Hey everyone, Oz Konar here. Listen, today, I want to talk about a topic that’s probably the most fundamental for anyone who considers themselves to be an entrepreneur, right? And that’s the topic of how to become an entrepreneur, how to become a successful one. We live in an age that everyone is promoting this entrepreneurial dream life that you have unlimited amount of money and you’re driving fancy cars and you live in big mansions, but this topic is overlooked on how to become one.
How to become an entrepreneur or a business owner
And when you’re talking about how to become an entrepreneur or a business owner, that in itself, is such a broad topic because that can cover anything from, how to come up with a business plan, how to choose your products and service, how to choose the business to start, how to hire someone, fire … So many different elements that I personally deal with, day in and day out. But those are all semantics on unless you have the fundamentals in place. So I’m going to handle this conversation in two separate parts within this video today.
One part is the why. Before you get to how to become one, we need to understand why do you want to be an entrepreneur? That’s the first part. The second part is what kind of entrepreneur are you? There are different categories of entrepreneurialship without you understanding based on your personality and your life experiences or your skillset, which one of them, you’re going to spend a lot of time treading water. A lot of things will be trial and error and maybe at the end, you’ll find that you don’t really fit into any of those buckets. And this whole entrepreneurial thing might not even be for you, right? It’s because you admire the lifestyles, can promote it constantly, but I can tell you that business ownership is not for everyone.
Different categories of entrepreneurialship
So that’s my goal with this video, to help you understand the why part and also understand different categories of entrepreneurialship. So hopefully by the end of that, you can self analyze yourself at the side, your primary why and what type of entrepreneur you are and putting together, you can decide which route you’ll want to go to start or grow your own business. Or even if you’ve tried different businesses, and for some reason, something is really not working, you can’t seem to figure out what that is, hopefully this video will help.
Fair warning, this is not going to be a shorter video in comparison to my other ones, because it’s such, again, important and deep topic, I don’t want to rush through it. So if you don’t have the time, you can come back to it later. But if you do enjoy videos like this in my channel, if you can like it and subscribe to my channel, that would be great. I also have an Instagram channel. If you can … Instagram account, if you can follow me on Instagram, that will be great as well.
Why do people go crazy about starting their own business?
All right. Without further ado, let’s get started. How to become an entrepreneur. The first part of that is, why do people go crazy about starting their own business? Well, I can almost hear you say, “Well, Oz, obviously people want to make more money.” So the goal is to make more money. I certainly understand that, but it’s not necessarily true for everybody, right? So we’re going to talk about the three reasons that someone wants to start a business. And this has to do with the personality, how you’re brought up, what happened to you in the past and your motivators, what ticks you, various things.
Now, obviously, there is no way for me to know all of that, this is for you to listen carefully and decide for yourself, which one of these categories provide you the why, that you have, why you do what you do. The first one and the most common one that most people start their own business is, the lack of satisfaction. They’re not satisfied with something. They’re dissatisfied at some element of their life. A lot of times that’s their job. They have a nine to five and they kind of, some people despise their job, honestly. Their boss and what they do. They really, really dislike it to the point of hating it and wanting to get rid of it. Right?
So the lack of satisfaction is the first reason that someone wants to get out of their current situation and start a business. Why do they want to start a business that way? Because it feels like it gives them a control on their lives, right? And this doesn’t always have to be about your lifestyle. Sometimes the dissatisfaction comes from a solution that you find. So let’s say you have a problem. And there’s a product that solves that problem and you can’t stand that product. The current solution to that. And you notice that, Oh my God, I’m just not happy with the solution. There has to be a better way, right?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Necessity is the mother of invention. So something is not working and it just upsets you so much and you go ahead and find a solution to that. But a lot of the time is within this category, within the category of dissatisfaction, it comes down to the finances. There are millions and millions of people who are not happy with the paycheck they get. They’re not happy with the amount of money they’re making currently. And of course, being an entrepreneur gives you the control to decide how much you will be making granted that you’re successful. Okay?
