0:00 This is an unpopular take, but I have to give it to you anyways. And there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be mad at me for dropping this knowledge on you. But this is a mountain that I'm willing to die on. I believe that every single person out there should own their own business. Now, it doesn't mean that you can't work for another company when you're coming up. As a matter of fact, I think that it's good. I think that people should work for other companies when they're learning, when they're in their learning phase. But I'm talking about like 18 years old to maybe 25 years old maximum. You work in that company. You learn how a business works. You see how the accounting department works. You see how the sales and marketing department works. You see how production works. You see how the boss navigates. You see how the employees function, how HR works.
0:47 And then you go out and you start your own business. preferably, by the way, in the same area of business that you started in in the first place because you already have knowledge. You already have contacts and you already know how those businesses work. So then you just flip the script and you become the boss. Why should you become the owner of your own business? And I hate, by the way, I hate when people say, "Not everybody is supposed to own their own business." It's not meant for everybody. It's people that have given up on their dreams. people that have given up on the fact on the idea of potentially owning their own business one day. People want to stay complacent. They want to stay in a place that's easy. They go work for a job. They get a paycheck. They don't have headaches. They don't have taxes. They don't have customers. They don't have employees. They don't have any of
1:33 these stresses. But what they do have is a big problem on their hands because one of three things happens to employees every single time. Either A they get fired, either B their job gets terminated because the company is going through some restructuring or the company goes bankrupt, or C if you manage to make it to the end of your career at 55 or 60 years old, the company will end up firing you. Listen to me. I'm in the recruiting business and I will tell you that when we get resumes that are 50 years old, people that are 50 years old plus, whether you like it or not, whether people are going to publicly state it or not, when we go present those resumes to companies, people always say the same thing. They are too old. Imagine, God forbid, getting fired at the age of 50 years old
2:21 and you have to go find another job and nobody's hiring you, but you're going to live to 80, 85, 90 years old. What are you supposed to do for 40 years without an income? I don't care how much money you were able to save. I don't care how much you put away for your retirement. If you get fired at 50 and you can't find another job, you are in a lot of trouble. Versus when you're the owner of a business, your life is in your hands. Your power is in your hands. You are able to be the master of your own destiny. Now, you might be saying to yourself, how do you start a business? It's much simpler than you think. They want you for whatever reason to think that it's difficult. First of all, if you're an employee right now, you are a business. You are Mr. You. And that's
3:08 the name of your company. Okay? But the problem is you have one customer and your customer is your boss. So, let's say you're a secretary or you're an architect or you are a accountant or a project manager. You have a client. That client is your boss. The problem is, as I mentioned before, if that client fires you, then you're left with zero clients, meaning you have zero income. Owning a business is the exact same as working for somebody else, except you're working for many people. The people that you're working for are called your clients. And a business could have 10, 20, 100, a thousand clients. So, if one client falls off, you still have revenue coming in from other places and you're not
3:54 doomed if you lose one or two or even half of your clients. So, how do you start a business practically speaking? Because it's very nice for me to tell you, go start your own business, but how do you do it practically speaking? I could only tell you how I did it. It's so simple, you're going to be shocked. when I left my family business and I had to leave that business because I had problems with my family. I wasn't getting along with them. I wasn't getting along with my brothers in business. It was very tough. We were three brothers in one business and it was tough to get along the three of us. And I had a choice. Either I could keep my family or I could keep my business. But I couldn't keep a family business. It wasn't working. So, I remember one day I drove home and I walked into the front door of my house and I started crying as I walked into the door and my
4:40 wife closed the door behind me. She gave me a big hug and she said, "You're not going back to that office. You're going to start your own business." She said, "I don't care if we have to suffer for a small period of time, but if we have to suffer short term for you to be successful long term, I'm willing to do that for you." By the way, it helps when you have a supportive spouse in the process, which I did, thank God. So, that night, I'm sitting at my kitchen table and I take out a pencil and a piece of paper and I write down, I brainstorm all of the potential businesses that I could go into. I had crazy things on that list. Everything from selling jets. I wanted to be a private jet salesman to selling flowers to I remember I had on there opening up
5:25 my own chain of laundry mats. I had about 20 things on that list and one of the things that I had written down, this is probably eight, nine years ago, was video production. I had really liked video production. I had experience with it in my family business. One of the things that was one of my tasks was to do marketing for the company. So, I had hired a video production company to do the production for us. And I was involved in writing the script. I was involved in the visuals. I was involved in the whole process, the whole production process. And I really liked it. And that video came out so good. I remember it was such a good way to open up new doors and to get new business. Whenever I would knock on a new company's door, I would send them the video, they would look at it, and all of a sudden after 90 seconds, they knew
