Latest / Pitch to Product / "You're Not An Entrepreneur, You're Unemployed" - The Untold Truth About Starting A Business
Transcript
- Peter | Over-prototype: Hey, I'm Peter Drakolich, and this is going to be a different segment in the Pitch to Product podcast. This is going to be the business talk that no one wants to talk to you about. You know, so look, it I always say this. It's easy to go buy a house. It's hard. It's a difficult process. It's scary, but there is a lot of people around you that have already done that several times. Just like buying a car. The process sucks. But people have done it around you so that you know what to expect. I would challenge you to ask this. How many people around you have started a business? Okay. That is the person that you need to understand, talk to. And I will tell you, anybody that's a business owner probably doesn't want to ever work for somebody else. And look, I'll be even kind of comical here. There's two types of business owners, those who can't work for somebody else and those who don't want to work for somebody else. And that's okay either way, because if you look at your neighbors and you see that there is a branded truck in there. driveway, knock on their door if you're about to start a business. Sit down with that person, buy them a cup of coffee, invite them to a barbecue. Learn from the person who started a business because they will tell you there is no one, two, three, there's no steps one, two, three. There is step one, that failed. Step two, that failed. Step six, I thought was going to work. But since one and two didn't succeed, how do I do this? It is the analogy of the squiggly line. Success does not come with a with an even keel like paved road. And anybody that thinks that, wake up. Because you're about to invest a lot of money thinking that this is really easy. And there's a lot of tools out there, and there's a lot of companies out there that will make it seem easy. What they will avoid to tell you is where the hard parts are. This is what this, this is what this conversation is going to be about. The hard parts are the things that nobody tells you. And that is when you're making the mistakes. You need to understand and discover the hard parts. Ask the right questions. Don't avoid them. Hard things are actually hard. But when you figure them out, you're in a you're in a one percent club. You are now a business owner. Business owners did not take an easy path. They took the hardest path to figure out how to be unique and they're in the one to three percent club. That's also why they live a lifestyle. They're they're working eighty, ninety hours a week, but they are giving, they're putting a difference into the world. They are putting a better product and a process in the world. They're seeing opportunity and doing things that other people will not do and did not do, and they're making a good living at it. Right. You you you've heard right now. ⁓ the only thing the AI won't be able to like really fix are trades. ⁓ they're gonna tell you how much a linear foot should cost. ⁓ good luck, because getting AI to like give you a ⁓ a quote or do the job at the linear foot that it believes that it would it needs ⁓ doesn't have the quality conversation, the material conversation, the labor conversation. So all those things, there's no bill of material. You are hiring people that have an expertise that do a job. Not a bill of goods or a bill of a list of of items that need to come back and get the job done. It just doesn't work that way. So in this business talk, I want you guys to just open your mind, open your eyes, listen and talk to people that are business owners. And what I will tell you is that small business owners are stuck every day working in their business instead of on their business. And you can hear all the the top people tell you that like working on your business is more important than working in your business. I would say crap. Okay. You can't swear on this thing, but yeah, no, that's not. You are always working in your business to learn how to work on your business. And if you don't do that, you are doing something else. ⁓ I love the fact that everyone thinks that ⁓ we I I think Steve, you brought it up, and sorry, Steve's off camera. So if I'm referencing it, ⁓ it's a reminder. We talked about franchising. I do not believe that you're an entrepreneur if you take on a franchise. I think it's a great business model. But what you are is you're an employee to a system that is what well worked out, right? You're paying because you don't have to go through the headache. What you have to do is do the work. That is why you don't get the majority of that. You work hard, the volume's there, and you're making nickels and dimes, but it's paying you extremely well. So I'm not anti-franchise model. I think that is a great process for people who are entrepreneurial that don't know how to do business. I would challenge this. Once someone knows how a business works. I can't unsee what I've learned. I cannot look at the world anymore and say, okay, I know how that business works. I know how that business works because I am in the business of building businesses. And so you need to understand that the first time you do a business, you learned everything. Put yourself on a weekend, take your own retreat. I give you permission to go and get yourself out of that and ask yourself the poignant questions. What did I do to become successful? What is that replicatable thing that That made me successful in this business that I had no business starting. Okay. I had a great conversation this morning with a woman who flourished in a cookie business. I got people telling me, well, you know, here's the here's the conversation. An inventor thinks that they're the only ones ever and that they're gonna make this billion dollars on the fact that that no one has this idea that everyone has already got. Okay. The One entrepreneur is going to do all the things to tell all the friends and family about what this great idea and they want a validation and information and they'll never take action. I would say that those are, you know, people that like to teach, people that like to show, people that like to do, but they don't like to take action. An entrepreneur, ⁓ I'll be honest, an