E08: Stop Overthinking it. Go Start Your Business

Do you want to start a business but you keep getting in your own way? I urge you, stop overthinking it. I'm Jim Doyon and welcome to another episode of remote start, where I bring you stories and strategies on how to start a business, build a brand and create your desired lifestyle. This episode is special to me. I've talked to so many entrepreneurs, so many individuals who want to start a business throughout my years and they overthink it. And this, this episode came to me by a trying to help a friend who really wants to go out on her own. She really wants to start her own business. She's got a million thoughts going through my mind, and it's so many of them take her away from the very simple model or thought of how much do I need to make to be happy? What do I need to do in order to go off on my own and start my own business? What do I need to do to make the money I need to live and go off on my own?

So today I'm going to share with you one little strategy that I hope will help you stop the clutter and get you to start focusing and getting the ball rolling. And who knows, after this exercise, you might realize your idea is not good, or maybe it's a good idea, but you're pricing models off or you need to figure out your cost but it's those things that you should be thinking about and worrying about before you start thinking about anything else, but the problem is we're humans and we naturally want to think in our minds of all these items that could go wrong all these things that we have to do when in all reality we forget about the most important and that's what I want to share with you today.

So first thing, stop overthinking it. Sure there's a lot that comes with owning your own business is business, trust me I'm on my fourth one, even if you're jumping into a partnership and the other partner has a lot of awesome qualities that you don't have and together as a team you're so strong, that's fine, but there's still so much to think about there's insurance putting food on the table for your family, getting customers, your product the structure, the bank you're going to use, do you need a business plan? How you're going to get it out on social? All these different things to think about, I get it, it's overwhelming. So stop, stop over thinking about it, and just think about one thing. How much money do you need to make per month in order to either live the lifestyle you are now or if you're willing to take a backseat to your current lifestyle cut corners and drop that or, you know that right away, you can live a better lifestyle, what is that number, what is that number that you personally need to make per month in order to pay your bills and live your lifestyle is a 5 Grand, 10 grand, 20 grand, what is it? And for this, I want to say let's break it down, really simple, right? So let's take a ten thousand dollars, you need to make ten thousand dollars is an example per month in order to go off on your own and be comfortable and realize that this is the lifestyle you want to live. For you to start making a living and building your business full time and be comfortable ten thousand dollars at number. First of all, how did you come up with that number? What does that include? Do you really need all those things or you can get rid of some? That's up for you to decide, that's not what this is about. But let's take our 10,000 number and I want you to take whatever it is that you're thinking about doing. Whatever your business is going to be, I want you to take one product, take one product from that. And let's break down, how many products you would need to sell in any given month to hit that number? If you sell a service just four simple simplicity. Let's break it down into a product right? So let's say your graphic designer. Your average 100 dollars per hour is what you think you can charge your clients, okay, so we're going to break that down to your product, each product is a hundred dollars product in this example equals one hour, okay, so if each product is 100 in revenue, simple math, if we need 10,000 per month at 100 per product, and we know we need to generate 100 hours of work per month for 25 hours per week, doesn't seem too difficult anymore, does it? But it's not that easy, I want you to kind of think of how you could get to that number, how you could get to that and how you can make it very simple and not overthink anything else but now we actually have to take the cost out. Some are fixed like rent, there's software and there's variable cost, but either way started at the number you're going to sell at and divide that from the numbered, you need to be at per month to live, and you're going to come up with a number, like in this scenario, 25 hours per week that you would need to bill in order to live that lifestyle and now back it down, once you figure out your cost. For this example, let's say your profit on a hundred dollars is actually only 80 because you have 20 dollars in fixed and variable cost, still pretty good. So now we're at 125 hours, that we needed hit per month, which equates to 31 hours per week, so, the ask how many hours you working now? Are you living the life you want to live now? Is that less is that more? That's something you got to figure out, but that should take all the other things out of your mind that you don't need to think about and only focus on that number to say, wow, okay, this might not be that bad of a movement after all, and when you put it like that, you start to understand that all the emotions are gone, now it's a numbers game in order to justify you starting your own business you need to sell X product per month and then everything else becomes manageable, that was like a good scenario of, hey, this