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9–5 Is Riskier Than You Think · The Expert Method

• speaker-0: It's very hard for you to feel secure. There's an illusion of security when you have a job. It's very dangerous to make decisions out of fear. It's never been easier to create something out of thin air right now with AI. Thinking is overrated. You don't know anything. I don't know anything. What's in my head is not fact. It's theory. speaker-1: A lot of people think they're playing it safe. Steady job, consistent paycheck, predictable path. But you're still relying on decisions you don't make inside a system you don't control. And the longer you stay there, the harder it is to bet on yourself later. So with that, I'm excited to be joined by Omar Zinham. Omar is the founder of the hundred dollar MBA and has spent over a decade teaching people how to build a business that actually makes money. In our conversation, we discuss why the traditional idea of safe work is often the riskiest path, how to rethink failure so you can actually move faster and improve your product, and what it really looks like to start from zero and build something people will pay for. If you get value from this conversation, be sure to hit subscribe and share it with a friend. And now here is my conversation with Omar Zinham. Omar, thank you so much for being here. speaker-0: Well, it's great to be here. Thanks, Ian, for having me. speaker-1: Of course, honored. So Omar, in some of your content recently, you've made the argument that what most people consider safe, like a nine to five, is actually one of the riskiest paths. What do you mean by that? speaker-0: If you don't have a way to create your own wealth, if you have no way to create your own income, it's very hard for you to feel secure. There's an illusion of security when you have a job. But the fact of the matter is, say for example, a company you're working for is not doing so well. The market changes, their industry changes, the needs of their customers change, and they make you redundant. They lay you off. Right. There's nothing you can do about that. You can't solve that problem. Now, if you have a business on the other hand, and that happens, the market changes, the customers needs change, you can pivot with that. You could do something about it. You could solve that problem and you can continue to earn an income. But you can't solve that problem for the company. It's kind of out of your hands. And then you're at the wills of anybody that is going to hire you in the next round of hiring. Now, I'm saying this as somebody who came from a very secure background. I was a teacher for a decade. I went into education because I wanted a secure job and I thought everybody needed teachers, so that's the job I took on. I worked up the ladder and I became the chair of the department of the university I worked for. And ⁓ when I wanted to get a promotion, it's out of my hands. It's basically up to whoever's above me. And if they decide to make an outside hire, if they decide to go with somebody else, if they just don't like... The way I look, whatever it is, it's out of my control. Whether it's fair or not, that's not the point. The point is that you are not in control of your own destiny. To me, that is not living. For me, my whole reason of entrepreneurship is that I want to be able to do and create what I want to do and create. As long as you are employed, it's going to be very hard for you to do that. And this is not to knock anybody in a job or who chooses a path or a career to be in. a job or work for a company because I have a lot of respect for people that know what they want. And a lot of people say they want to start a business. They say they want to have this great idea they've been working on and they've been working on it for two years in their head. And it's just like, you're lying to yourself because if you actually wanted to do it, you would have done it already. You know, so I actually respect a lot of people that just admit the fact that like, actually I like working for a company and I'm okay with the risks involved there. But to pretend there is no risk is delusional. speaker-1: Yeah, 100%. And I think another point to kind of underline your thinking there is that if you're working for another business, you are not the priority of that business, right? You are a part of the machine, a part of the, a part of the team, right? And they're going to talk about the value of team and how much they care about everyone there. But at the end of the day, that business has to do what's in the best interest of that business. Now what's in the best interest of you as an individual, right? And when you're seeing this transformation that's happening with all these AI tools that are coming out. the best decision for a business to make is going to be the best decision for that business. And that could include using AI to kind of replace a lot of the employees within their organization, right? So if you are an employee, so you're just not the priority, right? They're not prioritizing your well-being and you as speaker-0: I don't know if I 100 % agree with that. It's not that you're not the priority because I have teammates. It's just that the value that you add to the company doesn't align with the value that they need to provide to the customer. So like if you are providing a certain amount of value, say for example, your value is to be able to take notes in a meeting, right? If AI is coming in and can do that for you with Granola AI or whatever might be, whatever tool, then what value can you add to the company that can allow the company to grow? If you can't grow and pivot and change, then you're out of value, right? That's just the rules of the game, right? So it's not about you're not important. It's about what value can you bring? And if you don't bring value that's needed, that's at the moment, that it's going to be hard for you to kind of grow and really do well in that company. Now, the thing about entrepreneurship is that what I love about it is that there's no