Self-employment is not the ultimate goal for entrepreneurs…
The goal is to create a business that will feed your lifestyle, that can be scaled, that can be passed along to family members or sold.
It’s either gonna be a legacy or it’s gonna grow legs and get sold.
But no one is teaching that out there for some reason. They just go, “Go get self-employed, it’s the American Dream,” but it really ends up becoming the American Nightmare.
The Dangers of the Self-Employed Route
Being self-employed burns people out.
When I owned my own personal training business, man, you tell me you wanted to work out at 4AM, I was there. You wanted to work out at 4 PM, I was there. So I had clients spread out throughout the day.
By the time I’d actually get done training them, it’s 10PM.
Typically people will find me when they’re in a world of pain.
“Hey, I own my own personal training gym. Me and my wife are trainers. Now, I feel like I don’t even want to see my wife because we’re in the gym all day together and then we go home together, we talk about work.
“Our relationship is falling apart”.
The 9-5 Might Be Better for You…
So many people think self-employment is the holy grail. It’s not.
That’s part of my frustration. How do I get someone to see if they say, “Well, I’m self employed, I’m good, no one could ever fire me.”
It’s almost like, okay, well, that’s a great badge of honor, but no one would ever have to fire you if you just did your job right.
No one’s forced to take out a loan and go upside down and stress at night. I’d rather they’d clock out at 5, turn off their brain, and go enjoy their family.
The Solution That Makes It All Worth It
Right off the bat, I always use pain as a great motivator for my clients. I let them know that they could either continue to be in pain or step up and implement systems.
I define a system using an acronym. S.Y.S.T.E.M. stands for “save yourself time, effort and money”.
You run the systems, the systems run your business.
One system at a time begins to create the freedom you’ve always wanted.
Before you know it you start thinking scale. “I think I could do this with a second location.”
That’s when you start thinking like an entrepreneur.
Win Back Your Freedom
Sometimes, you have the money to hire an assistant to make your follow-up calls for you.
How can you systemize her job?
You can create a list of answers to the most commonly asked questions—canned responses. When they pick up the phone, how do they answer it?
When you hire an assistant for $13-14 an hour, you’re buying back your time, so you can do more valuable things like selling. An assistant can’t sell a multi-thousand dollar training program, but they can certainly follow-up with leads to make sure they come in, right?
That entrepreneurial mindset doesn’t kick in until you have some level of freedom, which comes from implementing the right systems into your business.