455: If I Only Knew: 5 Life-Changing Insights About Business I’d Tell My Younger Self – Family First Friday

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You’re listening to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast, where I teach you how to start a business or side hustle from the perspective of a father with two kids. Welcome to a new segment to the show, which I’m calling Family First Fridays. And in these solo episodes, I will be presenting to you my personal thoughts about family, entrepreneurship, business, and life. And today we’re going to talk about some life-changing insights about business that I would tell my younger self if I started all over again. But before we begin,

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I just wanted to thank Spockit for sponsoring this episode. Now most of you who’ve followed me for a long time know that I’m not a huge fan of dropshipping, especially from AliExpress or China. But I do know that many of you listening don’t have a large budget to start an e-commerce business. Now if you want to dropship from US or European suppliers, I like Spockit, and here’s why. Spockit integrates with all the top e-commerce platforms, which makes adding products and order fulfillment seamless.

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They also offer branded invoices, which allows you to add your logo and store name to the invoice, so it appears as though it’s being shipped from your own warehouse. But the main value add is that 70 % of their suppliers are from the US and Europe. And as a result, your shipping times are fast at between two and five days, and the quality is superior. You can try Spocket for free over at mywifequitterjob.com slash Spocket. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash Spocket. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast and the very first Family First Friday. Now what if I told you that you could make a few million dollars per year while working only 20 hours a week and spend most of your time with your loved ones? What if I told you that starting a business on the side and achieving financial freedom was not only doable, but that it doesn’t require a lot of money upfront and very little risk?

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Well, I can assure you that it can be done because I’ve personally achieved all the above with my businesses over at bumblebeelinens.com and mywifequitterjob.com. And if you are skeptical, let’s just say that a lot of things in life can seem impossible unless you see someone else do it first. Kind of like how no one believed that a human could run a mile in under four minutes until Roger Bannister did it in 1954. So in this episode, I’m going to share with you five life-changing insights that I would tell my younger self

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and anyone who wants to start a business, achieve financial freedom, and free up their time to do what they want. Insight number one, 99 % of the business and entrepreneurship advice out there is wrong. Now this is a very strong statement, but it is true and here is a fact. Most entrepreneurship advice is given by single men who have no responsibilities outside of taking care of themselves. They have no family, no mouths to feed, and no expenses to worry about, but that’s not really representative of most people.

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Now there’s a popular saying within the entrepreneurship community that entrepreneurs prefer to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours per week at a regular job. But if you follow the path of most entrepreneurs, working 80 hours a week and hustling nonstop, you will end up sacrificing your time and your freedom for the promise of riches. Work yourself to the bone and lose what precious time you had to spend with your loved ones. Now I’ve interviewed over 450 successful entrepreneurs on my podcast.

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who are absolutely killing it with their multi-million dollar businesses. But what you never hear about publicly is that they don’t see their family much or that they are totally burned out or stressed out. You don’t hear about the huge sacrifices that they had to make in order to get there. I once interviewed a billionaire whose business ended up destroying their marriage because he was working too much. And to this day, this remains his biggest regret in life. And he would trade all of his wealth to be back together with his family again. Now the truth

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is that you can in fact be financially free without being a stranger to your kids. You can make good money and have the freedom to enjoy it, and you don’t have to work 80 hours a week just to make it all work. There is in fact a sustainable way to achieve financial freedom without making huge sacrifices. You just have to follow a certain set of principles in order to stay on track. Insight number two, you got to start before you’re ready. Most people wait too long before doing what they know they need to do in life.

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I wanted to start my blog for years before I did, and what took so long to get started were two concerns. One, I was intimidated to build my own website on WordPress. Yes, even engineers can be intimidated by tech. And two, I thought I hated writing, so I kept stalling until finally the pain of not starting was greater than the discomfort of just doing it. And then after that, I installed WordPress, and it was surprisingly easy. Two years of waiting, the whole thing took a couple of hours.

