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Today, I want to talk to you about a common misconception that people have about life and work:
They think that just because they have a full-time job, they can’t be a business owner.
Based on my first-hand experience building Retirement Rehab while working full-time as a senior executive, I can assure you that this couldn’t be further from the truth.
You CAN be an outstanding employee and still have time to build an online business on the side. In fact, that’s one of the most popular strategies we teach for extending your career runway and financing the retirement lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of.
In this episode, we’ll dive deeper into the “why” and “how” of simultaneously being a high-performing employee and a successful business owner.
Here’s what we covered during our discussion:
The Commitments and Choices You’ll Have to Make
We’re all given the same 24-hours each day – it’s how we spend them that makes the difference. If you’re going to honor your promise to your employer, that only leaves about 8 hours per day where you aren’t sleeping or working.
So, you’re going to have to sacrifice some recreational activities and stay disciplined to your long term goal of being a business owner. We talk about some of the ways to do that without burning out.
Overcoming Common Objections
There are a handful of objections that are almost universally cited by people who want to start a side business, but are on the fence:
- Time and Energy
- Capital Requirements
- Lack of Technical Skills
- Lack of Business Acumen
In this episode, we systematically debunk the myths around each of these objections and equip you with strategies for going around, over, or through the roadblocks that might be holding you back from getting started.
Strategies for Balancing Your Time and Energy
We’ll also dive deeper into my personal strategies for managing time and energy in a way that lets you simultaneously make progress at the office and at home.
You’ll walk away with strategies to get more value out of each day by doing things like segmenting roles and responsibilities, bucketing similar tasks, outsourcing low value activities, and scaling your efforts up or down as needed.
You Don’t Have to Be Perfect, You Just Have to Get Started
There are a lot of things that can hold you back from starting your side business, but one of the most commonly cited (and least justified) excuses is “I don’t know anything about starting or running a business.”
There is a common misconception that you have to have all of the answers on Day 1. The truth is, most people are just figuring things out as they go, and the primary difference between successful business owners and wantrepreneurs is simply that – taking action.
When you’re just starting out, you will probably make a mistake every day – and that’s okay! You’ll learn from the experience and be a better business owner because of it.
You can go as slow or as fast as you’d like. But, if you want to accelerate your growth, you should join a community of like-minded individuals like the one we have at Retirement Rehab so that you can learn from peers who have “been there, done that.”
References and Resources
Transcription of This Episode
Welcome to the Red Pill Retirement Podcast, where we view the raw, unfiltered truth about retirement planning in the modern age. Pensions and 401Ks are quickly becoming a thing of the past, so we’re here to share resources and recommendations that will help you create the retirement lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of. If you’re ready to take control of your financial future, we’re here to help. Let’s get started.
All right folks, welcome back to the show. My name is James Sowers, and I’m your host, and I’m joined again by Mr. Ian Bond. Ian, how are you doing today?
I’m doing terrific, James. Great to see you again.
Yeah, great to see you, and I know the folks at home are excited to have another conversation from us, and today, we’re going to be talking all about how to take control of your retirement, and frankly your future without giving up your day job. I think a lot of folks mistakenly believe that if they’re going to go into bi for themselves, or if they’re going to try to run a business as a way to build a sustainable living, that they have to quit their day job, because they just won’t have the time or the energy, or the where with all to take care of both at the same time, and I think we’re here today to kind of dispel that and say that there are ways that you can set up processes and workflows and structures around your time and your life, that you can make time for it too, and be highly effective in both roles.
I think this is extremely prevalent for you, because you are still working for a traditional employer in an executive role with a team that reports to you, so it’s a demanding position, and you’re running some extremely successful businesses on the side. I think the folks listening in are going to be intrigued to learn from you and your experience, and how you’re managing both of those things effectively. Maybe Ian, the best way to start off is to just tell us a little bit about your professional situation, and what you’re doing to manage an employment scenario and an entrepreneurship scenario.
Sure, James. You know, let’s be clear about a couple of things. First of all, your best strategy if you find yourself looking at a situation where you don’t have enough money to retire is to keep your day job for as long as you can and earn it at the highest level that you can, and in the My Retirement Rehab Community, we talk about strategies on how you can do that, one of which is what I call the MVP employee. That’s, you know, what we owe our employers is sacrosanct, that comes first. Everything else has to kind of fit around that.
