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School For Startups with Jim Beach
I’m excited to have my fellow podcasting buddy, Jim Beach, join us. Jim does an amazing job. He’s been known to be called the Simon Cowell of small business. He’s got his radio show that’s syndicated across 24 networks across the country. He’s been featured in CNN and all sorts across the country. He’s been in commercials. He speaks to large companies like FedEx, Wells Fargo, Toshiba. We’re excited to have you. How’s it going?
Thank you. I appreciate it. It’s good to see you.
I love listening to your show. It’s become one of the binge-worthy ones that I listen to on a regular basis since we met back at the regional New Media Summit. I love that you provide a lot of great advice for entrepreneurs out there. Do you want to give a short story of what your show is all about?
We talk about anything related to entrepreneurship at all. You’re going to be on my show and we’re going to talk about your cool entrepreneurial business all the way from that to the fourteen-year-old kid who’s making $3,000 here in the neighborhood selling smoked salmon every weekend that he delivers. It’s delicious. I wish I could send to you some. We cover billionaires. We’ve had Shark Tank judges, Shark Tank contestants. We’ve had venture capitalists, famous marketers, the funnel people, those famous people and all of them. We try to have three or four guests per show because we were an hour show so we have to fill up a lot of time. We usually try to have an entrepreneurial story. This guy is doing this, this woman is doing this, here’s the story. How do they get started? Where did they get the idea? Where did they get the marketing? Where did they get the money?
Our second guest is usually a skill improvement person, a thought leader or someone who has come out with a new book on Facebook marketing that we need to know about, or someone who’s an expert on Instagram post. We’re going to learn something from that. We’ve got a little bit of motivation going, a little bit of education going. Our third guest is a complete crapshoot, sometimes it’s a corporate guest who’s going to give us some education. Sometimes it’s the guy who climbed Mount Everest, went to the South Pole, went to the North Pole and has a world record. He has so many world records. He doesn’t even know how many he has. We have that guy on because that’s just a cool story that I enjoy talking about in terms of topics, marketing, HR, finance, leadership skill improvement, how to get money and anything that I think could be related to an entrepreneur.
I love the fun Friday episodes too because you always have something weird and crazy in there. It’s offbeat but it’s great because it keeps it fresh. I’m always like, “That was interesting.”
Those were the fun guests. We try to get a wide spectrum. We had a guy who he and three or four of his friends crashed in the Amazon and his friends died. He was the only one to make it out alive and they’re making that into a feature movie. There are all sorts of angles to talk to him about. We can talk to him about how he survived the Amazon and then how he get himself turned into a feature movie. That’s interesting. We have TV stars on, we’ve had quite a few TV stars that are of note. We do those on Friday too. It’s anything that’s going to be a little bit wider than the normal load.
Entrepreneurship is not always the friendliest or funniest roads to travel. It’s never straight and narrow and stuff like that.
It is an up and down roller coaster.
Another thing that’s exciting is people don’t know that you’re also a very well-known best-selling author. You grew with the top ten in McGraw Hill’s bestseller list for a while. Is that correct?
Yeah. The word bestseller doesn’t mean anything anymore because there are so many services that can guarantee you a bestseller in three categories. We were proud that our book went to number nine on the big list up there with Hillary Clinton and those sorts of people with big books. Not the, “I published an eBook and it’s the bestseller between 1:00 and 1:05 AM,” which is exactly what people do. For $4,000, I can guarantee you that. That’s what people sell. I know the guy who sells that and you do too. All that means is that twelve people bought the book and he knew all twelve. All twelve are his employees and now you’re a bestseller. It’s ridiculous.
One of the great things I love is you’ve got a lot of advice. I’ve got some great stuff for me too since we’ve known each other talking about the market. What would you say if you were talking to somebody who’s a new entrepreneur who is looking at leaving their job as we transition here in a little bit? Do you have any nuggets that you would give them to look at where maybe you’ve seen people make mistakes on a regular basis or something they don’t think about?