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The next day, I typed out my first blog post and it turned out to be much easier than I anticipated and I could even make it fun. My blog post didn’t have to be long and eloquent, they just had to be helpful and direct and I’ve blogged regularly ever since then with minimal resistance. When my wife and I started our e-commerce store selling handkerchiefs, we knew nothing about websites, nothing about selling online and nothing about advertising. But we gave it a shot anyway and made over $100,000 in profit in our first year of business.

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with zero experience. Once we ditched our doubts, progress followed. And lots of things are like that. Most people hesitate to start a business because they doubt they have any marketable skills to offer, or they think they need to conduct years of research to create a viable business plan. None of this is true. Launching a business is actually easy. The hard part is getting it to run on autopilot with minimal effort or interference needed from you. Many aspiring entrepreneurs delay the first few steps

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which are ironically the least risky ones in the entire process. And nobody’s ever ready to begin, ever. You always have to start earlier than you think. After all, you can’t really learn how to run a business until you’ve had experience running a business. So if you wait until you’re ready, then you will never start at all. In other words, you will feel ready to start your business six months after you started. And even if your business fails, you learn something. And that is not failing in my book.

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It’s education. By the way, if you’re enjoying these insights, make sure you preorder my book, The Family First Entrepreneur in the links below. And as soon as you preorder, you’ll receive instant access to my three day workshop on print on demand and my two day workshop on how to make money with content. Just go to thefamilyfirstentrepreneur.com. Insight number three, do not build a business around what you love.

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Now when it comes to business, most people want to sell something they love or provide a service that they are passionate about. But what most people don’t understand is that whether you start a business around an area of passion or not, most of what you end up doing is not necessarily related to the thing that you sell. Now granted there are exceptions to this rule, but very few. In our case, we sell linens, but most of the daily operations have to do with sales and marketing, tracking inventory and customer service. We could be selling computers,

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and it would basically be the same list of daily tasks. So do not start a business because you’re trying to monetize your passion. Why? Because you won’t be very happy and it probably won’t work. In most businesses, what you end up doing, especially in the startup phase, is all the stuff required to run just about any business and usually this isn’t what you’re passionate about. You may in fact begin to associate these mundane activities with your passion itself and therefore grow to resent it. For example,

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My wife was passionate about embroidery and she loved to embroider blankets and pillowcases, you name it. But as soon as we started doing it for other people, for money, she started hating it. It’s just a recipe for unhappiness. If you do find something that you love and turn it into a business and you’re ready to do the work, great. But do not believe the myth that this is something you have to be in love with or that it won’t work. Simply not true. You can start a business around a lot of different areas of interest.

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and make many of them succeed if you know what to do. You don’t have to be passionate about running a business necessarily. Just know that this is how you end up spending the majority of your time, doing mundane, boring things every business owner has to do. So instead of the passion, focus on the purpose of your business. For me, our business was always about whether we could make enough money to replace my wife’s income so she could stay at home with the kids. That was the real goal.

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and every decision we made was oriented around that single objective. We passed up a lot of other opportunities that excited me more than hankies, believe me, but that wasn’t the point of what we were doing. The point was which business would allow us to have the most freedom to do what we wanted, and everything had to pass through that filter. It didn’t matter what we sold so long as we fulfilled our primary goal, and that was what we were passionate about, the purpose behind the business, not just the business itself.

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Insight number four, everything is a commodity. Now when starting a business, most people struggle with what to sell, not because they can’t find a profitable product, but because they want to sell something completely novel or unique. And the truth of the matter is that very few products are unique and almost every product is a commodity. Think of how many successful apparel companies or jewelry companies are out there in the world and you’ll soon realize that nothing is really new.

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Almost everyone sells the same types of products and services, so instead of killing yourself, trying to come up with the next big invention to present to the world, you should focus on what Drew Whitman calls the Life Force 8. The Life Force 8 are the core human desires that are responsible for almost all product sales. And here’s what the Life Force 8 is. Survival, enjoyment of life and life extension, enjoyment of food and beverages, freedom from fear and anger, sex,

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Comfortable living conditions, being superior to others, care and protection of your loved ones, and social approval. If you can appeal to a person’s life force, you can sell anything. And the truth is that people rarely make purchase decisions rationally. It’s all about how you feel. So if you can position your product to address sexual urges, to elevate your status, or to keep your friends and family safe, you better believe that people are going to have strong feelings about it.

