How to Know If You're Cut Out for Entrepreneurship Before You Risk Everything, with Grant Sabatier

22:59I mean, empire doesn't mean massive, you know, these people like Rihanna or LeBron James, these people have all these companies and all of these investments. It's just about you're creating a container in your life to be an entrepreneur in many different ways. And so right now I own five different websites. I own the bookstore. I have my book media company for the books that I'm writing. I have my real estate holdings and all of this lives within my holding company in a very, very tax efficient manner. And so this is that level where I'm deep in it, still learning about it, but it's just an incredible time.

23:34Building a holding company is very much like building an LLC. and as you become more successful as an entrepreneur, it's very, very valuable in terms of expanding your life and helping you make more money to expand your thinking into this holding company level. Right, and there are four different types of holding companies, is that? Yes, yeah, so there's more than that. I just tried to distill them down into four. I like that you brought this up. So there's holding companies where you own a bunch of businesses that are very similar and they leverage just one core office. So you have a few marketing people that work across all of your different businesses.

24:07And that becomes easy to do because all the businesses are similar. Say you own a dog walking company and a dog groomer and a pet store all in Chicago, right? And all of these companies, because they're all related, you can cross market across them, but they're still separate companies. And you can create immense sort of operational efficiency. Because at the whole company level, you're basically able to manage a number of different businesses by using a smaller team. And so I currently have a holding company. It's called MMG Media Group. We own a number of personal finance and gig economy websites.

24:39And we own basically six different companies within this holding company. But we have a centralized team. So we have front end and back end developers that work across all the websites. We have a finance person that works across all the websites. And so the thing is, I'm able to use a small team to manage multiple different companies. So I don't have to create redundancies. And this allows me to go out and buy a website where maybe there's a small team and I can basically take the website, integrate that website within my own sort of internal technology, my own team, and immediately upon buying it, increase revenue 50 % because I've reduced the operating expenses because I'm using my team instead of that old team.

25:19And then I'm able to do things like put my own affiliate links on the websites and immediately increase revenue because I have higher payouts. And so strategic acquisition, often within your industry, you're able to create a holding company that you reduce expenses, increase revenue, and so you can make your money back for that acquisition within a year or two. And then it's all profit from there. Kind of like different games of the chessboard. And then there's other types of holding companies where you're acquiring different types of businesses, like a Berkshire Hathaway, right? Owning Dairy Queen and Fruit of the Loom and NetJets and all these other things.

25:54Geico. And that type of holding company, typically the teams are operating independently, right? So Geico's marketing team's not helping NetJet's marketing team, right? So every company is siloed individually. But you can do a lot of really creative things like Warren Buffett does, which is the profit that Geico generates. He can then go use to buy another company, right? Or buy Apple stock and use that to invest in another business that needs the capital. And so there's a lot of things that you can do with cash flow management that's very, very efficient. And really, the tax code significantly benefits entrepreneurs.

26:31And at the holding company level, there's a lot of fun stuff that you can do, even in real estate, if you get creative. So I could have never imagined that I would be thinking like this, that I would be operating in this capacity. But it's really, really fun to learn. And I think more and more people are going to be launching these holding companies, especially with digital businesses, just because they're so asset light. You can do a lot of really fun, creative things. And it's amazing acquiring a business. And that's one of the things I never knew until I sold a company, just how amazing it is, how much better in some ways it is to buy a business than it is to actually start one from scratch, right?

27:09Because you can go in and spend two to three times an owner's annual, basically, profit to buy a business and then integrate it within your existing company. And you can basically buy profit and you don't have to start something from scratch. So this is like where I'm at now. It's what I think about. I try to actively convince myself not to buy things on a day-to-day basis. It's a lot of fun, but it's also very easy for it to run away from you. And so I have a two-year-old. I like writing books. I like doing other things than just running my businesses. And so there's a lot of sort of introspection within this book.

27:45And I think within my work around like just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. And I think I'm at that phase very much as an entrepreneur because there's a lot of great opportunities today. But anything's still going to take time. It's still going to take a tradeoff. Any business you acquire, you're really going to have to pay attention to it for a couple of years. There's no kind of like just buy it and forget it. And then, yeah, I just tend to now default back with the extra cash that I have into index fund investing because you're like, gosh, this is really passive and really easy.

28:16and I don't have to manage all these moving pieces, but not nearly as fun as launching and buying companies.

28:27The kids are back in school now and I finally have some extra time to plan a weekend getaway for just us. We've been wanting to visit Lancaster County, Pennsylvania for a while now because I've heard so many people rave about it. We love exploring new places, finding the cutest shops and eating at restaurants that the locals love. DiscoverLancaster.com. is the best place to learn about the unique things to do and upcoming events. Plan your trip alongside us at discoverlankaster.com slash amplified. I want to shout out to all the small business owners out there. You wear a million hats. You're doing a lot of things and you show up for your team every single day.

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29:40So you save lots of time. You get direct access to certified HR experts, and it's quick and simple to switch. I've been using Gusto since 2017 or 18. It's been a long time. I remember I was living in Las Vegas at the time, and I brought on my first team member, a woman by the name of Erin, who ended up working with us for six years. That was when I got on Gusto, and I'm still there today. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash Paula and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash Paula. One more time, gusto.com slash Paula, G-U-S-T-O dot com slash P-A-U-L-A.

