2169 - Breaking Through the Illusion of Success for Six-Figure Entrepreneurs with Jason Moss

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

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1:05with us right now it's jason moss jason you are a coach uh you work exclusively with six figure business owners and you help them scale jason your website is jason moss.com jason it's great to have you glad to be here josh thanks for having me i'd love for our friends that are watching a video clip or seeing the video jason you have a very nice aesthetic behind you by the way. I love the shelves. And that was you put some thought into that. And I really like it. That is that is full credit to my partner, Kimberly, who has way more aesthetic taste than I do. So she helped me pick it all out. And we did it together.

1:40So you can you can send the credit her way. What are you and Kimberly doing for fun lately? Or what are you into? Or what are you geeking out on personally lately? So we've been actually super deep in this Netflix show shameless have you ever seen this oh yeah well i so my son watched the whole thing and he said it was so good he's he says at times it's pretty dark uh but it's an amazing show and i was so resistant to watching it for a while i i just had this idea that it wasn't gonna be good and kimberly kept pushing me to watch it because she'd seen it in the past we're like five seasons in or six seasons in and that is like my favorite thing to do every night is at the end of the long day to sit down with her and watch an episode or two of Shameless.

2:23So highly recommend. I love it. I love it. So tell me what it is about Shameless that you love. So it's just this dysfunctional family, this scrappy dysfunctional family with an alcoholic dad. And it's really the journey of this family kind of moving through life together with incredible circumstances. I mean, they're in poverty. They really struggle in many ways, but their resilience, their ability to meet adversity, and just the scrappiness and the craziness of their life. It's everything you want in a TV show. It's fun, it's sad, it's beautiful, it's poignant, and it's just a crazy mess of an adventure.

3:05So amazing show, I would highly recommend it. Yeah, okay, I'm adding it to the queue. So I use TRAKT, T-R-A-K-T, to track all my stuff that I'm watching. So I just added it to my queue right now. You know what I need to, I need to share my, by the way, my username for Tracked as I'm kind of a big deal in Tracked. Josh in Orlando is my username. You'll see, you'll see my binging, but I'm adding that right now because you're not the first person to tell me about Shameless. Jason, let's talk about what you do professionally. Yeah. So I'm a business coach. I help online business owners who are at that six figure around that six figure mark scale to multi six or seven figures.

3:44and that is really what I geek out about, what I love getting to do and what I love helping people with. Why did you get into this? I've been an entrepreneur my whole life and my first online business was I was 13. I was a big computer nerd growing up and so I used to play a lot of video games and I'd lock myself in my room and play these video games for hours. The thing that used to bug me like nothing else was that in order to play your favorite games, you would always have to find the CD. And you couldn't play the game without the CD, putting the CD in the computer. And so I used to have to hunt around for the CDs.

4:23They were always like between the couch cushions or under the couch. And it would take me like 15 minutes to find the CD. So I was 12 years old, and I built this software program that basically made it so that it would trick the computer into thinking the CD was in the drive when it really wasn't. So you could play your favorite games without having the CDs. And I spent the summer coding this thing, learning how to program on, you know, my computer and, and launched this thing online. I had to go to my dad and ask for a payment processor. Cause I couldn't set one up cause I was too young. He was gracious enough to help me with that.

4:56And I'll never forget Josh that day that I woke up, I opened my inbox and I had that email. You've made a sale. And I was a 13 year old kid at the time. And it blew my mind that I could connect with someone on the other side of the world, that I could add value to their life, make their life better through this thing that I created, and that I could benefit too and get paid for it. And so that set off this multi-decade obsession with marketing, with the internet, with how do we use these tools, this incredible potential that we have today to connect with people all over the world, to be able to reach the people that we want, to be able to make their lives better, and to be able to enrich our lives too.

5:35and that has always been my passion since really a young age and it's evolved and it's taken different forms but that was really the the beginning of the story that led me to the work that I get to do today yeah yeah well tell me about the work that you do with your clients like what like what is it about uh you know working with the folks that you do like what do you what do you notice what trends do you see what what are you hearing a lot of maybe like, I guess, you know, again, if the goal is helping them to go from six to seven figures, why do they want that? And what's stopping them currently?

6:13Yeah, so I think a lot of people at that level, they get to the point where they've had some success in their business, they've built a profitable business, and yet, they feel like they're more in a prison. And they've really created a job for themselves. You know, most people when they start a business, it's like, I want to escape my nine to five, I want to have freedom. I want to be able to control my hours, be my own boss, have time, freedom, flexibility. And then they wake up two years, three years into their business and they're making decent money, but they feel like a slave to the business.