Now, that having said, having said that, there are choices you have to make. And you have to make this commitment. There is 168 hours in the week, and if you’re going to choose to watch Game of Thrones and be committed to the NFL and to have a DVR full of shows that you want to watch, you’re going to have a tough time finding enough time in the day to do the things that you want to do.
Now, I’m an executive, and people that triangulate up to me, there are probably 80 or 90 right now, and I have a team of people that handle, that those people report to, and … but I’m very involved in a lot of firm wide conversations about strategy. I’m very involved in obviously the strategy of my business, and you know, that comes first. I have to do that first for sure.
Everything I do is, in my side pursuits, come after what I think is my obligation to my employer, and after doing this for a number of years, and coming up through the ranks of, the way I’ve been ingrained to believe about this, I think that’s the right thing to do. Now, how do we manage our operations? Kind of in our last session we talked about in our e-commerce activities, my wife runs those. We bought websites and grew those websites, and that is my wife’s day job.
Sometimes it’s at night, she’s working on it right now in another room, and sometimes she’s working on it during the day, but that had to be done with, that had to be constructed with the notion that we’re not on the same time zone as the United States. It has to kind of run without us. We had to set it up to run like that.
When I come home from work, or when I have free time, I think about this strategy. I don’t know any of the people that work for her. I do know their names, I don’t know any of the suppliers that she deals with, although I know their names. I certainly can read the spreadsheets and the financials, and plan that stuff out. I can contribute in that type of thing.
Now, I happen to have a passion for writing and communicating. On MyRetirermentRehab.me, and ProfessionalWebsiteInvestors.com, I write about things that are interesting to me and important to me. On MyRetirermentRehab.me I write about what I think is the fallacy of the current state of retirement planning and why it’s failed so miserably for people, and what you should do if you find yourself in a situation like I was in, where I was 55 and, you know, not going to make it.
Then at ProfessionalWebsiteInvestors.com, I write about investing in websites. I’m not as prolific as I would be if I didn’t have a job, I’d be writing much more, but I have a job, and that comes first. Now, I don’t golf, I don’t watch Game of Thrones. There is no NFL football in my life. This is it. This is what I’m doing, and so it works for me, but if you’re not going to make some sacrifices, and if you’re not going to commit to being, you know, the best employee you can be, I think you’re going to have a problem.
Right, and you know, piggybacking on that point, I think one of the common misconceptions that we’ve created in popular society is, we’ve made the term “priority” a plural. We say, “what are your priorities?” But in the traditional, Latin sense, priority is singular, you have one.
That’s right.
If you’re going to do this, I think it’s important to know that you need to make building the business your priority after the traditional role. Your employer is number one, that’s your priority. You take care of that, it’s kind of like the safety briefing you get on a flight, right? Put your own mask on, right, and then help somebody else. Take care of your employer, make sure that primary source of income and the breadwinner is taken care of, and that you are excelling in that role, and then beyond that, your next priority is to build the business on the side. It’s not mixed in with Game of Thrones or whatever other hobbies you want to do. It’s going to require that kind of commitment. Is that accurate?
That is not only accurate, that’s probably better said than I said it. I liked the Latin, priority. There is a priority, and you know, literally, I think about every day, at some point in my day, there is something that I’ll have some time, there is something that I can do to take one step forward in this other stuff that I’m doing. Maybe I can even squeeze in two or three.
It doesn’t disrupt my work. There’s plenty of extra time at work. Sometimes I stay late at work and I, my evening hours are cut back, but there’s always something you can do to take one step forward, and if you’re well organized, you can do that. I have a very good friend named David who I coach, and he lives in Los Angeles. You’ve never met a busier guy. This guy flies all around, unfortunate for him, he’s incredibly well regarded by his employer, who keeps sending him to corporate off sites where he can’t drive his business, and he has to participate in the off sites, and then when he gets done with these things that start at eight in the morning and end at 10:00 at night, he still has to go back and think about running his basic business back in Los Angeles. Yet he is developing an online income, because he sees the limitations in what he does.
