Community First, Revenue Second (Reason 4 Everything)

If you've been enjoying our free, the reason for everything podcast, please be sure to like, follow, and subscribe on all platforms or wherever you get your podcast. This idea of reason for everything, things are happening for you and not to you. And coming out with a podcast was kind of the MVP way of me just instead of sitting in my couch and my laptop up like trying to, you know, hold this dream while still trying to figure out how to get a business off the ground. I'm like, hey, let me get this podcast started. I'll talk to cool people. And along the way, this is my minimum viable product. So, you know, when I do have whatever idea that comes to me, whether it's in one year or five years, 50 years, I have a personal brand that I'm building. I've had a building a network and talking to like this is the reason why I started my podcast. That's the exact same reason. Like, there is no, so some people are very aggressive about monetizing their personal brand immediately. I was building a company when I started my podcast, right? So there was no need to like really try and like gait content or sell courses or sell coaching with a lot of people do like all right and sometimes like a little bit too soon. They try and sell courses about things they don't even know about. So that's the whole of the conversation. But for me, it was like, okay, this you can, I don't know if you want to conclude any of it. Yes, but you can conclude all this. But my last company was a broadcast software company. And I knew that there was a path to exit that. And I knew that if I exited it, okay, that's some money. But then you have to start again. So the second you exit, second, like a check comes in or a wire comes in, nobody really cares about you that much anymore. Unless you have built something that has changed hundreds of millions of lives. And that is not the norm for most people. So I was like, okay, this is going to be over at some point in my life. I don't know when hopefully sooner than later, like hopefully we, you know, build it successful, we exit it and we did four years ago. But I know that if I want to build something else, I'm not going to be retired after this. So I have to start again. And I have to sort of like find eyeballs again and find an audience that is going to give me feedback on my product or my service or if I don't want to build another product, maybe I do want to be a consultant or maybe I do want to be a coach, but then I got to go find that audience. I'm like, whatever, I'll pick the Gary V model of build the audience. And then whenever I do in the future, I'll launch products into that audience. And that's literally what I'm doing now and what you're doing now. So no, I heard an interesting, I think it was, it's actually a Gary V quote that I purge or girditated by Ramosie and everyone, right? Everyone. He's like V.O.G. So 100% and it was basically like, your niche is just what you care about. You shouldn't like go and say, oh, I want to find my niche and build this niche. Exactly. And so for, Ramosie talked about for him, it was sales and gyms and, you know, everything there. And for you, it's same boat sales marketing. Yeah, but it's evolved to exactly that. So even like the first version of my podcast, it was called sales versus marketing. Because at the moment, I was CRO and I was thinking like, how do I sort of unpack all the stuff that I'm doing in my day to day and then teach it to, it was going to be like that somebody coming up and like the sales and marketing arena. But then obviously as companies acquire sort of my life expands, I start doing some investing. I start focusing more on not just sales and marketing, but like, like, say, for example, I want to help an entrepreneur go raise money or figure out how to hire properly. All the things that I sort of figured out in my career, like then you start to have different discussions with some of the guests you have on because you want to have a more diverse audience because you're not. You don't want to niche down in pigeonhole. Nitching down is great at the beginning if you really do want to monetize it immediately. But if you're trying to build like a community, I don't think that going broad is an issue. It will just take you longer to build that community. But for me, it was a long game. Like, I have the thesis that I said multiple times. I will commit 15 years of my life to anything. And I do believe that if you commit 15 years of life to anything, you will be some version of successful at it. Just people quit way too early. So of course, that includes like, you know, learning from mistakes and building a feedback loop to see what's working. What's not iterating, sort of evolving. But if you do have a smart person that commits 15 years of their life to building something and iterating through all the things that don't go right, you're going to be a version of successful at it. So I'm like, listen, I'm not in this for the short term. I want to build an audience that is focused on yet, like a high performing individual that cares about building a business that cares about building a legacy that cares about not only like operational and tactical success, but also like life success. And what does that mean? And it's like, then I bring on like Stephen Coatler, who's written like 12 books on a flow state and should like that, right? So there's a lot that I've incorporated into my life. And now I incorporate into the content that I create because I also realize that if you are going to be successful in a traditional sense, like make money, there's a lot of other things that you have to include into your life that gets you there. So it's not just about knowing how to optimize like a Facebook ads campaign, like there's a lot more to it because you have to be able to figure out, okay, how do I optimize my cognitive performance? How do I optimize my energy levels? How do I optimize my focus? How do I optimize my relationships? Because any of those other adjacent topics can sidetrack or basically destroy the chance of you being successful in business or career. So I think that like the I also believe that too many people focus on just business or just mindset if you think about even like Gary Vee is very it's very focused on like social, for example, or if you go on the other end of the spectrum, like a Dean Graziosi is almost all mindset and not that many tactical takeaways. But I do believe that you have to have that bridge between both to be successful because anybody who is, even if they don't realize it, has so many hacks to optimize their performance that it's not just operationally sound individuals, like they're they are people that have optimized their mindset consciously or subconsciously. So it is both of those arenas you have to play it and that's what I'm trying to sort of like give over my content. But that's like an evolution of me understanding that is I've grown as an individual. It's