RPF0546-QA_on_Careers_

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00:00:14.720 | It's Monday and today Monday means live career-related or income-related Q&A.

00:00:22.880 | [Music]

00:00:39.360 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:42.720 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while

00:00:47.520 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. Special live Q&A today which is open to

00:00:53.600 | the entire audience. We are specifically today speaking about careers and incomes. So how to

00:00:59.760 | make more money doing work you love. That is the topic of all of our questions on today's show.

00:01:04.400 | [Music]

00:01:11.200 | I did not record a podcast live Q&A on Friday so we're doing it here on Monday and once again all

00:01:16.640 | of the questions today are related to career and income planning. This is part of our launch

00:01:21.280 | celebration for the new course that I am teaching called the Radical Personal Finance Guide to Career

00:01:25.520 | and Income Planning. How to earn a lot of money doing work you love. I don't know if that's a

00:01:28.720 | cliche or not but it is indeed true. And on today's show I have a bunch of callers lined up where we

00:01:35.360 | will be talking in detail about career problems and career issues. What you'll be hearing here

00:01:41.120 | is just me live advice. So if any of this seems useful, if any of this seems good, number one,

00:01:45.840 | if you don't want to buy anything from me, take it and apply it to your own life. That is my

00:01:50.160 | ideal outcome. A good teacher always wants their students to learn and to apply. And the best

00:01:55.440 | emails that I get are the emails that where a student or a listener says, "Joshua, I did

00:01:59.600 | something with what you said." And so that will be exciting. But if any of this is useful to you,

00:02:04.240 | you will probably hear me refer to some module of the course or some particular concept. I'm not

00:02:10.880 | holding anything back. I'll be talking through it all today. But if this is useful, please be aware

00:02:15.040 | that we are currently having a four-week launch for the Radical Personal Finance Guide to Career

00:02:19.520 | and Income Planning. Launch window closes on Wednesday, June 6th, but your next price increase

00:02:25.760 | will come on Wednesday, May 16th. Sorry, the end of day, May 15th. So as this releases on Monday,

00:02:33.200 | you have until Tuesday night if you would like to get the course at the lowest possible cost.

00:02:38.240 | So I'd love for you, if you have any interest, to come by and sign up. Go to

00:02:41.920 | radicalpersonalfinance.com/increaseincome. We begin with Tanya in Maryland. Tanya,

00:02:50.960 | tell me about your career and what you're struggling with and how I can serve you today, please.

00:02:54.480 | Thank you, Joshua, for taking my call. What I wanted to figure out is I know that you like

00:03:02.160 | to teach concepts, and I think they're extremely useful. And what I wanted to know is what are your

00:03:08.800 | plans to help people on the course specifically to take those ideas and concepts and apply them

00:03:15.200 | for their specific industries and for their specific businesses or jobs that they do?

00:03:22.080 | Sure, it's a fair question. And in the course, I actually have a module called

00:03:27.120 | kind of the tension between philosophy and action. And here is the challenge as I see it.

00:03:33.440 | Philosophy doesn't change your life. Only action does. Only specific actions actually change

00:03:40.320 | anything. You can read all you want about being a great cook. You can watch all the TV shows about

00:03:45.920 | how to be a great cook. But until you actually go in the kitchen and start messing things up,

00:03:50.720 | you're not going to be a great cook. And so action is important. And I always want to have a bias

00:03:56.320 | towards action. The problem is if you only have action, you may quickly outgrow your action.

00:04:04.080 | Now, if you had to choose between philosophy and action, I guess you would usually choose action

00:04:07.920 | because action is what's needed for change. But if you change philosophy, you'll have an automatic

00:04:14.320 | change of action. A simple reality would be this. Let's use an example related to work and to

00:04:22.640 | income. If you go into your company with the philosophy that when they pay me more,

00:04:31.440 | then I'll work harder, you'll have a very different experience than if you go in with

00:04:37.920 | the philosophy of I'm going to work harder so they'll pay me more. If I only changed,

00:04:44.240 | let's say I were working with a young person who had a philosophy that they need to pay me

00:04:48.080 | more money so I'll work harder. If you just change that one thought and you expose that philosophy as

00:04:53.840 | a fallacy to say that, well, when I work harder, then they'll pay me more, and rather you said no,

00:04:58.880 | when... Well, I messed it up. You get the point. When you say no, that's actually,

00:05:04.000 | why don't you work harder so they'll pay you more? That'll naturally have an effect. So I think both

00:05:09.600 | are important. And I think that if you had to choose, you want to take action. But if you

00:05:14.880 | understand the philosophy, you'll be able to take action. Now, what I see missing in the modern

00:05:19.360 | world of career planning is philosophy that's applicable no matter where you are. Because

00:05:26.160 | in many ways, careers in business and work is very simple. It's as simple as this. If you have a job,

00:05:31.680 | your job is to make your boss happy and make sure that you make more money for your company

00:05:37.680 | than you cost them. That's it. That's really it. When I was a kid, my dad said, "Find out who your

00:05:43.680 | boss is and make them happy." He didn't go into all the details and make your money more than

00:05:47.200 | you cost them. But if you'll just go into your company and you find out who your boss is and

00:05:50.880 | make them happy, you'll have a blissfully productive career. So that philosophy is simple.

00:05:57.280 | The problem is that people give too much tactic and they talk about how to be more responsive

00:06:04.320 | to email. Why should you be responsive to email? And so there's so much that's all around tactics

00:06:10.000 | that's not around principles. And so what I do try to focus on is philosophy and is principle.

00:06:15.200 | But to specifically answer your question, I do also try to help you apply it. So I want to give

00:06:19.680 | you ideas, but then help you apply them to your life and give you examples in your own specific

00:06:25.200 | industry and in your own specific niche. So Tanya, tell me a little bit about your career and a

00:06:29.200 | specific problem that you are struggling with. And let's see if we can give you one or two specific

00:06:33.760 | ideas that will help you make more money and enjoy your work life more.

00:06:38.240 | Sure. So first of all, I am lucky that I do make enough money for myself and for my family. But I

00:06:48.240 | also see that there is a huge potential to make more. And what I do, I work in the pharmaceutical

00:06:56.560 | industry and I actually have my own consulting business. I can be just like another consultant

00:07:04.080 | on down the road. But I actually think that I have certain ideas how to carve out a niche that

00:07:13.040 | and grow that niche. I do not, though, have a plan written out and very well thought through,

00:07:20.400 | which I do need to have. And so having ideas to bounce off someone or some kind of plan that would

00:07:30.720 | help me be accountable would be helpful. So as a consultant, are you paid exclusively

00:07:38.640 | based upon the number of consulting contracts and the size of those contracts by your customers?

00:07:44.000 | Yes, absolutely. And they vary either paid hourly or paid by project. But yes, all I bring

00:07:52.400 | a client and we have a project either on an ongoing basis or one off, and that's the money I get.

00:08:01.840 | Okay. And is your goal currently to increase the revenue and profit of your consulting company?

00:08:08.000 | Yes, that's my goal.

00:08:11.520 | Okay. So let me give you something practical and let's talk about philosophy and tactics. And I'm

00:08:15.680 | just going to give you philosophy. This is one module from the course, but the tactics are going

00:08:20.320 | to be very difficult for you to apply, but the philosophy will give you the roadmap to grow on.

00:08:25.440 | So in a business, and you have a business, as a consultant, you have a business. In a business,

00:08:31.600 | your goal is to generate profit. Profit is defined as revenue minus expenses. For most

00:08:39.040 | consulting companies that are what I'm imagining yours to be, you don't generally deal with a lot

00:08:45.520 | of expenses. If you had a manufacturing company, if you had a lot of employees, generally there's a

00:08:51.200 | lot, then that's when you need to move into expenses more. But as a consultant, usually,

00:08:55.840 | from what I'm perceiving you to say, you're probably just a single shopper. You have a few

00:09:00.160 | staff members, but it's relatively small. So your main opportunity is in revenue. And in a business,

00:09:05.760 | the only way to increase your profit is to either increase your revenue or decrease your expenses.