Yeah. I think that kind of covered one of the considerations that a lot of folks are going to have when they are thinking about maybe starting a business on the side of their day job, is the moral implications of that. Am I doing wrong by my employer to try to juggle the two, and I think the answer is no, as long as you continue to prioritize your full time role as an employee with … you prioritize that over the entrepreneurship.
Now, I think another concern that a lot of folks have is just the sheer bandwidth. I mean, you’ve got a lot going on, and you’re managing successfully to be an effective executive and run businesses on the side. A lot of folks are afraid of the time and resource and energy requirements there. Do you think that that concern is justified, or is it maybe a little bit over blown? Do people make it out to be worse than it actually is, when you get in the trenches and you start making progress toward these goals?
Well, as I just mentioned, I don’t know a busier guy than David, so I would challenge anyone to show me their calendar and you know … and I know people that work from 10:00 at night to 1:00 in the morning, and then get up at 5:00 and then work til 7:00. I know people that do that, and have four kids and their moms, and they have the responsibility, and they’re doing it.
I find the, “I don’t have time” kind of argument to be a little bit lacking, to be honest with you, because if it’s a priority, if it is the priority, you’ll find the time. You tell me how you spend your day, and I’ll tell you what your priorities are. You know, having said that, we all go into a time warp sometimes professionally where it’s, you’re traveling or you’re indisposed or your work requires you to do things. Yes, obviously, there’s not much you can get done, but even listening to a podcast or reading a book or before you go to bed at night, jotting down a couple of things that you can think about subconsciously while you’re sleeping, and when you wake up in the morning. Any little thing that you can do to make, move the ball forward, to me it’s a big deal, and that’s the way you have to look at it.
I mean, you can only do what you can do, but I can only tell you this, that you’ve got to start, and you’ve got to make progress and at some point, the best way to make more progress is to learn how to outsource things so that you can get more leverage on your time because you can employ workers in other countries who work for a fraction of what people work for in the United States to help your effort, and when you get to the point where you can employ outsource workers, it’s a snowball. It just, it’s amazing what you can get done.
Yeah, and I think the important point there is that starting a business does not have to be a light switch, it can be kind of a dimmer switch. You can dial it up and down based on how things change. If you get busy at work, then you can dial back the business a little bit, but the important thing is to make incremental progress every single day, and over time, that is going to accrue to be meaningful developments toward your ultimate goal of running a business that can sustain your life by itself, when you do retire from the traditional gig.
I think that’s a really compelling point that you shared, and you know, along the same lines, I think we would be curious to hear about the steps that you’ve personally taken to make sure that there is balance. That you are during right by your employer, but also doing right by your business and not letting that go to the wayside. Are there certain systems or workflows that you put in place, that you hired a team, automation, outsourcing, that kind of thing? What are you doing to make sure that everything, every ball stays in the air and nothing falls to the ground and breaks?
Well, with regards to my job and my employer, you know, my day starts and ends committed with them, and like everyone, we’re on email, less outside the United States than it used to be when I was inside the United States in terms of after hours, but you know, there’s planning sessions and there’s social events and there’s client related things that you need to do after hours, and you do those things. Now, with regards to our E-commerce activities that my wife runs, my contribution is strategic. I can do analytics on different types of website investing, kind of in my sleep I’m, looked at different type of investments, different types of asset classes, different managers, for three dozen years now.
That’s kind of a super power I have, which is being able to look at spreadsheets and kind of being able to figure out, what makes the business tick, and you know, as you start to network in the world that you choose to participate in, mine is e-commerce, but it could be coach-
Participate in, minus e-commerce but it could be coaching and consulting, which I do, or it could be writing, which is something that I do.
As you start to network into these you meet people and you hear their stories and you learn from them. We outsource as many tasks as we can. As a matter of fact, my wife and I have a joke that when I get frustrated with things that are going on in the business because I look at the high level financial summaries all the time, when I get frustrated with the progress that’s being made it’s usually because we need to hire someone else, an additional person, to supplement the team that we have because I’m impatient and I want to do lots of things and I want to go fast and break things.
My wife is very methodical. The way to break that tension of me wanting to go fast and her wanting to make sure that everything is going correctly is to get some more leverage on our time by hiring a specialist that does whatever it is that’s holding us back. That’s something that we’ve experienced and it’s almost now a family joke. It wasn’t really very funny when we first started out. I can tell you that.
