How to Find the Right Business Model for You
Audio Transcription
Find the right business model in 5 steps and a 10 question test from America’s top business coach, Clay Clark
SHOW NOTES:
5 Steps to Finding the Right Business Model:
1. Determine your faith, family, finance, fitness and friendship goals if money was not an obstacle.
2. Determine the annual income you need to turn your dreams into reality
3. Determine the tradeoffs you are willing to make to turn your dreams into reality (Start a Business You Are Passionate About or Start a Business to Fund a Life That You Are Passionate About)
Start-Up – You must embrace the process of Define, Act, Measure and Refine…you must become comfortable with failing fast
Franchise – You must be comfortable with giving up business model freedom in exchange for financial freedom
License – You must believe in the product that you are licensing, because you are going to pay thousands for the right to sell it.
5. Whatever Business Model You Choose Must Pass This 10 Part Test
Part 1 – It must be scalable – A business must be scalable for it to be successful. A small business built rightly can grow 10,000 times its current size. – Michael Gerb (Best selliing author of the E-Myth book series)
Part 2 – It must be founded upon a big idea – A small business is no more effective than the idea upon which it is built. The entrepreneur’s vision is more important to the life of the business than anything else. – Michael Gerb (Best selliing author of the E-Myth book series)
Part 3 – Systems – You must recognize that a small business is a System in which all parts contribute to the success or failure of the whole. In this system, everything must work together: from employee to president; from equipment to resources. – Michael Gerb (Best selliing author of the E-Myth book series)
Part 4 – Sustainability – A business must be dynamic–able to thrive through all economic conditions, in all markets, providing meaningful, highly differentiated results to all of its customers. Such differentiation is key to survival. – Michael Gerb (Best selliing author of the E-Myth book series)
Part 5 – Growth – All businesses need internal growth. A small business is a School in which its employees are students, with the intention, will, and determination to grow.
Part 6 – Vision – A small business must manifest the Higher Purpose upon which it was seeded, the vision it was meant to exemplify, the mission it was intended to fulfill. – Michael Gerb (Best selliing author of the E-Myth book series)
Part 7 – Purpose – A small business is the fruit of a Higher Aim in the mind of the person who conceived it.
Part 8 – Autonomy – A business is not part of the owner’s life, but is, in fact, its own entity. A small business possesses a life of its own, in the service of God, in whom it finds reason. – Michael Gerb (Best selliing author of the E-Myth book series)
Part 9 – Profitability – A small business is an economic entity, driving an economic reality, creating an economic certainty for the communities in which it thrives. – Michael Gerb (Best selliing author of the E-Myth book series)
Part 10 – Standards – A small business creates a Standard against which all small businesses are measured as either successful, or not. All small businesses should aim to thrive beyond the standards that formerly existed. – Michael Gerb (Best selliing author of the E-Myth book series)
Welcome into the man-cave. Josh Merrill here with business coach, Clay Clark. Today on the show, Clay, what are we talking about? We are going to be talking specifically about how to find the right business model for you. A lot of people want to start a business, they want to grow a business. They say, “I just don’t know. What’s the best kind of business?” We have so many people out there, they want to be an entrepreneur, they want to start a business. They have this desire and they’re starting to go, I’m passionate about working for myself, but I don’t know what specific kind of business I am passionate about. And so we have a thriver who has a very specific question and he what he asks I think applies to thousands upon thousands of people out there who are asking themselves, “How do I find the right business model for me? How do I do it?” And we’re going to walk you through the specific steps that you can take to make this critical decision here today. This question comes from Charles. Charles says, “I do not have any particular skills that would be needed to start a business. I have a wide array of interests and several business ideas excite me. I would like to own and run my own business and put all of these great lessons into action. Is there any resources or advice in finding the right business for me? Would I be better off looking for a business to buy? I thought about engaging with local business owners and asking them if they could use help with various aspects of marketing their business and use that as a doorway in building a side consulting business.” A lot of questions there for the business coach, Clay. Okay, well one, if you want to get out there and start doing consulting, as a marketing consultant, we have awesome workshops here at Thrive15.com and we will teach you specifically how to do that. You can get out to a workshop and if you’re a member, it’s $19 a month and you can come out to one of these things. So I would recommend you do that, but in summary, you are going to have to basically do it for free, Charles. You’re going to have to cold call businesses you never met before, people you don’t know and say, “Hey, I want to help market your business and the first month I am going to do it for free and if I do a good job, would you be willing to hire me there after on an agreed amount.” So that’s kind of how you get into that niche if you don’t have a resume. However, we have some super moves that we can teach you in a Thrive15 workshop that allows you to kind of skip a little bit of those steps if that is something you are into. The bigger question in my mind is how to determine the right business model for you. We have some steps here. We’re going to walk you through these. We have 5 steps, but within those 5 steps, there’s 10 parts on the final step. You’ve got your first 5 steps and then you’ve got 10 parts to step 5. So Josh, without any further ado, let’s get cracking on step number 1.
