Use Your Job To Quit Your Job: A Proven Blueprint To Forming Your Best Entrepreneur Ideas And Starting Your Business. 9798357361608

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Praise for Use Your Job to Quit Your Job This book literally changed my life “This book literally changed my life and the future for my family! The specific techniques Jake shares enabled me to take what I used to do in the Army and create an online business around it. It's even allowed me to quit my full-time corporate job (exactly as the title of the book suggests) and begin living a more fulfilling, location independent lifestyle and live life on my own terms! If you've ever thought about pivoting from your 9 to 5, this book will show you what is possible and how to do it!” Steven Foust of cutoffscores.com, ncosupport.com, armypromotionpoint.com A great guide to prevent frustration “There are big differences between supporting your lifestyle as an employee and trying to do so as an entrepreneur. Use Your Job to Quit Your Job is a sensible and practical way to take control over your career by starting your own business. Jake Lang provides an easy to follow, step-by-step process for getting your online business launched. It is a great resource for identifying your idea and implementing it.” David Shriner-Cahn of smashingtheplateau.com Spot on advice “If you're sitting in a job that you don't think is your "life's work" a lot of people are right there with you! This book does a great job of showing you how you can use your current situation to help shape your ideal future. I love

the case studies and practical advice. Even if you're not in a spot to leave your 9-5, you can feel motivated by finding ways to gain skills you can use later. Highly recommend!” Vickie Velasquez of vegetarianzen.com Practical and tactical tools to help you quit your job “The best thing I can tell you about this book is that Jake's approach is rooted in real world examples of how others have applied Jake's approaches/tools to help them quit their job. It just works. If you want to quit your job and do it in the most successful way possible, then get this book and start applying what he is sharing in this book. You won't regret it!” Clara Del Valle, aspiring entrepreneur A must-read for any aspiring entrepreneur “Quitting your day job to forge your own path is an intimidating thought, and something many of us simply dream of accomplishing. Using real world examples and a step-by-step guide, Jake equips the reader with the skillset and confidence they need to begin making this dream a reality. We can all relate to Jake’s story – his own personal examples as well as anecdotes from others are familiar and easy to understand, proving that YOU too can do it! An absolute must read for anyone aspiring for the next big thing.” Erin Donovan, aspiring entrepreneur No other book makes it this simple “I was amazed out how clearly this book breaks down the entrepreneurship process, and the number of approaches it gives to kick-start the development of business ideas. Great read and can't recommend highly enough to anyone that is looking to leverage their existing knowledge and skill sets to eventually become their own boss.” Mark Goodwin, aspiring entrepreneur

Use Your Job to Quit Your Job A proven blueprint to forming your best entrepreneur ideas and starting your business.

JAKE LANG

Copyright © 2022 by The Entrepreneur Ride Along All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. To request permissions, contact the publisher at [email protected]. Disclaimer The information provided within this book is for general informational purposes only. While we try to keep the information correct and up to date, there are no representations or warranties, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability, or availability with respect to the information, products, services, or related graphics contained in this book for any purpose. Any use of this information is at your own risk. The advice, examples, and strategies contained herein are not suitable for every situation. The materials contained herein are not intended to represent or guarantee you will achieve your desired results, and the publisher and author make no such guarantee. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising therefrom. Success is determined by a number of factors beyond the control of the publisher and author including, but not limited to, market conditions, capital on hand, effort levels, and time. You understand that every business idea carries an inherent risk of failure and capital loss. This book is not intended for use as a source of legal or financial advice. Evaluating and launching a business involves complex legal and financial issues. You should always retain competent legal and financial professionals to provide guidance in evaluating and pursuing a specific business idea.

Affiliate Disclosure Some of the links in this book are affiliate links, which means that, at no additional cost to you, The Entrepreneur Ride Along will earn a commission if you click through the link and make a purchase. We only promote products or services that we have used and genuinely believe deliver value to business owners. Printed in the United States of America. First Printing, 2022 Paperback: 979-8-3573616-0-8 Hardcover: 979-8-3573618-3-7 www.theentrepreneurridealong.com www.quityourjob.life

Dedication

F

or Isabella. I can't wait to see who you become. I can't wait to see you grow up and change this world for the better. I hope you know you can be whatever you want when you grow up—even if you don't want to be an entrepreneur.

Table Of Contents

Before You Begin Chapter One: Introduction Chapter Two: Use Your Job Chapter Three: Business Ideas Chapter Four: Market Size Chapter Five: Target Market Chapter Six: Make Money Chapter Seven: Choose One Chapter Eight: Get Started Chapter Nine: Quit Your Job Chapter Ten: Conclusion Author’s Note Companion Course Appendix Resources Step One Sources About The Entrepreneur Ride Along About The Author

Before You Begin

T

o guide you through Use Your Job to Quit Your Job, I have created a free companion course that includes downloadable worksheets, video content, and all the resources mentioned in this book. The supplemental materials in this free course are organized to match the sections and chapters of this book, making it easy for you to find exactly what you need as you read along. Get free access to the course at quityourjob.life/course; it will help you better understand the process and steps described in this book and take action to launch your first business. FOR COMPANION COURSE ACCESS, VISIT quityourjob.life/course

One Chapter One:

Introduction

“Y

ou are making the worst mistake of your life,” Bill said.

Really, I thought? I had just given my two weeks’ notice, telling my CEO how I had built a business on the side that now earned me more than my salary. I told him I was taking a new job that allowed me to work from home so I could spend a year getting everything in order before taking the leap and pursuing my business full time. And THAT was the worst decision of my life? Sure, maybe this decision would allow me to pursue my passion and do what I love: building and scaling online businesses. I could make more money and work half the hours. I could finally use my creativity and imagination. For once, I could invent rather than follow the step-by-step corporate process to refresh monthly reports while resisting the urge to tear my hair out. But, didn’t I know that in just two or three years I would be promoted to manager, making upwards of $120,000 a year, managing a team of one or maybe two people? Didn’t I know that after five or ten more years, I would be under consideration for promotion to department manager, when I would manage a team of five people? And who knows, after a few more years grinding my brain into mush to put more money in the owner’s pocket while

earning the CEO bigger bonuses, then I just might be in consideration for an upper management position. How could I ever give up that opportunity? Did Bill really think that was the vision I had for my life? Sitting at the same desk, year after year, at the same company, hoping to slowly move up the ranks with my 3% annual raise. I could dream of one day attaining an amazingly illustrious position in upper management so I could eventually retire with the 20 people in my department circled around and clapping as the owner hands me an engraved plaque with my name on it before we head off to my retirement party, complete with pizza. If I’m lucky, they might even splurge and buy me a cake before sending me home to reflect on wasting 50 years of my life working on someone else’s agenda and toward someone else’s goals. No, that is not the vision I have for my life. I wouldn’t wish that torture on my worst enemy. I want to travel, I want to go surfing, I want to sit by the pool with my wife, and I want to watch my daughter grow up. Didn’t my CEO understand that I wanted his position? I want to create, I want to dream, I want to be in charge: I want to steer the ship. So, no, Bill, I don’t think I am making the worst mistake of my life. In fact, I think that for the first time in a long time, I am making one of the best decisions of my life. I am taking exactly the steps I need to take to pursue my goals and dreams. Quit Your Job I have nothing against corporate people; some people love the corporate life. It’s just not for me, and I’m guessing it’s not for you either. If so, that’s good, because it’s time to change that. Starting right now, you are on the path to quitting your job.

Two Chapter Two:

Use Your Job

I

n May of 2014, I graduated from the University of New Hampshire and started my career as a product analyst at Liberty Mutual Insurance.

