Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. My name’s Doug Cunnington, and today I’m gonna talk about five ways. I think it’ll end up being five, five ways that being an entrepreneur kind of sucks. And I, I watch a lot of YouTube videos. I watch a lot of Van Life folks too. And I think this is kind of a, this is one of those topics where like you could fill in whatever.
Thing, whatever lifestyle it is. So I was like, ah, you know what? I can come up with some ways and being an entrepreneur isn’t great, even though, I mean, it’s pretty darn good. It’s good for me, it’s not good for everybody. But yeah, I was a Van Life person and it was like 10 ways Van. Life sucks. And the thing is like if you watch YouTube or other social media, there’s a lot of.
Well, it’s all the glamorous stuff. It’s all the cool things about Van Life or about being an entrepreneur or about retiring early, but there’s always like a counterpoint. So I’m gonna go over, like I said, I believe five ways that being an entrepreneur isn’t as awesome. As it seems, or it might be a little different.
So I actually, I prepared a little bit, so I’m gonna go through these and because I’ve listed ’em out, like I said, we’re doing five. There is. Kind of a lot of pressure. Number one, there’s no off switch, so you, you’re kind of on, especially the, in the beginning, like you kind of have a lot of pressure on yourself.
Related to that is number two, the financial instability and. All over the place, uh, sort of projections that you might have. I know when I first started, I created a few spreadsheets and I showed my wife and she was like, I don’t think you could sell that many widgets, or whatever the fuck I was trying to do.
And, uh, she was right. Thing is like, you have to be like, smart enough to put together a plan and then like dumb enough to think it might actually happen. It wasn’t close by the way, but over time I got better with projections. Number three is you have to be the CEO, and in the very beginning you probably have to do everything.
So you’re doing like service delivery, you’re coming up with ideas, you’re doing the books, you’re coming up with the financial projections and other stuff, the marketing, the sales. You’re doing every damn thing. And it’s a little tough. Number four is the weight of the expectations. So a lot of these are very interrelated and, and part of it is like, the expectations of like revenue and income because at the end of the day, like you have to pay the bills and you have to be able to operate as a profitable business.
Number five, basically the never ending. Learning curve where as soon as you’re, you know, you kind of figure out a couple things. Well, there’s a few more things you have to figure out. In the very beginning, you know, I, I maybe had to figure out like what it was I was gonna sell and like unique selling proposition.
And then it was like, how do you optimize like an evergreen sales funnel? And it gets way complex very quickly. You can go super deep into any one area and you kind of feel like you are. Incompetent, like the whole way, which isn’t bad ’cause like, it’s pretty, it’s a good skill to have where you’re like comfortable with being out of your element.
So. Let’s go through a few of these. Hopefully I’ll have some examples without going on and on forever. Before I get into the actual details here, I had a interesting, like, customer service experience recently, so I have one of those, like a little it’s like a frother. Basically it’s a little mixer and they don’t cost too much.
And, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s like a little whisk. There’s a motor in there. It takes like two double A batteries. You can get ’em like all over the place, like Walmart, Marshalls, Ross, like, there’s a few different brands, but they’re super cheap. I think they cost like say between, eh, it’s like $10, give or take, right?
So some nicer ones, it might cost up to $13 or something like that. They keep breaking. So I’ve had, I think we’ve had two or three of them. They’ll, they last a few years. We don’t beat ’em up or anything. It’s not like we’re traveling with ’em or anything like that. But then it just, it stops working. I don’t know if the switch breaks or whatever.
And the thing is, I use it like every single day to mix like supplements. I don’t do like protein shakes or whatever. ’cause those are kind of heavier and I don’t want to like wear out the motor. Right. Like I said, they keep breaking on me, but the last one I got, I think it was the same brand as before, but now it has a lifetime warranty.