Why are you not happy?
So this category is definitely important to understand for you to decide, why are you not happy? Are you not satisfied for the wrong reason, right? If you just want to start your own business to escape the current reality, that’s a problem because there might be an easier solution. For example, if you just dislike your boss, you might like your job, but you just can’t stand this guy or woman and you want to start a business, that might not be the best motivation, right? Because maybe the motivation, if you really like your pay and if you really cannot stand the responsibility of being a business owner and your only complaint is your boss, maybe it could be a good idea to just change your boss, right?
But a lot of times, the reason is deeper than that. You’re angry at somebody. Let’s say your boss, because you don’t want to be dominated by that person. You want to practice your independence. You want to break through those chains and kind of take control over your life and build something maybe you can pass down to generations or build maybe generational wealth by certain families in the United States and in the world that they have, right? They’ve been rich forever almost, but they all started somewhere. That’s really, really important. That’s the first part, which is lack of satisfaction, which is really, really important.
If you’re not happy with your current situation, I think probably the worst thing you can do, is to try to settle into it and believe that just be optimistic and things will change by itself. I don’t submit to that belief system. If you leave things to their own accord, they don’t usually solve themselves. They get worse. So things go from orderly to disorderly. It’s a physical rule. Right? That’s really important. Being optimistic, especially in times like this is really, really important, but that should not turn into lack of planning and just praying and praying is not the way to go, right? That’s the first part, first reason, why somebody starts at business.
Some people have a big dream
Second reason, again, these types of people are a lot less than the first step. Majority of the individuals out there want to start their own business are in the first category. The second category is dreamers. These people have a big dream. They’re not necessarily unhappy with their current situation, but they have this vision in their mind that they want to accomplish something massive with their lives. And they think that the business is a vehicle for that. 99% of the time, business is the vehicle for that. Anyone famous and anyone who’s a celebrity, anyone who’s a multi-billionaire, chances of them holding a job as rare to none. Almost all of them own at business.
So owning your own business and being entrepreneurial is your vehicle to that. A lot of the companies, this category specifically belongs to a lot of companies in Silicon Valley. So they start with something, maybe it doesn’t even exist anymore. And there might not even be a demand for it. And people might not even know that, that they would need it if it existed. And these people have this dream of creating that and getting it out there.
So a lot of the startups start with this idea. So two founders down and they lock themselves in a room and they focus on a problem and all of a sudden, they come up with the solution and they go to investors and get some money from venture capitalists and things like that and start a business. Can this happen on a smaller scale? Sure. It can happen. But again, the motivation for those people are not so much the immediate solution to their problem, but more like, I have this dream. Like Elon Musk, occupy Mars, that’s his mission, right? That’s a bigger than life mission. So he wants to occupy Mars. Is it about money? Maybe you can argue that, but I think it’s more than that, right? So that’s the second type of category on why someone starts a business.
The self discovery.
Third one is usually overlapping or where the other first two categories. It is the self discovery. One of the ways that you can learn a crap ton about yourself is when you face yourself, people are afraid to do that a lot of the times. People are afraid to look at the person in the mirror. People are afraid to even be lonely with themselves, right? They would do anything not to spend time with themselves. So when you start your own business, you all of a sudden, take on this amazing responsibility because there is no person, no other person to blame. It’s just you. Anyone who’s used to lunchroom gossip about their boss and the company and all that stuff. Anyone who wants to play the victim card or they’re not the reason why something is not working in their life and you take them and put them in a business situation, it doesn’t work out really, really well because they will have to face themselves. But that’s on the negative end.
One of the most amazing experiences
On the positive end, it’s one of the most amazing experiences because I don’t think there’s such an experience to get to know yourself better, your strengths and your weaknesses and where you invest to grow personally. I mean, I personally spent over six figures on my own education and it took me a while, but I’ve come to peace with my own self, to understand my own weaknesses. And I figured out that for me to fix that, it’s that I got to learn from others who have done it before. Right? So this is the third category, self discovery.
