TMBA 574: The Power of Entrepreneurial Persistence
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We are reaching back into the mailbag this week to answer questions submitted by Tropical MBA listeners around the world.
In this edition, we'll be focusing on three specific questions that we believe get to the core of what it means to be resilient as an entrepreneur.
We'll be discussing how much money you should save as a "runway" if you plan on leaving your job, the fundamental differences between hiring freelancers and hiring employees, and how you can navigate questionable business advice on the internet.
You'll also hear an update about the new products that we are launching over at Dynamite Jobs, and why we are somewhat optimistic about events returning in 2021.
Listen to this week's show and learn:
Why entrepreneurship is about risk management and not merely risk-taking. (7:16)
How cash flows can ultimately do more for your business than a savings account. (11:44)
Why persistence is about more than just time. (21:33)
The difference between hiring freelancers and employees. (24:36)
How the "practitioner vs. preacher ratio" can help you suss out bad information. (31:02)
Mentioned in the episode:
Before the Exit - Our New Book
TMBA Masterminds
Partner With Us
The Dynamite Circle
Dynamite Jobs
Dynamite Deals
Tropical MBA on YouTube
Post a Remote Job
After Losing $38,6786+ as an Indie Hacker, I can't do it anymore. I quit.
Jordan O'Connor
Enjoyed this podcast? Check out these:
TMBA325: A Conversation With Ribbonfarm’s Venkat Rao
TMBA350: A Discussion About The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck
TMBA571: There is Only One Kevin Kelly
This week's sponsor:
Today's podcast is sponsored by Woven.
Woven is an all-in-one calendar that helps you manage and blend both your work and personal lives, enabling you to spend time on what matters the most.
With Woven you can sync all of your calendars in one place, including Google Suite and Microsoft integration, create new scheduling links from directly within your calendar, and much more.
Woven makes it easy to plan, join, and manage video events, helping you schedule with Zoom and Google Hangouts. With multiple timezone integrations, Woven is ideal for remote workers and productivity hackers.
Woven is a calendar for power users and those who are serious about their productivity, allowing you to schedule time with others and protect that precious maker time for yourself, all while giving you analytics so you can track your time and gain insights into your week.
Check them out over at Woven.com and a huge thanks to the folks at Woven for sponsoring the show.
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Thanks for listening to our show! We'll be back next Thursday morning 8AM EST.
Cheers,
Dan & Ian
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Dan: Happy Thursday morning. Welcome back to the podcast Bossman.
Ian: Hey, man.
Dan: How are you doing?
Ian: Pretty good. What about you?
Dan: I'm excited because today we're doing a Q&A episode. I love it when the listeners write in, they say, ‘Hey, we want to hear from you guys’. And I'm like, ‘You really want to hear from us?’ We have some wonderful questions regarding business entrepreneurial runway, we have a question about freelance versus employees. And we're also going to talk about one of our favourite topics, skin in the game and advice giving on the web, how you can navigate business advice to put it to work for your business. Before we jump into all that Bossman, I wanted to give a really cool update over at Dynamite Jobs. We launched a new product called ‘Business Pro’, which is $100 a month for unlimited part time and full time job posts along with support from our team. I think we're really freakin good at helping people hire. And so far we have 10 members in our first week of putting that live. So I think that's really, really cool.
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Ian: I think in the SaaS world, you call that 1000KMM
Dan: It’s been pretty cool. We have a bunch of new product coming down the line today, we were on the phone for a few hours discussing a service provider product, which is essentially, for productized services, for freelancers, for people that are basically hiring alternatives. You know, sometimes you go to say, ‘Well, I need someone part time to do this kind of work in my company’. And then you see a service that does it and you're like, bam, I'll take the service. So we feel like presenting listeners of this show as legitimate alternatives to hiring is going to be one of our projects as well as a product for our candidates. So something that's been truly amazing over Dynamite Jobs is the rate at which people are filling out detailed profiles. If you look at the profiles, they look similar to LinkedIn. But we have brought basically a different approach, then what most profile sites do, we have nearly 2000 people signed up for our platform right now. We're also going to be creating a more in depth product for those candidates to help them get jobs with companies like the listeners of this podcast run. So that's been exciting over at Dynamite Jobs. I got to mention, like one DC update here at the top, while I'm feeling more optimistic that we're going to be able to have an event next year Ian.
