Latest / The SmallBizChat with Melinda Emerson / How Small Businesses Solve Real-World Problems with Jim Beach

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How Small Businesses Solve Real-World Problems with Jim Beach · The SmallBizChat with Melinda Emerson

0:00
Three, two, one, zero.
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Ignition.
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Lift off.
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Ending small business failure.
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Welcome to the Small Biz Chat podcast with the number one small business expert, Melinda
0:17
Emerson.
0:18
Melinda's goal is to end small business failure, and she'll give you the information
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you need to succeed and live the life you dream of.
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Now here's your host, the small biz chat lady herself, Melinda Emerson.
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Have you subscribed to the small biz chat podcast?
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Well, it's time.
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Every Wednesday, we offer listeners bite sized actionable tips to start and grow a successful
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small business.
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In just twenty minutes or so a week, you can get a ton of insight and resources to propel
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your business forward.
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Be sure to subscribe to the Small Bitch Chat podcast today.
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Hi, everybody.
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Welcome to another episode of the Small Biz Chat podcast.
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I'm Melinda Emerson, small biz lady, your host, America's number one small business expert.
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And I'm so excited that you all are here with me for another great addition.
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Today, I'm gonna be talking with my good friend, Jim Beach.
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He's a nationally syndicated radio host on 80 AM and FM stations five days a week.
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His show has won an SBA Media Award, the first podcast to do so.
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And in 2024, Microsoft MSN named him a top 10 speaker to watch.
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He's a four time author and he founded his first company at 24, scaled it to 700
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employees, 39 states, three countries, all without outside funding.
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He's taught entrepreneurship for years at Georgia State and CNN has dubbed him the Simon
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Cowell of Small Business.
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He's authored four books, but he's got a brand new book out called The Real Environmentalist
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and he's gonna tell us about that and more.
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But if you want more information about him, just head over to jimbeach.com.
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My friend, Jim Beach, welcome to the Small Bitch Chat podcast.
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Hello, thanks for having me.
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Good to see you again.
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Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to talk to you.
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You know, a hardcore veteran entrepreneur is always fodder for a great conversation.
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Jim, walk us through your background.
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How did you get started in business at age 24?
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Well, I desperately wanted to work for Coca Cola and be the CEO of Coca Cola.
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You know, I'm an Atlanta boy and Coke is the center of Atlanta.
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And at 23, they decided to walk me out the door with two really big mean guards.
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And so I was escorted off the out of the company headquarters after saving them about a
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billion dollars in their Japan operation.
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I worked for the Japan operation for six months and they said that I don't play well with
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others and I should go off and start a business.
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And I had never can never thought of that.
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And I also wanted to go to architecture school and decided I would start a summertime
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business.
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And so I made a list a list of summer businesses, summer camps, pool cleaning,
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landscaping.
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And I don't like to get outdoors and in the hot because I sweat really bad.
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And so I decided to start a summer camp and I grew up kind of a dork.
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So I decided to start a computer summer camp.
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And the first location that we had the first year was Stanford and MIT.
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And so we started at the top and had 96 students the first year.
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The next year we had six locations, Georgetown, UCLA, Emory, SMU, and then 89 locations four
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years later doing 15,000 kids a day in some form of variety.
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Wow.
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Wow.
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So you exited that business and then did what?
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Started teaching at Georgia State University and teaching international entrepreneurship.
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And the first semester I was fairly arrogant, a lot worse than I am now.
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And I told my class this entrepreneurship, you know, it can be pretty easy.
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And my class was mostly nighttime MBA students working a full day.
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So these were people who were trying and, you know, 26, 27 year olds.
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And they said, no, Jim, it's pretty hard.
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Said, no, it's pretty easy.
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And I ended up making them a bet that I could start a business that semester and they could
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name the country and the industry that I started the business in, and I had to be cash
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flow positive and restart all or repay all of the startup capital before the end of the
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semester, or they all got A's.
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Well, I won the bet and that became the center story of my first book with McGraw Hill called
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School for Startups, which is also the name of the radio show.
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Love it.
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Love it.
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Love it.
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So wow.
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So I I feel like I need to go back and read that, Jim.
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That's a lot.
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I know that when you think about entrepreneurship, the way you talk about
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entrepreneurship, you always talk about creativity, risk, and passion.
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Now, what roles do these three things do you think take on in creating a great business?
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Well, I disagree or disapprove or disenfranchise all of them.
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I think they're all a mistake.
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You know, 3% of businesses are copies of other businesses.
