 I hate my job is not a business plan. And I say that maybe once a week to people, sometimes more often, it kind of depends on what I'm up to and what I'm doing and who I'm interacting with. And having owned a business since 2003, so this is my 16th year in business and I love speaking to entrepreneurs and other inspired people about running a business, but I also want to make sure people understand the reality of running a business. And it's not that I'm trying to do what they were made aware to as gatekeeping, where I'm saying, no, you can't do it, only I can do it or anything like that. Now I just want to make sure you understand the gravity of the situation, the reality of running a business. And I'm excited that people get inspired by some of the videos I may make or that you find others, but I just don't want it to be all candy, sugar-coated with no downside, no other balance to it, because this is one of the reasons a lot of businesses fail is not because these people weren't inspired. I believe a lot of times they did not have a solid plan, they did not have good market research and they did not prepare themselves for the reality of running a business. And before I go any further, do click the like button because that helps drive the YouTube algorithm to let people know that they should be watching this video or even on Facebook if that's where I'm posting this too. Click that button too, same one, like, just click it. All right, thanks. So I got this message, which I have permission to share with you, from Alex, hi Tom. First off, thank you so much for sharing so much of your business and how you do things. You have helped me give me the courage to start a whole new chapter in my life. Tuesday I will go public with the announcement that I'll be starting my own IT company and hopefully help lots of companies become more secure, deal with less IT shop talk and get IT partner who is transparent, honest and helpful. And he's got, and I'll leave a link to this too, is he's got, he sent me his website and I just asked permission for Alex to share this. He said, awesome. He also says, keep up the good work and sharing your knowledge with the rest of us in IT space established or starting out your videos mean more than you think. Have a wonderful day. I love getting, you know, messages like this and I really do wish and had some conversation with Alex, like, hey, I hope everything works out amazing for you. But I want to talk at least for a minute about a couple of the complexities of being an entrepreneur. One of them is I don't really need or watch because I get this question asked of me, like, oh, do you watch like, you know, Gary V or someone who's motivational? And that does get a lot of people hyped up. And I think that's where that other side comes in where people glamorize entrepreneurship a little bit. But it's one of those things like I am naturally that way. I am driven to be up early in the morning and start creating something, start writing something, start thinking about a content or I'm willing to spend seven, eight, 20 hours nonstop on something I'm hyper focused on. You know, whether it's learning about all the video gear so I can produce all these videos, building out the studio or sitting down and absolutely learning top to bottom, how a firewall system works and poking away at it. I am very motivated all the time like that. And it comes the same with my business. I am constantly reading a lot of books but they're less about inspiration or more about strategy. So anytime I'm looking at it, I'm always thinking from a strategy perspective. If you need someone to hype you up all the time and maybe that is a different strategy, I don't understand but maybe if you're not already hyped, entrepreneurship is something you are going to have a hard time with and I say that because you have to be able to constantly do. And no one's telling me to get up in the morning. No one's telling me to find the next job. No one's telling me to do that. Well, my bank account will tell me and people that I have money to will let me know if I don't pay them but that's not exactly the same. Versus when you have work, you have a very structured set. In entrepreneurship, you're creating the structure and if you create that structure wrong, the whole structure falls. And that gets a bigger and bigger problem as you go because the structure I've created, well we've got several hundred customers that depend on us. I have employees here. They expect to be paid every single Friday because we do weekly payroll. So, but if you do two weekly payroll, at least every two weeks, someone is going to depend on getting paid by you. So there's a lot of structure and any changes I make to that structure, you have to be careful. This is where you may fall into the category of not wanting to grow because of risk and the balancing act kind of comes in. These are some of the realities of entrepreneurship that I think people really need to understand. There's a lot to it, it's very nuanced. And you ask yourself from the outside or even as a employee of a company, why didn't they do this? It would make so much sense if they just did this. And once again, they're either mitigating risk or sometimes just not doing things right and that does happen and it may be a reason that you want to hate the job you're at because of the structure that they've created is not a structure that's for you but that's not necessarily the same as a business plan. Next thing about entrepreneurship, the complexity of all the taxes and all of the regulations that are around it and it's especially hard on a small business when you're starting out because the learning curve is really, really steep. And I do tell people how you're a really good accountant. I have a good accountant, good accountants are expensive though. And when you're starting up, you're going, hold on, how much do I have to spend on accounting? I always expect to spend some money. The tax laws here in the U.S. are convoluted, complicated. It is kind of messy at best. And if you've ever tried to read through any of the U.S. tax codes, you don't understand why there's an entire industry that's just dedicated to helping you navigate the U.S. tax code. That's a big complexity of being an entrepreneur. The other thing is managing losses. This kind of goes hand in hand with your accountant. And I lose money sometimes. I can lose 10, 20, $30,000 in a single month. Why is that a loss? Well, that's where the numbers get complicated. We make money in one month, we can lose money this month or sometimes lose money for two months because I fund our own projects. And then when all the contractors are paid because they seem to want to be paid sometimes before the job pays, I end up with companies maybe oing me $40,000 but I've already paid everybody else. So that was my loss because I self-funded the project and I have to wait for the $40,000 final payment to come in later, which I'm actually literally waiting on that right now. That's why I said that number for another job that needs to pay. So there's this whole tiered effect. Now it gets worse if you're a starting out entrepreneur and you have lines of credit because now if you have lines of credit and you loaned out on a project, now you have to think about, all right, I'm taking this much losses right now paying payments on interest payments on these lines of credit. So this all becomes these complicated juggling acts you do and it's completely non-technical. My, if my goal was exclusively to play with firewalls or cameras, then great. But in the back of my head, I also have to be juggling all the money people owe me. And at the moment last I looked, I think it's down to, and I say down to because we've been doing some collections about $80,000 owed to me. That's a very real number that is not in my bank account right now. But don't worry, I