These individuals, again, this overlaps with the first two, sometimes. They maybe had a glimpse of success at some point in their lives. You hear them say things like, “Oh, man, things were crazy back then. We were having a lot of fun. We were killing it. This business was doing fine, it’s not anymore, but I miss those days. I can tell you that I can’t stand working for somebody else.”
Again, this can remind you reason number one but at the same time, they had this glimpse of success and they know that they were in the zone personally back then, when they caught that moment and they missed it. Now they miss it so much, they want to go back to it because their body, their self, their subconscious mind, is definitely wanting to experience again. Because why? Because people want things that kind of expands them. They know that it’s going to teach them a lot. They’re going to grow.
What’s one of the most common reasons people leave jobs?
What’s one of the most common reasons people leave jobs? They call it dead ends, right? If your company that you work for, if your job is just flat and there’s no growth opportunity, or it’s not fun enough or you’re not developing yourself enough, one of the reasons that people look for a way out, is that. You’re not in the self discovery mode anymore. So these are the three reasons why somebody starts their own business. So hopefully you were able to kind of imagine yourself on which one of them, or maybe it can be all three of them, but there is always one of them that’s dominant.
And let’s say you identify like most people that it’s number one, you’re just not satisfied with the current status of your life. Then you got to get more specific. What does that mean? What exactly are you not happy with? Well, I’m not making enough money. Okay. What is enough? How much is enough that you’re not making that, but do you know how much is enough? Is it, if you’re making five grand right now? Is it 10 grand? Is it 20 grand? Because if you don’t know what that is, how are you going to know if you even get there? Right?
Set up a specific plan
So you have to set up a specific plan. So that’s the purpose of this part of the video, not just for it to identify, Oh, I’m number two. That’s not enough, and I can’t do that for you, but you need to pick up a pen and paper and write down and be really, really specific. And this is not the time to be super positive and optimistic. Yeah, future is positive, I believe in that. But in cases like this, you got to kind of push yourself to your limit, to have the truth come out.
When you’re in a really comfortable state of mind, where you sugar coat things and our brain finds a way to cheat us and make us believe that things are just fine. We’ll be okay. Come on, don’t make a big deal. That’s really not the case. So pick up a pen and paper, write down, what’s bothering the heck out of you. Is it your old desk in your office? You can’t stand it. Is it your car? You need a bigger car. You need a better car. Is it your neighborhood? You don’t want to grow your kids in this neighborhood. Is it the clothes that you can’t afford? Maybe you want this purse or shoes for ladies and you can’t afford that.
So whatever it is, the more specific, and you need to have a list of things. If you’re a really … If you’re trying to come up with a list to be perfectly honest, and if you only have two things, you’re probably not dissatisfied enough to start a business. It might feel that way, but you’re not there. People., I remember myself and I’m not an exception, most business owners are like that, if you asked me eight years ago, the amount of things that I just totally was angry about, it was probably two or three pages long. Okay? I can go through them in my mind, thinking about it. Just everything starts bothering you because you know that you don’t belong there. You need to do something to change that situation.
If you’re a dreamer, what is that dream be specific?
That’s the same thing for category two. If you’re a dreamer, what is that dream be specific? Right? Think of Bill Gates. When the first, one of the first computers created, it was the size of a two story building. When someone asked him what his mission was, he said, he wanted to have a computer in everybody’s home.” People laughed at him. Why? Because they looked at the computer, it’s as big as the building itself. And this young dude is talking about putting it in everybody’s home. It doesn’t make sense. Right? But he’s a dreamer. He knew that he could do that. He would probably have thought of, minimize the size of the computer and somehow getting it through. We don’t know. Right? But that’s the type of guy who was a dreamer. He could have answered, “My mission is to make $10 billion.” And he could have hit that goal. But as you can see, he’s not in the first category.
