The Entrepreneur's Guide to Delegation, Growth, and Freedom From Expert Jeremy Shapiro
Apr 23, 2024Season 1Episode 227
Firing The Man
Ever wondered what it takes to break free from the nine-to-five grind and step into the world of business ownership? Jeremy Shapiro joins us this week to unravel the entrepreneurial journey, bringing to light the defining moments that separate the self-employed from true business owners. From his own leap from college dropout to serial entrepreneur, Jeremy dishes out essential advice on scaling your business, the art of hiring and delegation, and the transformative impact these strategies have on personal freedom and access to new ventures.
Navigating the entrepreneurial landscape comes with its own set of mental battles, and we aren't shy about addressing the imposter syndrome that plagues so many innovators. But fear not, because we also lay out the game-changing benefits of peer advisory groups like the Bay Area Mastermind, where entrepreneurs gather to challenge, inspire, and hold each other accountable. Plus, we get real about entrepreneurial burnout, offering sustainable practices to ensure your business grows without sacrificing your well-being.
Finally, we zoom in on the practical steps to amplify your business's bottom line, focusing on increasing transaction frequency, amounts, and volume while staying clear of common pitfalls. And as a special bonus, we peel back the curtain on the Bay Area Masterminds, sharing the treasure trove of resources they offer to those hungry for entrepreneurial success. Join us for a candid conversation filled with actionable insights and a peek into the collective wisdom that could propel your business to new heights.
How can the guests contact? website, email, social?
Ever wondered what it takes to break free from the nine-to-five grind and step into the world of business ownership? Jeremy Shapiro joins us this week to unravel the entrepreneurial journey, bringing to light the defining moments that separate the self-employed from true business owners. From his own leap from college dropout to serial entrepreneur, Jeremy dishes out essential advice on scaling your business, the art of hiring and delegation, and the transformative impact these strategies have on personal freedom and access to new ventures.
Navigating the entrepreneurial landscape comes with its own set of mental battles, and we aren't shy about addressing the imposter syndrome that plagues so many innovators. But fear not, because we also lay out the game-changing benefits of peer advisory groups like the Bay Area Mastermind, where entrepreneurs gather to challenge, inspire, and hold each other accountable. Plus, we get real about entrepreneurial burnout, offering sustainable practices to ensure your business grows without sacrificing your well-being.
Finally, we zoom in on the practical steps to amplify your business's bottom line, focusing on increasing transaction frequency, amounts, and volume while staying clear of common pitfalls. And as a special bonus, we peel back the curtain on the Bay Area Masterminds, sharing the treasure trove of resources they offer to those hungry for entrepreneurial success. Join us for a candid conversation filled with actionable insights and a peek into the collective wisdom that could propel your business to new heights.
How can the guests contact? website, email, social?
Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your hosts, serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson.
Speaker 2:
Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast. On today's episode, we have the pleasure of speaking with Jeremy Shapiro as a mentor and coach to entrepreneurs. Serial entrepreneur Jeremy B Shapiro helps founders find entrepreneurial freedom as a true business owner an important distinction that many entrepreneurs can easily miss when working in their business as opposed to on their business. For over two decades, through structured masterminding, one-on-one coaching and consulting work, jeremy has been helping entrepreneurs discover core strengths in themselves and their businesses and attain the freedom that they deserve. We are very excited to have Jeremy on the show. Welcome, jeremy, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 3:
This is great. Love the show and love to chat about entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely so. To start things off, can you share with our listeners a little bit about your background and your path in the entrepreneurship world? Like many, of us.
Speaker 3:
I've been an entrepreneur for a long time and I identify as a serial entrepreneur, having not just had many businesses of my own but really seen most businesses spur off additional businesses. Beyond that, my last real J-O-B was actually in high school, so we're going back many decades and you know, my first one was, you know, I'd say, in elementary school, sometime around there. But, like, my first real businesses generating real money and truly providing for myself at the time were, you know, in that formative late teen years, and I actually ended up leaving college during my second year. I was at that interesting inflection point where I had a business that was taking up 40 plus hours a week of my time and also trying to handle a full course load, and so I had to make a difficult decision.