I think that that’s an intuition that a lot of folks have is there’s going to be this natural desire to move quickly, especially if you’re in a position where maybe financially you’re not where you want to be. You’re going to want to make money right now.
One thing that I heard you say there that I think is a big part of the message that you’re trying to communicate through My Retirement Rehab is that you don’t have to build a business from scratch. If that scares you, either from a complexity standpoint or a time requirement or a resource requirement standpoint, you don’t have to do that.
You can buy an existing business that’s already generating revenue and you can focus on growing that into something that can hit the revenue goals you’re looking for. I think that that’s one point that I heard you say that I think is really important for the listeners to understand.
Another point is that when you are crunched for time because you’re working full-time for another employer you need to be laser-focused on doing the tasks that drive the most progress for the business. For you, that’s the strategic tasks. Focus on your core competency and to the degree that you can, outsource or automate anything else that might fall under administrative tasks or lower value tasks.
That’s how you’re going to make the most out of the time that you do have available to build the business and still make sure that you protect that sacred time with your employer and that you execute at a high level there in the office, whatever arrangement you have.
Yeah. Going back to your first point if you were to come up with a brilliant idea on your own and you were to launch it you would be subject to the 90% fail in five years rule. Okay?
If you buy an existing business, an online business that’s already up and working, no matter how small the commitment can be, and it can be as little as $10,000. Our first business cost less than $20,000. You can get in the game in something that has a track record already.
You can learn. I called it the university of the internet. I was prepared to lose all of my money in my first investment to actually learn how to get into the game. I’m a big believer in doing that.
Now with regards to how much time the dimmer switch analogy it’s absolutely the case that if you lay the groundwork and depending on what model you choose to participate online, you can pick up various assignments and help people within your area of expertise at your leisure.
You can respond to posts for people looking with your expertise on places like Upwork or Freelancer dot com or some of the places where people freelance. There are industry-specific coaching sites, Clarity dot FM comes to mind, where people look for people with various expertise.
Yeah. You can absolutely figure out how you want to participate. I think the thing is that you’ve got to start and there’s a learning curve. You have to start before you are retired in order to be able to be at some kind of a running speed when you ultimately do retire.
You’re not going to get there … It’s going to take a while to build things. By the way, there’s jiggles, right? There’s things that work today that may not work a year from today and right now the economy is terrific but it may not be terrific at some point in the future. You’ve got to keep experimenting with things.
Sure. I would say that one of the most attractive aspects of starting a business on the side of your day job is its more similar to real estate investing than investing in traditional vehicles like mutual funds. Those things are intangible.
You send your money off. You check a dashboard and you hope that number goes up every time you come back but you really don’t have a sense for what’s being done with it, somebody else is managing it. You can kind of feel insecure or left in the dark. Again, if there’s another economic downturn that number can be cut in half tomorrow.
Buying an existing business is more like buying a piece of real estate that you can rent out. It’s a tangible thing. For the most part it’s a tangible thing. You can see the website. You can navigate the website. It is bringing money in every single month. You can touch and feel those things and you control how fast that grows. You’re not at the whim of the economy or some new law that gets passed at the federal level that might be tanking your portfolio.
I think that if somebody is looking to take control of their retirement, that’s the whole point of this episode, I think running a business is one of the best options when compared to traditional options like a brokerage account or speculative investing.
I think that it’s really a bit of autonomy and independence that a lot of people crave and it might seem scary at first but it’s really actually in a lot of ways the safer bet.
Well, look, what drives me nuts is that there’s a whole cottage industry that’s coaching people that are 60 plus into trying to figure out how to recast themselves by taking their graduation date off their LinkedIn profile and hoping that they can somehow massage their way into this shrinking pool of jobs for people that are in their fifties or sixties.
I think that’s crazy. I just think it makes no sense. I think the smart thing to do is to capitalize on your years of experience as a corporate career professional or as a professional in some other field. The internet allows you to take your expertise, which you might only be able to deliver locally without the internet, and now you can deliver it globally.
We’re talking. We’re eight time zones apart. My tax guy is another couple time zones away from you. He’s in Central America. I deal with people all the way around the globe. The website broker that I use, the CEO is based in the Philippines. Their team is distributed all over.