Ian: Gosh I hope so.
Dan: With the news of the vaccines coming out, the fact that the vaccine producers have been going ahead and producing the batches before the trials were finished. What that means is that a lot of the challenges that we're facing right now are simply ones of distribution and implementation of the vaccines. I am really confident, at this moment, and we'll take a snapshot that DC BKK 2021 is going to happen. And I think it's gonna be an really amazing outpouring of like, everybody's so excited to be there. And I'll be the number one person that's excited to be there. So, yeah, I'm really optimistic that next fall, we're gonna be able to party down.
Ian: It feels like we've been in a holding pattern here forever. But, you know, it's just like, I want so bad to announce DCBKK 2021. But I feel like the responsible thing, again, is just to wait and make sure that everybody can leave their country and get into other countries and things like that. Wait until it's kind of like a done deal. Like you, Dan, I'm very optimistic because I have to be because, you know, it's like, you got to have something to look forward to. Gosh, I haven't been able to look forward to an event in over a year now.
Dan: Yeah, agreed. So let's get into today's questions. These come through our emails. Our voicemail gets emailed to producer Jane at tropicalmba.com and we got three prompts today. The first is from Max. ‘Hey, guys, love the podcast. I've listened off and on for a couple of years as I've been working in the corporate world. I currently feel in a position where I'm comfortable enough to quit my job and start a location independent business. One of the major considerations right now is trying to determine how much money I will need until I would expect any sort of income. For some additional information or context, my background is in software development, would seriously appreciate the advice. Thank you for your incredible content you put out’. Max it is our pleasure.
And we have a lot of thoughts about this. And in order to frame this whole conversation about runway and when you should quit your job and stuff. There was recently an article that went viral on Reddit and on ‘Indie Hackers’, called ‘after losing $38,676. As an indie hacker, I can't do it anymore. I quit’ very clever headline. And so this is sort of the message from the future, ‘I had around $12,000 in savings, enough to cover a year of expenses and a bit more, I stopped spending money on almost everything’. Basically, he goes on to say he thought he could get a few clients, it would be no big deal. ‘Well, I'm broke now. I hate the projects I created. I hate that I spent all my money and that I didn't make $1. And so the real cost is more than the money I lost’. He goes on to write, ‘I made my girlfriend's stay at home for a year, we didn't do anything., we didn't buy clothes and eat the cheapest food. I feel that I have lost a year of my life, so I quit’, that is what this particular indie hacker said, I basically burned through my runway in a year. This article Ian went viral. So I want to use this in the context of discussing how Max, and people like Max, might not end up in the situation where you really regret this jump off into the entrepreneurial world.
Ian: We both read this article. And I think it angered you a lot more than it angered me, I would say, I don't know if your emotion was anger. But I was definitely sensing a little anger from you. Why is that?
Dan: There's a bunch of things but I think the overall feeling that I got is, on the one hand, I understood partially where this person is coming from. It's disappointing that he had a really tough year, they burned through all their savings. Yeah, that's a bummer. But it's also kind of loser talk. And that's the part that got me a little angered. And one of the commenters that I pulled out said, ‘Entrepreneurship is about risk management, not we're merely risk taking’. He goes on to say later in his post tha. ‘Every time I wanted to promote something, my stomach hurts. If I share an article on Reddit, I feel anxious for a week’. He goes on to say that, you know, basically promoting his product made him sick. He didn't like the critiquing. And I wrote as a response to this, you know, it's a little bit of kind of complaining in retrospect, like, ‘Oh, I put it all on the line for this sort of thing’. And I just thought, ‘Man, you have to have a sales infrastructure’. There is this kind of fantasy in the maker world, that you can just make something and put it out there. And that you don't really have to do anything all that difficult, you just the checkboxes, like I have to have enough runway, and then I have to quit my job, and I've spent all my time making cool shit.And then eventually, like, just as easily as I applied for a job, like I'm gonna have a business. And that's not typically how it goes.