Speaker 3:
Both my parents are educators. My mom was a career elementary school teacher. My dad had been a college professor. Going to parents like that and sharing this idea of, hey, I'm not going to continue my formal education, that's a difficult conversation, but I promised I'm like, hey, I'm probably gonna be going back. I might be, we'll see. This is just a semester, it's a little bump in business and the reality of that is is come the fall, I still wasn't ready to go back, and here we are, decades later and I haven't returned yet. But that's OK. Being an entrepreneur and having your own businesses provides a lot of wonderful benefits, as we all know, and one of the biggest ones is what I call entrepreneurial freedom, or that freedom of time. And so over that you know, over my career so far, there've been just a number of great businesses, and all of them have been around working with and serving business owners, founders and entrepreneurs, and it's fantastic.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, so thanks for sharing your story, jeremy, and I'm always excited when we have serial entrepreneurs on the show because all the listeners they get to hear a wealth of knowledge and experience coming from all of those years. So all of the grind, the hard work, you know you get sharper as you go on, and so how can the listeners tell if they're self-employed or a true business owner? What's the criteria there?
Speaker 3:
Oh, that's such a good question. When you, let's say, you're working a trades job and you go off and start out on your own. And you, let's say, you're working a trades job and you go off and start out on your own and this is a really common practice right, you might be a plumber, so you go open your own plumbing company. Right, you might be a carpenter and you decide to open your own carpentry business, and so on. This also applies to CPAs attorneys. Right, you're working somewhere else and you decide you want to do things on your own. Well, an interesting thing happens at that point you go out and you're no longer doing just the work of the business. You also have to run the business. So now you're dealing with the books, you're dealing with hiring, you're dealing with managing marketing, sales, you're doing everything involved in a business that was previously taken care of for you when you had a job. And so for many people, this is that realization that, oh my gosh, like having my business is a lot more complicated and involved than just doing the work that I loved. And so when you are at that point where you've hung your own shingle and you have your own company, but you're still doing like everything. That's a great example of being self-employed. When you're self-employed, you have typically the worst parts of a job and the worst parts of owning a business, without the benefits that either of those provide, right? So when you start to actually grow your business so it's more than just yourself you can start to claim back some of that freedom and do higher value and a higher level of work, right? So the litmus test I always use is to close your eyes and think about this situation. If you were to step away from your business for a day, for a week, for three months, when you came back, would your business be the same as where you left it, or even better, and if it is, then you've got a business, and if you don't, if you're like no-transcript.
Speaker 3:
He liked to go mountain biking and hiking where there isn't really great cell coverage, and so he was avoiding doing those things, even on the weekend, because what if one of his customers needed him and he wasn't there? So one of the things we worked on was getting that first hire in place, and simply bringing on someone to do customer service in that situation freed him up to first of all work in higher level stuff in the business. Right, he could go at this point handle sales calls, could handle product development, marketing, all those higher value activities, while someone else took care of the front line. But it also meant he got to go out for a mountain bike ride, he got to go out for a hike and enjoy the great outdoors and not worry about not being there for a customer. That was sort of that first step along those journey and we've got tons of stories along those lines. But that's your litmus test Can you step away from the business and come back to a business, the same or better, over an extended period of time?
Speaker 2:
Very nice. Now I'm sure there are some listeners who heard that response and are thinking to themselves man, I thought I was a business owner, but if I step away from my business it will implode on itself. And so I know this could be a really long answer, but what tends to be, if somebody recognizes, hey, I'm self-employed, but I want to transition to this business owner, what are some focal points that they can concentrate on to get them into that business owner mindset and operational capacity?
Speaker 3:
There's a group of business owners I hang out with and when they greet each other and they haven't seen each other in a while one of the questions they ask is hey, how many weeks of vacation did you take last year, which I love? You think about the traditional hustle mindset of the competition for how many more hours of work you put in in a given week, and somehow more is better Feels so backwards, right. And instead these very successful business owners are asking hey, how much time did you take off? What's bundled up in that question?
Speaker 3:
By the way, to get away for an extended period of time means a few things. It means you have, obviously, the financial ability to head off somewhere for a few months. It also means you have the right systems in place for your business and you have the right people in place for your business. So when you've got those figured out, that provides you that freedom of time to step away, Not because you have to or you should, but it means you are able to and that's just an indicator of being there.
