20 Years Of Business Knowledge In 20 Minutes (From A Multi-Millionaire)

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0:37As a small business owner, you wear many hats. You're the owner, you're the marketer, you're the seller, you're the hirer. I remember in the early days, I was doing pretty much everything. I was writing, I was bookkeeping, I was selling, I was marketing, I was doing a lot. But lucky for you, you have LinkedIn. They have the tools to help you boost your visibility, find prospective customers, and find the best team for your small business, all in one place. So while LinkedIn can hang up all of your hats, it makes it easier to wear them all. Learn more at linkedin.com slash MBA show. After side hustling for years, I quit my job and went all in with my business at 32 with absolutely nothing.

1:19No savings, no safety net, no rich parents, just a decision that the life I was living wasn't the life I wanted to live. I believed I was capable of more. I just had no proof yet. 14 years later, I built multiple businesses. I ran two of them simultaneously for a decade. I lost money. I made money. I launched things that flopped, things that did wildly successful, and I eventually sold one of my companies in an exit that changed my life. Today, I want to give you a gift. I want to give you what I wish somebody gave me at the start of my journey. I want to give you what actually matters, what you really need to know to succeed in business.

1:58All in just 20 minutes. So here it is. 20 years of experience condensed into 20 minutes. Let's go.

2:10Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. I got a quick favor to ask. If this show has helped you in any way, leave me a quick review. You could do so wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps me and my team reach even more people who need the same no-fluff practical business advice that you're getting from the show. It only takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey.

2:47Lesson number one, go where the money already is. This is the most important thing I have learned in my 20 years of doing business, both side hustling and full-time for over 14 years. And almost nobody talks about it. Listen, if you want to build a business that grows consistently without you fighting for survival, and I've been there, go where people are already spending money. I need you to drill this in your head because this is going to make your life a whole lot easier. Find an existing problem that people are already paying to solve. They're already paying money to solve this, but you're going to solve it better.

3:25That's it. That's the whole formula. That's about 50 % of all success in business. The problem is that people keep avoiding this truth and they try to come up with unique solutions to problems that don't exist. Listen, Netflix didn't invent movie rental. Blockbuster existed before them. They just delivered it differently, first by mail, and then they started with streaming. Nike wasn't the first sports brand or sports shoe company. They just implemented the concept better than the competition. Facebook, not the first social network. There was MySpace. There was Friendster, right? They all existed before Facebook.

4:00The difference is, you guessed it, Facebook's implementation was just superior to the other ones. None of the most successful businesses in the world invented something from scratch. What they did, though, is they found a market that already exists. They identified how the current solution is falling short for the customers, and they built something better. Very simple. I'm going to tell you right now that a lot of people out there on the internet, on the interwebs, are going to overcomplicate business to make you feel that you need their help, you need to buy their course, you need to buy their coaching, whatever it might be.

4:34No. Business is actually very, very simple. It just takes the discipline to trust that it's that simple. You don't need to be a revolutionary entrepreneur. The multimillionaires, the billionaires that I've met, they're not brilliant people, right? They're not exceptionally smart or savvy. They just know how to follow the rules of business. You need a real problem, a market that is already spending money on it, and deliver a better answer. That's it. Don't invest in a market. Don't invent a market. Find one. Then serve it better than anyone else. That's the lesson of lesson number one. And here's a little hint to make this a little bit clear.

5:12Think about the things you experience every day that you complain about. You're complaining because they're not being done efficiently. They're not being done properly. They can be done better. That's why you're complaining. And that complaint should result in a better solution. And there you go. Got a great business on your hands. Lesson number two, product beats marketing every day of the week, twice on Sunday as well. When I was starting out, I thought that marketing was everything. I thought that if I had a good product and I just marketed it really well, then I'd be wildly successful. I used to think like 50, 60, 70 % of business is marketing.

5:49Building something decent and then marketing it brilliantly and there you go, you win, right? I was dead wrong and I learned this the hard way. I don't want you to learn this the hard way. I want you to learn this the easy way by just listening to me and trusting me. Now, don't get me wrong. Marketing matters enormously. I don't diminish it at all. And I'm a big marketer. But here's what I know for sure. This is a fact. A superior product that's marketed well will dominate the market, will dominate and crush all the competition. A mediocre product that's marketed well will do okay, but until a better product shows up.

6:24We're kind of like living on borrowed time. It's kind of scary. And when a better product shows up, all your marketing won't save you. Okay, because people always choose a better product, especially when all things are equal. I find that if you want to really amplify your marketing and actually market on a budget without actually spending too much, the best product is the best way to do that. Word of mouth is what built some of my best companies like the$100 MBA, this podcast, as well as my software company, Webinar Ninja. because see lesson one, the product solved the problem better than the competition.