6:11 exactly what my company does, exactly what we were about. I had instant trust and instant credibility. So, I really liked that business, and I really liked the creative aspect of it. I happened to like being on camera also, as you could probably tell. So I said, you know, this might be a good business to go into. So I circled that video production on my list. And the next day when I was in between meetings at my family business, cuz I didn't quit right away. I still stayed on. By the way, that's an important part of starting your own business is don't give up your first stream of revenue until you have solidified your second stream of revenue. Because when you're starting a business, you want to cross over from whatever you're doing currently. You want to cross over a bridge into what
6:56 you're going to be doing. And if you jump, then you could fall and you could fall hard. So you want to create a bridge. So what I would do is in between meetings, I would make phone calls to friends and family and I would tell them about this new business that I was starting that I was going into the video production business. And I had closed six contracts like that. I had closed six contracts before I ever left my family business. As soon as I had closed my sixth contract, I walked into my father's office. I said, "Dad, I love you, but I can't work here anymore." And I got to work right away in my new business. Now, not all six of those contracts went through. As a matter of fact, only two of those contracts went through, but those two contracts gave me enough runway, enough money to breathe
7:44 for the next two months and to learn on the job. So, my first sale that I made was to my father-in-law. I flew to Panama and I created a great stunning video presentation of his real estate portfolio here in Panama. Then my second one was in Montreal. It was for one of my friends. They have a meat packing company. And that money that I had made from those two jobs gave me enough money to live for two months. During those two months, I was involved in the production. I was involved in making things work. I was involved. I was learning. I was growing. But also, I was hammering sales. Again, I was calling my friends and family. anybody that I had previous relationships with and I was trying to sell them on my new video production services. So, who are the people that liked me and that I had done business with were all my contacts from my family business. By the way, the
8:30 reason why I didn't go into my family business is because one of my business mentors told me that you cannot compete against your family business. You can't leave your family business and take all your contacts and then compete with them. That is immoral. So, I had nothing. I had no assets. But what I did have was those relationships that I had built over 10 years in my family business. So the first people that I had called to start selling video production services to were my old clients from my family business. They already liked me. They already trusted me. I already had a relationship with them. So I would sell them video for their metal companies. I was in the metal business. So they had other types of metal businesses that we serviced. And I would sell them contracts. And I would bring in the contract one after the other after the
9:17 other. Once you hit your power base and you start sort of running out of people in your power base, I'm talking about friends, family, past customers, past employers, you have to then start marketing to the outside world because you're going to run out of your power base pretty quickly. So then I started to hit LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and all the social media platforms that I could get my hands on and I would create videos about my experience, my journey in starting that business. And when I had a great day, I would post that we closed a contract and we had a great day. When I had a bad day, I would post about I had a bad day and how I lost a contract or I messed something up or a client was in pain. And people became emotionally invested in my journey. And people wanted to give me the business because
10:03 they wanted to see me succeed. And I grew that business with God's help. In our last year of doing video, we did almost $2 million in sales in video production to small businesses. And it was a great business. And I fed my family for five or six years on that business. Since then, I've opened up several other businesses and I just use the same method. I write down a list. I see what interests me. I see are the profit margins good? If the profit margins are good, I then look at the competition. Is there a lot of competition? If there's not a lot, and then I look at the demand in the market. Is there demand in the market for this product? How do you know if there's demand in the market? Very simple. You pick up the phone and you call 10 prospective buyers. A general rule that
10:49 I have in business, when you make 10 phone calls and if 10 out of 10 slam the phone down in your ear and they say, "I'm not interested." You don't have a business. But if you make 10 phone calls and three out of the 10, by the way, these are qualified buyers. And three out of the 10 are interested in what you're trying to sell, you know. Or four out of 10 or five out of 10, whatever that number is. If you see that the market wants your product, then you have a good business. So, back to my original premise, every person out there, whether you're young or even whether you're old, in my humble opinion, you should aim to start your own business. That should be your overarching goal right now. It will give you financial freedom. Don't get me wrong, it will come with tons of
11:35 headaches and tons of stresses. Everything comes with headaches and everything comes with stresses. I'd rather take any day the stresses and headaches that come with a business owner than the anxiety that comes with being an employee that you could get fired in an instant. I hope this video brought you value. If it did, please leave me a like, please leave me a comment, and please subscribe. God bless and I can't wait to see how you do in your business ventures.
