Welcome to the Thrivewell Journey. We're a new podcast dedicated to empowering
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entrepreneur, but as a human being. And with that, I want to thank you for being
a part of the Thravo journey. What's the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when
they're too focused on working in their business instead of on it?
I don't know if there's anybody who's ever been lying on their death bed and
looking up at their loved ones and their last words saying, I wish I had worked
more. So if you zoom out, all of us have the same destination,
like, life-wise. We're all ending up dead at some point. But we do have
this time between now and whenever that moment is. Why not be intentional in
terms of how we spend that time? So to your question though about what are
some of the challenges for folks that have started a business trying to
figure this all out, be mindful of what it is you're building and why you're
building. I think sometimes when I talk to founders, I hear this, there's
not a definitive idea of what is the trying to build. There's just this
bigger, bigger, bigger mentality. But if we step back and you look at why
you're building your business and what you want it to be, right, that can bring
some clarity. So in any business, there's only three directions it can go.
Like, there's only three ways that a business ends up. We know the one
direction we all end up, but the businesses have three, right? One.
Yeah.
Oh.
Feed up, fill it, and dump it on. Feed up, fill it, and dump it on.
We'll eat it and dump it on. Yeah.
Let's get it.
Welcome back to another episode of the Thrive World Journey. Today's guest is
Jeremy B. Shapiro, a serial entrepreneur focusing on size, technology, and
information marketing. Since 1998, Jeremy has been guiding entrepreneurs to
break free from the grind of solarpreneurship and step into the business
ownership. Through masterminds, coaching, and consulting, he uncovers hidden
opportunities, helping business owners maximize profits, scale smarter, and
achieve the freedom they set out for financially and personally.
Fees on NPR, ABC News, and other news sources and global publications.
Jeremy brings decades of expertise and passion for empowering others.
So let's just go ahead and dive into this journey of insights and
strategies of success with Jeremy B. Shapiro. How are you doing, Jeremy?
Awesome. Thanks so much for inviting me on. Stoked to be here.
I am happy you're on. And you know, so funny because you have the initial
in your name that I found out. And then I use the initial in my name as a
moniker, you know, that's just kind of how it happened as an actor.
You are a serial entrepreneur, right? Mm-hmm.
What gave you the bug to be an entrepreneur, period, to get you on that journey?
Yeah, I've been an entrepreneur like my entire career and beyond. Even back,
like, you know, as a kid, I had little businesses, right?
You know, as kids sometimes do. But my first, like, real business was during
high school. And it got to the point that was growing.
And when I was at university, you know, part way through my second year,
I had this really, you know, difficult decision to make.
My businesses were growing. My team was growing.
Client base was growing. And I was, like, getting up towards about 40
hours a week of running my business, but also trying to take on a full course load.
So at the time I thought, like, oh, this is just a little bump in business.
I'll get this sorted out and then get back to school.
Mm-hmm. And so I thought I'd just take a semester off and return.
And I still haven't gone back. And, you know, my wife, you know, tells me
when she first met me and I shared, oh, yeah, I'll be going back to school.
She took one look at me and was like, nah, this guy's not going back.
It's not happening. You know, here we are 25 years later,
I still haven't gone back to school.
Well, it sounds like you found your calling and you found your path.
Yeah, you know, entrepreneurship is not for everyone, but for those of us
who do choose to go down that path is so powerful, right?
It provides, if done right, this really, really incredible,
what I call entrepreneurial freedom.
That's, you know, made my life wonderful in so many, so many ways.
I am provided really great freedoms in terms of how we spend our time,
where we spend our time and so on.
The idea of like not having that is just so otherworldly at this point.
But, you know, I understand for, you know, for some folks,
that's where they're at and entrepreneurship may be the path to,
you know, to not be in that nine to five.
For people who don't know, Jeremy B. Shapiro and Michael Burke,
why would they need to kick it with us on this podcast today?
Well, you know, in terms of what our listeners are, you know,
going to be finding out about and why they're here today, a lot of that comes
down to, you know, seeking out this idea of entrepreneurial freedom,
understanding what that is and what that path looks like to get there,
who it's for, who it's not for, and, you know, what you might encounter along the way.
You started, you started your business in high school.
So you were, you know the world of being a solopreneur, right?
Yeah.
Take us back to the moment when you realized you wanted to shift from the
solopreneur to actual business owner.
What sparked that change?
Yeah. So I'll answer that in two ways.
That's a really good question, right?
For myself, you know, I remember being at the point, you know, I'd worked as part
of a team, even in high school businesses.
And as I was scaling up one of, you know, my first real businesses post high school,
I got to a point many entrepreneurs get to where you sort of run out of hours
in the day and you realize one of a few things can happen.
Either one, you bring on more skilled folks who know things better than you
and sort of a good tip for our listeners is hire people smarter than you, right?
Or two, you just realize that you can't take care of any additional clients
or do additional work, even if it's coming your way, just because you're out of time.
Right? So we start, you know, leveraging, leveraging time and others better.
And so for me, that came down to bring, you know, other team members on to work
one-on-one with clients.
It also came down to bring on a project manager to oversee, you know,
hires and training and management and client relationships and all that.
So that was sort of, you know, one of the inflection points for me.
But I also remember really vividly when my wife and I had first met early on
when we were dating, I remember being out for dinner, the two of us, you know,
nice to top in a nice restaurant, looking across the table at each other,
getting to know each other as you do on those earlier dates.
And here I was with this incredible woman who I didn't realize at that time
would be my wife, right?
You know, we're just dating at this time.
And I had my phone with me.
And I kept, you know, looking over and checking my phone and, you know,
client called at some point and excuse myself to take care of that.
And here I was thinking I was the hero, being there for my clients and taking
care of them.
And it wasn't until I was sitting across from, you know, my wife that I realized
there's more than just that.
And what am I doing trying to divide my time between getting to know this
incredible woman and taking care of my clients?
So there was really a turning point there where I said, you know what?
After, you know, quote, business hours, my phones, you know,
unsilent, not available, I'll check emails and messages in the morning.
Right. And so I got to really be fully present and, you know,
and get to know who she was.
And then even when it wasn't being out of dates, just, you know,
doing anything else in the evenings, I was very tuned into where I was,
what I was doing socially or in the community or anything else.