Was my life aspiration to be a product analyst in the insurance industry? Absolutely not. I stumbled into this career because of a booth on career day. I nailed the interview so I took the job because it paid well, it was within the realm of finance (my major), and the office was located in downtown Boston. Within three months on the job, I knew that this was not what I wanted to do with my life. The best part of my day was grabbing a free iced coffee from the cafeteria before heading upstairs to the 16th floor to hunch over my desk and read process documentation to forecast the 2015 revenue projections of the North Dakota auto market. I was only three months in, and I was already looking for a way out. I tried stocks first. I love investing and had been researching and buying stocks for nearly a decade by then. So, how could I make $5,000 a month by trading stocks to match my income of $60,000 per year? If I could match my salary of $60,000 per year, then I could leave this soul-sucking day job that made me feel like I was being kicked in the gut on a daily basis. Well, I didn’t have any money to invest, so I’d have to turn my $3,000 in savings into $60,000 a year, and then repeat that every year going forward. That meant that I needed a 2,000% return on investment. Given that I am not Warren Buffet or Peter Lynch, that was not a viable option. I needed a lot of money to play with to buy and sell enough stocks to make $5,000 per month in income. Considering

I was broke and had just graduated college, stocks were not the answer. What about real estate? I looked into buying a multi-family property in East Boston, where I lived at the time. I knew that I could charge a minimum of $2,000 in monthly rent per unit. If I owned a property with three units, that would be $6,000 in revenue! It also meant that I needed a cool 20% down payment on a $750,000 property. Coming up with a quick $150,000 out of thin air would require winning the lottery or robbing a bank. In addition, even with that down payment, there would still be mortgage payments of $4,000 per month. That meant, at most, I would profit $2,000 per month before factoring in upkeep, taxes, and everything else that goes into owning a rental property. Needless to say, real estate was not the answer either. So, how about this entrepreneurship thing? I had tried to start an online business once before, guided by the insights I learned from my favorite podcasts, Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn, and Online Marketing Made Easy with Amy Porterfield. Maybe I could start a website for $50, with no overhead, and like Pat Flynn, make $10,000 per month income. That sounded like a winning idea to me! So I did what all wannabe entrepreneurs do for their first businesses. I started a clothing company on the side while still working full time. The business was called SwayWear Clothing. I came up with the name by Googling synonyms for “swagger.” One that popped was “sway,” although I later learned that I was not using it properly. I launched the business, intending to sell made-to-measure men’s buttonup long-sleeve work shirts designed specifically for tall skinny men with long arms. All the customers had to do was order the shirt through my website; it would be tailored to their size. This seemed perfect for the recent college graduate entering the workforce who buys unfitted button-up shirts off the shelf at a big box retail store and knows nothing about hiring a tailor (like me). Just use my website; you won’t need a tailor. There was one problem. I knew nothing about tailoring clothes. I had never been to a tailor in my life. I started talking to manufacturers in China to learn how I could bring this business to life, and they started asking me about

the baste, the break, the darning, and the rise, words that I didn’t even know existed. I had no idea what I was doing. I had spent over $750 in advertising, had made precisely one sale, and had no clue how to deliver that one item. I shut down SwayWear Clothing after three months of struggles. Lost and dejected, I remember falling asleep, feeling like a failure and telling myself that I was destined for 50 years at a desk gunning to make middle management. I was not cut out to be an entrepreneur: it was not the path for me. The Turning Point The entrepreneurial journey is an emotional rollercoaster that takes you from the highest highs crashing down to the lowest lows. That’s where I was in December 2014: ready to give up. I had tried, and I had failed. Why bother trying again? I should just double down on the career path and try to make a name for myself in the insurance industry. This was never going to work. Taxes, payroll, supply chains: this whole new world was scary and complex, and had I even thought about how I would get health insurance? That’s when I stumbled on this simple but incredibly profitable business idea. I realized that entrepreneurship does not need to be complex. My first business did not need to be my big, million-dollar idea. I could use my day job to build my first business, and I could use it as a stepping stone to the next, bigger entrepreneurial venture: I could use my day job to quit my job. And that’s when I founded AssociatePI. A few months after SwayWear clothing shut down, I got the itch again. You know the feeling; I know you do because you are reading this book. You have that same itch that will never go away, no matter how hard you try. Even if you try to suppress it and give up on it like I did, it will always boil back up to the top. You won’t be able to contain your desire—your itch—to start your own business. At the time, I had just passed the API™ 28 and the CPCU® 556 exams to further my education in the insurance industry. Remember when I said I was giving up my entrepreneurial dreams and focusing on my career in the insurance industry? I meant it, and I took courses on my own time that could help advance my career. One of my decisions was to study for the Associate in Personal Insurance Designation and the Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter Designation.

A few months into my coursework, after I had passed the second of eight exams, I knew there was an opportunity to build a business in this niche. The study material was simply awful. The textbooks were 300 pages of boring, fluff-filled writing that took weeks to read, let alone understand, and could put you to sleep faster than Nyquil. There was also very little competition; there were only a few competitors selling this kind of study material, and their websites looked like had been launched in the 1990s and never updated. Feedback from my colleagues and others studying for these exams confirmed my impression. People wanted study material that was written in plain English and helped them pass their exams more quickly with less studying. I was on to something. I had found a pain point in my market. I knew I could differentiate myself from the competition with a modern study platform that used an online course and took advantage of proven internet marketing tactics like search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing, which nobody in the market was doing. I launched my business in March of 2015. By June, I had published three courses and had consistent sales rolling in, generating around $500 per month in revenue. Today, this business is nearly totally automated, requires only a few hours of upkeep every week, and generates a minimum of $5,000 in passive income each and every month. In April 2021, I quit my job to devote myself to my businesses full time. AssociatePI remains my best performer. It is the reason I was able quit my job to pursue entrepreneurship full time. And the idea for this business was sitting right in front of me, at my day job. I used my job to quit my job. Your Day Job “What business should I start?” This is the number one question I am asked, and I probably answer it three times a day. “Just give me an idea,” people say. “Tell me what business to start, and I’ll go out and do it.” It’s hard, isn’t it? You know you want to start a business, but you don’t know what to do. There are a million ideas floating around in your head, and there seem to be a million ways to make a business work, but which one is the right idea? Which one will work? It can be scary. I know you don’t want to make the wrong choice, and you may be overwhelmed, thinking that you

need to start some big business with employees in a complex and oversaturated niche. That’s what most people do. They try to become the next Daymond John or Mark Cuban by starting a clothing business, building a web app, starting a fitness subscription, or creating a finance blog. Don’t worry if that’s you. We’ve all been there (remember SwayWear Clothing?). It’s called paralysis by analysis. There are so many options and so many directions that you could go that you end up going nowhere, fearing that you will wind up stuck at your dead-end job forever. Not anymore. That ends today; your job is no longer a dead end holding you back from pursuing your dreams of entrepreneurship. It’s a gold mine, your saving grace, your light at the end of the tunnel. In short, it’s your way out. It’s the one place aspiring entrepreneurs overlook: their day job. There are many opportunities to build a business using the knowledge you have amassed from your day job. You can take that job and turn it into a profitable side gig. You can use your job to quit your job. Why Your Day Job? Day jobs are one of the best places to find business ideas. You are already good at whatever you do in your day job; you might even be an expert. You are literally a professional; you are paid to do what you do every day, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. That is the definition of expertise. You spend over 2,000 hours a year focused on a few particular tasks in one specific industry. You have an immense amount of knowledge on this subject, knowledge that other people will pay to access. If you look, you will find a topic you have mastered in your day job that you can turn into your first business. I don’t care whether you are a barista at Starbucks, the retail manager of a Dick’s Sporting Goods, a financial analyst at KPMG, an attorney for Samsung, or the CEO of Google. That job, where you spend over 40 hours per week every week is a breeding ground for business ideas. If you want to start a side gig or build a business to support yourself financially so you can live life as you please (and not work), look to that monstrous time suck where you spend 40 hours per week: use it to lose it. Use your job to build a business so you can quit your job and reap the