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We have Nike and Reebok, McDonald's and Burger King, Hyatt and Hilton.
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And so if I wanna start a business, I go find someone that started a business that I think is
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really cool and copy it and just do it better than them.
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I actually had a summer camp competitor.
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They were based out of the Clark Crest Resort in Connecticut.
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You remember Dirty Dancing Melinda, the movie?
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Imagine that facility aged thirty years and then running a summer camp there.
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My product was at Stanford and MIT and Georgetown and UCLA and Sorbonne and Cambridge,
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etcetera.
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Like, you know, so my product was much better and I ended up winning that battle.
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And you sit on the sofa waiting for your inspiration.
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Don't wait for inspiration of the God lightning bolt.
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Just go start a copycat business and do it very well.
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And while you're doing that, you're not gonna spend more than $5,000 to get up and running.
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You will test your business for $5,000 I got the summer camp business up for under $1,000 I
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can walk you through every penny of it if you want me to.
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I know a guy who started a restaurant chain.
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What is the most expensive startup thing you can think of?
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Well, an airline company and then a restaurant.
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Restaurants cost 2 or $3,000,000 to start.
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He started one for under $10,000 It's still open thirty years later.
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And so I believe that you limit risk as much as possible.
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That's your number one goal and only spend money that absolutely has to be spent.
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You don't get a business card until eight people have asked for it.
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You know, I was meeting with an entrepreneur the other day.
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Has office space and business cards, but doesn't know what her business model is yet.
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That just drives me crazy.
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So Melinda, I'm obsessive about reducing risk to the under 5,000 and passion.
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You know, I grew to be passionate about my summer camp business, but I've been in a lot of
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other businesses that I would never be passionate about furniture, purses, ladies,
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hand painted leather jackets, all sorts of other things that I've done that I'm not
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passionate about.
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And I would suggest that Simon Sinek is wrong, that my why of I just wanna work for myself and
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make enough money to support my family and wear shorts when I want to and have zero commute,
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that that's a big enough why.
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My business and my life doesn't have to solve every problem out there.
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I don't have to have a, my business is going to save the whales and the bunnies.
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You know, my business is going to make me and my family go to Disney whenever we want to.
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And that's why enough.
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And so I love it when you are passionate about your business.
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I'm jealous of that.
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I got in year two of the summer camp business, I got a letter from a mother said, Jim, I had
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not seen my daughter smile in five years.
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And she came home from camp laughing and with a best friend.
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Now it's hard not to be passionate about that kind of a business.
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And so of course I was very passionate about that, but that grew over time and there's
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nothing wrong with it growing over time.
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That leads to an idea called the corridor principle.
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So Melinda, you're standing in a really long hallway and you see doors off the right and
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left of the hallway all the way down, but you can't see into those rooms yet.
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So you've got to start down the path and then you can see into Room 101.
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I'm not really interested.
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No, keep going 102.
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Wow, look at what's in 102.
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I want to go to Room 102 and there you discover your passion, but you've got to start walking
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down with a copycat business.
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You know what?
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I think this is a really interesting thing that you've brought up because, I I too have a
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bugaboo about the word passion.
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I think I I like purpose as opposed to passion.
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When it comes to biz I feel like passion has become one of these overused words in business.
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And I think people are passionate about a lot of things.
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But if your passion does not have a profit center, what you have is a glorified hobby.
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Exactly.
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And so I am on the train with you, but I and I agree with you about risk, but I but I think
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you have to have a plan so that it does so it's a lot less risky.
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It's like you actually have a Oh,
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Oh, yeah.
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I I'm a big business plan writer.
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That you are it.
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Yeah.
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Let me interject for just a second before I forget.
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Jack GPT writes the most amazing business plans, and I've been getting more and more
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active with it up to about two hours a day now.
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But I've gotten so much work done in the last month because of it.
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If you have an idea, I ChatGPT, I saw a flower shop down the street that looked really
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interesting.
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Tell me everything you can find out about the business at 718 Woah Way, and what business
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model they have, and how I could copy it.
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Put that into ChatGPT and then keep going and keep going.
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It will tell you everything to do.
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And the advice that I'm seeing is very, very good.
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I agree.
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I I've become a ChatGPT aficionado myself.
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It has improved my personal productivity 200%.
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Mean, unbelievable.
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Yeah.
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I mean, it it's pretty amazing.
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Tell us about your nationally syndicated radio show because, I mean, man, five days a week,
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talk to me about how you built this and and and what your goal is with your radio show and how
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we can hear it too.
