MI Rewind: Owning Your Dream through Side Hustles and Entrepreneurship w/ Neil Patel

0:00You're listening to TIP. On today's show, we're resharing some of the older episodes that are my favorites for a few reasons. One, we get a bunch of new listeners each week, so new listeners may not have heard this episode before. Two, even if you've been listening for a while, you may have missed this episode when it originally came out. Or three, even if you've heard it before, it could be a great episode to learn from again. If you've already heard this episode or you're not interested in hearing it, feel free to just skip it. There's no harm in that. And you can pick up with our new episodes next week.

0:30That's all I had for you for this new intro. Everything going forward is going to be from the original episode. I hope you guys enjoy it. On today's show, I sit down with Neil Patel to talk about how he got his start as an entrepreneur, his thoughts on side hustles, and how everyone should own their dream. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and a successful entrepreneur. He is also recognized as one of the top 10 marketers by Forbes and one of President Obama's top 100 entrepreneurs under 30. It's easy to see just how successful Neil has become as a digital marketer and entrepreneur. He has over 750 ,000 subscribers on YouTube and nearly a million Facebook fans.

1:08Neil definitely knows his stuff and generously shares his information about the best digital marketing practices on his blogs and podcasts. I'm excited to share our conversation about his journey as an entrepreneur and the advice he would give to millennials who would like to become successful in their own ways. I hope you guys enjoy this episode. Let's get started.

1:31Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of Millennial Investing. With me today, I'm super excited to have Neil Patel. Welcome to the show, Neil. Thanks for having me. Let's start the show by talking a bit about you. You're a New York Times bestselling author. You were coined a top 100 entrepreneur by Obama and a top 100 marketer by Forbes. How'd you get here? Honestly, just grinding it out. It's funny because a lot of people are like, what's the secret? What's the trick? What's the silver bullet? There really isn't any of that. You do something long enough and you do it well enough, eventually things work out.

2:21I'm not the smartest person in the world by any means or any stretch, but I've learned one simple concept over the years. You're going to make mistakes as an entrepreneur no matter how smart you are, but the ones who succeed are the ones who continually learn from their mistakes and avoid making the same ones over and over again. So a few specific things I want to cover in the episode today are entrepreneurship, side hustles, and digital marketing. But let's first talk about entrepreneurship. What made you want to even become an entrepreneur in the first place? And why a digital marketing business specifically?

2:55When I was 15 and a half, I was picking up trash at a local theme park called Knott's Berry Farm. It's like a Disneyland, just not as well-known and not as big. Didn't like picking up trash, cleaning restrooms, sweeping up vomit. So one day I decided, you know what, let me look for a better job. I went to a site called monster.com. I know back in the day, a lot of people haven't heard of monster.com. They're old. But back in the day, they were a publicly traded company. They still may be. And I couldn't find any high paying jobs that paid well. I saw one trend, you need a college degree. I was 15 and a half.

3:27What college degree did I have? And I was still in high school. So through that whole process, I saw that I wasn't qualified for any of the jobs. Monster was a publicly traded company and I saw their financials. And I was like, holy crap, these guys make a lot of money. And I'm like, you know what? I can't find a job. Let me create a job board to help other people find a job. And if I make 1 % of what Monster makes, I'm going to be a rich kid. And that's how I started out. And what I quickly learned and realized from that whole process is you set up a job website, you go and you try to make money.

3:58It's not that simple. And when I first started my job website, I made no money. And the reason being is no one came to my website. I had to learn marketing. I paid some people to help me out. I got burned, ripped off. I lost all my money. I had no choice, but to learn it on my own. I got good at it, started getting a ton of people on my job website. And then all of a sudden, I still wasn't making money. But I was good at the aspect of getting traffic to websites. And I love that aspect. So I started to focus there. What ended up happening with the job board website or business that you had started?

4:31Shut down, focused purely on helping companies grow their traffic. And eventually, I started creating software companies to help with that. Yeah. So throughout this whole time, was there a moment where it hit you that you knew that you were going to be an entrepreneur and you were never going to go to a typical job? Or has it just kind of really evolved organically over time? It just evolved organically over time. I didn't know if I was going to go for a job or work somewhere or anything like that. It was just more so. I was just constantly grinding it out and whatever happened, happened. Keep in mind, when you're like 15 and a half, 16 years old, you have nothing to lose.

