A Million Dollar Information Technology Startup $$$$
hi this is jim gibson thank you for joining me today on my channel i'd very much appreciate it and today we're going to be talking to a very interesting young man who used to work for me a decade ago or so i don't know five six years ago maybe i don't know um but i've kept in touch with him and uh saw what he was doing and and what his uh business was he started the business from scratch and now it's well over a million dollars now maybe you're not interested in business maybe you're not interested in starting a business and if you're not i understand but he talks about his business that can help i t people in the future so if even if you're not an installer his business can benefit you even if you are an installer or an msp uh his business can assist you so you want to hear this you want to hear his story because it's really interesting and he's a great guy he's done a really good job he's worked hard and again he's seeing success of well over a million dollars and he talks about strategy business strategy things like that now before we start i have this real quick uh question for you or request i need subscribers so please subscribe uh to the website most people who make comments by the way are not subscribers i'd really appreciate it if you could subscribe also at the same time please hit the like button and notify other people about this video is this if this is of interest to you and again i think you're going to find it interesting if even if you're not going to start a business you'll find it interesting how he did it and even if you are going to start a business then you should hear his the way he did it and what he's thinking through now at the end we're going to be talking about two books we're going to be talking about the the millionaire fast and we're also going to be talking about the e-myth and how he used those two books to start his business so thank you for coming to the website today i mean to the channel today i really appreciate it and listen to what riley chase has to say about his business and how his experience can help you hi this is jim gibson with cablesupply.com thank you for joining me today very much appreciate it and today i have a very special guest that i've known for many years uh back when uh he worked for me back when he was a teenager and uh a very impressive young man that man i tell you he learned cisco ccna faster than i've known anybody to learn it and he was always fantastic with software and and we go back many many years have not really i mean we talked off and on over the years and that was fantastic but uh riley chase now owns his own company hostify and riley i know we've talked before about your company but why don't you just give a a quick brief of your company then we'll go into business and why start a business things like that sure yeah so we are um we provide a service for people who use ubiquity products for their network equipment they can connect all the devices to one cloud server our team provides like the updates backups ssl installation renewal all kind of the boring stuff and also support so um for our customers out there we have over 2000 customers and they've connected hundreds of thousands of these network devices to our service and we have a support team that's very skilled and specialized in uh ubiquity products so you're able to we're able to provide like uh phone email live chat support anytime they need help with stuff so yeah that's what hostify does well i know that you know if i was starting a cabling company or if i was cabling right now i would definitely use your service because why would i want to do this myself you know i got to have an employee do it or i have to learn it myself i got to set up my server you guys take care of security patches yeah you're there to help when i get stumped and there's just no uh support from ubiquity on these things that's right so you get a chance to do this um you know and support me so i can just concentrate on sales just exactly ubiquity installed in the ceiling and then i call you i mean there's a little more involved than that but right or i don't want to learn a whole you know i don't want to become a cisco certified person and take care of cyber security and everything else so you've got a fantastic business one price right per month that's right yeah it's 99 bucks a month you can connect up to 250 devices for 99 bucks a month you know prices might change we also have annual plans we can get a discount but uh it's pretty simple yeah pretty simple service and it's your server i don't have to yeah that's right provide electricity i don't have to protect it i don't have to air condition it in the summer and i have you know i don't have to secure it so someone breaks in and steals it uh that would be a problem and i don't have to worry about it 24 7 your server takes care of ubiquity and all the issues and and cyber security and and software upgrades and stuff like that that's right one of the things i wanted to talk to you about is what caused you to go into business um i don't know i feel like uh i've always wanted to have my own business i'm not sure exactly um when it started i know when i worked for you i'm actually someone who inspired me because you know i got to kind of first hand get to know you and your story and i just found it really interesting you have you had a this is in 2012 you had an i.t service business before you sold it no voice data systems where i worked as a cisco network engineer but you also had cable supplies you had an e-commerce store that you're running out of the warehouse in the back and and then you also had a youtube channel where you know cable supplies youtube channel and other youtube channels were um i wouldn't say you were famous but i mean you had quite a following you know thousands of tens of thousands of people and so i thought that was really interesting and um i think as a young you know kid trying to figure out what i wanted to do i i liked technology and i just i thought it was interesting and i want to make more money and i i feel like i i guess from a young age i kind