And so, first off, I think it's worth making a distinction between personal runway and business runway or burn rate. So really, what we want to talk about is not how many months you can live in Thailand based on how much money is in your bank account. I mean, I get that that's a cool factor to understand. That's your personal runway. But we're really talking about a sabbatical there. A business runway, or otherwise your burn rate is basically if you kept your current sales and expenses as they are, how long would your business exist before it went out of business. And this is really how I would want to be thinking about things. Even if what your business is you're a freelancer, and you moved to Thailand with a remote work contract, or a few clients or whatever, so long as you're able to cover and not dig back into your personal runway. That's actually where I would start this whole conversation. Unless you really know why you're digging into your savings, it's sort of a fundamental personal financial violation to dig into your personal safety net in order to do something that you have no idea of the outcome. So I would want to hedge that risk personally.
Ian: You'd want to hedge that risk. But I mean, you know, at the same time, Dan, we're doing a little bit of that right now. And I think part of that is just calculating risk. So it's understanding how long you can do that for, it’s understanding what kind of impact it's actually going to have on your life. But then also having a bit of a vision. Some of the best, you know, made for movie entrepreneurial stories involve people basically hitting rock bottom or digging deep and dead, or you're sitting in their parents basement for three years before they hit their thousand days.
Dan: That makes for a good story, but not necessarily a good strategy. Would you risk going broke in order to do this stuff? No. I think you would, for eg, in our case, we have the luxury of a little bit of savings that isn't fundamental like, we're going to go down to zero.
Ian: Let me just share a little word with you that I think changes this, this proposition. That's validation. So, for me, reading this story, it’s like, I wonder how this person burned through $36,000 not validating their idea? So you know, I think that's the curious part about this story so far to me, as we dig into it is: nothing is guaranteed, the universe doesn't owe you anything. You went on a limb here for a year. What can you learn in month one that will help you to pivot in month 123456. If you just do the same thing, month one through month 12, and you're not getting validation, you're not getting feedback, you're not getting revenue, you're not getting customers, you're not acquiring users, whatever it might be your form of validation and it better be one that's worth some money in the future. But what kind of validation are you getting on your ideas?
Dan: Take it a step further, the only validation that matters, if you're in a position where you're looking at risking your personal runway: I wouldn't risk that without customers, clients or employment, I simply would not, I would risk money beyond my runway in order to start another business. But if I have $6,000 in the bank, $12,000 in the bank, I'm not moving to Thailand and saying, ‘Great, I can live here for six months’. And I know I've said that a lot on the show. So I want to be clear about how I would handle it. This is about risk management, not risk taking. I would say, ‘Okay, I've got $10,000 in my bank account, I can live in Thailand for six months off that $10,000’. That's amazing. That's a backup plan. Now it cost me $2,500 a month or $2,000 a month to live in Thailand. Or in Omaha. What I'm going to do is get a client or a first customer or a group of customers that pays me that $2,000 a month. I'm not just going to go and burn for something and race to, you know, the six month cement wall of ruin. What I'm going to do is layer insurance policies that free me up emotionally to take the risks that I want to take.