Still costs like 13 bucks, right? Or, and maybe it’s 14, right? Lifetime warranty. I did the registration and the fucking thing broke. We’ve had it for two and a half years. We ordered it on Amazon. There’s a paper trail again, I registered it so I have the lifetime warranty. Contacted the company and they were like.
Make sure there’s fresh batteries. Make sure the contacts are working and you put ’em in the right way. Record a little video now. It’s easy, right? I just recorded on my phone. They were like, just double check. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll send you a new one. So they were like, sure, we’ll send you a new one.
You just have to pay for shipping. Which wasn’t too bad actually. Like it was, I think it was like six bucks. And the thing is, it was, it would only be $3 for like one, but they said, oh, you know what, because you’re a good customer or whatever, we’ll send you a replacement. But we’ll also throw in another frother for you, a little whisk guy.
And the, I mean, it doesn’t come with a stand. It might be a little bit of a, like a Lus, uh. Feature rich. I mean, it’s only like one speed. It’s like on or off, but they’re sending two. And I, I wonder ’cause I would pay again, I use it every day. I’d pay like $40 for like one that didn’t have like a piece of shit motor that broke or what?
I don’t know what happens. It’s not like we put it under water or anything like that. We don’t drop it, use it for like 10 seconds a day. I don’t know. The surprising thing is they’re like, we’re just gonna throw in another one. So because they threw in two, then the, the shipping instead of $3 is like six.
So from my perspective, it actually worked pretty well. It should be delivered in no time. But I do wish there was like a slightly higher end, and I’m sure if I looked around, there probably is a higher end, but I, I bet it jumps to some, something weird. I, I don’t know if anyone, if anyone can recommend a, a good little froth or a.
I would take a look at it, although I have now we’re gonna have two and I mean they do last about two or three years. So it might be, it might be good for the next five years and maybe by then, you know, AI will mix all of our stuff for us before we even get it. Okay. Five reasons. Being an entrepreneur isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
So the pressure is, is tough. Now I got into entrepreneurship. As a side hustle, and I got laid off. And then at that point, luckily I had enough success that I thought, Hey, I could probably do this full-time. But it was a very, like up and down ride. I had months where I made the equivalent of like my full-time job, but then I had other months where I did not, and I, I was losing money and it was like, well, I didn’t know what I was doing.
Right? So it was like up and down and I, I didn’t really. Feel secure in exactly what I needed to work on. What I did was kind of a mistake, but it worked out okay. There were probably like five or six business models that I thought could work and. I thought, well, I better try them all. So I kind of spread myself a little thin.
I’m sure I put more effort into certain pieces than others, but at the end of the day, I ended up with like a very profitable service-based business and then realized that I hated that because it was client work and I didn’t like working with the clients. And unfortunately when the scale grew, I found it to be more work.
Then like actually like gaining some economies of scale where I was like better at delivery. But you know, one of the reasons that sort of thing can happen is, you know, technically this was like a link building. It was an outreach situation. This was nearly 10 years ago. This was, man, yeah, it was like late 2015 or so.
And. If I had a client that was happy with the work and they wanted to hire me for more, and maybe they wanted to, I’m just making it up instead of for like a two month engagement. They wanted to hire me for six or eight months. They would want a little break because it’s a longer engagement, it turns out.
The way I was doing things, it actually was harder as time went on. So like I would get links early on, the easiest links I can get, and then as time went on, it got harder. It didn’t get easier. So for that reason, the economy of scale did not work out further. I wasn’t actually hiring people. I kind of like a lean business and I wasn’t.
Wasn’t hiring people that were getting more efficient and doing a better job. It was me, and maybe I got a little bit better, but by that time I kind of got as good as I was gonna get in that area. I wasn’t trying to get any better, not that I didn’t have room, but I just wasn’t working on that sort of thing.
So. The, the reality of it is because I was trying to transition to like a full-time entrepreneur. There was a lot of pressure. My wife wasn’t really on board with like me doing that. She had a much more like traditional outlook on career, doesn’t have the entrepreneurship spirit, and I mean, it really, it was something I had to grow into a little bit.