30:22This Friday, the NBA on Prime tips off with their debut doubleheader. First up, Boston brings the action to the Garden as the Celtics face the New York Knicks. Then out west, it's a battle of the superpowers. as the Lakers try to poster the relentless pace of the Minnesota Timberwolves. The Celtics and Knicks, who has the most hustle in defense? This game will come down to who wants it more. And the Timberwolves and the Lakers, it's two Western Conference heavyweights going toe-to-toe. Buckle up, folks. This one's going to be electric. Celtics-Knicks, T-Wolves and Lakers. Coverage starts Friday, 7 o 'clock Eastern, only on Prime.

31:13We've talked so far about two different types of holding companies, one in which the underlying businesses are all quite similar, and so you can create operational efficiencies, and the other of which the companies are quite different, with Berkshire Hathaway being a prime example of that. Before we get into the others, my question, the one that keeps coming up for me as I hear you talk about this, is how do you keep from excessively fragmented attention? Because it sounds as though if you, you can easily put all of your attention into just one company. And even in doing that, your attention can be fragmented because of all the different tasks that are required just to run one singular company.

31:52So the idea of then taking that and multiplying it out by 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 12, 20, it just sounds more than one human brain can handle. Yeah. And this is something I struggle with, right? I'm naturally human. And so opening the bookstore is a great example where a bookstore is so different than any of the websites that I own. And so the only way that I can segment this out is having a really good team is another thing. So I have within my holding company, I have a couple of business partners. I own a majority of the holding company, but I have other people who are far more technically savvy at running websites than I am.

32:30And they're focusing on the day-to-day of the business. And so it's very rare for me to hop on a call with an affiliate partner, to hop on a call with really anyone. I talk to our accountants once a month. I talk to our lawyers when we're buying a company, when there's some sort of legal issue that I have to be consulted. But by and large, you have to lean on really, really good people, right? And this is another Warren Buffett lesson, where it's like, just recently, the largest manufacturer of RVs, I'm forgetting the name of the company, the founder of it died. And this was 20 years ago, this company sold to Berkshire Hathaway.

33:04And Warren Buffett marked it as a really successful business, because he had actually never been there. He marked like never going there was the marker of success, right? And I think for me, I mean, obviously, that's a really extreme example. But I'm really trying to work with great, great people who are doing most of the work. And then I do what I'm good at, which is finding acquisitions, which is structuring these companies, coming in, doing negotiations, and then all the technical details. I don't send out any of the emails. I don't put any of the offers on the website, manage any of the links.

33:35There are tons of moving pieces. So leaning on really good people. And these people I've met through building other websites in my career. And now I just turned 40. I've been in digital marketing for 15 years. I've worked with a lot of great people and I've tried to get some of the best people that I've worked with in my career to work with me or for me within the holding company. And then the other piece is just segmenting out your time and knowing what phase you're at. And so it takes an immense amount of effort to launch a business. And so it took me about 1200 hours to launch the bookstore.

34:05And this is me in the bookstore alone, doing the measurements, getting the bookcases, moving just massive numbers of boxes of books. We have 40 ,000 books in our collection. I have four storage units, immense amount of time and effort. And I knew it would take that, but I felt confident that my other businesses were running well. And if there was a fire or a headache, they would give me a call because we have that great relationship and we have that trust. I was just getting on the plane to come to New York yesterday. I got a call from one of my partners. Hey, we've got this issue. We got to deal with it.

34:35Flew to New York, got off the plane, talked to our lawyers. We drafted some emails and it basically took an hour of my time on the phone and maybe half an hour reviewing the emails. And so I know that they're taking care of that. But launching the bookstore, because it's so different, I've struggled a little bit paying attention to it and the other things that I have going on. I don't have a business partner in the bookstore and I'm trying to figure that out. But now that it's launched, I have three full-time employees. One of them is my brother-in-law. He pays attention if there are any issues.

35:04He gives me a call. They send me texts. We have a group text chain. And so just being in communication, working with really good people. And it's hard to find good people that you mesh with. And so as you're working with people throughout your career, take note of who those people are. A lot of my best friends are people that I create things with. I just like to spend my time doing that. And so I've collected some really good friends over the years who are also good at doing things that I love to do. And so that's really, really important. And then the last piece is just having a good network.

35:34Entrepreneurship can be just so lonely. and so being a part of groups that you can be around other entrepreneurs and people who are creating things and have that similar energy or can connect you with people is also really really important i'm a natural introvert so that can be a little challenging for me but at certain times in my life i've been fortunate to build a peer group people who are doing what i'm doing and what i'm into and that's been just immeasurable to my success and i talk in the book about it's kind of cooperation over competition and i think this is a key point in business you should reach out to your competitors, get to know them, learn from them, because oftentimes it's much more effective to work together to grow a market than it is to just like compete each other and try to shut each other down because competition tends to be a zero sum game.