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Well, I started off, you know, just like everybody with some version of a podcast and I
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worked, you know, I knew very early on that I wanted to distinguish myself.
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This is fourteen years ago.
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I've been on the air for fourteen years, 2,600 episodes.
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And I knew very early that I wanted to differentiate anyone else who signs up for a
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podcast.
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And so I pursued radio stations, even if they were online radio stations, and then of course
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terrestrial from day one, because that makes me different from the podcaster.
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And the ultimate goal is for me to get hired to give a speech at the American Association of
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Dental Hygienists in Las Vegas, where my room airs comped and I get $10,000 for forty five
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minutes.
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That's what I'm ultimately selling.
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And if I am up against three podcasters and a 40 year old person is making the decision,
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three podcasters versus someone who's on 100 radio stations, which one's gonna win?
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Well, 100 people have validated my product and those are people who have to kick something
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else off the air to put me on the air.
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And so I've tried very hard to figure out what is the system to get onto a radio station?
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How do you get the programming director to make that decision?
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And we, you know, just like every other part of entrepreneurship, Melinda, you will say, create
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a system, right?
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You've got to create a system so that someone else can do it, not you.
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And I've done exactly that.
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I figured out the Get On Radio Station system.
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I don't do any of the work myself.
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It's all outsourced to a guy in The Philippines.
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I cannot stress how strongly I recommend you getting a Philippine, GA, you know, some sort
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of assistant, EA, executive assistant, whatever.
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My life is talking about doubling your productivity, my productivity has gone up 500%.
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$900 a month, college graduate, 100% fluent in English for $900 a month.
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You know, that's the first thing I would spend money on before business cards.
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And so that person now helps with that system.
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And we're up to five days a week.
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The show is 54 a day.
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And then we also create a ninety second version, a vignette version.
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But how long is 54 times five?
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That's four and a half hours.
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And I can do an entire week during one morning or one afternoon and then someone else edits it
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all up and puts it out, you know, one day at a time.
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Because it's systemized now, and I'll tell you, you know, during parts of the segments when I
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have to go back and forth with a co host or something, the co host films or records all of
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their segments.
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And then I record all of my segments at 02:00 in the morning when I want to, and I feel up to
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it.
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And I just do, you know, all eight things I have to say with a two second pause in between,
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and someone cleans it all up, you know?
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So I can record ten minutes of audio sometimes in six minutes.
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I love it.
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I love it.
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Yeah.
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I actually have been very successful with virtual assistants in The Philippines, in
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India, and I have found people in The Caribbean as well because I was looking for people that
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were on the same time zone as me.
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So I've been very successful with some folks in Saint Lucia and other Caribbean islands who
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speak English without so much of a thick accent and things like that.
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So I think that it's all about whatever you want is out there.
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And I'm I'm in full agreement with what you're saying and letting you guys know that I have
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someone like that in my business as well.
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I do have an American VA in my business too who's been with me over fourteen years who
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handles more higher level technical type things that I need done.
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But listen, I'm I'm here for your first hire should be your VA.
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I I have cosigned that 150%.
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What would you say are the top three mistakes that business owners make, particularly
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business owners under, you know, sort of like three years in business?
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Well, the financial thing, you know, I'm obsessed with the money.
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We've already kind of talked about that.
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People who have office space but can't tell me what their business model is yet.
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That drives me crazy.
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So, you know, I want you to have a check-in hand that you can't put into the bank because
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you don't have a bank account yet.
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You know, that's the ultimate situation because you should only be doing things that produce
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revenue now in the business.
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You don't need to go get your LLC.
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You don't need a bank account until you have a check to put in the bank.
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So I have a financial obsession.
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Don't spend any money unless God lets you do it and God will call you down on the phone.
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You can buy that.
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That's it.
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Then second is something about the ability to describe what they do.
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You know, a lot of people tell me what they do and I have no clue what they do.
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I'm in technology, or I'm in digital technology, or I'm in digital technology
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assets, or I'm in digital technology asset reproduction.
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I don't know what any of that stuff means, you know.
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So be very clear about what you do.
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You know, for example, the summer camp, I had lots of value propositions.
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Well, don't you want to send your kid to Stanford and MIT or Georgetown UCLA this
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summer?
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I'm the guy that makes that happen.
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You you won't forget that.
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Or here, Melinda, I know you're a mom.
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What about this?
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Send your child to me and they'll come home laughing for the first time in two or three
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years.
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That's what I do.
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What's your credit card, You're a mom.
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If you had an unhappy kid at home and had someone tell you that, are you not already
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sold?
