The Jeremy Epp Show: Recent Episodes

Jeremy Epp

Do you feel stuck in your career field feeling that it is too late to make a change? Have you dreamt of starting your own business, becoming your own boss, but don't know where to begin? If you're an aspiring entrepreneur, Jeremy Epp will help you tap into your strengths and passions to help you setup, launch, and grow a successful business. With over 25 years of experience working in startups, small businesses, and large corporations, Jeremy has insights and learnings from multiple industries focused on developing systems to drive to success; which he now shares with you to help you reinvent yourself, break through the mental barriers that may be holding you back, build a viable business plan that builds upon your strengths, and empowers you to successfully launch and build a business that will enable you to make the transition from being an employee to an entrepreneur.

Success is about practicing a disciplined approach to business and mastering focused energy working on the One Thing that will leverage the biggest results. While this may be boring and you may feel that progress is slow, it is essential that this skill be mastered to achieve long-term success. Show notes and transcription available at https://jeremyepp.com/blog/secret_habit

Learn how to maximize your effectiveness by identifying the catalyst, the one thing, that if you follow, you'll reach your desired outcome. Understand how the corporate pyramid constraint is in direct conflict of increasing your effective rate and how to avoid the trap of chasing the corporate ladder treadmill. Show notes available at https://www.jeremyepp.com/blog/increase-your-effectiveness

Taking time to be grateful and appreciate what you have and how far you've come in life gives you a fresh and attractive attitude that will help you through difficult times. Show notes available at https://www.jeremyepp.com/blog/be-grateful

How much do you know about copyright laws? Do you know what you should be doing, or not doing when it comes to protecting your business material from being used by others without your permission? What about utilizing information, images, video, music on your website or within your marketing materials? Are unknowingly infringing on someone else's copyright? In today's podcast episode, we discuss multiple copyright issues, including:

The definition of a copyright
When do copyrights get applied to your original work
Why register your copyright
Liability vs. intent as it applies to copyright violation
Avoiding copyright trolls- people seeking damages from copyright infringement
Using Create Commons licensed work
Ownership of work when it comes to employee's creations
Using contracted labor- who owns the copyright
Protecting your copyright from being infringed upon by others
And much more

Access the Show Notes and Show Transcription at: www.jeremyepp.com

Your trademark is the heart of your business brand. Learn why you need to register your trademark early to protect your brand and your bank account. Learn more at https://www.jeremyepp.com/blog/trademark

Learn about the various legal pitfalls to avoid as you launch your new business, including:

Partnership agreements
Non-competes and IP infringement risks
Choosing a business entity formation with investor considerations
Employees vs independent contractors
Usage of legal insurance plans
Using 3rd party applications to service your business
And much more

Show Notes and a full transcription can be found at https://www.jeremyepp.com/blog/legal-pitfalls

Social media expert Jill Fox explains how to leverage social media to grow your business marketing. Link to the show notes at https://www.jeremyepp.com/blog/social-media-marketing

Have you considered buying a franchise as a means to starting and owning your own business? Learn more about franchises as an alternative to starting a business from scratch. In this episode Jeremy Epp interviews Joe Fox, a franchise business broker, to understand the ins and outs of buying a franchise and why you may want to consider franchise options for yourself. Show notes and the show transcription can be found at https://www.jeremyepp.com/blog/franchise-options

Learn about the different types of motivation and how you respond to different motivation types based upon the situation you're in. Show notes and more details can be found at https://www.jeremyepp.com/blog/motivation

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit at home and think about it, go out and get busy -Dale Carnegie

Show Notes:

Finding the right balance between spending the right amount of time planning your efforts and taking action isn't always easy. We tend to lean toward either spending our time planning or just jumping into taking action with little to no planning.

Both are important.

Here are eight steps to help you find the right balance:

Set a time limit to how long your going to spend planning. Once you reach the end of the time limit, start taking action.
When planning, give yourself time to set the plans aside for a period of time, then come back to the plans. You'll have a refreshed view to validate the plans you've already captured.
Determine when your plan is "good enough" to allow you to move forward. Avoid tendencies for creating the perfect plan. Realize that planning should be an ongoing activity that you should revisit throughout the process to ensure you're still on track.
Acknowledge when you're using planning as an excuse to not begin taking action. Recognize what action step is causing you anxiety and address this issue.
Validate your plan with 1-2 mentors that understand the business and support your efforts and desire. Do not waste your time trying to have your non-supportive friends validate your plan if they don't believe in what your pursing and have no experience in the business your interested in.
Ensure your action steps are aligned to the end goal. Don't get distracted by new opportunities that will come your way, but also be sure to listen to the marketplace as it may be telling you an adjustment is needed.
Create a schedule for taking action. If you need to sell, set time in your weekly calendar to go sell your product and service on regular intervals.
If your struggling to take action, consider turning it into a game that will help motivate you to take action.

For more information, review the transcription at: https://www.jeremyepp.com/episode16, and learn about utilizing the Waterfall Method to planning.

Are you a priority in your life? Do you set time aside for yourself to work on your goals and your dreams? I'm not just talking about the corporate goals for your annual performance reviews with your manager. Stay tuned as we talk about how to prioritize yourself in a busy non-stop world filled with distractions.

Welcome to episode #15. My name is Jeremy Epp, and I am here to help you set up, launch and grow a profitable business. Before we begin, do me a favor and go over to jeremyepp.com and subscribe to the show. That way you'll be informed on any new episodes or information that's coming out and you won't miss a beat.

You may have heard of the concept of pay yourself first, as it relates to money, which is the practice of paying a percentage of your income every time you get paid, first, before you pay other bills. The money is typically applied to some type of retirement account to ensure you've got a nest-egg at the end of your working career. Over time, with compounding interest, you're saving grows to a considerable amount. This is the opposite of paying your bills and obligations first and then saving money from what you have left over. Which you probably have noticed can fluctuate dramatically month to month, and you'll be fortunate if you can consistently put money aside for your retirement using this approach.

That's why financial advisors are always telling us to pay yourself first a percentage of your income before you pay other bills. Now, what if we took the same concept of pay yourself first, as it relates to money, but instead apply it to your time. Instead of paying a percentage of your income before we pay our obligations, we get out our calendars and block out a percentage of our time in the coming weeks to work on a business that will grow with time to provide an additional revenue stream for our future.

It's not uncommon, when looking at the steps required to start a business, to quickly become overwhelmed with the various requirements that will demand time to learn and develop the product, the service, the marketing, in addition to legal, accounting and all the other tools necessary to start and launch a business. Instead of slowly taking action, we tell ourselves, "We'll get to it someday," but that day never comes because we keep pushing it off into the future, always getting swallowed up by other career, other family and personal obligations.

This is where a schedule yourself comes into play. For example, you may have a desire to write a book, but you don't have the option of setting aside a full day to write for several weeks in a row. However, if you could write one hour a day, every day for several weeks, at the end of the month, you'd have a chapter completed and at the end of the year you'd have a book written.

When I had a vision for this podcast, it was my desire to produce two to three episodes per week to share my message and help others. But, my schedule wouldn't allow for the time to produce that level of volume in the beginning. So, instead of producing two to three episodes, I committed to producing one show a week, every week, knowing that at the end of the year I would have completed 25 shows, because I started in the middle of the year. But, 25 shows produced was 25 shows more than I had at that moment. If I take this 25 and do this for another year, I'll be up to 77 shows and over a hundred episodes in just two years time.

As I learn how to better balance my time, I'm implementing the practice of batching my activities, where I'll record multiple episodes in a day or over a given weekend. But, the reality is that there are still times when even getting one episode out a week is still a challenge. However, I want to hit my goal of 25 episodes by the end of the year. So, I continue to grind it out even when it's those tough weeks. I don't want to look back at the end of the year and think, "Man, if I had just been consistent and started in June, I would have had 25 episodes already completed." So, this is where scheduling yourself first comes into play.