Speaker 3:
So for folks who want to take that next step, one of the common stumbling blocks I see feeling like no one can do a job better than you, and a good piece of advice is always hire people who can do the stuff you do better than you can. I don't know about you. I don't want to be the world's best bookkeeper or the world's best customer support agent or anything like that, but I want to hire people who are better than me in those areas. You may work with outside marketing firms or agencies who do a better job of their marketing than you could. You may find graphic designers who do it better than you can. That's great. That's how you build a business is by having other people in the business do the work of the business ideally better than you can, and yet following a process, so you get a consistent result, regardless of who's using the system.
Speaker 2:
Okay, Okay, Now what would be some common mistakes founders make when they're trying to scale their business?
Speaker 3:
Yeah. So the mindset, like we were talking about, of no one can do it better than me is certainly one of them. There's also, I find, a shockingly high amount of imposter syndrome among founders and entrepreneurs, especially if you're coming from a social circle or family circles of folks who are working nine to five jobs and you're now sitting out there and you're doing something different, suddenly you're the oddball in the group who is striking out on their own and there comes, without a lot of you know, a lot of head trash, a lot of mental blocks, especially if you haven't done it before. There's the. There's the question of can I do this? Am I good enough? Will my customers see value in what I'm doing? Am I worth this?
Speaker 3:
And so sometimes new business owners don't charge enough because they're undervaluing themselves. They can block their own growth because they don't get outside input from others, and that's one of the biggest reasons we have our mastermind groups is to help others, to get peer advisory and that third-party feedback from others who are only invested in each other's best interests. Especially when you're the only entrepreneur in your social circles, your family circles and so on, the questions you have and the challenges you face don't have a lot of expert input. So when you're sharing about what's going on in your business and your life, it's hard for others around you to relate.
Speaker 3:
When you surround yourself in the context, for example, of a mastermind group, you're around other like-minded business owners and entrepreneurs. These are folks who get it. They've been there, they've done that, they've done that and they want to help you along the way, and we all have our areas of genius and can help each other out in that peer advisory environment. Surround yourself with others who've been there. They will help you to get mentally unblocked because you'll realize there's a new normal, which is entrepreneurship, and the things that you want to do are possible because others have been there before you and done it.
Speaker 4:
That's something that I really like. That statement, jeremy. That's something that I always think about, too is when I get into a tough place or a problem I can't solve, I think, well, let me just go find someone that's already solved it and ask them how they did it, and so I really like what you just said there. Can you go over a few ways, strategic ways, that entrepreneurs can grow their business in 2024?
Speaker 3:
I think you know, when we look out at what we know, we have an idea of what we know we can do or what's possible. There's also areas of things we know that we don't know. Right, these are used in the forms of our questions, right? We're wondering, hey, how do we do this? How do we grow our business that way? And you know, for example, you might say, hey, I know SEO could help my business, but I don't know how to do it. So you have questions around that. Right, the real opportunity is.
Speaker 3:
The biggest pivots I see again and again and again are in that other category of the things you don't know, that you don't know. It's when I look around our table at a mastermind group meeting, the biggest aha moments I see where people's eyes go wide, the pen comes up and they start scribbling down notes and the smile creeps across their face. Those that the smile creeps across their face, those are not during their mastermind hot seat. Those are from other people sharing what's going on in their business, because it's revealing to you, it's pulling back the curtain on what others are doing to succeed in ways you never imagined, in doing things you didn't know existed, and so that's where you get that dialogue and those questions where people ask to find out more. So one of the examples I love is you'll have a brick and mortar store owner and an e-commerce store and the brick and mortar store owner is talking about using direct mail in their business and how they're bringing in new customers to their store by sending out postcards in the mail, right?
Speaker 3:
And the e-commerce guy is used to sending out emails and running ads online. He's like wait a minute, direct mail, like people still do that. And they start asking questions like well, how did you find your list? Like, what do you do to get that and who does the design? Should I do a postcard or a letter? Do I do a big or small? What vendor do you use? And they ask all these really good questions because it's a whole area they never knew existed, and so then the person who's been there and done that is able to share and say, hey, here are the vendors I use, here are the best practices I found the hard way by doing this for years and so on, and you get and that goes both ways.