36:21So it's better to learn and work with your competitors and collaborate. I've often reached out to groups of other entrepreneurs. And what I found is that there's almost a bell curve to that use of time in that developing those relationships to a certain extent is helpful because I get new perspectives from other people who are doing similar things. But if I do that in excess, I found that it can cross over into excessively talking about business, but not actually taking action. Totally. Right. Because so much of the execution and the implementation is head down, roll up your sleeves, like the hard, tough, silent, not solo or not fun work.

37:07Totally. Yeah. I think there's times to kind of ask and there's times to give. And so, you know, I'm in a number of entrepreneurship groups where they get together for these masterminds once a year in these beautiful locations. And I've only been to a couple of those. And I often, like you're saying, I go to these, everyone's talking about their own thing. You're all just kind of hanging out. It's fun, but it's like just not my vibe, right? Right. I like networks where it's like, hey, I need someone who's a great React developer who does these three things. Do you know anyone? And then they provide that information.

37:39And then I'm also there if they're like, hey, we're doing SEO on this website and it's not working. What can we do? And so it tends to be a little more transactional in nature than it is just like personal hanging out. I think this is just like how my mind works. I try not to be too transactional, but it's like hanging out and spending like a week with a bunch of people, even if they're doing the same thing that you do, just takes an immense amount of energy and time. And you're right. You can really get lost in like going to conferences and events and being on the road and traveling and being tired all the time.

38:12And you're like, whoa, I kind of learned a lot. I had a lot of fun, but I really haven't moved my business forward in any way. And so I try to be very transactional in those things. And then when you can give as much as you can, right? And then people associate you with being helpful and we can't all be experts in everything, right? So the things that you are expert in, share those, right? And I know podcasting, the podcasting world, there's a number of podcasters who it's like they can talk about the other person's podcast on their show and share guests. And there's kind of like a sum is greater than the parts at some point, but you can burn a ton of time just talking and not doing.

38:56Right. Yeah. I term it as fun disguised as work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because there can be a lot of that. There can be a lot of like fun disguised as work. It's a tax deductible vacation. Yes. Fundamentally. And those are fun for a while. But like, once again, you have to figure out where you're at. It just becomes a waste. Yeah. Yeah. I'd rather take a taxable real vacation. Totally. Then I would take a tax deductible, like pseudo one. There could also be a lot of pressure, like hanging out with your competitors and your peers in a way, like comparing yourself to them or also being like, why am I not doing as well as them?

39:30Or should I be doing something in a different way? Or I'm kind of a blunt person. And so I have in the business context, if I have a feeling about someone else's business or I see that something that they should change something, I'm pretty forthcoming about that, right? which can be a little jarring for some people, but it's always in the spirit of trying to help make someone's business a little bit better. Like I'm always trying to, if I see something that can be improved, sending an email to a founder, Hey, I'm a customer. I got treated poorly or this didn't work out. I'm not looking for anything.

40:01I just want to let you know, as an entrepreneur, this would bother me. So here's kind of what I would do. And that's connected me with quite a few entrepreneurs as well. Like founders want to hear from customers. And if you're an entrepreneur yourself and you can provide really constructive feedback, they tend to be open to that. So that's a lot of the ways that I try to engage with entrepreneurs now. It's like, hey, I love your product. I use it. But have you thought about this or your website's terrible or took this much time to load or this link didn't work for me? There's so many times I found like a broken link and just like shared it with the founder on LinkedIn and be like, hey, you know, I don't know who to send this to.

40:39But I just want to know that this link to your offer that I just got in this email, it doesn't work. and you'll get back this email from, you know, like a very successful entrepreneur being like, well, thanks. I appreciate that. And, you know, that's led to some connections. So just generally trying to be helpful as an entrepreneur with other entrepreneurs really goes a long way. So what are the other two types of holding companies? We've talked so far about the holding company number one, where you're buying a bunch of similar types of businesses, the roll up, and then holding company number two is like the Berkshire Hathaway model, where you have a bunch of different types.

41:10Yeah, the traditional hold. So then it gets a little murkier. So the other types of holding companies, it's really based around your personal interest and how you want to build your business. And so this is when are you doing something that's mission driven? Are you creating a holding company that's built to pass down to your heirs? Are you buying certain types of businesses like real estate companies and title companies and packaging it in a way and hiring your family members to get that level of tax efficiency? That's one. And then it just gets more kind of creative from there. So you can do things that are more hyper location based.

41:44You can do things that are more geographically diverse. And so one of the things you can do in like my city of Columbus, Ohio, I've thought and actually tried to buy one other local bookstore. So it's like within the market, how do you build a holding company where you can become more localized in place and then get local influence? And so that's one of the other things you can do. You can say, hey, within my community, I have resources. I'm going to go and buy the other bookstores. And because I know the community well, and I see that this coffee shop, you know, the founders has been doing this for 30 years.

42:16Hey, there's a connection between coffee and bookstores. And this coffee shop's two doors down. I'm going to buy this. And hey, now that I have these three businesses, I'd rather just own the buildings that I'm in. Who owns this part of a strip mall, right? Can I buy this business? And so it's creating that really like hyper local approach to building a holding company where you have a number of businesses that are more location based. You can get more community funding. You can work with local credit unions. You can get grants. And so it tends to be a hyper local type company. The thing about holding company is that it's just like an LLC.