lying. Right? You can't deny the marketplace. Like the market doesn't like what you put out there. It's going to tell you by not buying your product. So there's no way around not being valuable. So you have to be constantly valuable, which means that you have to become valuable. That's why I think entrepreneurship is the number one personal development program in the world because it forces you to become a better person and to continually evolve and get better because that's what the market demands. Otherwise you're not going to be valuable enough for customers to want what you have. And where's the value gonna come from? It's gonna come from you, whatever ideas, whatever products, decisions you make come from you. So I don't wanna poo poo anybody who's thinking like, well I'm in a job and I was in that career for 10 years. And the bottom line is that no matter what I put out there, the value I thought was valuable was not valuable to my boss, wasn't valuable to the company. Maybe it's valuable for somebody else or in some other world or any other company, but the reality was is that they just didn't want what I had and there's nothing I could do about that. So you don't really have much autonomy. speaker-1: Yeah. And that autonomy piece is kind of more so what I was hinting at, but to add onto what you just shared, a great quote that I heard is that entrepreneurship is personal development wrapped in capitalism. That one really stuck with me because it's so true. It's like, you're not going to grow more anywhere else than you will in the process of trying to build a business, just because everything kind of comes back to you. The extreme, stream ownership idea, like you have to grow to become the person in order to operate a business to the level of scale that you want to get to. Going back to the. Like you not being a priority piece is they're not making the decisions of the business. Like when you're an entrepreneur, right? You get to ask yourself the question of what do I want to build? Like what is the outcome that I want to create in my life? Like what is the situation, the lifestyle that I want to create for myself? you had kind of talked about it in your, in your keynote. Like there's going to be sacrifices that you have to make, but like you are. building this business for the purpose of creating, enabling you to be able to live the lifestyle that you want to live. And if you're working for another business, that really isn't taken into account. You can have your own personal ambitions, your own personal goals, but they're not going to be optimizing the business in order to enable that lifestyle that you want to live. Right? So another way to attack the angle of going and working at nine to five is risky. I believe is that it's, you know, not really going to enable you to have that autonomy to be able to create the lifestyle. or enable the lifestyle that you want to live, if that makes sense. speaker-0: Yeah, I could see that perspective 100%. And if we just zoom out completely and we ask ourselves the question like, are only non-renewable resources or time? So how much time am I willing to invest in a paycheck? I spent up to my, I was up to 32 years old until I left my teaching job and went full-time entrepreneur. And the thing about that transition is like, it's my number one regret that I didn't do it earlier because every day you you delay it is another day you're not living the life you want. It's another day that you're now going after your dreams. Now, it might take you five years to get to the point, five years of building your business and growing and learning to get to the point where you feel like you're living the lifestyle you want or you're building the business that you want. But it doesn't deny the fact that the more you delay, the more you're going to delay by another day, another month, another year. And I feel like when we delay things, Often we delay it because we're afraid. We're afraid to take a decision. We're afraid to make a mistake What if people don't like me? What if people are what are gonna say my family my friends all that kind of stuff and my number one like rule and Lesson I got out of my life is that it's very Dangerous to make decisions out of fear anytime fear is in the equation often. It's the wrong decision and The reason why we feel uncertain is because we just don't have enough information Unfortunately, a lot of people think that information comes before action. It's actually the opposite. You don't know what to do until you do something, right? You have to actually roll the dice on the board game of life and see what happens. And then, and from there you can make a decision. You're going to learn something from by trying something out. So a lot of us, want to like plan and this was me plan and meticulously. Figure out the business before we put out in the world and then just put out in the world Hopefully it's gonna be successful because our planning was amazing. That's just not how the how business works you have to actually Test modify even when you look at like somebody with a YouTube channel for example Like they don't just put out a video they put out a video and a thumbnail on a title only test in the AB test and there's constant testing happening to figure out before they put out the next video and the iterations happen so they can improve and grow all that that's what business is and in order for you to learn and grow and to make progress you have to take action and that's the scary part. don't want to take action because what if they fail? Well it's not the end of world you still survive. Usually you're going to still have a roof over your head and have food to eat. as long as you're happy with that criteria as winning, as long as I can eat and have a roof over my head, you're going be alright. speaker-1: And the idea of like failure, this is something that came up in the last conversation that we had on the podcast is, you know, I feel like we've been, the way that we've kind of been brought up and are the natural view of fear is pretty, or sorry, failure is