of realized that like there's a ceiling to how much you can make no matter how skilled you are there's only so much money you can make and it's you know probably less than 200 000 a year or like maybe 200 something would be like the upper limit maybe i don't know but i always felt like if there's a ceiling you know i should play a different game that doesn't have that ceiling i don't know i don't know i just always thought that since i was you know a young age i guess now you're talking about the limit to 250 000 it's basically the limit for an employee right you're not going to i'm owner no no i'm just talking about like if you're a skilled worker you know like as a cisco network engineer you could probably make a hundred thousand maybe 150 000 a year and then maybe if you're like an executive of a company you can make like 200 000 or something like as a business owner there's no limit to how much money you could make in a year and um why spend an entire career slowly working your way up to 100 or 200 000 a year when you could you know make more money i don't know that's kind of the line of thought i guess so you're you know a lot of people ask the question um are entrepreneur entrepreneurs learned are they born you know is this something you can learn or is it something that you're you're born with i think you can learn it for sure um and i think yeah definitely you can learn it you i don't think people are born entrepreneurs even if you start at a young age you still have to learn it and um and a lot of people don't be like decide to start a business until they're a lot older and i think there's also like that stereotype that young people are more successful or they start businesses like especially with tech like there's kind of the stereotype that like you know young college kid starts business but in reality the statistics say that uh someone in their 40s is more likely to be successful in business than someone in their 20s and it just has to do with experience and so that's kind of why i think you you learn it um but there are definitely attributes of like you know personality type or something probably you get drawn to it what do you think um yeah i don't know i don't know that answer i i kind of you know some people say well you know it's it's something you can learn but i think you have to have it to start with you have to have that desire like you said i hated that ceiling someone told me this is the best you're ever gonna do i remember working uh for an organization and they said that to me this is the best you'll ever do and i decided that day i'm quitting yeah so if this is the best i'll ever do then it's time to move on and sometimes as an employee that actually gives you a raise you go into another company get a raise instantly you know but yeah for me i remember being in elementary school and there was uh in philly and there was a creek there in philly and went through it as a kid and as we're looking at it there was a bunch of tadpoles and all my buddies they got one or two tadpoles took them home in a cup i went home and got my mom's uh nylons and made it into a net that using a a metal hanger i turned it into a circle and put the net on it and scooped these suckers up and stuck them in a big bar and i went to uh i went to school next day and at lunch the the to buy lunch was 35 cents back then you get a lunch for 35 cents in school so i i took my tadpoles and i priced them at 35 cents each and the boys came in the bathroom and i said yeah and i collected 35 cents and gave them a tadpole they had to go get a cup in the uh and take it home and everything else and i did that for a little less than a week and i used to joke that i i made more money than my dad did working full-time for the city of philadelphia my pockets were completely full every day it was hard to walk home a little metal lunch box completely full of coins and uh each day and finally the principal found out what i was doing and he stopped me from doing that but i i made hundreds and hundreds of dollars uh as an elementary school kid and thought this is great you know my parents would say well you know you got your salary of one dollar you know your your weekly uh allowance of one dollar but you gotta take out the trash i thought that week i thought i could pay someone else to take out the trash yeah yeah that's all right i got the bug at that point you know and i did many other small businesses uh just always looking for an opportunity to start a business and yeah i learned a lot along the way even as a kid and realized that hey i'm probably an entrepreneur but you know uh noah voice and data was 28 years uh yeah the black always paid my bills and always paid my uh my um vendors that's the key man pay your vendors ahead of time don't wait yeah i learned a lot working at uh nova and um i think i was inspired by your story too because you told me about how you know you started it you know you already had a family i think at the time and you you just said we're doing cabling projects on the side and and so um there's only been a you know a lot of times i worked for bigger companies i didn't work for that many companies but i there was only a few times i got to work with the owner of the company like you in a direct way and learn from someone like that because when you work for a bigger company you're just kind of that you know you're feeling this one little part of the business you don't really see how the rest of business works like how it got started or how sales works or the different areas of the business so i got to learn a lot about um uh working with your son matt he was always really good with customers and teach me more about the sales side like hey you gotta talk to him like i was very shy you know i would never really talk to anybody and so i'm a lot a little bit more extroverted now but he would tell me you know hey you gotta talk to the customer you gotta get to know them you know what are their interests and make small talk with them so he would always teach me he was always giving stuff like that and learned from patrick and um yeah i just really liked working with the guys there but i