42:53It can be kind of whatever you want it to be. It's just a container with a business thesis. Do you acquire businesses that are all the same and then roll them up together? Do you acquire different businesses where there's fewer economies of scale? Do you go really local on your local community and then use it as a way to get influence and maybe get into politics? It's just all built around whatever thesis do you have. Do you build by internet companies that are really, really primed to use digital advertising? And because you've got a really great Facebook or meta ad manager, now you can buy these businesses and just leverage that technology.

43:30And so a holding company is really just built around a business thesis. And that can be many, many things. And I'm sure there are a lot of people who are listening to this who are thinking, I don't know if I want to be an entrepreneur. I don't know if I'm cut out for it. I don't have the time. I don't have the money. I don't know what skills I have. Can you talk to that set of concerns? I realize I've just listed a whole bunch at you. So let's start with the, I don't have time. Yeah, I don't have time. I don't have money. I'm afraid this isn't going to be successful. My friend lost all their money being an entrepreneur.

44:03How am I going to find customers? How am I going to grow? How am I going to pick a product? How am I going to, you know, there's just tons. And I go through a lot of these sort of objections, try to dispel them. I think that everyone is already an entrepreneur. I don't think that entrepreneurs are born. I don't even think they're made. I think we're all entrepreneurs. We're all creating our own lives. And entrepreneurship is all about creating. And so whether you're a full-time employee, whether you have a couple of side hustles, we're already entrepreneurs. So it's important to figure out what it means to you and whether or not you want to actually explore what it could mean and what it could help you create in your life.

44:40And so this is the great thing about the time that we live in. You look back 50 years, so much of what we're talking about just wouldn't be possible. The tools didn't exist. The opportunities didn't exist because of the internet, because of technology, because of just the ability to work from anywhere. where it's unlocked so many incredible opportunities for people to test out what being an entrepreneur can be. And I'm constantly getting emails from people in their early 20s who are making a million dollars a year selling some ridiculous e-commerce product. And there's always selection bias. There's always someone who's been successful at it.

45:12And yes, entrepreneurship is hard. Yes, it can be lonely. Yes, it can be risky. I just want everyone to think about what it could mean for them and at least to understand what the possibilities are. Because you can learn about all the possibilities, how to launch a product, a service, a productized service, how to launch an HVAC company, how to launch anything that you want, and then decide, you know, I don't want to do that. But at least you're making an informed decision on your life from a point of knowledge and not a point of sort of fear. Because we're all afraid anyway. Like I'm still afraid when I launch new businesses and buy new things.

45:49Like I still worry about my businesses. Like it's still, it's never just like always easy. Right. But I think it's important for people. And this is one of the things, you know, right. There's so little in life that we can control. We're all sort of like living within this illusion of control. Like we think we have all of our lives locked down, but anything can really happen. And so of the things that you can control in your life, your relationship with money, what it means to you, how you spend it, how you save it. And then there's this other piece, which is how you make it. And for me, it's just like I could never, never live with just my income being reliant on someone else.

46:25Someone else who has different priorities than me. Ultimately, any business is about generating profit. And yes, your employer, they care about you. They want you to be successful. They give you all these perks. But at the end of the day, they're making money off of you. And so at the end of the day, it's going to be about making money. We see this with all the layoffs today. And so it's really, really important to figure out how to make money on your own terms and all the different ways that you can do that. And not just saying that, right? Because we've all watched the YouTube videos and there's tons of business books out there that are just crap.

46:58And it's just full of fluff. And for me, I'm just like such a detail-oriented thinker where it's like I want to lay out a system. At least people can make the choice for themselves around whether I should be an entrepreneur or not. So it all takes experimenting. It all takes testing it out and also a little bit of motivation and a little bit of spark, right? It's like you need to have that sort of like, I want something better for my family. I don't want to be stuck in a job that I hate. I don't want to be reliant on just one type of income. I don't want to just be reliant on my company that at the end of the day is just making money off of my time.

47:34And so to me, it's a very empowering narrative, right? And then it's not about just saying the thing. It's just actually here are the steps for how you can do these things. Here are the tactics, right? Because everyone's going to say, oh, you should be an entrepreneur, pursue financial independence and make money on your own terms. And all these words and phrases just become kind of empty and hollow, right? Because they're shared so much. They're used to sell very, very pricey products and things. And so for me, at the core of my mission and my being is how do I take these concepts that like even financial freedom, my first book, you think of just some scammy infomercial.

48:12How do I take these things and re-inject meaning back into them and help people at least make the decision for themselves on how they're going to pursue these things? And so for me, I wouldn't be financially independent without entrepreneurship. it's completely transformed my life and I just feel some deep desire to share how to do that with others in a way that is more expansive and I think everyone should try being an entrepreneur they should try it there are so many of these initial hurdles how do I sell something to somebody right and how do I get used to that and how do I get over this sort of uncomfort right and so there's just a couple of these hurdles where it's like how do I find an idea how do I figure out whether that's a good idea?