I have three tenet beliefs that I surround myself and they’re all designed to be controversial, but that’s why they’re fun. I also happen to believe all of them. Entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion. If we were to ask 99 people on the street, “What’s an entrepreneur?” They would say, “An entrepreneur is a creative guy who takes some risks, does something they’re passionate about and starts a business.” I find that all three of those are completely false. 93% of businesses are copies of other businesses and that data comes from the London School of Economics and Babson University so it’s good data. That’s encouraging to me because that means that if I want to be an entrepreneur, I don’t have to be creative. All I have to do is find something that someone is doing and do it well somewhere else. That’s simple.
Inc. Magazine is very good at that, “Here’s what some dude in Austin is doing.” It’s like, “That’s far away. I can do that in Atlanta.” That’s very simple and it changes the whole way we look at entrepreneurship. I don’t have to be out there waiting for this creativity lightning bolt from God, which of course will never come. I always remind people how many hotels do we have. We have Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott but if I were to open a new hotel, everyone would call me an entrepreneur. Another big thing is risks. I hate risks. I don’t take risks anymore. I believe that any business can be started for under $5,000. If you can’t figure out how to do it for under $5,000, you’re not ready to start that business yet. I’ve had 4,000 guests on my radio show and the spectrum of bootstrap stories is overwhelming.
My favorite story is Joey Tatum. He wanted a bar. Everyone loves a bar. You and I’ve had a nice meal at a bar before and I love a good bar. He wanted his own bar where everyone knew his name. He saved up $4,000 and that’s all we could do. He’s like, “I’m going to start.” He rented an abandoned barbershop. It had the exposed metal rafters, the linoleum floor, and the big rings where the chairs used to be were still there. The first weekend he opened, he spent most of his money renovating the bathroom. The weekend he opened, he couldn’t afford a kegerator or kegs so he only had cases. He made enough money the first weekend to stay open until the second weekend. 22 years later, he has fourteen bars and restaurants. The first one was a dive. It’s his most profitable one too, of course.
I’m not a big fan of risk. The whole passion thing, I reserve passion for the church, the synagogue, the mosque, and occasionally the living room, the bedroom. I am passionate about my family and doing things with them. I’m an entrepreneur so that I make more money so I can do more things that I’m passionate about. Outside of my family, I love woodworking. There’s a piece of furniture that I built that I’m proud of, but I’m still not very good at it. I would never make a living doing what I’m passionate about. Taking woodworking classes and going to Disney is not a profession that I have found yet. I look at passion as I’m not passionate about the junk that I sell. I’m passionate about the lifestyle. You’re wearing a t-shirt, I’m wearing a t-shirt. This is my house that I’m in. I don’t go anywhere. I love that some people commute 45 minutes a day. One way, I commute six seconds. I saved an hour and a half. I’m already an hour and a half more productive than you are, Mr. Commuter.
School For Startups: When you look at creativity, risk, and passion differently, your entire bucket changes and you can now become an entrepreneur.
I’m passionate about the fact that if I want to make more money, I work harder. That’s cool. I’m passionate about freedom and lifestyle. I get to go to ballet so I can watch my daughter do ballet and then soccer practice right after that with my son. It’s the lifestyle. That’s what I want people to be passionate about. When you change those three things, look at creativity different, look at risk different, look at passion different. It changes the entire bucket and anyone can be an entrepreneur. I wanted to prove this. I bought my wife a book to be an entrepreneur and it’s one of those systems. I know that you have an incredible class that I would love to come and take some time for your system. She wasn’t interested in real estate. We didn’t know about this but we bought one of the systems. We bought the Amazon thing. It worked $500 in $78,000 out, so don’t tell me that everyone can be an entrepreneur. I believe that anyone can go out there and make $100,000 as an entrepreneur. I’m not going to make you a billionaire, but we can teach anyone to go out there and make $100,000.
If they go into your class and do your industry, they can make $300,000 or $400,000 in a year. I just love that. That’s our message, the core belief that anyone can do this. I’ve had a lot of bets over the years where I bet people that I could do it and prove it. I made a bet with a bunch of graduate students one time that they could choose the country and the industry that I would start a business in and I had three months to make it profitable, repay all my startup capital and be cashflow positive. They chose Pakistan and furniture. I had three months to build a profitable Pakistani furniture company. I want you to go on my LinkedIn profile and I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn. Scroll to the very bottom of my LinkedIn profile and you’ll see timeless chairs that we developed out of that. I won the bet under $5,000. The product was not creative. You’ll look at it and go, “That’s beautiful. Who thought of that?” I copied it from a Santa Barbara flea market thing I saw years before that. It was a blatant steal. That’s my shtick.