think working at a small business you get to learn the different areas and everything so yeah that's interesting if you're thinking of going in business and work for someone in that business you may find out that you don't really like that that uh thing that you have your strengths and you have your weaknesses and i always think they're god-given strengths and we and you have got given weaknesses so it points you in the direction you should go and um for me it was i was always uncomfortable working for someone else i always felt like i should work for myself and you know one of the things my wife challenged me early on was when you talk about being um you know a little bit shy or something like that we'd go to a an event where there was a lot of professionals things like that and she would say i challenge you to get a business card from every single person in this room and so i would go out and i would hand everyone my business card and i'd get a business card from and get to know their name try to remember their name say it over and over and over again and things like that and a lot of business uh at nova came that way uh by going yes and learning people's names and it was a challenge it was not comfortable but it was a challenge and i learned from it and i like business but i've also had other businesses that didn't work out before this so a lot of people you know a lot of the employees would see this successful business and and they would say well you know you send me out and and i do all the work and you get all the benefits well they have forgotten about you know the startup they forgot about the fact that i'm illegal responsible and if you accidentally injure someone they sue me not you type of thing and i'm the one responsible for the mortgage or the rent and things like that and they they forget all that and uh um now you've had other businesses haven't you before this yes i mean the main business i had before this was uh lachlan networks and it was an i.t service
business where i did cabling websites phone systems i really did a little bit of everything and um and so yeah that did that starting in 2014 until uh i mean technically it's it's still the legal entity that owns hostify so um but i would i stopped doing project work in uh 2018 or so so why i own before nova i owned a a remanufacturing company and we remanufactured alternators and starters and things like that in philadelphia and i had a partner and i learned one big lesson every time i i started something i learned a lesson and that big question was do not have a partner because the harder i worked the less he worked and uh and i don't think you know i don't think he was completely ethical and yet i was going to be held responsible with the irs and money was here and things like that and you learn a lot in the business when you're doing business to business you learn you see other business structures and how people work at them and you you learn that there's certain ways to do it in certain ways now i'm always learning uh constantly learning in business but you know there's two books that you and i read and i was discussing that with you on the phone about a month ago or two months ago yeah and one was the fast lane yeah yeah so millionaire especially the millionaire fastlane yeah this was a book that was really influential and the entire reason actually that i started hostify and kind of diverged paths from lachlan networks which i was working on as an i.t service provider and my next step was like trying to figure out recurring revenue and stuff and then i read that book and decided i should start a software as a service business positive i was the first idea that i had and or you know one of my ideas that i had and so that's um how i got started there but the whole premise of the book is is kind of like thinking more about the business model and not just kind of blindly going into a business because it's what you know or what um or like a business type you're familiar with like a service business it's very simple um but really thinking about how can i scale this and so yeah that's what kind of got me started in the book he talked about you know you know a product business uh where you can create something once sell it over and over um and so that's really something that i thought a lot about and in the in the book actually he talked about software as a service being the best business model in the world because you have the element of recurring revenue and high margin where unlike a physical product where you have this cost of producing it and shipping it and all that with software you create it once and you can ship it over and over over the internet with virtually no cost so i just found that really interesting and so then i started googling like literally like how do i start a software as a service business and um you know just step one you got to create a website you got to have some something someone can buy a subscription once they buy the subscription needs to go do this thing and so yeah just kind of figuring out piece by piece and um there was another blog post to help me come up with ideas and stuff like that so but yeah that book was really influential for me um i'm not sure when you read it or what what are your thoughts on it well i i've read it actually multiple times um it has the wackiest name though a millionaire fast lane it sounds really cheesy but it's a great book yeah but i saw enough of his youtube videos that he intrigued me uh to read the book and yeah and you know and of course a lot of things he said i already knew being in business for all these years but it's reinforcement for me it was like yeah this guy knows what he's talking about this is really a fantastic book and uh you know he has that thing sense uh do you remember the acronym what does it stand for yeah it's uh control i think it i think it's control entry need time scale yeah if you want to walk through all those but those are really good let's walk through them let's talk about the control i actually forget what control what do you think control the control one was you have to control like you don't want to be an affiliate