unproductive. Like we look at failure as just like the end all be all like something to be avoided at all costs. When the way that I look at failure is like, you really only fail if you quit, if you give up and then failure. is just a part of the learning experience. But yeah, I think that's definitely a big part of it too. It's just like kind of a, I don't want to say irrational, but just an unproductive view of what failure is. Like we take it way too seriously. I think we take failure too seriously. speaker-0: That's a really good point. I'll pick it back on that point and say that if you've ever played any kind of games, card games, basketball, sport, any kind of competition, it's very hard to win if you're afraid to fail, if you're afraid to lose. You can't play not to lose. You have to play to win. That's the same thing in life and business. You have to go out there and be like, it's okay if I lose. It's okay if I fail. It's okay if it doesn't work out because I'll have another try at it. I highly recommend anybody who's into entrepreneurship that wants to taste what entrepreneurship is about is to play poker. Poker is a great game to learn about what it's like to be an entrepreneur because basically poker is making decisions on limited information. And based on your limited information, you have to try to win the hand. And the point of poker is to win all the chips. You want to win big pots. And you can't win big pots without taking big risks and putting yourself out there. And that's just the name of the game. You have to play to win, not to lose. If you try not to lose in a game like poker, you just eventually end up losing all your chips and you lose. And this is how it is. And you just kind of fizzle out. Same thing, any kind of sport, any kind of competition. If you're just trying not to lose by just playing defense and not playing offense, you're not going to score any points and you're going to lose. So you have to like play to win and not worry about failing. Even if you fail, it's okay. You have another game. You have another chance. Tomorrow's another day. And the thing about business is you only got to win once. You only have to a successful idea, successful business on your hand that's monetizable and that's giving you enough profit to be able to build and grow and scale for you to win at it. And so it's worth losing a bunch of times to get that one win. speaker-1: And you can accelerate this process if you intentionally through every failure, you look back and understand like what went wrong or what can you learn from that situation to kind of piggyback off the poker analogy, right? You are learning from every mistake, right? Okay, what did I get wrong there? And then, you know, I love poker too, but you can learn more information about each individual. Every single time you get down to showdown, you see what that person ended up having right now. That's just more information that you can use now in the future to make better. decisions. speaker-0: Just saying things like experimentation, exactly. ⁓ Any inventor can tell you that all the different experiments that failed led to the actual product that they created. It's not failure, it's just I figured out how not to do it. speaker-1: Right. I love it. Yeah. There's definitely a quote that's maybe it was Thomas Edison or some great inventor. It's like, well, in order to create the light bulb, I figured out 10,000 in one way is not to create it before I figured out how to actually do it. I love it. speaker-0: Which is a great idea. This is a great concept idea. It's like, that's what it takes. I have to fail a bunch of times to get... Eventually I'm going to get it right. Even by chance. speaker-1: Yep, and again, you're only, again, I feel like we need another word for it. Cause I really do think that failure only happens when you quit. Like when you give up on yourself, when you give up on the dream, when you give up on something, when you quit, when you stop, that is failure. Or maybe quitting is just the word, like that we really should be scared of. shouldn't be failing to accomplish something right away. Isn't, isn't really the thing to be scared of. It's quitting and giving up and selling yourself short. So going back to the idea again about the initial question of why nine to five is risky. And then you had mentioned the fact that you wish you had started it sooner, but the idea, like everybody makes entrepreneurship and starting your business seem so glamorous when it's really not. It is the hardest, like it is, you're going to grow a lot from it because of how much it sucks and how challenging it is. And it's going to force you to grow in order to get to the next step and make progress. But that idea of. Every day that you don't do it is one more day that you're farther away from, you know, accomplishing that end result, accomplishing that lifestyle that it is that you want to live. Also ties back into that point that we were again, kind of beating to death of if you're in an organization, your future, that lifestyle that you want to make is not the priority for them. So it's like, you're almost just kind of sacrificing that vision of the future that life that you want to be able to enjoy when you stay in there. But getting to a question is with AI, with all the job displacement that is happening, right? Say it's overblown, say it's not going to happen. It's probably going to end up being somewhere in the middle from what everybody's expectation is. There is going to be some of that that happens. Like I believe that the average number of employees per million dollars of revenue in a business is going to continue to go down or stay flat. But my view on it, and this is something that podcast listeners will have heard me say before, I am optimistic to a fault. Like I believe that that shift is going to push more people into a situation where they have to create more, find a way to create value for the world, right? Solve a problem, AKA become an entrepreneur, start a business. And from what I understand, that is something that you see as well. And