Putting these three things in place, figuring something out if it’s working on other market using your market, avoid as much risk as possible, which a lot of entrepreneurs talk to somebody else who doesn’t have any experience. They over-buy or they over-borrow versus using the basic, a lot of the free activities and the free resources around them. They tried to dive in something with their passion which not profitable. We see that a lot with people. They get very passionate about something and try to put a round peg in a square hole. Nobody is buying it because they’re passionate. You’ve got to save your passion using the money you’re making as an entrepreneur to develop those passions, but using what you’re selling or what your business is to help finance those versus the other way around.
I love what I do but I would rather be with my family doing a hundred different things. I have to realize what I’m passionate about is what I want to do the most, which is be with the family. Once you realize that though, it opens up a billion different industries. I used to sell purses for a living and I’m not a purse guy. I know that there are rumors out there, but it wasn’t true. I’ll sell anything if it gets me more woodworking classes.
My dad was a woodworker as well. What do you prefer? What do you like? Do you want to be on the leg or you got anything specifically that you enjoy too that you like?
I’m building big things. My goal is to have all of the wooden pieces in my house built by me. I’m working on dining room tables, China cabinets and stuff like that. My desk, it’s some nice pieces of furniture that I’m very proud of. Things that you will pass down for generations and generations. We’re not talking about building an IKEA.
I have a question for you that brings it back to the entrepreneur side of things. Besides those three things we talked about, what’s one of the biggest things that you see that you’ve helped people out with or talk with people about that was the biggest surprise and something simpler than they thought?
It’s all about marketing. I believe that you have to market first every day. My rule is the first 30 minutes of every day should be spent marketing. That means doing a podcast, producing a blog, posting on social media, calling 35 people, sending out 25 personalized emails. Whatever your marketing shtick is, you’ve got to do it first, otherwise you’re going to get into a boom and bust. You’re busy, you don’t market, you finish those projects, all of a sudden you have no work and you’d have a lot of time. The number one thing that I would like to encourage people to do is to be consistent daily or maybe weekly, two hours every Monday or whatever it is. The consistency of marketing is one of the biggest issues that I see. People just aren’t thinking long term enough. They’re like, “I’ve got income for the next three months at this. This project keeps me busy for the next three months.”
What about month five? That’s one of my obsessions and one of my big rules. With some of the software out there and some of the packages, you can schedule an entire week or month of social media in an hour at one time. I’m using a new product that I love because for so long you would do social media on Hootsuite or something like that. The same thing had to go to Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. I’m using a product called Loomly, which will specialize the Twitter one. You can have a generic post that goes out to five different social media in five different correct formats. I do it on Saturday night after the kids are in bed. Saturday night is not date night for us. The kids are in bed at 8:00. I’ve got three or four hours of work time. I tried to do my social media Saturday night and get it set up for the week. That’s my number one big obsession. I’ve got a lot of others too but that’s the biggest.
If you’ve got to work a full-time job, you’ve got 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM oftentimes that you can do it if you’re coming home or carving out that hour. Loomly is a great tool. I’ve been messing around that a little bit. I just came across it as well too. You talked about Hootsuite or Buffer or there’s Sprout Social, which is also the thing that a lot of people are using. That’s a valuable time that sets up the rest of your week and your month.
In that way, you don’t have to remember to post things. You were very polite to have me on your show so it is my obligation to tweet and post about this to my audience, so that they can learn about you. That’s how the deal works. If people don’t understand that deal, they need to learn that deal. We should sit here and teach that to them. That’s how you’re getting all the podcast, it’s by promising to tweet and tell your world about it. Yes, I’m going to set it up, get that carried out. The worst thing that would happen is if you drop the episode, I forget to promote it and then you’re like, “You didn’t do anything.” Those are the things that we can get taken care of. My radio show is a daily show. We produced six shows a week. I produce every single one of those usually on Saturday or Sunday so that the rest of the week is empty and I’m not worried about it.
You’re going six hours on Saturday?
I do a lot of the interviews during the week and then Saturday I put them all together, drop it into the bumper music. The introduction and all that kind of stuff.