Taking your expertise and expanding the number of people that have access to you is just so easy today. Why you would think that if you live in Dallas, Texas that you needed to only call on people in Dallas, Texas or Miami, Florida or Denver, Colorado, it makes no sense to me really.
Neither does thinking about what’s your next career going to look like when you’re my age. At some point you have to say that the likelihood that you’re going to get hired for the next great job is going to be somewhat limited.
We talked about this a little bit in the last podcast that it’s incredibly appealing to have location independent income that you own and that you can dial up or dial down as your income source. It’s totally liberating.
I would challenge anybody listening to this, just go sell one thing on eBay and the joy you get when the wire transfer to your account because you sold something that you don’t need and you got money for it it’s addictive. It’s really fun.
I wake up in the morning and I look at the dashboards for the backend of the e-commerce sites that we run. Every day I’m just amazed. You think it’s just going to end, right? For some reason you’ve got this feeling. Here we are now two and a half years into this. We started very meager. Made every mistake you can possibly make.
Finally got lucky at the beginning of last year and we hit on a theme in the niche that we’re in. Things exploded for us. We had a 5X revenue year. We’re now doing over $2 million in revenue. That’s growing and will be bigger this year than last year.
You know, I would never have guessed, James, that this would be what’s going on for us. If I can help anybody get somewhere into that process, if I can persuade anyone just to even look at it and think about it, that’s my mission.
Yeah. I can imagine. You talked about selling that first item on eBay. Every dollar you make today is just as intoxicating and motivating as that first dollar that you made a few years back whenever you started your first business.
If somebody wants that feeling … I think we’ve done a pretty good job of illustrating why this is a compelling path to go down compared to traditional vehicles. Let’s just assume that everybody at home is sitting there saying, “All right. Well, how do I get started? What do I do?”
Did you jump straight into e-commerce? Did you do some coaching and consulting? What did you do? What challenges did you face early on in that process that you want everybody listening at home to avoid because they’re learning from your experience?
Yeah. I became convinced that physical goods e-commerce, which is the biggest slice of the e-commerce universe, physical goods e-commerce is something that I understand. I think most people do, right? It’s kind of like real estate, right? If you and I were to be parachuted in to pick a city we’d figure out which apartments and which houses are cheaper and what rents should be. You can figure that stuff out. We’re all online shoppers.
Physical goods e-commerce made sense to me. The first thing I did was I paid a couple of thousand dollars for what I think is the best course to teach people how the theory behind building e-commerce stores because if you understand the theory on how e-commerce stores are built and why they’re built and why they should work if they’re built this way then I think you’re at an advantage when you’re looking to buy them.
Now I’m a deal junkie so I went and signed up on every website broker’s website and they will send you everything that’s for sale. I would get the prospectuses, the short sheets on every deal, and I would often times send back a question or they would contact me. I did plenty of interviews with people to learn about the sellers, to learn about why they’re selling, what are the challenges in their website. I didn’t abuse this.
Then ultimately I got comfortable with buying. The funny thing is the first site we bought totally contradicted all of the teachings of the course I took. It was an older site so I felt comfortable that it wasn’t going to go away. Like I mentioned, I was prepared to lose everything that I invested in it.
The reality is that it didn’t go away and it worked out so well that a month later we bought our second site and I kept accumulating some smaller sites after that. That second site, which is in a very big niche, we really got lucky and there were a few things in the formula that really worked. It’s in a very big niche. It’s household products. Things that you can walk around and see in your house. I love …
This is another bugaboo but people get all hung up on this idea that you’re an entrepreneur. I don’t really think of myself as an entrepreneur. I sell people stuff. I just sell stuff. It’s very simple. I’m not Zuckerberg or Gates. It’s not what I’m doing here. It’s not my goal.
