MBA2411 Q&A Wednesday: How do I go from one client to replacing my job while working full-time?

0:08Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, business insights you can count on with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. And today's Q &A Wednesday, where we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q &A Wednesday. Today's question is from Dan. And Dan asks, how do I go from one client as I'm side hustling in my business to going full time as an entrepreneur in my business while working in a full time job?

0:46Do I just take the plunge and go all in on my business? This is a question I get asked a lot because pretty much every entrepreneur that starts a business while they're in a full-time job will experience this challenge. Where they're working on their side hustle, they're working on their business, but they're not really sure how to transition out of their job by making enough to replace their income while working full-time. It's a little bit of a catch-22 because they're spending a lot of time working full-time in their career, in their job. So, therefore, scaling their business on the side is challenging.

1:22I'm going to get into detail in answering this question and helping Dan out. And I'm going to offer some creative ways, some creative ideas for you to think about. I'm going to challenge you to change the way you think about how you will transition from full-time job to full-time entrepreneurship. I'm going to share with you what worked for me. I was on a full-time job as a teacher for over a decade before I transitioned to full-time entrepreneurship back in 2012. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Believe it or not, this is the hardest part of becoming an entrepreneur, is that leap from part-time, side hustle, working on the side with your business, to making it your full-time thing, making it your full focus, which means leaving your job.

2:07It feels incredibly risky because it is. And that's why Dan asked the question, should I just take the plunge and just work on my business and hope for the best? Well, we'll definitely get into that if that's a good idea in a moment. But let me first give full context to Dan's situation. He's currently in a service-based business. He's taking on one client. He's going to need five to seven clients in order for him to go full-time in his business and replace his income that he has right now in his full-time job. Right now, he's already pretty much at capacity taken on this client with his full-time job.

2:39He probably can squeeze in a second client, but that's probably the maximum. So what does he do? How does he make more hours in the day? How does he actually bridge this gap so that he can safely land on his feet as he's moving into his business full-time? The first thing I want to say is the biggest challenge you're having here is not the number of hours. It's not how much money you're making. It's not how much free time you have between your job and your business. It's none of that. Your biggest challenge is actually changing your mindset. You're actually still thinking like an employee. You're still thinking like somebody in a job where you're exchanging time for money, where you feel like, you know, I have X amount of hours and I can make this much money in these hours.

3:26That's not how business works. That's not how entrepreneurship works. This is the beauty of entrepreneurship. The beauty of entrepreneurship is you can scale. You can move beyond the clock. You're not exchanging time for money. You're exchanging value for money. And to prove this point, let's just look at an extreme example. Somebody like Elon Musk. Forget about trying to juggle a job and a business. This guy's juggling multiple million and billion dollar businesses. SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, The Boring Company. He's got a bunch of other small projects as well. he does. Plus, he's on interviews.

4:03He's doing the news. He's on podcasts. He just recently bought this year Twitter, right, which became X. So if there's only a certain amount of time for everybody in the day, how is this guy doing this? More importantly, how can we do the same? How can we be able to first make that transition to full-time entrepreneurship while we're in a job, while all our time is being taken by the job? Now, the reason why we're struggling or anybody's struggling from full-time job to full-time entrepreneurship is because in the job, you have no leverage. Leverage is a key word in entrepreneurship. And there's different forms of leverage.

4:42There's leverage of capital. There's leverage of labor. There's leverage of code and media. But right now, all we're doing is leveraging our own time. But in entrepreneurship, you have to use different forms of leverage. You can't just use your time as leverage. Let's go through some of these. First of all, let's talk about leverage of capital, which is money, right? Some people use their money to make more money, meaning they invest in other companies. They invest in the stock market. They literally just have their money sitting in a savings account, making interest. This is using money to make money.

5:15And this is a very common way to leverage and get ahead and make more money with money, right? This is not something new. It's been around for hundreds of years. Another old and tried and true form of leverage is leverage of labor, which means human labor, humans doing the work for you. Did one person with their two bare hands build the pyramids? Of course not. It was built by a lot of people, a lot of workers. Forget the pyramids. Look at your local city. Look at the skyscrapers in the skyline, right? Who built these skyscrapers? Just some guy with an idea and a blueprint? No. Lots and lots of people.

5:54This is called leverage of labor. And the same thing goes with any business. You're going to need to leverage labor in some way, meaning you're not doing the work. You're leveraging other people to do the work for you. And then lastly, of course, leverage of code and media. This is producing something once and allowing it to work for you. Code is like a website, right? When you're sleeping, somebody can buy your product on your website. You don't have to do anything. You've built the code or you built the website once and it's working for you 24-7. Same thing with media. You create a YouTube video, you create a podcast like this one, you put it out there and it serves your business as content marketing over and over and over.

6:32That way, you're not just using your words anytime you say it live, like in person, and that's it. It's gone. It's vanished. No, you record it and you distribute it through podcasts or YouTube or the written word with books or blog posts. These are powerful forms of leverage. And we got to start thinking like this as entrepreneurs, especially when you're getting started. Why? Because you only have a limited amount of time. So you've got to leverage your time with these forms of leverage. So in Dan's example, there's several ways he can leverage capital, labor, as well as code or media to be able to grow his side hustle into his full-time thing.