actually have no lines of credit and I'm at no losses so for those of you asking if that's a position in my business, like, Tom, are you going to business next month? Oh, not at all. Actually we have cash flow in the bank and our balance sheet looks good and that's why I bought a Tesla. And that's why I didn't finance all of it either. So it's not a bragging thing. It's a strategy that led to this. And this is something you really have to think about if you're gonna start a business. Are you willing to do all those strategic moves to get yourself in a position that I both have all my contractors paid? Everybody's happy, like I hope, I think they're happy. I don't think it's just because of the center check but they get their checks every Friday for all those on payroll. And at the same time, I'm actively growing the business through YouTube, through different means of meeting people. I had a great meeting yesterday with a new project from a mutual friend because they know me and this comes back to hanging out with the right people which is another part about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship they've said is lonely and there is some truth to that. It can be very hard because you end up with a different perspective than people working a nine to five job. And they frequently, and trust me, I was there when I had a nine to five job other than I did like technology after work. Your job starts at nine and ends at five or whatever your work hours are. And then you're happy not to talk about it anymore. You're like, I am. Or maybe just to rant about it over a beer but now being an entrepreneur and even after 16 years, it doesn't leave. There's not a delineation here. There's not a stop mode. There's not a, oh, it's after four. I don't feel like talking about business anymore. But that becomes a problem because your friends don't have the same perspective. So sometimes you end up trading out to have different crowds you hang out with. And it's really hard building a entrepreneurship family. I've been lucky. I've worked really hard. And luck is by the way, something I can't express enough. Being in the right place at the right time sometimes helps a lot. You can be, do everything I do exactly as I do it but not to be standing in this elevator that got me a $10,000 job. I happen to be in the elevator. So one says, hey, you do that wiring thing. Yep, I do. And that led to a big job that led to a whole series of other jobs. I won't rule that out, but it's getting out there. Going to, I speak with young entrepreneurs all the time. I'm going to events where I can be in front of them sometimes with public speaking or just hang out at other business related events because keeping that whole ecosystem of people is really important. One, they're a great sounding board. So I got a message from my friend, Nick. Hi, Nick. He's probably watching this video, maybe. But we joked around. Play date is probably the wrong term but I'll be goofy and say things like that. Like let's just set a play date and it's just kind of business talk. Sometimes go out, have dinner together with another entrepreneur and bounce ideas and people not even in my industry or people in my industry. Matter of fact, I have numerous friends that I've hung out with that you would probably go Tom. Aren't they competitors? I guess we have actually actively bid against the same jobs. I think there's probably been some crossover but that's fine. There's one, there's a lot of business out there too. Knowing them and it openly discussing strategies between them has helped me immensely. And when I have people I hang out with like Brett on a regular basis who completely, we worked in the insurance industry, completely different industry for me, sharing business ideas and things like that is huge. But this is back to the difficulty or loneliness of it is if you're going to go be an entrepreneur, one, when you first start, you don't have those people so you're just gonna go have blinders on and bounce your way through your strategy for this. And I think the internet's helping a lot because well, this person was inspired by watching a video. I do watch other people who have videos. I think Grant Stevens has his name. He's got some good videos on making money and business and actually watching his videos makes me think more about strategies for one, how I run my business and two, how to share that knowledge back out via different platforms on how to run the business. So that's kind of the things I wanted to bring up about entrepreneurship is all these are all these little components of it. It's not that I'm like I said at the beginning trying to gate keep or say that you shouldn't do it. I just think you shouldn't do it blind. You should think about these things. You should look for support, either meetups or things like that. Maybe even before you become an entrepreneur if you can start ahead and learn from those people it's gonna make your journey that much easier because it's a hard road ahead of making sure you understand it. And don't get me wrong. Some people, man, they just create something that takes off or goes viral as they say. So there are times when rapid growth occurs and we've seen this with some of those companies but they're still so rare. You know, the unicorns of Silicon Valley and companies like Uber or Lyft that seem to come out of almost nowhere. It's an idea that venture capital money was just flowing upon. And that's kind of the equivalent of saying you wanna be a sports star top of the game for any sport or, you know, it's just not reality. It doesn't represent the overall number of businesses out there. And most of the time you're starting out you're gonna start out by yourself then you're gonna work on the whole stretch of how do I hire and become responsible for people. And while being responsible for people is a different topic in a different video because humans are difficult. And especially you're gonna rarely find people that think exactly like you that you hire. You're gonna really scratch your head a lot over some of their actions and it's gonna happen. So that's another, as I said, that's entire another segue into entrepreneurship but I'll leave that for a future video. Let me know what else you wanna know. And I'm always just coming up with our ideas and I'll be throwing them out there. Anyways, maybe that's things you didn't know you wanna know, but either way, I love comments, questions, feedback, what I got right, what I got wrong. Some of your own perspectives on it sometimes are very insightful to me for how to create other content or expand upon the reality of something maybe that you were curious about because I try to be very, very transparent about everything we do, about how I make money, how I do things at my business and how my whole business functions. And if you are going to jump in the boat and become an entrepreneur and start to start your own business, best of luck to you. I mean, I'm not gonna stop you from doing it for sure. Don't look at me for that. Just try to make sure you get into the reality of it. That's the best advice I can give. Thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you wanna subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon, and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. If you wanna hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video, head over to LawrenceSystems.com where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you wanna throw at us. Also, if you wanna carry on the discussion further, head over to forums.lauranceystems.com where we can keep the conversation going. And if you wanna help the channel out in other ways, we offer affiliate links below which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us that does help fund this channel. And once again, thanks again for watching this video and see you next time.