Podcast: Download (Duration: 42:55 — 49.4MB)
I have nearly 6000 students across 2 courses that I teach over at Profitable Online Store and Profitable Audience. And recently, I’ve been analyzing the character traits of both successful and unsuccessful students in my courses.
What makes one student more likely to succeed over another? In this episode, I reveal what I discovered with my partner Toni.
What You’ll Learn
- The common patterns between the students who succeed and the ones who struggle
- What makes students more likely to succeed
- What makes students more likely to fail
Sponsors
SellersSummit.com – The Sellers Summit is the ecommerce conference that I’ve run for the past 8 years. It’s small and intimate and you’ll learn a ton! Click Here To Grab Your Ticket.
The Family First Entrepreneur – Purchase my Wall Street Journal Bestselling book and receive $690 in free bonuses! Click here to redeem the bonuses
Transcript
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Now, as you know, I have almost 6,000 students across two classes that I teach over at Profitable Online Store and Profitable Audience. And I’ve been analyzing the character traits of both successful and unsuccessful students in my courses. What makes a student more likely to succeed? Well, in this episode, I reveal what I found with my partner, Tony.
00:28
But before we begin, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book.
00:56
fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.
01:07
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast. So what I’ve been doing for like the past week is kind of analyzing the students in my course and just kind of thinking about some of the common patterns between the ones who succeed and the ones who are struggling. And one of the topics that just kind of came to my mind was, is it better to start a business when you have a lot of money in the bank and maybe you have a great job? Or is it better to start a business when you don’t have a lot of money and you have to
01:37
Be majorly bootstrapped and support yourself at the same time.
01:42
I’m, I, well, I kind of already know what you think. Do you? Actually, I flipped a little bit. did you? Ooh, you get drama from the first minute. Well, here’s the thing. So the students in my class who have a great job that pays well and just want to eventually retire and have this turn into, you know, something bigger, an e-commerce business or, or content or whatever, they have the hardest problems getting started. Correct.
02:10
to the point where sometimes they don’t even get started and the company pays them so well that they’re very risk averse. Because think about it, if you have a job and you make, know, I don’t know, I don’t know, the world is so different, like depending on where you live, certain amount of money is good versus somewhere else. But you make a very comfortable income, right? You can afford a house, you can afford cars, your kids can be in after school activities, you know, all those things. You’re funding your retirement.
02:38
and you’re like, I would like to start something for the future, but it’s going to take away from your lifestyle. You’re not going to be able to go to the beach on Saturday, or you’re going to have to give up Friday nights with your friends, or you’re going to have to take your computer, do your kids volleyball practice. After the first two times of like, really hate sitting on the bleachers, working on my computer, are you going to keep it up? Well, see, that’s the thing.
03:06
That was my situation. So for the longest time, I was always pro, you know, earn money while you have money coming in, because you don’t want to be making these decisions on being too cheap. Even though I am cheap, you’re probably going to make fun of me. Not being too cheap to invest in like the right tools or whatever the equipment that you need, right? Yeah. But so one of my friends, one of the cheer moms that I know, she is a like a bookkeeper accountant.
03:34
and she takes on multiple clients. And her and I both joke about how much we hate sitting in the cheer parking lot working on our computers. She’s like, I want my multiple monitors. I wanna do that, you know, I wanna do this, I wanna do that. But she’s working really hard to build up this business that she’s creating basically, you know, it’s being like a fractional accountant. And so she’s willing to sit in her car every, you know, two nights a week and do this because…
03:58
She’s trying to get to the next level. She’s not at the cushion yet. She’s not struggling either, but she’s like in that middle point, which I think is not a bad place to be because you’re not extremely happy. You want more, but you’re still like being able to pay your bills and put food on the table. So I have a friend who works at a company that rhymes with Oogle. Makes a lot of money. Wants to start a business. Always wanted to start a business.
04:27
decide to start a business, but then realize that it takes a lot of time that would perhaps take away from the downtime outside of work because people at Oogle work very hard. Yes. They work long hours. that. They work long hours. How do know which company I’m talking about? I’ve heard that companies that rhyme with Oogle, Tugl, and Fugl work very, very hard. Our friend Liz Saunders and I have talked about this concept a lot.