00:09:12.080 | And most likely your big opportunity is to increase revenue. If your expenses are out of

00:09:17.040 | hand, you should decrease them and that will increase profit. But your biggest opportunity

00:09:21.040 | is to increase revenue. So in any business, there are only four things that you can change that will

00:09:27.920 | change the revenue of your business. There are only four. You should write these down, go back,

00:09:32.720 | listen to them later, because I'm going to go through them quickly. The number one thing you

00:09:35.840 | can do to increase revenue is to increase the number of customers that you serve. All else

00:09:41.520 | being equal, if you have 10 consulting clients and you increase that to 15 consulting clients,

00:09:47.600 | you will increase the revenue and you will automatically then increase your profit as

00:09:52.640 | long as your expenses aren't as long as you have a profitable company. So you can, number one,

00:09:56.560 | increase the number of customers that you serve. Number two, you can increase the average size of

00:10:02.000 | each transaction by selling more. That's number two, increase the average size of each transaction

00:10:08.240 | by selling more. So if your current consulting contract is an average size of $10,000, but you

00:10:14.720 | can sell more to that particular client because of additional value, additional services, whatever,

00:10:20.800 | to $15,000, you'll increase revenue. That's good. Number three, the only number three option you

00:10:25.920 | have is to increase the frequency of transactions per customer. So you could have a customer that

00:10:32.000 | usually buys one contract from you at $10,000 each year, but now that particular customer can now

00:10:38.000 | engage in two contracts with you each year for a total of $20,000. Or option number four is you can

00:10:44.240 | raise your prices. The next consulting client that you bring on, you just simply charge them

00:10:48.720 | more money. Those are the four ways that you increase revenue in a business. You, one,

00:10:52.800 | increase the number of customers you serve. Two, increase the average size of each transaction by

00:10:57.680 | selling more. Three, increase the frequency of transactions per customer. Or four, raise your

00:11:03.120 | prices. That's it. I don't know of any other change that you can make that will ever affect

00:11:08.720 | the revenue of your business. So business is very simple. Any business, any consulting business,

00:11:13.760 | any storefront, any business whatsoever can sit down and look at these four things. Now, the key

00:11:19.520 | is you have to then analyze which of these is your biggest opportunity. You have to look at it and say

00:11:26.240 | which of these is going to give me the best chance for growth. So for some customers, let's say in a

00:11:32.960 | consulting company, you currently have three clients, but you know you have a lot more capacity

00:11:38.160 | and you know there are more clients that are out there for you. Most likely, the simplest and

00:11:42.560 | easiest way for you to grow is to bring on more clients. If you have the capacity, you just say,

00:11:47.280 | "I'm going to bring on three more clients." Now, if you're in a situation where your time is full,

00:11:52.400 | you have no more time, you're working 40 hours a week, you have six clients, and you just can't

00:11:58.480 | handle any more, now you look at it and say, "Well, is there another opportunity for me to grow?"

00:12:04.480 | You could increase the average size of each transaction by selling more. And this is where

00:12:08.880 | you would look at your consulting business and you would say, "Well, in my particular business,

00:12:13.040 | can I sell more without particularly adding more time for me? Is my consulting input versus output

00:12:22.080 | linear or is it multiplicative? If I sell them more, am I going to have to increase the number

00:12:27.600 | of hours by the same amount that I've sold them or do I just need to increase my input and my

00:12:32.640 | output just my input a little bit and my output will increase substantially?" So you would look

00:12:37.440 | at that and analyze, "Is that the best move or should I increase the frequency of transactions

00:12:42.000 | per customer? Is my customer base the type that they would buy more things from me if they just

00:12:47.600 | simply had more opportunity and so let me have them come into my storefront, whether they're

00:12:51.440 | virtual or real, more frequently or do I just raise my prices?" Most of the time in consulting,

00:12:56.960 | your best opportunity is going to be increase the number of customers you serve and raise your

00:13:03.200 | prices. But it all comes down to how much time do you have, et cetera. So that's a good example of

00:13:08.560 | how philosophy, if you understand the philosophy, then you'll have to do the hard work of analyzing

00:13:13.200 | your business. And I couldn't hope to have the actual details of your business to actually know

00:13:18.560 | for sure, yes, this is the specific thing that you should do. But my hope is that by talking

00:13:24.800 | through the concepts and just the very cursory way that I've done there, you can take that and

00:13:29.200 | look at your business and try to say, "Okay, with my business now, how do I actually put this into

00:13:34.640 | practice? Where's my low-hanging fruit?" And in any business, this should be for most people

00:13:40.000 | relatively straightforward. I know for mine, if I just look at these four things, it's obvious to me

00:13:44.480 | where to focus. And in most businesses, it's obvious where to focus. There are times where

00:13:49.280 | it's a little bit less obvious and you'll have to take that. So hopefully those ideas would be a

00:13:53.680 | good example of philosophy and you can take them and study your business. And if that's helpful,

00:13:58.160 | I'd love to have you join me. Again, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/increaseincome.

00:14:02.240 | And here's the thing. Your biggest opportunity is to spend... On today's show, I'm going to be

00:14:06.960 | moving very quickly because I got a bunch of callers on the line and I'm trying to target

00:14:09.680 | an hour-long show. But in the course, I'll answer as everything that I possibly can. Just like any

00:14:15.280 | good class, I'm convinced more than half the value of the course is just working with me and other

00:14:20.560 | students in specifics for your situation. So I hope that helps you, Tania. We go to Mario in

00:14:26.080 | Norway. Mario, how can I serve you today as it relates to career and income planning?

00:14:30.160 | Yes. Hi, Joshua. Thank you very much for taking my call. Well, the question I have is I'm

00:14:39.600 | developing a basic course program like a part-time job. I also work as an engineer in the oil business

00:14:47.120 | here in Norway for today. But this basic coaching program is about a young professional. So my

00:14:55.280 | question is, what do you think should be the strategy to reach more young professionals

00:15:01.120 | to help them elevate their financial education, you know, to do good or bad regarding management

00:15:08.640 | their money from early stage in life? Where I should focus my energy to try to reach people?

00:15:16.720 | That is not an easy question. When you talk about creating educational products,

00:15:23.440 | how do you imagine, in a perfect world, how do you imagine delivering this information and education?

00:15:29.680 | Well, what I'm doing is trying to contact people who I can work with them for a period of time.

00:15:40.160 | Let's say it has to be a minimum of three to four months in a one-to-one basis. Of course,

00:15:46.560 | I want to focus basically in what I think about is try to help them first visualize where they are

00:15:55.920 | regarding the financial situation. And of course, what came to my mind is when people start making

00:16:03.040 | money as a professional, I mean, they just finish the university, graduate, and then of course,

00:16:08.240 | they get all the advertising and everything and try to get a lifestyle according to what they are

00:16:15.840 | starting to earn. So I have been there. So that's what I'm thinking. It would be very nice just to

00:16:22.000 | try to teach people to do better. But I have been dumb. I mean, I have 20 years career as an

00:16:28.800 | engineer. So I have always been working as an engineer earning quite good money, but also I was

00:16:34.960 | quite spending a lot. But I'm in a good position anyway. And are you trying to actually build a

00:16:41.520 | business from this endeavor that would support you? Or is this just a labor of love?

00:16:46.400 | Both, I would say. Because actually, what I would like in a point is to jump from my

00:16:54.160 | engineering career to just a coaching career, I would call it financial coach. But it's just

00:17:00.320 | to help young people to organize this. Because I really, really enjoy that very much, to be honest.

00:17:06.000 | So I actually working on that. So I would like to do that. And I started trying this

00:17:14.160 | kind of launching a better coaching program to do that.

00:17:18.800 | So this question is one of the hardest that I can possibly imagine. And frankly, I don't have a good

00:17:26.480 | answer for you because I don't really believe it's possible. But I'll explain that so that you can

00:17:31.200 | understand. Now, obviously, I would be quick to affirm that nothing is impossible. You just got

00:17:37.120 | to find the right way. But I don't know how this can be done. I don't know how to do it. I don't

00:17:42.160 | know how it can be done in the way that you're describing it. Let me tell you why. When it comes

00:17:47.280 | to money and trying to teach people about money, you have a couple of unique challenges. First,

00:17:54.240 | you're dealing with a subject that some people are interested in and that many people are simply not.