financial rewards. Why should your day job be your first business? Well, there are three simple reasons. It’s easy It’s the quickest path to success It’s profitable It’s Easy First, it’s easy. The easiest way to start a business is to leverage your expertise and sell what you know. That means finding an aspect of your day job that you already are or can become an expert at that people are willing to pay to learn. Find the opportunity, identify your niche, and leverage your expertise from your day job to build your first business. The Quickest Path to Success Would you rather dive into a new, complex industry (as I did in the clothing industry), struggling to gain leverage and keep your head above water, or teach what you know and quit your job with less stress and hassle and a much easier learning curve? Take the easy route. Leveraging your day job is the quickest path to success, to building a profitable business that can first supplement and then replace the income from your day job. You can get to a profitable business by leveraging your expertise with the least amount of work and effort. This is the quickest path to quitting your job. Even if what you choose is not your passion, it’s a stepping stone. It’s the first move to get you out from under the rule of your employer. Use the opportunity sitting in front of you: leverage your day job to build your business, quit your job, and make the move into full-time entrepreneurship. Then, you can build a business you are passionate about. It’s Profitable What’s better? Selling a $20 t-shirt to college kids on Amazon or selling a $20,000 corporate training class to Google? There is money in this niche. If you are in the business-to-business (B2B)

space, your customer is the corporation, and corporations have budgets with millions of dollars to spend on products and services just like yours. If you are in a business-to-consumer (B2C) space, business professionals have money to spend to advance their careers (and can often be reimbursed by their employers). This is a highly profitable niche that can be leveraged and eventually automated to generate recurring passive income without much work. Tom Heffner of TomHeffner.com is a great example of how profitable this business model can be. Tom helps people and organizations accelerate decision-making, collaboration, and innovation through training, coaching, and workshops. Simply put, Tom is a coach who hosts workshops that teach employees how to be more innovative. Tom charges $9,500 for his basic oneday package and $6,000 for each additional day. If Tom books one workshop for two days, he’s making $15,500. If he books just seven two-day workshops in a year, he’s making over $100,000. To put this into perspective, Tom went full time on his innovation consulting practice in 2018. By the end of that year, he had brought in $173,000 in revenue, almost all of which was profit. Not bad for less than 30 days’ work! Don’t get me wrong; Tom is one of the hardest-working people I know. A lot of sweat equity is invested to create and refine his workshop and to identify and book clients. He has perfected his craft and earns every penny he makes. But let his story sink in for a minute and think about how this could be you in just a few months. You can copy Tom’s business model; it is highly profitable. Your Employer Will Help There’s another reason why your day job should be your first business: it looks great to your employer. You are pursuing extracurricular education. You can leverage your employer to learn more about the focus of your business. If you want to sell a course teaching Excel basics, ask your boss. Your employer will probably pay for you to take advanced training to sharpen your skills, which you can then take and implement in your course. If you want to be paid for public speaking, talk to your boss, who may help you get connected in the industry to do local speaking gigs on behalf of the company where you can perfect your presentation and speaking skills before offering it for sale. If you need to study for an exam in your industry, your

company will probably pay for your study material, which you can use to pass your exam and then create your own study material to sell on your own website, which is exactly what I did. Your employer can help you quit your job by giving you more training and sending you to conferences or events that broaden your network and help you learn more about your industry. Chris Nelson is an excellent example; he had worked as a senior executive in the banking sector for over 20 years. At one point, Chris was asked to present at a school providing executive training for bankers. This presentation sparked Chris’s entrepreneurial spirit. He fell in love with speaking, presenting, and teaching. He started teaching at this school a few times a year. Chris resigned from his position at the bank in 2020. He perfected his presentations and teaching skills and partnered with this school to turn one of his presentations into an online course. Chris now offers training, education, and coaching services to bank executives at BondInvestmentMentor.com. He successfully used his job, and his relationship with the banking school, to quit his job. This Is a Stepping Stone By using this book, you are going to find one perfect business idea to start with, but don’t limit yourself by thinking that this one idea is the be-all-endall. This is not the only business idea you will ever have. It is a starting point, a stepping stone. You might keep this business for the rest of your life, and it might be your million-dollar idea, but it does not need to be. Use your idea and your day job to set up your first business and start replacing the income from that job. You will learn more than you ever imagined possible about entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, social media, and everything else that goes into owning, running, and profiting from a business. You will make money with your idea, and you will be hooked; you will be hooked on entrepreneurship. I am not saying to give up if you don’t make a million dollars in the first week or the first year. I am saying not to think that this is the one and only business you will ever start. While there is a chance that your first idea will be the business that supports you financially for the rest of your life, it does not have to be that way. Your first business is a starting point; you can easily take what you learn from this book and rinse and repeat by starting another

profitable business. That’s what I did; I have done this eight times now, and I will probably do it another 20 times in the next 10 years. What I am saying is not to hold yourself back by thinking that the first idea you have must be your forever idea. It might be a five or ten-year business, but it is still a starting point. Your first idea—which you will turn into your first profitable business—will earn you $5,000 to $10,000 a month in income before too long, but it might not be what you want to do for the rest of your life. You might want to sell this business, just as I did with my Pomsky Owners Association website, which sold for $95,000. You might want to automate the business and live off the passive income as you sit on the beach all day. Or you might want to run with this business for the rest of your life and pass it on to your children. The path you choose is up to you; take this idea and run with it. You can figure out the rest later. Take Chris Ronzio for example. Chris started a video production business in high school at fourteen years old. Over the next decade, he grew this business to three separate offices, with 300 camera operators across the country, and netted over $3 million in revenue before selling the business in 2013. This was just the start of Chris’s entrepreneurial journey. Chris took his expertise in managing a business and founded Organize Chaos, a consulting agency focused on business efficiency. Chris worked with small and midsized businesses, helping the leadership team scale through the process of organizing and mapping company workflows, procedures, responsibilities, and roles. In his consulting practice, Chris noticed a trend. These small businesses did not have a tool or process in place for organizing company operations, and it was hindering the company's ability to grow. So, Chris created and launched Trainual in 2015, a software program that helps companies build out their “business playbook” to document and organize company processes, people, onboarding, training, and operations. With this tool, the owner of the business can essentially hand off their “playbook” as a manual to operate the business. Chris understood the pain point and created the solution. Now, Trainual is a fully-developed SaaS product with over 10,000 customers, and 100 employees, operating in 183 different countries, with $33 million in funding. This is what you can do. This is your start, your first stepping stone. You can see, Chris took one step after another. Starting back in high school with a video production business. One business stepping