04:55
There is something to be said about having a safety net. And it changes the way you make decisions. So we talked about this in the context of when you look at people who are getting started in the either the digital marketing, e-commerce, know, anything online space, right? You’re trying to build a business that you can start by yourself. You don’t have to like get a brick and mortar and do all this stuff. There is a benefit to having a guaranteed stream of income coming in from somewhere.
05:25
And we talk about this in the context of that you either are married or have a partner that can pay the bills. And so if you are married or have a partner that can pay your bills or sustain your quality, you your lifestyle, it gives you so much freedom to take risk that you don’t have if you are your only, you you’re your primary source of support and you’re doing this completely on your own. And I saw this for…
05:52
100 % being true when I started my jewelry business. So when I started my jewelry business, I started with, I put in $1,800, my partner put in $1,800. So very low initial cost. And that was money that I had, right? I didn’t have to take away from anything in my life to put that money in. But I spent the next year, like 12 months working like crazy to get that business off the ground and make it successful.
06:20
And one of the reasons why I was able to do that is because I could let some of the other things that I was doing that was generating revenue like my blog, right? I could let my blog go on autopilot. So the blog went from making, you know.
06:32
let’s just say it was making 100K a year, maybe it went to 75 or 50, and I’m just throwing out numbers here. But my blog lost revenue, right? Because I was not focused at all on the blog, I was completely focused on the jewelry. And so, but I was able to do that because I had a secondary source of income through my husband. And versus, we had some other friends who started into e-commerce, and I don’t wanna like call anybody out or name names, but they started, they were their own source of they didn’t have a secondary source.
07:02
So when I was thinking one of our friends that got into silicone products and when she started having issues with getting things approved because they were for kids and getting all the approval process, it got costly, it got time consuming and she was like, I can’t keep moving forward with this because I’ve gotta keep earning income in my other way. And so it basically stopped her in her tracks where when I hit roadblocks with getting the wrong products delivered or having issues with suppliers or, you know,
07:31
running out of inventory, getting suspended on Amazon, I could dedicate 50 hours in a week to solving that problem, whereas she couldn’t. So your solution here is to get married. Is that what I’m? No, I think there is a distinct. I think there’s a distinct advantage in having a secondary source of income that you are not responsible for.
07:54
Right, so whether it is like investment property, right? Like, so maybe you have three or four rental properties that are providing you enough income to live on where you could then step away like, like what you did where you went down to like part-time at your day job, which gave you more time to focus. It gave you some freedom to do some things that you didn’t, weren’t able to do initially. So I do think that’s a benefit. I definitely would not recommend getting married to do a business. One or the other, they’re both really, really hard.
08:23
But I think there’s a benefit. The problem comes is that when you have a cushy full-time job and you start running into roadblocks or you have to give up things, it becomes really, really hard. You have to have such a high pain point in your current situation to be willing to have this equal same level of pain trying to do your own thing. I mean, that’s how my wife and I started. I worked full-time. I didn’t go down to part-time until much later. But in the beginning,
08:53
We were actually both working full time. And then when my wife quit, I was still working full time for many years actually running the business, which gave us the freedom to not have to worry about it, because we could just live on my salary alone. But remember, you had two very clear pain points. One, your wife hated her job. Yes. And she wanted to be able to be around the kids. So your pain points.
09:20
were equal to or higher than the pain points of starting your own business. That’s correct, yeah. So I mean, what does that say about the people who wanna start their own business though? Does that imply then that the pain threshold must be high enough for the people who are living cushy? Yes, I think for anybody, right? I think unless you are one of these people, and we know some people like this,
09:46
Like Noah Kagan, I think has this personality type where it’s just like go, go, go all the time, always wants to do something. Like most people do not have Noah’s personality and risk tolerance and all that stuff. Most people have a much lower, lower type personality. So I think the pain of your current situation has to be equal to or less or greater than the pain of starting a business.