not how I started. So it's great. I mean, one of the pieces of content that you put out that really captured me and your funnel, if you will. Well, and I want to keep it sale-supported for whatever, for whatever that is. So you wrote master these three things and everything else will fall into place, mindset, systems and connections. And that just spoke with me so so I've just resonated. And on your bookshelf in the back here, if you ever watch a session story on the bookshelf, you have atomic habits. Yeah, of course. Yeah. There's this whole concept of now the optimization trap and we get so kind of feel we get so spun up and being so optimal at their time and efficiencies and you can kind of fall into this. But I'd love to know as you as an entrepreneur, as a creator or optimizing your day to day, what does that work like for you? What are the systems that you've have in place so that you can put all that stuff to the side and focus on building whatever it is that Scott's building? Yeah. So optimizing is great and systems and habits and processes are important and I'll walk through mine. I just want to promise with the fact that I get people tend to want to over optimize. And if you are so focused on over optimizing and there's a certain kind of personality that things like sort of derail a little bit, then it all goes to shit. So it's very much like the analogy is you want to go back to the gym and you never go to the gym and then you go, you know, January 1st and then you like eat like shit and then you stop going to the gym. Because your whole concept of what you want it to accomplish has been derailed by like a slight little modification to the plan. So I think that it's very important that if you do optimize, like you still give yourself the ability to screw up once in a while and not like 20. Yeah, exactly 100%. So most of my most of my like like, so the basic things that I do is I'll batch a lot of the stuff that I take off. So I'll batch my emails. I'll check emails in the morning at lunch and at the end of the day. So I don't check emails in between like I'll batch calls like in between the email checking. I set up all of my content creation and buckets. So if I'm recording podcasts, I'll try and record like three or four in one day. If I'm creating, if I'm writing a newsletter or doing like a whole bunch of written content, I'll block off between four to nine on a Sunday night to do all of my content for the next week. And then I'll schedule it all out. So a lot of my optimization is batching and like allocating time to it. But for example, I'm not going to like, if something happens on a Sunday night and somebody wants to go out for dinner or whatever, I'm not going to let that derail my whole week. Like I'll reallocate that time somewhere else. So I sort of like move my blocks of activity around based on my schedule. But I always designate that much time to that block of activities. I know that has to be done for that week. I mean, other things that I try and optimize. My other things that are important to me. So like my health and wellness, my physical fitness, I'll go to the gym every single morning at the same time because that's like a routine for me. It kind of like gets me out of bed. I more or less eat the same kind of foods throughout the day. So I don't like overthink like I don't try and I try and like, you know, the the whole like whatever Steve Jobs only wearing like the black trail and that like remove all the options that if you're they are not really that important to you. So I usually eat the same kinds of foods throughout the day because I know what I like and I know what gives me like the best energy and it doesn't let me crash like halfway through the afternoon. Even even most of the like the clothes that I wear like I have one brand of v-neck that I really like that I buy like in bulk all the time. I have one pair of jeans that fits just right. So like I a lot of the stuff that I don't want to spend energy and time focusing on. I don't. That it's just easy for me. I know like my one jacket is like a canali like 46L and like off the rack that usually fits with no tailoring. So like that's what I always buy if I want to get new jacket. So these are all little things that I do. I mean, it sounds stupid, but I try and remove as many decisions out of my life as I have to because it's just it's when you're building it's too much because you're going to be going for 12 hours a day anyways. So you just don't want to have to think about all these things all the time. One other system. So I block off content creation, block off times when I check emails so I'm not constantly scrolling through my phone. Shut off all like my phone lives on do not disturb. Like I don't take calls inbound ever. If you want to call it on the calendar like it has to be. Why is that? Because my day doesn't have a lot of downtime. So if I have downtime, you know what actually, no, I don't. I just never take calls inbound anymore. Like just like off the cuff. Like for me, I like to have my calendar set up and I think it's a personality thing. Like if I want to talk to somebody, I do want to like I want to coordinate my day and I want to block it into like either morning or an afternoon. I just don't like taking ad hoc calls because I find that ad hoc calls they'll never they'll never fit into when I say it out loud. It's like, you see, but it's just how I structured my day. Well, I like I'm only asking a lot of double click on this because coming from a sales background. Yeah. Getting inbound calls like the most exciting thing and it's like this probably retraining of your brain probably had to go through it. It's an exciting thing. But then if I'm trying, so I'm thinking through why do I do that? And the reason why I do that is because I want the best possible outcome for every single call. So even in a sales context, if I'm going into a sales call, like I still spend five or 10 minutes prepping before that call to make sure that I have all the information in front of me that I need to have the best possible outcome. Right. And I don't do a lot of like ad hoc sales call stuff. So if I was like first person responding to like a mission critical something, then yes, you have to be available. But I don't do a lot of that anymore. So maybe in that context, I would change my sort of my view on that a little bit. But right now, if I'm going into a call, I want to prep, I want I want the best possible outcome. And for that to happen, like I want that blocked off in my calendar. So I know when that's happening and I can prefer accordingly. Yeah, that's just the habit that I've adopted recently. I also find that when there's like just ad hoc calls and they're not blocked off in a calendar, they tend to run longer than they have to and people tend to ramble. So if they're not blocked off and they're not like segmented as like 30 minutes or 45 minutes driven 15 minutes, people will like, there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff that people just tend to sort of dump on you in an ad hoc call that really isn't required to be solved in that moment. So I found it if almost every call that I have, and I like this is why also like coordinating them and putting them on a calendar, like there's agendas for every single call that I have. So we know what we're actually going to be addressing. So it's not just a dump of all the other 50 topics that we could be talking about, but this is not the right time for it. So I find that I've just optimized all of the communication that I have so that I don't have to spend more time on calls than I need to. I don't take a call that, you know, maybe I 15 minutes until the next call or the next whatever I got to do. The call comes in and then we start rambling going off and then goes into the next call and that's just pushed back. So it's just I found it is just not the best outcome. What do I have? Friends call you, bro. Friends don't call them. I mean like it's mostly texting to be honest. A lot of people. Voice mail guy. Yeah, I've sent a lot of voice notes. Yeah. I sent a lot of voice notes. If like I'll go through my voice mails at the end of the day and that there's people that have to call back, I'll call them back or or I'll send a text saying, hey, can we schedule the call for tomorrow? Here's my calendar link, whatever. It's not like I don't I it's not like I don't acknowledge people, but just in the moment there's nothing that that is that has to be dealt with. There's nothing that's happening in the moment that I haven't scheduled to plant out that has to be dealt with. Like I'm not in that position where there are fires. So for me, it's just like let's plant it out and like let's add accordingly. I mean like the point I did the interesting thing in the paradox that I've been trying to dig into more is putting systems in place. You mentioned Garcia at the start putting systems in place to get into flow state and it sounds well all of this is all of this is to to get into flow state because I mean like counterintuitive, you know, it is counterintuitive, but what is what's the principle where the like the work expands the time that you give it? I'm blanking on the name of the right. It's like not the bucket the wall. Yeah, but basically if you give work an hour and a half, like you'll find that that work expands for an hour and a half. And this is something that I find has been very applicable in my life. So I need to reduce the amount of time that I give tasks and I need to reduce the amount of time that I communicate with people because ultimately I think that I think that most people want to spend time doing like easy work or the chatting or the brainstorming and not doing the actual hard work that moves the needle. Yeah. And this is just a way that I found it really optimizes that enforces people to limit communication to like mission-critical items that are actually going to move the needle forward in whatever project business, whatever we're trying to do. And it just removes a lot of the fluff. And I think a lot of people like spending time on fluff. And I think that I actually now I've never really spoken about this like in person before, but it's like a little bit of like a therapy session like figuring out why do the things that I do. This only started after COVID. Interesting. It started after COVID because I found that people were spending more time on calls than they had to. People were jumping on zooms and they were again, they were dumping all the things that they wanted to figure out that really didn't have to figure out in that moment on a Zoom call. So I was trying to find ways to like tighten shit up. So that people wouldn't waste my time, but also their own time. Because people would much rather chat than actually get worked on. Myself included, but I have to like I have to like if I do that too much, then nothing gets done. So during COVID I found that people got very comfortable spending lots of time on calls for no reason. So this was like a way to sort of tighten it up a little bit. Like everything's scheduled, everything's on the calendar, everything's blocked off, everything's prepped for everything's planned. And if we need more time, we get more time. But like let's like really focus on getting that shit done in the time we allocated. Yeah, it's an interesting point. I mean, again, I find myself and in my day job balancing the efficiencies that you get from a Zoom caller, a virtual call with actually getting in person with someone and getting deals done and actually being across the table from them. And I'd love to explore your thesis on that and then have social club and your day to day now kind of ties into that, getting back people back in person, building networks that kind of maybe went by the way side in person, at least in the pandemic. So I've also come to realize how important in person conversations are after going through, you know, like whatever three and a half years of just so the difference, but in my opinion, between extra time on a Zoom call or an ad hoc phone call versus extra time spent in person is I do not feel like a relationship is built virtually to a significant degree. I agree. I could spend 10 hours on Zoom with you and it is not the same as spending an hour and a half sitting down over lunch or coffee with somebody. I have no idea why I can't like I'm sure there's like a reason be like a very sciencey reason. Yeah, I think we can hop on it. I'm sure you can totally do it. But I will always spend this is now now I'm this is this is me going the opposite direction. I will always spend extra time with somebody in person because I feel like that builds a relationship that can truly benefit whatever it is you're working on together versus extra time on Zoom. I feel is wasted extra time on the phone. I feel is wasted. It's it's not relationship building. It's virtually it has to be like tactical like knowledge transfer for next steps for this project in person. There's like a true relationship building component where trust can be built where you can you can understand outside of the context of business what's going on in that person's life. What they're stressed about what they're you know the humanity of the individual that you cannot get a gauge on virtually. So in person to me is very important. If I want to build a relationship with somebody if I want to hire somebody knew it has to be in person and I'm sure people will listen to this and they'll say I've hired fine virtually. I can't do it like it's very hard from I can continue a relationship virtually. I can't build a new relationship virtually. Yeah well there's no level of trust. If you're doing this virtually we'd have a great time we'd have a great podcast. We'd probably never talk again. Right. But if we're going to do this for an hour and a half in person we grab a coffee after whatever you already have a coffee maybe get more coffee. There will be like there will