And again, when I think about validation, the only validation that matters to me is money coming into my bank account through an employer, through a client or through a customer. I suppose you could also take an add investor to that category, I would feel comfortable with that as well. And so do one of those four things. We're not speaking with Max, we're talking about this viral article, this situation just simply wouldn't have happened. It relates to everything we talked about in the show, including the stair step approach, which is, for your first thing, this idea that you're gonna like, shut the door on your corporate career, and then go into a woodshed without validation, and without multiple layers of security there is simply not how I have and how I would approach it. So just a few TMBA mindset imperatives, I'll list them off to your Bossman and get your responses on them. First off, don't attend entrepreneurship or go do entrepreneurship like you would go attend night school. This isn't like a checklist that you follow off: ‘Build up runway, quit a job, go build something in the woodshed, have customers’, that's not really how it works. There's no one in the universe waiting around to give you the designation now that you're an entrepreneur now because you checked off boxes, you're an entrepreneur when you start selling things to people that you own.
Ian: If entrepreneurship was simple ee couldn't do this podcast for 10 years. It would just be an open and closed book. We’d do 10 episodes and it'd be like, ‘That's it’. But to your point, you know, entrepreneurship not being night school, I want to just reinforce the idea too that the universe, unfortunately, does not owe you anything. So this idea that you're gonna shut down your life and eat ramen and make your girlfriend miserable for a year that just might be what happens is everybody's miserable. Because your product did not resonate with people, you did not pivot. And now this is your reality.
Dan: Well, that suggests to me, too, I mean, we can talk about the value of supportive partners, maybe we'll put that off for another episode. But maybe this kind of idea that you've been in a corporate career for five years, and now you're going to shut the door and do something completely different. It's too big of a value shift. There's not enough hedging along the way, because this is a long term process. So one of the points we wrote down, Ian, is what is your reason for being an entrepreneur, it has to have a value outside of money incomes, because it is a journey, there has to be an element of creation, of freedom, of different sorts of relationships you can have that maybe aren't the ‘check the box’ sort of relationships. Now you're getting in a little bit deeper with people, there's more opportunities with people you meet, because you have the flexibility and agency of entrepreneurship.
And it's one of the things I always dig into, even when people are making a big switch like this. ‘Well, why won't your employer give you a remote work agreement?’ or ‘Why can't you cut a deal that did de-risk this?’ or ‘Why are you in a situation where things are so abrupt’. Again, I wouldn't treat entrepreneurship like people treat a sabbatical. Because the sabbatical idea is ‘Okay, I teach for a living, I got enough savings, I'm going to shut it down, I'm going to go like explore something with less stress and with more freedom’. That's not really how I'd explore entrepreneurship, honestly. I would get a better job, I would get a remote work agreement, I'll get a freelance client that's highly leveraged. There's a bunch of things you can do to explore entrepreneurship, that's not liburning saving sitting in a woodshed somewhere. So more engagement in the direction you want to go, rather than less engagement. And this is a theme we talk about all the time - if you feel like you got to save money, syphon off money from your job, and shut it down and then go build something for six months, I don't think that's a good strategy. Selling yourself to a company to pay you maybe less money than your worth to work part time from a remote gig is way, way easier than finding product market fit. So why don't you just do that, especially if you're a software developer, say, ‘Hey, I'll work X number of hours a week you're gonna cover my nut and like I've reduced my expenses because that's what entrepreneurs do. I have a low burn rate. I'm gonna do this work for you very well. I'm going to get paid for it and de risk my long term entrepreneurial journey’.
Ian: One of the most curious things that came up for me answering this question of why being an entrepreneur - it was actually just in the first sentence of what this guy Jose wrote, which was, ‘Around a year ago, I left my job as a developer advocate, to bootstrap a company’. And then he goes on to say, ‘I had around 12 k in savings. enough to cover one year expenses’. But right there, that's the one sentence that I want to know more about. Which is: why did you leave your job as a developer to bootstrap a company? Because there's a lot to unpack there. Again, I think that the number one reason for being an entrepreneur is different for people. For me is because I hated the culture, I hated the environment of the job, I hated having to go somewhere every day, I hated the fact that I couldn't control my income and my time, all those things. I don't think that this person writing that article had the same hate hate hate that I had for a job. And so it probably wasn't that painful, again, to walk away and come back to that job. And I think that there has to be a deep, deep, deep level of pain for a lot of people to go into entrepreneurship, because you're basically your back is up against the wall.
