If you don’t want to read it, you can watch this video.
People don’t want to hear the truth because it is painful. The first truth is, if you’ve never started a business before, the chances are it could take a couple of years. No one wants to hear that.
We are about to go through the mother of all recessions. It may be worse than the Great Recession. You have all of these people out here wasting time looking for a shortcut. There are people on this channel who have been looking for shortcuts for nine years, or as long as I’ve been on YouTube. If they would sit down and apply themselves, they would be much farther along.
When I had my storage auction business, I used to sit at my desk and watch the customers. As a storage auction buyer, every week you are looking for stuff to buy. Every week, you’re making deals. I knew how buyers thought. I knew what people wanted because I was a buyer.
Being the customer is not the same as knowing the customer. I got challenged on that point by someone who has no real business experience. I will say this to you. If you have no real business experience, I’m probably not going to listen to you. That’s like a fish listening to a bird about how to swim. The bird may have studied swimming. The bird may have watched many fish. But the bird is a bird and the fish is a fish.
You’ve got many people out there who are trying to hack success because the hard work of setting up a business takes time. There are certain things you are not going to be able to immediately overcome. This is where I am going with the participation trophies. There’s a $1000 challenge. As your trainer in Hustle Camp, my goal is to make you better, not happy. My goal is to make you successful, not comfortable. There are no participation trophies.
When you have a poverty mindset, you expect and crave immediate gratification. People want immediate gratification because their life is hell. Immediate gratification is not going to make you rich or financially solvent. It is not going to put $10K in cash in the bank. Most people can’t even come up with $1000 that is not on a credit card.
A lot of the stuff online is built on slippery slopes. I know someone who had his whole business built on Facebook. Then he got put in Facebook jail. His income vanished. He was freaking out. This person had to go out and get a job. There’s nothing wrong with getting a job, but he didn’t have any other skills.
As we head towards the recession, one of the things Hustle Camp is going to do is teach you how to make yourself recession-proof. As everyone talks about the recession, they talk about buying silver and buying gold. Let me ask you this, if you are in the middle of the woods and you need food and you have $100,000 in gold coins on you, what are those gold coins going to do? You would be better off with no money, three guns and a bunch of ammunition. If you’ve got a gun, you can shoot something and cook it. If you’ve got a gun, a knife and some matches, you can shoot something, start a fire, cook it and eat.
Let’s say you’ve got $1 million in gold coins and no gun and no survival skills. You have no way to eat or get water. Do you see where I am going? The gold thing is a hedge against inflation to keep your earning power high. It is not going to help you if you are in a situation and you have no skills.
Essentially, you need skills sets. You need businesses that serve people. Learning how to start a business is hard. That’s what you’re going to have to do to ride out this next thing that is coming.
In August 2009, I started this channel and I have made a great living in this and have accumulated assets. This business was started in a recession. What we’re going to do in Hustle Camp is to explore new skill sets you can learn.
Get your financial house together and then build a business. If you’re struggling to pay your mortgage and your car payment, most people crumble under that kind of stress. A few people perform. That’s not the norm though. Most people crumble. Why do you think there are so many people on welfare?
I don’t think hard times make you stronger. I think hard times reveal who you already are. The strong people just do what they do and the weak people are eaten up by the environment.
If you start a storage auction business today, you can have a customer list of 100 to 300 regular buyers in two to three years. While you are getting there, you will not make the money you want to make. If you stick with it and continue to serve and add customers to your list, you have created your own economy. It takes time.
You have to hustle to get started, but it is not going to help you build a long-term durable business. Let’s look at Donald Trump. He is an excellent salesperson. He’s probably one of the best I’ve ever seen. He could probably sell ice to eskimos. As a manager, he’s a disaster. That’s why you rarely see companies started by someone who remains CEO.
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Question: How do I become a great salesperson?
Answer: Find a product and sell it every day. Find something you believe in.
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Question: What should be my first business? I am in school for business and I am also black and have a few felonies.
Answer: If you go out and start a business, no one does a background check on you. You can do anything, except own a gun store or a liquor store. My question to you is, what are you interested in? What people are you interested in helping out? One of the things I do here is help out beginning entrepreneurs, because when I was getting started, there was a lot of bullshit out there. There’s still a lot of bullshit out there.
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Question: What’s the best marketing strategy for my book? I have a couple of thousand followers online.
Answer: The best marketing plan for your book is more books. Write more books. That will increase the number of people following you. Develop a catalog or a series of books and continue to write. Another thing you should do is create a following before you write your book, which takes time.
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Today, one of the things you want to do is leverage your local online resources. You can use YouTube to pinpoint locally. You can use Facebook to pinpoint locally. If you have a physical location and you use Facebook, it will help you do better.
You need to do your research before you go wide online. Sell to your friends first to see if your product or service is something people want to buy. Test it, then take the feedback you get to move forward and go online.
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