6:42So there's a lot of overwhelm. There's a lot of burnout. There's a lot of people wearing all the hats in the business. There's a lot of inconsistency. It's like, maybe I've been able to create a level of success in my business, but things are inconsistent. I never know when my next client is going to come. I'm kind of like riding by the seat of my pants. I have these systems that maybe I don't really have many systems, or if I do have systems, everything kind of feels like it's held together with duct tape. And so I have no idea when my next client is going to come and everything's up and down, and there's a lot of inconsistency and instability.

7:11And so it can be a very stressful place to be as an entrepreneur, as well as you're doing everything yourself, wearing all the hats. So I think for most people at that level, it's really on a deeper level, it's a desire for more freedom. It's I want to be able to grow and scale and make more money. But I also want to hold myself out of being in the weeds so that I can have a life and then I can run my business without it feeling like it runs me. So I think that's the deep desire for many folks. And that's really a big part of what I help people with and what I love getting to serve people on. And I think on a deeper level, the bottleneck, the thing that really holds people back at that level is it's really this mindset shift from being an operator to being an owner.

7:52You know, most six-figure entrepreneurs got to six figures. And when I say six figures, this could be around that point. I mean, depending on where you are in your business, sometimes this is multi-six figures. But usually people get there with a lot of hustle, a lot of grind, and a lot of hard work. Yeah. And it's like this scrappy... The thing that works really well when you're in the earlier stages of entrepreneurship actually really starts to break down when you scale. And I mean, you probably know this. because you've been running your business for a while, but it's like the thing that got you from zero to six figures is not the thing that's going to get you from six to multi-six or multi-six to seven.

8:26So it's this shift from the operator mindset, which is very much being in the doing the one who kind of solves all the problems and does everything themselves and kind of gets a lot of validation from being the one who's constantly busy to more of this high level CEO owner type mindset, which is much more of this, like, we're looking at the business as a set of systems, we're delegating, we're learning how to build something that stands separate from us. We're unhooking from our value as doers, and realizing that our value is much more in the way that we kind of run the business as a whole. And so there's a there's a real shift that has to happen there.

9:09It's a challenging one. And it's one that I think many entrepreneurs struggle with. And And that's one of the biggest reasons people get stuck at that six figure level. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very, very, very common. Jason, you said something in your social media. You said, you want to know the secret to my success? I'm actually super lazy. Explain that. Well, I had a big moment. You know, when I was, before I became a business coach, I was director of sales. And I worked with one of my best friends who we were scaling up a multi seven figure coaching business. And so it was great. It was a great experience.

9:39I got to be on the ground floor of a rapidly scaling coaching business. And I really respected him as an entrepreneur. And we'd been friends for a long time. I was actually one of the groomsmen at his wedding. And one of the things I found fascinating early on in our journey of getting to know each other was he was one of the, and he will tell you this, he was one of the laziest people. And his partner would constantly get upset because he would half do things and everything was kind of like all half done around around him all the time but but there was at that time I I really had this value around hard work in my life and there was a sense of I pride myself because I'm constantly in the weeds doing everything I have a very high standard as to how I do everything and I remember hanging out with him and he was making way more money than I was at that time and yet he was operating completely differently it was much more of this like everything at 80 % is okay.

10:38And it was a complete radical mindset shift for me. And I realized that as an entrepreneur, some of the things that, I mean, one of the things that often gets in the way is just our standards. It's like, we have this incredible high standard for everything that we do. And there's some areas where I think that's valuable and useful, but it can easily become a bottleneck for many entrepreneurs. And it, particularly when it comes to delegating, One of the things that really shifted for me was because I tell people I'm a recovering control freak. One of the biggest things that has held me back as an entrepreneur, scaling past half a million a year in sales today, is I have this high standard around how I want everything done.

11:22And so it's really hard to let go and delegate to other people. But when I started thinking 80 % done by somebody else is better than 100 % done by me and really dropping my standards, which sounds weird because that's the exact opposite of what people tell you you're supposed to do. That really unlocked this freedom for me because I recognize that most things in my business don't really need to be done to 100%. Like, for example, I have someone who manages my social media account. I didn't even, I originally wrote a post that you're referring to that was not actually like, she took that post and kind of adapted it and made it her own.

11:58And even as I hear you say that, I'm like, I probably would have said that like slightly differently. Yeah. Like I like to say ambitiously lazy, right? Like I'll work my ASS off. Like, you know, and the way I look at it is it's investing in future Josh. So it's like, I'm just going to do the hard thing now. I'm going to do it right. I mean, it's the same thing for any DIY project that I'm doing around the house. Like I could do it half-assed, but then I'm going to, you know, it's not good. I'm going to have problems with it. And I'm going to have to go and fix it another, you know, three to five years.