be this this connection that's born this bill that you can't build on. So how does that translate into my work? Well I mean like I'll spend extra time going for coffee going for meeting going for lunch is going for dinners. The company that I'm building the social club is it's a private member's community predominantly exited entrepreneurs or some like later stage operators. But it's like a YPO Tiger 21 DO for people that are advancing their career and I'll say people that are in Tiger 21 are not advanced but it's a little bit later stage than YPO for example or EO and all of the events that we do are in person again because you're building true relationships. It is a cohort or a group of peers that are all at the same level in their life. They're all dealing with similar things and for you to truly get support from peers you have to trust them because if you're going to say you know I just sold my company for a hundred million dollars and my wife's cheating on me and I got to get a divorce but I don't have a pretty like these are wild issues that people ask you to deal with you have to trust the person that you're talking to and that is not going to be built over a Zoom call or a webinar any of that shit ahead. So the power of community I think is in in-person experiences because you can build trusts and then you can actually you can build friendships that and at the end of the day like if you if you want to succeed in life like I mean there's all these that like there's all the tropes right like you're the average of the five people you spend your time around or whatever like those are all very very true so you have to spend time around people that are at your caliber and that you can build friendships with and that you can get to know and get the trust and for some people that's a very easy exercise and for some people that comes naturally and for a lot of people it doesn't so people always create community and this is why even in a private members community four exited entrepreneurs is still focused on in-person because I think that's where all the trust is built. Yeah to get woo woo for a second I think that's good let's go I'll go there I mean I think that that's a matter of trust and that's from just like the energy someone gives off. I agree that this is like you know deep and granular from like the molecular level all that stuff that people can get much you know deep on the night again but I think there's just so much that you can learn about so much from being in their presence and again it's you can talk about mindfulness and this can talk about being present but I think that you can't get that from pixels on a screen. No well when somebody walks in a room like you you feel their presence. You feel who they are you feel if I mean some people probably can are better at reading individuals and others but you you feel like are they are they good are they a little bit malicious are they kind are they nervous are they confident like you feel this when somebody comes into a room first impression yeah it's very hard to gauge that right you really can't read people I mean that there's like there's like body language experts and shit like that too like that's outside of my expertise but so that's where in person really comes into play that's what I'm trying to create with social club and it's sort of like how I do all my business like there really hasn't been one significant business move transaction everything from raising money to hiring somebody where there hasn't been an in person to fall into it I think that your emphasis and interest on trust and building trust there's interesting parallels to your family's background and you know they promote justice I mean there's something uh something subconscious there for you but I'd love to get an understanding I don't know this is turning with their message maybe just help me understand better at what point did the idea for social club first hop in your head maybe in a nascent form of what it what it has now manifested out to look like but what was the first time you thought hey there could be something um yeah I think I think what I saw was the I took for granted the community that I had built with my podcast I had just moved from Toronto to Miami um I had like a fabulous network of people like it's truly incredible people people that I don't like it's not just that I just like friends that sell a company for you know half a billion a billion dollars like that is a wild group of people um so my landing in Miami was very comfortable because I had the podcast I had a network of people and then you meet one person who's local who's had some success and you know they're not lying about their success and and then you get to know them and they've sort of like vetted their own circle of friends so they'll introduce you to their friends and you build like a really nice network quite easily that's not the norm for most people right most people have not spent six years building a massive network of people that are all sort of vetted and above board and good honest ethical business people right so for a lot of the friends that I met that were not part of the podcast like I noticed that they were incredible people they just moved down here um but everybody was siloed like nobody had really strong networks because they had come especially Miami it's always been a little bit of a transplant city but even post-COVID you have all the people that like all of my friends are actually not from Miami some now but very few most of them are like New York SFC, Ohio, LA so they all move down here and they all have great networks back home they're all very successful but they don't have strong networks down here so I'm first of all thinking like okay so there's something there's something there I mean I've built this awesome network myself and people are always asking me to introduce them to other people that I know so that's interesting um but then I also I mean I also look at YPO and I look at EO and I look at Tiger 21 and I I am building social club for me as the avatar somebody that has exited a company but I'm a little bit too advanced for YPO because I'm not a current operator I'm I mean EO is probably like one to two million dollars revenue some people stay in YPO and EO for forever but ultimately they're not served so what do I mean by that well YPO EO are mostly focused on operational um Tiger 21 is mostly focused on wealth but I also know that people that exit a company I care about a lot of other things too so yes wealth deal flow investment you know legacy planning tax mitigation all those things but they also care about longevity and health and wellness because the second you make any little bit of money even if you don't but the second you do you definitely care about living longer yeah and being healthier and preventing cognitive decline um obviously you want to be around peers that are like operationally excellent business leaders then you also care about influence and I