If I were to give you 5, 10 or even 20 hours a week to work on your business, how would you spend your time? Would you begin to write that book, develop and test a product, build and launch a marketing campaign? Perhaps, you might even reach out to prospects and talk about hire your company to help them. Would you build an infrastructure that would allow you to automate various requirements, allowing you to spend your time on high dollar producing activities?

If you were to set aside one hour a day to work on your business, Monday through Friday, over the course of a year, you would have invested 260 hours in your business, which equates to about six and a half weeks worth of work at 40 hours a week. If you doubled it to two hours a day, Monday through Friday, you'd have 520 hours or 13 weeks worth of work, which equates to three months. If you add in four hours every weekend, so a total of 12.5% of your waking hours, after we had equate for eight hours worth of sleeping, you'd have 18 weeks worth of work done at the end of the year or four and a half months worth of 40 hours a week worth of work into your business.

The point I'm trying to make here is it's not all or nothing. You can start small and make major changes, if you are consistent at it and you schedule yourself first, the time will add up and there will be value. So stop saying, "I'll get to it one day," and one day never occurs. You've got to be diligent. Start where you're at today. Figure out how to carve out some time and stick to that. If you are able to commit to setting aside time to work on your business, you are going to face pressure to do the work later, so that you can participate in some other activity. Don't expect others to value your commitment to set time aside for your priorities.

An example of others not sharing the value of my priority comes when I was working in real estate. Frankly, I was on call seven days a week, always waiting for the phone to ring, asking for assistance or some kind of question that would always keep me on edge. Frankly, I was feeling pretty burnt out. I like to have downtime where I have no expectations, I'm not waiting for the phone to ring and I can just purely relax and invest myself in whatever is non-work related.

I made an interesting decision that I was going to set aside a Sunday as my family day. I say interesting because in real estate, as you can imagine, the weekends are pretty busy. But, I had built up my business to such, where I could afford to take a weekend off and focus that on a family day. However, when I would tell clients that I'm unavailable on Sundays because it's a family day, they would typically give me a nod and say, "Okay, sounds good." However, it wasn't very long before I would get a phone call saying, "Hey, we just came across a home. We'd like to take a look at it. I know it's your family day, but it should only take about 20 minutes."

Well, consistently a 20 minutes showing would turn into an interest and we would end up writing an offer on the home and it would end up costing three to five hours worth of work. I'm not begrudging writing an offer, after all, that's how I got paid as a realtor. However, it did take away the value of what I was trying to accomplish with setting aside a family day in the first place. So instead, what I found is that I would tell people that, "I'm sorry I cannot meet on Sunday. My calendar is full with other appointments." Their response would be, "Oh, okay, that's fine. Are you available Monday?" And that worked out fantastic for me.

Going to the corporate world, I found a similar response when I would go take a day off from work. My co-workers and other managers would still think I was accessible even though I wasn't at the office. "Yeah, he's not here, but give him a call, give him an email. He could jump into that meeting." The key here was to let people know that I wasn't accessible as I had other appointments throughout the day. What I wouldn't tell them is that the appointment was with myself to work on my business. There is a perceived difference in saying, "Hey, I'm taking tomorrow off," versus saying, "Hey, I won't be in tomorrow as I have several appointments." "Oh, okay. Sounds good. I'll see you the following day."

Let me switch gears here. I want to touch briefly on the benefits of scheduling yourself first. Now the first benefit is ending the guilt that you currently have of not taking action. You need to silence those voices in your head telling you that you should be doing something to better your future. I know you know what I'm talking about, because I felt it, personally, myself for many, many years, telling me, "Get off your butt. Go do this. Stop just thinking about it. Start taking action."

Number two builds off of number one of scheduling yourself first, as it helps to end in decisiveness. By taking action you will gain clarity. As you start to take steps to build your business, you'll gain direction based upon getting clearer with your thoughts and through market feedback of what your business should be. You don't have to have 100% right before you begin. In fact, I would encourage you, if you have some semblance of an idea of your business, get started on it and clarity will come. But, you must schedule the time to allow yourself to work on it.

The third benefit is you need to learn how to prioritize your work. As you are setting aside your time to work on your business, you really need to get smart about where the bang for your buck will be. To pull from the Pareto principle, "You need to focus on the 20% of the effort that will produce 80% of your results." Which leads right into benefit number four, which is by doing this, you're going to just achieve your goals faster. If you can write one hour a day, over the course of a year, you're going to have your first book. Amazing. Think about that. How many people desire to write a book in their lifetime, but never do? And you could be one of those with only a year. You could write your first book.

Another benefit is that you're going to gain confidence in your skills and your abilities, and you're going to take back control. Instead of working to be validated by your corporate job and your corporate efforts, you'll create an environment for self-validation. Stop looking to others outside of yourself to validate what you're doing in a corporate world, but, instead, look to yourself to gain that self-validation through your own efforts and the work that you're doing.

Finally, one of the other benefits for scheduling yourself first is you're going to be more energetic, as you create a better future for yourself and build up positive momentum. It's just going to be exciting. You're going to see the progress, you're going to build off of that energy, you're going to gain clarity, and as you move forward, your future becomes brighter than it ever has before.

In episode #13, I talk about scheduling your time when you're at your peak production time zone. If you can match up the time you set aside for your work on a daily basis with your peak performance, my goodness, you're going to be able to multiply your results and be that much further ahead.

If you want to learn more about how to launch your own business and work toward leaving the corporate environment, go to my website at jeremyepp.com, and subscribe to the show. Also, for a limited time, and I mentioned this in my last episode, I'm offering a free business coaching session to a select number of people. If you are interested in getting advice and having somebody look over your shoulder, go to jeremyepp.com/coaching and fill out that questionnaire for consideration. We'll be pouring through the information and selecting a handful of people for a coaching session in which we can help provide some clarity and some guidance.

I appreciate you tuning in. Thank you for your support and I look forward to speaking with you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening. Be sure to visit our website at www.jeremyepp.com for more information and resources.

There are 7 principles of leverage that when properly applied to your business, will grow your business exponentially. If you are just starting your business or have been running a business for years, learn more about these leverage principles and how they will multiply your results without additional effort.

For a full transcript, visit https://jeremyepp.com/blog/leverage-principles

Finding the balance between working a full-time job and starting a business on the side is hard work. Learn about different tips and tricks you can do to create more time to spend building your business.

If you've been in a corporate environment for a period of time and you're working towards starting your own company, you'll need to shift the way you think about business and how you approach business activities. Stay tuned as we talk about the 10 mindsets you'll need to incorporate into your business startup to be successful.

Welcome to episode #12. My name is Jeremy Epp and I'm here to help you set up, launch, and grow a profitable business. Before we begin, do me a favor, head on over to JeremyEpp.com and subscribe to the show. This way you'll stay in the loop on vital information including new podcast episodes that will help you in your journey to reach your career goals while creating an amazing lifestyle for you and your family.

My first introduction into the startup business mindset began when I took a job coming out of college. I had a recruiter gal that was helping me locate a job that was better suited for my talents and she gave me an opportunity to join a startup company, which I was very excited about. The startup company had three partners and I was to be the fourth person to join the team. The first employee.

I still remember sitting at a table listening to the owners of the business talk about how they were to approach various problems with different solutions and I recall hearing them talk in a different way than I've ever heard before, and it dawned on me while sitting at the table that if we did not sell anything that we did not eat. There was no guarantee. There was nobody writing a paycheck for anybody. There was no higher level corporation that was behind the scenes with their accounting department waiting to write a payroll check every other Friday.