That second site we struggled for a long time until we finally hit it. You know, when you think you’re doing everything right but the numbers in any given month are kind of uneven and you’re kind of …
But the numbers in any given month are uneven and you’re kind of failing every day. It’s the antithesis of the way you would expect your corporate life to go, where if you have a mistake it’s a huge problem. Okay? I will tell you that when you buy your first website, you’ll have a mistake every day. Okay? We kind of coined a phrase here my wife and I, that if it didn’t kill us, if we survived, we would live to fight another day. Most of the time it was an expensive lesson that we learned and then we moved forward. Then ultimately when we got lucky, and we got lucky through a lot of hard work and some very good luck then things they got very serious. When they got very serious, then we started to have to really commit ourselves to putting things in place, like standard operating procedures, and formal hiring policies, and stuff like that. My wife does all that stuff and I look at the high level strategy things as I’ve mentioned before. I also, because I’m a deal junkie, I looked at kind of what the next thing we might do.
Right, and so I think the important thing to emphasize there is that it was an evolutionary process. If you’re sitting at home thinking, “I gotta figure out how I’m going to hire a team and I got to have all these standard operating procedures,” you don’t have to know everything from day one. In fact, you don’t really have to know much of anything. You just have to get started and-
I can make it easier for you than that. If you join our community, you ask the question and people will give you the answer, “What do I do in this situation?” You’ll get a ton of answers for people who did something similar to you and they’ll give you a great idea of what resources you can do or how you should approach it. It’s that simple.
Yeah. Yeah. That’s actually the perfect segue. I was going to emphasize the community. I know we’re running up against time here so let’s just cap this off. If somebody wants to get started today, what is your advice to them? I think that my gut tells me you’re going to mention the community and that you are not alone in this. If you’re thinking about this and this is something you want to do. You don’t have to do it by yourself. You don’t have to figure everything out by yourself.
There’s a community of people just like you that are either in the same position as you or some folks that are further down the line that can say, “I’ve been there and done that. Here’s what happened to me and here’s how you don’t make the same misstep.” This community exists in the world, and you can join it today, and you can have all that kind of support that you want from Ian and all of the folks there at the My Retirement Rehab community. But what other advice would you give somebody to get started small today and start making progress towards taking control of their retirement?
Yeah. So James, I think my contribution is that in my day job I’m fortunate and I looked at kind of every imaginable investment and asset class and manager and I know a lot of the best managers on a first name basis, so I can cut through all of the retirement planning mumbo jumbo for people. The community is a very practical place to go that didn’t exist when I was in the situation where I was trying to figure out which way was up. I was really quite befuddled and quite confused and now I feel like we’re really on the right path and I’m very excited and I’m excited to share that with other people. But what would I do? You know I would look around and try to figure it out, kind of what interests me, what are things that I’m good at, how could I apply those things to solve other people’s problems and I would think of the world in those things.
But the reality is there’s a go-slow path and there’s a go-fast path. The go-fast path, which if you’re in your 40s, or 50s, or 60s, is that you’ve got to find some mentors quickly. They could just cut through things and you won’t make the mistakes. The best money I’ve ever spent has been to hire great mentors and hire experts who can look at a problem that I might have and in a moment they can discern what the answer is. I’m involved in an E-commerce community. I won’t mention the name of it. It’s full of people that just geek out over E-commerce issues. I am far and away … I’ve got to be in the bottom few percent in terms of intellect, in experience in this group. I will never, ever give up that membership because the annual membership, whatever it is, for the one question that I might ask in any given year, it’s priceless. It’s absolutely priceless. You’re not alone. Join a community. Participate. Find one that fits for you where you can be with like-minded people and contribute.
Now the first thing that most people do when they join a community is they lurk. Okay? Then they start to kind of get their footing, and they see a question that a newbie is asking, and they answer it, and that’s a great feeling. Then suddenly they decide to ask their own question. I remember being the guy that was really reluctant to open up and share and somebody asks it, answers it, because that’s how communities work, and it’s great. It’s a great way to find in this world like-minded people because they’re no longer living … It’s no longer your neighborhood or your neighbors. It’s who you’re connected to online and how we’re all networked together.
Yep. If you want to take action today, you don’t have to follow Ian’s model of buying that $10,000 or $20,000 existing business. You can start small and if you’re happy you can stay small or you can start small and grow. But one way to start today would be to look at your current skittles and get into something like a freelancing or consulting position through some of the websites you said, Upwork or clarity.fm. Just start taking a coaching client and start having a weekly or biweekly call with them. See if you like that kind of thing. You can always scale that up. You could take two, three, four and let them work around your schedule and fit that in and generate revenue that way.