10:15
So what does that mean for all the engineers? So I always make fun of this, but like the engineers in my class are always the hardest ones for me to get going. And that’s, guess analysis per house is another issue, but. I think that’s a bigger problem for them. That’s probably a bigger problem for them, but also like they’re weighing the risks and you know what’s funny is they, this is all happening after they sign up for the class. They go, Hey, do I have to keep this quiet with my company?
10:44
Am I gonna have any free time anymore? And then it just ends up in this endless spiral of thinking. Yeah, let’s talk about the other side too. Let’s talk about you have no money, right? You’re broke, you don’t have a job, whatever. Most people have some sort of a job and they wanna start a business because this is how they’re going to support themselves. I mean, most people,
11:12
99.9 % of people who start a business don’t make money in six months or even a year. So, you know, the people that have zero are also at a disadvantage because they don’t they lack the resources to be able to, you know, like one of the things that would happen to me with the jewelry is remember I got I lost my buy box with bike by counterfeiters. Yes. And so I was able to drop my price low enough to where I was basically breaking even first.
11:41
a week or two to be able to grab the buy box back and then readjust my pricing and knock off the counterfeiters, right? But if you are literally like, I need this check from Amazon to be able to have my apartment for another month, you can’t do some of those risky behaviors, right? Because I didn’t know if that was gonna work. I was like, I might lose money on this, but I could afford to lose the money. Whereas if you can’t afford to lose the money, then sometimes you can’t take certain risks or you can’t go into a new product line or you can’t
12:10
hire someone to maybe design something on your website or whatever it is, right? You don’t have any freedom to make those decisions. You know what’s funny about this conversation is my class has evolved so much in the last decade. So I’ve been running this thing for 13 years now. And in the beginning, I just talked about everything that I used and all the tools. And I still do that. But then came this wave of sign ups of people who didn’t have any money and they were bootstrapped. So I started putting all this content out.
12:39
on how to run the store on the cheap, but it requires more labor and it sometimes requires more technical know-how, which opened a whole nother can of worms, right? Yeah, that was a bad idea. If you’re willing to learn, I mean, that’s the way to do it on the cheap. Like I don’t spend any money, right? On the tech stuff. But I’ve learned all that stuff. Kind of like this printer, which I just took apart over the last week. I don’t want to pay for servicing, so I learned how to fix it myself. But you’re right.
13:08
probably was, ended up being a bad idea. Well, because you end up providing way more tech support for people than probably you want to invest in. It’s correct. Well, I think people just underestimate what they’re willing to learn. They’re all enthusiastic, like, hey, I’m a quick learner. I’m pretty tech savvy. I use a computer every day. And then what defeats them is, how do I add a
13:36
Where’s the login page? Yeah, know, honest, I mean, we’ve said this so much. The thing that separates people, successful people from people who don’t get started is the willingness to do the work. Right. And I don’t necessarily know if it’s based in money. Right. Because we both know people who were, I was just, I’ve been talking to Jim Wang lately. He and I have been on a little TikTok.
14:04
journey. His TikToks are pretty good. His TikToks are great. I told him, I was like, you’re going to destroy Steve Chiu. You’re going to become the number one Asian. He’s not because I’m just going to steal his content and post it on my own channel. But you don’t have that low Jim Wang voice. That’s true. That’s true. Jim Wang’s voice is like the catalyst for his fame, I’m sure. But like, Jim Wang’s a similar situation to you, right? Like he started bargaining when he worked at Northrop Grumman. I think that’s where he worked. Had a great job, was very successful at work.
14:35
started as a hobby business. But here’s the thing with Jim, and Jim is not overly hardworking. Jim is not, wouldn’t, Jim He’s like the antithesis, I would say, of overly hardworking. But he’s very strategic with what he does. If he’s gonna spend time on something, he’s very strategic with his time investment. We were talking about this last night about, I was like, why aren’t you putting your TikToks on YouTube shorts? I was like, you’re just basically gonna double dip. The content’s really great. I think it will perform well.