Understanding that and looking at how these individuals thought differently than anybody else that I had been exposed to, it opened my eyes up to the world of entrepreneurship and startups and running your own company. Today, I want to share with you 10 key startup mindsets that you'll want to adopt if you want to be successful.

Now, I've worked in the corporate environment for many years as well, and so I understand the paradigm shifts between the two mindsets of both an entrepreneurial mindset and a corporate mindset, and so we'll talk about the mindsets that as you're shifting away from a corporate environment that you need to be successful and to think differently.

So let me jump right into it. I want to talk about mindset #1, which we've talked about this in another podcast, but it's very, very important and that is the mindset about cash flow. Everything you do must be focused on creating and increasing sales or decreasing costs. Now with that, you can only decrease costs so much. Primary focus needs to be on increasing revenue to the company. Everything you do must be focused on that, especially during the startup phase. It is critical to maintain and grow your business. You've got to get that cash flow, that lifeblood, that business lifeblood flowing into the business to build it up for the ups and down cycles that are to come in a business.

You'll also need to think differently as far as how you design your products. And what I mean by that is you'll need to go out and sell your idea first. Sell your product first, and then create the product. This seems counterintuitive, but if you think about it, it's really the smart thing to do. You might go out there and spend countless hours and money building up resources to develop a product just to turn around and make an introduction into the marketplace and find out nobody wants it. You missed the mark completely. They're perfectly satisfied with their other alternatives, or you're missing the mark with your features and your benefits. So the smartest thing to do would be to sell first on the idea before you create the product, and then go out and create it knowing that you've got sales in mind.

Mindset #2, speed. You've got to change the velocity in which you take action. You don't have the luxury of time to build the perfect product or have the perfect marketing strategy or to sit there in debates and have discussions with coworkers and big committees to get approval. You need to move quickly. You have time working against you and you have cash flow putting pressure on you. You must move quickly in response to the market and to get out there. You don't have the time to set up this elaborate system. You must go, go, go and get the system caught back up with you.

All right, let's move to mindset #3. You must be humble and you must have the willingness to take on roles beneath your skills as well as learn new skills. Let me say that again. You must be willing to take on roles beneath you as well as learn to take on new skills. You're going to need to be the CEO as well as the janitor. You're going to be the finance department as well as the sales department. You're going to be the product development team as well as the customer service call center.

When you start out, you're going to be wearing all these different hats. Now, you might be in a position with your startup to have a partner or you may have enough resources to outsource some of this stuff immediately, but more than likely, you may have to grow into that as your business grows. So initially you're going to need to understand things and be willing to jump in and help out wherever it's required. So be prepared for that. You can't just outsource this to anybody. You're going to be doing the important work as well as some of the mundane, boring work, but yet it still needs to take place.

Mindset #4 you'll need to get creative on your solutions. And what I mean by this is due to cashflow constraints, due to cash constraints, you won't typically have access to all the latest and greatest tools. You may come from a corporate environment where you've got all these amazing software products at your fingertips to do the job, but when you break out on your own, those products are often quite expensive and in some cases quite customized already. So you may be getting software off the shelf that has to be customized to tailor fit to what your needs are, or you may not even be able to afford some of that software and you're going to have to get creative on how you utilize what tools you do have in order to make your business work.

All right, moving on to mindset #5. At first, you will not have a steady paycheck. You know, we've all heard the stories of these amazing entrepreneurs that struggled and scraped together and bootstrapped their business, and after a period of time, typically years of hard, hard work, they're now making amazing amounts of income and they're able to help grow their business and support their families in ways that they've never even dreamt of.

But there's a price to pay and everybody has to kind of go through the motions and the experiences of really struggling at the very beginning. Not that that's what they want, but that's just reality. Now, the good news is if you can think beyond that point, you realize that in the corporate environment, there's always income limitations. When you work for somebody else, you will only grow so much. You may have caps to how much your paycheck can rise over the course of a year. Maybe it's a cost of living, or maybe there's small promotions. But bottom line is there's limitations to that and it takes a long time to move up the ladder. And eventually, you're going to find yourself in a position where you kind of flatline out. Now, with a startup, initially, you're not going to have any income, let's be honest, but over time it becomes almost unlimited is the opportunity there. So keep that in mind if you're successful in your business.

All right, mindset #6, you do not need a fancy office and a prime location. You need to put your ego to the side and you need to be thinking about cash flow. So again, I keep coming back to this because it really is the lifeblood of your business. But when you begin your company, there is very little reason why you need to rent space in the downtown area of the city in a high rise. Often times you can start out by working at home or sometimes in a shared office environment. You need to take on that bootstrap mentality. Take a look at what kind of work you're doing and analyze if you really need that presence to where people will come to you for business. Often times in today's technology environment, you could do things through Skype or video chats and other activities.

I know an attorney that I work with that he has a home office in Seattle that he spends half of his year and the other half of the year he's in Spain. So again, he's not having people come to him. He's generally on the phone having meetings this way. When I was in real estate, I found out that I did not have people come to my office for meetings, typically. I would go to them. So typically you do not have to put yourself into an office environment where you've got additional funds coming out. Now I understand that not everybody's home situation allows for them to do that and perhaps you can get creative. One time for a couple of years, I rented space inside of a CPA firm's office. I rented one of their offices. I didn't pay anything for utilities, I didn't pay anything additional for a front desk.

There's other options like WeWork that allows you to rent space, whether it's a dedicated office space or just an as-needed office space. So there's more and more opportunities and options that are coming up, which is fantastic. And I think also importantly, the public, your customers understand that there are creative ways to work as well and they may not necessarily think anything less of you and your business if you do not have that high rise office space that you think that you may need.

All right, let's move on to mindset #7. As a startup, you do not need anyone's permission to take action. You are the sole decision-maker. You can move forward. You do not need to have permission from the finance department and from the directors to move forward. You can make a decision and move forward. However, for some folks, this can be difficult, especially if you're used to bouncing your ideas off of others to get their perspectives and sometimes you could even say and to get their permission.

So again, if you need to be in a place to make a decision and move forward, and be confident with that, which leads into mindset #8. You need to expect failures and setbacks, but you need to learn from them, adjust, and move forward quickly. Again, you need to expect failures and setbacks, but you need to learn from them, adjust your actions, and move forward quickly. Just as #7 was you don't need anybody's permission to take action, that also means that you are the sole responsible person if you make a mistake.

The key here is that you cannot let failure stop you. You need to expect them. They will happen. This is part of the entrepreneur's journey is to make mistakes, make adjustments, learn and grow, and make a better product, and make a better service. Don't let failures shake you from your confidence, but at the same time, be wise when you make these decisions. Don't bet with all your chips to where if you were to fail, you're out of the game. Don't go all in. You want to be nice and steady and wise with your course of action. You want to test the market, get feedback, make adjustments, learn, tweak, and make a better. Put it back out there for more testing and more feedback.

All right, you hanging in there? We got two more. So moving on to #9. The beautiful thing about being an entrepreneur and a startup mentality is that you get a focus on creating something new and fresh versus being focused on competition. This mindset shift comes from Justin Atlan. Justin talks about, in the corporate environment, there is this competitive nature. Large companies are continuously competing for market share. Coke vs. Pepsi, Nike vs. Reebok, Ford vs. Chevrolet vs. Dodge versus Toyota. You get my point. Companies in a competitive environment are always racing to find the next feature that customers are wanting and also they're in a pricing war typically.

You as a startup can't compete at that. You don't have the deep pockets and the time on your side. Instead, you need to shift your mindset to focus on creating unique solutions to problems and offer alternatives to the marketplace that they don't currently have. That's your unique selling proposition. You're going to come to the market with a better mousetrap, with a new opportunity, with a different way to do things and that is what's going to set you apart. Don't go after the same thing that everybody else is doing. Don't put your hat in the ring of competition.