00:18:00.000 | Most people don't care about their money. Now, if you tell them that to their face,

00:18:04.960 | they'll quickly say, "Well, I actually do." But the reality is that most people simply don't care

00:18:08.960 | about their money. If they cared about their money, they would pay attention to it and they

00:18:13.360 | would actually do something about it. But they obviously don't because they don't pay attention

00:18:17.920 | and they don't do anything about it. So most people just don't really care about their money.

00:18:21.920 | They only care about their money insofar as they can use it and spend it as they want to and earn

00:18:26.400 | it. And they think it'd be nice to have a little bit more, but they don't actually demonstrate that

00:18:30.640 | it's nice to have a little bit more by actually doing something. Don't mean to be overly harsh,

00:18:37.040 | but that's truth as I see it. So most people don't care. The people that do care about their money

00:18:42.480 | actually are probably already likely to do something about it. There's so much information.

00:18:49.040 | I can't, I mean, is there a subject that's talked more about than money? I don't know what it is. I

00:18:55.600 | mean, if you expand money to its full scope in every area of our life that's discussed about,

00:19:00.560 | I don't know of a subject that's discussed more. It's certainly, it's a constant. Is there a

00:19:07.520 | subject that's been written about more than money? I don't, there's so much from ancient

00:19:13.040 | texts till today. I mean, you can go through the Bible. Jesus talks more about money in the Bible

00:19:19.600 | than faith or heaven or anything that people usually associate with being a religious topic.

00:19:24.640 | Most people, there's more written about money than almost anything else. So is there anything

00:19:30.240 | that could be actually created that was new? I don't think, not much. There's just different

00:19:37.360 | variations of it. So you have a problem of people aren't really interested. Well, what about the

00:19:43.680 | people who are interested? And the people who are interested for kind of quick and dirty analysis

00:19:49.440 | probably fall into two buckets, those that have money and those that don't have money.

00:19:55.440 | And here's the basic problem. Those that have money don't need to know how to make more of it.

00:20:03.360 | And those who don't have money don't have any money to pay you to help them get some. So

00:20:08.240 | you wind up looking at the people that you want to help, those who don't have money,

00:20:13.840 | and saying, "Well, I want to help you, but I don't know how to help you because you don't

00:20:16.400 | have any money to pay me." So the only thing I know to do this is to possibly these two ideas.

00:20:23.040 | Number one, the best value for you to build a business is found in serving the wealthy

00:20:30.080 | because they have money and they can buy things from you. Because teaching people about money or

00:20:35.760 | coaching them about money is not an actual necessity, because of that, you can't sell it

00:20:43.920 | in the same way that you can sell rice to poor people and make a living. If I tried to sell

00:20:48.880 | financial advice to poor people, I wouldn't make a living unless I could sell it for very

00:20:56.240 | inexpensive, which is media. I'll come to in just a moment. So the best way for you to build a

00:21:02.480 | business is for you to actually go and serve the people that have money. But if you're going to

00:21:08.080 | serve the people that have money, you have to bring some particular value that's of value to

00:21:12.400 | them. And this is where the world of financial planning comes up. The world of professional

00:21:16.960 | financial advice is very good at helping people who have money get more of it or helping people

00:21:24.080 | who have money to hold on to what they have. So if you become somebody like a tax expert

00:21:30.400 | and you can help engineers living in Norway keep more of their money from the Norwegian tax system,

00:21:36.000 | you can sell that advice because you can put a specific monetary value on it. You can say,

00:21:41.440 | "Look, I'll charge you $1,000, but I'll save you $5,000." Well, any person with money will take

00:21:46.640 | that deal all day long. Or you can sell investment advice or you can sell services of some kind,

00:21:52.800 | whether those services are as normal as bookkeeping or if they're as esoteric as,

00:21:59.120 | "I'll help you hide your money in the Caribbean islands so that you get it out of the European

00:22:02.800 | system." I don't know what issues are appropriate to the Norwegian scenario. But you can make a lot

00:22:09.520 | of money selling good care of money to rich people. But it's hard to make a lot of money

00:22:15.600 | selling good care of money to poor people. About the only way to do it is if you can have a giant

00:22:21.120 | number of customers with a very low cost of servicing those customers with a small transaction

00:22:27.040 | size. That's what I'm doing. That's what radical personal finance is. Because my cost of reaching

00:22:32.080 | many people is extremely low, I can afford to do what I'm doing right now. I can create education

00:22:38.800 | that can reach a mass audience. And it doesn't matter to me in terms of costs, whether 10,000

00:22:44.880 | people are listening to me or 100,000 people are listening to me. It costs me the same amount every

00:22:49.520 | month. So I can create a large free option to serve people who may not have a lot of money.

00:22:58.800 | And then I can use that as a marketing process to attract the people who do have money

00:23:04.400 | to my other opportunities to pay me for stuff, whether that's coaching or a product or advice

00:23:10.800 | or something like that. But I couldn't sell $400 courses on how to build an incredible career and

00:23:18.880 | increase your income to people who are broke. They don't have the money to do it. Now, if they

00:23:22.960 | were wise, they should. I have no problem whatsoever encouraging somebody who's broke to invest in

00:23:30.240 | their income. But on the whole, it's been my experience that people don't generally do that.

00:23:34.480 | They should. I did. I used to have done it. I've seen people who do it. But those people,

00:23:41.120 | they're out there and I hope I can serve them. But I'm just speaking generally as far as a

00:23:44.960 | business is hard to do. So the only way that I can see that you can actually do a business helping

00:23:49.920 | people who don't have money is if you can serve them in a large number. That would come down to

00:23:55.760 | speaking, speaking fees. That would come down to creating products that can be distributed widely.

00:24:01.040 | So if you want to work with high school students and you create a high school curriculum or you

00:24:04.800 | want to become a lecturer or you want to create a particular product, et cetera, but I don't know

00:24:10.000 | how you can work with individuals. And that's the nutty problem about money. I really don't see any

00:24:15.600 | big solution to solve it. But what I would encourage you to do is to say, "Do I really

00:24:21.920 | want to do this and help poor people or do I want to do this and help rich people?" If you want to

00:24:26.480 | help rich people, go into the professions and find an opportunity where with your profession,

00:24:32.240 | you can actually help them, save money on taxes, help them invest better, et cetera.

00:24:37.440 | Rich people will pay constantly for good financial advice. Or if you want to help people who aren't

00:24:42.240 | rich yet, then look at it in service and try to figure out how can I build an audience for my

00:24:48.800 | service and then try to figure out what that particular audience needs in terms of service.

00:24:55.040 | But I wouldn't, unless it's a labor of love for you, I wouldn't jump out of an engineering career

00:25:01.040 | first off to try to go and help poor people. The best people who have the opportunity to help

00:25:07.680 | poor people are those who are in their life naturally. So I think back to a high school

00:25:12.800 | teacher that I had. He was an economics teacher. In the school that I graduated from high school,

00:25:17.520 | all of the people in that school were required to take instruction in economics. And this teacher

00:25:24.800 | worked very diligently to labor and to lay for his students a good foundation in personal finance.

00:25:31.360 | He took it very seriously. It was very simple, but he was really good. But he had hundreds of

00:25:36.240 | students per year coming in through his classes. And a small percentage of those students were

00:25:44.880 | able to actually put those things in place. So if you can figure out some way to put yourself

00:25:50.560 | in the position where somebody is going to be forced to work with you, then possibly you can

00:25:57.680 | help them. But it's a hard question. I know a lot of people in the personal finance

00:26:01.920 | punditry world and doing what I do who don't know how to solve it. I don't know it either.

00:26:05.840 | What you hear is my very best attempt to do what you're saying. So check back in a few years and

00:26:12.400 | I'll report on the results. Andrew in Maine, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today,

00:26:17.440 | sir? Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking the phone call. So like I said, when we first spoke, I'm a

00:26:24.880 | carpenter, fairly rural Maine. I have not lived in the area for too long. And it seems the only

00:26:32.720 | thing I can do to increase my income is either raise my price or hire people and just get more

00:26:39.120 | jobs. I'm kind of wary of being a huge company, a big crew. I like to offer solo craftsmanship.

00:26:48.400 | I'm really one-on-one with a customer. Everybody seems really happy. But it seems like there's a

00:26:54.800 | ceiling as far as trades go. So I didn't know what you might have for input on that.

00:27:02.480 | Where do your customers currently come from? Mostly word of mouth. Just to give you an idea,

00:27:10.160 | we have a website my wife made. I got to actually compliment on it the other day.