7:00So here's a lesson for lesson number two. Marketing gets people through the door. It gives you a trial. It gives you an audition. The product is what makes them stay. It's what makes them tell their friends about you. So you got to make sure your product is brilliant. Otherwise, you're actually going to be shooting yourself in the foot. You're going to be marketing and then they experience your product. You're like, well, this is okay. And hopefully they leave without giving you a bad review. So you have to remember, your product is what it's all about. Invest a lot of energy, a lot of talent, resources into creating the best product possible.

7:35When I say product, I mean anything you produce, your content, your videos, anything that you do in your business that your customers consume needs to be the best. Lesson number three, the wrong hire will cost you everything. Literally, it will cost you your entire business. I once made a hiring decision that cost my business half a million dollars. Half a million. That's not from malice or corruption or embezzlement. It was nothing like that. It was my fault. It was from not taking enough time to hire the right person, right? I was just doing as many interviews as I could and just choosing from the best candidate out of those interviews.

8:16That's not good enough for you just to give the keys to your business to somebody who has the influence to take it down, to cost you business, to cost you money, to cost you customers, to cost your reputation. Sometimes irreversible damage is done. You have to remember also, when you're interviewing someone for a position, you're looking at the best version of them. You see none of their flaws. None of them, you can't see it yet. Now, I'm not saying this to scare you and for you never to hire anybody. No, you need to hire great talent so that you can scale your business. That's how you become a great business.

8:50And that's the differentiator between you and the competition is your team, is your talent capital. I'm telling you this because it's so important. You need to make sure that you find the best possible candidates for the positions you're hiring for because they can really take your business to a whole new level that you could never imagine and you can never do alone. As your business starts growing, recruitment becomes your number one skill set. You need to be able to recruit the best talent possible. The better you become at this, the better your business will become. And here's a little note.

9:20If you already have someone on your team who could fill a role that you are looking to hire, maybe like a promotion, the person that you're considering that's outside your company needs to be at least 30 % better than the person inside your company. Why? Because of what I mentioned before, you know every flaw of your internal candidate, the person that you already know. You know zero flaws of the person that's external. What we like to do when we make any hire is we either start with a contract, like a contract basis first, or we have a clause which allows us to have a short termination window in the first six months.

9:54This gives us a chance to have an extended interview, an extended audition for us to just see if they can actually work with our team under the conditions of our company. We like to give people a lot of autonomy, make decisions, to have ownership. Some people don't like that. Some people don't like working like that. And we got to be fair and give them a chance to say, hey, this is not a good fit for me. Vice versa as well. The lesson here is when it comes to hiring, slow down. You are seeing the best versions of everybody. Build a trial period every single time so that you can have an extended period of time.

10:30And listen, don't get discouraged if you go through a bunch of interviews and you just can't find a good candidate and you want to settle. No, don't settle. Keep trying. Put that job post back up. Keep on interviewing. and keep on giving them little projects or little trials to see how they do. We always do like a little project too, like a 48-hour project before we actually agree to hire them and go for that extended six-month trial period. Now, just keep doing that. Don't get discouraged. And even if you make a hire and they are on your team for a few months and you realize they're not a good fit, fire quickly.

11:02It's okay. Back to the drawing board. Hire again. Go through the whole process again. This is too critical for you to just settle. For small business, a high-speed fiber connection is only one piece of the puzzle. You need the Total Solutions Advantage from Comcast Business. It's a first-ever combination of the largest, fastest fiber-powered network, gig speeds with equipment and security included, plus a five-year price lock. Learn more, get started for$60 a month for 12 months when you add an advanced solution to a qualifying internet package. Limited time offer restrictions apply. New customers only requires 300 Mbps internet, security edge, and additional qualifying service.

11:42One year agreement, paperless billing, and auto pay with bank account required, taxes and fees extra. This episode of the$100 MBA show is brought to you by Booking.com. If you're looking to grow your vacation rental business, this is the place to be. Booking.com is one of the most downloaded travel apps in the world, and for good reason. Since 2010, they've helped over 1.8 billion vacation rental guests find places to stay. But here's the thing. Most vacation rental hosts don't even realize they can list their properties on Booking.com. And if you're not on the platform, your rental is basically invisible to millions of Booking.com travelers worldwide.