I saw this in the mortgage industry after the housing boom. They took a lot of the creative products that were misused and abused by unethical mortgage brokers and banks and they took those off the table. And what that did is it put everybody in that industry at a pricing war. And so instead of offering and having the ability to offer creative solutions that were uniquely designed for an individual borrower, it put them at a pricing war. There was a 30-year fixed rate mortgage option and there was a 15-year rate fixed mortgage option and that was it. So at that point, the consumer says, "Well, if it's the same price, I want the best rate at the lowest price." Who wouldn't? So again, focus on being creative with something fresh and new.

And lastly, mindset #10. When you're in the corporate environment, you are typically working 40, 50, maybe 60 hours a week. Sometimes a little bit more. But generally somewhere in the 40 to 50 hours a week. When you clock off for work and you walk out the door, you might have some lingering thoughts about a meeting that's coming up or reflecting on a meeting that you had and how you would address those concerns, et cetera. But generally, for the most part, you're kind of off work, in air quotes.

Well in startups, you're on 24/7. When you wake up, you're thinking about how to do things differently and how to do things better. When you're at work, you're not punching in a clock. You're working as much energy as you have and then some. You're constantly thinking about it in the evenings. In the weekends, you're going to wake up in bed thinking about things. So your mindset is going to shift. But the difference here, and there's a benefit to all this and that is you won't mind because you're building something for yourself versus building a business for others.

This is the joy and the amazing opportunity that startups and being an entrepreneur offers is you get to be creative and you get to help others and you're building something for you and your family and your future as the owner versus building something bigger and amazing for somebody else.

If you want to learn more about how to launch your own business and work toward leaving the corporate environment, then head over to my website, JeremyEpp.com and subscribe to the show. Begin learning on how to set up, launch, and grow your profitable business to take you to the next level. I appreciate you tuning in. Thank you again for your support and I look forward to speaking to you on the next episode.

Are you layoff-proof? Do you have a plan that you've implemented to decrease your risks of a layoff? Or are you leaving it to chance and the fact that you're "a hard worker" to see you through the lean times? See why creating a side hustle may be your best insurance against being laid off.

Welcome to episode #11. My name is Jeremy Epp, and I'm here to help you set up, launch and grow a profitable business. Before we begin, do me a favor and go to JeremyEpp.com and subscribe to the show. This way you won't miss out on vital information that will help you in your journey to reach your career goals, while creating an amazing lifestyle for you and your family.

If you turn on the news today, you're going to hear a lot of talk about concerns about recession. You're going to turn onto one news cycle and you're going to hear about the indicators and the trends going down and toward a recession. On the other hand, you're going to flip on stories and you're going to hear politicians and CEOs of large corporations telling you how great and wonderful everything is and that there is no recession.

So which one is it? There's confusion, there's back and forth. Who do you believe? Well, it's been my experience over the years that the more back and forth you have, typically the more accurate it is that something bad is on the horizon. Now to what degree, nobody really knows, but I do know this. When things are trending up and the economy and the trends are showing favorable, typically people are not in conflict with the messaging.

So the louder the politicians get of how there is no recession, everybody sit tight and stay calm, the higher chances are there's probably something there that they're concerned about. They're just trying to avoid the panic. I know you've seen this too. You've been around the block. You've seen this happen on many occasions. We've seen it in the housing market crisis in the 2008 - 2010 crash and in other situations similar to that.

We're talking about layoffs today. We're talking about how to protect yourself in the event of a corporate layoff. And I want you to begin to think about how you could be proactive in building out mitigation plans and multiple streams of income to protect yourself. But first I want to ask you, have you ever experienced a layoff for yourself? Have you ever heard the concerns in the office, the rumors, the "what ifs" and the, "Hey, I heard this is going to be happening."

And you start to think about will that impact me? Will that impact my team or my larger organization? When would it happen? When would we know more about it and what would it look like? Well, I've been in that position, and in fact I've been in that position on three separate occasions. I've also been in other situations where layoffs are going around me and fortunately haven't impact my particular organization.

In fact, I was at a corporation when there was an announcement where a particular team was going to have their jobs moved from the Seattle area down to California. And the individuals that were getting impacted were told that they could reapply for their same job. However, that job would be at a lower rate and if they got the job, they would be responsible to relocate themselves down to California at their own expense.

And I sat there in this facility, watching people in their 50s literally walking around stunned, almost as if they had gotten in a car wreck and were able to get out and they were in a sense of shock. And they weren't quite coherent, but they were almost like zombies.

In fact, I heard one gentleman who was in his 50s mention that he didn't know what to do. He had always worked at this company since graduating from college. In fact, he said, "I don't even know how to apply for a job. I don't know how to complete a resume. I've never done this before. I've never needed to do this." And he was very concerned about being in his mid-50s and being looked down upon because of his age and not being rehired because of that. On the flip side, he wasn't prepared to retire either.

I heard another story of a gentleman who made the decision that he was willing to relocate his family to California at his own expense, and applied for a job that was paying less than what he was paid for doing it previously. Eventually he told me that the job that he applied for his current job, he was denied on the basis that he was overqualified, which was ironic because he had been doing that job for over eight years.

So for whatever reason, and I don't want to get into analyzing the ethics of layoffs and moving jobs around, but I want to help protect you against layoffs and give you options. So there's a couple of lessons that I've learned personally, I've watched, I've experienced them based upon various activities and events in my life, that I strongly encourage you to make it something that you apply in your life.

So the first lesson I want to talk about is acknowledge that change happens. Change is going to impact us, whether or not we believe it will. We might be able to stay in an environment, tuck ourselves back in a corner, feel like we're future-proof or untouchable. But eventually there's a high chance that we will need to change with the change around us. These might come in the wake of a recession or concerns about recession.

These might come in the wake of an event that has impacted the company and now the company has to make some tough decisions. It may come in the event of a company merger and acquisition like one of my layoffs did, or it may come in the advancement of technology to where the role that you played is no longer relevant. It's being outsourced or it is now being done by technology or it's no longer needed at all. Whatever it is, you need to acknowledge that change happens and that it's coming.

Now, not all change is bad, but not all change is good either. So the key here is understanding and be looking out or change. Pretending that change is not something that will impact you, will only make it worse. In Ken Blanchard's book, Who Moved My Cheese? it's a parable about a story of two little mice and two little men that work together and a maze. And every morning they get up and they go to a corner of the maze and there's cheese in the corner, and they enjoy the cheese for their food and they go back at the end of the day.

Well one morning they wake up and go to the corner and there's no cheese. So the two mice look at each other and they go off and search for where the cheese went, where the two men sit there and have a conversation about what they should do. And in essence they're talking about, "Well we can stay here or we should stay here because that cheese will eventually come back." And so they make that decision to stay there for many days in a row. And eventually one of the men make the decision, "No, we've got to go and search for the cheese. It has moved on." Bottom line is, the story is when hit with change, you need to be prepared to move on.

So I would encourage you to make plans for change, whether it's happening now or whether you know it may happen in the future, just have plans in your mind and be ready to take action. And that leads us to lesson number two which is take action despite your fears. It's said that 90% of the time, the fear that we feel is mentally self-imposed. We believe that something horrible will happen if you do or you do not take action. And most of the time it is not reality.

I like how Tim Ferris in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek talks about how he analyzes a situation, whether it's an opportunity or otherwise. And he'll typically what he'll do is he'll look at it and he'll analyze, okay, if I moved toward this opportunity or toward this mitigation plan, what's the worst thing that can happen to me? And he looks at the worst case scenario and he determines if he can live with it and if he can recover, if that worst case scenario does happen, and then he makes a decision to move forward toward that.