00:27:14.080 | I'm one of like four people. What's your website?

00:27:16.800 | LibertyTimbers.com. Okay. So we're going to try to increase your business. If anyone wants to see

00:27:24.000 | what Andrew in rural Maine can create for custom woodwork, you can go to LibertyTimbers.com. Go

00:27:28.960 | ahead, Andrew. Keep going. Yeah. Thanks. I'm one of like three people in this area that even has a

00:27:36.320 | website. So I get phone calls off my website. I leave cards around town. I talk to just about

00:27:44.000 | everyone I know. And word of mouth seems to be the best way to build a lasting trade business.

00:27:57.280 | Just from everybody I've talked to and things like that. Mass marketing doesn't really work

00:28:01.760 | around here. But I live on the coast. There's really, really high-end coastal homes. And I like

00:28:09.840 | really fine woodworking. So it kind of works that way. Like I said, it seems like there's a price

00:28:16.000 | ceiling and slowly working up, but it can only go so fast. And it's a challenge working 40 hours a

00:28:26.320 | week with a family, also meeting people for future work. And just, you know, things are going well.

00:28:37.120 | I'm not employed as a carpenter. That doesn't seem to go very well for anybody. But self-employed

00:28:44.960 | seems like a pretty good niche for me. I'm fairly young and it's a dying breed. So

00:28:54.320 | that's kind of where I'm at with my whole business.

00:28:56.960 | - So from looking at your website, it looks like you do a lot of, you're primarily,

00:29:03.440 | you're doing carpentry, fine carpentry, but it's very much residential as far as working on houses.

00:29:09.600 | You work on houses, you do home restoration and remodeling, you're doing some timber framing.

00:29:14.000 | So you're not creating furniture. What you're doing is you're creating structures. Is that

00:29:17.840 | accurate? - Yeah. And I have a background in making,

00:29:22.240 | I mean, I can make furniture and my wife and I always joke about the tables that you see for

00:29:26.640 | $15,000. I mean, I know how to make those. I don't know how to sell those, but yeah, I do restoration.

00:29:35.360 | I do remodeling, mostly things like that. And I work right now, it's just me. I like that because

00:29:42.640 | I'm reliable and I show up and I don't steal my own tools. So I'll keep things, you know,

00:29:50.480 | I keep things fluid as far as my family life and my business life.

00:29:53.920 | - Right. - And yeah.

00:29:57.440 | - So here's what, how I would, here's the direction that I would turn you on. In the course,

00:30:06.320 | I give a case study of, so I look at a lot of businesses and I enjoy seeing particular businesses

00:30:15.120 | and I enjoy analyzing those businesses from people who are in weird niches that I come across. So let

00:30:20.800 | me tell you about one that I profile in the course. The website is powerstrokehelp.com.

00:30:28.080 | Now I stumbled across this particular website when I was building or when I was researching

00:30:34.800 | Ford diesel engines. I needed to buy a diesel pickup truck and I was researching Ford diesel

00:30:39.120 | engines. And particularly the problem that I was researching was an engine called the Ford

00:30:43.840 | six liter diesel engine. This engine, when Ford created it, was known, it was supposed to be a

00:30:50.160 | great engine, but it had all kinds of problems. And so I was trying to decide, there is a glut of

00:30:54.400 | them on the marketplace where you can get a newer pickup for pretty cheap because these engines are

00:30:59.920 | so considered to be major problems. And I didn't know, should I go with a six liter or should I go

00:31:05.040 | with one of the other engines? Because it seems like there's a big supply, price is cheap, but I

00:31:09.680 | don't want to have problems and diesel engines are particularly problematic. So I stumbled across

00:31:14.480 | this guy who has this website called powerstrokehelp.com. Now what he does, he exclusively

00:31:22.000 | works on Ford diesel engines. But the model of his website that I'm going to describe to you

00:31:29.120 | is a model that you can take and apply to your industry and anybody else who's in some industry,

00:31:35.120 | even if it's something like you, where you have localized custom work. Now, I think, although

00:31:42.800 | I haven't researched this, I think the guy who wrote it, his name is Bill Hewitt. I think he

00:31:47.520 | probably started just like any other mechanic, just working on cars. Now in that approach to

00:31:55.120 | learning to work on cars, at some point in time, he became interested in diesel engines. And so

00:32:00.640 | he specialized in diesel engines. And this is one of the things that's super important is when you

00:32:05.680 | find a specialty that's in demand to specialize down. In a modern market economy, the more

00:32:12.000 | specialized you are, the more money you can make because the supply of people who, the supply of

00:32:20.400 | workers who are able to do that work will be much smaller. So you can see this in many industries.

00:32:27.600 | You should see it in the construction industry. Somebody who is perhaps a specialized

00:32:34.080 | Finnish carpenter for boats, who only does Finnish carpentry on boats, should in your area,

00:32:42.240 | if you have boats on the coast of Maine and if this is in demand, should command a higher hourly

00:32:48.000 | wage or a higher rate than somebody who does Finnish carpentry on houses. And both of those

00:32:54.320 | Finnish carpenters should command a higher hourly rate than somebody who just does general carpentry.

00:32:59.360 | Now, this is subject to there actually being a demand for the work. A Finnish carpenter

00:33:05.520 | who does Finnish carpentry on boats but lives in the Sahara Desert is going hungry. They're not

00:33:13.600 | earning a higher wage. They're going hungry. So there has to be a demand. But if there's a demand

00:33:17.600 | for work, then you'll make more money as a specialist. A physician who is a specialist

00:33:23.600 | can command a higher hourly rate or a higher wage than is a physician who is a generalist.

00:33:29.520 | And this basically applies to any industry, any company. The work of somebody who's at the top

00:33:36.880 | is more specialized than the work of somebody who's at the bottom. And this is one of the

00:33:40.080 | reasons why they get paid more money. So the first career, not having spoken to him, just analyzing

00:33:45.600 | his website, the first career move that I would bet Bill Hewitt made was he went from being a

00:33:50.000 | general mechanic to being a diesel mechanic. The next move that he made was to become not just a

00:33:56.160 | diesel mechanic but to become interested in Ford diesels, exclusively power stroke diesels. He

00:34:01.440 | doesn't work on Chevys. He doesn't work on Dodges. He only works on Ford power stroke diesels. And

00:34:07.040 | because of his expertise with Ford power stroke diesels, he developed an inside specialized

00:34:13.920 | knowledge, which makes him much more valuable as a mechanic than some other people. Years ago,

00:34:22.000 | I owned a Honda Accord. And one of the major benefits that I had with this Honda Accord

00:34:27.200 | is I lived a few blocks away from my mechanic who only worked on Hondas, and if he was feeling

00:34:33.760 | generous, a Toyota every now and then. But for over 30 years, he had worked exclusively on Hondas.

00:34:40.160 | And so what this gave him was a vast background of information. And it always kept me with the

00:34:47.280 | cheapest bills possible because he could diagnose my car so fast. So because of his breadth of

00:34:52.720 | experience with Hondas, he always knew, "Oh, this particular year of Honda, they had this one

00:34:58.080 | problem and he would just swap out the part and it would cost me 60 bucks. Whereas if I took that

00:35:02.000 | car to the general mechanic, it would cost $200, an extra $140 for the time of diagnosis." He knew

00:35:07.920 | those things right off the bat. I have no idea how much he ever charged me for anything. I just

00:35:14.000 | knew that he charged, he was so fast at fixing things and doing things because he'd done it so

00:35:18.320 | many times that my price was cheaper, but I'll bet his hourly rate was higher because he could do

00:35:24.480 | things faster. So as I'm telling you this story, Andrew, be thinking about the parallels to the

00:35:30.080 | construction industry and your competence as a master craftsman in a particular niche.