control is what i violated with noaa voice and data systems i had one one major vendor and that was toshiba there you go that's control so i had one you're dependent on them and they controlled me and when they decided now remember i was the largest uh toshiba dealer in the country so i sold more toshibas than anyone else throughout the united states and i sold to the big companies petco ameriquest mortgage and everything else so and they would come to me for service and for add moves and changes things like that so that's rarely where nova made the money it was not local installs and stuff like that and and it was number two uh of business telephone systems you know 15 20 years ago and they decided they were going to exit the market uh and they gave us like a month you know again in a month we're going to exit the market well you know so i i did i violated that sense thing uh you know the control because they controlled the product uh i did not so when they yeah that was that was a majority of my business was national accounts with toshiba so i'm no longer in business basically i don't think anymore i think another example he used in the book was being an affiliate marketer so you build up a following and you're promoting this affiliate marketing thing and you're starting to make a ton of money off it and then they change the terms or they stop they go out of business or something out of it you know you don't have control of the you know particularly the terms i guess like as an affiliate marketer you're getting a percentage and they can change that on you and so yeah control is about um about yeah having you know ownership of of the product kind of end-to-end in a more end-to-end way where someone can't change one thing and it affects your whole business but uh that's tough one yeah that was a tough one when they said we're no longer going to supply you with telephones because we're going out of business at the end of the month we don't this is not profitable enough for us completely out of your control and you were very dependent on that them in that way yeah which i think i think i know every business has its risks and i don't think there's anything wrong i don't think you should have been you know knowing that now i don't think you should have been like oh i shouldn't do that business like that was a great business and it ended you know it was out of your control i don't think every business can hit every one of these but these are really good things to keep in mind control um entry was the next one just on the cnts so entry this is a great one so this is like people you always see like oh so-and-so is the business owner now but like they're just like uh what are these multi-level marketing where you just you bought something and now you're a business owner like that's that's entry so like anyone can get into that there's no there's no cost to enter maybe the cost is buying the multi-level marketing package to do the demos or or whatever um but when there's when the entry is so easy that anyone could just start it then you really it's really not going to be a good business if anyone can do it with very little money or expertise i think is that did i nail that one you nailed it man that's that's it uh barrier what is the barrier to entry and yeah and some businesses are really high at a barrier to entry so yeah it's like service businesses on the lower end you know anyone can start a service business um i don't know yeah some some businesses you have to buy a lot of equipment you know yeah it can be really expensive the expertise um yeah the investment in the expertise yeah it's a barrier you know what is the the level of entry that you need to commit to start a business and to be successful it's also at that point risk um you know you you put all this money all this time and everything else into something and then it may not um you know it may be a big barrier for someone else to be your competitor right such a big barrier for you that you can start the company next one yeah so that one's entry and then we have meade so i think that one is and i haven't read this book in like four years so i'm trying to remember here but you know needs seems pretty obvious like it needs to be something a customer you know is actively looking for a solution for not something that you've created an idea and now you're looking for a problem to solve with it it has to be something that like is a real problem people are already paying money for it um and i think uh i think that was one that i learned is something that people are already paying money for is a good uh metric um if they're not already paying money for it then i don't know it's it's tough one if they actually need it or not if you convince them to start paying money for something that they don't already need that they're already paying money for it what are your thoughts on that one well my thought is that you know i remember the quote from henry ford that said customers customers if i listen to customers they just want a faster horse yeah rather than the car but at the same time there is a big difference true and he pretty much ran the market at that point remember he said you can have any color car you want as long as it's black and he learned because chevy came in and really took him the task on that i was watching a seminar put on by salon school of business and it was because i was bored uh because generally i think that entrepreneurs um know a lot of this stuff already or learn it and there's a lot of times you can't you just can't learn you gotta do it yourself anyway they were talking about it and there was a whole classroom full of uh uh of uh students and the guy actually the guy was pretty good uh the professor he stood up and goes what's the number one thing you need to be in business and the one person would say well you need money and he said no that's not it another person say well you need staff no that's not it well you need a business plan no that's not it and finally finally after about five minutes and i'm shouting customers yeah customers that's your main thing you can have a great business if you don't have