Category three. And one of the examples is that, maybe you’re not feeling like you’re yourself anymore. You might feel like, I feel like I’m a loser, right? I’m not doing well. Or my family is not … My husband, my wife is not appreciating me enough. They’re not treating me like I’m a winner. I missed that feeling of being the winner. I miss it so much. I got to do something about it. Right? And that doesn’t have anything to do with the money, that doesn’t have anything to do with having this large, big dream.
Am I going to be successful?
Because everyone confuse … A lot of people confuse that or like, Oh yeah. Am I going to be successful? Because I don’t really plan ahead. Or I don’t have this massive dream or anything like that. Maybe what you’re missing is bigger than some dreamers dream. If you kind of pull yourself together and get yourself in that zone, other options will open up and then you can start planning about the financial goals or you can have better dreams, if you have a roadblock, that’s kind of avoiding and stopping you from even dreaming right now. Okay. That’s more psychological.
Now we’ve covered the three reasons why somebody starts a business. If you’ve done that, now, let’s move on to the types of entrepreneurs out there. All right. The first type of entrepreneur is the pioneer. All right? These are the kids of the Silicon Valley. They just want to start the next Facebook, right? So they see a problem, they immediately jump onto the problem. They want to create a solution from brand new that doesn’t exist before, they think their solution is the best one out there. They think they’re going to create the Uber of this, Uber of that. You hear that a lot in Shark Tank and all the other shows out there. These are the pioneers. Okay?
“The pioneers are the ones who end up with arrows in their backs.”
Very rarely they succeed at a massive scale. But if they do succeed, it is at a massive scale. We’re talking about Airbnb, Amazon, Facebook, and Uber, and these types of companies. And there’s also a saying for them, “The pioneers are the ones who end up with arrows in their backs.” Because a lot of the time, they are so futuristic about their goal, they kind of don’t see the mishaps of why it’s not even feasible for them to accomplish that goal. They cannot get enough investments. The market doesn’t agree with their dream of creating the next solution and they don’t buy and they have crushed dreams.
I do have friends like that. They started businesses. And when you talk to them, their eyes would glow. I mean, they’re in the zone all the time. They’re growing this multi, tens of hundreds, of millions of dollars company. And you’ll be like so convinced, and if you had money, you’ll just want to give it to them without really understanding. Their energy’s contagious. But again, less than 1% of these people become really successful but when they do become really successful, that means, you know them. Those are the pioneers. Most people are not pioneers. Okay? They think they are, but they’re not.
“I can do better than that.”
The second type of people are the ones who are aware of a problem … This is the second type of entrepreneur. And there are solutions out there, but the solutions are not good enough. They just come up with a better solution. They look at a solution in the marketplace. They can just say, “I can do better than that.” Right? One example that everyone will remember, as they probably watched the movie, Wolf of Wall Street. Right? Jordan Belfort.
Well, the stock market has existed way before him. But what he didn’t like is the way people were selling. So he kind of developed his own way of selling stocks that would work well in a dishonest way. I’m not approving his process, but I’m just giving me an example of how that worked out. He looked at a business model, he worked in it. He noticed that, how they were doing things was wrong. There was a better way to cheat people and convince them or whatever you want to say. And he came up with that model, straight line persuasion, I think. Straight line something. Then he used that. And there are many other examples of that. This is a more of a common way of starting your business, right?
A better solution in the marketplace
When someone is looking at a business, they can say, Hey, I see a bagel shop. They’re doing okay, but I can probably triple the revenue they do because I understand the market. Right? This is where things kind of fall into place. In the beginning, I told you, I’m not going to talk about specific elements of how to become a business owner, like the business plan, the marketing, hiring, and all that stuff. This category determines, you can take the same industry, the same people, but someone will 10X the other person because they have a better solution in the marketplace. That’s the second part.