And then during business hours was very focused and, you know,
on point in terms of the business side of things.
And that was just a matter of retraining clients and resetting
the expectation for what normal was.
Hmm. You know, that's great.
When you, when you're talking about that, with the word that came up
in my mind was balanced.
Like when you're starting a business and you're seeing yourself as a solopreneur,
but want to take your business to another level, don't necessarily know how.
Balance doesn't seem like it's in the vocabulary.
How does one create that?
Yeah, sometimes it can be a bit of a push and a pull, right?
Some, you know, some things get more of your attention at certain points
of your life than others or in certain parts of your week, your day and so on.
The thing that doesn't work well is trying to split your time in one moment.
Right. So, you know, many of our listeners can probably probably relate
to trying to get work done while also being present with your kids.
Right. You got the phone in your hand and you're saying,
uh-huh, uh-huh, while you're trying to do something and you're not tuned in to them.
And you're also not doing a good job at, you know, whatever it is you're doing
on your phone. So you're sort of doing a terrible job of both. Right.
Yeah. Pick one, do a really good job.
Be fully present for that, then shift over and do the other, you know,
when you create that time for that.
You know, I don't have kids, but I do have, have great or grand,
have you want to say it, nephews and nieces, uh,
they tend to want to spend a lot of time with me. Um, what I do love about
owning my own business and as an entrepreneur is that I can create my time
as time freedom, even though there's a lot of work to do.
I still can say, you know what, I'll put that to the side for right now
and let me spend time with them and I can, I can choose that.
Yeah. That's entrepreneurial freedom.
And that's giving you freedom of choice in terms of how you spend your time.
And that's so powerful.
Regular nine to five doesn't afford you that.
No, it does not.
What's the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when they're too focused
though on working in their business instead of on it?
You know, I don't know if there's anybody who's ever been lying on their
deathbed and looking up at their loved ones and their last words saying,
I wish I had worked more. Right.
Uh, so if you zoom out, like all of us have the same destination.
Right. Like, life wise, we're all, you know, we're all in an update at some point.
But we do have this time between now and whenever that moment is,
why not be intentional in terms of how we spend that time?
Right. Yeah.
I still remember when my kids were younger, we, um, we had met someone else
socially, um, just, you know, like those groups where you meet up with other
newer parents and these two parents handed me a business card for their kid.
And when I say kid, I mean like a five, six month old.
Right. Okay.
Uh, I thought that was like that tickled me that they had a business card for the
kid, but it had like a nannies phone number and the parents phone numbers on
there. And it was like, you know, a text for play date kind of thing.
Um, as we just got talking and both parents were attorneys and they hated
their jobs, like hated the work they were doing.
They were working crazy hours and it was miserable.
But their plan was we're going to put in five, they did the math, right?
Like we do this for five years, right?
We pay off law school, all the rest of that.
We got enough in the bank and then we're done.
They don't have to work anymore.
And like that was their plan.
So from a financial standpoint on a spreadsheet, maybe those numbers look great.
Right.
And their plan was, you know, to work, work, work, and then rebalance and don't
do any work and be fully present for it.
That time would be a six year old, a six year old who wouldn't have known their
parents for the first six years of their life.
Right.
Yeah.
So like, I remember looking at that and just thinking like, how wild is that
balance that you're thinking to go all in, you know, on one side, imagine if you
drove your car like that, right?
Taking a hard 90 degree right and a hard 90 degree left, right?
Going back to your point earlier about, you know, balance, right?
Balance is about making the small corrections about, you know, is about a lane
change, not, you know, aggressive U turns on the highway.
There's, there's, um, this is when I learned what balance is for me.
Like, like riding a bike, right?
We learn how to ride it.
We don't know balance about riding a bike until we practice it.
And sometimes we go to the left or to the right and finally, you know, we, we
know balance, right?
We, we sometimes don't have to get on the bike for years, but you get back on it
and you know, balance, you feel balance.
And the only thing that you sometimes need to do is just correct it a little to
the right, correct it a little to the left and you have balance.
And I think that for me made me realize, you know, it's not like you're
saying a hard left or a hard right.
You know, it doesn't, that doesn't necessarily work for me.
Yeah.
Uh, it's, it's these small corrections, right?
We've probably all heard the story about, you know, when pilots are heading
to your destination, right?
They don't just take off from the airport, point and direct direction and go.
Right.
They're constantly making the small course corrections all along the way.
Right.
And that's okay.
Right.
Even the tiniest, you know, one degree difference in terms of where they're trying to go.
Left unchecked could have you in a completely different state by the time you
land or a different country.
Right.
So to your question though, about like, you know, what are some of the challenges,
um, you know, for folks, um, that have started a business and are trying to figure
this all out, um, be mindful of, you know, what it is you're building and why you're
building.
Right.
I think sometimes when I talk to founders, I hear this side, you know, there,
there's not a definitive idea of what is the trend of build.
There's just this bigger, bigger, bigger mentality.
Right.
But if we step back and you look at like why you're building your business and what
you want it to be, right, that can bring some clarity.
So in any business, there's only three directions it can go.
Like there's only three ways that a business ends up.
We know the one direction we all end up, but the businesses have three, right?
One is you pass the business on to your kids.
Now, like, look, does that really happen a lot these days?
Not really?
Can it?
Sure.
And if you think you're going to be one of those, you know, rare breeds that will
pass on to your kids, ask yourself, like, are your kids really going to want to
continue on with your business?
Do they want it?
Yeah.
Right.
Like, and oftentimes, even when you think that's the plan, your kids, your
grown up kids, you know, won't agree with you.
So, you know, let's just set that aside.
Might it happen?
Sure.
But that's not usually the likely path.
Right.
The second option, and this is unfortunately the direction most businesses go, is
you run it into the ground, right?
You got a good thing going, you watch a peak, you watch it, you know, head down
and then you just turn that sign over and, you know, the shop is closed,
you're out of business and that's that.
You close a chapter in your life, right?
I've had businesses like that.
I've seen clients with businesses like that.
And that's not the greatest direction to go.
It's your baby, right?
It's your business.
It's built for everything you put into it.
Do you really want to just build it to close up shop?
It's not the greatest direction, but that is where almost all businesses go.
Right.
The third option though, is you build your business and you sell it.