stone after another, learning more and more with each step until he founded Trainual. Start small, start niche. Learn the ropes; learn everything you can about being your own boss and building your own business. Then, you can go big and scale that business or launch your next one with everything you have learned. For now, you want to focus on using your job to quit your job. Blueprinting I am far from the only entrepreneur to use my day job as the inspiration for my first business. This is a common theme among entrepreneurs; it’s where many successful full-time entrepreneurs got their start. Pat Flynn, for example, is the founder and owner of Smart Passive Income, a multimillion-dollar business in the entrepreneur education space; he got his start in entrepreneurship with an online business at greenexamacademy.com, a business he has since sold. Pat started by selling PDF study guides for the LEED Exam, which he passed during his career in architecture. Pat was making over $10,000 a month selling PDF study guides in this niche. He used his job in architecture and the expertise he had amassed by time studying for the LEED Exam to build his first business. That business was his stepping stone into entrepreneurship; it supported him financially when he was laid off from his architecture job in 2008 and carried him into other projects and businesses that he has since grown into a respected brand and an impressive following. Like Pat Flynn, Amy Porterfield used her job to quit her job. Amy took her years of experience working in marketing and social media management for Tony Robbins and major companies like Harley-Davidson and started her first business as a marketing consultant. This was her stepping stone into entrepreneurship, where she later built a multimillion-dollar brand and podcast at Amyporterfield.com, teaching entrepreneurs how to use marketing tools such as Facebook, webinars, and even email to convert sales. She used her expertise from her job in marketing to build the brand that allowed her to quit her job. Shane Sams is another great example. Shane was a social studies teacher and high school football coach. He took his experience as a defensive

coordinator and started a blog about coaching high school football. He shared his stories of success and failure in coaching, focusing primarily on the defensive scheme his team used. He launched his first digital product in 2012: a simple downloadable practice plan with 10 plays that taught coaches how to run his defense. He generated $7,500 in the first month selling his downloadable playbook. This was Shane’s stepping stone into entrepreneurship. He used his job and expertise as a football coach to launch his first business, which allowed him to quit his job as a social studies teacher. He now teaches entrepreneurs how to build profitable membershipbased businesses at flippedlifestyle.com. Pat Flynn, Amy Porterfield, and Shane Sams are some of the biggest names in the online business space. Each has gone on to build multi-milliondollar brands. They all used their day jobs as building blocks for their first business… and they are not alone. If you look at successful entrepreneurs, it is easy to see the trend. They used their jobs to quit their jobs. They have created a blueprint for success for us to follow, and it’s already working for many other entrepreneurs. Aaron Crowley is an excellent example. Aaron started working in the stone industry in 1993 when he took a summer job at a local stone shop. Five years later, he opened his own business fabricating and installing granite countertops. Now, having worked in the stone industry for nearly 30 years, Aaron started the business fabricatorsfriend.com, where he sells gear for fabricators including protective jackets, sleeves, and aprons. Aaron sells his gear through both specialty retail shops and his own website. Aaron took his experience in the stone industry and experience running his stone shop to develop products that meet the needs of fabricators and stone workers. Additionally, he took his years of experience and wrote the book Less Chaos More Cash, where he helps stone shop owners develop a process to delegate tasks and improve shop performance. This has helped Aaron build a following in the stone shop industry; he now hosts the Fab Lab Podcast, a successful coaching practice, and a paid mastermind group for stone shop owners. Aaron took the skills he started learning at a summer job in a stone shop and has turned it into a 30-year successful business with his books, brick-and-mortar shop, retail products, and coaching practice.

Steven Foust owns a portfolio of businesses in the military niche, including ncosupport.com and cutoffscores.com. In just two years, he has signed up more than 100 members, generating over $5,000 a month in profit. He took his experiences from serving in the military and his knowledge of its promotion points system and shows military personnel how he was able to leverage this system to be promoted quickly and climb the ranks in the US Army. He used his past job—even though he had retired from the military over 20 years earlier—to build the business that has now allowed him to leave his corporate day job and pursue entrepreneurship full time. Steven followed the blueprint and used his job to quit his job. Chuck Marting is another great example. Chuck spent 20 years in law enforcement, 18 of them as a drug recognition expert. With the help of his wife Stacy, Chuck took his expertise in that highly specialized field and created coloradomobiledrugtesting.com, which specializes in employee drug testing and workplace safety audits. Chuck found that no companies in northern Colorado offered walk-in drug testing and that no company in the entire state offered mobile drug testing at the employment site. This meant that, if an employer needed an emergency drug test, it had to schedule it weeks in advance and pay the employee to drive hours to the nearest drug testing center. Chuck saw an opportunity, recognized the pain point, and created the solution. What started as Chuck and Stacy going business to business to perform on-site employee drug testing has grown into a nearly $500,000-a-year business with multiple physical locations, walk-in testing sites, and several full-time employees. Chuck took his expertise from his day job as a drug recognition expert in law enforcement and turned it into an immensely profitable business. DJ Eshelman, a Citrix consultant, is yet another example. He travels around the United States from business to business, teaching and training people about Citrix, a cloud computing and virtualization company. DJ took his knowledge and expertise of Citrix, built his own business, and became one of the go-to resources for Citrix training and coaching. He is now one of the most respected and highly sought Citrix consultants and teachers. He has turned the expertise he gained in his day job into a profitable business that has resulted in numerous paid speaking engagements, a prosperous coaching practice, paid mastermind groups, and a number of highly regarded books on

information technology, including Be a Citrix Hero. Lastly, take my own Grandpa, Ted Lang as an example. Having worked as a videographer, photographer, internet marketing strategist, and course developer for over 35 years, he packaged his expertise to build his business at advantagevideoandphoto.com where he provides video production and marketing for small businesses. Do you see the possibilities now? Do you see how countless entrepreneurs have followed this same path and used their jobs to quit their jobs? Do you see the blueprint that is there for you to follow? Follow that blueprint. The path to success has been laid out by entrepreneurs before you. I came to the idea of using my day job as my first business by accident after failing with other business ventures. Now, I see it everywhere. Time and time again, I see that successful entrepreneurs are using their day jobs to start their first business and launch themselves into the world of entrepreneurship before taking on their next big venture. Your Business Idea Your next business idea, the one that will generate enough income to help you quit your day job and launch you into entrepreneurship, is sitting right in front of you, in the same place you spend 40 hours per week. Use your day job to quit your day job. In the next chapter, we will find the idea for your business.

Three Chapter Three:

Business Ideas

T

he process of using your job to quit your job starts here.

If you read Step One, my previous book, this process will look familiar, but there is a little twist. It’s called the brain dump exercise. This is an extremely simple yet highly effective process. I have used this exact process to start eight online businesses and have helped thousands of entrepreneurs go through this exact process to find viable business ideas. In this process, you dump all the business ideas hidden in your brain onto a piece of paper. You are looking for a topic that could be the focus of your business. You might not realize it yet, but you come across potential business ideas every single day at work. Everything you did in the past week, every software program you use, every training class you have attended, and every career you have ever pursued could be your first business. Look around your office right now. See the TI-84 calculator, the CPA prep books, your cheat sheet of Excel formulas, the FE Certification hanging on the wall, the muddy steel-toed boots by the door, the safety vest and hard hat hanging in the corner, or the dirty scrubs in the laundry? Any of those could be the focus of your first business. There are countless opportunities sitting in front of you right now. Everything you have touched, done, or seen in your working life could be the starting point for your first business. I’m not exaggerating: your first business is right in front of you. Deborah Leveroy turned her experience as a dyslexic actor into an online business. Pat Flynn turned his knowledge of architecture exams into an online business. Frank Lipski created a membership program for firefighters. Steven Foust

created a membership program for non-commissioned officers in the US Army. Shane Sams turned his knowledge of coaching high school football into an online business. Jocelyn Sams turned her career as an elementary school librarian into an online business, and I turned my knowledge of the insurance industry into a business. Your first business is not just within reach; it is sitting in your head right now. And this is when we get it out of your head and onto paper. The brain dump in this chapter involves taking a deep dive into your day job. You will look at your job and the expertise you have acquired to find potential business ideas. It all starts with the brain dump questions. Brain Dump Questions In the next section, you will find four categories, each with four or more questions (20 questions total). The categories touch on topics like your education and expertise, the problems you solve, and the software programs you use. Answer the questions posed in each category. The goal is to list five answers to each question. If you have more than five answers to a question, write down more than five: the more the better. At this point, you are looking for quantity, not quality. You will narrow this list down for quality in the next step. Here, you are simply putting thoughts down on paper, letting your mind run free. Your answers should not be fully formed business ideas; just answer the questions asked. No answer is too crazy. You will filter this list and find viable business ideas in the next chapter. Don’t worry if an answer seems too broad, such as “leadership” or “engineer”; just write it down. Later in this process, you will find a niche inside each idea. For now, your focus is to answer the brain dump questions. This should be done quickly; don’t spend more than a few minutes on any one question or more than 30 minutes on the exercise as a whole. Sit in a quiet place and let your mind wander and reflect on each question. If you are stuck, move on to the next question. You can always come back and answer the question that’s holding you up later. Do It Now