00:35:35.200 | So back to Bill Hewitt of Ford Power Strokes. So I would guess that he built a specialized

00:35:42.000 | business, but along the way, about 10 years ago, he pulled out his video camera

00:35:45.840 | and he started taking videos and putting those videos on YouTube. And he started telling other

00:35:50.880 | people about Power Stroke engines and started talking about the benefits and the problems of

00:35:55.840 | those engines. Well, on his YouTube channel today, 10 years later, he has, I don't know if it's

00:36:02.240 | thousands, I don't have it right in front of me, but he has something, he has probably thousands,

00:36:07.680 | hundreds, if not thousands of videos on his YouTube channel. And he has 112,000 subscribers

00:36:16.080 | to his Power Stroke Help YouTube channel. Now, what has he done with that? Well,

00:36:24.720 | he's expanded. First of all, he does still offer mechanical services. He probably spins a wrench

00:36:31.520 | every now and then himself, but more importantly, he's outside of Atlanta in Georgia. He has a shop

00:36:36.800 | with multiple mechanics and the only vehicles they work on are Ford Power Stroke engines.

00:36:41.360 | But that shop, because of their specialization, is in such high demand that they not only pull

00:36:46.400 | customers from their local area in Atlanta, they pull customers from across the country.

00:36:51.440 | He tells stories on his YouTube channel of how he has customers who will buy a truck,

00:36:57.280 | a pickup truck in California, and they'll specifically buy a six-liter Ford with low

00:37:02.640 | miles, but that's older, but has low miles. They'll buy it in California. They'll put it

00:37:07.360 | on the trailer and ship it from California to Atlanta, Georgia in order for him to pay him

00:37:13.280 | about $15,000 for what's called in the industry bulletproofing. They do all these things to fix

00:37:18.560 | the studs on a six-liter engine, fix out all the problem parts, and basically take the six-liter

00:37:22.960 | engine from a problematic engine to a really great engine because it's been out for so long,

00:37:27.360 | they know how to fix the problems. So these guys will buy a pickup truck in California,

00:37:31.600 | used pickup truck with 30,000 miles, ship it to Atlanta, Georgia, pay him $15,000,

00:37:36.160 | and then ship it back out to California for them. And they'll do that all the time.

00:37:42.320 | And so he's got this shop where not only is he drawing on a customer base locally,

00:37:47.120 | but he's drawing on a regional and even national customer base for the actual work. So he has a

00:37:52.080 | big shop with a bunch of mechanics working for him. That's one revenue line. Notice how the

00:37:56.640 | revenue lines have increased from generalists to diesel specifics, then to diesel specifics on

00:38:02.240 | Fords. And this man today is the nationally known person on diesel engines. If there's anybody who

00:38:10.800 | looks at diesel engines, researches them, works on them, it's hard for me to imagine that they

00:38:15.920 | don't at least every now and then stumble across his work because it's so specialized.

00:38:20.640 | So he dominates this market for work. But what he's also done is he's now taken that expertise

00:38:25.840 | and he's translated it into other lines of revenue. On his website, he sells educational

00:38:31.200 | products. He has some of them that are free, which are for owners, but he has educational

00:38:36.880 | products for power stroke owners and mechanics. And he has them for each of the Ford diesel

00:38:42.480 | engines. And he'll sell subscriptions to these courses, which are basically him with a video

00:38:48.000 | camera telling people how to diagnose and how to fix all of the problems with their diesel engines.

00:38:53.760 | So he sells these courses. In addition, he also has other lines of revenue from his website,

00:38:59.600 | such as the sale of products. He sells some oil products. He sells some different things that

00:39:04.640 | will help your engine run better. He doesn't sell a lot of it, but he sells some. And I assume he

00:39:09.200 | makes some commission revenue from that as well. Also, he has other lines of revenue, such as

00:39:15.120 | fixing up and selling trucks. So what they'll do is they'll have people who are looking for a

00:39:20.160 | particular truck, and these are people who need the truck to do a serious job. And they'll call

00:39:24.400 | them and say, "I'm looking for a truck with these attributes. Can you find it?" And they want his

00:39:29.840 | expertise to find it. They don't care where he gets it, but they care that he goes over it and

00:39:33.920 | he fixes it up. And he sells them at high prices to people who demand these vehicles. They'll also

00:39:38.960 | take other vehicles that are broken down and they'll bring them in and he'll fix them up. And

00:39:43.120 | then he sells them on his YouTube channel. So just about every week on his YouTube channel,

00:39:46.640 | he'll post a video, a 20-minute video of him and one of his guys walking around their lot,

00:39:51.200 | showing all the Power Stroke trucks that are for sale. And today, if I were looking for a Power

00:39:56.080 | Stroke truck of the vintage that he likes to deal in, I would very likely go and buy it from him.

00:40:02.560 | I would add to the cost of probably a few extra thousand dollars over something that I could find

00:40:06.480 | locally and at the cost of going to Georgia. Because he's eliminating, he's solving a major

00:40:11.520 | problem for buyers of used vehicles, which is confidence in the quality of the vehicle.

00:40:16.640 | That's why used vehicles don't sell well, partly because some of their expected lifespan is used

00:40:22.080 | up, but partly because of the risk that you take in buying a used vehicle, which has nobody standing

00:40:26.560 | behind it. So he's built this particular business where he stands behind it. His guys have gone over

00:40:32.560 | that truck from tip to tail and fixed everything on it. So you have a high confidence and you're

00:40:38.960 | willing to go in and he's selling a 2004 Excursion here for $36,000. And I'm sure he'll sell it. He

00:40:45.600 | sells a lot of trucks. So I use that as an example. That's a case study that I go over in the course.

00:40:50.240 | I use that as an example to talk about how you actually can take a business that most people

00:40:57.680 | would look at and say, "Well, it's just a matter of, I just work on trucks. How can I expand this?"

00:41:06.080 | And you can say, "How can I apply business thinking to my lines of revenue and try to figure out how

00:41:10.800 | do I grow my lines of revenue?" So in a business like yours, specifically Andrew, you could probably

00:41:16.240 | do a similar thing. Now you may not be able to do the same thing because the specific attributes of

00:41:21.520 | your business are different. If you live in rural Maine and most of your work is done on physical

00:41:26.400 | structures, remodeling, local timber frame construction, et cetera, then you're going to be

00:41:31.760 | limited based upon your pool of customers. If Bill Hewitt were on a Caribbean island and there were

00:41:37.680 | 200 total Powerstroke trucks on the island, he could probably develop a reputation as an expert

00:41:44.000 | in Powerstrokes, but he couldn't do what he's doing where he lives in Atlanta, where in Georgia,

00:41:48.720 | in rural Georgia, everybody and their mother drives a diesel pickup truck and majority of

00:41:53.040 | them are Fords. So you've got to actually have a market. But you can still look at your business

00:41:57.600 | and you can analyze outside of it. And you can look to say, "What is the core product that we're

00:42:03.040 | selling?" And then you look to say, "What are other products that we could sell?" Some businesses,

00:42:08.240 | there are lines of continuity where you can sell warranty services, you can sell additional

00:42:13.120 | consulting services. Sometimes you can develop products. Sometimes in timber framing, if you have

00:42:18.480 | an expertise in timber framing, I'm sure you are aware of so many people are interested in learning

00:42:22.800 | timber framing. So perhaps you can take your expertise and you can develop that into teaching

00:42:27.520 | timber framing to others. And that may result in you traveling during the winter months and

00:42:32.000 | possibly doing timber framing workshops, possibly selling timber framing tools, possibly developing

00:42:37.120 | timber framing educational products to help people who want to do their own timber framing.

00:42:41.920 | You're really good at building a pergola in the backyard using all hand tools with traditional

00:42:46.640 | 200-year-old timber framing methodology, but now you sell and teach other people about that.

00:42:51.280 | So whether it's products that you sell on your website, tools that you build and develop,

00:42:57.040 | instruction manuals, et cetera, you can look at a business like yours and try to figure out,

00:43:01.440 | "Well, where are my opportunities for growth?" There's not a guarantee that you can do everything,

00:43:07.200 | but if you start looking at it and you start analyzing and saying, "Well, what can I do?

00:43:12.160 | What could I offer?" You may be able to find additional lines of revenue that you could add

00:43:17.520 | into your business. Go and look at something like PowerStroke Help and look at how somebody in a

00:43:22.880 | totally disconnected business is doing it. And then take your business and start looking around

00:43:29.360 | online, start talking to people and see what other people are doing on the subject of timber framing

00:43:36.160 | and see if you have some ideas that would interest you enough to pursue. And if you'll start adding

00:43:40.160 | them and pursuing them, maybe it's you build some products that are shippable, maybe you do some

00:43:44.640 | furniture. In today's world where any individual can reach an international marketplace with a

00:43:50.720 | very low cost through the connectivity provided by the internet, we have a lot of opportunities.