Then if you decide that this independent business owner lifestyle is for you, then you can double down and buy the business, but being a part of a community and having some people that have your back and can provide some insight from real world experiences is going to be the best way to determine if this is something that’s viable or of interest to you. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed, just start small. Take a coaching client, take a freelancing advisory role, and started making money that way and just get a feel for it. Then Ian and the folks at My Retirement and Rehab will be happy to help you grow from there if that’s something you want to do. Is that … I think that’s-
Yeah. So James, so what we talk about in My Retirement Rehab, in the community, is that there’s really the big three, right? There’s coaching, and consulting, and then there is writing or speaking. Speaking is teaching English. Writing is, there’s all varieties of different writing. Then there’s various different ways to participate in E-commerce, Those are really the big three. Figure out what’s right for you and we provide people with resources in the community to help them in all of those. I tick all three of the boxes, so I can add a little bit of value of my own. But there are other people that are far deeper in some of these things than I am.
Yeah. You know you’re the advanced course. That is basically is what you’re saying. You don’t have to start there, but that can be the end-goal. I think that what we’ve done today is illustrate that you can take control of your retirement. You can take ownership over your future and build sustainable systems that can finance whatever you want to do with your life after you leave the workplace. But you don’t have to give up your job right now. In fact, you should keep it and keep excelling in that role to support your ambition, to be a business owner and to take that as the eventual outcome for that.
We’ve got all kinds of resources and in future episodes we’re going to talk more specifically about types of work that you can do and things like that. But I think the real learning point today is don’t be afraid to take action if it seems scary, if it seems like you’re not going to be able to balance the time commitment, or if being a business owner seems too complex, then don’t let that hold you back. Take action today. Feel it out. With the resources that are available at myretirementrehab.me that Ian’s providing, I think you have everything in your toolbox you need to be successful. We just encourage you to get started today. Any last words, Ian, before we sign off here?
No, James. I think you kind of summarized it well, hit the nail on the head. You’re not alone, but everybody has to solve the problem that we’re all going to live too long, and we’re going to need to fund our retirement, and there’s lots of ways to do it. I would just tell people that are in the conundrum that I was once in that there is a way out. We published, we have over 120 pieces of content on our website that address all different kinds of issues. Peruse the website. Look for something that’s interesting. Post a question or a comment. I answer them regularly. Please use us as a resource.
Yep, and we are going to link everything that we talked about today up in the show notes so you can find the URLs there and peruse that way. Of course in future episodes, we’re going to keep diving into this. So if this is something you’ve enjoyed, go ahead and subscribe and stay tuned for more information about all of this. As always, Ian, thank you so much for your time and we appreciate hearing from you. We’ll look forward to the next one.
Thanks James. It’s a pleasure talking with you again. I look forward to the next time.
We talked a little bit about how there will be some sacrifices that need to be made in terms of maybe you can’t keep up with your favorite TV show. Maybe you can’t have as much downtime for things like reading, or watching movies or television, or maybe even exercising in the short-term. You may have to cut back on those things just a little bit until you can get your business off the ground and then gradually reintroduce them as you have stability and predictable revenue around what is going to ultimately fund the retirement that you’re shooting for.
We also talked about how you can take small steps just to get started and you don’t have to jump in headfirst and dive into being an entrepreneur or a business owner. You can just take a small step and test it out with something like coaching or freelancing and just take one or two projects on at a time and see if it’s a good fit for you. Then you can always scale up from there. Over time, you can scale up the independent business and scale back the traditional employment arrangement until finally you are totally free and “retired”. Or in other words, free to live the life that you’ve always wanted and build a business in the process so that you never have to worry about whether income is going to continue coming in, and never have to worry about any bills or expenses that you have to support your lifestyle because that is all funded through the business.
Of course from there you can continue to double down and start additional businesses or grow the one that you already have in progress. So a really enlightening conversation again with Ian today, and of course you can find more of your peers and your support group at myretirementrehab.me. As always, you can learn more about this podcast, like additional episodes, or the show notes and the resources we talked about today at redpillretirement.com. In the meantime, until we publish our next episode, go ahead and check out those resources, but otherwise we will see you on the next one. Take care.