you know, your work with the hundred dollar MBA is supporting people in that journey to create this business. Is that something that you see that you anticipate that this shift, like we're going to have more entrepreneurs or people are going to be forced into a situation to have to create their own value in the world? speaker-0: I find the best teacher in life in a lot of ways is history. So anytime there's any kind of major change shift dynamic that's happening in the world, whether it's ⁓ a recession, whether it's a real estate bubble that bursts, whether it's the dot-com boom and bust, whether it's now with AI, there's opportunity. There's always an opportunity for somebody to do something. It's never been easier to create something out of thin air right now with AI. AI is just... And the acceleration of what it can do is just absolutely bonkers. know, I'm able to create fully fledged apps in a weekend. Like this is just insane. I ran a software company for 10 years. founded and started a software company called Webinerninja. I built it for 10 years. We got acquired in 2024. And that journey took a long time because it would, to build a very sophisticated app. took years to really fully fledged and all the all the different features to just put out a new feature would take maybe a month or two. That type of work takes hours now. I prompted 30,000 lines of code with a hobby app that I created in three hours. This is just absolutely insane. Like, so a lot of people say, okay, so what do I do with that? Well, you can create value with that you can create something that people want. And I was like, well, if anybody could do this. Why should I do it? Why can't they just do it for themselves? Anything easy to do is also easy not to do. It's easy to go for a walk every day. It's easy to actually walk into the gym and do a few reps. But most people don't do it. And that's the point. The point is that just because it's approachable and easy and the bar is low, it doesn't mean people are going to reach the bar. So my hope and aspiration for people out there that want to start out, it's never been easier. I'll give you perfect example. We just opened up a studio office here in Sydney and we got a lease agreement and I want to negotiate the lease. Before AI, what are you going to do? You're going to go hire a lawyer, you're going to get a consultant, you're going to talk to a bunch of people, you're going to get charged per hour, right? You just upload these documents to Clawed and ask it, you know, like, how can I negotiate this? What are the terms? How can I, you know, what does this actually say and what can I do with this contract to be able to get closer to what I want? You know, and it scripts out an email for you and everything. this is just insane. Like, what are we talking about here? Like, this is just absolutely mind-blowing. it's never been easier for you to do the hardest things ever, and you could do it affordably. I was looking at the five top AI tools I use in my business, and they cost $79 combined a month. Like, this is just, what are we talking about now? So, like... My message to people here is that there's a huge opportunity here for you to create a business that it could be very valuable to people. Whether it's a product or service, you can embed it in your current business that you have, the current things that you offer, and you can increase the amount of revenue, the amount of customers you have in a very short amount of time. This is like unprecedented. It would be incredibly hard to do this, you know, a years ago. So capitalize on it. A lot of people ask me, how do I get started? How do I use it? Literally just download Claude, pay 20 bucks a month so you don't have to worry about your things running out and the memory and all that stuff. Anything you want to learn, ask it. It's going to teach you. It's going to show you how to do it. Some of it, they can just do it for you. Like you could literally take over your desktop and just do the actual tasks for you. Book the flight, know, research the product, whatever you wanted to do. Right now is a really a gold rush, I think, for people to create things. I think there's going to be a huge boom of solo preneurs and small team entrepreneurs that are building, you know, a hundred million dollar companies, even billion dollar companies with small teams because of the amount of value you can create with very little time and effort. speaker-1: And that just fires me up. Just the idea that more people are going to be entrepreneurs and just more people in that situation and just how accessible it has become. Because I believe on the risky side of things for sure, we've kind of, we've discussed that, but also on just like the overall engagement. Like I feel like a lot of people just are not engaged with the work that they're doing. Like we're just very separated from what we are here to do. Or we're here to be creative. you know, beings and just engage in the work that we're doing. So I feel like a lot of people are super disengaged from the work that their, their jobs. I feel like they're going to be kind of forced out of those, which is going to be really uncomfortable, unpleasant and hard. But once we kind of get through that transition, in order for you to be successful in your business, you need to actually genuinely care about the problem that you're solving, the people that you're helping. AKA you're, you're engaged with the work. Like you actually give a about doing a great job. So. in order to then be successful, you're going to have to find something you genuinely care about doing. So more people are just going to be enthusiastic, engaged with their work, doing the things that they're uniquely gifted at doing and solving a problem that they care about. think that's really exciting vision of the future. speaker-0: That's 100 % valid and then on the other side of the spectrum, it's never been easier to make a buck. You could literally call up all the local businesses in your area, the restaurants, the yoga studio, the dentist, everybody, go look at