So given those three choices, pass it on to your kids who don't want it, right?
Run it into the ground or build a business to sell it.
Most folks with that perspective look at that third option and now we get to ask,
how do we build our business so it provides for us in our life and supports the lifestyle
and everything we want now and in the future, right?
And that often comes down to building a saleable business.
Now, if your business is just you, how saleable is your business?
That can be really tough.
So when we start looking at, you know, that perspective of building a business to sell it,
and we start asking the question of how do we make a saleable business that often comes
down to having the right systems and the right people to run those systems.
The less dependent the business is on you and the easier it is for someone else to step
in and run and own that business, the better.
Right.
And you talk about freedom as optionality.
I think that's what you use.
What does that mean in a business sense?
Is that what you're talking about there?
Yeah.
So entrepreneurial freedom, you know, when I define that really comes down to that optionality,
that freedom of choice, right?
It's choosing what you do, who you do that with and when you do that, right?
Now, if you're working a regular job, there's someone else telling you where you need to
be and when and what you're going to do during that time, right?
So like that's the exact opposite of what we're talking about.
So as you grow in your business and you hire other folks to build out your team, right?
Nobody is saying that with entrepreneurial freedom, it means you're on a desert island
sipping, you know, umbrella, you know, drinks, you know, for the rest of your days.
Like not many of us actually want that.
And if you think you do try it for a week, you might get over that pretty quick, right?
Generally, we're in the business we're in because we love it.
We're passionate about it and we really enjoy what we're doing.
So when you have the entrepreneurial freedom, it's not saying you don't have to work in
your business, right?
It means you get to choose what you do.
If there's a part of the work you do or part of the, you know, one of the roles in the
company, you can continue doing that.
You can be selective about which clients you work with, which projects you take on, right?
You can do the jobs in the company that you love.
Maybe that's you are really great at and love being in the visionary or you're the inventor,
right?
Or the product person.
Maybe you love being on the front lines.
Maybe you love being the chef in the kitchen, right?
You can still do all these things, but it means you now can choose which roles you're
doing in the business and really love, you know, the time you do spend in your business.
When someone's growing their business, some business owners, I would say I'll use the
word stuck.
Sometimes they feel stuck and like they can't grow the business though.
What do you typically start to identify the growth opportunities within the business?
Yeah.
So business growth, when we look at companies that are scaling typically has like these S
shaped curves, right?
You sort of flat line and maybe there's some slow growth and there's some inflection and
you start to get that hockey stick, right?
Most folks think like once you hit that hockey stick, it just goes up, up, up into the moon.
The reality is if you let time go on that hockey stick starts to flatten out and plateaus
again.
And that's okay, right?
So what caused that, right?
It might be a new sales channel, a new partner you're working with, it might be a new product
launch you have, it might be some great press coverage.
It could be any of these different things that cause that growth to go up, but then
it plateaus.
So our goal is to stack those S's, right?
So as you're coming off the tail end of one, you're hitting that growth on the next S curve,
right?
Now, none of us have a crystal ball.
We don't know what exactly is going to cause that, but we have some good ideas of the things
that can help to create that next bump as one's tailing off to be starting that next
one, right?
So when we're filling plateaued, that's typically because we don't know how we got where we
are and we can't play that same tape again and get the same result.
And so we're feeling stuck, right?
We've worked with businesses where you have a pay-per-click campaign going and for every
dollar you put into your ads, you're getting $4 in sales back, right?
So you double down and now you're getting like a one to three return.
So you double down and now you're getting like a one to two return.
And then at some point, like it just becomes less effective.
You can't keep scaling that forever, right?
We've even seen where you have a campaign that's running that's producing a reliable,
predictable outcome and then there's changes and suddenly that campaign's running negative.
So you thought you had it all figured out, right?
You thought you could put it on autopilot, but in the game of business, right?
These unexpected things that come up and what was working for before doesn't work tomorrow.
So when we're feeling stuck, going back to that same playbook of what worked before won't
always get you unstuck.
So we've got to zoom out, right?
When we do the actual strategic work on the business as opposed to the day-to-day work
in the business, we can start to get unstuck.
But if we're limited to just the ideas we have in our own minds, we're going to be stuck
with just the ideas we have.
So how do we get the fresh ideas?
How do we find out the blind spots?
How do we learn about opportunities we didn't know about?
A lot of that comes down to surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals also on this
entrepreneurial journey.
We're going to share with you what they're up to, what's working, what's not working
and so forth.
And the format for these is often in a mastermind setting, right?
Napoleon Hill talks about this whole mastermind concept in his book, Thinking Grouge from
the 1930s, right?
And it comes down to when you have two or more people in the room at the same time working
in harmony on common goals and all.
You have the creation of this third mastermind.
If you've ever had the experience of brainstorming or trying to solve a problem on your own, and
then you talk to someone about it, sometimes just talking about it out loud with somebody
else can help you find a solution.
Sometimes just improving with someone or spitballing ideas or whiteboarding something out collaboratively
with others unlocks a whole new idea that you never would have found individually, right?
But together you're able to uncouple.
But really the most important part of surrounding yourself with individuals and sharing what's
going on is you get exposure to the things you didn't know you didn't know.
And that is where time and time again behind the closed doors of a mastermind group, I've
seen those key pivots in businesses.
That's where I've seen entirely new businesses launched.
I've seen existing businesses pivot, new sales channels, added new products launched, all
from getting exposure to the ideas of what folks didn't know they didn't know.
And that's where you get unstuck and unblocked.
It's from that peer advisor, from that third party perspective.
Yeah, you know, you don't know what you don't know and you don't know that you don't know
that you don't know.
So you need that core group of people that can give you insight.
So you brought up the mastermind.
I know that you have Bay Area, mastermind, is that correct?
Yeah.
Okay.
Can you explain what makes structured mastermind powerful for entrepreneurs?
I know you said a little bit about it.
What's the secret sauce in that?
Yeah, so what I think is really interesting is everyone who comes into the room, right,
there's some sort of superpower you have.
There's something you're really good at.
There's something you find easy that others find challenging, right?
Maybe you're amazing at marketing.
Maybe you are a fantastic operations person.
You're excellent at hiring.
You've got something you're really good at in business, right?
So everyone comes into the room with the things they know they know, right?
