What is your goal for being on the show?
Help the audience.
I think the key, everything I'm doing this for
is to help people from getting into a business
and struggling, losing money, getting discouraged
and giving up.
Can you tell me more about that?
What do you do exactly to help the audience?
Well, I think answer tough questions.
What do I do to prepare,
what do I do to prepare to go into business for myself?
And I think the answers will surprise them.
Most people go into business with a kind of,
I'm gonna jump into it mentality.
I've made the decision, let's go.
And I think that's a mistake.
I think they should be much more cautious,
do much more research and be much more deliberate
about getting into business for themselves.
Wow.
And most often they are so excited about the prospects
that they're blinded by the positivity
without thinking about have I prepared for this?
So whether it's real estate
or any other entrepreneurial aspect,
they really didn't, many, most of them,
most a high percentage probably have not done enough
research and analysis of really questioning
what's the survival rate?
How long does it take to become profitable?
What's my upside potential?
And what will be involved in getting that potential?
And they don't do that.
Tips for early entrepreneurs then.
Early on what?
Entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs, yeah.
I think the first thing is,
the first question they should ask is,
where do I go to understand the business
that I'm getting into or that I seek to get into?
Where are the sources of information
that allow me to do an estimate of the situation?
In other words, going into financial planning, for example,
are there resources that would provide me with details
or analysis or information that tells me the survival rate,
that tells me what the likely income is going to be
in the first one, two, three years?
Are there associations?
Are there, for example, in real estate,
there's a National Association of Realtors
which has significant amount of information,
surveys of agents and how much profit they make or don't make.
And that was a tremendous resource in writing my book
because it gave me the statistics of how many people
were failing in the first two years,
how many people were limping along making minimal income.
It gave me the average hours worked.
It gave me statistical data
that I could assess this estimate of the situation.
And that's a very important term.
The estimate of the situation is what is the industry today
and how will I survive in that industry
and what's my likelihood of success being open-minded
about the positives and the negatives of that
and not having a tunnel vision
that I'm so excited by this
and I'm so enthusiastic to do it
that I ignore the warning signs.
And when a person goes into real estate
and finds out that,
well, Harry, I'll just give you a real good story.
A gentleman called me up
and knowing that I was one of the very top-producing
real estate agents in our area,
he called me up and I had helped him purchase a home.
And he said,
Sonny, I'm thinking about going into
the real estate business.
And I asked him, how much do you make per year
in your current job, your current assignment?
And he said about 200,000 a year.
And I said, it will take you, in my opinion,
three to four years to equal that in net profit
if you go into residential real estate
from the very beginning,
three or four years,
to equal what you're currently making.
Now, and there's no guarantee of success,
but if you're very good and you study and you really try
and you devote the time to it,
you could probably work your way up
to making about $200,000 a year in three or four years.
This man was a talented, successful businessman.
But a lot of people go into real estate
and they think it's gonna be so easy.
I'm gonna turn on the engine for my new business
and I'm so enthusiastic, I'm so excited
that I ignore the red flags.
And that's a problem.
Yeah, I have so many names of people
that come to my mind who are going down this path.
And I see it, I see it.
Hopefully they make it with their grit and enthusiasm
and they do it and they prove me wrong.
But I also see the pain coming from the other side.
I'm like, oh my gosh, I should have switched
five years of my life, I didn't realize why.
Well, in my book, I tell a story of a brilliant man.
He was president of a medium-sized corporation.
And I mean a pretty good sized corporation.
If I said the name of it, most people would know it.
And he, a medium-sized meaning about probably 25,
30 million per year in revenues.
That's not a bad business.
And he retired from that business
and had been successful in everything he had ever done.
And he started a business and he hired me to come out
and evaluate the business and tell him
what was going wrong,
because he was losing about $20,000 a month
in this small business that he started
after being president of a medium-sized corporation,
having lots of employees, et cetera.
And I did the analysis and determined that he would lose,
was losing 200 to $250,000 per year.
And that his likelihood of continuing to lose that money
was pretty high.
He did not have a business marketing plan,
a business plan or a marketing plan.
He did not have the marketing strategies and tactics
that would allow him to be successful.
He had a boat with no captain.
Even as highly knowledgeable as he was
of running a big corporation, keep in mind,
he had captains of all the different areas.
That's going back to what you said a minute ago
about your most recent activity.
When you look at, you've got to understand financial.