Then roll out the following week. That’s nice because you’re pre-scheduling workday on Saturday and knock it off. That’s awesome. That’s smart. What’s been the most surprising tip that you’ve received from one of your thousands of guests that twisted your head a little bit? I threw a curveball there at you.
I always run across guests who have come up with new ways of using what I’m also using. This one is not a great example, but it’s one that came to mind. I’m also addicted to Upwork.com. I outsource every single thing I can. Sometimes I’ll outsource it two or three times and average. If I’m designing a book cover, I’ll have three people take a whack at it and see which one I liked the most, but I was interviewing someone who is an advanced Amazon person. My wife, her Amazon system is buying something local wholesale, send it to Amazon and Amazon retails it for you. My guest has come up with his own brands just like you with the Note Closers. He’s come up with his own product. Instead of a cooler by Yeti, he has his own version of the exact same thing so you make a lot more money because you’re the manufacturer and the middle man.
He needed someone in China to help do that for him so he went on Upwork and posted, “I need someone in China who can help me negotiate local purchasing agreements from factories in China.” All of a sudden, he had an employee in China who he’s never met, who has no long-term expense with and no benefit costs. He can say, “I’ll pay you $25 to find someone who can make 300 koozies for me.” That was a tip that blew me away. I had never thought of that. I’m using Upwork to get my taxes done, to get logos designed and proofreading. Here’s someone who’s got an employee on the other side of the world. That blew me away how smart that was.
School For Startups: Some of the people that you would think are great guests are actually horrible guests because they’re on a script and they’re not going to deviate.
Many people get so bogged down thinking, “I don’t know anybody.” You may not know anybody who does exactly that, but you can jump online. It’s a lot cheaper than you would domestically find somebody who can do that job often better, but even better help you with your bootstrapped with your limited budget to get things rock and rolling on time. For local resources, you mentioned a couple to me when we were talking about. You were very integral to get the show on the radio and do a variety of things there. You gave me some amazing tips here for local people, experts, entrepreneurship and things like that. Would you mind sharing that with the audience?
What are you referring to? From my memory, I’ve given you 700 master tips. Each one is smart enough to build a career upon. Which one are you talking?
You talked about small business especially going into the SBA, Small Business Administration. I think a lot of people don’t utilize those. Share that 1 of 700.
I love the SBA for a lot of different reasons. One is great advice. If you want an SBA loan, they are a lot easier than you think. I have been able to get some aggressive loans done through the SBA. The way I do that is I go in the back door, which is to go in through the attached SBDC, Small Business Development Center, which is usually run at a university. It’s usually in the same city as the SBA office and they have a very close relationship. If you can go into the SBA and say, “This business plan was written by my friend at the SBDC,” your chances of getting a loan there are doubled. I used them for great resources. They do provide great information. Another thing that I think is fantastic about them is they give out awards every year and they do it in almost every category. They give the awards to are the people who have come through their office and asked for help. There’s nothing cooler than being able to say, “Your federal government gave me an entrepreneurship award.” That’s a great thing to be able to say.
You want to get into Entrepreneur Magazine, wear the Small Business Administration award. Entrepreneur Magazine is going to cover that. It increases your coolness and your cache considerably. It’s one of the easier awards to get. I’ll take it a step further. At a point in my career, I want it to be 40 Under 40 so I figured out who was in charge of that and I found a publicist that he knew. For $3,000, I got to number one in my year 40 under 40 and that was because I knew the publicist to do it. All of these awards are bought. I don’t want to go that far, but a good publicist will get you the award that you want to get. The same thing is true with the SBA. I wanted an award for my podcast. The SBA has a media award that they give to whoever does the best small business coverage. I told the guy, “I want that award.” A year later, I got it. The federal government has blessed my radio show, Scott.
It is federally approved but that goes a long way. There are not real bodies for podcast awards yet. That guy tried to set it up, he joined for $1,000 and you won an award. I respect that model, but it didn’t last. I can say my podcast radio show is award winning by the federal government and then a hundred other people got awards that year too across the country. Your business should be one of them because it makes a difference. Is McGraw Hill more likely to publish you if you want an award? Yes. I think of it as stairsteps, if you’ve got 30 different things. If I can get my radio show on one more, I’m twice as likely to get this publishing deal. If I’m published, then I’m more likely to get this speaking gig and then that’s going to make it more likely to get this radio show. They all build together in a stairstep fashion one pulling the other up. Going after the award industry is a good way to help all of them.