But what that meant was nights, weekends, vacations, when we were traveling or vacationing or whatever. I was kind of on, I would bring my laptop everywhere and or on vacation. I wouldn’t like bring it out, but I’d bring it just in case something went wrong and I needed to like take care of things. So it was all up to me.
It all reference, I mean, really, I like Tim Ferriss, right? So I mean the four hour work week was around that, right? Basically. Tim grew a business and then it was so successful that he really didn’t have any time off. He was like more stressed out. So he created this plan where he was like, all right, I’m gonna create systems and processes around everything and I’m gonna remove myself from the business and I’m going to, you know, travel and be outta town.
And this was, you know, whatever, 2005 or something like that. 2006. The book came out in 2007, so it was, you know, early aughts. It was a different time back then. So, I mean, all the technology and connection and like being able to operate a business from your phone, like it really wasn’t a thing then. So anyway, the point is like he had to figure out a way to remove himself from the business, otherwise he was gonna drive himself crazy.
So for me, I slowly. Brought on VAs to help out with certain pieces, specifically the ones that I really did not enjoy doing. So there were certain pieces that I couldn’t get rid of, but generally that’s the idea. So you. I have to remember that if you, if you are the entrepreneur and you actually are hiring people and other people are relying on you too, that’s even more stressful.
So not only are do you have to like be on to support yourself and your family, if you hire people full, full-time, I mean even if you hire them part-time, they may be relying on you, but when you hire them full-time, like they are relying on you and you kind of have to like. Create work to make sure they have something to do.
And if you really hold that responsibility, then you’re like, alright, I need to pay for them to do work or pay, even if they’re not doing work, because you know that their whole family is relying on you. So that’s even more stressful for that reason. I, I’ve had contractors, but I never hired anyone full-time.
The paperwork gets more complex too. I mean, it’s not like something you can’t figure out, like people hire folks, right? But it’s definitely more complex and more stressful. Number two, there’s financial instability and. Basically there could be like feast and famine cycles where maybe your pipeline is too full and you’re super busy and you have to hire people, and then you don’t have new business coming in sometimes because you’re part of that delivery.
So you end up with very inconsistent revenue, and in the very beginning, you probably don’t have the information or the knowledge and experience to make. Good predictions about your, like revenue, especially over like seasonal kind of stuff. Once you have a few years of data, then maybe you get a little bit better, but there’s always like external factors popping in and things that might fuck up your projections.
The the thing that I did that helped out. Was different revenue sources, number one. So that could be helpful. It can also spread you too thin, so there’s some danger in that and it can make your business more complex than it needs to be. But basically like I smoothed out my revenue, ’cause I had two main sources.
So one was. Affiliate and niche sites and mainly earn affiliate revenue. And that was pretty seasonal. The retail season was, you know, by far the most profitable, but depending on like whatever niche it was, there could be some other ups and downs throughout the year That said the other portion, so that was like 50%.
The other 50%. Of my revenue was from courses. So courses they, they might have sort of a launch cycle. Some people do that. You can also have an evergreen situation, and I won’t go too deep here, but if you wanna hear more about it, leave a comment. But basically I did sort of a launch cycle where I launched Core, my course, my main course four times a year, quarterly.
I did that, um, January, April, July and October. I avoided the retail season because I heard, and I later confirmed this, but sales for courses in November and December, and they often led to refunds because. People spend money on a course and then the holidays come around and they’re like, oh, fuck, I overspent and turns out I bought this course and I’m not doing it, so I’m gonna ask for a refund on it.
Because there’s a 60 day refund policy, which is, I think that’s what I had 60. And I could had, I don’t remember, it’s like 30 to 90 days or something like that. I probably tested something. But anyway, I heard from the person that I took a lot of insight from. To launch those specific months, or at least don’t launch or sell courses in November and December.