Step number 1, determine your faith, family, finance, fitness and friendship goals if money was not an obstacle. So it’s super important that you determine those goals and we call it the 5 goals at Thrive15.com. But you’ve got to figure what you would be doing if you had all of the time freedom in the world. And get that written down. Don’t rush through this. Take the time, hit the pause, go ahead and write it down. Maybe right now, I’ll give you the music. I’ll tell you what, this will be kind of fun, we’ll give you the music right now so you’re able to at this very moment. Go ahead and take some time. Get out a pen, do you have some paper, get out an etchisketch, maybe a mobile phone or an iPad with a nice little stylus on it. Write down your faith goals. What are your goals for your faith? What are your goals for family? How much money do you want to earn? Fitness. Friendship goals, friendships. So anyway, the thing is, you’ve got to define your faith, family, finance, fitness, and your friendship goals because if you don’t do that, what is the point? Got a notable quotable here from Tony Robbins, the 6 ft. 7 in. best selling author and renowned motivational speaker. Tony says, “setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.” So what Tony is talking about, is you have these big dreams, but you’ve got to put them out on a paper somewhere. You’ve got to write them down. You’ve got to turn them into reality and there is a powerful, mystical, spiritual, super sonic awesome thing that happens when you take an idea from your head and turn it into a writing on paper. It is just powerful. When you put it up on the mirror, put it up on the wall, put it up on the tablet all of a sudden it sticks around awhile. All I’m saying is you need to make sure that you turn those big dreams into specific goals and thus turning the invisible into the visible.
Number 2 from the business coach is determine the annual income that you need to turn your dreams into reality. This part sucks sometimes because if you’re like me and have 5 kids, you’re like, “Well, if everyone gets insurance. Oh I’ll just give insurance to two of them, my two favorite. If one of them could just not eat as much.” So the thing is, you’ve got to really think about that. You’ve got to think about what it actually costs in a practical sense to turn those dreams into reality. What’s the number? Now you’ve got twins, is that any kind of discount? No, and actually one of them went to ICU so it was like twice as much. One of them came out a little bit disgruntled and decided to stick around in the womb for awhile. All I’m saying is you’ve got to figure out the annual income you need to turn your dreams into reality. We’ve got a notable quotable here from Jack Welsh, CEO of GE who grew the company by 4000%. He says, “You’ve got to eat while you dream. You’ve got to deliver on short range commitments, while you develop a long range strategy vision and implement it. The success of doing both, walking and chewing gum if you will, getting it done in the short range and developing a long range plan and executing on that.” We started DJ Connection back in the day. We grew that thing to where we were almost doing about 4,000 events a year. And my wife used to say, “How are we going to pay the bills?” “Hey, do I sense negativity? Do I sense a lack of faith?” “No, but seriously, how are we going to feed ourselves?” “Do I sense negativity? People have to dream it and if they can dream it, they can achieve it and all I hear you saying is, hey, no but seriously how are we going to pay our bills?” I know anybody that is starting a business, you’re ambitious, but you have to be responsible. You’ve got to be able to make those short range commitments and it’s just so important that you take the time to think about these things and just go in eyes wide open. Know I’m going to have to get two jobs while I start this business, maybe one job while I get this business. I don’t know, but you have to determine the annual income you need to turn your dreams into reality without starving.