their website. Any trash websites, there's probably going to be more than 50 % of them that look horrible and look like they're from 2001. You could literally get Claude to redesign it, give you a URL. Email the business because their email is public, know, and just say, hey, I redesigned your whole website. If you want it, it's 500 bucks. Like so easy. for me, it's just so exciting because it's never been that easy. I used to design websites as a freelancer and that would take weeks of work. So yeah, I'm jealous. ⁓ speaker-1: Right. And what you, you mentioned this earlier, right? Like you, you mentioned it from the perspective of somebody who was maybe considering about starting a certain product and saying, well, if it's so easy, how is me doing this for them actually going to be valuable? But then you can apply that same thought process from we're saying all these things, right? That we've given them all these ideas on, you know, how easy it is to go make money, but 99 % of the people that listen to this aren't going to do anything. Right? So at what point does somebody go from realizing this, that how accessible this is and these shifts that are happening and how risky being in this job is to actually doing something about it and taking action and going and starting this business or starting the thing. speaker-0: You need to make a commitment to yourself. You need to commit, say, this weekend. This weekend, I'm going to make one sale, whatever it might be. I'm a big believer of like practical business, which means like sometimes you just need to make some money. Maybe you just need to like learn the mechanics of business. You don't need to start out with the passion project of your life and the business that's going to like fulfill you creatively in every way. Like that can happen. You could do that, but sometimes you just need to know like, how do I... make a sale, how do I give an invoice? How do I do accounting? How do I have a P &L sheet? Just like the basic, you know, business transaction. So just make a commitment. This weekend, I'm going to make a sale. I'm going to figure out how to make a sale and offer to somebody a service, a product, or whatever it might be. And choose something that people are already in pain with, that are already trying to solve for. So for example, people need to wash their car every day. What if you hired somebody to come out and wash their car? People need to cut their lawns. It keeps growing month after month. Go ahead and do that. Pest control. I had somebody on my podcast, David Royce, who sold his pest control company for half a billion dollars. We're talking about killing bugs. Like you don't need to be the next TikTok. You know what I'm saying is just as a thought experiment, what if I just offered some service, a cleaning service, and you don't have to do the work. You can find somebody to do the work and you pocket the difference. A handyman service. There's so many ways to do this, to do arbitrage of labor. And the point here is that just put yourself out there and see what it's like to ask somebody, hey, would you like this done? Learn from the experience. What are their pain points? Why they can't do that? Is it the schedule? Is it the timing? Are they afraid you're going to ding their car if you wash their car? Maybe it's better for them to it in their driveway rather than in your shop. Whatever it might be. The point is that think about just accomplishing one sale this weekend as an experiment. This doesn't have to be your business. know, it could be literally like printing a funny t-shirt and selling it to your friends. Like that is a business, just a transaction. So you can just get into the vibe of what it's like to be an entrepreneur and see how it is. And this is a baby step. And then from there you can say, okay, what's next? What else do I want to do? How else do want to make money? speaker-1: Yeah. So it starts by making that commitment. And I feel like you're only going to make that commitment if you have the desire, right? And that desire comes from you wanting to move away from pain or move towards some new pleasure ⁓ or creating some change, a desire to create some kind of change. And you're not listening to this podcast if you're not already there. You want to make a change. You want to learn something. You want to go change something. So yeah, I don't think we need to take any further steps back in the, in the journey of where you start. So it starts by making a commitment and then sticking to that commitment, like keeping the promises that you make with yourself. You know, it was absolutely vital if you want to accomplish anything, right? Like you can think things through all you want, but you actually have to go in and do the work and do the ⁓ speaker-0: I'm big believer that thinking is overrated. Thinking is overrated. You don't know anything. I don't know anything. Like, what's in my head is not fact. It's theory. Right? So what is fact is doing. If I do something, I will get an output. I'll figure out what's happening, right? I actually learned this from teaching. How do I know my students are learning something? I got to get them to reproduce what I'm teaching. So do something first. ⁓ I get it. You don't understand how to carry the one in the division. Okay, great. Let's go through that again. The point here is that you have to do to learn. The thoughts in your head, the ideas, they might seem brilliant in your head, but you're not your only customer. You need other people to buy. You need lots of other people to buy. And only way to know that is to put out in the world. Even if it's just like a waiting list page on a website where it's just like, would you be interested in signing up and getting like a founder's discount? If people are not willing to put their email in, they're not willing to buy and put their money down. So that alone is just an experiment of seeing, is somebody willing to buy my thing, my app, my product, my service? speaker-1: Talking about getting started, if this is something that you want to do, a great place that you