The reality is most of the time that will never come to be because it's mentally self-imposed, the worst case scenario. So the key here is to run toward what scares you, face your fear and conquer it. Realize that making no decision is still a decision. The key here is to take action despite your fear.

And the third lesson I want to talk about is when things do happen, I want you to move forward. You need to look forward and not backward. When hit with change, you've got to move on. You've got to be like the mice in the maze. You need to just implement that plan B and you need to move forward. I was involved in real estate during the housing crisis, that hit between the years of 2008 and 2010. many people in the industry didn't know what to do. Many of them try to stay in the industry and they picked up odd jobs here and there.

So I saw these folks and they were working three times as hard for less than half the pay. And when I spoke with them, their thought process was, "Hey, when the market turns, I'll be right back in it. I'll be the first one back in the game." Now my theory was I can go and leapfrog out of the industry and when the industry comes back, I can leapfrog back in and I'm actually headed the game.

So bottom line is they didn't know what to do. They were afraid to leave and try something completely different and they didn't have a plan. When you're hit with change, you need to not paralyze. Don't wait for things to return to normal. Don't sit there in the corner waiting for that cheese to show back up. It's probably not coming back and if it does come back, it's going to be moldy and it's not going to be what it used to be. You need to acknowledge that when change happens, it's the new normal.

So I'm a big believer in having mitigation plans. Plan A often fails and you need to have a plan B to roll into its place. Working in a corporate environment, you need to be thinking outside of the box. You need to be thinking about how you might be impacted. And you might say to yourself, "Hey, I am the top of my team. I'm invaluable. They would never lay me off." And you're probably right. They do not want to lay you off. But yet you must acknowledge that sometimes decisions are outside of your boss's hands and their control.

And in fact, how many times have you heard of entire organizations or branches of a specific company being sold off or closed down? Well, there are countless people, dozens, if not hundreds of good folks of good quality folks that are unable to move within the company to a different position because there's just not enough positions. And if you think that your boss or your boss's boss has got your back, you need to be prepared for the inevitability that they may have their job on the line as well. And so they're going to be scrambling for themself first before they're thinking about anybody else.

So if you think you're safe because you're top of the heap of your team, you really need to be thinking about having a stronger Plan B. What does this have to do with starting your own business? Well, many times folks need to realize that if their industry is being hit by one particular thing, that may impact their ability to go to a competitor and try to get that same job with them. First of all, there may not be a need for it. Second of all, they may be also impacted by the same situation that your company's being impacted on. And thirdly, they may just get flooded with applications and they just don't have the bandwidth to bring you on.

So what are you going to do? You got to change your skill. You're going to move something, or you can look for something outside of a corporate environment. And that is starting your own company, whether it's a side hustle and you're a consultant, or you're looking to do something where you have more control and more stability in your world. So there's great advantages to starting a side hustle to create a platform that is outside of a company. To where you can have control and you can grow it on your terms to the market that you're interested in, and add the value of how you best see it.

So what's your plan B? What are you going to do? Are you going to live in denial saying that, "I'm not going to be impacted by change"? Are you going to roll the dice and take the gamble and say, "Well, I'll deal with it when it comes, if it comes at all." Or are you going to say, "That makes sense. Change does happen. I've seen it before and I don't want to be in that same position of somebody caught off guard and not knowing what to do next."

Well, I would encourage you to make connections in other parts of your company. Build those networks now, so that you can have a place to go to, should something happen. Reach out to other companies and make connections there as well. You never know when you may need to move from one corporation to another because of a different situation that's impacting you. And I would also encourage you to strongly consider starting your own business on the side. This is something that would enable you to build it how you see fit and if done right, could eventually take over your corporate job and give you options for a different lifestyle.

If you believe there's wisdom and creating career mitigation plans, plan Bs, and want to learn more about how launching your own business would be a viable solution, then go to my website at JeremyEpp.com and subscribe to the show. Begin learning on how to set up, launch, and grow a successful business to help make you lay-off proof. I appreciate you tuning in and I thank you for your continued support, and I look forward to speaking with you on the next step.

Show Notes

Your gut, your core, your inner voice, your spirit, your chi, or your instinct, whatever you call it. Today we're going to talk about trust. Trust in yourself, and trust in the calling of your inner core.

Welcome to episode #10 my name is Jeremy Epp and I am here to help you set up, launch, and grow a profitable business. Have you ever had a goal that you found yourself daydreaming about? I mean really daydreaming about. Not just a one time thing, but over and over again? A goal that was so much bigger than yourself and your beliefs that you left it in the daydream stage. You thought, "There is no way I could ever do this." Perhaps it was a goal to start your own business. Perhaps it was to travel abroad for an extended period of time, get into shape, or volunteer for a year with an organization overseas, but you dismissed the thought and said to yourself, "I can't do that? I don't have the time or the money. I have obligations with my family, with my company. I just can't stop and quit and move on to something new."

However, months later, if not years later, you keep finding yourself returning to the same goal, to the same daydreams. I had a goal of helping people with their business. When I was younger I found my passion in business and just loved all of the challenges and how business came together in so many different aspects and there's so many different ways to approach a problem. It really got me excited. But as I looked for opportunities to restart a new business, I kept coming back to "what do I know?" Not what my passion is, but where's my expertise? And I kept returning to the real estate industry because I had been in the industry for 19 years and I thought, "Yeah, I could help people with their real estate business, with their marketing, with learning how to set up and grow their business, how to work with real estate clients, et cetera."

I actually started a real estate podcast and I started up a company for that, but I knew deep in my heart that that was a short term situation. I knew I didn't have the passion and the drive to really put everything of me into it and I knew that that would come out and my audience would see right through me and see that my heart wasn't in it and they would tune me out. But it's what I knew. It's where my expertise lie, but I kept coming back to, "But my passion is in business, small business, helping people like you get out of a situation where they're not happy, where they're not satisfied, where they have so much more to offer the world than just working at a large corporation. That's where my passion drives." So I finally decided to take a chance and listen to that voice and start this business as a side hustle and I'm glad I did.

I knew immediately that that was the right choice. I knew that by saying no to the real estate growth and helping people with their specific real estate business and focusing more on the business, the small entrepreneur, I would still help businesses like the realtor and the real estate broker. However, my focus was going to be to a bigger audience and specifically to an audience that was similar to me, that was stuck in their mid career and had obligations that held them back even though their passion wasn't there, but they just agonized when they thought of spending the next 10, 15, 20 plus years of their life in a corporate environment. Just counting down the years and the months toward when they could retire. What a life. No, thank you. So why do we push down that inner voice? Is it because we tell ourselves that it's not logical? That these ideas are crazy? And sometimes they are crazy.

Sometimes it is not logical. Are we worried about what others may think about us? Are we desperate for people's approval that we fall into the trap of not wanting to be different? Ironically, it's those people that do take that chance, that step out of the mold that we celebrate, that make all the difference. I think of all the great artists and the musicians that we celebrate today because they are different, because they speak to who we really want to be and who we are in our core. They're not singing about getting a corporate job and working for the next 40 years of their life so that they could one day retire and then go traveling. No, we celebrate the Mother Teresas, we celebrate the Steve Jobs who had the courage to step out and do something different. We think of the dreamers like Elon Musk who took a dream so radical and actually built cars and products and are continuing to dream to this day and sharing with the world new technology. We think of authors and speakers like Seth Goden who speak simple truths that are outside of the box, but they make complete sense to us.

And then of course we have the greats, like Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and many others that have come before us that have set the trends. Well, they didn't listen to others, did they? Were they so concerned that they were discouraged? I'm sure they were, but did they stop? Did they shut down or did they continue? Were they called crazy? Were they radicalists outside of the box thinkers? Were they celebrated at their time? Probably not. People probably thought they were just that wacky, crazy person. So why do we not listen to that inner core? Why do we have so little faith and trust in ourselves?