Number 3, determine the trade offs you are willing to make to turn your dreams into reality. Yeah, the trade off thing, that’s not a popular thought, but when I built the DJ business, I was willing to work 7 days a week, I was willing to work anywhere anytime for any event as long as it didn’t violate my ethics. I was willing to DJ any event, any time, anywhere, answer the phone 7 days a week, go without sleep, work at night, work in the morning, do anything that I had to do to be successful and because of that, I had a lot of success, but I also had a lot of stress. Now I’ve matured a little bit, I’ve set some boundaries. Now I really have no interest in dong things on Sundays, I don’t like dinner meetings, I really don’t want to meet people for lunch, I don’t like to travel in planes or trains or automobiles, I don’t like to leave. I have much more diva esque needs now. But when I first started, went in eyes wide open with the understanding, I wasn’t like in the dark about this, I knew, eyes wide open, that these are the trade offs I’m willing to make. It’s so important that you write those down. So Josh, I want to ask you, with your video company, have you ever been asked to do some weird stuff that you said no to because of boundaries you had in terms of trade offs or values? Have you ever had those moments? Yeah, all the time. What are some where you had to say no, I can’t go tot Alaska or what are some things you had to no to? One thing early on that I said no to was weddings. Are you serious? Did you ever get booked for a few weddings? Early on I did weddings. How many weddings? Probably like 6 or 7. Here’s the thing about my weddings, at least half of them ended in a divorce. And statically, I want you to know, you’re probably that coach that allowed that high percentage of success to exist because right now, statically, they are showing that a little more than half of weddings are ending in divorce. So I would credit your mentorship and your coaching for these phenomenal success of these weddings. Thank you, I feel bad though. I said no weddings, I’m going to focus on doing commercial work. So I just encourage you to ask yourself if you’re listening right now and Charles, what are you not willing to do? What are you willing to do? How many hours a week, let’s get specific, are you willing to work? From when to when a day? What are you not willing to do ethically? Take a moment, write it down, or not. But if you don’t, it’s kind of hard to go in there and have success when you say, “we’ll see.” I’m just telling you because opportunities sometimes dressed and it looks great and you think you want it and you say yes to the tradeoffs and now you end up alone in a van down by the river. Hey when we come back, we’re going to continue talking about how to find the right business model for you. We’re going to hit step 4. Step 4, woo. It’s hot. It’s hot stuff. You don’t want to miss it. Thrive Time Show, we’ll be right back.
Alright Charles, so you found that magical business plan, you figured out what you want to do, finally, you say, “I now know what I want to do. I know what I’m going to do. I have it. I’m going in eyes wide open. I know what trade offs I’m going to make. I know how I’m going to turn my dreams into reality. I know my goals.” But now, you need a little bit of cash, a little bit of coinage, a little of bit money, a little bit of currency, a little bit of kabbage. What’s kabbage? Well kabbage offers no cost or obligation to draw a funds. Pay only for what you take. Take only what you need when you need it. Access your cash 24/7. Now kabbage, my friend, has been trusted by hundreds of thousands of small business owners all across the world. And did you know, Josh, since their funding, they have actually funded over 1.6 billion dollars into small businesses to help them grow. Josh, do you know how you find them? How do you find them? You go to kabbage.com. So again, once you know what you’re going to do with that business, once you know what kind of business you’re going to start, Charles, you might want to go up to kabbage.com and check it out. They’re a trusted resource for many thrivers all around the world and they are a great resource for people like you. Do you have to pay it back? Yes. Do you have to have good credit? Yes. Are they going to make you pay it back, take credit scores, all of that kind of stuff? Yes, but it’s kabbage.com.