customers it's useless so sure he turned around and and finally someone said customers and the guy said yes and i'm thinking you students have been in this master's class on business administration and you haven't figured out that the main thing in the start of business and to have a business is have a customer and that's what he talks about is need you've got to have a need where is your schedule and who's going to be your customers you've got to have that need and yeah you know a million times you guys said over again where's your customers coming from where's your customers coming from who is your customer you know which what's your your your uh you know who identify your customer yes and that's um identify the customer you identify the need so c-e-n and then t i think is time so i think this is uh again you know refreshing my memory here but uh it's you don't want to trade your time for money and um is this a business that you can trade someone else's time or you can um you can instead a product where you can sell it over and over uh where you input your time and you know obviously it takes time to create it and everything but at some point can you sell this and it's not a one-to-one match where you're you know 100 an hour or whatever it is um is this a business that you can scale independent of the time that you're putting into it without a you know direct match between your time and the money you're making from it is that what time was i think yeah well what is it if you're trading time for money you don't have a business you have a job that's true so if you want to have a a business you have to get to the point not saying at the very beginning because very beginning i'm sure just like you you know i've had 12 hour days 18 hour days i remember one time starting at four in the afternoon because i i was working at burlington air express and my day ended at four in the afternoon and i started seven in the morning ended at four in the afternoon i always bought my dungarees with me and my shirt that had the little logo on it nova and yeah and uh i would go out and do cabling and uh sometimes i would cable all night long and i would go home in time enough to eat breakfast get a shower and go back to work yeah yes at the beginning there's a lot of time invested but you have to have the model the business model that can progress past that time that you know like with me i i uh hired people like you uh to go out and do the kit to go out and do the installs and i would train you guys uh or someone at the company would train you all to go do these things and then you know it is no longer i'm not trading my time uh yeah you know i'm multiplying it so i have people out there doing cabling jobs i couldn't possibly do those cabling jobs that day so you know i i was no longer so like if you were uh if you were trading like you're you were doing speaking engagements and it was very much your personal brand and you had to go on a stage and you got paid to speak um that would be a violation of this tenant you know this is kind of like the commandments of of a good business that's scalable business in this book so i guess that i think that would be an example of like a um violating the time principle because you can't train someone else to tell your story on a stage i mean i guess you could but if you if you are creating a personal brand you know not that you shouldn't do that but um that is kind of you know that's something you can't have someone else do it's not scalable because you're trading your time for money it might be a lot of money but um yeah i think that would be an example of of breaking the time principle on that i think philosophy here and you may have brought it up speaking engagements might be the one in a principle they're paying you 500 000 dollars right then you take the money and you invest it in real estate then yeah yeah then you you know you're getting passive income uh right right so that might that might be the i might break the rules i don't know but yeah that's tough one what's the last the last one would be scale i think so cnts scale is this something and i guess that goes back to the timeline kind of where is this something that scales is a repeatable process so you might have something that it's not a one-to-one trade for your time but if it's not a repeatable process like for example uh custom i.t work where you're doing a custom service it's different for every customer they each have special needs like they all have their different requirements and it's not a product where you can you know do it the same thing over and over and over the exact same thing um in a cookie cutter kind of way then that's that's breaking the scale tenet and so um yeah i think another great book on that is uh there's a book called uh built to sell by john wareherlo and that was one that i read as well and it talks about the agency model it's uh the agency model in the in the book it talks about a graphic design business and every customer is different they each have their different requirements and so he's having trouble scaling this business but then as soon as he productized it he made it where uh all they do is local creation there's a four-step process there's this step this stuff this stuff and so they made it where he could hand this off and scale it and you know it has a fixed price also it's always ten thousand dollars for the logo and um and so he was able to turn what was a very custom process with different customers different requirements turned it into a productized service and then scale that over and over um following the same process it's still custom for each person but it's more productized you know so there's levels to it um so i think that was uh that was another book that influenced me to starting hostify where you know we instead of i guess like as an i.t service provider as locklear networks my previous business it's like how am i going to become an expert all these different all these different things i'm doing cabling websites programming um phone systems backup solutions and every time i was doing a job there's like this huge learning curve and it was definitely