15:02
You were just talking about that kind of stuff. And he’s like, well, I don’t really want to do any extra work. And I was like, oh, I hear that story every day from Steve, you know. But he built Bargaineering, you know, because he was very strategic with what he did, even though he didn’t dislike his job, he wasn’t miserable. But what he loved, I think about the personal finance stuff was one, it seemed like easy money, which it was back then. And then two, like the community around it, right? The friendships that he made.
15:29
the challenges of the things that he was doing. So he was very into SEO, he was very into A-B testing. And so I think he found that very challenging and exciting. So it fueled him to keep going and continue to build this very, very successful website. And then eventually quit his job, sell the website and basically rinse and repeat. And I think that stuff matters, right? Like is what you’re doing challenging or just frustrating? So we know a lot of people who get started and they just…
15:58
They’re not challenged, they’re frustrated, right? They don’t know how to do something, they can’t figure it out. The website doesn’t look how they want it to look. And so they get frustrated and they quit. Versus a challenge of like, I wanna learn more about A-B testing, I wanna figure out which page is gonna convert better, and then when I figure that out, I’m gonna make more money. So it becomes a challenge versus a frustration. And I think it’s all about how you frame things and how you look at things that will then propel you to keep going.
16:28
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.
16:57
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.
17:09
I had to play these mind games with myself actually recently where I was like, I really don’t want to go in and debug this stupid printer that’s broken. And then I had to reframe it. And I kind of got this from Michael Hyatt’s book. Like, hey, I get to work on this cool new tech that’s going to let my kids print whatever they want and everything like that and make money. And that got me excited to work on it.
17:37
How important do you think it is, is it for someone to actually really love the product that they’re selling?
17:45
or be really into the, just the niche. I don’t necessarily think you need to be in the niche. If you’re not into the niche though, you need to be into the process. Yeah. So maybe you don’t, maybe you’re selling jewelry boxes on Amazon, right? Like, and you don’t care, you don’t wear jewelry. It’s not a big deal. Like you don’t care about jewelry boxes at all, but you love.
18:06
the strategy of Amazon. You love listing optimization. You love PPC. And there are people that do, right? I mean, I think about Brandon Young, right? And his wife. They’re so into this stuff. They just think it’s the greatest thing ever. So they could sell anything and they would still think it’s a fun thing to do. However, if you don’t love all that side, then you really have to love what you’re doing. And I would say that’s where I came, that was my background, right? I did not love the tech side of things. I did not love
18:35
trying to figure out WordPress when I first got started, but I did love sharing all these home hacks with people. It gave me a lot of pride and sense of accomplishment when someone would email me and say, I got my grocery budget down $200 a month and we were able to pay off our credit card debt. Then it made when I was in WordPress trying to figure out how to move a widget in my sidebar and I was super frustrated.
19:00
I was like, if I can do this, then someone else is gonna be able to pay off their credit card debt and it’s gonna change somebody’s life, right? And so I don’t think it has to be life changing, but that’s how I motivated myself. It’s like, if I can do this and I can reach more people, I can help more people, and then it’s worth the pain that I’m feeling. Oh, and by the way, I also got to take my family on vacation because of the money I made. I think the product doesn’t matter at all. I think it does to some extent.
19:28
I mean, as long as it’s a good product and you’re proud of it, I think that’s all that matters. Because it’s the people who really love their products and aren’t willing to do the process work that are probably the most problematic in class. people who are really interested in learning, like how to run ads, conversion optimization, email, and all that stuff, it almost doesn’t really matter what they sell because they’re going to get the process right.
19:56
And if you understand the process, you can pretty much sell anything. I do agree with that. And that’s what I felt like I’m not interested in handkerchiefs. I’m interested in the stuff that was. Yeah, you already know that. You already know that. But the process is cool and it can be applicable to anything that you ever do. I know, but I think the rub comes from people that aren’t into the product and struggle with the process. And then there’s zero, zero motivation to continue.