00:43:57.040 | And there's probably some ways that you can apply those to your particular industry.

00:44:01.440 | Daniel in Texas, welcome. How can I serve you today, sir?

00:44:04.400 | Daniel T. Johnson, CEO, PowerStroke Health, Inc.

00:44:06.080 | Thank you, Joshua, for taking all of our calls today. And good job. I haven't had the chance,

00:44:11.200 | as I said earlier, as a beta subscriber to the career and income course, I haven't had the chance

00:44:16.160 | to look at the new stuff yet, but it's definitely helpful to begin with.

00:44:19.840 | Well, thank you for being a beta member. I appreciate it.

00:44:22.080 | Yeah, you're very welcome. Yeah, so I am currently a restaurant manager and

00:44:27.120 | especially for the restaurant business, I make good money. I have a pretty good schedule. I've

00:44:32.800 | gained seniority within the company, but I am pretty well tapped out for, I could move up in

00:44:39.840 | the company, but it would be require us to move, which we're not super excited about. And which

00:44:46.800 | we realize is a, I mean, that's a limiting factor. And we are as well, at best, I would make the same

00:44:54.160 | amount of money. I probably would even make less than I do now for the pleasure of running my own

00:44:59.840 | store. So that's not ideal. And I don't know how much you know about the restaurant business,

00:45:06.400 | but it is not, I mean, hours are typically very long. Money is not great.

00:45:14.320 | Depending on what exactly you're doing, especially at a lower level, once you get to be a store GM,

00:45:18.960 | you can make pretty good money. And I know people who make, as you were talking about the other day,

00:45:25.200 | they get into that. I think it was the 5% percentile you're talking about making

00:45:29.600 | above $120,000. So that is certainly possible. So I'm trying to figure out

00:45:35.520 | about whether I seek to pursue something else in the restaurant business,

00:45:42.240 | or I've kind of started playing around with learning to program. So something I've always

00:45:46.960 | kind of had an interest in, and certainly I think there's a big future in that just as we become

00:45:52.880 | more and more technological. I've also got multiple side things I've kind of done, and as well,

00:46:01.120 | trying to get into real estate investing. I actually have a couple investors lined up and

00:46:07.040 | I'm trying to do apartment multifamily investing, but it's just the market. I'm basically in Houston

00:46:13.360 | and the market everywhere is extremely challenging right now. So any thoughts,

00:46:19.040 | so the options are kind of, do I pursue something in the restaurant business and seek to,

00:46:26.880 | I've do my best to make the best job choice possible, but no, I might take some hits there

00:46:35.680 | on the hours and such, but increase my income, or do I take the time to basically learn an entirely

00:46:45.280 | different skill such as programming, jump industries. And even my plan with that,

00:46:50.960 | which I'm trying to figure out now is actually kind of create a website. Because there's not

00:46:54.720 | a whole lot of resources from, hey, here's someone who's actually gone from totally not

00:46:59.120 | in the industry to doing this, kind of create a blog or something to help other people walk that

00:47:05.520 | path. But, or just kind of stay with, I have a pretty good job, I make pretty good money,

00:47:11.760 | it's better to develop this other side stuff. How much are you earning currently?

00:47:15.680 | I make about 70,000. And how much are your monthly living expenses?

00:47:25.760 | I mean, it depends on how you define it. I would say our hardcore living expenses are

00:47:33.120 | hard because I basically practice a $0 budget. So it's like, well, what does that mean?

00:47:40.240 | I would say probably about 2800, give or take to 3000. And then the rest goes, I mean,

00:47:52.000 | that's including putting money away for car repairs and et cetera, et cetera.

00:47:55.680 | Tavish Leff: So if you had $3,000 a month of revenue, could your lights stay on,

00:47:59.920 | your rent get paid, and your family continue to eat?

00:48:02.160 | Michael O'Hanlon Yeah.

00:48:03.360 | Tavish Leff: Okay. So that's important because it means you have tons of options.

00:48:07.360 | That's very different than if your monthly living expenses were 8,000 a month,

00:48:11.840 | and you're constantly behind. So you've done a good job of planning and giving yourself options.

00:48:18.480 | So now let's go to the careers. Do you have any reason why you want to stay in the restaurant

00:48:24.480 | business other than the fact that you know it, you're making money at it, and you can do it?

00:48:28.880 | Michael O'Hanlon Not really anymore. As everyone is,

00:48:34.560 | I'm tired of the late nights, and I would like to spend more time with my family.

00:48:39.200 | Tavish Leff: Right. So you asked what I know about the restaurant business. I don't know a lot.

00:48:44.880 | I just wonder why anybody works in it, at least without owning a bunch of restaurants or without

00:48:49.760 | a passion for cooking. But it just seems to me like a meat grinder that's very difficult. I

00:48:54.560 | don't know how people make it. But I've always just assumed maybe there's something I don't know

00:48:59.600 | about. And I have learned, I think there are some people who like the schedule, but it is a hard one

00:49:05.440 | to handle. Michael O'Hanlon

00:49:06.080 | Yeah. I will just tell you, I think it is one of the industries, and I think more industries are

00:49:11.040 | more this way, but it's definitely one of the industries you can start as a dishwasher and end

00:49:16.080 | up being a GM. And I think that's where a lot of people, it's, "Well, I'm kind of trying to figure

00:49:22.240 | out what I want to do, but they offered me a job as an hourly manager." And you kind of work your

00:49:27.520 | way up, and it happens to be that you're 45, and you're working 75 hours a week and going home at

00:49:34.240 | 2 a.m. That's just kind of what it is. Tavish Leff Right, right. That is a good point. And

00:49:38.640 | I remember I had a client one time who was an executive at McDonald's, and he had started as

00:49:44.000 | an entry-level McDonald's worker, and he had progressed through every stage, and he was a

00:49:50.880 | high-paid executive, and he was so grateful. He said, "I wouldn't have had a chance without

00:49:56.960 | McDonald's," but because of the McDonald's University and every stage along the way,

00:50:00.800 | he was able to start with basically no skills and become a highly paid executive. So good point.

00:50:06.400 | But for you, that's not the case because you have opportunities. So let's talk about

00:50:10.000 | the opportunities to move on. Just going between those two, as far as programming and real estate

00:50:19.200 | investing, does one of them excite you more? Are you more drawn to one or the other?

00:50:24.640 | Michael O'Hanlon Oh, I don't know. I've partially gotten to

00:50:32.880 | real estate investing because listening to you and other people, I realized that you have two

00:50:38.240 | ways to build wealth, and it's either make a lot of money and put the excess money into some form of

00:50:45.600 | stocks or bonds, ETFs, whatever, and let that money build and grow for you, or you do that

00:50:53.760 | through real estate. And that kind of seemed to be the two paths that people went.

00:51:00.320 | And so I was like, "Well, at this point, I'm not expecting to have a super high-paying job. I mean,

00:51:05.280 | I'm putting money into my 401(k), so that will grow over time." But it's like, "Okay, I'm never...

00:51:13.440 | And especially, I mean, I'm 28 now, so when I "retire," who knows what even $1.5 million in

00:51:22.400 | my retirement account will do for me." So I chose real estate because it's like,

00:51:28.560 | "This is the reasonable path." It kind of excites me. I like it. The numbers of it excite me.

00:51:36.800 | I'm also... I am very frustrated at this point now. I have chosen to give myself a fairly

00:51:42.320 | small pool of properties that I'm looking for, also kind of confirm those criteria with others,

00:51:50.720 | and they believe that is a good thing what I'm doing, that I'm looking at solid properties,

00:51:56.880 | and I want the numbers to be right, and I don't want to be driving three hours to go get them,

00:52:00.240 | etc., etc. So that just makes it so partially, it's like, at this point, it's frustrating for

00:52:07.440 | them like, "Okay, I'm kind of stuck. I'm sitting where I am. Maybe there's something else I can do

00:52:16.240 | that I can build my career and my income elsewhere while still pursuing real estate and building that,

00:52:23.360 | but kind of just also recognizing that the market's at a very high point. I don't know

00:52:28.240 | if I think it will or won't crash. Who knows? We'll see, but kind of waiting for things to

00:52:33.600 | do the right thing to pop up or things to cool down.