saw that because of all the people that sold their companies that were like Scott come I want to go on your podcast I want to do an episode and when I started talking when I started talking to them they're writing a book they're trying to get on a TEDx days are trying to start their own podcasts are trying to build their social and they're asking me all these questions about how to do it so I'm like okay so you've built and sold the company you've basically like like you know like you've won at life you've done it but now there's another there's another thing that you want to accomplish right so I'm like knowing the fact that there's especially Miami there's a whole bunch of transplants that are successful simultaneously the fact that there's no community that serves four buckets so business wealth health and influence I'm like let me put together a community that serves exited or highly accessible people and I will leverage some of the connections that I have to make an incredible community I'll bring speakers in that are usually inaccessible because they have access to those um and I'm already being asked to make all these introductions plus I'll make sure that they're served in the way that they actually need to be served as exited founders and I'm focusing on the bucks that they're like they care about yeah and that was sort of the genesis for um social club it was a gap in the market it was opportunity it was unique adventure unique unfair advantage and it was all those things and I'm like let's see what happens so it's going it's just yeah I mean I was just digging in this past week on the idea of third-party venues outside of work or third-party locations for individuals outside of work yeah like like we work or like more more so like back in the fifties after work people would have their country club they're a lot of the diner that places they go there's some term that's like I'll just have used for it because I can't think of right now but yeah basically talking about how important there's now but some mocktail bars that are opening up things like that we want to go to and so I'm about how people in today's society just don't have that especially folks that work from home all day long they don't have a work community but it's almost interesting it's an interesting kind of allegory that social clubs providing this almost like quasi metropolitan clubs quasi like correct place for people to convene outside of you know they're typical they're work in their home so I mentioned like for very like for very obvious buckets of facilitation speakers that I want to that want to say I mentioned like business wealth longevity and influence those are like tangible things that you can say like if I go to an event discuss putting on I'm going to get a speaker that's going to speak to one of those four things when I talk about one of those four items however you are very correct in saying that at the end of the day people just want to spend time with people that they like that understand the things that they understand that can have conversations that they like to have conversation like so it's it's there's there's very tactical things that I want to deliver but at the end of the day it's like you want to step into a room with people who are who they say they are and have achieved what they say they have achieved and you you want to be friends with these people and I think that the second you sell a business you're a little bit guarded about who you let them peer circle naturally yeah it's I mean this is why some of these groups already exist because you just want to be with peers so I'm like peer group that serves somebody who is successful and then provides some additional programming I think that's a win because you are going to spend time with people that are the same level as you plus I'm bringing in programming that's going to serve where you're at in your life but it is it's a social plan right if you can walk into a room even if I didn't have programming and I just sure rated a group and we went for dinner every single month like that's still a win yeah because these are people that you know you can have a conversation with about what do I do with my kids I don't know how much money to leave them like I I just you know I just sold my company like how do I start a family office that's a wild question to ask but you don't know just because you're a great operator how to do all the other things that you're supposed to eventually do is because you're an operator doesn't know me you know how to invest downs you've been liners on head down building a thing a lot of hard work a little bit of luck probably like 20 years of your life and now you have a lot of money and you don't really know who you want to bring in and to help you figure this shit out right so you talked to other people that have gone through the same experience and I interestingly enough ties into your framework of mindset with mindset systems and connections right yeah those those operators and folks that have exited for tons of tons of money they've probably mastered mindset to some capacity whatever mindset gets them to where they are yes they master the systems component that got them to where they are and then connections change to your point they have the connections they know they know the connections have got them to where they are right they know the different connections will get them to where they have to go so we'll always be connections but it won't be the same ones right like you don't need an amazing CML that knows ex you know type of marketing better than you do that's going to take your company and from wherever it is to where it has to go like this is a different set of connections that will help you figure it out but yes correct like they know that that's an important piece of their own success right they didn't build this business on their own yeah so you mentioned the point on longevity talked about omnipatch and how that journey is tied in the yeah sure so that's the longevity on me patch um health of wellness has been a big part of my life um basically my first job ever was coaching tennis really so i mean i've been some version of athletic i used to play a lot of hockey i played rugby and football in high school soccer um so i played like a ton of sports and then after high school if you're not drafted to like my sport was hockey if you're not drafted that time you're 16 you're not going pro so like then i got into like way lifting and all that stuff so health and wellness like first of all so that you feel good you look good but then i realized that it started to impact your cognitive performance and your energy levels that was very important and then of course with on me on me was a transferable vitamin patch um so we actually sold that a year ago to uh like a wholesale vitamin manufacturer and davi but um the premise was it was supplementation so that you could get vitamin supplements minerals without all the additives that usually