It was in the fall of 2006 and my wife and I had decided that we wanted to make an offer on a new construction home. In fact, it was a home that wasn't even built yet. There was a builder in our local area. We really enjoyed his building and we were looking for something a little bit better layout in a little nicer condition of a home compared to the home that we had been actively upgrading over the many years. And so we found a lot that was being offered for sale and we made an offer on it. The realtor that was helping represent the seller at the time, the builder, gave us a couple options as far as what homes that they were planning on placing on that lot. We enjoyed the floorplan and we really were excited because that was the right home, but we wanted to make several tweaks, several customization features that were not too radical but still radical enough to the point where they weren't in the builder's original plans and the builder was willing to do them.

However, they wanted to have the money up front for those changes in case we backed out or couldn't get financing down the road. And so we paid out different funds. We extended the garage and made it larger. We upgraded the heating system, we upgraded some of the finish work and the materials of the countertops and some of the materials that were going to be used and selected and a host of other things. And these upgrades, including our deposit down on the home, was roughly about $30,000 and so we had to pay that money up front. So over the course of the building that took place in late Fall and early Winter of 2006, we felt being in the real estate industry, that there was starting to be a slowdown in the marketplace.

And we were very concerned about this. Our house was set to close in February of 2007 and we were kinda touch and go with the builder as far as their schedule goes. But we had some nagging feelings, I'll call it our inner core, was really talking to me and my wife, and it was saying that this house was a bad move. It was a bad idea. And in fact, we had a few conversations about whether or not we should pull out of the deal and go figure out another plan. But what we didn't want to do was lose that $30,000 and we knew that if we pulled out, that was money that was going to be gone. And that's a lot of money, let's be honest. So we kind of convinced ourselves, "Let's just stay in the game and let's stick with it. And worst case scenario, we'll keep the house for a year and then we'll sell it and not only cover our costs, but we'll actually make a profit and then we'll figure out what the next steps are from there."

Well, as the building process moved forward, the closing date moved from February, eventually into April. And over the course of that couple of month extension that the building needed to finish out the building, the mortgage rates rose dramatically. And so by the time we were set to close, our interest rate had skyrocketed and we were in a very bad position. So again, we kind of came back to, "Well, we've got enough funds, we can hold onto the house for a year, a year and a half or so without much of an issue. And then we can sell the home."

Well, we closed on the home and if you listen to my last episode, #9, you learned that eventually my business dried up. We had no income source really coming in for 2007 and we eventually lost the house in the third quarter of 2008, which incidentally cost us a whole lot more than the $30,000 that we would have lost had we listened to our instinct and that inner gut and told us to back out when that voice came evident in December of 2006. So why do we turn away from that?

Why do we talk ourselves out of it? Are we so busy thinking it's just noise? Do we try to bury this? Is it uncomfortable? I would say yes to all of those things. So what's a time when you've had a gut feeling and you've chosen to ignore it? What were the consequences? Did it work out just fine and there was no big deal or was there something negative that occurred that had you listened to your gut and followed through and taken action, you would've avoided that pain or that cost or that situation? A time, a positive time when we did listen to our gut, many years ago, my wife and I, we traveled to a small resort town outside in eastern Washington called Leavenworth, Washington. This whole town is built around a Bavarian theme. It's a beautiful setting surrounded by gorgeous mountains and you're in this little valley with these beautiful buildings and this character that's just fantastic.

And it's only a couple of hours away from our house that we lived in at the time. So we had been invited to attend a timeshare presentation to a new resort community that was being built in Leavenworth. And we were so excited because we love that town. In fact, we had dreamt of eventually maybe buying a second home or a piece of land that we could build a second property in Leavenworth area and just really enjoy the peace and the community and the views that everything that Leavenworth had to offer. So we put a deposit down and we are super excited, but over the course of the next day or so as we travel back to our home on in western Washington and we began to talk and think about it and we both kind of had a negative feeling in our core and we chose to actually follow through.

And so when we got back to our place, we reached back out to the timeshare company and said, "I'm sorry, but we're going to need to pull out of the transaction and get some of our money refunded." We did lose, we believe approximately $500 on that. And again, it's not fun to lose any money, but we just felt that this was a bad investment for us at that time, even though we knew that this was a prime time to get in at the ground stage while the costs were still low. But we listened to that gut and we followed through and, and lo and behold, it was probably less than two years later that that timeshare company went bust. They filed bankruptcy and everybody that had invested in it had lost everything that they put into it.

So that was a time where we were listening to our gut and we've all heard stories about that air traveler or that train traveler that had a funny feeling and decided to not get on that plane or not get on that train and make that trip and something bad happened on the trip and they were spared that. So why do we not listen to our gut more? Why do we deny it? I'd say it's because it's kind of a mystery to us, you know? Is it just this weird feeling? Is it based upon logic? You know, when my wife told me she didn't feel good about my partnership and I kind of dismissed her and then later, I should've listened to her, why do we turn that away?

Well, a couple of takeaways when it comes to your gut and the first that I want to share with you is that as you listen to your gut, I'm going to encourage you to actually follow it and take action even though it doesn't make sense all the time. Even though it may be counterintuitive. But I want to say that if you take action and follow that, follow your gut, follow your instinct, your action will bring clarity as you move forward. However, you must follow it. You must begin even when you don't have all the answers, but your clarity of that direction will come to you as you progress down the path. Bestselling author, Mike Littman states, "You don't have to get it right. You just have to get it going."

I recently was told a story about a gentleman who came to America. His parents were first generation immigrants and he was trying to make it on his own. He had finished college, his parents had poured everything into him and put all their hopes and dreams into him. And here after attending college, he was struggling in the entertainment industry and he longed to be a success in what he set his mind to. He was a videographer and he did a lot of work kind of behind the scenes, taking videos. Well, he literally was on his last leg as far as financial speaking and he had made his last rent payment and he had this nagging voice in his mind saying, "You need to buy a camera. You need to buy a camera, you need to buy a camera."

It made no sense to him. He was down to his last dollars. He had video equipment, but no camera. He didn't know anything about a camera, but he decided to follow his gut and he went and used the last remaining $2000 on his credit card balance and he purchased a camera and some equipment, so now he was down to nothing. He was literally calling up trader Joe's, asking them when they threw out their produce and other products because he was having to dumpster dive for his food. He had to let his roommate know that he had no money for rent that month. Well, circumstances would have it that after he bought the camera, a friend of a friend of a friend contacted him and asked him if he did videography to which he replied, "Absolutely I do."

Well, it turns out that Usher, the great Usher was doing a video shoot and wanted to have a videographer for kind of documenting behind the scenes what was going on. He had just fired his videographer and was looking for somebody else and somebody knew somebody that knew somebody that knew this gentleman. So he said, "Absolutely, I do that." So on his way to the shoot, he made sure that he brought his camera and as it got out of the car, that voice in his head, his gut, was saying, "Make sure you bring your camera into the shoot." So he goes into the shoot, setting up his equipment, he's got the video equipment going. It's kind of in a stationary place. But while he's doing that, or while the camera is doing that, he's got his camera out and he's taking still shot photos and he tells a story of Usher came up to him and asked him what F-stop he was using.

Now they were in a basement environment and the lighting was horrible and the setting was dark and the lighting was actually fluorescent. So if you know anything about photography, it's very poor for taking photos. And he had this voice in his head when Usher asked him that question and the voice said, "It's better that he thinks you're crazy then to open your mouth and prove that you don't have a clue what you're doing." So he looked into Usher's eyes, said nothing, and turned around and walked out. And so he walked upstairs where he could get cell coverage on his phone and he starts scrolling cause he's scrambling, he's sweating, he's nervous because he doesn't know what he's doing. He's just taking photos and and doing the best he can. But in the meantime, he's trying to learn this as quickly as he can. So he goes back into the photo shoot, doesn't say anything more to Usher and he's taking photographs.