Now the reason people are finding us and coming into a closed door mastermind is because they're
feeling stuck, right?
There's some big burning question you've got.
Something's keeping you up at night.
There's something that you look at and you're like, if I only had an answer to that one
question, my goodness, I'd be so unstuck and I could just go a million miles an hour, right?
But when you have a question, right, you can seek out answers.
You can find a coach.
You can find a consultant.
You can find a book, take a course, go to an event, like go to a library.
You can search online.
When you have a question, you can find answers, right?
So people usually come into the room with that big question and looking for an answer
to that question.
But here's what I find so interesting, right?
When each person has their hot seat, right?
Our guests expect they're going to get the most notes and ideas during their own hot
seat where they get answers to their question.
But the real value, like all the pages of notes that people take are not from their
own hot seat.
It's actually from everyone else's hot seat.
It's when we get the deep dive into everyone else's business that we get that perspective,
right?
It's when we have that collaborative conversation where people have differing points of view,
where they challenge assumptions, right?
Where they call people on their BS, right?
Where they lovingly nudge someone towards the thing they don't want to be doing, right?
These are the opportunities.
These are the insights.
These are the pivots that are so, so game-changing for individual business owners, both professionally
in their business and sometimes really even personally in life, right?
They're with other people on Spaceship Earth here on this journey of life who have life
experience, who've been through the challenges, the trials, the tribulations and really have
that powerful perspective that can be so, so helpful.
So to your question about that secret sauce, a lot of it comes down to curating the right
room of people, right?
I know the things I look for when we're bringing in prospective members is we want lifelong
learners.
These are folks who are actively reading books, taking courses, going to events, right?
Taking the sword and getting better themselves, right?
That's a really good indication of someone who's going to be a good fit in our room,
right?
We also want folks who are open-minded, right?
Because if people are giving you input and ideas and you don't want to hear it, well,
then you're not going to get a whole lot of value from their perspectives in the room,
right?
Being open to loving feedback is really, really important.
On the flip side, we also want folks who aren't just there to receive but are also there to
bring their own expertise from their superpower who can contribute to that room and bring
their unique perspectives as well.
So we see folks who are just quietly observing or wanting to be a fly on the wall.
That's not going to be a great member in the room, right?
Because they're just sort of receiving information but not participating actively in that conversation.
So we look for that as well.
So there's a bunch more, but at a high level for really any group that you're going to
create or be a part of, you want to make sure it's a curated group.
It's not just a matter of someone who has a credit card that will clear and they can
fog a mirror, right?
You want to know there's an application process that members are being screened and that
you're getting the right folks in the room that are going to both bring and get value
from that group.
That's powerful to be just, I know that it should be a give and take and give, but it's
really powerful just to be in that room with people who have like, where I like-minded.
People that are looking for answers just as much as the next.
Can you share one of your biggest entrepreneurial failures or successes?
Just as a lesson.
Yeah, for sure.
So for one of my businesses that we're building up, it was building and growing really fast.
We're doing really well.
And we were a geographically located business.
We're tied to one geography just by nature of the business.
And there was a period where we were just getting phenomenal press coverage.
It was like almost every day we were on TV, radio, print.
It was just constant media coverage, which was wonderful.
And at one point we got picked up by a publication that had really tremendous readership.
And overnight the inquiries from all around the country were coming in.
And we people asking if they could license or franchise or learn about how to run our
business model in their geography.
At the time we looked at that and our response was like, yeah, that's great.
We're not doing franchises.
We're not doing licensing because we're going to be in your territory soon anyways.
We sort of had that.
We did it here.
We'll do it everywhere model.
So we appreciated the inquiries, but we really thought we could do it all on our own.
The short version of the story is we did not.
That was one of those businesses that sort of peaked and we watched it sort of crest
over right around that time actually and just go down, down, down.
And really the big, big lesson I take away from that multi-million dollar business that
really turned into nothing was that really was a well-timed business in terms of where
the markets were.
We had a lot of interest that we could have done a lot with.
We could have licensed the business model.
We could have explored that franchise route.
We could have trained folks on how to run this kind of business.
There's so much we could have done, but instead of looking at the pie as a pie that can be
bigger that we have a slice of, we looked at it and said we want the whole pie.
And it being too big of a project for us to take on on our own, when we could have leveraged
the passion, expertise, budget, leadership in others.
So the takeaway from that is when you do have the opportunity to have folks be a business
owner in an area and help you to expand that business, that can be a really, really positive
thing.
I had the opportunity years ago to head out to Ann Arbor.
There's a company out there at Zingerman's.
And one of the cool things that they did as a business is they really worked their way
up their supply chain.
So they started off as a deli near college campus and they were successful.
They were running a really great deli.
When they looked at their expenses, they realized one of the biggest expenses for rolling out
sandwiches all day long was bread.
So they said, well, what if we opened our own bakery?
And so they did, they opened a bakery and the bakery's first customer, their big wholesale
customer was the deli.
So the deli suddenly took the biggest expense category and the money was now going to themselves
as a separate business.
That bakery then also went on to get other wholesale customers, restaurants, stores,
distributors, and so on, and sell direct to consumers.
So they now had two businesses running.
The cafe then, the deli then looked at their expenses and said, well, the next big expense
we have is dairy, right?
They've got cheese for all their sandwiches.
They've got milk.
They have cream cheese for their bagels, all these different things.
So what does one do?
Well, they went and opened a dairy.
So suddenly,
They're versifying real well.
Right?
So now they're bringing in the cheese, the milk, everything else to the deli.
And by the way, the bakery also needs dairy products.
So the dairy had two big customers at the get go, but then also expanded and had all
these wholesale customers and direct to consumer and so on.
So you can imagine the story repeats and goes on again and again.
I think at some point it's like a dozen businesses they have, you know, this whole family of
businesses, right?
So they're supporting each other and their businesses in their own right.
And so there's two things I want to share on that.
You know, one for our listeners is if you look at scaling up, one of the things you
can do is look at your supply chain.
What's your biggest expense?
That might actually be the bigger real business there, not just the one that you're running.
But two, one thing I think that Zingamans did really, really well there was for each
one of those businesses, it was run as its own business with a co-founder, partner, entrepreneur
running it.
Right?
