Run With It

Nuggets:

• Use the opposite of the “Mom test” - tell people about your idea/mockup as if it’s someone else’s terrible idea to get their honest feedback
• Waking up with a “poor mindset,” living on a budget and working hard to always earn more could be the secret of some very wealthy people
• Even if you have plenty of money it can still help to live less extravagantly so that you can maintain connections with close friends and family.
• Anthony echos a common entrepreneurial mantra “Fail fast.”
• Once one masters money, the next focus is often “impact.”
• Really dumb down your MVP a lot (e.g. the creator of palm pilot carried around a block of wood as a prototype to feel if it made sense to create)

Action Steps:

1. Create a very “dumbed down” MVP to see what might make sense for you
2. Sign up for an existing app, like Mint to explore the niche
3. Consider tech savvy millennials and college students that you can support as their income grows. 
4. If you are not technical, connect with developers at meetups and join developer groups. Also, develop your skills at communicating vision, emotion and motivation to others.
5. Experiment further with potential app features
6. Consider account blocks on spending via the app based on triggers users set up
7. Focus on making the experience fun and easy for users
8. Create “hoops” that users have to jump through before making questionable spending decisions
9. Find a way to get yourself obsessed with one relevant number in your pocket all day long.
10. Look for partnerships with banks (start with small banks then move to the larger players)
11. Look into collecting financial data on client habits to help them get great loan rates and connect them with lenders
12. Consider using AI and user feedback to help curate a good budgeting plan for users
13. As an aspirational plan, you could move users from budgeting to making impact: saving money for fun to sharing it with a cause that’s important to them

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

Credit Karma

Mint

http://www.anthonysarandrea.com/

Anthony Sarandrea started off door knocking and built a company to $100k+/day with over 1M customers a year. He is recognized as one of the top customer generators in the world, running a team that drives over 1 million customers each year. Today, he runs a profitable portfolio of websites ranging from commerce to content blogs that combined reach millions of buyers every month.

He is consistently featured as one of the top “under 30 year old” entrepreneurs and was featured alongside Snapchat’s founder Evan Spiegel as one of the “Entrepreneurs that are changing the world.” 

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Do you enjoy this type of episode? What areas of business would you like us to focus on more? Email us at [email protected] and you may get an on-air callout!

Links:

The Expensive Water Bottle with Jeff Proctor

Done-For-You Digital Marketing with TJ Clark

A Clever Take on Residential Window Cleaning with Richard Bitton

How to Start a Software Company with David Hauser

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• The idea is 5% of what makes a business successful; execution is the rest
• Jeff Bezos was savvy enough to make billions just investing in other companies
• Find a pain that elicits a visceral response in your customers
• Learn why some businesses pay some employees to quit
• Focus on three things when starting a business: your customers’ pain, their ideal outcome, and your mechanism for bridging the gap
• Craft your prospecting emails envisioning that you are the person reading it.
• “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing” - Teddy Roosevelt
• Be willing to build things that might not work and move on from them if they don’t.

Action Steps:

1. In summary: Find a clear customer, get them a clear result, and implement a clear mechanism.
2. Create sales funnels to recruit job candidates as if they were clients. Use landing pages, lead magnets, opt-ins.
3. After the funnel qualifies them, prospective employees invest in personality tests, such as Kolbe A and Wealth Dynamics (test fees can be refunded if hired).
4. Create a test that allows you to see how prospects implement a job-related task.
5. Implement this idea manually. Take on your first client for free. Prove a result with some of their hiring jobs, then move on to clients 2, 3, 4 and 5, increasing your fee.
6. Invest the majority of your time in client relationships and let the business details be determined by what you learn.
7. Hire developers to build a saas around the systems that work.

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected].

Links:

Start From Zero (no opt-in excerpt for Run With It listeners)

Kolbe A Index

Wealth Dynamics

Breakthrough Advertising

Key Values

Loom.com

We Work Remotely

Google Forms

Wufoo Forms

Teddy Roosevelt - A Square Deal speech

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• The idea is a small part of a successful business; it’s about the execution
• Creating a business idea that forces you to network with local businesses has collateral benefits
• The pain is deep here: local business owners are eager for something that helps them compete with bigger names

Action Steps:

1. Create a list of all the businesses in your local area
2. Build a minimum viable product website that houses these businesses' information
3. Use targeted advertising to bring locals to your site
4. Test monetization strategies
   1. Approach business owners and sell them on advertising with you
   2. Include an app-based discount card that promotes local businesses
   3. Gather local citizen email addresses and send them discounts and offers
5. At a meta-level, you could create an app that allows local governments to implement this in their own towns and neighborhoods

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

The How of Business

SCORE Find a Mentor Program
Extracting Pain from Dentists with David Cristello
Smart Home Installation and More with Mehdi Kajbaf

Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, Small Business Coach, and Host of top-rated The How of Business podcast show. In addition to investing in and growing his businesses, he is dedicated to helping others start, run and grow their small businesses. He has over 34 years of diverse business experience, including successful careers in the information technology industry, sales, sales training and business ownership. He has been directly involved in over 10 different small businesses since purchasing his first business in 1991. He has developed and launched his own businesses, and has bought and sold businesses as well. Henry also serves as a volunteer SCORE Mentor.