not a productized or repeatable thing each customer had a different requirement and so with hostify i took something and um it's a very just this one part of the business which was the wireless network side and bundled it up into this support and server maintenance package and so that was a product that had a very specific requirements a fixed price and i had recurring revenue element and i could sell that over and over and as the business grew i got better and better at that skill set because we're doing the same thing over and over so it has other benefits like being able to hire people was easier being able to automate stuff was easier and so um once you do that where you have like a product instead of a custom service it changes everything i feel like yeah um scalability so you have scalability in your business and doesn't mean you have to have you know you got one coffee uh shop you should have a hundred that's scalability but you're scaling in a different way which i think is smarter um it's just nicer you can go on vacation um yeah sometimes when you own a company especially at the beginning you can't go into yeah yeah and now that i have employees when i was just me it was no vacation working all day all night weekends everything it was it was tough but uh yeah now that i have employees i can trust them to keep everything running while i'm gone well you know they're sort of like um what would you call it phases that a company goes through yeah and it and at the beginning it's going to be all your time it's going to be you know it's not going to be scalable yet you have to figure that out sometimes you have to change your model and you have to change your business model and there's good business models and there's bad business models and so this book was fantastic i'll put a link down below um great book yeah and the author and everything else he has a couple of books out have you ever seen any of his other books i do i have his other books i haven't read them though um the millionaire fastlane was the only one that i've read i know he has unscripted and i think another one about uh something about the rat race but i think the theme of his books is is uh yeah business models and you know encouraging people to try out business becoming a business owner i think sometimes people come into business backwards uh they say oh i'm gonna start this business and um and and i have a friend a very good friend he's a nice guy he's retiring and everything else and he says i'm gonna start a coffee shop and i said come into it from the other direction where's your customers who's your customers what are they willing to pay what is your specialty there that you're going to offer to them that they can't get from starbucks down the street um you know it might be atmosphere maybe and i said so you got to realize that nine out of 10 businesses fail in the first five years and and thinking this through ahead of time and maybe even going into it slowly to test the waters with me i was working at burlington ericsson senior communications analyst there and it was a great job i had great employees but what i did is when i was doing it work i would keep track of the i.t work and i would try to figure out my income from this work and it was getting pretty consistent and everything else and as i and i couldn't see a consistency month to month so i broke it out every quarter and then also all of a sudden it was going like this next and and i could see if i hit this level that i could break even i could pay my health insurance i could pay my you know all my bills and i could still feed my kids and uh so when i got a little bit past that level that level that you know that that i needed that's when i put in my resignation with the company and i remember all the people telling me don't do this you're crazy yeah crazy thing especially my mom she said yeah you're giving up a great health insurance and they have yeah they have retirement and i said mom i have my own health insurance and i'm gonna have my own retirement i don't have to count on anybody else so yeah it's this is a hard path and not everyone should take it some people they do they want their weekends off and if you're going to run a business you don't get weekends at the beginning but later on you get the week off yeah and try to go anywhere you want and do anything you want later on in life you know there's uh one other book that that uh i always liked i just and then nova by the way was uh e myth revisited yeah yeah that was a book that i read as well that uh it came right at the right time uh somebody i was explaining how frustrated i was that uh this was my business had gotten to about a hundred thousand dollars per year in recurring revenue now keep in mind there's expenses and stuff so maybe a sixty thousand dollar per year salary i could have afforded for myself at that time um but i felt like my business was a failure i had this moment where i felt like i had worked my butt off and i created this business and it was great but i um i didn't have any time off i didn't have any uh i couldn't go out even for a weekend to go on a trip without um urgent stuff happening and having to i was at a campsite connected to my phone my laptop trying to help a customer and so it was just becoming really stressful and so i felt kind of like a failure that i'd created a business the whole idea behind the business was you know have more time more money instead i had less time less money than i had at my previous job and so i was kind of uh venting to a friend about this in in a business owners group in a chat room that uh my part of my investors had uh created a chat room for us and someone had recommended the e-myth revisited and he said you know here's how you could you know get help yourself out of the situation by hiring somebody and so up until reading that book i kind of felt like how could i hire someone who's like me who knows how to do all this stuff because i was doing you know linux servers and providing support and writing code and so there's all these different parts to the business and doing sales and and i was like how could i find someone