can start too is by going to the $100 MBA. If somebody, when somebody gets started with the $100 MBA, what is the actual process that you guide them through, that you teach? What are the stages that people move through to make this happen? speaker-0: I would say 95 % of people that are listening right now don't need my program, which is $100 MBA program. It's $100 a month. And it's basically everything I know concise. And it's just in a format. If you want like a fast track way to like get started, we have three tracks. There's like start, grow, scale, depending on where you are in your journey. And it goes all the way up to a million dollars in revenue. It's based on revenue. For the rest of the 95 % Honestly, you could just consume the podcast, which is absolutely free. created 2,700 episodes and counting. We've been doing this for over 11 years. We cover every topic of the sun from Facebook marketing to how to fire and plea to, you know, how to scale your business to how do you do the finances of your business? How do you find the right account and all that kind of stuff, right? A lot of people in the reviews and the emails I get build their whole business. Just listening to the free podcasts because they're building and they're listening and they're moving along. But if you want to fast track, if you want to like get like the crash course and move as fast as possible, then the program is what we have it for. But I never openly really market the program because I honestly believe that most people are going to be great with the podcast and be okay with that. And those who want to go beyond that, they'll find the program themselves. speaker-1: Nice, okay, sounds good. Going to the... starting point again, right? Something that has come up in conversations is when you're, okay, I remember thinking back to me when I was getting ready to graduate from college, I was applying for a bunch of jobs, doing interviews, not really excited about that idea of going and working in this big corporation. like, I wanna start a business. And you got this, you're gung ho, you're young, dumb, and excited about... getting your business started. like, where do you start, right? You start by identifying a problem that you can solve for somebody, right? And this is an idea that we've discussed on the podcast. identify, you start by identifying a problem that you can solve and everybody is capable of solving a problem for other people because there have been a myriad of different problems that you've solved for yourself. Or maybe there's problems that you're solving in your current job that you could then just go and solve for other people. But then you have clarity on that problem. And then the next big thing is, is selling. So this is something that I'm still working on and I need to get better at is selling. So given that you've had a podcast for 11 years, you've talked to a bunch of people, you've probably learned a lot about sales. Like what could you tell people who are getting ready to go have that first conversation where they're going to ask somebody to give them money to do a thing, AKA sell. Like what do you tell that person? speaker-0: This is an amazing question because the answer is very simple. See rule number one. Rule number one is the problem. And if you're having a hard time selling a product, it probably means the problem is not big enough. It's not painful enough. If you have to explain the value, they should be stopping you. You should be saying like, wait, wait, wait, are you saying that you're going to solve this problem? How do I sign up? What do I got to do to get this what you're talking about? Because if you have a painful enough problem that you're solving. Like think about the things you spend money on, right? You don't think about it, right? If you had to get surgery, you're gonna get surgery because you want your limbs, right? If you broke your leg, you need to fix your leg, you wanna walk around. It's a no brainer for you, right? It's like, I gotta solve this problem. So you're gonna pay for it. But it's also as simple as like we talked about, like you can't have an overgrown yard. You're gonna attract pests, snakes, rats, it's gonna just... be a compounding problem. So you got to solve it. So somebody's got to come and cut and do landscaping, right? It's a no brainer thing. Like I don't have to think about is this good value? Should I buy this? Should I not? All that kind of stuff. I like to tell people that when you're starting a business, the only thing that matters is margins, right? You need to have good margins, which means that you need to make enough profit so that it's worth your time and effort, but also enough for you to reinvest in the business so you can grow. A lot of people, they're stuck in a rat race where they're doing all the work themselves and they can't hire out because they just don't have enough margins to hire somebody to do the things that they don't want to do or shouldn't be doing. That's all boils down to a lot of people can't scale or grow because their margins are not thick enough. So how do you build a business that has large margins? Well, you got to build a business that solves a painful problem because people are willing to pay for painful problems. Whether they're like reoccurring problems. daily problems, things like that. So for example, my software company, Webinar Ninja that we sold, we had a software that we started in 2014 that helped you run webinars, right? Now, what we did is that we created, the problem that we were solving is that most people at the time, this is before Zoom, they want to run a webinar, they would have to create a landing page on their landing page software, they would have to have an email sequence that would automatically trigger when they register, and then they would have to use another software to do the chat, because they're using like GoToMeeting. And then from there, they have to record it somehow. And then they got to send the recording and they don't know, really know who attended who did not attend. So they're just hoping, you know, they