Stop right now and download or print the brain dump worksheet from the companion course at quityourjob.life/course. The purpose is to get all your thoughts down on paper. Now, sit down and begin. Brain Dump Questions Answer the following questions; try to provide five answers to each question. What you do: What careers have you pursued? In each of these careers, what jobs or positions have you held? What did you do in your past day jobs? What do you do in your current day job? What big project are you working on in your job this week? Make a list of everything you did at work this week. Include every meeting, every topic of work conversation, every tool you used, everything you learned, and every physical work item you touched. What you know: When people ask you for help at work, what do they need help with? What qualifications or certifications do you have? What extracurricular training, courses, or exams have you completed? What functions or seminars have you attended? What you use: What software programs do you use in your day job? What physical products do you use in your job (calculator, footwear, stethoscope, welding mask, etc.)? What do you wear at work (Timberland boots, hard hats, scrubs, etc.)? Look at your work desk or office and list five things you see. Step into another room at your office and list five things you see. What you need to learn: What do you want to learn at work? What training is available to you (ask your boss)? What are the different departments and positions at your company that you could learn about?

What other software programs used by your company could you learn? What physical products are used by other departments at your company? Your Brain Dump List You did it! You have completed the brain dump exercise: great work! Now it’s time to take a look at your list. You might be thinking, “What am I looking at here? This is just a long list of nonsense; what can I do with these ideas?” Look again. If you answered every question, you have over a hundred potential business ideas on your list. This is where all successful entrepreneurs start. Steven Foust, for example, used the brain dump exercise to identify his first business idea. On a Zoom video call, I asked Steven to “look around the room. Look at your work desk or office, and list five things you see.” He panned across his home office using his webcam showing me WWE memorabilia, NASA aerospace decor, and photos of his family until he scanned over a book positioned above his computer monitor. It was hanging from the wall in a beautiful, professionally designed frame. He sees it every time he looks up from his computer. “Oh, that’s a book I wrote in the ’90s to help US Army personnel get promoted faster by earning more promotion points under the Army’s guidelines. I was one of the fastest ever to climb the ranks and get promoted by maximizing my promotion points.” Bingo! That was the basis of a business. The idea for Steven’s first business had been sitting right in front of him, day after day. It became the topic of Stevens's business, and he now has over 100 members who generate over $4,000 a month in profit. Karthik Vijayakumar spent 15 years working in product marketing and product management for some of the largest technology companies in the world. In 2016 Karthik quit his job and started publishing content at designyourthinking.com, a blog and podcast about product design where he discusses the product mindset and which led to eBooks, speaking gigs, and corporate trainings before he branched out into teaching podcasting and copywriting. Karthik took the brain dump question “When people ask you for help at work, what do they need help with?” and turned it into his first

business. He took his expertise in managing products and turned that into a business. Now he has once again taken his expertise, this time in podcasting and copywriting, and turned that into a business helping startups and small businesses fix their messaging and make more sales. Karthik used his day job and his expertise from 15 years of mastering that job and turned it into a business. This is also how I started my business at AssociatePI.com. As required by my employer, I was studying for a series of exams called the CPCU® Certification. Based on my experience and countless hours of studying, I learned what does and doesn’t work when trying to pass these exams. I learned the pain point of my target market because I was that target market. With the inside knowledge I had from having passed these difficult exams, I built an entire business about the CPCU® Designation. I am now expanding the website to branch out into broader certifications in the insurance industry; with over 15 different online courses, this website generates up to $10,000 a month in passive income. I took the brain dump question “What qualifications or certifications do you have?” and turned it into my first business. I took the skills from my day job, which my employer paid me to learn, and created a profitable business that allowed me to quit that job. Can you see how ideas for your business would show up on your list after answering the brain dump questions? Profitable business ideas are all around you, especially at your day job. Now go back and look at your list from a different viewpoint, the viewpoint of possibility. Hidden in your list is a golden idea for your first business. Look Again Look back at each answer on your brain dump list and let your mind wander, thinking about related ideas that you could add to your list. For example, I look at my list and see “shoe salesman” because I worked in the footwear department at a sporting goods store in high school; I would let that spark additional insights for me. What else is related to this job that could become a business? I was really good at selling running shoes; I received training on the Brooks brand from one of their sales reps, so I would add that to the list. I was also responsible for managing inventory and used the Intrinsically Safe

scanner, a handheld device, to update inventory. I would add inventory management and Intrinsically Safe scanner to my list. I was also trained on the cash registers and learned how to use their new point-of-sale (POS) system. I helped with the sporting goods department whenever we were short-staffed, so I had to learn about the best helmets and goalie gear for lacrosse. I would add all of those ideas to my list. You can see how one little fact (I worked in footwear sales) can rapidly become four or five ideas. You can see how I could become the go-to resource for recommending the best POS systems, start a business installing POS systems, or build a business around inventory management and the Intrinsically Safe inventory management scanner. I could build a brand about Brooks running shoes or lacrosse helmets. Anything you have ever done in any of your jobs could be the focus of your business. Look back at your list, at each answer to each question, and let your mind wander. Think about related topics for each of your answers and add them to your brain dump list. For more ideas, repeat the entire exercise. Do the brain dump again tomorrow or next week; you are sure to get some fresh ideas every time you go through this exercise. Another Viewpoint Once you finish your brain dump list, I recommend having your spouse, significant other, or a good friend go through the same exercise. You are not the only one with potentially amazing ideas. Friends and family can offer a whole new set of answers to the brain dump questions, some of which could be your next business idea. You might even end up starting a joint venture! I did this with my wife, Brooke. Even though I know she will never join me in the world of entrepreneurship (no matter how hard I try to convince her), there is a wealth of opportunity in Brooke’s industry. Brooke is an attorney. Some of the ideas we came up with from her brain dump are LSAT exam prep, bar exam prep, LLM, PPM drafting, moot court, and Cilo legal software. I could start a business about any of these ideas, with Brooke as my behind-the-scenes expert.