Welcome back to the Thrive Time Show with your business coach, Clay. We’re getting jiggy with your business. That’s right. We’re talking about how to find the right business model for you. We’ve got 5 steps here, plus 10 steps after step 5. It’s awesome. Step number 1 was determine your 5 F’s. That’s faith, family, finance, fitness and friendship goals if money was not an obstacle. You’ve got to determine those things. Number 2, determine your annual income you need to turn your dreams into reality. Number 3, determine the trade offs you are willing to make to turn your dreams into reality. And here we go with number 4. Decide which type of business model is right for you. We finally get to it. So here we go. You’ve got a startup, you’ve got a franchise, or you’ve got a license. Josh is going to read to us a little bit about the startup here. You can hear a little bit about the startup and I’ll break it down for you. The startup, okay here’s the deal. You must embrace the process of define, act, measure and refine. You must become comfortable with failing fast. I don’t recommend a startup. Honestly right now, as a business consultant and coach there’s so many businesses that I am not a part of that I didn’t start. I teamed up with somebody. Just locked in a new deal today it looks like. I cannot tell you how hard it is to start a business and worth it is on the other end, but how hard it is. It’s like a love hate thing. How many businesses have you started up that way? DJ Connection, Party Perfect, Thompson Photography, Epic Photography, Chocolate Elegance, Tulsa Bridal Association, a landscaping company called Four Seasons, Gear Corp., Elephant in the Room, Make Your Life Epic, Thrive 15, there is something else. But there’s a lot. So you’ve done that ten times and you say don’t do it? I’m just telling you. There’s better things to be doing with your time. I think it’s better to find a business model that works for you and make it profitable so that you can go out there and produce your passion. Here’s the thing of why I did it is I prefer starting businesses as oppose to hanging out with most people. Not everybody, but most. “Hey you guys want to go see a movie?” “No, I would rather just go start a business.” Because I enjoy it. But I see so many people who don’t enjoy it and they’re gong, “what am I doing here?” So I encourage you to find a business model that would work for you, but if you are going to start a business, you better love it. You better love it, Charles, in a way that it’s unhealthy.
Next up is the franchise. You must be comfortable with giving up business model freedom in exchange for financial freedom. A great franchise that’s available right now is called OxiFresh.com. I highly recommend that you check it out. It’s oxifresh.com. And oxifresh.com, it is awesome because they offer the world’s greenest carpet cleaning experience. So in the world where everyone is trying to go green, they’re trying to reduce their impact on the environment, they’re trying to use less water, Oxi Fresh is the world’s greenest carpet cleaner and people absolutely love working with them. But the thing is when you sign up for their system, Josh, when you buy a franchise, guess what you have to do? You’ve got to pay money. And you have to follow their systems or other wise, why are you buying it? So you have to use their logo, with their font, on their particular template with their letterhead and you have to use their mailers and their website. “But I want to put a little stamp on it.” You can’t because it’s Oxi Fresh. And the brand comes first because other people have bought the different brands too and if everyone is out there running their own special or their own promotion or their own logo, it’s not a brand anymore. So I’m just telling you, if you buy a franchise, the power if you buy a Subway or a KFC or a pizza hut, is that everyone knows that brand, but the problem is now you are going to have to hold yourself accountable to that brand standard and it’s really hard to do for crazy entrepreneurs to do this. So I recommend franchises for people that are saying “I want to own the time freedom for owning my own business, but I also don’t want to go out there and start one all by myself from the very beginning.” And some people say, “Do they all have to be food?” No, UPS is a great franchise. There’s Remax. It’s arguable that donuts are a food, but Dunkin’ Donuts is a franchise. The main thing is, there’s a lot of franchises out there and many of which make people millions of millions of dollars, but you have to be committed to exchanging a little bit of that brand freedom, a little bit of that creative freedom for the financial freedom that you gain as a result of being successful with a franchise owner.