48:56How do I start testing it? How do I see how it makes me feel? And how do I ease into this thing? And then just get more confidence as I do it, right? Because it's like anything, there's so much risk in life when you don't know how things work. But when you know how they work, you can manage that risk, right? It's like things become more predictable when you know how things function, right? It's like when you know nothing about money or investing, you just get afraid and you don't open your student loan payments and you're just freaked out about it. And the same thing with entrepreneurship, you say, gosh, I can't imagine doing that.

49:26And oftentimes it's just because you don't have enough information and you don't know what you should create and do. And so a lot of the book, a lot of my work is how do you figure that out and start testing that. So I think everyone in 10 years, 70 % of people are going to be entrepreneurs, whether they like it or not. And so can you get ahead of that curve and start getting this information? Because the worst thing, and I see this all the time, Someone gets laid off from their job. They've never been an entrepreneur and they're forced to learn all this from scratch. So at least start learning this and figuring it out.

49:56And maybe it'll even make you a better employee, right? Because you'll understand what your boss is thinking or what the owner of your company is thinking. You're like, oh, this is what my company is trying to do. We're trying to build to sell. Okay, I now know how that works. And so here is how I'm going to add more value to my company because I know how all of this fits together. Let's talk about some of the types of businesses that a person can start. Now, you mentioned earlier there's products, there's services, and there's productized services. Let's go through all three, starting with product.

50:24Yeah, so product is just something you sell, right? It's a bracelet you made. It's a baseball cap. It's a ultralight camping tent. It's an apple pie, right? It's something that you create that someone gives you money for. So physical products versus digital products. Digital products are obviously great, but it's a really competitive space. You can build something once, a course, an Etsy printable. You can put it on these large platforms, build an audience and make money repeatedly, right? So digital products are great, but very, very competitive. Physical products with tariffs, all the stuff going on now, getting very, very expensive to create physical products.

51:01But I still think there's a great opportunity there. And I talk about that. So if you're really into baking apple pies, how do you build a business around it, right? It's like a thing that you create that you only have to create once. Maybe you have to keep getting better at it. But I talk about this guy, Dan the Baker in Columbus, Ohio, by far the most successful baker within Columbus. Sourdough bread goes between$11 and$17, sells out by noon every day that it's opened. Viral sensation, incredible, loves bread, bakes the best bread, has great people who does it. Never seen him. Actually, I've seen him in the store once.

51:35I think he's always out surfing Costa Rica based on his Instagram account. You can build incredible businesses around very, very simple products if you do them at a high quality level. So I talk about the difference between physical product and digital product services. This is whenever you're trading your time for money. This is your consultant, you're a marketing expert, you're a podcast editor, you're trading your time doing something. Service businesses are great because they often require no money to start. You just have a skill and then you're selling that skill. And so this is one of those nice things.

52:09Anyone can start walking dogs. Anyone can start driving for Uber or Lyft. We all know the sort of limits of those sort of transactional, training your time businesses. A lot of people start as a consultant. Hey, I'm an editor and a freelance writer. I'm going to offer my services. A lot of people just get stuck there. I talk a lot about how service-based businesses, especially consulting, they're great places to start, but they're not great businesses because they're very hard to sell because they're often just reliant on you and your time. You're always chasing clients. It's very difficult to build those types of businesses.

52:43So in the book, I'm talking a lot about here's why this is great and here's why this is really challenging. and I go deep into this multiple list of the different types of products you can launch. So you can just start envisioning and thinking through, okay, I actually never knew that I could be a home stager for a real estate company. I never knew that people got paid to do that and you could build a business just getting paid by a realtor to come in and stage a home, right? Or these things that you might not have thought about. But service-based businesses are great when they can be productized service businesses.

53:16And we talked a little bit about this before the show. This is really the holy grail of entrepreneurship is when you can create a productized service, which is a service that you've packaged that has defined deliverables that you can then pay someone to deliver that product. And so in order to do that, you have to have done a service for a little while, found your market, and then you build basically a product around it. So when I had a marketing agency, we did Google audits, Google campaign audits for universities. And that was something and then management. So that's something a product that a university could come by for between 20 and$250 ,000.

53:54And that was something that I built. And then I had a team that I trained how to do it. And every single time we sold it the same way, the proposal looked the same, and it was tweaked a little bit. And because we were doing the same thing over and over, the team got better, the results got better, it's more predictable. And so that's really the holy grail of service businesses, is you've created a product that's a service that's really a product. The productized service seems like when a person often might make that transition between a solopreneur to an agency model. 100%. Yeah, absolutely. So at the end of the day, we know that being an entrepreneur is the way you're going to make the most amount of money and get more of your time back is you've got to create something and then hire someone else to sell it and deliver it.

54:39And so whether you have a product or a service or a productized service, You as the entrepreneur, you need to create the thing. You need to be Dan the baker and create the sourdough recipe. And you're going to have to hustle at the farmer's market for maybe a year or two before you get enough money to open your first shop or your first commercial baking location. And you're going to have to do it all at first. And you're going to have to trade your time for money. But as you make more money and in order to scale and grow, then you start hiring other people, right? So you're not baking the bread.