Do the same with your parents, grandparents, children, and friends. My mom is a real estate agent, one of the best in New Hampshire (seriously—she wins awards practically every year). I could leverage her experience to build a business selling real estate license preparation courses, a training course about New Hampshire’s real estate market, or a corporate training business teaching new agents how to leverage the GIS software program. I could also create a consulting practice on a specific aspect of real estate such as managing wetlands and septic systems. Go through this brain dump exercise with your significant other, kids, parents, siblings, and friends. The more ideas, the better. You will be amazed at the ideas and niche opportunities you will come across on other people’s brain dump lists. Tangential Expertise Don’t overlook the tangential expertise that you have and how you can use a skill from your day job to build an unrelated business. I often see this with engineers, who are great at process and design. That’s a skill from their day job that they can take and turn into a business. My father is a great example. He has a masters degree in engineering and has worked as a mechanical engineer in the medical device industry for over 30 years. For as long as I can remember, he has been tinkering and building little products around the house to help with home renovations (such as a hammer affixed to a 10-foot pole). He loves inventing and building, but he never thought about it as a business until he went through the brain dump process. Over the past year, my dad designed and built a product in the birdwatching niche. He designs, manufactures, and sells devices on Amazon to keep predators away from birdhouses. He sells as many as six a day! Now, my dad didn’t quite use his job to quit his job, but he did take the expertise and skills in designing, testing, and producing he had acquired over 30 years in the engineering industry to create a physical product that would meet the needs of an entirely unrelated market. He used his tangential expertise in design to build his business. Vickie Velasquez is another great example. She worked in project management as a business analyst manager for 20 years. Rather than starting

a business about project management, she has established a portfolio of online businesses on a wide range of topics, including vegetarianzen.com, a website that shares resources for living a more compassionate plant-based lifestyle, cheerybirdvintage.com, which sells vintage products, and firsttofinal.com, a copywriting agency. Vickie took the tangential skills she learned on the job—communicating, presenting, and, most importantly, project management skills—to build several successful businesses. She uses the project management skills she learned at work to bring a project from start to finish, asking important questions such as “why am I doing this project?” and “is this in line with my ultimate goals?” to keep herself and her businesses on track and avoid wasting time. Now, Vickie is taking her skills and joining forces with her wife Larissa to create a successful copywriting practice. Larissa has a background in professional copyediting, and Vickie has grown into an accomplished copywriter. Combining Vickie’s project management and writing skills along with Larissa’s professional copyediting background, they started the copywriting agency firsttofinal.com. Do you see how you could take your tangential skills, as Vickie did in project management, and build a successful business? Look at your skills and expertise. You can use that experience to build a business in an unrelated niche. That is still using your job and the skills you have mastered in your job to quit your job, if in a slightly roundabout way. My Brain Dump Answers: Day Job To help you brainstorm and see how you can pull profitable business ideas out of your brain dump list, take a look at my brain dump. In just 30 minutes, I came away with over a hundred new business ideas. Read through my list of answers for some inspiration. Let this jog your memory and spark more ideas for you. If you see something here that you like or something that resonates with you, simply add it to your brain dump list. If reading through my list makes a new thought pop into your head, add that to your list. Use this as a reference to see how I progress through the brain dump exercise, how quick and simple my answers are, and how I can envision potential businesses from the ideas on my list. For this example, I will use my career as an insurance product analyst rather than my current career as a full-time entrepreneur. Here are the

answers to some of the questions from my time as a product analyst in the insurance industry: What careers have you pursued? Retail, financial analyst, equity research, product management insurance industry. What did you do in your past day jobs? Senior product analyst, insurance industry, create reports in Excel and Tableau, state filings in SERFF, Insurtech analysis, ISO endorsement filings. What qualifications or certifications do you have? Bachelor’s degree in finance and management, insurance certifications (CPCU® and API™), Agile certification (PMI-ACP). What software programs do you use in your day job? Excel, PowerPoint, SQL Server Management Studio, Tableau, Salesforce, SAS, SNL dataset, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype. What physical products do you use in your job? Double monitor screen, standing desk, ATR 2100 microphone, HP laptop. Look at your work desk or office and list five things you see: HSA debit card, CPCU® exam prep books, PMI ACP exam prep books, and Massachusetts auto industry reports. What are the different departments and positions at your company that you could learn about? Insurance agents, underwriters, claims adjusters, underwriter license exams, insurance agent license exams. What other software programs used by your company could you learn? Xactimate, HomeGauge, PL Rating. What physical products are used by other departments at your company? Drones for claim inspection, Telematics devices, cameras for claim photography. Brain Dump: Business Ideas Without even completing the full brain dump, I already see any number of business opportunities on my list. Every career I have ever pursued could be its own business. I could start a corporate training business, selling workshops to corporations teaching employees how to write effective stock reports, how to analyze a 10-K, or how to become an effective product analyst. I know there is a need for these skills because my past employers spent thousands of dollars to send me to workshops on precisely those topics.

I could start my own business selling these corporate trainings. Any of my certifications or qualifications could be a business. I did this with the CPCU® certification, creating my own study material to help people pass those difficult exams. I did the same thing with my experience in Agile, creating a business selling training guides, courses, and practice exams for Agile certifications. I’m far from the only one doing this. Allison Strickland worked as an athletic trainer before switching careers to work at a company developing neurocognitive testing software. In 2020, Allison combined her years of expertise and education in athletic training and her knowledge of building learning management systems to launch ATStudybuddy.com. A website dedicated to helping athletic training students pass the BOC Exam, the certification program for entry-level athletic trainers, which Allison had passed. Allison now sells a membership-based course with a full suite of study guides, flashcards, study games, and practice exams to help students pass the BOC Exam. She licenses this product to universities but also sells directly to students. She is now branching out to develop professional-level courses that can be used by athletic trainers for continuing education credits. You can see how Allison successfully used her job to quit her job, taking her experience of passing the BOC exam and building learning management systems to build a profitable business that supports her financially as a fulltime entrepreneur. Any of the programs that I have mastered, such as SQL Server or Tableau, could become a business. I could create training guides or courses or provide corporate training. Remember, this is what DJ Eshelman did with his knowledge of Citrix. He turned his knowledge of the Citrix program into a coaching, speaking, and education business. Since I have primarily worked desk jobs, I don’t use a lot of physical products in my job. That being said, I could still start a business about the best dual monitor setup for remote workers, about HP laptops for remote workers, or about ergonomic office equipment like my office chair and standing desk. This brain dump question is even more powerful for jobs like engineering, nursing, or construction that involve physical tools like protractors, stethoscopes, and scaffolding. But no matter what you do for a living, don’t overlook this question. There are lots of opportunities to start a

product-focused business based on the physical products and tools you use in your job. Look around you. Take inventory of the tangible and intangible things around you. Pay close attention to your surroundings. Your first business might be sitting right in front of you. Looking around my room, I see a few potential business ideas. I see my health savings account (HSA) debit card; I could create a resource to help people understand their HSA benefit plans and assist companies in setting up HSA programs. I see an old manual about the auto insurance sector in Massachusetts. I could become a consultant focused on helping insurance companies launch new products in Massachusetts, one of the country’s most complex insurance environments; I worked in it for over five years. Look around; your business idea might well be sitting right in front of you. See how simple the brain dump exercise is? A few simple questions are all you need to come up with a wealth of potential business ideas. There is boundless opportunity sitting right in front of you, right where you are paid to spend 40 hours per week. There is something there—a certification, program, or subset of your job—at which you are an expert. You study it, train for it, and work at it every day. There is something at your day job that you can turn into your first business. Don’t think too hard about this. Write down everything that you occurs to you. Let your mind wander. Think about this for a few days, keeping your mind open to new ideas while you are at your day job. Your idea is there, somewhere, hidden inside that 40 hours at work. More Brain Dump Examples This process works. This is the process that will uncover the idea for your business. It worked for me, it works for my clients, and it will work for you. Take Griffin Nutall for example. Griffin is a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) manager for a military defense company. In Griffin’s brain dump he came up with ideas including leadership development, Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, Microsoft Power BI, and blue light eyeglasses. Based on Griffin’s expertise I can envision him pursuing a variety of businesses. He could start a business as an FP&A consultant, he could