5:05If it works, great. great. You're doing better than when you were. If you fail, great. You're still living with your parents and nothing's really changed. So when you were 15, and even your next business after that, since your first business didn't really make any money and you didn't sell it, when you were just starting out, how did you start? It doesn't sound like you raised any venture capital or anything like that. It sounds like you just bootstrapped it. Is that the process or the route that you went? Well, as I mentioned, the job board didn't work out. My mom's a teacher and I grew up somewhat book smart.

5:34Not that book smart, but smart enough. I also decided to take college classes while I was in high school. I was going to community college when I was around 16. And my first class was Speech 101. I gave a speech on how Google works and how to rank your website and get more traffic. And someone in there said, hey, my company's looking for someone like you. We didn't know what it's called, but we want to hire someone like you. And my first gig was around$5 ,000 a month. That's how I started off. And then I did well, grew them. They were paying me$5 ,000 a month. I thought it was rolling in the dough.

6:03What I didn't realize is I drove them roughly around$20 million in additional revenue. The owner of the company, he had a son. His son owned an ad agency. And back then, he got me clients like Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Countrywide, which is now owned by Bank of America. From there, it just kept expanding and growing. And so what were you doing exactly for them to generate the$5 ,000 a month? So for$5 ,000, they were paying me and I was getting them higher rankings on Google. So I would rank up for terms like power supply, power supply manufacturer. Now this company was called LPAC, E-L-P-A-C. They got bought out eventually by someone else.

6:39And what they did was produce power supplies for large corporations like Boeing planes and fill apart resuscitators and stuff like that. I think it's going to vary from situation to situation and everybody's going to be different. But in general, do you think it's unwise for a new entrepreneur to try and raise venture capital for their business? Should more people be just trying to focus on their business itself and start bootstrapping rather than worrying about raising money? Not all businesses are venture-backable. So a lot of people want to raise money, but if you can't figure out how to go after a big 10, and I mean a total addressable market, like something huge, not like a$500 million market, probably not even a billion dollar market, but something that's like a 10, 15, 20,$50 billion market.

7:25Usually in most cases, raising venture capital doesn't make sense. And you should try to bootstrap it or raise some friends and family money and just kick them out dividend checks. Yeah. I think that's the component that a lot of millennials who are listening to the show that might want to start their own startup miss is that they think they need venture capital. And then when they're not able to raise it, they think that their idea is not good when maybe it's just not, like you said, venture capital backable. And maybe they have a good idea. It's just not going to grow into an addressable market that is big enough to be backed by them.

7:57Bingo. You got it right. There's so many times where I tried raising venture capital and I failed. And funny enough, some of those businesses did well. It doesn't mean that they're going to be the next Uber or anything. They still didn't do that well, but they did well enough. And I was really happy with the outcome. I could tell that VCs wouldn't because it wasn't a business that could make hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit or anything like that. For a normal person who has a regular career, say making$50 ,000 to$100 ,000 a year, a business can be successful if it brings in an extra$5 ,000 a month or$10 ,000 a month, or even a little bit more.

8:31But for a venture capital firm, that's not going to be nearly enough because they're spreading their bets across all these different companies. And they need a company to 10x or 100x for them to make up for all of their losses. So there's really just a missing alignment of incentives, if you will, for companies that can be successful, but small in venture capital. That's right. I think entrepreneurs make that mistake in which $5 ,000,$10 ,000,$15 ,000, even$3 ,000 a month could be great and it can change your life. That additional income is amazing. But for a venture capitalist, they're raising funds of hundreds of millions, sometimes even billions of dollars.

9:07They don't want to manage 100, or 200 deals. They want to manage fewer deals, put bigger checks in and go big. They want to find the next Uber, the next Airbnb, the next Peloton. If you can't be massive like that, it's just not a good fit. But that doesn't mean you have a bad business. It just means that maybe you should raise some money from friends and family. And you know what? If you create a business that pushed off 200 grand a year in profit and your friends and family who own 50 % of the company gave you 150 grand to start with, but they now get a check each year for 100 grand, they're happy.

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12:18To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. I talk about that a lot on the show. I really think that that's such a powerful idea because Because I'm all about having big goals, and I'm sure you are as well. But setting out thinking that you have to build a billion-dollar business, I feel like it almost sets you up for failure, where you could have a business that does$3 ,000 to$10 ,000 a month in profit.

