"I Have a Cushy Job. Should I Start a Business?"

0:00your advice for most people to start a business is to start with a lawn or snow service. Uh what would you recommend for someone with a cushy IT job? Is that still the best path to get started? So, I'll just I'll I'll initially reject the premise, which is that for most people start a business that's lawn or snow service. Um I think my advice has generally been start with the thing that you have the that you already have the greatest existing skills for and has the greatest amount of existing leverage. So, if you have basically not a lot of skills, most people can do lawn or snow, being able to knock on a door and have a lawn mower. And so, it just has a very low bar of getting started.

0:36That being said, is it the best path? I think that asking the question best has like best as compared to what? For what outcome? And I think this is important to dive into because we have this idea that we're going to somehow have this perfect pick that like the first business we start is somehow going to be the last business we start. And unless you're Zuck or Bezos, that is almost never the case. Almost every very successful entrepreneur I know hasn't just started like one or two, but they started five, 10 plus different companies. Not to say they didn't do those all at the same time. They learned from the first one and they moved on to the second and so on.

1:05And so, that being said, if you have a cushy IT job, then I mean, there's this whole new thing called AI. It's pretty sweet. It's coming out. Uh coming out soon. Uh so, there's a ton of money to be made in AI implementation for small businesses. Um and that's because there's still a lot of people heavy stuff that has to happen, which is integrating their old stuff with the new stuff. And I think that there you're really dictated by how much money Basically, let me say this differently. You will be able to charge based on how much money you make or save the company or business that you're serving. And so, it completely takes you out of selling from your own wallet and gets you in a as close to the revenue or bottom line as possible. And in general, if I have to pick opportunities, at least in the B2B side, I want to pick stuff that's as close to the money as I can.

1:48On the other hand, if you're selling to consumers, then you want to sell to pain points that affect lots of people that are worth lots of dollars. But which one you should pick? It's like let me give you this one thing. Well, there's a gazillion different people and it's like, okay, should every first person start a snowblowing business? Probably not. Right? But, if you were 16 years old and you have a lawn mower and you have a neighborhood, it's a great place to start. And I think the biggest thing that people have to demystify is this idea of like starting this business becomes this very amorphous vague thing. But, starting a business is always the same steps. So, the advice to help somebody who's at a hundred million dollars a year versus somebody who's at zero, very different based on the different businesses they have at a hundred. But, at zero, it's all the same, which is that you need to start an LLC, you have to have a way to process money, you have to have a bank account. If you have those things and you accept a dollar from a stranger, you have a business.

2:39Congratulations. Now, from there, everything else becomes more and more varied the bigger and bigger you go. But, that's the nature of the game. So, hopefully that helps. If you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the 100 million dollar scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so, we broke it in these ten stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it.

3:23And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com {slash} roadmap, plug in your business information and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team and we will look at your business, see if we can help and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.