20:26
Well, yeah, I mean, if you’re not interested in either, you’re screwed, right? But but like they if I were to choose, though. Yeah. But I think there’s a lot of people. Let’s just talk e-commerce because that’s a much easier path. So someone does product research, right? They’re completely agnostic on what they want to sell. They do all the product research and they find an opportunity in selling Stanford football helmets. That’s what’s sitting behind you in your video. And so they know there’s this great market for Stanford football helmets. But they they went to, you know,
20:55
Harvard, they don’t care about Stanford, right? It’s not even applicable to them. And then they get started and everything is hard for them, right? Shopify is hard, ads are hard, setting up their Calavio account is hard. Then it’s like, they don’t care about Stanford and they’re struggling through the process. There’s nothing to keep them going, except, like think about you, you’re a former Stanford football player.
21:19
You you went on a full ride, you’re the top rusher for the records and you want to sell this cool Stanford product. If you struggle in the tech side, then like your motivation of selling it just can kind of carry you through some of that, I think. Not always, but I think there has to be something that pushes you through. Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t excited about handkerchiefs maybe I’m not the best example of this, but in the website stuff, I had to just learn from scratch, really. I have the technical background for it.
21:48
But wasn’t But most people don’t. But you, see, you can’t use yourself. Okay, let’s use someone else. You love pain because you’re Asian. I love figuring out eventually how it works because it’s satisfying at the end. It always sucks in the middle. It’s always, it’s almost like running. memories of your childhood. It’s like running. I hate the running part, but the after part feels so good.
22:16
It’s like any type of exercise. really sucks in the middle. And then once you’re done, you’re like, oh, I feel so much better. I’m trying to think of an example that I’ve interviewed on the pod or whatnot. But I would say a lot of the students who do well, it doesn’t really matter. It’s kind of like a business transaction, what they sell. Yeah. You know, it makes sense from the numbers perspective, and they’re willing to learn the process and then they do well. And I don’t want to bring up engineers again, but like the best students
22:45
also are ones that they just go for it without, without doing much research. Yes. I’ve had students go in without any money where, and I had her on the podcast before where she didn’t even have any money for the product. So she took pre-orders saying it was going to be delivered in like six weeks and then made the order. Yeah. After she collected the money, which is a pretty brilliant way to do things. Cause you already know that there’s demand and people are willing to pay you upfront for it.
23:16
Yeah, so I would say, I don’t think money matters at all. I think the deciding factor is your internal will. You can be, because we know people who are very successful, you, Jim Wang, you know, we can think of a lot of people, right? Those are the only two that are coming to mind right this minute. like, you know, I know a lot of people who started out successful and then continued.
23:44
to be successful with starting their own thing. But then I can also name a ton of people who started with nothing. Kim Sorgis. Kim Sorgis literally spent her grocery money to come to a conference to learn how to get a blog started. Bob Loddick, right? Literally broke down to his last time. Kyle Taylor, Penny Hoarder. Literally on the struggle bus ends up.
24:11
building and selling a website for a ton of money. So like, there’s buckets of people that do the same thing. I think about our friend Liz Saunders who like, was divorced, three little kids and was like, I’ll work at a bar to do this. And ended up going from like, getting gig to gig to gig to giving herself the ability to now launch her own software tool.
24:38
Right. And she just did the process. Right. But she was like initially she’s like, I will wait tables if that’s what it takes for me to get to the next step. Right. So there’s something inside you that’s like whatever it takes, I will do to make this succeed. And it doesn’t matter if they started out with a lot or they started out with a little. I think it’s all internal. I mean, if the will is there, I think it’s better if you have money. Yes, like a stable job. that it’s the it’s It’s the husband advantage.
25:08
Right? Like you can, you can just go and do whatever and you’re fine. But you’re probably going to have more of a will if you’re like down to your last dollar, right? Because it’s do or die. I don’t know. I don’t know about that. Like, because I also feel like why are you down to your last dollar?
25:25
I can’t answer that question. Why are you down to your last dollar? Because you don’t work hard or because you had an unfortunate turn of events? Like I know a lot of people who just had an unfortunate turn of events, right? Like they got a divorce or they had a medical situation, right? There’s people that literally just have bad luck, right? They have a situation in their life or multiple situations and, you know, they end up in a place where they don’t have, you know, they’re not in a good place financially.