build out a corporate training program teaching leadership development, he could create an online course teaching Microsoft Power BI, or he could build an affiliate website recommending the best blue light eyeglasses. With one simple exercise, completed in less than thirty minutes, Griffin has four viable business ideas. Erin Donovan is another great example. Erin is a senior occupational therapist. In Erin’s brain dump, she came up with business ideas including Board Certified Occupational Therapist training, CPR certification, EPIC software, Theraputty, Therabands, pulse oximeter, and goniometer. Based on Erin’s job and expertise, I could see Erin starting a business providing occupational therapist education focusing on licensing, training, and continued education. Alternatively, she could start a business providing training on how to use the physical tools of an occupational therapist with courses, books, trainings, and a membership program providing exercises using Theraputty and Therabands. This is how Erin, as an occupational therapist, could use her job to quit her job. Mark Goodwin is a Senior Manager at a consulting firm. Mark’s brain dump revealed a number of viable business ideas. Mark’s brain dump included ideas such as the CPA certification, CTA certification, financial modeling, chapter 11 bankruptcy management, Tableau, and Microsoft SQL Server. Any of these could be Mark’s business. He could branch out and start his own consulting firm focused on chapter 11 bankruptcy, he could provide freelance financial modeling sold B2B, he could create exam preparation courses for the CPA certification (just like I did for the CPCU®), or he could create courses and a membership program teaching Tableau and Microsoft SQL Server. William Browner is an electrician. Will’s brain dump included ideas such as installing light fixtures, installing ceiling fans, the master electrician license, PPE layers, and arc-rated FR shirt. There is ample opportunity to turn Will’s career as an electrician into a passive income based online business. He could have a membership program for electricians, helping new electricians learn how to get licensed, he could build an affiliate website recommending the best fire-resistant clothing, or he could focus on the howto space for electricians teaching how to install ceiling fans, home generators,

and chandeliers. There are a lot of opportunities to build a passive incomebased online business as an electrician. Will can take his expertise as an electrician, and use his job to quit his job. See how, no matter the job or industry, the brain dump exercise will help you find viable business ideas? This is how you get started. This is how you use your job to quit your job. For more case studies going step-by-step through the process laid out in this book, I have provided additional examples in the back of this book, in the appendix, and in the companion course. What Now? You now have over a hundred topics related to your day job that could be the focus of your business. The question now is simple: which idea is best? There is one more step I want you to take before we move on to the next chapter. I want you to narrow your list down to your 10 favorite ideas. This is not a perfect science; it’s simply helping you identify the topic about which you are most passionate. These are called the narrowing questions. The narrowing questions are easy. Start by reading through the six narrowing questions to get a feel for them. Then, spend the next 30 minutes reviewing your brain dump list and ask yourself the six narrowing questions for each idea on your list. Don’t be concerned about what you don’t know yet. If you don’t know the market size, competition, or profitability of a given idea, don’t worry. We will research that in later chapters. For now, just ask yourself this simple set of questions to filter out the ideas that clearly will not work or do not excite you. By the end of the narrowing questions, I want you to choose your 10 favorite ideas, which you will take to the research phase of this book. Go through your list and eliminate the ideas that you don’t want to pursue or research. Narrow your list down to 10 ideas that excite you enough that you want to dive deep and research each idea throughout the rest of this book. To trim your list down to these 10 viable ideas, ask the following narrowing questions about each idea on your list. Am I Passionate about This Idea? Do I See an Opportunity with It?

Are you passionate about this idea? Can you see yourself in this niche and building this business for five years or more, writing blogs, creating videos, and recording podcasts about this topic? If not, do you see the opportunity to start a business in this niche? Can you envision yourself pursuing this idea? If you are not passionate about this idea or do not see an opportunity and can’t imagine yourself in this potential business, remove the idea from your brain dump list. Grab your pen and cross it off. If you aren’t passionate about an idea, that is okay. You don’t need to be. I am not passionate about insurance certifications or Agile certifications. I don’t jump out of bed excited to talk about insurance. I consider myself an opportunist entrepreneur. I get excited and passionate about exploiting an opportunity in an untapped niche. To me, the subject is a secondary consideration. If I’m at least moderately interested in it, I am open to the business idea. I’ve only been truly passionate about one of the businesses that I’ve started: The Entrepreneur Ride Along. The other businesses that I have started were great opportunities that I had a moderate interest in learning about, tinkering with, and monetizing. Do I Know Anything about This Topic? Do you already have the knowledge and expertise needed to build a business in this niche? If not, do you want to learn and become an expert in this niche? How Complex Is This Idea? Are there a lot of moving parts? Will you need to invest capital up front to make this idea work? Will you need investors? Is there an easier idea on your list that you are just as excited about and could be just as profitable? Is This a Fad? Will this niche still be relevant in 10 or 20 years, or is this just the new hot trend that will fade away in a year or so? Could I Charge a Premium Price in This Niche? Can you charge a premium in this niche? Can you envision this business generating a minimum of $5,000 a month? How many customers would you need, per month, to make $5,000 from this business?

Does This Pass the Grandma Test? This is a simple test: would you be proud to show your business to your grandparents, or are you embarrassed about or even ashamed of the business idea? Choose 10 Ideas By now, you should have reviewed your brain dump list and asked yourself the narrowing questions for each idea on the list. Stop now, before moving on to the next chapter, and choose the 10 ideas from your brain dump list that you want to research further. Consider each narrowing question carefully. Review each idea on your brain dump list, removing those that do not meet the narrowing question criteria and choose the top 10 ideas that remain. If you are left with more than 10 ideas after going through the narrowing questions, then select your 10 favorites, but be sure to limit yourself to 10. In the next chapter, you will begin conducting in-depth research on each idea. You do not want to move past this chapter with more than 10 ideas on your list; it would take too long to research. Choose your 10 favorite ideas, each of which should be something you can envision as your first business venture. We begin the research phase in the next chapter. We get more technical and direct by conducting in-depth research on each idea to help narrow the list even further and choose the single best idea for your first business venture.

Four Chapter Four:

Market Size

A

fter a month of hard work, I applied the finishing touches and launched the website AssociatePI. I began the business with a single online course to help insurance industry employees pass the API™ 28 exam, the first in a series of three exams for the Associate in Personal Insurance Certification; I had passed all three. The course had been written, edited, and programmed. It was time to launch, time to get rich. Weeks went by with no sales. Even worse, I wasn’t getting any traffic on my website. I was writing blogs, creating content, and posting on Twitter. My blogs ranked on the first page of Google, so I should have been seeing traffic and making sales; that’s how online business is supposed to work. After weeks of attempting to sell this one course, I analyzed the market for the API™ 28 exam. I found that 20 people a month were searching for the term “Associate in Personal Insurance” on Google and only 70 people were searching for “API™ 28,” meaning that my market size was about 90 people a month. No wonder I wasn’t getting any sales; no one was taking this exam. No one was searching for what I was selling; no one was out there actively looking for this niche topic. I had made a critical mistake: my market size was too small. I learned, and I pivoted. At that time, in 2015, I had just started studying for the CPCU® Certification, a more advanced insurance certification. This time, I did not make the same mistake. Before pivoting and spending weeks writing a new course, I analyzed and validated the market potential of this niche. This time, I found a viable market. Over 12,000 people a month were