Okay, we’re going to move on here to license. You must believe in the product that you are licensing because you are going to pay thousands for the right to sale it. Okay, for example, if you like the New York Yankees. Okay, so if you’re going to go out there and print a bunch of Yankee hats, you know how you do it? You have to get a license from the Yankees. And do you know what they cost? Do you know what they charge for the ability to use that logo on some things? A lot. Do you know one of the biggest eye wear manufacturers in the world, do you know what the name of the company is? It’s Luxottica. Luxottica is an eyewear brand, it’s one of the biggest brand in the world, but what they do at Luxottica is they license the ability to take their glasses and to have a certain designers name put on the side of them. Allegedly, the designer helps design them, but I doubt it. But the point is, DKNY or Oakley glasses, have you ever bought those before? Michael Kors, Chanel, Burberry, Prada, Polo, Ray-Ban? They’re all made by Luxottica. True. People are just buying the name. One company makes a massive amount and the first company to stand up and say, “We’re tired of this. We’re not going to let you just make glasses and put a different logo and trick us into buying billions of them. We’re going to start a company called Warby Parker glasses. But the thing about Warby Parker, they’re the first people that kind of democratized, that made it more affordable. They have this thing if when you buy a pair, they give a pair to someone in need. Really neat deal. Neat story. But I highly I recommend that you check out the guys at Warby Parker. They have a pair, give a pair. They’re trying to make an impact on the entire planet. Neat company. It was a startup and now it’s doing hundreds of dollars a year in revenue. But again, the license thing. Could you imagine being Luxottica, people go in there looking for glasses going “Oh I’ll take the Nike kind. Oh I’ll take the Chanel kind. Yeah, I’ll take the one that’s endorses by DKNY.” That’s what licensing is about. But if you’re going to license something you better be in love with that brand because you’re going to spend millions if not thousands of dollars for the right to use it before you even get to sell it. When you buy a franchise, they’re giving you a whole model. When you buy a Subway, it’s a turn key system to get customers, to satisfy customers, to make a profit. You pay for a turn key system to get the customers, satisfy customers, and make a profit. When you buy a license, you’re really more of a cowboy. You get to use the license how you want and there is not a ton of restrictions sometimes. Stay away from that. Either do a start up or a franchise. And you’re most excited about the franchise? I think franchises are fabulous, if you have the money to do it. Have you had a business where you franchise out to people? Elephant In The Room is heading that way towards franchising. But Oxi Fresh is a brand that I actually help to sell franchises for. I actually helped them to develop some things, but they’re a beautiful brand that started by a guy named Jonathan Barnett in his minds eye in the college dorm room. And now they have hundreds of locations all over the world. And they’re very affordable. They were featured in Forbes as being one of the fastest growing franchises on the planet. Oxifresh.com, I highly recommend that you check them out.
It seems like with franchises, you’re taking away a lot of the stress of certain decision making, but you still get to be that business owner. Here’s the part where you have to kind of decide. You have to decide whether you are going to buy a business model, are you going to start a business model, are you going to engage in a business model that either A, you are passionate about and hopefully it allows you to make enough money for you to pursue your passions or B, that you’re just passionate about your goals and it really doesn’t matter what kind of business you have. So for example, maybe I’m passionate about taking my kids to school and sending them to private school and having a boat and having a great house and having a great life and so maybe I buy a franchise that hauls away trash. Maybe I’m passionate about my goals, but I’m not passionate about trash. Maybe somebody else listening is like I love trash. i love taking out trash since I was a little kid. I wanted to be on the trash truck and that’s why I bought a trash franchise. Boom. We are talking about how to find the right business model for you. When we come back, we are going to be talking about part number 5 which has ten parts inside of it. That’s so awesome. We’ll be right back. The Thrive Time Podcast. Let’s do it.
Okay, okay, you started working on a project on your laptop. Now you’re in your car and you forgot your laptop and you’re trying to find the file and you think you might have synced it to your Google Document, maybe you didn’t. Who knows? The thing is Dropbox.com allows you to get all of your files from anywhere on any device and share them with anyone. So you can take your docs anywhere. You can save files on your computer, then access them on your phone from the road. Everything that you keep in Dropbox is synced automatically to all of your devices. You can send videos quickly, Josh. You can send your entire wedding video to a family with a simple link. It’s easy to share large files, Josh. Can I give you an actual customer review here? I use Dropbox to send Clay all of the videos that I make. Really? It’s true. Not only do you do it everyday, but I’m excited about you doing it everyday because i use Dropbox, you use Dropbox, we should all use Dropbox. It’s Dropbox.com. It is a super affordable resource. It backs up all of your photos. Never lose photos again. Never lose files again. Work on slides with your teammates. Never lose a file again. Keep your photos safe. Use Dropbox.com. We use them, you should use them too. It’s Dropbox.com.