come with the stuff you get that like a whatever you know like a oral or out of vitamin shop or a G&C there's like a lot of stuff there because a lot of filler is not it is and shit that you shouldn't put in your body so it was like you were so you can actually absorb a lot of stuff through your skin or just orange mix on that was that was the premise right and that's that's the product that we created um but yeah for me it was that was after my last company so my last company was a broadcast software company it was called its item or we renamed it the Swift um and then after that family office asked me to bring on a patch to market and that's that's what we did so it was it was the first time i sort of took my health and wellness passion and then built a business around it um because i never done that to that point i was always like health and wellness was like something that was important to me um but then i was like i was always building tech companies yeah so um yeah that was that was really it it was it was a fun little consumer goods product that was a massive shift for me um coming from a tech background a lot of different things to figure out um both through direct consumer uh as well as through like brokerage distributors and getting into like actual doors so yeah that was like a fun it was a fun entrepreneurial i don't know like a learning experience because you totally switch how you build a business instead of onboarding new customers by spinning up new AWS servers now you have to actually worry about like margins because your margins are no longer like 95% of so now you have to figure out okay so what's my capital TV and how do i you know build a subscription component and reduce churn and work with UGC and all these different things that i never had to do with sass um but i mean like that's fun so you learn you learn a whole new version of entrepreneurship and business but uh yeah it played into something that was like super super important for me and i think for now a lot of people because when i got into health and wellness and i was worried about mac bro's and i was messing around with intermittent fasting and i was trying different supplements again to like like like not only like feel good look good but like feel energized throughout my entire day which is like a very actually right now with my health of wellness journey for me it's yeah i like to gym every morning but okay am i gonna still be sharp at like five six in the afternoon and i'm not hitting like any slump so i sort of like i optimize my diet for that but um now it's very popular now if you like post-COVID people are so caught in center their health of wellness right like everybody's doing like this peptide or red light sauna or cold punch um it's it's funny because i was into this stuff like years ago but now like the masses are getting into it because they realize it if you don't take care of yourself you're not going to have a very good life so um on me was like playing into into sort of that hype cycle of the market but i don't think it's going away now anything that removes garbage from your body anything that makes you feel better live longer like you're gonna you're gonna try it out at least yeah yeah so i was around out here one of the things you frequently publish on and you talk about a lot is pursuing your passion slash the passion trap you uh you had an interesting point i i wrote down so i didn't want to butcher it but if you do have a passion what you're doing it's easy to sustain it for a long period of time for the money starts to find you yeah i really liked that point about the money starts to find you and we talked about this on the outskirt right you built something that you're passionate about and the money i know that's like the cliche the money will come but like i feel like there's this theory that oh you go like you know quit your job and the money will come and go pursue your passion and you wrote about that previously but so you shouldn't you shouldn't quit your job and first of all passion is difficult so this is this is what i believe about passion first of all i think motivation is is i don't think motivation is very useful because motivation leaves immediately the second it gets hard motivation is done um with passion you will be passionate about the thing that you build when money starts coming in like you will find passion for like if you started like a dog food business and you're making tons of money you will start to get super damn passionate about dog food right i think passion is fine but we have to have this like venn diagram of passion plus what the market needs and if we have passion plus what the market needs and i think that what's uh well what's the there's like an actual term for you guy you guy yeah i have like five hours of sleep last night you guys so it's like what you're good at what the market needs and then there's one other uh there's one other component to it i think it's where you're good at what you're passionate about yeah we're good at what you're passionate about what the market is so i think that's a very important framework to think about passion because if you are passionate about something but you're not good at it and the market doesn't need it then obviously it's a massive waste of time so yes passion is good passion will carry you through like those sort of like laws what things aren't working out but you also have to make sure that you are setting markers for is this business moving in the direction that i needed to and if not then you're iterating and you're pivoting or you're trying new things or whatever but you do have to make sure that there's some need for it in the market so you have to find a way to validate the need for your passion in the market before you sort of go down that path and also some you mentioned it but like don't put your job like i'm a full believer in work your nine to five and then you test from five to nine or on the weekends so you figure out some semblance of product market fit for whatever that passion or whatever that business is and then once you double your income from your nine to five that's when you can pursue it full-time and like i mean in 2024 with gig economy with no code tools with the amount of you know free information you can find on youtube like you do not need a ton of money or a ton of resources to start most businesses that can make a lot of money yeah um there is a very interesting graph that shows the amount of employees require that maybe you can find these graphs and like put them all in the screen if you want but there's a very interesting graph that shows the amount of employees over a time period that are required to hit one million dollars in revenue and it's like i'm gonna make up numbers but just to illustrate the point in 1950 you would be like a hundred employees would be required right but then you see this graph along the y-axis like you see this obviously this this line like decreased dramatically to the