So the coffee importer, the cafe, the deli, the bakery, the dairy, these all had a general
partner running that business.
Right?
So that let them expand.
It wasn't one person trying to retain control over all of it and run everything.
Can you imagine what your day would look like trying to run that variety of businesses all
day long?
Too many, not enough hours.
Right.
So, you know, really the lesson I got from sort of, you know, my own, you know, passing
the peak in that business that I've seen done better elsewhere is this idea of leveraging,
you know, leadership and others and having them run things as a business unit, separate
business and so on.
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All right, we're doing the spot.
Let's get back to the podcast.
That leads into the next question, which is like systems and strategies for entrepreneurs
or solar entrepreneurs.
Let me make this distinction first.
What's the distinction between solarpreneurship and entrepreneurship?
Being a solopreneur, you are an entrepreneur, but you're running everything yourself.
Moving beyond solopreneurship, you're still an entrepreneur, but you're starting to leverage
others.
You're building out your team, whether it's a contractor or third-party vendor like a
bookkeeper or a virtual assistant or a part-time person overseas.
Those are all ways of extending beyond just being a solopreneur.
Of course, hiring your first full-time employee also gets you out of being a solopreneur.
Even then, you can still be in the world of what Robert Kaisaki would call self-employed.
For our listeners who aren't familiar, Robert Kaisaki wrote this great book called Cashflow
Quadrant.
In it, he defines these four different quadrants that you go through from being an employee
to an investor.
It's the two middle ones we actually care about for the purpose of our conversation here.
That is going from being self-employed to being a true business owner.
There's a huge chasm between those two.
Even though the way he draws it is just these four quadrants that look the same, you pull
those two squares apart.
There's a huge break in the middle there.
How do we know if you're self-employed or if you're a true business owner?
The litmus test that I use is if you close your eyes and imagine for a moment, what would
happen in your business if you stepped away from your business for a day?
I mean desert island away on a plane for a day, no cell phone, no text messages, totally
offline.
What would happen if you stepped away for a week or for a month or for three months?
If you can step away from your business for one to three months, when you come back to
your business, are you the same as when you left?
Has the business grown in your absence?
Or do you come back to a dumpster fire and everything's gone wrong?
For many folks, the answer is the latter.
You can't imagine stepping away for days, let alone weeks or months from your business.
However, true business owners can do just that.
The only way you can do that is with people and systems.
If you an exercise I love doing with my clients is we map out the org chart for your business,
not the people, but the roles in your company.
Then we fill in the faces or names of who has each of those roles.
If you're a solopreneur, it's going to be your name in all those boxes.
Your first hire or first thing you outsource is going to free you up from one of those
boxes.
Let's take the two most common roles I see earlier stage founders hire for.
One is front line customer service like things.
The other is bookkeeping, accounting, and so forth.
As you bring on that first hire for one of those roles, it's going to take you out of
that box.
That gives you time back in your day.
The question is what do you do with that time?
One of my clients I was working with was a solopreneur.
For him, he recognized that if his clients had a problem with his hardware that was running
their stores and they couldn't reach him, they were offline.
That was a problem.
He felt the need to always be by his phone.
That's good.
It's his business.
He was trying to enjoy his name on the line.
That's a good thing.
But it also meant that this was a guy who loved mountain biking, who loved being out in nature
and riding his bike in the mountains.
Well, there's not a whole lot of cell phone coverage there.
What he wasn't doing as a new business owner was doing the one thing that recharged him
that was good for his mental well-being, his physical well-being, that gave him that space
and all those good ideas.
That was so good for him in so many ways because he felt he had to be there.
The first thing we did is we said, well, what do we need to do to get you back in the mountains
from time to time and give you that space?
That came down to hiring a customer service person.
He found someone overseas who was able to answer his phone during business hours, respond
to customer emails, and be there as that first on a defense to help customers out.
Does that mean that he just suddenly went out and was riding his bike 40 hours a week
in the mountains?
No, of course not.
It meant he got out for a bike ride now and then, but it also meant he was freed up from
firefighting all day long and being on the front lines.
He could reinvest that time in the business on higher value tasks.
That meant he could work on product.
He could work on sales.
He could get newer and bigger accounts for the company, and he could do all the things
to grow the company because he was freed up from having to do front-line customer service.
This goes back to working on your business as opposed to being in your business and also
leveraging the people that can do the things that you don't have to do.
There's tons of people that can do the things that you don't want to do that they want to.
Well, people who can do the things you don't want to do.
There's also people who can do the things that you are doing, but they can do it better
than you.
A little hiring wisdom for folks is if you can hire people who are better at the job
than you are, then you're doing great.
Again, I'll use that second example I shared about bookkeeping.
Many small business owners, if they're doing their books, which you should be, are doing
it on their own.
That's not a great use of your time.
Even when I was a teenager and had my first business, one of my earliest hires as a teen
was a bookkeeper and an accountant.
That was both for the business, for myself, and so on.
That freed me up to focus on building the business and not needing to do all the day-to-day
work of that.
And someone, by the way, who was far smarter at this stuff than I was to a kid.
Who knew all the legalities, the complexities, what to do with the strategies and all that,
who I could go to and ask advice and seek counsel from, not just someone who came to
me and said, what's next, boss?
I had a client, the CEO of this multimillion-dollar company, and he was really excited because
he had found a VA to do some work for him.
This was someone overseas, I think at the time, it was like $2 an hour to do some tech
work for him.
And he was ecstatic.
He was like, look, this is like, throw away money, and I've got someone 40 hours a week
to do anything he needs.
The problem was, this person was constantly bugging the CEO, asking for things.
Every time the CEO needed something done, he wanted to fully delegate that.
But what he was doing instead was he was abdicating.
There's a big difference between delegation and abdication.
He was tossing this, I like to say, through over the fence to this VA and just one of
the results, but the VA was constantly coming back and asking for clarifications, wanting
to understand and asking how to do things, and was wasting way more of the CEO's time.
Then had he hired someone skilled.
In the end, he had brought me on to help out with this.
We already had a great arrangement.
I said, look, this is taking weeks to get done.
I'm considerably more expensive.
Orders of magnitude more expensive, but this will be done in a day.
He was like, I just need this done.