So I did that for about two years. And initially I think I had just like a onetime payment, but very quickly added a monthly payment situation and. It’s great to have all the money up front because sometimes, you know, people start making the payments and then they cancel and then you have to figure out, do you refund that or do you keep that portion?
Or how are you gonna, you know, evaluate that? I was pretty generous overall, but the thing that happens is when people make the payments, then it kinda smooths out the revenue. So I didn’t get all the money up front. But more people purchased the course because it was a lower upfront cost. So instead of, I’m just making up the numbers.
So instead of $1,000, it was a hundred dollars a month for 12 months. So of course they had to pay a little bit more, but they only needed $100 of cash flow per month versus having $1,200 today, that smoothed out the revenue. Really well. So as I continued to launch the course, you can see where this is going.
So instead of, you know, having the, the one time fee and then having all the revenue come at once, I was launching four times a year. It was staggered. I would have people sign up for a hundred dollars a a month and then more people would sign up four months later and then four months later. So it slowly stacked and snowballed and you know, a handful of people, 10 to 15% would ask for refund and most people would would pay all the way through.
It turned out, I think it was about. Half, it varied but say half to, um, 60% opted for the monthly payments. So that again, really smoothed out the revenue. And it wasn’t the same as having a membership site where people pay each month similar to it. ’cause depending on what your membership. Was you would have people sign up and they would stick around for some amount of time.
You don’t know until you do it for a while, but it could be, you know, six months to a year. And depending on like how much it was, I heard, you know, sometimes people would hang on for about, you know, six to eight months before they canceled their monthly membership. Again, this is all anecdotal, but I was like, you know what?
If I’m getting, you know, most people to hang on, this is great. So that’s one thing I have never emphasized. But anyway, that smoothed out the sort of pipeline issue and the seasonality of certain things. And it was a blend of revenue, one time fees, monthly payments, and then the other half of the revenue.
And crazy enough, that held true about 50% from the courses, 50% from the websites. Totally insane. Plus, whenever I sold one that, you know, jumped the, um, website angle number three, I need to move faster here so we don’t go on forever. So if you are running your own business, you have to do everything. You gotta do the sales, you have to figure out the marketing funnel, you have to create the top end funnel.
You have to do all that stuff, and you have to be the CEO. It, it’s it’s tough. It’s fun. You get to learn a lot of stuff. The the key thing that I can give you advice on is you potentially will gravitate towards the thing that you’d like to do the best. And that can be dangerous because you unfortunately have to do a blend of stuff.
I continue to do my own bookkeeping. It’s a good way. To keep your eyes on, like where the revenue’s going and the cash flow. That said, bookkeeping is one of those things where people are like, get rid of bookkeeping. You could hire a bookkeeper for whatever, X, X number of dollars per hour, 20 bucks an hour, or whatever, and then you don’t have to worry about it.
But for me, I know how to work a spreadsheet, so going in there, looking at all the revenue. Looking at every expense, like, am I actually using that software? Does that software give me $60 of value per month? If not, get rid of it. So if you’re literally looking at that and you feel the pain every fucking time, a dollar is withdrawn from your account, then, you know, so I did.
I did that kind of thing. I actually enjoyed learning about the copywriting and the marketing funnel, and I would slowly get courses that usually like pinpointed that exact thing that I was trying to learn, only when I was trying to learn it. But the portions that I didn’t like were around customer service.
It was dealing with clients. Like I said, dealing with students was often much better. One thing that I did, and I think this holds true, no matter what you’re selling, if you go to the higher end, the more expensive of whatever it is you’re working with, typically, not always, but typically you’re gonna end up with customers that don’t bust your balls as much and they respect your time a little bit more.
It was very evident once I started charging more. Early on, like I didn’t have the confidence, like the first couple things that I sold, I didn’t have the confidence to charge as much, and you don’t know. You have to pick a price and move forward and then adjust from there. And I went with under $100 for like the, the lowest price range where someone could like buy an ebook or whatever it was, right.