Dan: Well, in the short term, how this has worked out for Jose, at least, my observation is that this article went viral, he decided that he likes this sort of interaction in the world. And so now he's going to become a writer talking about, you know, the failure that he experienced and building an audience that way and getting people to buy his products that way. The informative thing here is - he wasn't building things that he wanted to be interactive about, he didn't want to interact with his job, he wanted to quit it, he didn't want to get a client, he wanted to go to the woodshed, you know, and now all of a sudden, he's starting to interact with the world and seen that ‘Oh, my gosh, like, this is a way forward, like I have to understand how value flows. In order to do that, I have to interact with other people’. In the early days, interaction is important. As your business and asset value increases, you can get further and further away from that if you choose. Again, this maker fantasy, that you're just going to make something, put it out in the world, and it's just going to cash checks for you is possible, but it's a dangerous one. And I would de risk your journey by not falling into that trap. Again, you must have a sales infrastructure.
Few other things. Persistence - often that term is used with the sense that time is the only input in persistence, ie, you know, maybe you could say Jose didn't persist long enough, maybe you should have persisted for two or three years. And that's probably true. But ultimately, you have to take responsibility for the result. So, saving money, deciding how long that money is going to last you. Those two things are relatively easy. And then going and spending a year on quote, ‘entrepreneurship’, building things, that's easy too, all those things are easy. So we haven't really done anything hard here. Why are people gonna pay you to do things that are easy? This is all for you. The real question is: what have you done for the world? That's ultimately when you're going to get compensated as an entrepreneur. And when people talk about persistence, our point is that it's not merely a function of time. You have to persist in being responsible for the result. And that's what's hard.
Ian: It's about the journey. I mean, some years are gonna suck, some years are gonna be great. That’s one of the things about being an entrepreneur is you kind of have to be okay with these, like, large swings.
Dan: So this is a complex way of answering Max's question, which is originally, ‘How much runway do I need?’ So Max has got a background in software development. And my response Max would be, ‘I believe that it's great to have six months of living expenses in your personal bank account’. If you can do that, you should do that. But my answer to the runway question is that - it's not the primary concern, the primary concern is your cash flow. And that I would not quit a job, unless my expenses were covered by clients, remote work, customers, or investors. And it's, frankly, not that hard to do, especially if you're a software developer. And if especially is what you want is to build a business that has product market fit, that has employees, that has hundreds, if not thousands, of customers, what is easier than that is convincing 1,2,3,4 people to pay you for a leveraged remote deal, to prepay for the product you're building, to pay you for client work, or to invest in your business, those four things that I just laid out there, they're easier than what you're aiming to do.
So if you can't solve the first challenge of covering minimised expenses, that's a bad bad sign for the ultimate goal. This is a way to de-risk the situation because the skill sets are exactly aligned. like figuring out how to cover a basic monthly nut in a leveraged way, such that you can do multiple things, is exactly the skill set that it takes to build a business. So I think I just wouldn't recommend going down and burning through runway, I've seen it go wrong. A bunch of times, I've seen Jose's story a bunch of times, he was simply simply too early in the entrepreneurial journey to risk his savings on a product that had no validation.
Ian: I agree.
Dan: All right, we got a question from Sam regarding freelancers versus employees. ‘Hope you guys have been well. Since we last spoke, the podcasting as a service business has come along nicely. I'm now earning a comfortable income from one hour a week’. The question Sam asked is whether now he needs to officially hire a person or people to do the producer role he's currently executing himself having outsourced audio editing, or whether I can work with people on a freelance basis. ‘My thoughts freelance would be easier to administer. Just pay people well for good work and greater flexibility on both parties. Whereas with an employee, you would have more commitment. And so you wouldn't then risk compromising your brand, someone who basically wears the T shirt, so to speak. So I feel it is because the work they'll be doing is well defined and documented, ie easy for new freelancers to take over even if they are more likely to leave than an employee, then sticking with freelancers is the way to go. That said, Maybe I'm missing some inherent or implicit values that come with having people as a quote, official employee, Sam’. So the first thing that jumps out at me here, Ian, and something we've noticed in our businesses - is it really the case that a freelancer is more likely to leave you than an employee?