Over the course of that day, I had no questions for him, didn't need to bother him at all,
and we were able to just execute, get it done, and deliver the final result that I knew he
needed because I had the high value expertise that he was paying me for.
Instead of someone who the work was abdicated to who ended up taking more time and it never
got done, no matter how much it was spent.
Hire folks who are smarter than you at the job you're hiring for.
This can now be your counsel.
They can now help to advise you and they can do a better job than you could ever have hoped
to do on your own.
Exactly.
That allows me to ask the next question, which is, how can entrepreneurs, how can entrepreneurs
that are designed their business as such, just create more time freedom?
Because I know for me, time freedom is an example of success because I have the time
to create what I want to create.
How do entrepreneurs do that for themselves?
Yeah.
And I love that you've created that for yourself.
It's so valuable to me, to my clients, and so forth.
I really value the family time we have every morning and the traditions we have around
the morning, the evenings, the weekends, and so on as a family and to be able to be so
present for all of that, even when things come up during the day or whatever that is.
That's really valuable to me as an entrepreneur and I know is so valuable to the folks I work
with.
How do you create that?
How do you get that time?
Well, a lot of that comes down to having the right systems and the right people to run
those systems.
So, that exercise I was sharing that I run through with my clients, where we create that
org chart and then we put the names in there.
The next evolution of that is to figure out which of those boxes we can systematize the
role that we can then remove your name from and task that system to a person.
Now, look, when we create systems and you then get someone using that system, it's going
to go in one of three ways.
The ideal that we want is that the person runs the system and gets the result that you
want.
That's our ideal and that's where we're going to move towards.
But the reality is, earlier on, the most likely outcome is the right person is going
to follow your system and get a different result and it just means the system wasn't
there yet.
Right?
Exactly.
Something we thought was obvious someone else didn't realize.
Right?
So, this comes down to just iterate on the system, understand what you thought was obvious that
the other person didn't correct and update the system.
These aren't written in stone.
These are living documents that you should be reviewing and updating as you go.
As you go through the iterative process, you'll end up with a good system that others can
use and get a predictable outcome.
Then what we'll have over time is someone will use the system and not get the outcome
you wanted and the system will have been fine, but the person didn't follow the system.
Right?
And so, that then is a coaching moment of working with that person to get them back on track
using the system or maybe that role just isn't for them and that's also okay.
Right?
But we move from it being a system problem to a person problem to then the system person
alignment gets you the outcome that you want.
Right?
So, there's an iterative process I use with my clients that helps to slowly extract them
from more and more of those roles within the business that lets that business operate
without them.
Right?
There's always going to be things that you can do in the business or you should be
doing in the business and that's okay.
It's not an overnight, you know, you flip a switch and suddenly you're not needed in
the business.
It's a process.
Got it.
Talking about processes, can you share a specific habit or practice that has significantly
contributed to you and your personal professional success and growth?
Yeah.
So, this whole idea of like a mastermind.
I remember the first time I was in a mastermind setting.
This is, you know, 20 plus years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into.
It was thankfully, you know, because of a business partner who, who's not the power
of this and who recommended, you know, reading, thinking, grow rich and who understood this,
you know, this idea of a mastermind had brought me into that environment and it was really
powerful.
Suddenly being surrounded by other individuals, right?
Who were also on this entrepreneurial path, who are also seeing success, albeit in different
ways and being able to share challenges, share successes and get that feedback, that acknowledgement,
that motivation and the insights was really, really powerful.
So for me, that whole mastermind process has been so impactful over decades.
The conversations that I've had behind the closed doors of a mastermind have led to literally
like back of the envelope businesses, business ideas, discussions around that.
And then the launch of multiple multimillion dollar businesses, just from the conversations
behind the closed door, the rapid iteration, the test marketing of it, the MVP launch and
so on has proven ideas out and, you know, allowed me to launch businesses.
If it weren't for those conversations, you know, I'd probably be still doing the same
things, you know, that it was then, you know, or falling into happenstance.
Instead, it was around intentionally investing my time, intentionally investing my money,
intentionally investing my resources, focus and so on to surround myself with like-minded
growth focused individuals who wanted nothing but the best for me.
These weren't clients, these weren't partners, these weren't, you know, customers, investors.
These were other folks on that same path, right?
And that has been so, so, so impactful.
And then the second thing is what we're talking about with systems and people, right?
Is, you know, freeing yourself up by creating systems and then bringing on team members
to run those systems.
Good habits.
That's a good habit.
On this podcast, we really dove into life as a purpose driven life, even with entrepreneurs
like if you're, this is your business, like you said, if you had to love it, you know.
What does purpose play in creating a business for entrepreneurs and that can support their
freedom?
Yeah.
So it's good to understand what it is you're trying to build and why, right?
And who you're serving, right?
I had heard for years and years, this whole idea of like, your company should have core
values.
You need like your mission, vision, purpose, all this great stuff.
Love it, right?
The number of speakers I heard from the stage talk about this, you know, was a lot.
You know, podcasts talk about this, books would talk about this.
I go and get the latest, greatest book on figuring this out.
And it would just sort of reiterate the same point of like, you should have this stuff
figured out for your company.
But nobody wanted to actually explain how to do that.
How to do it.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And that was until I came across the book, Traction by Gina Wickman.
That was like the first book that as I dug into it, it broke down for me a tactical guy,
right?
And I was like, step by step, here's the conversation to have and here's what to do.
And so it was so eye-opening to finally have the roadmap, the blueprint, the process to
go from I want mission, vision, purpose and core values to have the output be those things.
And so I was so excited about, you know, reading this and finally having this, you know, I
got a copy of the book, you know, for my team members and on one of our planning calls,
I, you know, I let them know, hey, you guys all now have a copy of the book.
Next Tuesday, we're going to be diving into this and we're going to start the process
of figuring this stuff out for our company, right?
And so I shared that on the call, sort of teed this up.
And then we moved on with, you know, the next, next stuff on the agenda.
And we're talking about something that one of our clients was looking for.
And there was some functionality in one of our products that a client wanted.
And as we were talking about it, there's sort of always the easy answer, right, that would
take care of that one client's one need, right?
Over there is sort of the better solution, which more broadly would take care of that
client's needs and a whole lot of other needs, right?
So as we're talking about this, we're like, yeah, like we, we could implement this change
for that one client, but like, look, if we're going to do it, like we should do it right.