25:53
There’s also people that just get really fortunate, right? Like they stumble into a job, it ends up being amazing. They work hard, but they kind of rise quicker because the situation just aligns for them. Yeah. I think, yeah, the people who succeed have a reason, a really strong reason for them to actually need to make it work, so to speak. Yeah. Let’s switch gears and talk about another aspect that I was just thinking about too with students in the class.
26:21
Is it better to be the visionary or an integrator? Which skill do you think is more useful? Integrator, 100%. I was on that trail, but there’s a lot of integrators in the class. Great at putting up the website, getting things up and running, but then they’re lost. They can’t figure out how to market the product. They don’t even know why they chose the product in the first place, but they did everything else right.
26:53
And everything’s working. The visionary, though, is that they have these great ideas and they can’t implement them.
27:01
But you can hire someone to implement them, You can. Whereas the integrator can get everything done, but they don’t know what to do.
27:13
I don’t know. I would vote integrator. Really? I would because I don’t want to call the student out, but there’s I don’t want to call this person out. Their name rhymes with. And this is like fresh in my mind because I just spoke to this person, but a beautiful website, everything implemented, email forms, everything. But I remember when I got on the console calls like
27:43
This isn’t going to work. Sites beautiful. You did everything right. But just what you chose and the way you’ve you’ve framed it on the website and how competitive it is. And I think you need to start again. I didn’t say that exactly, but I think we need to pivot. And it’s because like the vision wasn’t there on what the business was supposed to do or how it was going to make money. But everything else was there.
28:14
Do you think you had a vision when you started Bumblebee? I didn’t have a vision, but I had a plan, which is the same as a vision. My vision wasn’t to bring joy through handkerchiefs to the world. No, you want to bring tears. It was, I’m going to try this. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to do this. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to do this. Ironically, none of those things that
28:42
were part of my original plan actually ended up working well. It did for a little bit get the first couple sales, but I don’t know. think having the plan is important. See, I don’t see visionaries as having plans. I see them as having ideas.
29:00
Maybe we’re not, maybe we have two different So what’s your definition of visionary? My definition of a visionary is an idea person. They have lots and lots of great ideas, but they cannot get started.
29:15
Okay, I guess my definition of visionary is someone who has a plan, they just do not know how to execute it. Yeah. Right.
29:30
I just know so many visionaries that don’t execute. I probably have a lot of bias. Does that have to do with the will, like we just discussed earlier, or the fact that they just can’t get anything working by themselves? I think inherently visionaries struggle with the implementation. Yes, but I think the advantage with the visionary is they can just hire people. They could just throw money at the problem. If they have money.
29:59
You got to be a visionary with money. You can’t be a brute visionary. Whereas an integrator, what are you going to do? You already know how to do everything, but if you don’t have a plan, then you’re screwed. You can’t throw money at that. I guess you could, I guess, hire someone else’s idea. You’d rather be an integrator. Interesting. I don’t know. I feel like of all the consults that we’ve done and all the people that we’ve talked to,
30:29
for most people, see, Timmy, I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know. I feel like most people struggle getting things actually executed. I actually had the opposite opinion of the consults that I’ve done, and I do a lot more outside of the class that we run together. It’s that people just can’t figure out what they wanna do, what they wanna sell.
30:57
They don’t have a plan, like who’s a target customer, which is one question I asked in my last consult and they’re like, I have no idea. I’m like, well, that’s a problem. Who are you going to sell this stuff to? I want to be on a consult with you where I’m not on it and I can just listen in the background. No, I’m very nice in the consults, but I make suggestions. Anyway, if you don’t know what you’re to do, that’s a bigger problem than how you’re to get it done.
31:27
Well, let’s take you, like before you became all technical and everything, you were not really an integrator. But I was not. You knew kind of what you wanted to do and where the content was going to go. And you got it done. You hired someone, right? You had this guy on retainer. can’t remember his name all of a sudden. Yeah, And I’ve used Grayson too, yeah. I agree. agree. But I think I think.
31:56
My superpower is that I’m a huge risk taker when it comes to business stuff. I will start anything. I will try anything. I’m not afraid to do much when it comes to business. In life, totally different story. But in business, I’m very, very fearless. And I think that’s my, so I get in over my head all the time. I’m like, can figure this out. I’ll do this. I have no idea what I’m doing.