7:11So he says he can take on one, maybe two clients with his free time between his full-time jobs. So this is him using no leverage. But what if he raised his prices? What if he offered those one or two clients more products or services, where he made more average income per customer? This is leverage of capital, right? Right now, he's thinking, I can fulfill the work I need in my service for one client, maybe two. But what if somebody else did it for him? Leverage of labor, right? Now, this is going to take some investment of time and effort and focus to train this person to do what they do. And by the way, a lot of us, we think, oh, no one's going to do as good as me.

7:49Probably not, but they're going to do good enough for you to be able to outsource it. And that person can do it day in and day out full time while you don't have to. So train them up, hire somebody. Let's say one person can take on five or six clients a month, but then you've got to pay that person, right? But as long as you're making a margin to say you pay 50 % of what you're charging, you're still coming up up top. And then once you train one person, you could train another person and start leveraging that person. In fact, the person that you first hire can train the second person because you might've documented everything and they can train them up.

8:23And therefore you now can scale the business easily. You just rinse and repeat, right? You can just hire the next person, the next person, they take on more clients. And your job as a leader is to bring in business. And how do you do that? Well, leverage of media, leverage of code. Maybe you want to create some sort of lead magnet on your website. Maybe you want to create some content so that you can attract your clients. And this is the fastest way to get out of the rat race, to get out of your job and into your full-time entrepreneurial career. It's also low risk because you're only going to spend money unless you're going to make money.

8:59And you're not quitting your job and just taking this leap, hoping that you can just do all the work yourself and ramp up. So now you can see why I'm saying you've got to change your mindset and you've got to start thinking in forms of leverage. So my advice to Dan is instead of trying to get that second client, keep your one client, see if you can offer them more services, products, maybe even increase their pricing if possible, or moving up to a higher tier. So you're maximizing as much as possible with this one client. And then any additional time you need to find somebody to do it for you because you don't have the hours.

9:36Now they could be a freelancer. It'd have to be a full-time employee or anything like that. And you can pay per gig, meaning for every client they fulfill, they get a flat fee. It doesn't have to be an hourly rate. This incentivizes them to be able to fulfill more and more clients. This also incentivizes you to sell more to the client or sell for more money because the labor that you're hiring is a fixed fee and then anything you sell to the client is gravy for you, anything more. This all boils down to the point that in the beginning, when we're building our business, we feel like we're doing all the work, we're spinning our wheels, we're hustling, and that's great, hard work is important, but you gotta start transitioning into the entrepreneurial mindset, which is you're not really supposed to be doing the work yourself.

10:21You're supposed to find ways to get that work done. Your job is to manage, to lead, to bring in customers. And even that will eventually be fulfilled by somebody else. Entrepreneurs are really the conductors of an orchestra. They are leading a bunch of specialists, a bunch of people that are fulfilling certain duties to make beautiful music, right? But they don't actually pick up an instrument. They don't actually play the piano or play the triangle or the trombone. They find great people that know their stuff and are specialists in their instrument, and they bring them together to create great music.

10:58And that's what you're going to do as an entrepreneur with your business. Now, my number one piece of advice to Dan and to other entrepreneurs who are in his position is to use this opportunity to document all your processes. Why? Because your business's value is really the systems that you build. So when you hire somebody, document how you're hiring them. That way, the next time you hire, you could just follow the documentation or you can find somebody to do the hiring for you. They could just follow your documentation. When you're training this person to do the work, to fulfill your customer's needs, this needs to be documented.

11:32And this doesn't be fancy. It could just be a Google Doc, right? Where it's just step-by-step instructions. And we did this for every aspect of our business, our software business, Webinar Ninja, this podcast of the$100 MBA. Systems are gold because they're just playbooks. You just basically document what you're supposed to do. Therefore, anybody can come in, plug and play, follow the documentation, and do the job. Thanks so much for listening to The$100 MBA Show. And thank you, Dan, for emailing me with your question. We always got your back. So if you have a question you want to ask, just like Dan just did, go ahead and email me at omar at 100mba.net.

12:07I'll make sure to answer right here on Q &A Wednesday. If you're listening right now, whether on your phone, in your car, on your computer, whatever it might be, make sure you hit subscribe, hit follow right now. Go ahead and do it. It's usually like a checkmark you got to click. Click that button so you get our next episodes automatically, but also you get access to over 2 ,400 episodes in our back catalog. It's the only way to get access to all our lessons from the past. So go ahead and do that right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There will be a moment where you'll have to take a leap, a leap of faith, where maybe you're not making exactly as much as you're making in your job, but you're almost there and you just need more time to work on the business, to scale it, to grow it.

12:51And that's OK. It's just so you can bridge the gap between how much your business is making for you versus how much your employer is paying you in your job. This makes things a little bit more comfortable. So you might want to cut out maybe your holiday this year just for this year to bridge that gap or maybe downsizing your car. I know that seems a little bit extreme for some people, but that's temporary. You can always get a better car later on when your business is booming. I did this when I transitioned into full-time entrepreneurship, and it was great because I had less finances to worry about.

13:24I went to another extreme altogether where I downsized to a studio apartment and sold my car. had pretty much nothing anymore and spent very little on myself because I was chasing a dream, something I really wanted, which is to be a full-time entrepreneur. So it was worth for me to not have those things temporarily. I didn't miss them actually. And I was a whole lot happier because I was doing what I loved full-time. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Friday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

14:01Thank you.