entrepreneur is basically a title for unemployment. That's it. I'm I'm gonna say it the way is. I love the entrepreneurial spirit. I'm all about starting businesses. But if you have entrepreneur on your ⁓ card, take it off. An entrepreneur, ⁓ I'll be honest, an entrepreneur is basically a title for unemployment. That's it. I'm I'm gonna say it the way is. I love the entrepreneurial spirit. I'm all about starting businesses. But if you have entrepreneur on your ⁓ card, take it off. Because you're you're basically you're telling everybody you're unemployed and you're unwilling to work and you think that you're doing something. Because you're you're basically you're telling everybody you're unemployed and you're unwilling to work and you think that you're doing something. Move into the zone. Everybody can start a business. You can go buy a lawnmower, you can start cutting grass tomorrow. You can go do something. It's the action. The difference between an entrepreneur and a business owner is action, activity, asking the right questions and being prepared to fail. An entrepreneur stays in this comfort zone. And I will I'll be honest, there is more ⁓ entrepreneurs than there are entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs is this one little step. It is the step. It it goes like a flash from being a I got an idea to wanting to be a ⁓ an entrepreneur to entrepreneurship. You stay there, then you go into entrepreneurship. That entrepreneurship is your decision point. You have to decide right there, am I in or am I out? Because if you stay in the entrepreneur zone, you will stay unemployed. You are an entrepreneur to start a business. You're an entrepreneur to go and discover things that someone's missing in the market. You're an entrepreneur to say this is a product idea that needs to be in market. But the minute you stay in that entrepreneur zone, you are wasting time, money, effort, and you're and you like you need to just take that step. And that's hard. It's really hard to say, ⁓ my God, how do I come up with the money to start something? Let me clear that for you. You have people around you that trust you, that see that you're a hard worker, that know that you're going to do these things. What you what you need to show them is how do I do this? And what you need to do first is say, I am doing this. If you say, I'm going to do this, I want to do this, and I'm gonna like I'm I'm showing you all the things I've already done to do this, that's got no credible action. You have to decide, I am going to do this. When you have that clarity, you will see your shoulders relaxed, the universe will start giving you information, you will start making better decisions and you will figure out how to start your business. And really look at anytime you start a business, the biggest question is where do I get the money? How do I get the money? You either have enough to invest, which will lead to another question. What happens if this doesn't work? Well, look at high probability it doesn't. So get those questions out of the way. Figure out, and I I always say this, it's the ramen soup conversation. If you can afford to eat ramen soup for the next three years, you should do this. Okay. If you don't have to eat ramen soup for the next three years and do this, you should have done this already. You've got the money. You're not living well. This is disposable income. You're gonna spend it on worse things. That's my opinion. The conversation of ramen soup when you have kids in the development years, I wouldn't recommend doing it because what you're gonna do is you're gonna take kids that are nine to fifteen years old wondering why they can't get Chipotle and they they want to have and they're you're making them eat ramen soup, you're gonna have angry adults that way. So avoid that, right? Like be realistic, invest in them, get their kids, get that out of the way. But the other conversation, if you're currently eating ramen soup, you get no choice. Go find the money. Go go get the idea. Keep your day job. Don't quit your day job. Don't dream don't be a dreamer that this is going turn into a thing. Start with the side hustle, turn it into a business, get get money coming in, and then do the next one, do the next one, do the next one. Because the only way you get out of the ramen soup conversation is you got to take action. All of these take action. Look at that's my rant for today. ⁓ there's gonna be a lot more of these because look at I love the fact that this is forced by the change in the world that people are seeing, not seeing. AI is at the forefront of changing the world. And I am the first one to tell you I believe in it. The information that AI is giving you is accurate. It is out of context a little bit that you need to put yourself into the you need to ask it better prompting questions. Everyone loves to know that I have ⁓ I got this billion dollar idea. No, you don't. What you have is an idea that you need to start at the ground level and you need to look at this as a strategic platform to say, who do I need to be better than? Who do I need to take a little bit of market share from? Who do I need to then improve? And everyone wants to be at the top. I want to be number one. You know what? Start with the opposite. I just want to be really good at something that's missing in the market. And then the rest of it will build naturally. And that's the bit that's the better attitude. And I don't know if there's any expert out there or anybody that is telling you that truth, but that's the truth. And ask any business owner how they started the business and how they became successful. They did not think that they were doing. The billion dollar idea. What they were knew is they saw a customer need that they could fill. And that is how they started. And then they learned how to re rinse and repeat that. Then they learned how to scale that. They learned how to do more things with that. And that is how they became successful. That is just fact. So look at appreciate it. Share this. Like this. It's time to have business conversations because this world that we are in right now, you can launch a product idea any day of the week that you want. The question isn't. You know, should you? The question is why shouldn't you? That's what I got.