32:25
So I don’t know if that makes me a visionary or just stupid. Probably a little of both.
32:33
See, I think we all want what we don’t have. So for me, I feel like my integration skills are very strong. They are. My visionary skills not as strong. And in fact, what I find myself doing a lot of times is looking at what’s working for other people and trying to just kind of emulate it in my own way. But I never come up with this stuff from scratch. That’s what I said. If you’re an integrator, you can just copy. That’s just not my strength. But you can’t just copy.
33:00
No, it’s not copying. if like, OK, look at Jim Wang, right? He’s a perfect example of this. Like he’s frustrated with Google stuff. And so now all of a sudden he’s like, well, Tiktok’s working for people. He’s literally doing Tiktok’s right. Like that’s not a vision. That’s like, well, this was working for all these other people. I’ll start doing it myself. Like and then he’s he’s willing to do the work and, you know, get on Tiktok. But he has a plan. If you notice that his content, it’s very interesting stuff that has broad based appeal. So he has a plan.
33:30
Yeah. He’s not just going on TikTok and telling them people like what he had for breakfast. Right. I would would watch. was Jim. would watch. But like when but the same thing you’re saying, like when you when you decided to get on YouTube, you were like, hey, YouTube’s working for people. That needs to be my next step. Is that a visionary thing or an integrator thing? Definitely a visionary thing. Like, how am going to make this work? Like, what’s the strategy? OK, I’m just going to modify blog posts and make videos out of them. Right.
34:00
The integrator part is how do I edit the video? What equipment do I get? How do I even produce a video efficiently and that sort of thing? That’s integrator stuff. Just like the pod, remember when we first started, we were having all sorts of sound issues, sound quality issues? Oh yes. That’s kind of like an integrator thing, right? That’s not really like, the visionary part is like, what the hell are we gonna talk about? Yeah, I have no problems with that. Which is more important, right? Yeah.
34:28
Well, I don’t know. Sound quality is important, but yeah, I don’t know. mean, I don’t know. just I feel like you can be either and succeed. I don’t know. definitely can. Yeah. But I’m saying when I get on a call with somebody, I’d much rather be talking to a visionary than an integrator because the visionary knows what they want to do. And then I can just lead them on a path which will probably cost money.
34:59
to accomplish what they want to accomplish, right?
35:03
Whereas like an integrator and maybe integrator is synonymous with engineer in my case, right? They’re like, hey, I’m really good. I’ve been developing websites for years. You I can get anything to work. can write code. I just need to know what to do. I’m like.
35:19
You need to give me some choices or ideas first, right? Okay, this is where I feel I’ve just realized our disconnect with each other on this. To me, integrators do not start their own business.
35:32
Integrators work for other people. And if you have your own business, you need an integrator, right? That should be the first person you ever hire is someone who can get stuff done, right? They go in there, they figure it out, they fix your forms, they clean up your website. And I’m noticing this because I was thinking yesterday, I was like, why do I have so much work for Seller Summit?
35:57
Like I’m just having like the workload is unbelievable right now. And it’s like more so than it’s been in the years past. And I realized I don’t have my overseas VA. Because I- Is that why? Well, she did a lot of the like, check the room lists, check this, like see who signed up, see who’s missing a form, see what, you know, even like the name tags, right? Like go through the name tags and like make sure the names are like.
36:20
correct versus there’s not someone that has a missing first name, things like that. You know what I mean? All these little tedious tasks, she did. She’s done for five years, right? Or however long I had her. She always did those little tasks and now I don’t have her. So I’m like, oh crap, I gotta go check the name tags. I gotta check all this stuff. So I do think everyone needs that integrator or that person that gets stuff done in their business because one, it removes all this kind of mindless stuff from your
36:49
which allows you to come up with these big visions and goals. But to me, if you’re a really good integrator, you should always be working for someone else. You should never try to start your own business because you’ll fail. Okay, so we’re in agreement finally. We are in agreement, but I’m thinking of like the, I guess I’m thinking of, you know, the visionary versus, I don’t know, the other bucket of people. I don’t.