12:23After all, they can't book what they can't see, right? I book all my travel, personal and business, through Booking.com. And it's for good reason. I love their Genius Program. So because I'm loyal and I use Booking.com, I'm a genius level three. Yeah, I say it with pride because it gets me the best prices. I also love the fact that they give you all the details about all the hotels or the apartments that you're booking. So I know exactly what I'm getting before I check in. Does the place have a gym? Does it have a hairdryer? Does it have a fridge? What about a washing machine? I know because the listing is always accurate.

12:58And their app is easy to use. So when I'm dead tired after a long flight and I'm trying to check into my accommodation, it's super simple. Just pull up my booking and show it to the host. So if your vacation rental isn't listed on booking.com, it could be invisible to millions of travelers searching the platform. Don't miss out on consistent bookings and global reach. Head over to booking.com and start your listing today. Get seen, get booked on booking.com. lesson number four and this one is all about what success actually looks like listen when i started my definition of success was embarrassingly small okay we're talking tiny i wanted just to replace my teacher's income and i would be happy i wanted a business that paid the bills and let me do what i love and that was pretty much it i didn't know what was actually possible i didn't know what was out there in the world and what were my limits, right?

13:53I had a limited view, to be honest with you. And here's what I believe about success now. After 20 years of chasing success, okay, and reaching different versions of it and redefining it for myself, what I find is that success, real success in business is getting to the point where you don't need money anymore. Real success is really freedom from money because rich and wealthy is very abstract. But when you say to yourself, I don't need money anymore. I don't need to chase it anymore. I can do work because I want to do good work and not because I need to do the work to survive or to live a lifestyle or to maintain a lifestyle.

14:35In my opinion, that's actual financial freedom. I'm talking about having enough chips off the table that you can live comfortably for the rest of your life without the business that you're running. Because only when you reach that level, in my opinion, does something profound shift. And this is what happened to me. The fear goes away. You don't have any fear anymore. You don't have this kind of survival mentality, which is very hard to shake because this is the environment I grew up in. My parents were immigrants from Egypt to the U.S. And survival was our middle name. But when you get to this point, you stop creating from anxiety, which is a very bad place to create.

15:11You really can't be free. You start creating instead from genuine desire to put something great in the world, something that can actually impact people in the world. And that's when the work gets really good. And that's when things become fun and become expressive and become inspiring, not only for you, but the people around you. When I eventually sold Webinar Ninja, my software company, it was one of the first times in my life I felt that kind of freedom. And it changed how I showed up to everything I create now. I don't feel like I need to prove myself to anybody anymore. And at the same time, I feel like I am producing work for myself now as much as I'm producing it for other people.

15:49Yes, I am conscious of the fact that we have an audience and we serve the audience. But at the same time, I'm looking inwards to figure out what do I need to express that is of value to other people. This is why I'm a big believer, and this is the lesson for this lesson, by the way, of chasing financial freedom. You've got to get there because it's way better than financial comfort. Because financial comfort means you're still on the hamster wheel. The difference between the two is the difference between your life you manage and a life that you actually own. Now, I wanted to say really quickly before we move on, a lot of people think this is like such a grandiose number, like hundreds of millions of dollars.

16:28It doesn't even need to be that much money. If you actually do the math and think about if I had X amount of money and I invested that money into something like real estate or, you know, this is not investment advice, but, you know, you had money that was making money for you. You know, this is what people don't understand until they get to a point where they can actually do this, where they have the problem of, okay, I have this money now. What do I do with it? Well, what smart, wealthy people do that have financial freedom is that they let money work for them rather than they work for money.

16:57You have an asset now that you can leverage, which is capital, whether that's investing in other companies or in the stock market or whatever it might be. But the point here is that that money that you've earned is now working for you, and therefore you don't need to work for money anymore. Now you're working for yourself and for your own enjoyment, your own fulfillment. A lot of people don't really understand that that number is not that much. The average return on any kind of investment, whether it's a stock market or real estate in some markets or whatever it might be, can be between 8 % and 12%, 10%, let's say.

17:28If you made a million dollars in profit in your business, which is not that unachievable, it's actually very achievable, that is a million dollars in an investment that's going to give you a return annually$100 ,000. A lot of people can live off$100 ,000. You need more money? Put some more money in there. Reinvest the money or reinvest the profits. And before you know it, you're making plenty of money to live off with the money that you earned without you lifting a finger. This is exactly what I mean. And that leads me to lesson number five. Know your numbers every single week. Most entrepreneurs that I have worked with, spoken to, have no idea what's happening in their business financially.