Well it turns out that his setting on his camera, he set it to the smallest jpeg setting. And if you know anything about photography, that means that when you go to edit the photos and print them out, that they're at the smallest setting. They're not at an eight by 10, they're not good for eight by 10s. So unfortunately, what happened because he set them so small that anytime he blew them up, they were extremely grainy because the settings were done in appropriately. So three days after the recording, he gets a call from Usher's manager and asked him where those photos are. And so he's scrambling and the lighting is horrible. Some are bluish because of the fluorescent. Others are yellow. It just looked hideous. So his gut once again told them, "Stick with black and whites." And so he took the best 10 or 11 photos because they were so grainy, you could barely make out who Usher even was.

So he took the best ones where you could still tell it was Usher. He blew them. He made them black and white, and he sent them over. Now he knew it was a disaster, it was hideous. Well, about 30 minutes later he gets a phone call back from the manager. "So how did you know the Usher's tour is focused on vintage black and white, old-school musician, underground feeling? The photographs are perfect. They represent exactly what Usher's looking for. In fact, they're so good would you be willing to come with us on tour for the next year and be his personal photographer?" That is an example of an amazing, amazing, crazy story that happened because he followed his gut time and time again. Even when it didn't make sense, he followed it. His action brought clarity. The other thing I want you to know regarding your gut is that there are going to be seasons in your life that ebb and flow.

There's going to be differences. There's going to be times where you have to say no today, but it doesn't mean you need to say no forever. You may be in a time of your life where you're taking care of a family member, young or old, and they need your attention. They need your time. They need your focus on them in this particular season of their life, but you know that season's not going to last. Even though it may not be right time in your life to move forward today, that doesn't mean that you should not prepare to take steps in the future. So again, listen to that gut. Don't push it down. Focus on it. Let it grow. Let it nurture inside of you and give it the attention because again, it may not be today, it may not be in this season, but it may be in the next season or the one following.

The other thing I want to encourage you, if your gut is telling you to do something crazy, it makes no sense, your friends are gonna think you're bonkers, find somebody that has gone down that path that you wish to go and follow them. Learn from them. Seek mentorships with them, if possible, or others that have gone down that same journey to help you bring clarity and to give you courage cause by surrounding ourselves with like minded people, you're going to be encouraged to move forward to follow that gut. Even though those around you that may not understand what you're doing may not be supportive. Don't let the imposter syndrome stop you before you get started. Don't ask, "who am I to do that or this? I'm nobody. Nobody's going to listen to me."

I want you to become the expert. I want you to become the teacher. I want you to become the master of your expertise, of your focus. We all start out at different phases. Nobody starts out as the teacher or the expert or the master. They become it over time because they learn from others and they implement and they execute and they learned from their journey both good and bad.

And finally, I want to remind you nothing great comes without discomfort. If you were running away, if something seems so giant, so enormous that you're turning away from it, you're letting fear take you and talk you out of it, you need to change your mindset and run toward that fear. You need to conquer it. If something scares you, great, go do it. If you're not experiencing that discomfort, you're probably not challenging yourself enough. You're not dreaming big enough. You're not listening to your inner calling. So again, follow your instincts. Don't let yourself or others talk you out of your goals and your inner calling.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like to be notified when other episodes release, head over to my website, JeremyEpp.com and click on the subscribe button. If this is your first time, I want to thank you for popping in and listening and encourage you to go listen to other episodes as well. I appreciate you tuning in and I thank you for your support and I look forward to speaking with you on the next episode.

Failure is a part of life and a part of business. In your business journey, you'll experience failures and setbacks that will stretch and challenge you. How you respond to failures will make the difference on how your succeed. Basketball legend Michael Jordan was quoted saying "The key to success is failure". The reality is that failure can be our greatest teacher, if we let it.

In this episode I share my biggest business failure and the lessons that I learned through my painful experience.

Lessons to Avoid Business Failure:

1 Don’t try to shortcut the process- Don’t try to force growth in your business when your business isn’t mature. Premature growth will place strain in all areas of your business. It will strain your sales requirements, internal processing systems, staffing requirements, and financial strain. Natural growth allows for you to develop robust systems one-at-a-time vs. all at once.

2 Be slow to form Partnerships- Be cautious when considering giving up control and ownership to another person. Instead, seek out ways to form joint-ventures which will allow you to work together, yet part ways in the future without the need to split your company up.

3 If you married or have a life partner, be sure you’re on the same page- Ensure that you're involving your spouse or partner in major business decisions. Your decisions impact them, and they often will have insights your overlooking, if you're willing to humble yourself and listen.

4 Protect your Cash Flow- Stay focused on generating revenue in your business and always be watching your Cash Flow and burn rate. Refer to Episode #8 for more details.

5 Be honest with yourself, call out issues quickly, and deal with them immediately- Don’t deceive yourself into thinking that a bad situation will right itself. It will only get worse if left unaddressed.

This year only half of all businesses that started five years ago will still be in operation by the end of this year. Let me repeat that. 50% of all startups fail within their first five years of launching. Of those that fail, 82% fail due to cashflow issues, they run out of money. Today we're going to talk about cash flow and how to protect yourself and your business from becoming a negative statistic.

Welcome to episode #8. My name is Jeremy Epp and I am here to help you set up, launch and grow a profitable business. Today I want to talk to you about a very important topic that will be at the core of your business success or at your business failure, and that is the subject of cash flow. Cash flow is often referred to as cash management. It's how you handle your funds in your business as you start your business and work toward building an ongoing stream of revenue coming into the business.

Cash flow doesn't stop once you have built a revenue stream, but it will continue to be vital to the business throughout the life of the business. I want you to think of cash flow as the lifeblood that flows throughout your business. If you run out of cash or don't have enough, your business will eventually struggle and fail.

I want to cover 4 mistakes that business owners make when they're first starting out regarding cash flow. The 1st mistake that business owners make is not properly funding the business to start. I've seen this time and time again in the businesses that I've been involved with in the industries, but an example of this is when I started out in the real estate industry many years ago, the recommendation at that time was to have a minimum of six months worth of savings in the bank. Now, for me, at that time that wasn't possible. I was where I was at. I was making a transition from my first company and I was actually looking at how to generate cash flow immediately so that I could basically stay in a self employment world and not go back to a corporate environment.

The fact that I did not have six months worth of savings in the bank, in fact I think I had closer to two weeks of savings in the bank. What I was able to do was, it really got me focused on what I needed to focus on and really get in there and hustle hard, and so that was a motivation for me. I did continue to have a little bit of income source from another business to kind of help offset that, but it was not an ideal situation and if the people that were mentoring me in starting in the real estate business knew that my cash flow was that low, they probably would've steered me away from that in a hurry and recommended I go get a traditional job. But bottom line is I hustled. I was motivated, I survived. I kind of beat the odds, but it's not the ideal situation.

According to an article written by Small Business Trends, in March of 2019, one third of small businesses get started with less than $5,000, and 58% get started with less than 25,000. Now that may sound, wow, that's great, I can get started for less than $5,000, but keep in mind the statistic I mentioned at the very beginning of the show, which is that 50% of all business fails within the first five years of launching. And of those that fail, 82% fail due to cashflow issues. So it can be done. We've all heard the success stories of the companies that started out on credit cards or with $100 bucks or $500 bucks and have built something amazing, that is not the norm. So just be aware of that. It can happen, but it is not the norm.

You have made the decision, that you wanted to start your own business. And you have narrowed down the product or services, that you'd like to offer. You're ready to officially start your business. You're really excited, but you're not sure what your next step should be.