37:14
I just feel like there’s these people that like have this idea, but they can never execute because they always come up with all these problems of why it won’t work.
37:22
Right, that’s the over-thinker. Okay, yeah, I guess that’s what I’m thinking. The two things we talked about today kind of tie together in a way. One, you have to have the will and a reason to follow through. If you have this cushy job, then you’re having a grand old time, you’re taking vacations. You don’t want to not take vacation. Having a job is great. I actually kind of miss it sometimes because I was at work and when I was not at work, I didn’t think about work at all.
37:49
That is definitely the thing. I’ve never had a job, so I don’t know what it’s like to do that. But I often think about how nice it would be to come home and not be like, oh, let me, like last night I was going to bed and I was like, oh, I need to put a video up for the video challenge. So I’m editing a video at like 930 in bed, right? Like I gotta put my video up. Like if I…
38:15
If I worked for marketing for some company, I would literally just come home and not care about it at all until nine o’clock the next day. I wouldn’t check anything. I wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t be answering seller summit emails because people didn’t book their hotel room. I just would be like, yeah, too bad, so sad. I envy that some days. That was my life. I’d go come back weekends. I didn’t even think about anything.
38:44
I just slept in and whatnot. And now I’m always thinking about stuff. But I love my job too. But the one reason why I left was, aside from the fact that I wasn’t doing anything towards the end and I got called on it, was that just numbers didn’t make sense anymore. Yeah, for sure. And when I think about, oh, it’d been so nice to have a nine to five. And then I was like, well, let’s see. On Monday I…
39:12
took off in the middle of the day to get my kid their driver’s license. On Tuesday I had to take off to go to an appointment. Next week I gotta go to a preschool graduation. It’s like all these things that I just get up and walk away. I don’t care, right? And in my mind the trade off is well maybe I’m editing a video at 9.30 at night but is that really that hard? No, it’s not. And is it worth the trade off of being able to get my kid their driver’s license? Yeah, for sure. So yeah.
39:41
The trade off is worth it for sure, but I do envy people that don’t think about work 24 seven. So here are the rules for success based on our discussion today. When you have to have the will or a reason for you to just follow through. Number one trade in my book at least is being willing to follow through and just being willing to figure out the problems as they come. You have anything to add to that before I move on?
40:09
Yes, I would say if this is your struggle, there are two amazing books written by John Acuff. One’s called Start and one’s called Finish. And they are probably the two best books I’ve read on the topic. I know you’ve interviewed him last year. But if this is where you struggle and you overthink and you don’t follow through or you get halfway through, his book will speak to you.
40:34
What’s ironic is a lot of people don’t finish books. So I wonder if like, do you get the gist out of the finished book before you even finish that book? I didn’t finish the finished book. I’ll be honest. But I did finish Start. And I think for the people that we talk to a lot in the courses is Start is a great book for people because so many people have so much self doubt and overthink and overthinking everything about it. Like that book, even if you have to read one, read Start.
41:05
Okay. And then the second aspect is that you don’t need to understand how to implement everything. You can be the visionary and then there’s so many resources out there now that will help you do the integration part. Just look at Fiverr, look at Upwork. Most people are not like me, which is why I have problems sometimes displacing that because I don’t like to depend on anybody.
41:32
I want to figure it out and whatnot, I don’t have to pay anyone. Yet someone’s remodeling your bathroom. That’s true because I have no desire to learn that. I think take advantage of what a cool time to be able to be in business. Take advantage of AI tools, take advantage of Fiverr, take advantage of Upwork, take advantage of overseas VAs.
41:59
There are so many things that you can do that are cost effective. So even if you don’t have oodles of money and you’re getting started, you can hire someone on a project base from Fiverr Upwork and get a decent product that will take you to the next step. Now, will you might wanna update it in the future? Probably, but it’s gonna get you to the next step. So take advantage of all these things that weren’t even around when we were getting started.
42:29
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now if you’re looking to join any of my full-blown online courses, head on over to mywifequaterjob.com slash online dash courses. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequaterjob.com slash episode 537. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequaterjob.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.
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