This is usually the category that a lot of businesses fail because their perception of what’s better for that business might be totally wrong, right? Although a lot of people are in this category, they might not always be doing the best because they lack the guidance and what they see from outside is way different than when they own that business. But this type of person is all about improving the current solution. They don’t like it. They’re good at finding flaws and that solution and they go ahead and come up with a better solution and just kill everybody else.
One of the prime examples for that is Salesforce.com. It’s a CRM system. Prior to salesforce.com, there were a ton of other CRM systems out there, but Salesforce came knocking through all of them and became the biggest CRM company out there with so many bells and whistles and so many things, probably the most expensive one. It solves a really massive problem on a market that people thought, it was already dominated, that no one could take over that.
Chobani Yogurts is another one. The yogurt industry in the United States is almost saturated. Anyone wants to come in and take over 32% of the market was thought impossible. And this guy Chobani came through and he created yogurt with no sugar or less sugar and various combinations of that and took over the marketing. So for this category, I’m going to give you a couple of examples from my own life, if you care to listen.
I’m a combination of different categories of entrepreneurs, but more like this one. When I started my marketing agency, we decided after a while, we decided to focus on the merchant cash advance industry, alternative lending industry. This industry funds money to small businesses when the banks do not or cannot fund, which is most of the time for small businesses. I got into this industry and prior to me starting the business, I was a sales person. I was selling this door to door, to small businesses along with credit card processing.
I got in as an agency, we wanted to get clients and we were attracting a lot of clients. But a lot of times, there was always a friction because these clients, their understanding of marketing was just putting more guys on the phone. Their understanding of marketing is, listen, man, if I have 20 people all dialing all day long, if they’re all dialing 300, 400 people, we’re going to kill it. The interesting part is, well, they were killing it. That’s that’s the good part. But the bad part is, their marketing was restricted to hardcore sales. There was really no inbound marketing, meaning that they didn’t have customers coming to them. That was just really a hard boiler room Wolf Of Wall Street type of environment, that everyone is dialing, dialing, dialing.
I’ve done that myself. I come from that background, but I knew that there was a better way to get clients. And this is when the online marketing was kind of evolving and exploding. There was explosive growth out there. We had this one big client that we had massive success with and we were slowly getting the other ones. But the problem was that most of the industry copied what they saw from each other. They were coming into industry from one end and getting out from the other one without any success because their mindset was stuck on telemarketing. Telemarketing is not easy to make it work. You need people. And there’s a high turnover because I don’t think anyone enjoys dialing 400 people every single day.
When we came into that market, I looked everywhere and noticed that, well, there is a solution, right? So people want to grow the merchant cash advance business. Why? It’s very lucrative to grow and there’s massive demand. Those are the positive parts. But the negative part is, your way of acquiring customers is through the phone. I totally disagree with that. As you can see, what I did is I scanned the market. I am from the market, came in and noticed that, well, there needs to be a pattern interrupt. I don’t like the solution. And then the solution I came up with is, we’re going to specialize in doing online marketing for the companies in the merchant cash advance industry. That took us from only having one or two clients and the industry to becoming the most known company in inbound lead generation. We never sold leads. We never did telemarketing, it was all inbound, online, marketing related. And then we were the only company doing that, right? That helped us make a mark in that industry.
So second time, identify myself with that category of entrepreneurialship. Looking at a problem, not liking the solution, creating the solution, is a training that we have, the business lending blueprint. As an agency, we grew really big and we’re doing marketing for so many people, but I noticed that this is a really enclosed industry, but it can do so much volume. There is still a massive demand in the alternative lending industry that’s not covered. There are not enough people handling it.