Ian: I don't think so.
Dan: I don't think so either. And, sometimes like, because a lot of employees are basically hired for positions that aren't well defined and that tend to change often, that often those duties or responsibilities might not match up to what their expectations are and so there can often be higher employee churn in a lot of online businesses. And again, this is from our experience at DJ, as well as our own company, than for Freelancer positions, where it's like, hey, in the case of Sam's business, he needs a professional producer, someone that loves producing shows, someone that focuses a lot of energy on it. What if you just pay them well for that little bit of work, it's one of those leveraged freelance remote work agreements we talked about at the top of the show, it's a win win for everybody?
You don't have to take on the burden of what might be payroll taxes, taxation, health care costs, the added expenses of not only the real regulatory expenses of having an employee, but also the emotional burden of providing a full career to somebody. Rather, you are providing them a leveraged source of income to do what they love. And so in that case, we might challenge the assumption that employees actually stick around longer than freelancers. It depends how you think of freelancers, and part time work, in your business. You know, one of the observations that you pointed out to me a few weeks ago, Ian, was that what we're seeing with full time hiring sweepstakes, or contests on Dynamite Jobs, in other words, we call them sweepstakes, when you put up a job post and companies that are doing that, they sort of expect to bring in people who have, yes, relevant skills, but it's more of like an attitude, like a personality thing, because they do expect that person to evolve over time. Whereas with freelance, it's very specific, like, ‘I want this skill. You come in, you do the work’, what's more consistent, you know?
Ian: Well, moving it back a couple steps, I think you got to ask yourself the question about incentives. So where are the incentives for both parties? What is the benefit for the company, and then what's the benefit for the employee or the freelancer? From there, I move on to definition. So it seems like Sam has a lot of definition around his role. So you don't necessarily need somebody that's thinking about this on the weekends or what we call like their ‘Shower time’, like they don't need to be necessarily innovating on this process. They just need to be going in and executing. So, going back to like incentives. If I'm Sam, I'm posting this opportunity and the incentive for Sam is that he doesn't have to do this himself, and that he can pay a decent wage for somebody to do this. And then all of a sudden, maybe he's doing business development, and he's not working on this at all. So he can go out and do the only thing that he can do in his business, which is grow the business I don't think you can really rely on an employee or a freelancer to do that, Sam, you got to go out and do that. So this frees you up to do that.
So your incentive is pretty high, the incentive for the freelancer, who knows? They might be somebody that's just getting off into their work from anywhere or work from home kind of leap, right? This allows them to have a different life. I mean, completely different life. So that seems like an amazing thing. If you're finding somebody at that apex like, ‘Hey, I'm gonna pay you 1500 bucks a month. They're gonna execute on this process. That's all I need right now to get into this new work from anywhere movement’. So right there, I mean, Sam's incentive and the freelancer’s incentives are both very high. I mean, the upside for both individuals in that situation are very high, life changing almost. So I think, honestly, Dan, it's just kind of on a case by case basis. In Sam’s situation, it's like the work seems clearly defined. That seems like it would be good work for a freelancer unless you had enough of it for it to be full time. And then I guess you could bring on an employee.