12:55And like you said, that's life-changing. And I think that that's a lot more achievable for a lot of people than a billion-dollar company. And you just have to set your expectations appropriately. That's right. Now, I want to talk about your book, Hustle. In that book, you talk about why people must own their dreams, not rent them from others. What does this mean and why is it so important? Let's back up actually a little bit. So in life, let's say most people are lost and they don't even know what they want to do. A lot of people believe that when you're growing up, you know, you want to be a doctor or policeman or a firefighter.

13:31Like when you were growing up, did you have an idea of what you wanted to be? Yeah, I was going to be a professional a motocross racer. All right. And did you end up doing that? Very closely, but no. So most people, similar to you, don't end up doing what they thought they were going to do when they were a kid. And most people believe that others know what they want to do when they're kids. And that's actually not the case. In life and in reality, as you grow up, a lot of us don't know what we want to do. Majority don't. Some people go their whole life not knowing what they want to do. And what ends up happening is if you have this dream that like, oh, I want to do this or do that, by all means, go for it.

14:10But most of us don't even have that dream. So we don't know what we want to do. And what I would do if I were you is start testing new things out. Don't go just copy what someone else is doing or don't go copy your friend because they're a firefighter or a doctor or entrepreneur and they're doing well. You need to experiment and try a handful of things and you'll quickly realize what you don't like and what you like and what you're naturally good at. Typically, what you're naturally good at is usually what you become more passionate about and what you're going to enjoy and what you're going to excel at in life.

14:39And you need to double down on that and focus on that. And what you'll find is you'll thrive and do much better in life than if you just tried copying someone else. And that's a huge mistake we see. I see that day in and day out. It's just people believe that you grow up, you know what you want to do, and that's what people do when they're older. And And it's like that very rarely happens. I don't really know anyone who said they wanted to do X when they were a kid, and they ended up doing that same thing when they grew up. Robert Leonard How do millennials deal with the dynamic of wanting it now versus putting in the work and the time that it takes to actually get what they want?

15:15Robert Leonard You just got into putting in the hours. If you expect the results without getting there, it's just not going to happen. If the world was that easy, we would all be successful, and we would all be happy in life and rich. That's not the case. There's not a ton of entrepreneurs. Most of us, we're going out there and we're working for someone. And the ones who are doing stuff on their own aren't doing as well as they want right away. It's because things take time in life. It's the reality. I wish it wasn't the case, but it really is. Yeah. I forget who it was that told me this, but they said they wish that there was a shortcut or a secret that they could tell them.

15:51If there was, they would, but there isn't. You just have to put in the work. Exactly. It's not just about putting in the work. You got to put it in and you got to focus on it. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were sitting down in the room and someone asked him in an interview, what was one of the biggest things that led to your success? And they both wrote down without talking to each other right then and there that it was focus. And a lot of people, when they want to do something and they put in hours, they also start getting scatterbrained, especially with millennials. I don't know why, but I've been seeing them more and more scatterbrained versus to just sitting down and focusing and hunkering down and just doing that one thing and trying to do it really well for like 5, 10, 15 years.

16:31Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say is millennials specifically, but just even entrepreneurs in general, they tend to get distracted by what a lot of people call the shiny object syndrome, where everything looks, next idea is going to be the idea, or they got to go try something else because this didn't work quick enough. And I think that's where a lot of people run into issues. I mean, I even fall into it myself. For a while, I was bouncing from idea to idea to idea until I finally found one that I was passionate about. And it did get a little traction early on. And so I've been able to stick with it.

16:59But I think that's where a lot of people fail. And a lot of people are just like, look, jumping around and not putting enough time because things that we all want to happen and succeed usually just don't work right away, sadly. If they did, I mean, everybody would do it, right? I mean, if you had to put in a week of time or two weeks, even a month, if that's all it took, then everybody would just do that. Exactly. So also in your book, you wrote about how millennials can create their own luck and quote unquote pop. How is that? One of my co-authors, Patrick, he has a son. And I'm going to butcher the story because I don't know the type of fish, but let's call it koi fish, right?

17:38So Patrick and his son, one day were in a little creek. Dad's like, dad, let's go find some fish. Let's go see. And Patrick looks done, he's like, son, there's no fish in there. Let's just go. His son just jumps in there, shuffles his feet, and then boom, he starts seeing some fish pop up and appear. If you don't end up trying, you don't end up trying to create that momentum, the energy of trying to do something, nothing's going to happen. It's so funny. I meet so many people these days that are like, how'd you get lucky? How'd this happen for you? And I'm like, a lot of it's hard work. Sure, there is some luck in there when it comes to entrepreneurship and succeeding in life and even things like right timing.

