Survive and Thrive - How to Build a Profitable Business in Any Economy

Interview John Meese

Video version of interview:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmcq4i3fPqzkfKfznnPIGnQ?sub_confirmation=1

Survive and Thrive Book on Amazon

https://amzn.to/3yIGFJd

You can find John here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-meese/

https://johnmeese.com/

Let me ask you about your book. What inspired you to write your book, Survive and Thrive - How to Build a Profitable Business in Any Economy (Even This One))? 

John: Well, you know, like many people I've been meaning to write a book for a while. So my wife and I opened a business together called Co-Work, well now it is called Co-Work Inc. At the time it was just Co-Work Columbia, but we started a co-working space and an entrepreneur center in our hometown and walking distance from our house. January 15th, 2020 had a big grand opening, you know, hundreds of people in the space, dozens and dozens of memberships it was a great start.

And 58 days later, there was a declaration of a national or a global pandemic. There was the executive orders closing our business. Like we were just 58 days after being open. We were closed. By executive order we stayed closed for 48 days, which is not a great start. And so when that happened, it would have been very tempting, and it was very temping, to just kind of sit back and be like, wow, I guess, well, this was really frustrating. I guess I'll just wait for all this to blow over.

 But I've never been very good at sitting still, you know, like I'm very much a man of action. And so I, I just, I took some time to really just like close out all distractions and reflect on like, what is going on right now. And right away, I realized that there were actually three, there was a triple crisis. There were three crises going on at the same time in the world. 

One of them is a health crisis. Right? COVID-19 you may have heard of it. Uh, you know, it's, uh, it's uh, it was a real health crisis. This is a real health crisis all over the world and that's very serious and I'm completely unqualified to help.

And so I was like, okay, there are people working on that problem, but there's also a mental health crisis, right? I mean, you think about the PTSD of, and the grief of life as we knew it being just, you know, dying day by day overnight. And you know, and so people just craving what used to be. Um, that's going to take a long time for us to recover, as the human race to recover from that. But again, I'm kind of, I'm pretty much on qualified to help with that one.

So the third crisis that was going on at the same time, it was an economic crisis where all of a sudden you had 30 million Americans, just in the U.S., 30 million Americans suddenly promoted to entrepreneur. Right? Which is a nice way to say, without a job and they're going, like, what do we do now?

And that's just in the U.S. I mean, that's where we have the most readily available data. But if you think about it, the same lockdowns that happened in the U.S, where it's inconvenient for us to sit at home and work off of our computer, and next to the dishes. The same lockdowns happened in third world countries, all over the world.

Only there you've got day laborers who live, literally, normally live off of a $1.20 a day. Now, all of a sudden they can't leave their house and the streets are being patrolled with armed militia to make sure they stay inside and quarantine. Oh my gosh! Talk about an economic crisis! I mean, we went back, we went back several decades in progress in global poverty. So that's going to be, that's a big problem. It's going to take more than one person to solve, but I thought, well, I have a little something that I think I can add to that. And so that's the crisis that I chose to devote my attention to.