might be a reputable, this might be a business I can start but let's say you only make $25 per hour, maybe it's not going to work, maybe you charge $50 an hour, but you don't need 10 grand to live on per month. All right, maybe that'll work. These are things you need to have to answer and figure out and, you know, let me know message me all, I'd be happy to help and say, like, yes, this makes sense or a dozen but I can tell you doesn't always work like that and here's another example, but this exercise isn't just good for understanding that your idea could be great, it's also good for understanding that your idea could be really flawed, but the fact of the matter is, just remember the numbers don't lie. Let's you shirts for an example, I could tell you have a background in this, so I know how difficult it is selling shirts. So let's say you sell t-shirts and you want to create a brand you have this great idea for a design, great idea for a brand and you're going to go sell t-shirts to your friends, and you're going to start a company. I've heard this a million times. The market tells you just by looking at what other people are selling on social or selling on, you know, any of these other e-commerce platforms, they're selling a t-shirt for let's just say $25, you take your product costs out of that, you have 15 dollars profit per tee that's just taking the product out, not factoring any other cost. So $15 profit per t-shirt, you sell and you want to live off 10,000 per month, for a desired lifestyle. Simple math says, you need to sell 666 shirts per month, it's a lot of shirts so I can promise you, you either better have a really awesome, incredible social presence or following somewhere, or you need to be doing something to have, to be able to offload, 666 shirts per month. It can be done and if you have money behind it and you can advertise, you can do all these other things, it can absolutely be done. I've done it but if you don't have the backing, you don't have the social presence, you don't have the following, just by doing Simple Math, is going to tell you that you're probably not going to be able to sell right away, 666 shirts per month, so before you start stressing about any of the other things that are going back and forth and going through your mind, think to yourself, can I sell them amount per month, is that reasonable? What do I have to do to sell that? There's your marketing strategy or let's go back to that main number of 10,000 per month to live your desired lifestyle, do you really need that number in the first three months, could you could you put a nest egg together? Could you say that you only need 3,000 per month? Then it's not, so then it's not so bad. A couple hundred t-shirts is a heck of a lot better than almost 700, so again, do the simple numbers. Stop worrying about all the other things and just do the simple numbers to make sure you even have a good business model because if you don't go back to what you're doing and be happy about it, it's they're coming up with a different game plan or looking at other strategies or figuring out, do you really need to live that desired lifestyle you want right now or could it wait six months? Sure, all questions you need to worry about or think about I should say after you do this simple exercise. My point is in less than a half hour you can have a decent idea on if you want to go further with your idea or not, so now you can start worrying about if you decide you want to go through with it, you can start worrying about adding it to the cost of insurance, looking at rent, looking at other costs and how to register your LLC, but until you do this exercise, stop playing mind games with yourself, stop stressing yourself out, and enjoy what you're doing, and once you do this exercise, then you're going to have a better idea of what's needs to fall in place, and yes, there's other things that come into play here, you can look at the average order value, you could look at getting higher profit margins, you could look at adding other products, these are all things that yes, absolutely you can do but you shouldn't think about those until you look at your base, your what is your number one product that you want to sell? What is your number one service that you're going to offer your clients and get really, really, really good at that or look at the other products as just another item to add to it, right? But we should even think about those things until we know what our number one opportunity is and if that makes sense for us, to start a business by doing that, and if not, like I said walk away come up with a different strategy come up with a different plan, this episode isn't meant to get into the trenches of all the other things you could do or all the other things to think about. I wanted to throw this out there because I know there's so many of you in the Remote Start Nation, so many out there that want to start their own business or want to start a project or want to do something but there's a million things holding you back, so this episode is meant to make you think in a very simple way, take your idea and break it down to the numbers, they don't lie, they aren't going to give you false hopes, they're going to tell you what it is, it's going to tell you how many products you need to sell per month to be able to live your desired lifestyle. And more than likely just know, it's not going to happen overnight, it's going to take a ton of work, it's not going to be easy, but you can do it. Remote Start Nation you can 100% do it, but my point is stop worrying about everything that doesn't matter until you figure this one thing out.

Alright, until next time.

Go start something, start a business, build a brand and live your desired lifestyle!