who could do all this stuff and then if i did find them how could i afford them and so um i guess what i kind of took away from that book was that i don't need to hire another me i need to create systems and processes that i could hand off to anyone with the right technical knowledge they'd be able to follow a system for any kind of support ticket that came in they would know here's step by step how to do that so that's kind of that helped me a lot to figure that out and also writing down like kind of an org chart so thinking about my business as not just me but it's me and i wrote my name on all the different roles in the business so like i'm the ceo and also currently i'm the sales person i'm the programmer i'm the support person but in the future um these are going to be separate roles each each of these is going to be a separate person doing just this one thing and so that that helped me a lot um i i read this um while you know i i was owning nova and i remember back in the marine corps they had this thing called desktop procedures which you were supposed to write down everything you need to do to do your job and then and if you're an administrator type or a staff nco you would have this book and so if you were sick or gone or someone else could open up that book and see all the the policies the procedures and things like that and that's what i learned from e-myth is is that you need to have the policies and procedures in place like you said that you can hand off to someone else i already had people doing accounting dispatching but i decided i'm going to think it through each position and create this desktop procedure and we had it and i remember one time the accounting lady up and left i don't you know the password to get into the accounting system i don't even know this where do i go from here i know anything about quickbooks at the time that's something if you're going to be in business you got to have an accounting system and i'd recommend quickbooks yeah and uh so to make a long story short i you know my wife came in and uh and i handed her the desktop procedure and she said oh it's right here how to deposit check see it's on a tab but i did not write that that was something i if i remember right my daughter if you remember christine she yeah and then nice before this new person came in she left and and she you know she had a family and she took care of that but every single thing and then the the lady that did leave she updated it as she went on so we had policies and procedures and how to do things so it's not this is our rules and this is everything that is done and it and that's what i learned from the e-myth but the the second thing i learned is something you already hit on was i mean it's a great book and it's easy to read it's fun to read yeah story he does everything through stories he doesn't give you a list of these six things he actually runs a a real life story and he talks about that lady that on the the pie shop right yep and she spent all this money on on ovens and everything else and she's getting up at four o'clock in the morning and working till two in the morning and she was doing everything herself and she was at the point of exhaustion and she wanted to get out of it and she couldn't because she had the lease she had payments on the oven and all this other stuff right and and and you know his point was are you starting a business or are you um creating yourself a job and this lady was stuck but i don't i see that a lot of times when people are starting a business that they don't think it through from end to beginning not just from beginning to end but go from that's right so what is it in mind and you can always change i mean you can always change it and but think it through is it a good model just because you're good in one thing uh doesn't mean you can turn that into a business you know the old thing of uh he mentions a technician you know if you're a great machine doesn't mean you're gonna be a great business owner so i think that's a lot of us that start i.t
businesses this we were we were great technicians so we thought we would be great business owners but then you realize the technician is just one small part of doing the actual job is like 20 of the where you know you should spend 80 of your time doing sales and marketing and talking to customers and and only 20 doing the actual uh performance of the work that whatever it is you do so it's very different yeah i had um uh one of the employees came to me one time uh and he said um my father-in-law said i can do this myself but why do i need you so he quit and went in the business and failed within three months because it's not if you have the technician mind frame um you're never going to succeed as a business owner or you're going to have a rough time until you learn how to be a business owner and that's what i like about your business that i could be running a business and i don't have to have an employee handle my unify i have you to do it and i can pay one rate and yes this is an unabashed commercial for you um you know one rate and um someone else is going to take care of it to take care of work so that i do uh we have an accounting are you still there jim yeah i'm still here again oh oh internet was cutting out for a second there but um hold on a sec let's do a check here and do the do the thing hold on oh man why is my internet going to be bad today all right i think we're ready now go ahead and we'll close it okay we're okay now can you hear me yep i can hear you okay trying to continue on here which is so annoying you know you know uh guys if you're watching this and you like what you hear i i need those likes and i need the subscriptions so subscribe not subscription subscribe to the uh youtube account because i'm trying to get to 100 000 subscribers i think i'm around 54 right now or 50 somewhere around there and you know you just get more credibility with manufacturers and also i can show some more of the products things like that are you back with me nope i lost them well i'm going to finish up we'll see about the internet connection um but emeth fantastic book if you're gonna go into