You've got to understand marketing, technology, personnel.
You have to understand your marketing strategy
and the marketplace.
You have to know who your target audience is
and what's going to be the hot button for them.
There's so much you have to know that when you start
a very small business as an entrepreneur
and you don't have expert, subject, expert, expertise,
subject area experts in those other areas,
it's going to be risky.
And the fewer of those resources
that you have available to you,
the more likely it is for failure.
And one of the biggest problems is that someone
who's been highly successful in something else
has a false sense of knowledge and security
because they feel like I've been successful.
I've done it before.
I can do it again.
It doesn't mean that when they started the endeavor
that they're in currently or previously,
that they were maybe an employee or a team member
or a partner.
But when they have to start over and do everything
from the beginning in a different environment,
in a different world than maybe they were in
when they started, it could be catastrophic.
And this particular man said to me, almost in tears,
if you can imagine a 68 year old man
who has been highly successful
in almost everything he's ever done,
losing 400,000 dollars in cash,
in the first two years of his business,
seeing his retirement funds dwindle
as he funds a non-profitable business,
he looked at me almost in tears and said,
what do I need to do?
Help me.
And the first thing we went dead was we went back to basics.
What is the audience?
What are they looking for?
And how do we appeal to them?
And we corrected the shift,
but it took another year to get back to normal.
But it took another year to year and a half,
and he lost over $500,000
before he started making money.
Well, it took him a long time to recover the 500,000.
I don't want that to happen to people.
I don't want them to go into real estate
and work two years and make a little bit of money.
Maybe they make as much
as they would have made working for someone.
And to that extent, maybe they believe they're successful,
but that's not business ownership.
Business ownership is owning a business
that not only pays the key people who run the business
a meaningful or reasonable wage,
but also makes a profit.
And I said, first thing, I'd do the research.
But then I'd also ask for,
I'd look for some mentors.
I mean, for example, let's just say that someone,
and I'm not volunteering to do this
because I don't do this for a living, meaning mentorship.
But let's say that someone said,
I want to go into real estate or insurance
or professional services businesses of some type.
They would need to look for someone like me, okay?
That would give them the hard truth.
That would tell them, listen,
I'll put it this way.
There's a brilliant man who's probably a billionaire.
And I was going to take a project
to list 2,000 acres of land surrounding a big lake.
And I went to this gentleman and I asked for his advice
and his opinion of the likelihood of success
in selling that 2,000 acres for a lot of money around a lake
to develop as a, let's just imagine Vail, Colorado.
That's the kind of environment it would be.
Well, that was a billion dollar project there.
It would cost about a billion dollars to develop that.
So you got to sell it to someone
who can put together a project with an expense
of over a billion dollars over a period of 20 to 30 years
that would develop into a Vail, Colorado or Beaver Creek.
And I told him some ideas I had
about how to market this 2,000 acres of land.
Now I trust this man.
He's a billionaire.
He's been successful beyond measure
compared to most people.
And he said, Sonny, a lot of people have good ideas.
That's the easy part.
A lot of people have a great idea
about a business they want to get into.
They have a great idea about something
they think the public can use, would pay for, et cetera,
but they don't know it.
They just think it.
And it may be a tremendous idea with no potential.
So you got to have people you can go to.
Like if you came to me and said, Sonny,
I'm thinking about doing this business enterprise
and probably I'm going to be able to do it.
I'm thinking about doing this business enterprise
and probably in about two hours and about 20 questions,
I could probably tell you, Perry,
you are or you're not on track to success in that
because I would ask you important questions.
Who is your target market
and why are they going to buy from you?
Why would they go to this lake with this 2,000 acres
when they could go to Vail or Beaver Creek,
which is already developed and very, very popular?
Wow.
Sonny, go ahead.
Thank you.
Having a good understanding of the market,
the estimate of the current situation,
great way to say it.
What is the current market?
What is happening in this industry?
How many people are successful?
How many people are failing?
What is the prospects for success?
Having mentors to test you, to really answer you honestly
in your best interest.
And then asking yourself a very hard question.
Do I have the financial ability to sustain myself
through the early years of this project
or do I have to produce 80, $100,000 per year in income
year one or I'm going to be in trouble?
And that's the acid test.
Can I survive long enough to be here?
The old last man standing concept, right?
Will I be here or will I be the last one standing
and successful when all the other people have failed?
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned into Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.