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I would definitely be already sold for that.
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Definitely already be sold for that.
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All right.
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So let's talk about your new book, The Real Environmentalist.
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Tell me about it.
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Yes.
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Thank you.
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I love the environment, and I want a clean environment for my kids and grandkids.
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And I I'm not denying that things are changing, you know, temperatures are changing and I'm not
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going to deny any of that.
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But the incredibly happy message that I want to share with everyone is, is that you name me an
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environmental concern and I will introduce you to the entrepreneur starting a business to
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solve that exact environmental problem.
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The problems are being solved.
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You know that big black blob of plastics that's floating in the Pacific Ocean?
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There are three companies for profit cleaning that up.
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One of them turns that plastic stuff into sneakers and flip flops and stuff like that and
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makes an incredible.
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That's an incredible new business.
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And one of the other guys I interviewed in the star of the book is a guy named Wayne Elliott
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out of Canada.
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He made a fortune buying aircraft carriers and submarines and, you know, abandoned oil rig
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ships and stuff and recycling it down to absolutely nothing and recycling all of that
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scrap and asbestos and everything and iron and steel and batteries and figuring out how to
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make that profitable.
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And he does has been doing it for fifty years now.
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And then along the way, was like, damn it.
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I can't do anything with these batteries.
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So he spent 20,000,000 of his own dollars figuring out how to recycle alkaline batteries
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and Canada made it a requirement at every drugstore and grocery store in Canada had a box
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for his company.
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Everyone knew to put the batteries in that box and they all got recycled.
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That business was just sold to BlackRock.
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You really don't get a more prestigious buyer in the world than BlackRock.
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I think they have $17,000,000,000,000 godzillion dollars under management and then
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half a birth.
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And so he had an amazing exit with that.
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The book is about these people and I found two sixteen for profit startup businesses that are
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100% tackling the environmental problem that keeps you up at night.
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So the message is an incredibly happy one.
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You are not going to die from an environmental problem.
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Well, maybe you do, but society does not end because of the environment.
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We do not lose New York and Miami because of the environment.
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The Netherlands, 90% of Netherlands has been three feet underwater for a hundred years now,
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and they're doing quite fine there.
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So it's an incredibly happy message.
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And then Melinda to spice it up, we had chat GPT find the 10 biggest celebrity enviro
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hypocrites.
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The people who say they're doing so much and in fact are doing absolutely nothing.
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So the data is not my personal opinion.
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It is chat GPT generated, and we published the list of the 10 biggest hypocrites in the world
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and tell you why.
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And so I hope your celeb is not on the list.
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Well, listen, Jim.
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With with a tease like that, you do know that you gotta give me a couple of people on the
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list.
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Who's on the list?
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Well, you name people, and I'll give you some indications.
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You think about it.
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Who do you think would be on there?
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Let me tell you this.
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The worst thing you can do for the environment is to own a superyacht.
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And if you own a superyacht, that's worth 600,000 families of pollution.
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So imagine how arrogant that is that I deserve a superyacht and the pollution that it causes
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for 600,000 families.
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That's how much better than I am.
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So anyone that owns a super yacht is a very big candidate.
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Someone who just got married, you know someone who just got married?
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A I
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know lots of people that
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A billionaire that got married in Italy.
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Yeah.
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From a lady that looks like she was made with balloons.
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Looks like a cartoon character.
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I think, do I know who you're talking about?
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He runs a book retailing business online, started in books.
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Now they sell anything.
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Can you think of any company?
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Let
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think.
21:37
Could that company don't know.
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They start with
21:41
an out of Seattle.
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Do they start with an A and end with a zon?
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Maybe so.
21:46
Maybe so.
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He's on the list for sure.
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You know, he has the yacht, the superyacht for he and his wife.
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And then there's another superyacht that follows it follows it around to carry the toys,
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the extra submarine and the extra helicopter.
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So he has not one but two superyachts.
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That's over a million people's worth of pollution that he's creating for his summer in
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the, the med.
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Yeah.
22:12
Yeah.
22:13
Well, I mean, but but are there corporations on this list or is it
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just individuals, certainly bash some companies and point out the fines that they've gotten,
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you know.
22:22
All right.
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Give me one or two of those guys.
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Who else are you guys with this bad people list?
22:30
Cola had a $300,000,000 fine.
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The biggest fine ever was 17,000,000,000 for German Volkswagen for completely lying about
22:40
their EPA fuel efficiency by about 20% for their entire fleet of cars.
22:47
They got caught.