And one of my team members said, like, you know, I think that might be one of our core
values there.
I'm like, what's that?
Right?
Like that was an earlier part of the agenda of the meeting.
And she said, like, no, I think you just hit on one of our values.
Like if we do something, we do it right.
And like, I'm like, that's really good.
You know, we weren't going to have a conversation until Tuesday on the whole core values thing,
but like look at the team already surfacing some of these values we had as an organization.
And so that was a really, really valuable process to go through.
Because what's fascinating is whether you document your mission, vision, purpose and
values or not.
Like they all exist within your organization.
Right?
So do you want to just go to what the default is that, you know, the values everyone is
living or do you want to be more intentional about it?
And if you can't tell, intentionality is really important.
It is important.
So, you know, I'm plural listeners, you know, attraction is a great book, read through that,
and then go apply that process.
In fact, I loved it so much, like my wife and I sat down so we could have a conversation
about like, well, what are our values, mission, vision, purpose and all that for us as a family?
And that was like a really insightful, fun thing to do as a family.
In fact, I know many folks who have done that process and have, you know, taken those values
they have created a fun name for it.
One of my friends created placemats for the family that lists out, you know, all their
values so at every meal, right, their placemats, you know, have this.
Others have made like wall art for this, you know, for the living room, the kitchen, so
on.
That's pretty cool.
So it's not just something you talk about, but it's something you, you know, can can
formalize much more.
Yeah.
And like a living document just make it living.
Yeah.
That's pretty great.
I had a different question, but it just slipped my mind.
So I'm just, I'm just go ahead and move forward.
You have the, the base, is it Bay Area?
Is Bay Area?
Yes.
Bay Area.
Okay.
How does, how does, how do, how do, no, is that for everyone?
Is it just in the area or is it for, for everywhere?
You know, it's funny, like, like many brands, you start off sort of geographically confined
and then as you grow, you realize that, you know, folks in Texas still want Boston chicken,
right?
So the, the origins of us are here in the Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area.
But one of the interesting things that happened during the pandemic is as we shifted to a
virtual model for a little bit before coming back to in person, we had folks were finding
us not just around the country, but around the globe.
And so our reach really extended beyond just, you know, that immediate Bay Area.
You know, and as you fast forward, we had some folks who stayed virtual, you know, other
folks were thrilled to come back in person and join us for any of our different events
that we have in person.
But we also, you know, it's a hybrid setup.
So we've had folks who joined us virtually from, you know, around the globe that can
still participate, not just in the meetings we have, but really the community we have
for our members, founders and established entrepreneurs at large between the meetings.
And that's really where a lot of great resources to get shared.
That's really where, you know, folks are able to ask for input or get feedback, not just
add a mass for my meeting, but really from other folks between meetings as well.
So you can, you can do it virtually and in person as well.
Yeah.
Correct.
Okay.
Just your insights on this new generation.
I have, you know, again, grand nephews, great nephews, whatever you want to call it,
growing up and I see them and I asked them, you know, what, what do they want to do?
They have the more of the mindset of business, business, they want to have their own business
and hopefully, you know, when I, as my business grows, like earlier, maybe I can leave it
to them, but who knows?
You know what I mean?
They, what do you see business, small businesses and growing, growing businesses in the generation
Z and generation Z alpha?
Yeah.
You know, I think there was this idea for a long time, like when you build a company,
you've got to build this, you know, a business with hundreds, thousands, you know, tens of
thousands of employees, right?
And there's this idea that, you know, bigger is better.
You've got to be, you know, expanding, growing, growing, growing.
What I've seen a lot more of these days is, you know, actually hearkening back to sort
of that pre-industrial era, smaller business, right?
That, you know, it's okay to have a business that's only five of you, right?
You can have a successful business that's you and an entirely virtual team.
Right?
It's okay to have a business that the goal is not just bigger, bigger, bigger.
So I see a lot more businesses these days that are like the old days supporting the
business owner, the community and the family, right?
And not looking to be, you know, the next, you know, Silicon Valley, Ducatcorp.
And I love that because when you're on this path of it's got to get to this, you know,
$10 billion plus valuation, like that sets you on this very specific path.
There's a book I love called Small Bets and, you know, the whole idea behind that book
is that when companies get bigger, right, a lot of their innovation or what made them
a huge company was these tiny bets they made, right?
And when companies embody that in their culture, that allows them to innovate and try things
and be okay with failure, right?
When you're a small business, you try something out, it doesn't work, that's okay, you move
on.
When you're a huge company, you can't do that.
And so the book talks about how like, you know, the HPs and the Dells and these sort
of really big companies, I think they're talking about Hyundai at some point, that they sort
of had this mantra of like, if it's not a billion dollar idea, right, it's not worth
talking about.
Because for a company that size, unless it's going to be this multi-billion dollar thing,
like it's not going to make a big difference.
But all the multi-billion dollar ideas, as it were, right, the only way you know it's
that big of an idea is because it's already established and developed and you've missed
that innovation window.
And now you're just following on and building on something that's already there.
Right?
So when you're a small company, you can pivot quick, right?
So many startups and so many smaller companies start doing one thing, realize their message
to market matches isn't there.
They try a different market, they shift the product, they adjust things.
And it's, you know, the third or tenth iteration is really where they hit the stride and they
find the real growth, right?
An established company can't do that.
And so in the book, one of the stories they talk about that I love is, you know, Amazon
was really well known in its earlier days or even, you know, to today for having a culture
of innovation.
Like as part of your reviews as an internal employee, the question is like, well, what
experiments are you doing?
What are you testing?
What are you trying out?
Right?
They really wanted to keep fostering that sense of innovation, which was good because Amazon
tried a lot of things.
So for example, if you recall, Amazon had, I think it was like Amazon marketplace, they
were trying to take on eBay, right?
They saw eBay growing and they said, well, we're going to do the same thing.
And they tried it out, right?
In the end, after years of running their marketplace, they still only ended up with
2% of the market share.
eBay was still the big, you know, online auction place.
Amazon, despite their size, everything else just couldn't compete.
And so they ended up shutting that down.
Now if you were a small company, that's just another day in business, right?
You tried something that didn't work any more hard.
Right.