In today's episode, I'll be explaining the various business entities that exist, and what you need to understand and consider, prior to launching your business to the public, to ensure you're compliant with multiple laws, and to ensure that you're protected from financial loss, and a whole lot of headaches.

Welcome to episode number seven. My name is Jeremy Epp, and I'm here to help you set up, launch and grow a profitable business. Let me take you back to the first business, that I've ever set up. It was at a time where I was working in Bothell, Washington, for a medical device company. The company had been purchased by another company, that had headquarters based in Boston. Essentially, we were working in tandem for a couple of years- to where there started to get overlap, in the efforts that were occurring between the two offices on the West Coast and the East Coast.

It came as no surprise when the announcement was made, that they were actually going to be shutting down the Bothell office where I worked, and laying off everybody. Now, I had the opportunity to actually move over to Boston, and continue to work for that particular company. But I chose not to make that move at that time, with my young family. I saw this as an opportunity to launch my first business. I had been thinking about it for quite some time, and was ready to go. And looked at this as the perfect storm, to help motivate me and get out there in the entrepreneurial space.

I launched my trade show business company, called Caspian Event Management. In the process of setting up the company, I felt like I needed to get some expert advice in both the business entity, as well as the tax formation standpoint. I set up one meeting with an attorney, and another meeting with a CPA, to get more information about what I needed to know, in order to protect myself, and make sure I was doing everything right. As I was sitting in the attorney's office, and this gentleman was telling me different stories, and giving me various examples, all I could think about was how much his hourly rate was. And how I could minimize his storytelling discussions, so that I could get the value that I was looking for, and get out of there without having to pay him too much money.

Similarly, I had the same experience with the CPA. Where again, as I was sitting there listening to information, a lot of it wasn't making a whole lot of sense. However, I was so busy thinking about how to shut down that meeting, so again, I didn't owe too much money.

Now, one of the things that I want to help you with, is to give you a good solid foundation to start from. That, as you begin to do your research online, and look at what your needs are to seek professional assistance in the future, that you already have the bases covered. You don't have to start from scratch, and spend your time, and energy and money in developing the right business entity formation, for what's good for you.

Now, before we begin, I want to say that the information that we're going to be talking about today, is going to be centered on US laws. If you are listening to this, and you do not reside in the United States, take this with a grain of salt. There may be some good information, that you can take and apply to the regulations and the laws, within the country that you reside. But, I'm going to focus in on US centric focuses. Because that's what I know, that's what I'm familiar with.

The beauty of the perfect product, system or service. Everything thought out from start to finish. Everything in its place. A true Masterpiece. Does this sound wonderful to you? Me too! If you can relate to what I am saying, you also may suffer from the trap of Perfectionism. We’ve all had friends and have seen co-workers that have delayed the completion of a project as they make a “final” (tweak to a document, a website, a design, or something else. How much time was lost completing this “final” task only to discover there are more tasks to be completed?

In a past life, I called this the “Engineer’s Dilemma” as design engineers continually tweaked their drawings in the pursuit of perfection, only to fall further and further behind in their schedule, placing increasing schedule performance pressure on the next team to work the project once the designs had been released.

You don’t need the “perfect” plan to start your own business. You will never foresee all the challenges and opportunities that will come your way prior to starting. Rather you need a framework that will guide you. Imagine that you are driving at night, in the dark to a destination that you’ve never been before. You’re not familiar with the neighborhood of the final destination, or the roads that you’ll need to take to get there. But good news. You have a GPS to guide you to your final destination. The GPS is the framework that you’ll use to get you to where you need to go. However, the visibility of the road that your headlights give you is the detailed actions you’ll need to accomplish to get you to the next step. You only need to concern yourself with what is within your headlights, while you rely on the GPS to be your guiding framework. The same principles apply to setting up and launching your own business.

When I was a student in high school and college, I was the type of student that felt like I was under too much pressure if I didn't have my major assignments done a week, if not two weeks prior to the due date. This was something that I prided myself that I often had my work done prior to the completion date and I could go into that final stage doing some last minute adjustments without the pressure to get the bulk of the work done well. When I entered the workforce, I applied this same approach to my career, often getting ahead in the work, making sure that I didn't have that pressure and feeling like I could do the best job possible with the amount of time that I had.

At one point in time, I worked for a gentleman, his name was Tim Tran, and he was the owner of a law firm. Tim had the exact opposite habit of mine in regards to working ahead. For example, I would get a call that there were some concerns about a particular issue and I would often brainstorm with Tim about solutions to resolve these issues. Some solutions required that Tim, as an attorney, get involved and be proactive, jumping in to help remedy the issue. But when I took these issues to Tim and discuss them, often time what Tim did was give a “ho-hum” answer and push it off and his response was basically, “let's wait until the deadline and see what happens". This was very frustrating for me because I felt why would you waste the time you have that you could use to work to resolve the issue?

Have you ever thought about creating a business? You get excited about the adventure and the steps required to launch your new business but you just face one problem: you have no idea of what your new business should be about. Well, in today's episode I'll give you some tools and action steps to help you sort through the thoughts and ideas that are running through your head to help you zero in on the right business for you.

Welcome to today's episode, #5. My name is Jeremy Epp and I am here to help you setup, launch and grow a profitable business. I used to joke when I was younger when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, that I wanted to own my own business. However, I didn't know what that business would be, but when the idea presented to me I was confident that I would be able to run with it and make is successful! But the reality is that that business epiphany never came for me personally. I always had this desire to kind of break out on my own and be my own boss and have the entrepreneurial, creative drive.

Circumstances were always such that the timing was never right or I never had a strong idea to help me really go out and launch that career. For a period of time I thought it was real estate but in the end that real estate idea was just almost like becoming self employed and creating a job for myself. It wasn't truly a business in the sense where I could have a recurring revenue coming in the door and going out and expanding new opportunities that I was excited about.

I have learned through many different areas, through a lot of processing time, through a lot of soul searching, but a lot of experience and some trial and error of what I was passionate about and, over the course of that, I've developed some action steps that I wanted to share with you today that I think will help you if you are struggling with finding out what that idea is that you believe that you need to help you break out of your existing rut, create an exciting business that you're passionate about and that will enable you launch into becoming self employed so that you can change your circumstance and change your life.

So, first off, I want to direct you to go to my website to download a worksheet, it's actually jeremyepp.com/discoveryworksheet, no spaces in there, just jeremyepp.com/discoveryworksheet and all these steps that we're going to be talking about today will be there for you if you are driving or exercising and you don't want to stop and pause and write down these action steps to take.

So I want to begin. We've got nine action steps to help you process through the ideas, the conflicts that you have to help you in your journey and help you zero in on some ideas that will enable you to launch a new business and get excited about it. All right. So let's jump right into it.

So Action Step #1: What I want you to do first is I want you to write down three to five different job roles, projects, assignments that you've been involved with over the last several years. So these might be actually job titles or these might be major projects that you've been involved with one by one over some length of time. Write those down.

Next I want you to take each one of those and actually write down the positives, what you really loved and enjoyed about your responsibility and the actions that you were taking within that job role or that project assignment, and then, to follow it up, I want you to write the negatives, what you didn't like about that role and responsibility, some of the frustrations, what that may be. So write those down. Go one by one. Take the time. This is going to take a period of time to really dig deep in this.

Listen as Dave Scheer speaks about his journey in building up his company to break free of the corporate world.

Do you feel stuck, like you don't have any options? I have and I am sure you have as well. Today's guest, Clare Josa, will be sharing information about our self-talk, about our beliefs, and the stories that we project on ourselves.

What would it be like if you had the courage to follow your dreams and passions to start your own business? Learn about the different work "modes" to understand where you currently are in your career.

This episode is about your mental frame of mind and why it is so important to your success as your mind is able the change your behavior, and thus, the outcome of your life.