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And you know, the worst are I hate to bash again, but the super yacht industry, Elon Musk
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is not doing the world any good.
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He's also high on the list despite all of the good things that he does do clearly.
23:04
He started Tesla, but Tesla, if you study Tesla, it's really awash environmentally, you
23:10
know, it's not actually wrong when you study the disposal of the batteries and the shipping
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of the batteries, all of the we've averaged the entire life cycle from mine to road, the Tesla
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comes out almost exactly neutral.
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But his SpaceX, as much as I love it and think it's one of the coolest companies ever.
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They've had some huge environmental violations, with billions.
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I'm not sure how, let's say millions of fines that they've paid.
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So I think the list is pretty fun, though.
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It, you know, talks about the celebrities.
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This really got me, Melinda.
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This is, the Kardashians were the worst of this.
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A $100,000 a month water bill fine because they're using so much over their allotment that
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they're fined $100,000 a month plus their water bill, which could be $250,000 They're spending
24:11
that per month to keep their grass green in the middle of a desert.
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You know, that is upsetting.
24:17
Oh, and then here's the worst.
24:18
I don't know if you heard about tests, not Tesla, but OpenAI chat GPT and their facility
24:24
in Texas is using more water than the rest of the state of Texas.
24:29
That one facility, it was, article came out last week.
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And so there's certainly a company that's, you know, fun to play with.
24:35
I already bragged.
24:36
You and I both bragged about playing with them.
24:39
They use more water than Texas does.
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Wow.
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That's really scary.
24:44
Right?
24:44
To think about that, that's not good.
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As they say, that's a no bueno.
24:48
That's
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no good.
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That's not that's not awesome.
24:52
Alright.
24:52
Well, listen, Jim.
24:53
It has been so wonderful to sit here and talk to you.
24:57
I've got one last question for you.
24:59
What is the best business advice that you have ever been given?
25:07
Tons of things are jumping into mind, but a lot of those would be repetitive.
25:13
Do the one thing that you're good at and stop doing the other stuff, you know, do the one
25:17
thing that you do.
25:18
Maybe it's you're an amazing cook.
25:20
Well, then don't try to be the manager of the restaurant to just cook.
25:23
Maybe you're an amazing plumber or whatever.
25:26
Do the one thing that you're good at because you and I have talked about this before
25:30
Melinda.
25:30
I we believe I think we believe this together that God gave us a set of basket of talents and
25:37
values and abilities.
25:39
And the way we honor God the best, perhaps, I argue this, is to use that basket to its
25:44
fullest, and that's what an entrepreneur does.
25:47
Uses all the skill God gave you.
25:50
I love it.
25:50
I love it.
25:51
Thank you so much, Jim, for being a guest on the Small Biz Chat podcast.
25:55
And for those of you that are listening, if you are a business owner, a coach or consultant,
26:02
and you are struggling to get sales, or you're struggling to close your sales, listen, I can
26:09
help you.
26:11
A lot of times you guys are struggling with your sales because you don't have a sales
26:14
process or maybe you know how to generate leads but you're not qualifying leads.
26:19
You got all these people wasting your time.
26:21
Or worse than that, you get them on the meeting and you don't know how to close them.
26:27
Well, listen, if you are ready to stop all of that craziness in your business and have a
26:33
steady flow of sales, leads, and closes, you need to be a student in in my sales accelerator
26:44
boot camp.
26:45
I built this program to help coaches and consultants learn how to sell.
26:49
And here's my brand promise to you.
26:53
I'm the last person who's really gonna have to teach you this.
26:55
You're not gonna have to keep waffling and figuring this out.
26:58
I'm gonna teach you my systems.
27:00
I'm gonna show you the software we use.
27:03
I'm gonna show you how to get your appointment centers and closers.
27:06
And after I do that, it's gonna start raining money in your business.
27:10
So check out smallbizladyuniversity.com.
27:14
We have what you need to boost the sales in your business today.
27:18
Check out the Sales Accelerator Boot Camp right now.
27:23
All right, thank you everybody for joining us for this episode of the Small Biz Chat podcast.
27:28
I want to leave you with this.
27:30
You never lose in business.
27:32
Either you win or you learn.
27:35
God bless everybody.
27:39
Thanks for listening to the Small Biz Chat podcast with Melinda Emerson.
27:44
Subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and join us next Wednesday for
27:49
more fantastic information and interviews.
27:52
You can find more sources and small business success strategies by visiting Melinda's
27:57
website, succeedasyourownboss.com.
28:00
Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next week.