I wanted to bring it up because we’re not just centralized here in Austin, Texas where home is. We have students all across the country and in most of the major markets. We also have listeners in 78 different countries besides all over the market and stuff like that. That’s an integral tip. I can remember hearing about SBA and stuff like that in college especially in graduate school, while I’m working on my master’s. I dealt with some people from SCORE as well as helped advise me early on with a variety of different things, but I’d forgotten about it until you mentioned it. I was like, “It’s such a brilliant nugget for those that are out there.” There’s not a lot of competition for it as well too, for the most part.
You could go get the media award out of Texas. If you make that your goal in the next year, you should be able to do it. Every listener out there should be able to get an award this way too. They’re looking for cool stories to talk about. Think about it from their perspective. They’re a government employee who has to send a report to someone that says, “We worked with 37 businesses in the last quarter and 34 of them grew because of our efforts.” They don’t get fired. They’re not going to get fired anyway. They’re a government employee. It’s all perpetuating. You help them achieve their goal. It’s a win-win when you go in there.
At least a lot of other things and other periodicals are helping, to get the word out to get the name out there and attracting clients like, “Award-winning, I want to talk with you. I want to hear about what you’re doing. Let’s hear the stories behind the stories.” Who have been the guests that you like because you had so many interesting people? You had Simon Sinek, the Founder of Barefoot Wine, and so many people on there. Who have been your favorite guests on your show that stands out when you think of them that are top two or top three?
Some of the people that you would think are great guests are horrible guests because they’re there on a script. They’re not going to deviate. Some of the A-plus guests I’ve had, I would not want back. They’re not very good. I love that fourteen-year-old salmon kid. He just blows me away. All of those cool stories that you hear, I finished up a whole month of African American entrepreneurs that we did for Black History month and some of those stories were amazing. A 60-year-old woman who retired from the federal government started a company supplying the federal government. She did $20 million in her first year at 60 years old and things like that. It’s just amazing stories. These are the people that you just never hear of. They’re not famous. They’re not Zuckerberg and people like that, but they’re out there discovering cool little niches like your niche.
When I met you, I had never heard of your industry. There are people out there just like you that blew me away with a knowledge that I don’t have. I had a guest that will come in. The reason I thought of this is because of your real estate. Their business will come in and buy 20% of your house. Think about it. If you want to remodel the kitchen but don’t want to take out a loan, you sell 20% of your house. No one has ever done that before. If you sell a house, you sell 100% of it. They’re willing to hold on to 20% forever for 30 years. They don’t care because they’re appreciating with you. They like the idea that you remodeled the kitchen. You remodeled the kitchen, you improved their asset so you can buy it back eventually if you want to. The guy who thought of that for the first time is genius.
Another real estate guy, Roger Blankenship, flipped 800 houses and has blown me away with his knowledge of his industry. I got six houses that I’m flipping because of him. The guests that can come in and change my life are the amazing guests. The one I remember is like, “You’re not going to believe who I interviewed. What they’re doing is so cool. We need to try it.” Roger blew me away so I’ve got six houses that were flipping to experiment with that. It’s a cool thing. If Chip and Joanna Gaines can do it, I can do it too. I’m smarter than Chip, I think. I love those guests that come in and blow me away. I’ve interviewed 200 SEO experts and I’ve never hired one of them. One guy came in and his package made sense. The reason I liked him so much was that he was like, “This is search engine optimization. It’s going to take a year or two.” I was like, “Finally, someone who is honest. You came in and blew me away with honesty. You’re hired.” That’s the guy I have doing my SEO.
The one who’s the most honest and he was also the one who said, “You’re going to have to pay me for two years.” Everyone else was like, “Give me three months, I’ll get you to the top.” A liar is what you are. The guy who came in and said, “I want a two-year commitment from you,” that blew me away. That level of honesty. He was able to back it up with, “Here’s what we’re going to do week one and here’s what we’re going to do week two.” There are cool guests who are making money on selling airline tickets. I was 100% sure that the travel industry was dead. This is an amazing story. He went out and raised $5 million and told us, investors, “I have no idea what I’m going to do with your money, but I will be better at it because I already have the money and won’t need to be scrambling to get the money when I do find the perfect idea.”