point where in 2024 you need like one employee to hit a million dollars in revenue so that's because of all the access information and resources you know take advantage of of geographies and and go on five or upwork or top top whatever it is um but yes you can do that in your free time and then once you have again samples of product market fit um there's different ways to measure product market fit but you have a little bit of stems of product market fit then that's when you can triple down on on your passion per se and like pursue a full time um but i'm also a big fan of like building up that MVP of whatever that product or service is like if even for example let's do a more complex example if you were going to build a software product and you are not a developer um this is what buffer did so buffers spin up a there spun up a landing page um they put i think it was like a type form or something on that landing page saying like would you pay for this product if we created it and it described the product it described all the utility it described the different price points and it and they pushed traffic the founders pushed traffic that landing page and captured all the individuals that said yes we'll pay for it this is how much we'll pay these are the features we want so you actually have like this zero code like pre product pre revenue list of individuals that have already committed to paying for exactly what you say that you're going to build yeah and then now you've figured out that there's either some product market fit you can go find a technical co-founder i always recommend not doing a dev shop or you could even take that list and say like listen vc angel look at this is i've already found out that there's like 200 people that are willing to pay this price point for the product if we create it um let's go build it so i mean that costs you like what you go you just like enough space for one okay right and then maybe a couple ads but you could also do some organic social push with that page as well the point is it takes nothing to validate an idea and then you can start to pursue it and even then if you pursue it i still wouldn't quit your job yeah but i mean you can do risk the whole entrepreneurship journey like significantly so i love that dog food example i'm stock all-way professor jeep prof jeep talks about if you go in a tax law and you get a tax right no one's passionate about tax law true but if you go and you become the best tax right you can possibly be an internary able to go and take care of your spouse your kids your parents it's going to be this feedback loop or then you able to go and stay at the four seasons do whatever you want to do and then from there when you go back to your desk as a tax journey oh it's kind of it's not but it's amazing life style you have to live so it's like there's this whole feedback loop that you can get if you go do the best that you can there and that's kind of one side of it kind of entrepreneurial journey but i like that idea of also de-risking thought i like i like de-risking the entrepreneurial journey i also like i also don't want people to be static in their in their career choice so say you are a tax attorney and you are making money there's a lot of different entrepreneur or business ideas it can come from that right i mean we're going to legalize something yeah somewhere like you can do technology that solves problems in your own life that's usually so the highest success rate of an entrepreneur somebody who's been in the industry for like 10 to 20 years and then they find a problem that they're dealing with and then they go build a solution for that problem it's like the inverse like you always hear like you know entrepreneurs have like a whatever a 90 percent failure rate yeah if you solve a problem you've been dealing for 20 years that no one else knows about you go sell it to your peers it's like the it's like a 90 percent success rate and that's actually what entrepreneurship usually should be it's not the Stanford grad that goes to build like the next like whatever piece of tech that's going to change the world it's you're solving a pain point that is so niche that only you know about that you have the authority to go solve and I think that's what people should focus on but that takes 10 years in a field to understand 10 to 15 years of experience to understand like what that thing is but that de-risk again it's all about de-risking and then thinking inside the box if you put in like again 20 years that's turning there's a lot you can do with that there's a lot of different things you can build to serve your own community there's I mean but then you can also for example you could forget about even building a product you could go raise money and you could go acquire other like tax attorney businesses because now you know what good looks like you could go raise a fund and your thesis could be like listen we're going to do a roll-up of like tax attorney offices and then go sell to a private equity for like there's so many ways that you can make money if you understand your industry and you have this again competitive and unfair advantage based on your experience which is really what you need is an entrepreneur so good thanks for it and then yeah just so easy yeah this the point of static frustration when I talk to my friends are complaining about their job I'm like there's so like if you're a talented hardworking individual there's so many even in a bad job market there's so many places that are looking for good employees one yeah and it's like my like my for me I jump jobs three times in three-ish years and I got to a job that I absolutely love yeah and I'm like if I hadn't you know taking that risk that leap of faith gets a job that actually like by three years in my career I'd tried tech consulting M&A consulting product development and product manage like a product manager role now I'm in a sales job that I absolutely love but I wouldn't know that if I hadn't you know try these other things exactly and and like that's one side of it or well if I wasn't that tech consulting job or M&A consulting job and I didn't like it you have that nine to five role and then go afterwards go and figure out de-risk figure out what you like and dodge perennial journeys well but there's some of people have the kind of victim mentality oh my job sucks my boss sucks I can't do anything and they just get stuck in this loop where my response always just finally go find something to actually like whether it's in a new w2 or you know as a side awesome list like a lot of people when you say like spend time after hours like well I have family and very sympathetic to that but I there are always hours in a day and if you are somebody who I mean like I don't think there's too many people in this world that do not watch TV and spend from five to eleven only taking care of their kids yeah I like I don't believe that's a reality for most people maybe some people are very hectic lives