Welcome back to the Thrive Time Podcast. We’re talking about how to find the right business model for you. Josh Merrill here with business coach, Clay Clark. Alright, we have gone through the four steps. Would you like me to recap those? I do. Step number 1: Determine your faith, family, finance, fitness and friendship goals if money was not an obstacle. Number 2: Determine the annual income you need to turn your dreams into reality. Number 3: Determine the trade offs that you are willing to make to turn your dreams into reality. Number 4: Decide which type of business model is right for you. Start-up, franchise or license. We are going to move on to number 5. Number 5: What ever business model you choose, it must pass this ten part test. This is how we are going to do it, you are going to read the part and I am going to read the notable quotable from Gerber and I’m going to unpack it, okay? Love it, let’s do it. Part 1: It must be scalable. Michael Gerber, my main man, the author of the E-Myth book series. He says, “A business must be scalable for it to be successful. A small business built rightly can grow ten times it’s current size.” Scalable means, other people are capable of doing the work and not you. If you don’t do that, you’re going to build a business where you’re trapped inside of the business working 70 hours a week. That is why, Josh, I often endorse and tell people, start a business in an industry that you don’t even like. I literally talked to a guy in New York years ago and he goes, “I’m thinking about buying a franchise and I kind of like chicken a lot. I love southern cooking. I love this. And I’m also looking at a pizza place, but I don’t really like pizza.” And I said, “Do pizza.” He said, “Why?” “Because you won’t be tempted to work on it late night. Won’t be tempted to run to the office.” In my mind, if I’m building a business so that I can make big profits so that I can go do what I want to with my life or the business itself is my passion. But I don’t want to have a deal where I’m kind of passionate about a business and I’m stuck in it and it’s really allowing me to achieve my financial goals. You want to be all in like I’m doing it for strictly passion reasons and it allows me to fulfill my need to remodel cars or it has to be something that funds the achievement of those things. So you make enough money, you can spend the day in the garage tinkering with cars that are years past that you can now completely revamp and remodel. You want to choose a business model that allows you to pursue and achieve your dreams.
Part 2: It must be founded upon a big ideal. Michael Gerber, my main man, he says, “A small business is no more effective than the idea upon which it is built. The entrepreneurs vision is more important to the life of the business than it is to anything else.” I don’t honesty agree with that. I would say that I agree with a large portion of what he said. I would say that I agree that the vision is very very important. If you buy a franchise, the vision of the founder is very important, but the systems are as equally important in my mind. But it’s super super important that you’re buying into a business that the world also buys into, Josh.
Part number 3: Systems. Michael Gerbers says, “That you must recognize that a small business is a system in which all parts contribute to the success or failure. In this system, everything must work together. From employee to president, from equipment to resources.” A system, my friend, is super hard to build. Check lists, those are tough to build. Work flows, those are tough to build. Org charts, those are tough to build. Property agreements. Those are all tough to build. So when you’re buying a franchise, many many times you get all of these things. When you build a start-up, you’ve got to build all of these things. And I’m going to tell you what. I started a DJ company cause I loved DJing and I never got a chance to think about anything about DJing for the last 8 years that I owned it. Every second was consumed with operating agreements, legal disputes, playlists, contracts, selling, pricing, marketing, photoshop. I’m just telling you. Sometimes, buying a franchise can be the short route if you can afford it.
Part 4: Sustainability. Michael Gerber says, “A business must be dynamic, able to thrive through all economic conditions and all markets providing meaningful highly differentiated results to all of it’s customers. Such differentiation is key to survival.” Oxi Fresh is great because it’s carpet cleaning. When the economy gets tough, people tend to take care of their carpet longer. When the economy gets good, people tend to take care of their carpets more often. Either way, it’s sort of a need. It’s a need based service. Or at least close to a need based service. Elephant In The Room, our men’s grooming lounge, people always want to get their haircut. When things get tight, when things get abundant, people, as a general rule, keep on getting coming back to chop that mop.