Speaker 3:
We've seen traditional businesses think, for example, we had a doctor, traditional medical practice, and he's hearing what e-commerce folks are doing and he's like wait a minute, let me get this straight. Every time you send an email, money comes in. Well, what do you put in the email? What kind of offers do you guys use? And so you get a doctor who goes and creates an e-commerce store, creates a subscription program right and suddenly starts adding in additional streams of revenue to the business that have nothing to do with being a doctor, but are all about growing the customer base, and generating recurring revenue, by the way, is not dependent on trading dollars for hours. So these ideas are what swirl around the table, and so the biggest opportunities I see again and again are are not in what you know, you know, or you know you don't know, but in the area of the things you didn't know. You didn't even know.
Speaker 2:
So, jeremy, you've talked a lot about masterminds and I think this would be a good time to kind of introduce your role in masterminds and how they've made a difference in your life, and so can you talk a little bit about masterminds you're a part of, and are you the host or the attendee? Can you kind of lay that out?
Speaker 3:
The short answer is yes, all of those things. The idea of masterminds, you know we date back to Napoleon Hill. In the 30s he published one of his most well-known books, think and Grow Rich, and in there he talks about the power of the mastermind. In today's language, what we would say is when you have more than one person together in the same place at the same time, you know, working in harmony together towards a common goal, you don't just get the benefit of like one plus one equals two. There's really like this third mind created. That's the culmination of everyone else. That's there. That's where all those really cool ideas start coming from, those biggest pivots for businesses, right? So for myself, you know, for the past number of decades I've been an attendee at mastermind groups of all sorts and shapes and sizes and we can talk about sort of what those look like if you guys want to do that. But what I realized is there's a format that really I found works the best for businesses, and so well, over a decade ago we founded the Bay Area Mastermind Group. In that role, not only am I part of those groups, I facilitate the group, so I help to get folks into a test drive to join us for a day and see what a mastermind group is like and then actually facilitate those meetings for our members and then facilitate our communities between meetings, right?
Speaker 3:
So each month, in the format we use, our members get together for a full day of working on the business, which, by the way, is much different than working in the business, right, working in the business is doing the work of the business. It's the thing you sell, right, but the work on the business is the strategy. This is where you're deciding the vision for your business what's next, what markets you're going into, how you're going to get there, who you want to be. Right, it's all that big work, and a lot of business owners are so stuck working in the business they don't make the time for that. So this is carved out for our members on their calendar and they know this is a day away from the office, away from the field, not talking to clients or employees, and just entirely focused on the growth of the business and the visionary work and connecting with like-minded business owners. And so each of our members during the day, as well as our guests, has a chance for a hot seat, and this is where we get to deep dive into your business and talk about what's going on, and four things are primarily covered there For our members.
Speaker 3:
We talk about accountability in terms of what happened over the past month. As entrepreneurs, we're our own boss, which means we're not usually accountable to anyone, which means we can get away with not doing the work we have to do because there's no one to hold us to that ourselves. So having that peer accountability is really valuable. The second thing we go over is what's working well, third is what's not working well and the fourth is where you need help.
Speaker 3:
The beautiful part about this, like I was sharing, is those big opportunities and pivots can come from not just an individual's hot seat, but by seeing everybody else's. That's where you find out from like your virtual laboratory of scientists out there working and testing things in their own business. You get the benefit of all that research and what worked and what didn't. And so, let's say you're launching a new sales page, you have the benefit of 10 other people who've recently done that and can share the best practices they have found. Or if you're getting ready to create your first physical product and get it onto Amazon and that's a new space for you you get everyone else who's done that, who's there to share their best practices with you, and so on. So that's where a lot of those really good ideas come from is from everybody else's hot seat and that mastermind format I'll let you see all those opportunities lets you get the important impact, the important advisory from your peers and lets you also, in your areas of genius, be a mentor and help others too.
Speaker 4:
You know I've David and I are both, we've both been in masterminds before and a lot of them in there.