don't notice the fact that they're sending the email to everybody. ⁓ then they have to do some sort of way to send offers. There's a lot of these little small softwares. had to hodgepodge and Frankenstein together and make it all work. And most people just thought it was not enough effort. It's too much effort for the payoff. So we created a software that did all that for them, plus the video streaming and all that kind of stuff. And it solved the painful problem because. And the upside is that if I do this right and I don't have any pain, I'm going to make money. So I'm willing to pay for this product because every time I run a webinar, I make money. As you can see, this is me building a business that allows me to roll the boulder down the hill rather than up the hill. So when you're thinking about what you're offering, think about what is a product or a service or something that's going to solve a big enough pain. So as soon as they hear about it, they're like, this is a no brainer. started selling Webinar Ninja when we just did beta users, we sold out in 24 hours. Then we opened up a couple extra ⁓ spots and sold out again in another 24 hours because people were just like, this is so painful. And this is on a promise. Like they haven't seen the software yet. This is just a landing page, right? The point here is that like, you will know when you have that kind of business, when people are banging down your door for what you have. And it doesn't need to be revolutionary. We're not the first streaming software. We just combined. the different pieces of software, landing page software, chat software, video streaming software, we put it all together and put it into one software, didn't reinvent anything. All the best businesses didn't reinvent anything. Netflix, there was Blockbuster for them. They were doing things in the mail and then they did streaming, still selling movies and TV, right? If you look at Facebook, not the first social media platform, right? But they just did it right. Their implementation was better. So just think about what kind of pain you want to solve. big enough problem so that I can charge enough to have big margins and that way I'm not killing myself when I run a business. speaker-1: When you go and approach that first person in that first conversation, you just spend time talking about how you're going to solve their problem, right? That promise that I'm going to solve this problem. speaker-0: 100%. And if it doesn't resonate with them, this is a golden opportunity to figure out why they're not asking you, how can I buy? If they're just like, of like, ⁓ I don't get it, I don't understand, what does it do? Ask them why you're resistant, what's happening, what's not clear. You know, get some information. Why? Because then you can go and refine your offer, refine the product that you're creating, create more value for the product. Make sure that all those objections are addressed in what you provide to the customer. So the next time you approach somebody, those are taken care of. You might get some new ones, which is good. That means you're improving your product. But the point here is that it's really not the customer's ⁓ job to figure out what you're doing, right? You have to just present it. It's very easy to understand what Apple offers. It offers a reliable computer that doesn't have viruses. Okay, great. I get it. That's why I'm paying more. Cool. I'm buying this and it looks nice. Right? So that's your job. is to make sure that it's easy to understand, easy to consume, easy to like, yep, this is what I want, take my money. And that takes time sometimes, takes iteration and improvement and all that kind of stuff. The message I want to send to everybody who's listening is that product is important, but if you have to oversell, if you have to kind of convince people why this is valuable, right? Then you're either talking to the wrong person, person that this product is not for them and they don't have this problem because They might have the problem, even not recognize they have the problem, right? For example, like if somebody was selling me coaching for starting out a business. I'm not starting out a business, so it's not for me, right? So, but somebody who's selling me a program to say, hey, you want to take go from 100 million to a billion? Yeah, okay, tell me how to do that. I want to know that. I need that program, right? That's appealing to me. So you're either talking to the wrong person or your product is just not good enough. And that sometimes is a hard reality. It's just a hard reality. And that's why it's important for you to understand this. speaker-1: And that process never ends, That process of those conversations with your customers, or it should never end. The conversations that you have with your customers to understand how can you keep solving their problem. Right? Okay, maybe we have this thing right now that solves this problem for you right now, but what guides your product improvement plan is further conversations with your customers, exploring what other problems are they having upstream, downstream from them using your product and how you can continue to provide value. And that's how you continue to provide value. speaker-0: This is music to my ears. I love this, Ian. mean, again, like I said, just look at history. Apple, when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, they cut all the product lines. All they offered was one computer. It was actually two computers. And then what? Now Apple has AirPods, has AirPod Maxes, has a phone, has desktops, laptops. Apple music, all this stuff, they're solving other problems for other things that they have. And think about your buying journey. How did get into the Apple ecosystem? Well, what happened is I first started with an iPod, which was a MP3 player, and I used to just play music. And then when I had to get a new phone, I got an iPhone, the first iPhone that came out. And then my laptop died. I was like, well, I kind of like the iPhone, and I kind of like... the iPod, let me move to a Mac and I got a