He went and bought travel agencies, which blew my mind away. They’re making tons of money because there is still a niche. I’m constantly getting amazing stories that blow you away and it’s not the Simon Sineks and Brian Tracys. My April Fools’ show, I’m particularly excited about my guest. His name is Ben Gay. That’s going to be fun. The story gets even cooler because Ben Gay’s first job was also Zig Ziglar’s first job. The two of them competed for 30 years as salespeople and it turns out that Ben Gay was always the winner and Zig Ziglar was always second. Imagine a story that starts like, “Me, Zig Ziglar and Napoleon Hill,” walk into a bar. Where do you come up with stuff like that? Someone who’s hanging out with Napoleon Hill and Zig Ziglar as their friends. Those are just fun interviews to have. There are a lot of great stories in people.
You’re doing stuff on the radio and you’re also doing stuff on podcasting. Where do you see marketing going? I’m excited about what podcasting is doing for our business and things like that. Where do you see it evolving to in the next 12 to 24 months?
It’s getting more and more personal. It’s no longer, “Is it okay to say, “I’ve got a great resort in the Caribbean?”” You now need to come in and say, “I’ve got a great resort in the Caribbean. It’s got a great play place for your three-year-old girl and your eight-year-old boy. They’re going to like this particular activity.” The people like that who markets. I am building a business that involves email marketing and I engage some email marketing companies. I told them I’m willing to create an individual video for every single email because that’s what I think is going to sell and they were blown away. They were like, “We haven’t even gone that far yet.” I’m willing to do it. If you think about it, it’s only 200 videos and your head will explode. If I do one video every 45 seconds, that’s 200 minutes. That’s three to four hours of work with a pee break in the middle.
School For Startups: You’ve got the freedom because you’ve chosen the right lifestyle.
I have three or four people who are pulling cameras back and forth so it’s not one camera recording, it’s three cameras recording. What’s my close rate is going to be when I all of a sudden send you a personalized video and it gets even better? Your web page is in the background over my shoulder in the video. I’m looking at your web page while I’m talking to you and then it gets even better. I’m going to quote you to you. That person is going to buy from you. I believe that marketing has to use the data that we have available. Too many people know that I have kids, there are too many pictures of them out there. If you’re good, you’re going to hit me up through the kids and come at me that way if you’re trying to sell me a vacation.
We all have these footprints. We all have this stuff out there. If in ten seconds I can hit your Facebook page and see that you were in Cancún, I know for a fact that this person likes beach vacations. This person is going to the ocean. I’m trying to sell a museum package in Iceland and it isn’t going to happen. It works in every industry. Don’t tell me that it doesn’t. It’s all about personal service. I went to an old bar that I hadn’t been to in ten years. The bartender remembered my name and drink. What am I going to tip that guy? For weeks, I’ve been talking about it nonstop all over town. You’ve got to go to Mayhan’s. The guy is great. Those are the things that I always remember and I buy because of that.
Anytime you can have that personal touch and things like that. One of the things that we’ve been doing is if anybody that opt-ins to specific lists or stuff that we use with our website, I’m taking the time just pulling up my smartphone and doing a short 30 to 45 seconds little video. I shoot them a text message with it just to say, “Thanks for opting in. I’m going to shoot you a link with the schedule. Let’s get on a phone call. Let’s talk.” I don’t know if people are seeing this come together. You spend 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes an hour doing the marketing, you’re doing that not to the masses to then turn around and engage in those personal conversations from those that have said, “I’m interested in finding more information out.”
The big data allows us to do it better in bulk. It would be inconceivable to do that research a few years ago to send out 200 personalized emails. Let’s go back to another thing we talked about. I paid someone in Manila $3 an hour to do the research. I hired them off of Upwork. I got the research done that I needed for $17. For $17, I’ll be able to have seventeen times better email because it’s going to say, “I’m on your website and I love what you’re doing right here. This is cool. I wanted to talk to you about this.” You’re going to call me back, you’re going to email me back. I noticed you’re doing a lot better with the phone than I am. I’m not a phone person yet. All of these things, the texts, I don’t like to text. I think that texts are for your wife, your children and other than that, send me an email. That’s because I’m old and I’m a curmudgeon. Right here is a text reminder, “Get yourself on the internet because we’re talking real estate in five minutes.” I don’t do this but here you are. That’s your message that you sent me to remind me and I got three of those. I bet your absentee rate is half of what mine is.