Speaker 4:
You know, I would say to the listeners, if you're listening to this, and business owners and their experiences you're going to pick up on stuff that you're not doing, that they're doing because they've thought about it from a different angle. So I think there's lots of different benefits there. My next question is this is something that I think all entrepreneurs have faced at some point in their journey. I know I have, I know David has, and it's burnout. And so what is your advice to entrepreneurs when they are facing burnout, and maybe what are a couple of things that they can do along the way to either not experience burnout or, you know, go around it or whatever.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, there's been what I consider a toxic movement towards hustle culture, and hustle culture is all about if you're not out there building your business, your competitor is. And while you're sleeping, your competitor is eating your lunch and taking all your customers. And that is such a toxic, unhealthy belief Like, how do you sleep at night when you feel like someone's taking your toys away? And it's really, really toxic. And so the flip side of that is the anti-hustle movement is the idea that you can work smarter, it's okay to work fewer hours and still grow your business, and when you have that hustle mentality that so quickly leads to burnout, it's not sustainable. You only have so many hours in a day and if, instead of sleeping, you're working on the business, instead of being there for the family, you're working on the business. Instead of taking care of your health, you're working on the business. Guess what? You might have a business for a short period of time, while you are still alive and while your family is still with you and while your health still supports you. The flip side of that is, if you're taking care of the other areas in your life and also building a business, your business can be built to support the life you want to create and the life you want to live right.
Speaker 3:
We've all seen couples where you know they spend so much time focused on the kids for 18 years and then look at each other 20 years later and realize like I don't even know who you are to their spouse because they haven't taken the time to invest in their spouse relationship, because they've been so focused on taking care of the kids. The same thing goes with business. You can be so focused on the business you lose track of the family. You could be there with the little league game, you could be at the date night with your spouse, the time with family, and so on.
Speaker 3:
When you are able to prioritize what matters most and build a business to support that, you're getting all the things that you need mentally, physically, taking care of your wellness, your health, your spirituality, whatever it is that's important to you. You can make the time for those, and so I was sharing that story earlier of a client who was not getting something that was fulfilling for him and providing for his health and wellness, which was getting out in the outdoors, being physically active, climbing tough mountains on his bike. He instead was staying within cell phone coverage zone and not doing those things, and so now he's able to reclaim that and get that back. So, as you build your businesses, be mindful of why you're in business in the first place and who you're doing it for, and don't lose sight of who you're doing it for.
Speaker 4:
One follow up to that. I know, like for me personally, I enjoy listening to Gary Vee, but I think also that is part of that, like you know, kicking the ass mentality of hey, get out there, you know someone's going to take your lunch if you're sleeping, and so I think it's. Maybe have you experienced like early, initially in an entrepreneur is like when they're starting out, they need that big jolt and that hustle and then transition into a more of a, more of a balanced. Or should you? Should you start more at more balanced and just take longer to to get where you want to go? What is your thought on that?
Speaker 3:
Yeah. So keep in mind, between anti-hustle and hustle is a spectrum right. It's not a black and a white. There's not a right and a wrong right. You can be anywhere along this journey and so sometimes, starting out, you can lean a little more towards hustle without being a hundred percent, and you can move more towards anti-hustle without being entirely offline and purely a third-party investor. This is a needle that can move. As you're coming up to a new product launch, you might be leaning into the business, putting in some more time doing things around. That that's fine, but it's that macro mindset. So, yes, when you're starting out, if you're heading the right direction, you can run there and get there faster. But if you don't know what direction you're going, maybe you don't want to race to go in the wrong direction it's okay to get some input from others and learn and then learn and then keep in mind you know I'm always a fan of MVPs or minimum viable product, whatever you can get out there and start ROI-ing and working for you. The faster you can do that the better. So you can create the perfect website right, or you can create a good enough one that can start getting you leads and getting you revenue.
Speaker 3:
The very first e-commerce business I launched was 21 years ago, if you can believe that that. You know, on a Friday afternoon I was having a conversation with a mentor of mine who you know is older and more experienced in business, and I was in this wonderfully fortunate place. I had like a half dozen opportunities in front of me that all seemed urgent and I wanted to do them all but you can't do all the things at the same time and he provided really valuable guidance to me, and not what to do. He was a good mentor. He provided the guidance on how to make that decision, and so what came out of that was this idea for our first e-commerce business and I realized you know, it's a Friday night. I bet if I put in some weekend time, by Monday this thing could be online. And again, we're talking 21 years ago. There was no, just, you know, plug and play e-commerce, right. There was no, you know, just go at a shopping cart online. We had to build all this from scratch.