Macbook. And from the Macbook, that's it. I'm sold. Anytime I need any of the problems that they're solving, I'm gonna go to them. That's it. And that's the beauty of learning from history. speaker-1: Amazing. Reading biographies has been some of the most helpful thing in my personal journey in learning how to grow a business and build a business. Just learning from the stories of people who have done it and done it at a really high level. You can pull so much from that versus just like reading a classic business book. Not that those aren't great too, but they all kind of say the exact same thing. And when you can kind of embellish those lessons with the stories of history's greatest founders, I found that they really stick with me a lot more. speaker-0: I couldn't agree more. One of the biggest takeaways I got when I reading those biographies early on in my journey is reading what they had to go through to be successful. It made me ask the question, am I even willing to eat glass for this long to be successful? Because that's what the pattern is for all these stories I'm hearing about all these successful entrepreneurs. No one has it easy. No one just gets it in their first shot. So yeah, it's great. speaker-1: 100%. Yeah. And just throw it out there. Founders podcast called Founders is amazing. It just summarizes biographies of history's greatest founders or icons into hour long episodes. I highly recommend that. Probably my favorite podcast, honestly. But then, you know, really to underline the idea of every entrepreneur goes through that journey of just eating glass. And what is eating glass? It's just failing. It's just not having it right and just having to continue to iterate and push through and not give up and not quit. until they finally push through breakthrough. ⁓ they're an overnight success after five years of getting it wrong. Omar, thank you so much for the time. I have one final question for you. It's a recurring question I ask every guest. But if you had a giant billboard that everyone in the world could see for 10 seconds, what would it say and why? speaker-0: I would make the billboard a mirror and on top of the mirror it would say, this is who's stopping you. You got to get out of your own way because a lot of us, think it's everything else. We think it's the economy. We think it's our circumstances, the timing. None of that stuff ever going to be right. In fact, when the economy is bad, it's actually a good time to start a business because there's a lot of upswing that comes when the economy recovers. The point here is that like I used to be somebody and I've given a lot of tough love today, but I give it because I've been there and I'm that person that's listening right now 20 years ago. I was a person that had a long list of excuses. I'm not successful because I'm a minority. I'm not successful because I didn't grow up with money. I'm not successful because I don't have the education. I don't know anybody who's an entrepreneur. I wasn't around business. I had all these excuses, a million excuses. Guess what's on that, not on that list? Me, I'm not on that list, right? Where it's like I didn't get off my ass. I didn't try, I didn't take a risk, I didn't put myself out there. I didn't even make the commitment to try something new or put ⁓ something together so that I can show the world that hey, I have something that I want you to see and maybe buy one day. The point I'm making here is that nobody is coming to make it easy. Nobody's coming to just say hey, by the way, Now's the time to start that business. I've been waiting for the perfect time and now it's the time and I'm here to tell you that. No one's going to do that and you're never going to know. So the point here is that you got to get your own way. You got to get started. And the fun thing is that as you get started, as you start moving forward, as you start building up small wins, it's exciting. It's fun. You start realizing I'm living the life I want. I'm in the arena. I'm part of the world that's making things and creating value for the world. I'm one of those people. Right. That's one of the things I really got excited about when I started entrepreneurship. speaker-1: Yeah, there's not much more that's gratifying than getting a win. you've been going through a slog for a while and then you get like a client, somebody to say yes. My goodness. I haven't celebrated more than in those moments. It's the best thing. it's the best. Omar, thank you so much for your time. speaker-0: Thank you, Ian. speaker-1: Thank you for listening. My biggest takeaway is how simple the path of starting and growing a business is conceptually and how few people actually follow it, including myself. You find a problem, you talk to people, you try to solve it and you keep going. That's it. Most people stay stuck again, including myself, because we're trying to think ourselves to certainty before we move. What Omar kept coming back to is that you don't get clarity first. You get it from doing the work. from having conversations, from getting it wrong and adjusting. And if you avoid that part, you don't just avoid failure, we're gonna avoid progress entirely. And that's the trade-off that most of us are making without realizing it, right? We're trying to protect ourselves from the hard conversations, from the rejection. We're trying to build up this idea in our head and get it perfect before we go face somebody when we're never gonna be able to do it alone. We have to talk to people and we have to put it out there and ask the people who are going to buy it if, would you buy it? If you want to get connected with Omar, you can find him at 100mba.net and through the $100 MBA show. Both will be linked in the description of this episode. And if you run a coaching program course or mastermind and your clients aren't completing the work, download the free program execution system toolkit in the description. It shows you how to install execution infrastructure so clients actually follow through and get results. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next one.