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Spirituality doesn’t have to mean religiosity. Understanding your mind, body, and soul for yourself can be all you need to become spiritual.
• If you see the soul as a separate entity from our body, and a mind you may notice that all three conspire with each other to generate our experience. 
• We want to improve in our personal development, but the content that is unique that has been accumulated over centuries and is not reaching the general public.
• Always be ready to pivot and stay detached from your ideas.
• Pivot or quitting depends on time, money and conviction.

Action Steps:

1. Validate the idea by having conversations.
2. Determine who you want to talk to.
3. Then figure out how you're going to search for these people, Google, LinkedIn, etc.
4. Reach out, pitch your idea and adjust it until you come up with something people will pay for.
5. Design an MVP once you narrow in on an idea.
6. Create KPIs to track the success of the project.
7. Build the MVP, bring it to market, and track the KPIs. e.g. time spent, money spent.
8. An MVP could be as simple as a PDF ebook or basic course.
9. Be ready to pivot anywhere where potential clients see the value and will pay.

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

Innergamepurpose.com

LinkedIn

Udemy Academy

Manuj Aggarwal is an entrepreneur, investor and CTO of Tetranoodle, a software consulting company that helps startup founders with tech projects. Manuj has become a technical leader and CTO of multiple startups. Through mindfulness and meditation, he broke through the emotional and mental barriers he faced along his journey starting from a 15-year-old working in a factory for $2 per day. Manuj remains passionate about education and spirituality. 

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Savvy founders often don’t come up with their own business ideas - they get them from an opportune market
• You can do this even if you have a full-time job - you have to get laser focused on the most important activities

Action Steps:

1. Search for the top 100 dental practices in the country
2. Reach out to them and interview them to find out what about their systems are producing results
3. Starting a podcast about dentists as a platform to connect with them could provide you much more leverage than cold emails and build deeper relationships faster
4. Notice that their processes are probably pieced together using spreadsheets and by connecting disparate software tools
5. Start documenting the processes you discover
6. Wireframe a software using Balsamiq, Keynotopia, or just cutting and pasting buttons and flows from your favorite software and apps

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

Jetpack Workflow

David Hauser on Run With It

Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi

David Cristello is the CEO & Founder of Jetpack Workflow, which is used by thousands of accountants in 18+ countries to help them better manage their client work. He has a background in (lean, cost effective, measurable, value driven) Marketing, specifically for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups.

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Learning to set and achieve goals has been the single most important skill Zachary has developed.
• The label of “ex-con” does significant damage. There can be a lot of value in rebranding after going through a certification process as we’ve outlined.
• Get the “right people on the bus then figure out where to drive out” - Jim Collins concept.
• Follow the “Learn. Do. Teach.” model for success.
• Save money, and do good: there’s a tax cut for companies that hire convicted felons.

Action Steps:

1. Research how much prisons cost taxpayers. 
2. To promote and grow, invite coaches, entrepreneurs to speak in prisons.
3. Create a platform for online course creators to share their content within prisons.
4. Create a business forecast for how much money this will save society, and come up with very specific numbers on how this program could increase government revenues.
5. Create a vetting process to choose the best, most committed participants for this program.
6. Teach goal setting as a basic first step and then create categories to funnel people into training in line with their strengths.
7. Start with one ex-convict and do your best. Build on their success.
8. If you’re currently in prison, read Man’s Search for Meaning and write a reflection of what you’ve learned from it.
9. Invite successful graduates to evangelize and recruit others within prisons.
10. Investigate how Ghost was built as a successful business-like non-profit.
11. Create a franchise model with smaller branches getting a stamp of approval from the larger organization.  

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

Underdog Empowerment

Andy Frisella on Underdog Empowerment

Grant Cardone on Underdog Empowerment

Neil Patel on Underdog Empowerment

Dean Graziosi on Underdog Empowerment

Designing Education for Real Life with Zach Fleishman

Ghost

The High Line Project

Jim Collins - First Who, Then What

Awaken the Giant Within

Man’s Search for Meaning

From over 5 years in prison to building a 6 figure business, Zachary Babcock helps entrepreneurs launch, grow, monetize, and produce top-shelf podcasts.