Turns out those people. Are not the best to deal with. They pay you like $27 and they think they could take up all of your time. And eventually I was like, you know what, this, that is not how I wanna spend my time. And I did hear, hey, if you, if you charge more, it’s a higher level person that they value their time, they value your time.
And that turned out to be a hundred percent true. So it is stressful because you have to. Basically do all the different roles. I would encourage you to outsource what you can stay on top of certain things. You know, if bookkeeping is not your thing, that it just worked out fine for me. But if bookkeeping is something that like bogs you down, I would say that that’s one that’s cool to outsource.
But stay on top of it. Make sure you know where your money’s going and. You know, cashflow is a thing that could put your business under. So if you fuck up your cashflow, you may end up owing vendors money that you can’t pay because you spent too much. Taxes are a major thing. You have to hang on to the money that you earn because you will have to pay taxes most of the time.
Number four. The weight of the expectations, whether those are external, perhaps family, friends, the society, societal pressures that you, you may get from, uh, like even social media and perhaps the worst is the self-imposed expectations. And here, here’s one of the big issues, right? Man, I, I, I did this too, and then quickly was humbled.
Really easy to, you know, get your ass handed to you overall. But I had, or I have a computer engineering degree and I’m kind of technical and I don’t know, everybody thinks they’re above average, which it like mathematically it doesn’t work out right. Not everyone could be above average. So I thought, you know.
These other people can do it. And I would watch success stories, right? I would watch success stories. I would hear podcast interviews. Back in, in the old days, there were blog posts and I would read those. A lot of times people would send out like the same questions. I remember, remember, us, Spencer Hawes would send out questions.
People would answer those 10 questions or so. And like sometimes it was sort of shorter answers. Other times it was like full on tutorials and stuff like that. But I love those because it was like, oh, there’s a project manager. Oh, here’s, um, you know, a carpenter who’s doing stuff and here’s someone else, a teacher.
I’m, I’m running outta professions. But basically it was like. Anyone that you can think of, any kind of type of person, career avatar, different backgrounds. The family person, the single mom, the career oriented person, the grandma, the teenager, like so many different people had these success stories and I was like, well, it’s great ’cause I could see myself in, you know, this person or that.
But I also fell into the trap of like thinking that. ’cause of my background and my experience, I should be able to do this a little bit faster or better. Turns out, I, I couldn’t, and I try to tell other people that too, and they’re thinking, ah, you know what, I, I am smarter than other people. And it does turn out like, I mean, some people are smarter than other folks, but you still have to cut your teeth and figure some shit out.
I will tell you, the unfair advantage is. Back in those days, a lot of it was blog and writing oriented. So if someone had a writing background, maybe they were an English major, maybe they worked at the newspaper, fuck, maybe they worked at their yearbook in high school or whatever, but they knew how to write.
That was super helpful. That was a big hurdle for me. I did not write much, especially in the style of like blogging, so it took a long time. Nowadays. I mean, video is the hot thing, right? If you could do video, you could probably do really well, not just on YouTube, right? But like any other platform is trying to do more video, short form video, long form, whatever, like if you could do video, you have a leg up on people.
So if you happen to have worked. At your, uh, local TV station and, and you have like a journalism background and you know how to be a broadcaster, well, you have an unfair advantage. So there are those times where like, if you literally have put in your time and like you’re a professional videographer, you can probably, you know, skip a couple steps, you’re gonna move a little bit faster, but.
The thing is you have to basically understand that you’re gonna be a beginner and there are gonna be things that you don’t understand. So even if you have like a broadcasting background and you’re a pro in that area, and you can sit in front of the camera, stand in front of the camera, talk, fill time, that sort of thing, maybe you’re not a great copywriter or sales person, so you’ll have to figure out how to do that.