Speaker 3:
So over the weekend, I put the time in and built effectively a CRM that could do lead capture, could do recurring billing, could provide, you know, secure members only access to stuff things we take for granted now. But by Monday, even though we didn't even have SSL like a secure server online, we had no bank account, we hadn't even formed the entity yet. We had people who I don't know how to this day day, they found our site and were opting in and like filling out order forms to buy stuff, and then, like a day later, asking us like, hey, when can I get access? And I'm like I haven't even we haven't built that yet. So we're wonderfully fortunate in that scenario, but we're able to get an MVP up and online as quickly as possible so you can see what's working faster. You should expect to fail on things like failure isn't something to avoid. We just expect to fail on things Like failure isn't something to avoid. We just want to do two things with failure we want to fail faster and we want to recover from that failure fast.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely Now. What advice would you give for a business that is stalled out or feels stuck, plateaued? What advice would you give to them?
Speaker 3:
no-transcript entrepreneurs. They're going to be sharing what's going on in their business and how they're moving forward, and often it takes surrounding yourself with other people to realize what's possible and to get unstuck. I've seen time and time again the members of the Bay Area Mastermind find an idea for a new business or pivot their existing business just from a conversation or a line item of their notebooks that came up during a mastermind meeting. And so we talk about getting unstuck. It again delves into that area of the things you didn't know, you don't know, and seeing others who are succeeding and who are breaking through barriers and who are there with you to celebrate your success, your successes, and help you through with your challenge.
Speaker 3:
As an entrepreneur, it's lonely at the top. Who do you share your big wins with? When you just crushed a product launch and you made more in a product launch than friends might make in a year, you can't really talk to them about that. That's an awkward conversation. On the flip side, if you just lost a ton of money on a botched you know idea that you had in a business direction that didn't go well, in the same way, like are you well, you get the support you need from your social friends, your family, who can't relate to that or haven't been there. We can't usually talk to friends, family, um, customers, vendors, team members, like those aren't usually people you talk to about really what you're feeling, about the wins and losses. A mastermind group provides that setting to celebrate your wins with you big and, on the flip side, support you when you're stuck and help you to get unstuck and help you to see what you can't see because you've got the blinders on of doing things the only way you know how. So surround yourself with the right people.
Speaker 4:
That's crucial. So, jeremy, can you tell us more about your infamous FAQs to increasing profits in a business? This is something David uncovered while researching your history here.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, it's fun. What I love about having this long career of working with business owners, entrepreneurs and having many businesses of my own is, at least for me I start to see those patterns, I start to see the commonalities, and that's where I think there's a lot of interesting things to learn is not about one person's freak accident that worked out really well or that one off success, but by the things that seem to be thematic throughout that process. Right, when you look at growing profits in a business, I've found that they typically fall into one of three categories, and this is like we could nerd out on this for hours. I teach classes on this stuff, like I love this, but like at a super high level. My FAQs come down to you can increase the frequency, the amount and the quantity. So we talk about increasing the frequency. We're talking about how do you get an existing customer to transact with you more. So if you have a business where someone transacts and they buy something one time and that's it. They're done because you only sell one thing, then that's a huge opportunity.
Speaker 3:
What can you do to increase the frequency of transactions? And a simple one, a model we all know well, is a subscription model when someone is signed up to pay you every month or every week or every year, whatever it is, that's now additional transactions for that customer. When you expand your product line, you have more things you can sell to your list. That is increasing the frequency of transactions. You take a one-time sale and you now have additional things to sell that same customer. This time sale, sale and you now have an additional things to sell that same customer. This can also come in the form of affiliate offers. I know our listeners are very familiar with that. When you're able to offer someone else's product to your list, you are now getting additional sales from that same customer. So you're increasingly frequency of transactions.
Speaker 3:
There's tons of ways to do this, but those are a few high level examples. The A is the amount. So what is the dollar amount of the transaction? How do you increase that? Well, there are many ways we can do it right. There's one is super simple you just increase your price. If you're in a services based business, there's a good chance you got some mental blocks around what you're worth. On that Experiment with increasing your prices. You'd be surprised. I'm used to it enough now that I know how it works. But in general, when you increase your prices, your profits can go up. That's a good thing. You might lose some customers, but you probably won't be attracting less. Your overall gross sales and, more importantly, your net profit typically go up when you raise your prices to a limit. The other example that we all know is would you like fries with that?