That was a simple tool through Calendly that we’ve used to help maximize my schedule and help squeeze those times. I’m talking to people between 2:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon if I don’t have a podcast. I’m speaking to people between 10:00 and 12:00. I’m maximizing that schedule so that I get a lot more stuff done, but I also can live a lot more. I can do the fun things that I want to when I want to. You’re going to the ballet for your daughter at 4:00 to watch her, Steph and I are going to the ballet for something. I don’t know what the show is. We’re going but we are able to do those things. It’s also why I’m able to work out with my trainer usually most days from 12:00 to 1:00 because you put it in the schedule, you work around it and you still get as much stuff done because you’re organized.
You’ve got the freedom because you’ve chosen the right lifestyle and that’s huge. I don’t know that your boss would let you go to work out every day from 12:00 to 1:00. That’s the passion of being an entrepreneur. In today’s society, with all of the big companies rightsizing, downsizing, offshoring, nearshoring, firing people, whatever the euphemism is, your best safest play is the entrepreneurial one and that sounds crazy. I’m not going to get fired from my job because a robot replaced me because I’m not going to buy the robot. I at least don’t worry about that.
I worry more about the Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger taking over the world, than me losing my job because a machine can flip a burger better than I can flip a burger. Entrepreneurship is in this century becoming the safe route and the best lifestyle in terms of quality of life, safety, financial opportunity. I thought my life was going to be working for Coca-Cola. At 24, they decided to escort me to the door and my entire life dream ended at 24. Imagine how horrible that would have been if it had been at 44 with three kids in private school, 2.6 mortgages, and four car payments.
That’s not a good time at that point, but it’s likely happened early on.
Entrepreneurship, when done right, is the best alternative. The great thing is that there are thousands of people like you teaching a thousand different cool verticals for us to go and explore. It’s the golden age of entrepreneurship. It’s the golden age of television and entrepreneurship because there are so many people teaching how to be successful. A lot of them were full of BS, but a lot of them are successful and willing to throw the crackers down for you to follow. If you pick up the pieces, you can learn an entire industry for free on YouTube if you just watch all the videos. My wife and I wanted a tile floor and we got a $6,000 quote for the labor. We said, “For $6,000, I will learn how to tile.” We did and we had an enjoyable time together tiling for three weekends in a row. We saved $6,000 and YouTube taught us to do it for free.
I’m speaking at a self-directed IRA company about due diligence on assets abroad and YouTube is one of the things we talked about. You can find anything in just about on there. If you can’t, then you can find somebody who’s an expert at that and go there a lot cheaper for things. I love the fact that you’re talking about using YouTube to learn something new and using Upwork to find the people that need to get those things done. Many entrepreneurs are struggling to try to overpay it, not figure it out or give up on what they’re doing because they won’t take that little extra step to go search it.
There’s one more thing that I’m finding useful. I’m a bad procrastinator because the thing is big. Instead of doing the big thing, what I’m trying to do is make it into 42 little things. 42 little things can be done one little thing at a time. All of a sudden, that’s called progress, momentum and then called finished. For me, as a procrastinator, that’s an important thing too. I use Calendly and I build those things into the calendar. I’ve got to open all of the tax information and put it in one pile. That’s one little step that’s not that bad. That’s not doing my taxes. Doing my taxes is an onerous job I could never conceive of doing, but just getting everything in one pile, I can do that.
Many people get so scared of the big thing they’re progressing to do other things. I’m not the biggest fan of to-do lists but I do like, “What are the biggest rocks that I’ve got to focus on to get done today? What are the three big rocks?” All the other stuff can fill in as we need to get done, but I need to focus on the three biggest things that are going to generate income or generate revenue for the day and everything else will fit in around it. Most of your big rocks are made up of little small interconnecting. You’re the transformer coming together to take down that big tasks that you’ve got to get done. There are a million little steps along the way, but most people won’t take the time to see those little steps.