There are little hurdles all along the way, so you have to understand that like these are things that you could figure out and you will be bad at things before you will get better, but you, you can get better, especially if you critically focus on, you know, certain areas where you’re gonna work hard on it, and then improve that area and then move on to the next so everyone deals with it differently.
You know, I think for me, I was actually, I’m usually bad at something. I was used to this growing up even through school. Like I had to study quite hard and I didn’t naturally pick things up. So I’m used to struggling through and being bad at stuff. If you happen to have been like a, a great athlete that picks up sports really quickly and you’re hardly ever bad at anything, then.
You may have a tougher time ’cause you’re used to being good and, uh, well, it’s, it’s uncomfortable. Being bad is something I’m really com comfortable at, being bad at stuff. Then you have your external, you know, expectations. Those are tougher to manage. Those are, those are relationship based. And if you know the answer to that one, leave a comment below.
Those are much tougher. Alright, number five. Eh, all of this stuff is kind of related. Like I said, you kind of feel incompetent perpetually. The learning curve is just out there for different areas, and it could take, I. A lifetime or longer to become really good at all the different areas. Like I said, there’s all these different hats you’re wearing.
You have to be the visionary, you have to be able, you know, if you’re building a team, I didn’t hire people, but I trained them. Turns out, like my previous job taught me how to train people. Well create job aids and have sort of like a continuous feedback loop. So training was very tight and that was just like from the professional.
You know, experience that I had in consulting. So you will be bad at being a CEO. You might not be a good manager. You might not be a good marketer. You’ll have to figure out sales, you have to figure out networking, you have to figure out customer service, blah, blah, blah. Like there’s, there’s so much stuff.
So usually. You can go and figure out like individual pieces or just enough to move forward, and that’s really the key here. You, you just have to figure out like the next best step and not completely screw, screw things up. Which is totally doable. Like as, as long as you’re making sure you’re not dropping something completely, you should be in good shape.
The biggest mistake that will put you outta business. Is not managing the cash flow or not being able to pay your taxes, that sort of thing. As long as you’re selling stuff and your customers are happy and there’s no catastrophic mistakes, you should mostly be okay most of the time, and you can continually move on to the next thing that you need to.
You don’t have to figure everything out all at once, and you’ll just have to look at all the the different challenges that you have. But like I said. If you’re okay with feeling uncomfortable because you have to learn and figure out how to do the next thing, you’re totally gonna be okay. You may feel like other people have it all figured out, but no one knows what they’re doing hardly ever.
So you can be comfortable with that. So it all sounds dark, but let’s wrap it up with something a little more positive. I. Say it all the time. ’cause uh, you know, I do interviews occasionally or I make an introduction for myself on, you know, different, different things. A lot of times it’s, it’s actually in person, but I say, I had this corporate job, it was fine.
I didn’t really like it, and I’ve been working for myself after I got laid off, it turns out. I’m a really good person to work for myself. It shouldn’t be a big surprise. Hindsight’s really easy to, you know, connect these dots. I didn’t get hired for an actual job until I was in college with a co-op program, which is like an internship.
The school I went to Georgia Tech, the co-op pro uh, program is very big there. So essentially you t typically what happens, not always. Also, this is like 25 years ago, but typically what happened then you would start school as a freshman, you’d go through the two. Quarters back then, I’m that old. So it was like three quarters or two semesters, we’ll just talk semesters and then that next summer you start working somewhere again, like an internship.
So you get experience. But the thing is, with a co-op program, there’s kind of the understanding that you’re gonna go back to the same company several times. So you could build a, you know, relationship with the company. You get additional responsibilities as time goes on ’cause you’re learning that company or whatever the thing is you’re doing there.
And then you alternate terms. So it extends how long you’re in school, but you end up working at the same place, taking on more responsibilities. A lot of times you have a good opportunity to be hired at the place. Not always. I mean, the place I worked at was a company called Nortel Networks. I think they got it.