18:08And it's very sad because in my opinion, business is money. They have a feeling of what's happening, but feelings are a lie, okay? They're not factual. And what I love about numbers is that they're black and white and they're facts. Revenue can often feel like success, but it isn't always success because you're not working for revenue. You're working for profit. You know, feeling busy feels like progress, but it isn't always progress. This is why I always say that you as an entrepreneur, the founder of the business, need to have a simple profit and loss sheet that's reviewed every single week.

18:43It takes five minutes, even less than five minutes, just to take a look at your profit and loss sheets, literally a Google sheet, where you see all your expenses, you see all your profits, and you see where you are heading. Where is the trend? What's happening right now? How much money is in the bank, but also how much money are you making and growing every single month? It will tell you the truth more than any other person in the world. It's staggering how people don't have a simple profit and loss sheet. If you don't have one, don't worry. You can download it. We have free templates that you can download.

19:16Just go to 100mba.net slash templates. In the template pack is a profit and loss sheet. Has all the formulas. You can go ahead and just download it for free. Choose one day a week and spend five minutes reviewing your P &L sheet. Make sure everything is on the up and up. I choose Monday. I call it Money Mondays. Every Monday, I open up a P &L sheet. I look at what came in. I look at what went out. I look at the margins, I update any kind of expenses that are not there, you know, through the accounting team. And if they're all green, fantastic. I keep on working, I move on, I don't look at the P &L sheet.

19:45If things are kind of in the yellow, or I'm not really happy with the way they're going, or the trend is going the wrong way, we don't, we have a meeting with people that need to hear about it, you know, or send a message. It's easier to correct things before it gets really bad when you look at it weekly. And here's something that people underestimate completely. Overhead walks on two legs. Cost creep. Every quarter, you need to look at your costs and cut ruthlessly. Anything you're not using or it's not directly tied to business growth, cut it. The lesson here is you can't manage what you don't measure.

20:17Five minutes with your P &L sheet every Monday will protect you from any slow bleeds or a sinking ship that you don't see coming. You're going to hit an iceberg one day and you're like, what happened? Oh, no. You didn't look at your P &L sheet. That's why. It was coming and you just didn't see it because you didn't look at your dashboard. You didn't look at your radar. And your P &L is your radar. Hey, look out. There's something bad here. Let's steer clear from it. Lesson number six, don't follow your passion. Fall in love with your work. I am not a big lover of this phrase, follow your passion.

20:48I think it's one of the most dangerous pieces of advice ever given to entrepreneurs. I think it's not a really good thing to tell people because passion alone doesn't really create a market. Okay? You could be passionate about something, but if no one wants to buy what you're passionate about, then you don't really have a thriving business. Makes total sense, right? Again, see lesson number one. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do what you love, but you have to keep in mind that you might love something, but it's just not a good business. You can have hobbies. For example, I love playing the piano.

21:22I like trying to play the piano. I'm not good at all. but if it took me five years to get good enough to build a product anyone would pay for you know with my piano skills whether it's a piano course or even a piece of music and even then is there a market for what i'm offering i need to find that out first the question you have to ask is not what am i passionate about okay the question is what are people already spending money on and how can I bring my skills and my genuine interest to serve that need? A simpler way to put it is the market doesn't care about your passion. They don't. They don't care how passionate you are.

22:00They care about what you can offer them, the value that you can add to their life. So what kind of value can you add to other people's life that you actually are interested in? I'm going to say something very blunt, and it's for your own good. And you need to understand that this is a truth with a capital T. Business is about the customer, always. It's not about you. It's not about how you feel about your product or your service or your team. Without customers, you have no business. You have no payroll. You have no mission. You have nothing, okay? Your customer is your biggest stakeholder. So build for them and not just for yourself.

22:35Now, with that said, I do believe finding joy in your work. If 80 % of your day is spent doing something that you genuinely enjoy and you show up with the energy and consistency, that's going to make a great business for you because things are going to get tough and you got to be happy to show up and ride the storm. So the lesson here is don't chase passion, find a market, bring your best skills to that market so that you can add value to it. If this episode is giving you something that you need right now, make sure you subscribe to the show because later in a very near future, we're releasing an episode that I can't wait to share with you.

23:11It's called, Are Successful People Just Lucky? How Much Does Luck Actually Influence Success? We dive really deeply into this topic. I can't wait to share with you. I'm putting the final touches on it right now. Hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode when it comes out. Lesson number seven, your circle is your ceiling. This one can be a little bit uncomfortable for people, but it's completely true. You will rise to the level of the people you spend your time with. Whatever limits they have, they become your limits. And by the way, this goes with anything, not just in business, life, health, physical activity.