55:09You're not the one at the farmer's market selling the bread. You're the one behind the scenes creating the things, but then slowly you've built an infrastructure where other people are doing all of the work. And instead of selling your own time, you're selling other people's time. And that's really the great thing about entrepreneurship. I can tell you, go into any of your favorite restaurants, and I guarantee you the owner is probably not the one standing behind the counter or cooking the food, right? It's someone somewhere. And what they've done is they've created a business and created a structure where they've hired other people to do all of the work.

55:44And this is the beautiful thing, because as you grow, you have more resources, you have more opportunities to hire other people, you've built the systems, and you have something that lives outside of you that you can then reap the rewards from. because that's the thing about entrepreneurship. So many entrepreneurs are just overstressed because they try to do everything and they've always tried to do everything. But really these key points are, it takes a lot of time to edit a podcast and post on social media and come up with interview questions and find guests. And if you can outsource that or have an assistant, here are the four people that you need to hire.

56:19Executive assistant, number one, they should do everything that you do and learn how to do everything that you do. Number two, a great bookkeeper, someone, you don't need an accountant even, And just someone who knows your numbers and can give you good data, a good lawyer, right? And there's just a few people that you should hire any solopreneur that just is going to free up immense amounts of your time. You can go out and buy expertise. You don't have to learn everything yourself. And so I know I sound like an evangelist a bit, but I'm just so into this because it's so, it just changed my life.

56:49And I've just now seen thousands of other people who've launched businesses and just, it's just an incredible time to be alive. And I want anyone who's like, hey, I can try this or I want to try this just to have enough information and some motivation to try it out. Well, in terms of hiring the EA, the executive assistant, better in person or online, remote? So I'll tell you about my executive assistant. And I've had a few over the years. But the one that I have now and the one that's been the best is a woman named Emily. And she's in her 60s. And she retired after a long career in marketing. and then she, you know, I got introduced to her.

57:28We started working together. This is someone who's based in the US. She lives in North Carolina. We don't actually meet in person. We did work in person for a number of years in Chicago, but now she lives in North Carolina and I live in New York and Ohio. But she has like over the past seven years, I've been able to teach her how to answer all of my emails, manage all of our systems, work with our vendors, work with the team. I basically cloned myself through her. She gets to do it on her own time. But the thing is we built like complimentary schedules where she works about 20, 25 hours a week.

58:02So it's not all the time. A vast majority of her work, she's an early riser, gets up at 5am. She can knock out four hours of email and tasks before I even log in. And so when I log into my email, we're using AI, we're using her. There's one folder and it just says grant. And that's all I pay attention to. And those are things that have gone through multiple levels of review. And these are the things that I really, really need to pay attention to. And she's filtered those for me. And so this whole virtual EA hire from the Philippines thing, I know it works for some people, but for me, I'd rather pay higher hourly wage for higher quality time.

58:40And then someone who just knows me and she cares. She's like my mom in some ways. She also looks out for me in other ways, like, hey, you should really pay attention to this or someone emailed you this. And she also writes back to reader emails. So people like my book, hey, Grant, love this. It's like, hey, this is Emily Grant's assistant. I'll make sure he sees this. Thank you so much for your support. This means so much to us. And then sometimes she gets in correspondence with my readers and all the good emails that she thinks I should see. She puts in this sort of love folder. So whenever I'm having a bad day, I can go in there.

59:12And it's like, Grant, I loved your book, or this changed my life. And that makes me really happy. So she wants me to be happy. she's looking out for me. So I tend to think that like finding someone who actually not a young person, someone who's had a career and maybe they want to go part time or they're closer to retirement. So they have all this experience and they just want to do something on the side. It could be a family friend. It could be, you know, there's just amazing people out there. For me, that just always felt more comfortable.

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1:01:30we talked earlier about the three types of businesses product service and product as service in terms of who you're serving there are a few classifications of those as well there's b2b of course there's b2c can you talk about how a person should think through whom they want to serve? It's a great question. So first, before answering that, I want to say that you're always going to make more money selling something to someone who has money without a doubt. And so this is one of the things, if you go out and build a company to sell something to college students who are broke, you're going to have to get way more customers and probably spend a lot more money to launch your company and market your company than creating something for someone who has a ton of money.

1:02:15And I talk about real versus perceived value. And the big thing for me was when I started building websites, the first client I got was a small lawyer who bought a website for me for$500, a small lawyer in Chicago. He wasn't that successful. He just needed a new website. So it was kind of bottom of the barrel. I actually found him on Craigslist, believe it or not, my first website client. But the thing about him is he introduced me to other lawyers in Chicago who needed websites. There's a local association I went and spoke at. got some more clients. And then I sold a$50 ,000 website six months later.

1:02:49Didn't even take me much more time than the$500 website. The thing is it was for a hundred person firm. And this was this big light bulb moment for me. It's like, whoa, I can sell the same thing to two different people and make drastically more money just because this other company has more money. There's more at stake. The better the website is for the hundred person law firm, the more money they're going to make. And so this is one of those key pieces where ideally you're able to sell something to someone who has money or doesn't worry about money as much. And I see this even at the bookstore.