Well, they, they had some major issues with the.com bubble. You kids could look it up, but basically I think they got acquired, or some pieces of the business got picked up by Cisco, I think. But basically I was in the co-op program there, and that was the first time that I got hired because when I was like.
12 years old, I started cutting grass and some of my friends, they would get jobs at whatever, the grocery store or you know, wherever people work, right? Restaurants. But I cut grass, so I passed out flyers again, hindsight, I can’t believe that, you know, I thought I was gonna work for other people, but I passed out flyers.
I was like 12 years old. I didn’t know. Anything passed out. Flyers, people would call me, they would tell me stuff I would like negotiate. I’d go look at their yard and be like, ah, this it would probably be like 25 bucks or whatever. So I was like, when I was a kid, and this was in 19 90, 19 91 or so, I was earning like 20 bucks an hour.
And I think minimum wage was like, I don’t know, back then it was probably like four 50, something like that. I don’t know. I didn’t have a job then, but I was earning good money, wasn’t paying taxes and stuff, and I saved up a lot of money. And I, I did that for years and then, you know, basically word of mouth, like got me more and more business and I was doing like whatever I wanted, when I wanted, if I didn’t wanna do a yard, I was like, you know what, I, I would raise the price.
So it’s like I was learning a lot of this stuff, but I, I didn’t realize that for me, working for myself is way better. But it does make sense. ’cause later when I actually got jobs I was like, alright, I’ll drink a little of the Kool-Aid. You know, when you go to orientation you’re like, okay, this makes sense.
These other people seem successful, but later. When, you know, I didn’t get the raises that I thought I deserved or I was like, I’m better than that per, like, I’m doing more work. Like that person’s always goofing off and they’re the manager that motherfucker’s planning their wedding. And I’m like, we’re doing all the work here.
So turns out I am way better off working for myself. I struggled along for about 10 years. I mean, I wasn’t doing horrible, but um, you know, I was never in the right organization and most of the time I. I was a little annoyed. The good part is I did start working remotely on a partial basis, starting in like 2008 or so, which is really early I think, for a lot of companies.
Not full-time, but there was a lot of freedom in there instead of having to you know, dress up, go to the office. Sit in traffic the wor, and that’s the worst for me. So why, if entrepreneurship has some sucky parts, why do we do it? Sometimes you’re just built for working for yourself and that turns out to be the case for me, I think probably not everyone, but probably a lot of people, they just want to be able to like do the kind of work that they want to do.
With who they wanna work with and do it on their own timeframe. This all comes down to autonomy and like making decisions for yourself and like what you wanna do, when you wanna do it, who you wanna do it with. And I mean, that’s a lot for me. It’s totally worth it. There’s a lot of struggles in here, uh, you know.
Like I said, you, you kind of constantly feel like you’re behind. You don’t know what’s going on, things are screwed up. You have to, you know, potentially figure out these complex things that are external factors. And I recently chatted with a friend who does a lot of drop shipping. It didn’t impact his business, but he had some other friends that were much deeper in had, I mean.
Big companies. Potentially in the eight figure range. ’cause he was like, yeah, they have, you know, warehouse, they employ like a hundred people there. Like that’s a lot of cash flow happening with the tariff uncertainty in the past six months or so, like they had to lay a lot of people off and it’s super scary.
I never grew obviously to, to that point where I had all those people relying on me. But anyway. Entrepreneurship. It can be great. There, there are some downsides. Let me know what you think in the comments. Or you could shoot me an email feedback at Doug show. I have been publishing some, uh, you know, sort of different things over on YouTube recently, so have a look.
Just head over to the channel if you do the YouTube thing. Appreciate you watching or listening. If you are not on the email list, be sure to sign up. We’ll put a link in the show notes and description. And I’ll wrap it up for today. So thanks a lot. We’ll catch you on the next episode.