Dan: That's one of the perspectives I've had, Sam, over the last five years that has really changed in my mind and my thinking, I'm long freelancers, and expanding our definition of what they are and what they can bring to the table. One of the things I wouldn't be so quick to think is that they couldn't innovate maybe better than an employee, because employees tend to sit in the middle of a lot of functional processes, and it can be difficult for them to have this focused improvement. Whereas you could imagine, with something like your freelancers that are focused on one specific area of your business will, why couldn't they be incentivized to improve that? I think there's a lot of ways that, if you broaden your mind about what a freelancer or a part time specialist does in a business, and really part time professional specialists is a growing opportunity for us. You bring someone in for a part time role, for something very specific, I don't think there's any reason why you can't incentivize them to grow, to create incentives, or incentives for them to do so. And for it to be a win win for everybody, an amazing opportunity for online business owners.
Finally, we have a prompt here from a listener to check out a tweet from Jordan O'Connor, who wrote that, ‘Learning on the internet is hard. Because some people are authors who talk about implementing, and others are implementers that end up being authors. You want to find the implementers who end up being authors. They're tough to find, but they usually have a history’. Over here at the TMBA pod we've called this practitioning preachers or your practitioner to preach ratio needs to be good. Your thoughts on the ‘skin in the game’ principle, a classic TMBA theme.
Ian: I'm trying to always be careful about it. Honestly, my honest feeling is that I'm listening to this podcast as we're talking about it. And I'm trying to make sure that these are things that we've actually implemented, trying to think back to businesses that we've run and making sure that we actually did the things that we're talking about now. I do a lot when we do this podcast. I think if you ask me tomorrow, would I rather be a practitioner or a preacher, I'd rather be a practitioner. It just so happens that we like talking about this stuff, in that it's brought into our circle, a lot of interesting people. If you look back at the reason why we started doing this in the first place, is because we're lonely. And we had a feeling that other people out there were lonely, too. And it brought a lot of practitioners together. And that's basically what the DC , the Dynamite Circle is comprised of. So I think it's very tough. I think they're the person writing this tweet is right to say like, you have to look into the person's past to figure out where they're coming from to understand whether or not you should be reading practical information from them.
Dan: I think this kind of circles back to the very first question here Ian, where, you know, if I look at how Jose has responded to his big failure, he's turned it into a writing career, talking about failures. And often people on the internet are talking about the things that they need to hear right then at that moment. And that's understandable. The real action here is the nexus of your personal responsibility. If you're in the mode, where you're going to listen to people online, or buy SEO coaching, and if you're credulous enough to think that, that actually information holds the key to the reality that you're seeking. You know, I think you're gonna be in for a rude awakening. And that's why there's always an implied answer to advice, or to a message and ours has always been like, ‘Meet the people in our community’. Once you talk to the people and join a mastermind, or whatever it is, you're gonna be able to decide for yourself, and ask the questions for yourself directly to the person. ‘Hey, Ian, is that thing you said true? How much money are you actually making from that? What's going on here?’ Like that's my final answer is that you have to build real relationships with the real people. You know, if you're building relationships with information or checklists, or to do lists, which I think is a little bit of the theme we talked about in the first question about runway, which is this idea of approaching entrepreneurship as if it were going to night school. You go to so many classes, you follow the process and boom, you got a business. That's not how it's worked out for us. It's not how we see it work out very often. So yeah, I agree with the theme. I think it's something we could talk about and we have talked endlessly over the years. It’s this idea that information is an abstraction of reality. And what entrepreneurial persistence is about to get to the theme of this episode is about being responsible for your own reality and understanding it in a way that very few others do. That's entrepreneurship. It's not following a guideline from some expert on line. Go meet the expert. See what they're all about.
Ian: Word.
Dan: We appreciate your questions. We get them from our emails, Dan and Ian at tropical mba dot com. Our producer’s email is Jane at tropicalmba dot com and you can drop us a voicemail as always, you can email it to us or check it out at tropical mba dot com slash voicemail. Bossman we got a lot of work to get done today. That's it for this week. We appreciate you listening to the show and we want to give a big shout out to this week's sponsor woven dot com. That's it. We'll be back next Thursday morning Eastern Time.
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