really respect, they say that when that's about to happen, that your old life throws the kitchen sink at you. It's kind of like hitting a final boss, if you will, that everything will go wrong. And you'll have fear and doubt. And I definitely did have those things. I was really worried about making a mistake. And again, maybe that's part of why I got the result that I did is because I was fearful or nervous about making a mistake because I have a family to feed. I have an obligation, I have a duty to take care of my family. And yeah, I mean, imagine for instance, if I actually like literally quit, like I literally burned the boats right there. And I just, instead of taking PTO told them like, I'm out, I'm done leaving. And then my Amazon story is suspended. And then I don't sell anything for like three weeks. Uh, that's three weeks of like basically zero income. That's brutal, man. That's really, um, that would have been, that would have been really bad. So, you know, We as aspiring dadpreneurs, we have a little more constraints, but they're beautiful constraints in terms of having a family to support. And so we have to be responsible. But implore you guys, I'll keep you updated. I'm right there. It's still going to happen. I'm still going to make it happen this year. But I guess not quite yet. Not quite yet. I've got to get things. corrected here, I got to get the Amazon store back up and running and I got to get my mojo back with the sales and we will do both of those things. And when we do both of those things, we will finally have made the transition from employee to the entrepreneur. So guys, if you're out there listening to this and you want to do it yourself, please join me. Shoot me a DM. Let me know. Let me know you're joining my journey and I'd love to help you if I can keep you accountable, give you whatever I need or whatever you need really. So Please shoot me a DM guys. I'd love to know you if you're an aspiring dadpreneur because I really have a heart for you guys. I really believe that there needs to be more of us out there. So if you're thinking of doing it, please join me. Make the transition to entrepreneur and I will see you on the other side.