Speaker 3:
This is an upsell. When someone is buying your thing and it's in their cart, what else do you have that can increase the amount of that initial transaction? In one of my earlier businesses we had an education business and we were selling a live event ticket and that ticket was about $1,000 and we had three upsells and we found, on average, people took an additional at least one upsell. Many folks would buy all three upsells in that same transaction. No-transcript of the transaction. There's many more, but those are two good ones for you.
Speaker 3:
And the third of my FAQs to profit is the quantity, and this is what almost everyone talks about when they talk about growing your business. They talk about increasing the quantity of customers, like how do I fill the top of my funnel? How do we work on tofu? How do I attract more leads, get more opt-ins, get more initial sales at any cost.
Speaker 3:
And the thing to be mindful of is what metrics you're chasing and how you're measuring that. A classic example of this is a car dealership. They put up the whiteboard the back room for the sales reps and like all right, we're going to see who the leaderboard is, who sells the most cars. Is that the metric you want to be chasing? Is it only quantity? Because if your sales team goes out there and starts discounting cars and brings them down to zero profit margin, they'll win your volume game. They'll sell a lot of cars, but now you're losing money, right? So just be mindful of you know. For example, one of the things I talk about a lot is the dangers of discounting, right, you don't your stuff. You can discount your stuff and be losing money on a sale and getting more sales as they've increased the quantity of negative transactions. You can do it, but that's a dangerous game to play. Those are your three FAQs your frequency, amount and quantity of your transaction.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely so. Before we go into the fire round, I'd like to ask a little bit about the Bay Area Masterminds. Is this something that is reserved for people that live in the Bay Area, or do you have any virtual events? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, our origins were initially here in the San Francisco Bay Area, which I now say because all of our meetings were in person, and then, with the pandemic, we quickly switched to a virtual format and it actually worked really well. Our members enjoyed that and we attracted members from further afield who could join us virtually. And we had one gentleman who is halfway through his test drive day with us when he realized he's like you know, the theme of everyone seemed to be in the San Francisco Bay area and he was in Green Bay. And so we're like oh, we should say which bay. We had someone else who joined us from Maryland. Thought we were at Maryland Bay. We're like I guess there's a lot of bays.
Speaker 3:
Yes, we, you know our physical and we have members who join us from not just around the country but also folks who are able to join us internationally. Some do it hybrid style, where they'll fly in for a few meetings and the rest they do virtually. Others have gone totally virtual. But it's really allowed us to expand the number of entrepreneurs that we can help and sort of the reach that we have in doing so. And the format, like I mentioned, is we spend one full day diving into the business, where we get to spend that time in your hot seat talking about what's working, what's not and where the group can help. And then our community, which is, you know, of all folks, is really between meetings, and that's in our private Slack community, our private email list, and that's where we can continue to help each other out between those once a month full day meetings.
Speaker 4:
Excellent. Now. Thanks for sharing, jeremy, for all the listeners. If you're interested, all of the links and everything are going to be in the show notes. So if you're driving, don't try to write any of that stuff down. Just when you get home, go and look up firegermancom. We'll have it all in the show notes For every guest we have on the show. We run them through a ringer and it's called the fire round. Are you ready?
Speaker 3:
Ooh, I'm ready.
Speaker 4:
All right, what is your favorite book?
Speaker 3:
I have a lot you know. Behind me is a bookshelf and it's just part of all the business books I love. But I put together actually a mastermind master reads and that's sort of the foundational books our members love. So your short answer is foundational books all of our members read and love obviously is Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.
Speaker 3:
Robert Kiyosaki wrote Cashflow Quadrant Forever Ago when we were talking about self-employed to business owner. That's where a lot of that comes from. Is that cross-net chasm between those two sides of the quadrant E-Myth Michael Gerber's E-Myth and E-Myth Revisited. That's where a lot of our org chart structure we talk about and creating those position role descriptions and then hiring people for those different boxes All that comes from E-Myth. When we talk about core values, gina Wickman's Traction is like the only book I've ever read that tells you here's how to figure out your core values. Yeah, there, it is Not just a matter of everyone saying you should have them, but actually how to do it. And I've got great stories all around that.