1:03:22So at the bookstore, there's people who come in from my community. There's the woman who comes in, picks five cookbooks, all between$35 and$45, doesn't think twice, throws a$30 tote on top of it,$250 revenue transaction for me, doesn't think twice about that. My margin's about 50%. So I've made$125 off a woman who's in the store for five minutes, getting some cookbooks, some gifts. It's clear that she has money. Someone else comes in, 25-year-old, spends an hour in the store hunting through all the bargain paperbacks, buys a$3 book that I ended up buying for$1. So I made$2 on it. So the margin's actually better, right, on that$3 book, but I made a lot less money.

1:04:08And those are two different consumers. the person who has money and the person who doesn't have money. And so you're always going to make more money selling to the person who has more money. And so that's a really, really important piece. I think it's also important to understand where your customer, your potential customer is in their life and how can you connect with them. And so we're all exposed to so many messages, so much information. It's very, very difficult to get someone to pay attention. This is why it's very difficult to launch digital products because you can't just really run an ad and build a successful product.

1:04:42You have to be living within the market. And so this is the thing I see a lot of entrepreneurs, Hey, I'm going to launch this. This looks like a cool opportunity, but you can't launch a rock climbing product. If you're not a rock climber or you don't know rock climbers, right? It's like, we see this in personal finance. How many finance companies have we seen come and go over the years thinking that they could just buy themselves into the market, right? And then as you're not going to get accepted, you're not going to know how the market works without being inside of it. And so this is one of the things about even my bookstore, the first thing that I did when I decided to open the bookstore before it was open, the first way I decided to market it is I convinced our local farmer's market to let me set up a table to buy books at the farmer's market.

1:05:26I'm not selling anything. We buy books here. I had a sign, put it out there. And that was that people could bring their books to the farmer's market, I'd buy them and then they could use that money to buy vegetables. I did this for four weeks straight and it was by far the best, most effective marketing I could do. The farmer's market charged me$10 a week. So for$40 and some of my time, about 20 hours, I stood there and people, oh, where's your bookstore? Oh, it's a block away. Oh, I'm opening. Oh, you're opening a bookstore? Oh, my mother just passed away and I have 2 ,000 books. Hey, I'm a professor.

1:05:59I'm getting ready to retire in two months, and I'd really love to find a place for all of my books. And so just with$40 and 20 hours of my time, basically having this table at the farmer's market, I got to know who the customers were. I got to connect with them. They got to learn who I was. And I couldn't have faked that. No amount of Instagram advertising, no amount of Facebook advertising could have replaced that hand-to-hand interaction. And then when I launched some of the early book reviews, hey, I met Grant, the bearded owner of the bookstore. He's a really nice guy and gave us good prices for our books, right?

1:06:30No one knows who I am, that I'm an author, that I've been successful. It's like most people have no idea who I am, right? They just know me as the bearded guy with the bookstore who's really kind of jolly. You know, I feel like I'm working on this sort of like Santa Claus, like the hipster Santa Claus look or something. But it's like, it was by far the most effective marketing and way to connect with my customers was being at the farmer's market, connecting, buying their books in that way. So you have to know your market and figure out how to get connected with them. Same thing, I'm working on a project in the rare book world right now.

1:07:00I haven't announced it, haven't shared anything about it, but I'm getting ready to go to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair. I went last year, I went to the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. I've been paying attention, I've been connecting with dealers, I've been listening, I've been seeing the tools that they use, how they're engaging with those tools, how they're selling books, how they're buying books. And so I'm building a product, I haven't shared anything about it yet. Within the rare book world, I'm at that point where now I'm doing that grassroots component of getting to know the market, being involved, buying books from these people.

1:07:31And so you can't, you can't, you can accelerate entrepreneurship, but you can't fake it. People can tell when you really care when you're really into it. And so I think that's an important piece as well within the book is like, yeah, you can go out and see how to make money and launch a product and maybe do it successfully. But at the end of the day, people can really tell when you care. And especially when you're first starting out, it's very hard to sell against big companies. And the only way that you can do it is through your story, right? So if someone's always been working with this HVAC company for 30 years, how do you convince them to work with your new upstart HVAC company?

1:08:07Hey, I'm Grant. I'm really passionate about HVAC. Here's why I'm launching this company. Here's where I see the opportunity in the market. Every HVAC company in Columbus is just selling subscription fees and the costs and prices have gotten higher. I built this company to be responsive. We respond in two hours or less. or fair, upfront, transparent pricing. We don't try to sell you on subscriptions. And I'm really passionate about serving you, blah, blah, blah, whatever. You know what I mean? You think about the about page on the website. But you have to connect in that way. And the best way to do that is to really know your market, really know your customer.

1:08:40Ideally, you're the target customer in some way. And so the problem with this is once you start looking at the world this way, anytime I hire anyone, like a tree removal company, I'm like, I'm going to launch a tree removal company. I could do this better. We'll be there 24 hours or less,$750 price point. So I start seeing these business opportunities everywhere. Right, right. And you look at the world a different way. Yeah, exactly. I have a little bit of a dream of having a dumpster company. Dumpster, it's a good business. Yeah, always. Yeah, exactly. It's a great business, actually. Thank you for spending this time with us.