But for a company the size of Amazon, man, shareholders and the board were calling for
a business head like he's got to go like he tried this and he failed.
That's a screw up and he's got to, he's got to get gone.
It's a whole different arena.
Right?
But business came back and said like, no, right?
It's actually our culture of innovation and us trying things out that have led to all
the greatest things that have made Amazon what it is, right?
Their whole subscribe and save, click to buy, Amazon Prime, all of these were mere experiments
they tried out, right?
They got some traction and saw success and those are like the things that make the company
who they are today.
Right.
So it's only because of the culture of innovation and keeping that alive, which is really hard
for them to big company, but they were able to act like a startup and have things like
AWS, right?
Amazon Web Services, which runs most of the world now, right?
All these things come from that culture of innovation.
So continue to do that, but don't feel like you've got to be a huge company, right?
You can have a small business that serves you and your community well and takes great
care of its team members and is not trying to become huge, but can be, you know, an innovative
and still small successful business.
Yeah, a couple of podcasts ago, we were talking about innovation and it's really great with,
especially with small businesses, just be purposeful of who you are and innovate, you
know, and if you need to pivot, pivot, you can do that as a small business.
Yeah.
When you know, like this is just a broader question you can ask a lot.
If you know what success looks like, like that airline, you know, the airplane pilot,
you know, adjusting courses as you go, if you know what success looks like, you can
course correct to make sure you hit that, right?
And that applies to like, when you create a system for someone, is it clear what success
looks like for running that system, right?
When you're hiring someone, is it clear what success looks like for that role, right?
When you're building your company, is it clear what success looks like?
The more clarity you have on the stuff, the more easily you can decide what to do and
more importantly, what not to do.
Otherwise, you might just end up being a typical OO shiny entrepreneur who's constantly jumping
at the next idea, next opportunity, next marketing channel and not seeing things through to completion,
right?
And saying yes to everything at the expense of like the one thing that really matters.
So be intentional and clear on what success looks like.
Be intentional.
Sometimes it's good to say no.
It is really good to say no.
Because you can't follow every path that OO like I think you said OO something.
OO shiny.
Yeah.
That shiny object.
That's great.
It's not always there.
Yeah.
Look, one of the things that makes a lot of us entrepreneurs, I find this for like three
checkpoints that entrepreneurs go through, right?
One is that like we see gaps in the marketplace, right?
We see opportunities where others don't.
We see a problem where like this could be better, right?
Most folks just accept it and move on.
We see an opportunity.
Opportunity.
Right?
But that's only because that OO shiny mentality.
Others don't see it.
They don't see it.
That's the tunnel vision on.
We see what could be better.
The second thing is we see a solution to the problem, right?
There you go.
We don't, where others might just see the problem and complain about it.
We see the problem, but also a solution, right?
And that's like the innovator in us, right?
That's the part of us.
It's like, hey, I bet there's an opportunity here.
Let's do something about it.
But that brings us to the third point where others might see a problem and also see a solution.
Most successful entrepreneurs do the third thing, which is we execute on it.
We do something about it.
There you go.
We see the problem.
We create a solution and we go with it.
We get it to market and we actually build a business with that.
That is, that makes, that's the difference.
You know, and for people who do listen to the podcast that are not entrepreneurs, these
are, these are ideals that you can actually apply in your life as well.
As a, as a, you know, being a boss in your, in your career or, you know, growing your
family and making it a success the way that you want to make a success.
So it's not just an entrepreneurship that you can take these ideals.
So that's, that's really good, good information.
Thank you.
You had, you, so you, you recommended two books, traction.
Who was that by?
Tractions, Gina Wickman.
And then small bets.
Yeah, small bets is, sorry, it's little bets.
Little bets.
Yep.
Little bets is Sims.
Peter Sims.
Sims here.
Okay.
Yep.
And the other one we're talking about, catch flow quadrant by Robert Kayasaki.
Robert Kayasaki.
Yep.
All right.
So yeah.
Yeah.
We cover a handful of stuff.
I'll send you stuff for show notes as well.
That's cool.
It'll be in there.
So we got those three recommendations.
You know, people should go ahead and check those out as well as your mastermind.
How does one get in touch with you and your mastermind?
Yeah, you can find out about the mastermind group, how to test drive a mastermind, how
to start a group on your own, what makes a good group and everything.
All that is at Bay Area Mastermind.com.
I also chat about this stuff, you know, quite a bit on LinkedIn.
So you can also find me at, you know, Jeremy Shapiro on LinkedIn.
And you have Instagram as well.
I do.
Yeah.
Okay.
So Instagram, LinkedIn and the actual website itself.
And before we go, can you leave, listen, there's one piece of advice, a story, last words about
anything that you want to leave or just break in free from the entrepreneurial grind.
If you could leave those last words, what would it be?
So you know, whether it's parenting or running a business or, you know, doing whatever it
is you're doing in life, right?
I always find comfort in the idea that there are generations of people across the world,
thousands of years who have faced similar challenges and have found a way through.
So you're probably not the first person to face the challenge you think is unique and
special to you.
There are others out there who have faced similar challenges and found a way through.
So when you're feeling blocked or plateaued or stuck, right, you don't need to go at it
alone.
And when you're in an entrepreneur, it can be lonely at the top, but surround yourself
with like-minded individuals and be open about sharing what's really going on.
You'd be surprised how often someone else has a similar experience that they don't talk
about that can lens the expertise, the resources, whatever it is to you when you need it most.
All you have to do is share what's really going on with the right folks and you'd be
surprised who can, you know, who can unblock you and who can, you know, bring you the resources
and expertise that you need.
That's good.
That's really good.
And I want to thank you, Jeremy, for being on the Thoreville Journey podcast.
You have tons of information that I'm still, I'm going to have to digest and look through
the show notes myself again.
And for our listeners or watchers, they can always go to the Facebook, the Thoreville Journey
podcast on Facebook to get, you know, some of the show notes and also clips of this video
of the podcast so they can, you know, attune a little bit more.
So again, thank you, Jeremy, for being on the podcast.
And as we always say around this time, let's make thriving our new normal.
Thank you, Jeremy.
Thanks for inviting me on the show and let's make thriving our new normal.
I love it.
All right.
So, I guess I'll take a couple more places.
I'm moving really quickly.
I'm going to quit this game.