Speaker 3:
And the last one I'll share is the Goal. Elliot Goldratt wrote that it was originally about. It's all about the theory of constraints and it's written as a great parable. So it's a very readable, enjoyable book, but at the heart of floor for our, for our protagonists in the story. We use this in business all the time. We look at what is the worst performing area that's bottlenecking everything else. How do we huddle and work on that and fix it to then reveal the next worst performing part? And so we go through this iterative process, looking at funnels or everything else in our business, on how to fix that and increase the, the conversions, each step of the way. So that's you know. You said favorite book, but no, I like that list.
Speaker 4:
What was the last one? It was called Goals the Goal the Goal. Okay, and who wrote it?
Speaker 3:
Elliot Goldratt wrote that and, like I mentioned in our master reads you know I outline all those books and what we love about it, but that's a really good one. I have a funnel workshop I did that's at bayareamastermindcom slash funnels. The video is free online. There's no opt-in. Go watch it, enjoy it, use the stuff in your business. But we deep dive into applying theory of constraints to the funnels in your business so you can iteratively improve from your click through to your opt-in rates, to your purchase rates and upsell. How do we improve all? And it uses theory of constraints.
Speaker 4:
No, I really like that. I'll be checking that out. All right, next one what are your hobbies?
Speaker 3:
So I'm an avid cyclist. That's one of my favorite things to do, and I spend a lot of time doing that and, coincidentally, end up talking shop. Oftentimes. The people I'm riding with you know talking business and life and all that, so I've set a few course records. I'm, you know, at times a competitive cyclist, but also it's just what I enjoy, doing a lot of my time as well.
Speaker 4:
Oh, wow, okay, You're getting after it. That's awesome.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I'm also known to run occasionally, but not as fun as riding Next one.
Speaker 4:
What is one thing that you do not miss about working for the man?
Speaker 3:
Well, my last, you know, was early on in high school. So it's been a while. I've been a few decades, but you know, when I look at not just my history but also broadly about that is two big things. First is someone else having a say in how you spend your time, and that kind of relates to having your income directly connected to the hours that you show up somewhere. When you have entrepreneurial freedom, you're not bound by those. You can grow a business that's not dependent upon your hours and you can have control over your time, and that provides optionality. You can choose how to spend your time and what to do, and those are things you typically can't do in a traditional JLB.
Speaker 4:
All right. Last question what do you think sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started?
Speaker 3:
In the land of entrepreneurship. You know, here we are in the States. For some of us as well as really these days around the world, it's a land of opportunity. The barriers to start your own business are so low. So even when you have a traditional job, you can start a small side business, something on the side to bring in additional cash flow, and that's really low risk. And sometimes these little side businesses or side ideas become the real business. For myself, I've seen it for our members. I see it all the time. That little idea becomes the real business. Almost all my businesses have filled a gap that I myself have seen in an existing business and fills that need and then does it for others as well.
Speaker 3:
In life you're going to find there's wishers and wanters, then there's doers and getters and it's easy to fall into the trap of being an entrepreneur seeing everyone else doing it and saying I want to go out there someday and I'll be an entrepreneur. I want to do it, but not actually starting that process. Real entrepreneurs go out there, they get it and they do it right. They don't wait for all the traffic lights to be green before they pull to the driveway. Right, they go out there, knowing there'll be stops along the way, they'll encounter detours and challenges and problems, but they set out and course correct as they go, with a clear intention on their why and their where, but with flexibility on the journey and how to get there, absolutely.
Speaker 2:
I want to thank you for being a guest on the Firing the man podcast. If people are interested in getting in touch with you or learning more about Bay Area Masterminds, what would be the best way?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, you can find us at bayareamastermindcom. That's where you'll find that Mastermind Masterreads. You'll find all my writing. You'll find the workshop, like I mentioned. It's a free video you can watch on funnels, which is fantastic. You'll find the worksheets that go with that, a Google sheet you can copy and use on your own. All my writing where I interview members and other entrepreneurs who found that entrepreneurial freedom and we talk about their journeys and how they got there. All that is over at bayareamastermindcom and that's also where you can find out about our test drive process, how that works and see if our masterminds are fit for you or how to create your own group Outstanding Well, thank you so much for your time and we're looking forward to staying in touch Likewise.