For that reason, I noticed that, well, people can actually start doing this, but the market was so closed to that idea because their understanding of taking somebody from not even knowing this and having them a success, was almost impossible because they needed to be a salesperson and they need to not understand the numbers behind the scenes. There was a lot of smoke screens and the bosses didn’t want to talk about the commission structure and all that. We came through it and we put together an actual training. I’m taking the average person without any sales experience or marketing or industry experience and having them build a very sustainable and profitable business. As you can see, again, yeah, pat on the back, good job boss. But I’m trying to have the points sink in. Right? This is the second time entrepreneur. This is a lot of the people. Look at a solution, don’t like the solution and you go find a better solution.
The safest bet
The third type of entrepreneur, which is the safest bet is, find an industry that has a problem, that has a demand. An industry that has a solution and also, a step by step plan in succeeding that, right? Third categories usually are franchises, a franchisor, already identified a problem like a subway. They wanted to have a fast food solution that was also healthy back in the day. They took it from concept to a national running business and they managed to replicate it. So you can duplicate their process and make it profitable. And they made it a franchise system. And it was repeated through Dunkin’ donuts and McDonald’s and so many other franchises out there. Super Cuts and any different categories.
This is a third category of business ownership. People who are looking for a proven system, they go ahead and they get that system. This also encompasses buying courses and trainings and hiring mentors. Again, people usually overlap. You’re usually not just this one type of category. I, myself, again, I invest in a lot of the coaches and mentors and I buy a lot of courses. Why? Because I want pretty much something already figured out. I don’t want to go to Google or YouTube and try to figure it out myself. I want to find the best at something and follow their lead and follow their mentorship. Okay?
The least amount of risk
Third category is the least amount of risk, usually it costs you a little upfront money to get in. Maybe the second category doesn’t cost you as much, or it might cost you 10 times more if you’re trying to open your own Brick and Mortar store. But the third category, that doesn’t cost you a lot of money, but it does have a cost because there’s a learning curve and you’re you’re following a system and it requires you to be a coachable person. That’s why it’s important for you to identify, if you’re in any of those categories. If you rebel against authority or anyone, and you think, you know everything, or you just want to be left alone and do things yourself, then do not invest into a coach or mentor because you’re not going to listen to that guy or woman, right? You’re going to make your life miserable.
And this category, I think, is a lot of the people who, … And I hear these people quite a bit and anyone who’s interested in our services and the training, they come through and one of the first things they say, “Oh, I’ve been scammed so many times and none of the programs work out there.” When that happens, I usually them on the spot. I tell them, “Buddy, how many times have you actually invested in a program? How many? Just humor me and tell me how many.” “Oh, a lot.” I’m like, “No, no. Let’s be specific. How many times have you bought a program you actually did the recommended amount of time and applied and it just turned out to be a total scam and didn’t work. How many times?” And usually the answer, we don’t come up to an answer.
That doesn’t mean, that’s always the case, but most of those people, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to create this video to help people understand by themselves, which category they belong to. So if they are, you’re somebody who’s just, Oh, I don’t trust this person. Or the industry’s bad or the economy’s bad, or the president is bad. You’re probably not a good fit for the business world. Right?
Commitment and responsibility
This business world requires you to have this understanding, this commitment and responsibility. You’re a hundred percent responsible for your actions. All right? So the third category again, is for those who will want to follow the proven system, they ,just their mind is set at where they want to go. They want to kind of take the shortcut. Instead of being in the second category, you’re trying to create it or the first category, you’re trying to create something that doesn’t even exist. Right?
Those are the three types of entrepreneurs. And again, they have their own subcategories, which I’m not going to get into, that would take too long to explain. But again, this is, the second part is also a part for you to think deeply about and maybe write down notes on things. The goal is, collectively, by the end of this video, when you look at your notes, you can identify yourself with at least a couple of those things. So you know that you’re not going to make a mistake of starting a business when you shouldn’t even be in the business. Right?
We’re going to wrap up right now. If you again, like the video, definitely like below and comment and tell me what you find out and what your thoughts are. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. I’ll see you in another video, take care now.