1:09:12Where can people find you if they'd like to know more? Yeah, thanks for having me. So at GrantSabatier on Instagram, grantSabatier.com is my website. At Sabatier on X, Those are the best places to reach me. You can email me grant at grantsabate.com. It's my personal email. Emily will see it and she will filter it and I will hopefully see it and get to read it. And then, yeah, check out my books. That's the best way to engage with me. And that's my mission is to share what I learned with others. And so my first book, Financial Freedom, you can get in most libraries. You don't have to buy it. Just go to your local library.

1:09:46They'll have a copy or you can pick one up online. And then my new book, Inner Entrepreneur, A Proven Path to Profit and Peace, comes out today as we're recording this. Today is the release day. So thank you for having me. And I love everything that you do. It's nice to hang out in this context. We've hung out in less formal circumstances. So I appreciate you having me on and just love everything that you do and just love being on this journey with you. And thanks for having me.

1:10:15Thank you, Grant. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, many entrepreneurs invest too much money too early. Often with new projects, there's this eagerness to get started. And so a lot of entrepreneurs might just throw money at their business before they really understand how it works. Grant said that he spent years researching bookstores, talking to dealers and setting up at farmer's markets before he actually opened his brick and mortar shop. And so he had this low-cost testing phase that saved him from making expensive mistakes because he got to – he still, as every entrepreneur does, he still made mistakes, but he did so with – to paraphrase Dave Ramsey – he did so with fewer zeros afterwards.

1:11:02He got to make inexpensive mistakes. And in the process of doing so, he got to understand the business better and his customers better. I think a lot of people put too much money into entrepreneurship. They launch a company too quickly. They invest a ton of money. They take too big of a risk early on without doing enough experimenting up front. And I think you see that all the time with retail. You know, there's a donut shop that opened just down the street and I see what this guy is doing. And I'm like, gosh, that's a really expensive lease. There's already a couple of donut shops within this neighborhood.

1:11:34I don't think that's a great business. Don't overinvest in your company straight out of the gate. Instead, take some time to learn. The first year or two, your primary objective is learning in a low-stakes, survivable manner. So that's the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, your story is your competitive advantage. Because in a world where AI can copy pretty much anything, your personal story is the one thing that competitors can't replicate. Customers don't just buy products. They buy into the person behind the business and they buy into the values, the spirit, the personality, the character that that person represents.

1:12:18I also talked about how your real competitive advantage, the only competitive advantage that you actually have today is your story. Because AI, everyone can copy what you're doing quickly. So how do you craft your story and share your story in a way that actually connects with others, connects with customers? How do you get them to believe in your story? How do you offer a promise and then deliver on that promise? So bring yourself, your personality, your ideas, your principles, bring all of that into your business because it will show. That's the second key takeaway. And finally, key takeaway number three.

1:12:57You are already an entrepreneur. whether you know it yet or not. Grant believes that everyone will become an entrepreneur in some manner within the next decade. And, you know, Joe Saul Sihai has a term, he talks about intrapreneurs, where maybe you work full-time as a W-2 employee at a company, but you still are entrepreneurial in spirit and you're entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial about your own career and your own trajectory. If you look at entrepreneurship broadly, not just as a career category, but as a concept that anyone in any role could embody. So sort of if you look at entrepreneurship as a spirit that you could embody, well, there's a lot of value there because even if you stay in your current job or even if you stay a W-2 full-time employee throughout your career, understanding how businesses work and having an entrepreneurial spirit at heart will make you a much more valuable employee because you'll be able to think like an owner and you'll be able to empathize with the owners.

1:14:05I think that everyone is already an entrepreneur. I don't think that entrepreneurs are born. I don't even think they're made. I think we're all entrepreneurs. We're all creating our own lives. And entrepreneurship is all about creating. And so whether you're a full-time employee, whether you have a couple of side hustles, we're already entrepreneurs. So it's important to figure out what it means to you and whether or not you want to actually explore what it could mean and what it could help you create in your life. This is the great thing about the time that we live in. You look back 50 years, so much of what we're talking about just wouldn't be possible.

1:14:39Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Grant Sabatier. Thank you so much for joining us through this conversation. I hope that you learned from it. I hope it sparked ideas. I hope it inspired you. And I hope that some positive change, whether big or small, comes from it. If you want to talk about this episode with like-minded people, go to affordanything.com slash community. It's completely free. It's a space where you can chat with other members of the Afforder community about anything you're interested in, whether it's entrepreneurship, debt payoff, retirement, financial independence, anything you want to talk about, there's a community for you.

1:15:26Totally free. Affordanything.com slash community to sign up. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with your friends, family, with the people who run the local bookstore. Share this with the people in your life. Also, please open up your favorite podcast playing app and leave us a review. Let us know what you think about the show. I read every single one and they're enormously valuable. You can also sign up for our newsletter, affordanything.com slash newsletter, completely free, and we share valuable insights that you won't find anywhere else. Thank you so much for being an Afforder.

1:15:58This is the Afford Anything Podcast. I'm Paula Pant, and I'll meet you in the next episode.