18:19But if you don't take the time and effort to try or do anything, it's very rare that you're going to get that luck. So you got to just go out there and try. Even when the odds are stacked against you, if you're not going to try and make the effort, you're not going to end up doing well. And these days, there's a lot of things going against us from COVID to the economy struggling. What I always tell people is no matter when things are good or bad, If you put in some creativity and you try to think outside the box, you're much more likely to succeed. There's another interesting concept from this book that I really liked, and it was this idea on how someone can betray themselves to stay true to themselves and develop their potential.

18:58Explain to us a bit more about that. So when you end up wanting to do whatever you are in life, like right now, what is your goal? What do you want to do right now? Right now, I would say that my biggest goal is just time freedom. If your goal is time freedom, funny enough, so many people have that goal, which is a great goal. Even I have that goal too, because sometimes it just gets burned out to slog it out for 50, 60, 70 hours a week. So I'm going to actually break down three actionable tips that can help you achieve that. The first thing is look at what you're doing right now that's generating you your income.

19:36And I would try to figure out what are the quickest ways you can expand it, increase it, and grow it, right? Like in whatever way. Is it getting more ads? Is it selling more? Is it marketing more? Is it closing some more deals? Whatever it may be, there is ways to grow whatever you have. And you don't necessarily have to do anything new. A lot of times, it's whatever you're doing is already working. You just have to do more of it. The second thing I want you to do is create processes on your framework of what's everything that you're doing that lets you be successful. And then break it down literally step by step.

20:08And then the third thing I want you to do is you go and you hire someone who is somewhat qualified that you can end up training, that can follow the processes and procedures, so you can save some time and you can automate your life. And not necessarily automate from AI or machine learning, but automate it in which you don't have to be there day to day. And you'll start doing better and you'll get back some of your time, your freedom, and you'll be better off. But I look at a lot of things in life as just problem solving, right? You don't have to do something new. You don't have to do something out of the box.

20:38Other thing that's interesting too is I was talking to someone the other day, my neighbor, and they're a chef. And they're a pastry chef. They create cakes and breads and croissants, brownies and whatever else a pastry chef would end up creating. And they're telling me how they're trying to achieve all these things. They want to live a better life, yada, yada, yada. And I was just like, you know what? Yeah, you love what you're doing. You're trying to find other solutions so you can meet all these goals, how about you just cut back on your life? Like, yes, investing is great and doubling down is great.

21:09And I'm not saying you shouldn't do that. But at the same time, do you need that new car? Do you need that fancy watch? Do you need these extra things in your life? Probably not. If you cut back some of those things, you can win back so much more time, be so much more successful, have that freedom you want, and not be holding to the quote unquote man or these large corporations or whoever it may be that you're paying your bills to. So do you think about getting a lot of your time back? Do you think a good resource for learning more about that would be 4-Hour Workweek from Tim Ferriss? Because when you were talking about hiring someone, training them to do some of the lower level tasks that you may have, the first thing that popped in my head was Tim Ferriss' book, The 4-Hour Workweek.

21:51It is a great book and people should definitely check it out. What's funny is when I was telling you that story too, 4-Hour Workweek popped in my head as well. Robert Leonard Yeah. I recently read it probably beginning of this year, maybe late last year for the first time. And when I was working on the podcast, that's one of those things. It's really helped because there's a lot that goes into developing a high-quality podcast, a lot more than people think. And so you need to really take those concepts that you just mentioned and also what Tim talks about in his book and really try to automate as much as you can.

22:18Otherwise, it's going to take over your life. Robert Leonard So what are the four major career hustles? And what is the best path for those listening to the show today? It's funny. So I gave a speech a few years ago about the... And I used to give it multiple times because at that time, we were selling books like a hotcake when it first came out. And I was breaking down the different types of hustles from what you can do inside a company, outside a company, and multiple variations of it. And what I realized though is when I broke them down and I started following up with some of the people, most people never ended up choosing any of those hustles.

22:57So I adjusted it. And if I had to rewrite the book with my co-authors, I would adjust something in which instead of breaking down the different types of hustles, I would actually tell people, if you're trying to succeed in life, look at what's already working for you and double down on that. Because a lot of people out there, they try to replicate what others are doing and copy them instead of just focusing on what's working on for them. It's like the grass is always greener. I remember when my dad first moved to America, or we first moved to America, I was young. When my parents told me the grass is always greener, we moved to America.