It’s easier to do a little step than the big step. Even if it means putting your briefcase somewhere where you’ll find it and remember to get something out of it, that’s easier than doing my taxes.
That’s such a great lesson for most people. That’s why I did the whole idea there for everybody out there. If you’re also looking at some of the things, that’s also making your money on things, many people start looking into like, “I can never do this big thing.” You don’t have to do the big thing. Figure out what this is, figure out the little things, talk to people and surround yourself with people that can help you identify those things. If you don’t know anybody, jump on YouTube and you’ll find somebody there who’s an expert in what they’re doing. Most people were glad to spend time with you, to give you some advice and counsel. Before too long, that impossible idea is just a series of small one foot in front of the other steps. What’s the best way for people to get more information on what you’re doing, Jim?
There’s JimBeach.com. It’s an overview. There’s SchoolForStartupsRadio.com if you want to learn a little entrepreneurship. There are some books to buy over on that Amazon place. I already let you know that if you follow me on Twitter, all your following is something that I did on Saturday night. I’m not sure that there’s any value and even tell you that Twitter handles, but it’s @EntrepreneurJim. You can always email me at James.Beach@ATT.net and hit me up on LinkedIn. I have a book out called Free Radio & Podcast Marketing in 30 Minutes as part of the in30minutes series. If that’s too complicated for you, you may then move to the In 30 Minutes series. I wrote a book for them. I’ve done hundreds of interviews to promote various products that have sold my products for free. I don’t pay to be on the podcast and then my products sell so I call it free marketing. I wrote a little book that you can read in 30 minutes on how to do that and how to become a podcast super guest. You have to buy the book for $7 or whatever on Kindle.
School for Startups: The Breakthrough Course for Guaranteeing Small Business Success in 90 Days or Less
The free gift that I’d like to offer though is I have eight or nine lists that have somewhere between 4,000 to 5,000 contacts per list of podcast hosts. If you are a small business and want to get on 2,000 or 3,000 podcasts, I have the emails and everything you need to contact them. If you’re a spirituality show, a relationship show, a sports show, a real estate show, a big business stock show or a politics show, I have lists of thousands of podcasts that would like to have you as a guest. Send me an email and tell me what lists do you want and I’ll hook you up with the list. It’s got everything you need on it.
That’s a huge gift, Jim. Thank you so much. I know you have been working on that quite a bit. We’ve talked about that as well for you. It’s awesome. It’s such a huge gift to our audience out there. Thank you so much on behalf of The Note Nation.
If they use it right, they can get $1 million of free marketing with it. Learn how to create a pitch, then go out there and start pitching 100 people a week. Do you remember that 30 minutes of marketing that we were talking about? Now, I’ve given you the list of people to send emails to every day.
Jim, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy and hectic schedule there. Check him out at JimBeach.com or the SchoolForStartupsRadio.com as well out there. You’ve got a big goal of getting on 100 new radio channels as well too. I’m looking forward to that and I hope I contribute. Jim, thanks so much for such great knowledge and a funny interview. I appreciate it.
Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.
Check out his books and check out his website. There’s an amazing gift that he’s given away for everybody out there. There are nuggets to help you as new or existing entrepreneurs that can take your business to the next level. Go out, take action and we’ll see you all at the top.
Important Links
- Jim Beach
- School For Startups Radio radio show
- New Media Summit
- Inc. Magazine
- Hootsuite
- Loomly
- Buffer
- Sprout Social
- Upwork.com
- Yeti
- SBA
- Entrepreneur Magazine
- 40 Under 40
- SCORE
- Barefoot Wine
- Roger Blankenship on School For Startups Radio
- Ben Gay on School For Startups Radio
- Calendly
- JimBeach.com
- SchoolForStartupsRadio.com
- @EntrepreneurJim – Twitter
- James.Beach@ATT.net
- LinkedIn – Jim’s LinkedIn
- Free Radio & Podcast Marketing in 30 Minutes
- in30minutes
About Jim Beach
Jim Beach is a Serial Entrepreneur, Keynote Speaker, Award Winning Radio Host of School for Startups Radio & Bestselling Author of the School for Startups.