Part 5: Growth. Michael Gerber says, “All businesses need eternal growth. A small business is a school in which its’ employees are students. With the attention, will and determination to grow.” It is super important that when you team up with an organization or you start one, that continuing education online, practical education, workshops, training. Making your team the best it can be is an ongoing part of the business.
Part 6: Vision. “A small business must manifest the higher purpose upon which it was seeded, the vision it was meant to exemplify, the mission it was intended to fulfill.” A little bit deep for you. But all I’m saying is if you go out there and you start a business, you want to have a big vision for your life because if you don’t the world is going to paw on you and you’re going to be distracted and you won’t actually get to that place of where you want to be. You ready to bust through the rest of these? Let’s do it, buddy.
Part 7: Purpose. “A small business is the fruit of a higher aim in the mind of the person who conceived it.” You must solve a problem for the planet. If your business does not solve a problem for the planet, get out of there.
Part 8: Autonomy. “A business is not a part of the owners life, but it is, in fact, its’ own entity. A small business processes a life of its’ own in the service of God in which it finds reason.” Michael Gerber is a religious man, but what he is talking about is a business in his mind is like its’ own entity you are giving birth to. It has a life of its’ own. It employs people, it takes care of people, it feeds people and you want to make sure that you team up with the right business for those reasons.
Part 9: Profitability. “A small business is an economic entity, driving and economic reality, creating an economic certainty for the communities in which it thrives.” The point is if the business does not make profits, get out of there. It has to make a profit.
Part 10: Standards. “A small business creates a standard of which all small businesses are measured as either successful or not. All small businesses should aim to thrive beyond the standards the formally exist.” My friend, Michael Gerber, is talking about just because it’s small doesn’t mean that it has to be crappy. You want to start a small business with a big aim to be the worlds best bakery, the worlds best plumbers, the worlds best roofers. Whatever you do, make it your aim to be the worlds best because when you inspire your team with a vision of excellent and you have high standards, people will flock to it. Customers will want to be a part of it and that is what will make it successful.
Okay, Charles, we hope that helped you out on how to find the right business model for you. Business coach, Clay, any final thoughts? Charles, I would just say this. When you choose your business model, you want to make sure that you are choosing a model that helps you achieve those big goals. It is helping you get there. So don’t get stuck in the whole belief that you have to be in love with the business itself. A lot of people do jobs that they don’t want to do every single day to feed their families and you might be doing that yourself right now. I mean a lot of people work for the government, a lot of people love working for the government. A lot of people work for the government and they say “I am doing it to provide for my family. I’m doing it to serve my country. I’m doing it for.” But not because they are passionate about making weaponry for the military, it’s just that is something that someone has to do. So what if you could do something that you love to do while making the money that you need to make? That would be awesome. You have a rare opportunity as Americans to go out there and to find the business model that is going to allow you to achieve your financial goals while also meeting some of your personal goals along the way.
This is an exciting time. It all starts with a question and we’re so happy that you emailed us at [email protected] because that is why we are here, my friend. Anybody out there, if you’ve got a question and you’re listening to us, email us at info@ thrive15.com. Go on to Thrive15, sign up, subscribe. It’s $19 a month. Business coach, Clay, tell us about it. Well, Thrive15.com is something that we started years ago. David Robertson, NBA Hall of Famer, Lee Cockerell, former executive vice president of Walt Disney World Resorts, Michael Levine, the PR consultant for Pizza Hut, Nike. All of us got together, we started this thing called Thrive15.com. It is the worlds best business school. The world’s best business platform. You can check it out. It’s $19 a month. It will absolutely change your life. It’s a no brainer. It’s the business school without the B.S. You’ve been listening to the Thrive Time Podcast with Josh Merrill and America’s number one business coach, Clay Clark. We’re going to see you next time on the Thrive Time Podcast. Until then, Thrivers, thrive on.