and schedules may some people work two jobs okay sympathetic but the majority of people spend time with their family and they do have hours yeah most people have leisure time in their life I'm saying for a season up by the way for if you want to build anything significant a season of your life will be uncomfortable yeah I saw that that's so good it's very important to me for people to understand that because everyone's like well you know I don't like you know hustle culture and whatever and hustle point I'm like yeah you're right it sucks it's like not good to say that for the next 50 years of my life I'm gonna be working 12 hours a day but if you want to escape from where you're at or if you want to build something that's significant there will be a period a season where it's not comfortable where there isn't balance but that's okay because you're you're not balanced for a period so that you can have freedom I subscribe to that I'm sorry post that I absolutely love that I think that people have to be uncomfortable have to be comfortable for a period and that's okay and there's nothing wrong with that so yes for example if you do work nine to five and you commute up both ends that means you leave at eight and come back at six and then you gotta go pick up your kids and then you have dinner and like you're literally learning on YouTube from like nine to 11 or like 10 to 12 every single day great it sucks but you know what you're doing it for a purpose you're doing it for a reason and I bet because you're so time constrained you're gonna make sure that every single second you spend on that thing you're gonna be much more focused on it right and then you're gonna be able to take that away and you're gonna be able to do something with them so I just mean I'd spend that extra time and and commit to it as much as you can't because I think that that's really what's really gonna get you out of this victim mentality when you start to take small actions use I mean that's what really propels you forward that creates this this flywheel effect of activity that's gonna get you to where you want to go yeah I think there's a lot of people that are okay just settling and having their number which is also cool too 100% that's also cool but I would also say the strategic about your career I'm like I mean if you're gonna play the job game like it sucks but I mean you got to be able to bounce around a little bit and not bounce around and like hurt the company that's paying you but I mean make a contract with the company and this is one of my favorite things to do especially in a market where people do jump around say I'm gonna commit two years three of pick a number I'm gonna commit two years of my life to you to this company and for those two years I will give you everything I will not look for other jobs um but during those two years I watch you director VP whatever to help me get to where I want to go next and I'm telling you right now in two years I want to be making 10% more this is a salary or this is the title or these are the responsibilities like let's sign this contract to be an actual contractor it could be like just like a verbal contract like yeah I'm gonna go there because if you don't help me go there I'm gonna leave anyways and I'm going to probably be taking interviews like on my lunch break and I'm gonna be half-assing in that work and I'm gonna silent whatever quit or whatever the hell is called so I love that concept of the company and the employee to make a contract for commitment to work for period of time focused on future both the employee so it's serving both in the best way possible and I think it's even more important now because why would you have loyalty when there's no pension why would you have loyalty when there's no benefit I know for a fact that if you're working for one company and you're getting paid one salary and you you quit and you go to a competitor you'll get a pay bump faster than if you stay at your own company so if like people aren't stupid so let's like let's play the game people want to play it and that's where I think you get the most out of people that you actually hire and that's where people that are getting hired understand this is a good company it's actually gonna serve me in the future so then you're setting yourself up future success and you commit to each other for a period of time and you know where the angles want to be paying it to healthy work relationship to but like that's my point if you're gonna play the W2 game like be purposeful about it or else again you're gonna be like 50 and you're gonna be like a lot of regret and resentment and I should have and ultimately yeah maybe you don't want to be an entrepreneur but like you could have moved farther if you want to or if you don't want to have more responsibility optimize the life that you want with the role that you have and get the most damn money you can because like lifestyle already right I beg of you go speak at HR conferences go start some sort of HR consulting company for four to five hundred go build out like a and you know offshore HR business because like yeah that's the reality of where I say so I think I've heard talk about the lack of pensions today or are not there are not right yeah the lack there which is none but yeah that's just I think good advice all the way around I know we're coming up on time you're just be mindful of of your time and and I want to just ask you've to film what about five years of success story how many episodes set out I think we're at 500 episodes 500 episodes yes you've talked to some amazing founders some amazing entrepreneurs yeah there's someone that you haven't been able to get in touch with you have an expensive network because someone you haven't been able to get in touch with that we can you know hunt down and get the gun on the shelf um call them out let's get get a clip going I know right I know I know I mean like I'm just gonna I'm gonna shoot for the moon on it's like I'll I'll take Elon every day yeah I haven't had him on um I want I want like I take Mark Cuban I know there's a lot of podcasts I should probably reach out to him I have to yeah um he is down here a lot so I think that like big business personalities um that are not afraid to voice their opinion because it's not fun when you have somebody so guarded yeah I don't want to be canceled like I'll get out of here or over that yeah I mean we're wrong you know I'm gonna be canceled so I think that um yeah I think that like big business personalities like that like a Elon or a Cuban or even like an Alira haven't had these guys on yet so that's probably where I'll go next next year well it's got folks in my audience I want to know if you before yeah I want to tap in where's the best place for them to follow you get in touch um you can go to Scott DeClairey.com because everything's there and all the socials are at Scott DeClairey too so it's awesome thanks so much I appreciate that I appreciate it thank you well