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Take Dr. Squatch for example. They sell soap for men, but if you look at their commercials, what they are really selling is sex. Remember those old herbal essences commercials where they implied the women washing their hair were having an orgasmic experience? Or the Old Spice commercial where the guy getting out of the shower is daring the men watching to be stronger and manlier. These are all appeals to the Life Force 8, and they work very, very well. Everyone gets hung up on finding a niche, whether it’s a physical or a digital product.

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But the truth is, is that you can make anything sell as long as you appeal to a person’s emotions. The product is less important than the emotions you evoke in a customer. So focus on the feelings and the sales will come. Insight number five, starting a side hustle is not risky. Now the biggest misconception about entrepreneurs is that they are all inveterate gamblers. Now at this point, as I mentioned before, I’ve interviewed over 450 successful small business owners on my podcast.

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And I can tell you that not one of them has ever struck me as a big time risk taker. Quite the opposite in fact, I don’t know if the media is to blame or just some modern misunderstanding about what it takes to succeed, but there seems to be a myth in our culture that successful entrepreneurs enjoy taking wild chances, that they’re all high rollers who go big or go home. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. And almost every entrepreneur I’ve interviewed or met in the past 10 years,

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has taken a methodical and conservative approach to starting their businesses. And as a result, most of them have succeeded. Now to put it concisely, what successful entrepreneurs do more often than not is take small calculated risks. They don’t bet the farm, which gives them room for little mistakes. And then they iterate. When my wife and I started our business, we both worked full-time jobs while building an e-commerce store on the side. And we only invested $630 to start a business.

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We made small bets as we went, making little tweaks with each step and learning along the way. And our success is not a result of any brilliance in our part, just a willingness to keep experimenting and not going all in too soon. Well, how did things end up? It took a while, but our store makes over a million dollars a year. My wife and I no longer work regular jobs and we spend most of our time with family, not on the beach sipping margaritas, but with our kids creating meaningful experiences.

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Starting a side hustle doesn’t have to be risky. Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It really can be a slow and steady process of taking risks, yes, but not the ones that will financially devastate you if something goes sideways. Now, if you decide to take the plunge into business ownership, I applaud you. It’s not for everyone, but the rewards can far outweigh the risks if you do it right. Just make sure you have a backup plan. Stay or day job until your side hustle can support you.

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and then build upon your existing successes until you have a portfolio of income streams. Now this episode is just a small sampling of the insights in my book, The Family First Entrepreneur. And my book is relevant to anyone who’s tired of working four hours a week at a job that they don’t like. It’s relevant to anyone who runs a small business and is finding that their business has turned into another job. It’s relevant to anyone who wants to achieve financial freedom to spend more time with their loved ones.

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or to spend more time on what they actually want to be doing in life. I specifically wrote The Family First Entrepreneur to walk you through a better way of building a business. One where you don’t have to strive unceasingly to succeed. One where your business actually frees up your time instead of draining it. And this is the book I wish I had when I first became an entrepreneur. And I hope it inspires you to find your own path to success and happiness. Pre-order it at thefamilyfirstentrepreneur.com.

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and you’ll receive instant access to my three day workshop on print on demand and my two day workshop on how to make money with content. Once again, all of this can be found over at thefamilyfirstentrepreneur.com. Hope you enjoyed the first Family First Friday episode and this means I’ll now be putting out two episodes per week. An interview at the beginning of the week and a solo episode on Friday. And once again, I want to thank Spockit, which is a drop shipping supplier that I like for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button,

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You can easily add products to your store and have pre-vetted suppliers ship your products to the end customer, no storage or fulfillment required. And the best part is that most suppliers are in the US and Europe for super fast shipping. For more information, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash spocket. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash S-P-O-C-K-E-T. And don’t forget to pre-order the Family First Entrepreneur over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book.

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and you’ll get instant access to a couple of amazing bonuses that are worth 690 bucks. You’ll get a three day workshop on print on demand, a two day workshop on how to make passive income with content, and I’m also giving away a six week family first challenge where I will personally help you find your next side hustle. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifecourtajob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.