00:52:36.080 | Right, right. Well, if you think about the difference between

00:52:40.400 | real estate and programming, I think they're two very different paths, and it wouldn't be

00:52:46.720 | right or wrong, but I think some very careful analysis on your part would be important as far

00:52:52.160 | as the vision that you have for your life. Do you have any experience in either of these industries

00:53:02.000 | yet? Not necessarily. I'm sufficient with computers. I mean, I have fairly good computer

00:53:13.280 | knowledge when it actually comes to programming. As I've told people, I know enough HTML just to

00:53:18.000 | break everything, so not really. I would say I almost have more experience in real estate

00:53:25.040 | because I've been learning about it longer, and we just bought our own house a couple years ago,

00:53:29.360 | so I've become more intimately acquainted with all of that, dealing with that ridiculousness.

00:53:34.480 | Right. Well, the reason I say I think they would go in two different directions,

00:53:38.560 | so the problem you face with having a restaurant job, depending on your hours, etc.,

00:53:42.320 | is it's a job that demands you to be in a certain place at a certain time,

00:53:47.360 | and one of the benefits of real estate, but one of the challenges of real estate,

00:53:51.280 | is you don't necessarily have to be in a certain place at a certain time.

00:53:54.240 | So in a way, if you're going to be putting together deals, you're going to be looking for

00:53:58.960 | deals, etc., in a way, you need the ability to go when you need to go and be where you need to be

00:54:08.960 | when you need to be there, so you need a flexible lifestyle. Now, can programming deliver a flexible

00:54:15.120 | lifestyle? I guess it could if you were an independent programmer. There are many people,

00:54:19.120 | programming is such a wide range. There are mainstream programmers, and there are non-mainstream

00:54:23.840 | programmers. There are tons of people that work full-time on standard business hours for a company,

00:54:28.320 | and there are people who have a very diverse work schedule that it could integrate,

00:54:36.800 | but I would see those as kind of two different paths. With programming, you need to really

00:54:43.360 | invest in your skills, and those skills are going to be harder to invest into your particular

00:54:50.640 | industry. So with programming, your model is going to probably be more to earn a high income

00:54:56.240 | and then invest that money, and invest not based upon finding deals, but based upon the high income

00:55:04.480 | and the low expenses and enjoying the lifestyle of programming, if you enjoy the mathematical

00:55:08.560 | challenge. Most programmers pursue things, seem to pursue things, especially if they're really

00:55:14.240 | focused on wealth. They want to pursue something like being involved with an early-stage startup

00:55:18.160 | and building their equity, et cetera, and that's a possible world, but it's not an easy world.

00:55:23.200 | So it's kind of its own thing, but I would guess that if you were pursuing that, it's hard for me

00:55:29.280 | to see how you would be served by trying to build a real estate investment business and a programming

00:55:34.080 | business at the same time. Now, with real estate, real estate has, if it's of interest to you,

00:55:39.440 | there are lots of well-proven ways to do it, and it sounds like you're already aggressively

00:55:45.200 | pursuing it. Now, question, do you have a lot of money that you can use now to pay for your own

00:55:49.920 | properties? I do not necessarily have any of my own. Like I said, I've got both through my father-in-law

00:55:57.120 | and then already just through basically talking to people, I've got at least one other investor

00:56:02.000 | lined up, so I have some money. Now, does your job currently give you the flexibility that you

00:56:08.080 | feel you need in order to pursue real estate and put some deals together? Yeah. So that's one of

00:56:14.240 | the advantages to my job is that I work, I mean, I do, I work about 50 hours a week, and I typically,

00:56:21.440 | we do breakfast. So most times I come in at five and I'm out by about two, and I've got,

00:56:29.600 | partially because I have seniority, I've got the flexibility in there to, so I'm like, "Hey,

00:56:34.880 | can I have this day off?" or "Can I bug out a little early?" you know, whatever. So I do have

00:56:39.360 | that flexibility, and with being off by two, you know, yeah. Okay. Well, it's hard, so there are

00:56:46.720 | a couple ways in real estate. So if you have the benefit of having a stable income, that can be a

00:56:51.920 | really valuable resource for you, because you have enough money to provide for your needs,

00:56:57.200 | to provide for your family, and you have a stable source of income. So that can help you to be

00:57:02.880 | stable while you're trying to build your business. On the schedule that you described, it's also

00:57:08.400 | possible that you can build the business with that. Being done at two gives you, what, six hours

00:57:14.080 | that if you needed it, six hours to pursue putting things together. You have hours during business

00:57:20.960 | hours and you have hours in the evening. So that's a good way to advance, and you can integrate your

00:57:27.040 | family with some of your skills and possibly buy yourself a little bit more time to work

00:57:31.280 | because of the flexibility there. So I wouldn't run away from it, but I would seriously consider,

00:57:36.640 | if you're not too excited about the restaurant business, I would seriously consider a transition

00:57:40.480 | plan. And I would look at real estate-related careers that you can work in while you are

00:57:47.360 | trying to build your real estate investment portfolio. And I would think that if you could

00:57:52.480 | be closer to the business, that could be a better move for you than being in the restaurant business.

00:57:58.880 | If I were pursuing real estate and I was starting with nothing and I were flat broke,

00:58:04.000 | I would try to get kind of a couple of jobs that are related to real estate as kind of my starting

00:58:10.640 | position. And I would try to see if I could get a job in managing real estate. So can I get a job

00:58:18.160 | as a building, what do they call it, the people who live in the building?

00:58:22.240 | - Property manager.

00:58:23.760 | - Yeah, can I get a job, but like as a property manager where in exchange for some of my

00:58:27.440 | work, I actually get a discounted rent. That would be the one thing I would pursue. So that would

00:58:33.600 | lower my expenses and help me to learn what it's like to work as a property manager. I would pursue

00:58:40.480 | some business in it. So I would work for a company that does rental management. And you should be

00:58:47.520 | able to make easy. If you go work for a job for a company that manages real estate as a property

00:58:53.200 | manager, you should very easily be able to get a job making $50,000 a year that would provide

00:59:00.240 | enough to cover your income. And that would start to get you contacts and relationships

00:59:04.400 | with the particular business that you're pursuing. Always the obvious example is real estate,

00:59:12.720 | as a real estate agent, buying, selling properties, et cetera, or some specialist of that

00:59:18.480 | as well. Because now you have flexibility, you have the potential for high income,

00:59:23.120 | which can be helpful for you to build your own revenue and you have flexible schedule.

00:59:29.920 | Frankly, that would be what I would pursue because there's no reason why you can't make

00:59:34.880 | six figures as a real estate agent. As you build the business, if you've got the financial ability

00:59:39.600 | to get started during the difficult years, you can make six figures as an agent. You can have

00:59:43.440 | a flexible work schedule. You can, along the way, build up a little management business if you want

00:59:48.560 | to as well. And you can develop cashflow, which you can use and you're in the business. So you'll

00:59:53.040 | see the deals. That's a time proven example. Or working with someone else that services the real

00:59:59.680 | estate industry. I guess I would see that if you have interest in it, I would see that as something

01:00:06.000 | seriously worth considering because it gets you closer to the business. You're more likely to find

01:00:10.720 | out about real estate deals in Houston, Texas. If you're working in the real estate industry in

01:00:16.240 | Houston, Texas, then if you're managing a breakfast cafe in Honolulu, Hawaii, I obviously changed your

01:00:23.680 | location just to prove the point, that the closer you are, the more likely you are to meet investors,

01:00:29.520 | the more likely you are to meet sources of capital, the more likely you are to come across

01:00:33.200 | deals. And if you want to be as an investor, you need deal flow and you need money flow.

01:00:38.640 | And those are probably going to be served by you being closer to the business than in the

01:00:44.480 | restaurant business. So I wouldn't jump out, but I would seriously consider transitioning. And if

01:00:48.960 | you were convinced that that were the direction you wanted to go in, I think there's a lot of,

01:00:54.240 | it's a sensible path. -

01:00:58.880 | Okay. Yeah. And I had kind of asked some people who, one of the communities I'm part of that do

01:01:04.000 | real estate, like, well, should I try and pursue a job in the industry to help, you know, give me

01:01:10.480 | contacts or whatever. And they're like, eh, maybe, maybe not. It just depends. I think that was

01:01:15.920 | actually great of an idea. So, and frankly, being a real estate agent sounds absolutely terrible to

01:01:22.640 | me. So I probably would not go that route. But so you kind of see those as almost two,

01:01:27.920 | it'd be better to try and find a actual job in the industry that would pay me decently. And then I

01:01:38.080 | can, whatever, then trying to get an entirely different career path altogether, like going

01:01:49.440 | and doing programming. I mean, programming sounds interesting to me. So that's kind of why I was

01:01:53.040 | pursuing it. And I was like, well, maybe I can then develop a real estate on the side.