business you need to uh read that and the millionaire fastlane if you're thinking about going in business you need to read that are you back you're back i'm back yeah i uh i switched internet connections here it's having some trouble hopefully it's good now um i forgot what i was saying what were you talking about we're talking about the e-myth revisited yeah that was a that was a really good one um what was the last thing i was talking about yeah i revisited it was the one i read but uh yeah i think i think one thing about the book that i felt was a little bit abstract was she was baking pies and so i felt it was kind of hard for me to apply that to my own business at first um because it you know pie obviously is very simple you you know you have the steps step by step this is exactly how you make a pie every single time now with a technology business you know like like a noble voice and data systems or a hostify um it's not as straightforward we're not baking pies here things are quite complicated there's a lot of different things that can happen even in my own business with just a really small area of things that can happen um and so what i what i kind of figured out was um what i did is like as support tickets came in i would record myself doing the support ticket and then watch you know later i would you know realize that i okay i had done the same thing 10 times and um you know i create kind of like a rudimentary process for it and so like anytime this type of ticket came in i would hand it off to my new hire along with the guide or video i had created of me fixing a similar ticket in the past and so over time the guides that we had got better and better but we didn't i didn't go out and like create the guides um i waited for the request to come in first then i'd create the guide and then the guide would get proved over time and then the ultimate the best part like you had mentioned is when the employees actually take over create their own guides and improve in existing guides and so eventually you have now we have an internal database of like all these different guides and when we have a new hire like you said as someone new comes on we're able to train them a lot quicker because we can just hand them a ticket hand them a guide that goes with it and they can follow the step-by-step process to learn about how to solve this particular issue and anytime a ticket comes in that we don't have a guide for we'll create a new process and so um now i'll even i'll read my own guides and my own processes and follow them because uh it's just nice you know you don't have to remember everything you can just go back to the the process um and and refresh your memory on what the steps were for restoring a server or um whatever it was installing a certificate ssl certificate so um yeah that's kind of how i handled creating the processes and stuff but uh you know as a business owner you're constantly improving and you're constantly you need to be constantly improving reading books i read about uh one book a month on business i know some people read one book a week i i don't have that time to read one book a week yeah these two but not anymore um so it's one book a month and so i'm reading all these business books even the ones that have strange first our titles uh the millionaires vaseline that sounds so cheap yeah but it's such a great book it's just a cheesy name um you know we'll put all those links down below i'll put your link to your business because i think it's a fantastic business you really got me thinking a lot of ideas uh on how to to do things and i always told my kids when they were younger now they're all in their 30s um but i told them they're younger whatever you want to do in life there's probably someone who has done it before you and you need to read their book yeah and learn from yeah you know yeah you asked me earlier what uh piece of advice i would give um for people that are new to want to start their own business and stuff and yeah that's my number one piece of advice too is read a lot of books and particularly read books about people who you want to be like or like whether it's a certain type of business or i also listen to a lot of podcasts so when i was starting a software as a service business there was one person in particular who wrote about his story building and and eventually selling his software service business tyler tringus and he wrote a book called microsas ebook that really inspired me you know reading kind of you know his entire journey from beginning to end and then i also listened to this podcast called the software as a service podcast and got to listen to like over 100 uh episodes of people telling their story about how they started it built it grew it sold it and so um yeah the more you can learn about other people who have already done the thing that you want to do the better yeah you know i know you were on lawrence is that the name of the uh youtube lauren oh yeah tom lawrence uh lawrence systems youtube channel he's he's a great you i'll really i'm a fan of his channel and he has his own i.t service business in detroit michigan and i actually went to visit him before and it's in the studio but yeah i've been on his channel a couple times yeah and and i i don't listen to everything he says but he has a lot of good ideas and and some of the products i'm not really interested in because that's not what i do that's what he does but when he talks about business he has a lot of interesting ideas and i always like to listen to someone else in their approach and he said that's a pretty good youtube so i'll put that link down there for his youtube account and yeah and uh but you know for i don't know the guy personally don't know him beyond what i see on on youtube but he does uh you know he's he he has some really good ideas and he seems to be a or you know really uh interesting person uh well what do you say we wrap it up yeah it sounds good it's been great talking with you jim thanks for having me on the channel uh riley is always good talking to you and i always enjoy and i just applaud your success thank you for spending time tim
2022-02-19 15:25