12:32And then it's going to annoy me for three to five years. So I'm just going to get it done. I'm going to do it a hundred percent. It's the same thing like delegating, right? It's like, I don't want to be pulled into conversations around billing or something like that, please shoot me. Like that is someone else's job in the company to handle that sort of thing. And so - Yeah, and being able to know when to take that mindset of, okay, it's really good to do this at 100 % because there are some things where that's really important. If you don't do something right, you're gonna come back to your point and fix it later.

13:04And then there's a lot of other things in our business that really don't need to be done to that level of standard. And we just tell ourselves that story and it creates a lot of extra work. And it also holds us back from being able to delegate and pass those things off to other people. So I think it's a nuanced kind of way of looking at it for sure. But it can be a big unlock, I think, for a lot of more perfectionist-minded entrepreneurs who tend to get in their own way. Jason, when you're working with your clients, what does that typically look like? And how do you engage together? Are you just meeting on a regular basis?

13:39and it's kind of like going to therapy with you? Or how would you define it or describe it? Well, we were running a pretty large group program up until about three months ago. So it was like group calls and I had client success. It was much more of like a traditional, I think many business coaches kind of run that structure where you've got like a course and there's live calls and things like that. About three months ago, I decided to shut that entire thing down and migrate back to one-to-one coaching exclusively, which sounds kind of nuts. you might be like, Jason, that sounds weird. Doesn't that sound like the step in the opposite direction of scale?

14:14But the reason I did that was because I'm seeing what's happening with AI. I'm seeing that there's a real shift in terms of our market and what we're looking for and what my clients really desire. And there's this deeper desire for intimacy. And this is something I'm seeing across the board because I talk a lot about what's happening with AI and the shifts and what that means for us as entrepreneurs. But I think there's a real desire and a hunger for deeper, higher intimacy experiences, whether that's in-person experiences. So we do some of that stuff, whether it's retreats and things like that, or just one-to-one type experiences where people can actually feel connected to a real human being.

14:52So today, what that looks like is one-to-one calls, people get text message access with me. So there's a level of intimacy that I think is possible through that kind of a relationship that most business coaches who are past the revenue level that I'm at don't typically run programs that are structured that way. And if you're looking in your crystal ball and there's a lot of things moving very quickly right now. And for some, this is incredibly disruptive. And for others, they, I mean, I'm up till two in the morning last night, you know, just fascinated, you know, understanding the role of AI agents and how this is a part of our reality right now.

15:38And if you are not keeping up, you know, I'm just thinking about you and your clients. Like, I wonder if this ever comes up, you know, maybe other people are not worried about the pace at which things are evolving. I don't worry about it, but I know boy, there is a huge sense of urgency right now, because if you can stay relevant and adapt, there is enormous opportunity. Yeah. I mean, there's always those two choices in business, right? The choice between fear and kind of more of that opportunistic mindset. And to me, I see it more like that, which is we are living through the most significant technological technological revolution in probably the history of the world.

16:24And we are right at the tipping point of that right now with everything that's happening in AI. And you can choose to bury your head in the sand, which is what a lot of people are doing. They're saying, you know, screw chat GPT, it's no good anyways, and it can't do what I do. And they're choosing to ignore it. That's one perspective. The other perspective is I'm afraid what's going to happen is AI going to take my job. And I have empathy for that because I've had moments of that too in my own experience. And I I think that's very human. And then the third mindset, which is where I want to encourage everybody to step into, which is how can I seize the opportunity that this moment presents?

16:59And for people who are looking at just like, I mean, I've also been in this AI agent research craze the last few days. I'm like, what's happening with these agents is radically going to change the way that I do a lot of my business over the next six to 12 months. There are things that I hire people for right now that I will not need to hire people for. I will have basically an incredible AI assistant on my team who can manage at least 40%, 50 % of the admin type tasks that I now previously either do myself or pass off to somebody else on my team. That's a great thing for me as an entrepreneur.

17:39And so being on the cutting edge of understanding what that means, how to leverage these tools, and taking more of that faith-based approach, looking at the opportunities, I think is where we all want to be. And there is so much opportunity for people who are paying attention right now, particularly with AI. Yeah, yeah. Well, Jason, for our friend that's listening right now, what would you recommend? What would be their next steps if they want to grab some time with you? Or how do you even know that you're a fit, necessarily? Yeah, so I would say if you're at six figures and you're serious about scaling and getting to that next level in your online business, you can go to my website, jasonmoss.com.

18:18There's different links and we got our YouTube channel. You can check out more of my free content. There's a work together button if you want to apply to work together. And we can definitely explore whether or not that's a good fit and whether I might be able to help you. Jasonmoss.com. Jason, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us. Thanks, Josh. Appreciate you having me. Thanks, man.

18:44Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

19:26I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

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