01:01:57.520 | - I'm not trying to talk you into one or the other. So if you're interested in programming,

01:02:03.120 | go and pursue programming. And, but if you're programming, you're going to just buy a house

01:02:10.000 | every now and then as you accumulate money. How are you, unless you're the kind of person,

01:02:13.440 | say, I love both of these and I want to give half time to both of them. You could set up your life

01:02:17.440 | any way you want. If you can find a way to program four hours a day and do real estate four hours a

01:02:21.600 | day, hey, go for it. But I look at it and I say, what's the point of splitting your energy? Why

01:02:28.320 | not put 100% of your energy behind the most, the biggest opportunity? So many people kind of split

01:02:37.280 | their energy all over the place. Why wouldn't you, if you could work in the area where you want to

01:02:42.800 | invest, why wouldn't you take all of those benefits? When you look at rich people,

01:02:49.200 | they don't usually come from a diverse background. What happens is you have to have those

01:02:56.000 | specialized skills and you have to develop a marketplace. So if you're going to build in

01:03:01.520 | programming, then if you're going to do programming, then go ahead and pursue it.

01:03:06.400 | But then also make sure that your investment approaches are areas where your unique knowledge

01:03:10.880 | can be applied. So maybe you have a specialized knowledge in programming. And so now, is there

01:03:17.920 | a way that you can apply it to your investment plan, whether you're particularly interested in

01:03:21.840 | cryptocurrency or you're particularly interested in certain kinds of technology startups, or you

01:03:26.240 | really have your finger on the pulse of this certain thing that's happening. The obvious

01:03:31.840 | example is it's hard for you if you're living in Houston, Texas, it's hard to have your finger on

01:03:36.400 | the pulse of how real estate is doing in Bangor, Maine. It's possible to have your finger on the

01:03:42.240 | pulse of what's happening in Houston, Texas. So why not to build wealth? Why not structure those

01:03:50.320 | things as much as possible? So live in Houston, Texas, invest in Houston, Texas, work in Houston,

01:03:56.960 | Texas. And if you get your living, your investing, and your working all in the same area,

01:04:02.000 | now you start to have multiple benefits in all of them. You're known as a good investor.

01:04:05.920 | You're also known as a good businessman in Houston, Texas. That builds your network. Your

01:04:10.320 | network in the area gives you access to more money. Your access to more money gives you access

01:04:14.400 | to more deals. It all starts to feed off of each other. But if half the time you're in Houston and

01:04:19.040 | half the time you're in metaphorical Bangor, Maine, now all of a sudden you have to work twice

01:04:23.680 | as hard in both places. So conceptually, that's my point. Pick what you think is your best option,

01:04:30.560 | and then try to grow, and then only add lines of business and investment as they relate to your

01:04:36.320 | particular approach. I love having a chicken in the background on my show. That's my kind of

01:04:41.840 | personal finance show. Yeah. Or we also have five acres. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Any

01:04:48.640 | other final question, Daniel, before I go? So I guess just a quick question with that. With

01:04:53.360 | certainly a peaking real estate market, whatever that exactly means, do you think

01:04:59.520 | certainly not knowing what's going to happen, who knows? It could go on another 20 years crazy. It

01:05:04.320 | could crash tomorrow. I mean, do you then potentially see as, okay, let's I go get a

01:05:10.480 | job as a real estate agent at a title company or whatever, and I'm trying to invest in real

01:05:15.200 | estate properties as am I putting too many eggs in one basket? Or is it kind of like, well, you

01:05:21.920 | ultimately never know what's going to happen. So you just go with, you make the best choices

01:05:26.880 | possible at the time with the information you have and do what you can. Yeah, it's possible.

01:05:32.640 | And it is a risk. The most obvious risk that I often give advice on is if you work at a company

01:05:39.440 | and you invest all of your money in that company stock, what happens when the company goes bankrupt

01:05:45.120 | is you lose your whole life. So if you work at a company, don't necessarily invest in that company

01:05:49.840 | stock. So I don't think that you should get, I think it's risky for you to have everything in

01:05:55.040 | one area. It's risky for you to depend entirely on real estate if everything is dependent on a

01:06:01.280 | positive real estate market. So how do you manage the risk? Well, I don't have a perfect answer

01:06:08.080 | because most of us, we have a huge risk. For most people, if they lose their job, they're sunk.

01:06:13.280 | Now, with your good financial planning in that you don't need a, you're a good budgeter, you

01:06:17.600 | don't need a huge amount of money to live on, you're more insulated. But still today, if you

01:06:21.440 | lose your income in the restaurant business, you could be sunk. And there's a connection between

01:06:26.880 | restaurants and real estate. If people aren't able to pay their mortgage, they're probably

01:06:31.760 | less likely to be spending money on restaurants. And so we always have these risks. So I look at

01:06:37.600 | it and say, I want to have my eyes wide open to the risks and try to protect myself. So I would

01:06:43.360 | try to say, first, let me make sure that I've got good financial planning in place for myself.

01:06:48.720 | I've got cash in hand that I'm going to be insulated. If I lose my income for a few months,

01:06:53.280 | I need to make sure that I'm not going to be devastated by that. I would also look at my

01:06:57.760 | business and try to say, what are my backup plans? If the market turns, what are my backup plans?

01:07:02.640 | So if you think the real estate market is going to turn, then while you're building,

01:07:06.720 | working with buyers as an agent, by way of example, while you're working with buyers,

01:07:10.800 | start studying short sales so that you can become a short sale expert. I knew some real

01:07:15.360 | estate agents here locally in the last collapse of real estate in Florida where they made a huge

01:07:21.760 | amount of money. They never did better because they became short sale specialists. Same thing

01:07:26.080 | with investors. There are certain investment strategies that work in rising markets, and

01:07:29.920 | there are certain strategies that work in falling markets. So a falling market may be a time where

01:07:35.920 | if you-- let's say you had work as an agent and an investor. As an agent, perhaps the falling

01:07:42.960 | market isn't serving you because people aren't buying houses so much and you're not interested

01:07:47.760 | in working in short sales. But if you have access to the capital, can you become a dealmaker? And

01:07:53.440 | now you start bird-dogging deals and flipping-- you're bringing properties under contract and

01:07:58.800 | you're assigning them over to wealthy people. And now you're taking advantage of the people

01:08:02.320 | who have more money and know deals, and you can do very well in a falling market because now

01:08:07.120 | you're able to do deals. So real estate is unique. It's cool in the sense that you can do well no

01:08:15.600 | matter the market. You just need a different strategy to do well in the market that you're

01:08:19.840 | dealt.

01:08:20.480 | -Okay. That's very helpful. Thank you.

01:08:24.400 | -Beyond that, I would just say look at the actual business, look at the industry, look and try to

01:08:31.920 | decide what best fits my lifestyle. I'm more familiar with real estate than I am with

01:08:36.880 | programming, which is, I guess, why I started to talk more in that direction than about

01:08:42.800 | programming. But programming can be great. Just do your research and study it carefully. But

01:08:48.880 | most of all, try to build a life first, focus on the interest, and then you'll, over time, be

01:08:54.080 | able to build the income that you need. That's it for today's show. I hope that you've enjoyed

01:08:59.920 | this discussion of questions and answers. Obviously, I'm trying to do a couple things here.

01:09:06.160 | I'm trying to create an interesting show that'll help you. If you don't have the money or it's

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01:09:14.800 | discussing in something like this and apply them to your own life. There was some gold here

01:09:18.800 | in this show that you can take and apply to your own life. I gave you a bunch of resources.

01:09:22.800 | Take them and run with them. That's why I do Radical Personal Finance. If you'd like more

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01:09:50.400 | calls. Most of today's callers, there were about three times as many that called in. For most of

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01:11:07.280 | Thank you for listening.

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