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Deep commitment to your business is essential. Don’t bother getting started if you’re not going to be all in
• Don’t need to reinvent the wheel in order to be successful. It’s ok to follow a successful model and execute it in your city
• Make up for your growing pains through good customer service
• Use complaints about a competitive product or service to find out how to launch a new product that’s better

Action Steps:

1. Layout the menu of food, drinks, etc, and of course, games
2. Run numbers to understand revenue, and see if you have a profitable model
3. Once you’ve decided on your offerings and revenue model, decide on the layout of the space
4. Investigate competitors in your area: what are they doing well and where are opportunities for improvement?
5. Play some board games! Find out which ones are suitable for this idea and create a curated list
6. Find a suitable location - either high-traffic or a large space
7. Here are some potential models to use, one or all three:
   1. Patrons come in with friends, grab a table and technology or a person facilitates your experience
   2. Create a consistent time, say 7pm every night that anyone, even solo gamers can come in and join a game
   3. Create smaller rooms to host customized gaming experiences for groups including the appropriate atmosphere, props, music, etc.
8. Explore potential revenue models: e.g. cover charges, order minimums, group rate custom experiences.
9. Join forces with, or buy out an existing coffee shop, bar or restaurant. You can start by hosting some game nights or tournaments for them.

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

Brew Point Coffee

Starting & Running a Coffee Shop book

Snakes & Lattes Board Game Cafe

King Makers in Columbus

Pieces in St. Louis

Melissa Villanueva and Angelo Sepulveda are a couple who started a coffee shop (Brewpoint Coffee Workshop and Roastery) with nothing and in the past 6 short years grew it from one shop to a coffee company with multiple storefronts, and now their own book on how to start a coffee shop. 

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Find the joy in your work - Mehdi set up a ringtone to go off every time he made a sale. Have fun with your clients and make your products and services a joy for them.
• You need your values to drive what you do as an entrepreneur - Mehdi’s deep desire for freedom fueled his work ethic and helped him through the inevitable tough times
• You can always get value out of and generate value from a business project—even if it isn't financially successful and even if it fails.
• Live in the moment to create your future

Action Steps:

1. Buy several smart devices and set them up in your own home
2. Throw a party for friends & family who are not familiar with smart home technology and demonstrate it for them
3. Post an ad on Craigslist or Kijiji
4. Reach out to complementary businesses and pitch your services as an add-on for them
5. Grow through word of mouth
6. Develop an Amazon Affiliate income stream for equipment
7. Add extra special touches for your clients and network with them
8. Become an agent for other installers
9. Consider this business as a jump-off for a larger home management service

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

10% off Matboard and More by using Coupon Code “runwithit”

Kijiji (Canada’s version of Craigslist)

Mehdi’s Starter Story interview

Mehdi Kajbaf is CEO of Matboard and More, the number one online retailer of custom matting and framing online. They've been working on the site since 2012 and have helped tens of thousands of customers get picture matting to showcase their art. He studied at the University of Waterloo in Engineering and completed his MBA at Schulich. He loves traveling, the Maple Leafs and believes you gotta live in the moment to create your future.

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run

Nuggets:

• Find out the three Filters Justin uses to vet his business ideas
• Find people/corporations “already in motion” (e.g. don’t waste time and energy to convince people that climate change is real)
• How Justin thinks about unlikely competitors in entirely different industries
• Justin uses Twitter the way a comedian works out material at local clubs - collection of raw thoughts
• Product/entrepreneur fit and entrepreneur/market fit are just as important as product/market fit

Action Steps:

1. Attend a sustainability conference, connect with people in charge of sustainability, and ask them about their current programs
2. Build a better carbon impact calculator than sustainablestartups.co
3. Collect emissions reports from large companies and compile an assessment of their biggest emissions
4. Read up on strategies to improve efficiency and do an audit for your local YMCA, Police Station or City Hall

Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at [email protected]. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.

Links:

Wildbit

Saul Griffith

Google Scholar

Paul Jarvis

Matt West

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice

Sustainable Startups Carbon Impact Calculator

Justin’s Twitter Account

Justin’s Website

Transistor.fm

Justin Jackson is the co-founder of Transistor.fm, a podcast hosting and analytics platform. He lives in BC, Canada.

🎙️ Podcast hosting provided by Transistor. Want to start your own podcast? Get 15% off your first year by going to transistor.fm/run