searching Google for “CPCU®,” and 2,400 people per month were searching for “CPCU® Designation.” Even more importantly, I found that over 600 people a month were searching for the specific term “CPCU® 500,” the next online course I was writing. That is a viable niche market. It was large enough, with plenty of search volume, for me to build a niche business. This website now generates upwards of $11,000 in revenue per month from selling online courses to a small but highly targeted niche audience. I still sell that API™ 28 online course. I sell, at most, one API™ 28 course per year. That’s $425 in annual revenue for all the hard work I put in to launch that first online course. If I had not pivoted—if I had not learned this step of analyzing the viability of my target market—I would still be struggling to get rich selling online courses to a market of 90 people. To avoid that happening to you, you are going to take your list of 10 ideas from Chapter Three and estimate each one’s market size. If necessary, you will refine your idea even further to find opportunities within your niche. Analyze Your Niche You have 10 ideas that might be your first business; that’s great! Now, you need to choose which idea is best. We start that process now. In this chapter, I take you through a few simple steps to analyze the size of the market for each idea. This is important because it will help you determine which idea offers the best potential for success, and the potential to generate enough revenue so you can quit your job. What’s Your Number? The first thing you need to consider before you dive into analyzing your market size is how much money you need to make. How much do you need to quit your job? Do you want to match your income or can you take a pay cut: what’s your number? For me, a good starting point is $5,000 a month, which is $60,000 annually. If you can make $5,000 per month on the side while working your full-time job, you can likely scale and increase that revenue when you take on your business full time. Ask yourself, as you go through the analytical process in this chapter,

whether you can make $5,000 a month from this business idea. What can you sell in this market that will generate that $5,000? Maybe it’s a live training at $10,000 a day, maybe you can sell 10 online courses a month at $500 each, or maybe you just need a membership program with 100 members paying $50 per month. If you are unsure about what you can sell in this niche, that’s okay; I talk more about revenue streams later in this book. For now, simply consider whether you think you can hit your target revenue number with your business idea.

Market Size Once you have your number, the next thing to consider is market size. Is there a large enough market for your business idea to generate the revenue you need? Think about how much money you need annually from your business and what product or service you would be selling. If you are planning to sell a $5 eBook, you are going to need a market on the larger side. If you are planning to sell a $500 course, you can target a much smaller niche. When I look at a business idea, I want to see a minimum of 100,000 people in my niche market. With 100,000 people, I know I can sell a $500 course or a $50 monthly membership to just 0.1% of that market and generate $60,000 per year. With a viable niche market, I know I can accomplish that goal. To estimate the market size you need, work backward. In my insurance business AssociatePI, for example, I am selling a $400 online course. To meet my target profit of $60,000 per year, I need to sell 150 courses, or approximately 13 a month. Using the Semrush tool to analyze my market, something I explain in the next section, I found that 10,000 people per month are searching for the term “CPCU” on Google. This gives me a sense of how many people are interested in my niche. If 10,000 people a month are searching for information on the CPCU® certification, I can assume that there are 120,000 or more people per year in this market. That’s not a perfect market size analysis, of course, but it’s a good baseline to start with. With this number in mind, selling 150 courses means I need to convert 0.125% of my market into buying customers (150 ÷ 120,000 = 0.125%). That is doable. My website currently has about 5,000 visitors a month. That means that to

sell 13 courses per month, I need to convert 0.26% of my website traffic into buying customers. That I can do. Compare that with a website selling a $5 eBook. To generate $5,000 per month, you would need to sell 1,000 copies of your book every single month. Assuming you convert 1% of your website traffic into paying customers, you would need 100,000 people visiting your website every month to generate $5,000 (1,000 sales ÷ 1% = 100,000). That means you are going to need a much larger market because you can’t assume you will reach every single person in a market of 100,000 people. That’s why I recommend selling a high-value product; it is a lot easier to sell 10 courses for $500 each than it is to sell 1,000 eBooks for $5 each. Analyze Your Market In this section, you will estimate the market size of each of your final 10 business ideas. This will help you determine which idea offers the best potential. There are two primary ways you can estimate market size: with a manual estimation or using Google search volume. I prefer the latter approach for a more accurate measure, but I walk you through both approaches in this chapter.

Google Search Volume—Semrush The best way to estimate your market size is to use Google search volume. Simply put, Google search volume refers to how many people per month are searching for your business topic. This gives you a baseline estimate of how many people are in your market. To estimate market size, I use Semrush, a tool that allows you to see Google search volume, search trends, niche opportunities, and competition. This allows you to compare the market size of your 10 business ideas to help determine which one offers the best opportunity. For example, on my brain dump list, I listed Xactimate, a software program used in the insurance industry. Using Semrush, I see that there are 18,100 searches a month for “Xactimate.” Even better, I see there are 2,400 people per month searching for “Xactimate training.” That’s great! If I’m selling Xactimate training, I know there are approximately 30,000 people a year who are directly looking for training. Since I know this software is

targeted at the corporate market, I know I can charge a premium. I estimate I could host a live training once a quarter for $1,000 per customer. That means I only need to sell 15 seats to one training a quarter to generate an annual profit of $60,000. That is absolutely doable. Compare this to SERFF, another program used in the insurance industry. I see that there are only 2,900 people per month searching for “SERFF.” In Semrush, I see that most people are searching for the SERFF login page, with fewer than a hundred people a month searching for “SERFF training.” That is not a good sign. This does not look like a viable market to me. I don’t see an opportunity to generate $5,000 per month in this niche.

Using Semrush To try Semrush for free, go to quityourjob.life/semrush. This will take you to a page where you can get a free trial of Semrush to conduct this research. In the interest of full disclosure, I am an affiliate of Semrush. If you use the link quityourjob.life/semrush to purchase a Semrush subscription after your free trial, I will earn a commission. I am an affiliate because I have tried dozens of other SEO and keyword research tools and found Semrush to be the very best. It is now the only keyword research tool I use; it is also the tool I use most in my online businesses. As an affiliate, I receive access to free trials and discounts, so using my affiliate link will give you access to the seven-day free trial. Please note that you may be asked to enter a credit card to start your seven-day free trial, but don’t worry: you will only be charged for the subscription if you choose to continue to use Semrush after the trial period. I highly recommend investing in this tool; I use it every day. But if you do not want to continue using the tool, simply cancel your subscription after a few

days, and you will not be charged. I recommend setting a reminder on your phone to check after six days of using Semrush to make sure you cancel before your card is charged if you do not plan to continue using it. There is a lot you can do with Semrush; it is a powerful marketing and analytics tool that will do just about everything you need for market research and analysis. To avoid getting overwhelmed with everything you can do using Semrush, all I want you to do for now is analyze the size of your market using Semrush search volume.

Search Volume The primary purpose of using Semrush for our research is search volume analysis, which will help you estimate your market size. Using Semrush for market analysis is easy. Log in to the Semrush web platform. On the left side of the screen, you will see a sidebar with all of the tools available in Semrush. Go to the Keyword Magic Tool and type in a key phrase related to your business idea in the search bar that reads “Enter keyword.” Semrush will search and return hundreds of suggested keywords that are relevant to the keyword that you input, with additional metrics to analyze the keyword, including search volume and a keyword difficulty (KD)

score. For example, on my brain dump list, I mentioned that I used Excel in my day job. To research the market size of this business idea, I would type in “Excel” in the Semrush keyword magic tool. Semrush will run its analysis for that keyword and will also return suggested keywords related to the topic. In this case, when I type in “Excel,” Semrush shows me that there are 368,000 people per month searching for the word “Excel.” In addition, Semrush provides thousands of suggested key phrases related to Excel including “Vlookup Excel,” “Excel formulas,” “Excel remove duplicates,” and “PDF to Excel,” with the corresponding search volume data for each suggestion. This quick search in Semrush for “Excel” has now confirmed that the market size is viable, with plenty of search volume in this niche, and has given me new ideas for niche business opportunities that involve Excel. I can now go deeper with my analysis. If I am interested in “Excel formulas,” I would go back to the keyword search bar and type in the phrase “Excel formulas.” Semrush then runs a brand new search and returns thousands of suggested key phrases related to Excel formulas. I can now see that 27,100 people search for the term “Excel formulas” on Google every month. People are also searching for specifics relating to Excel formulas: “Excel if then formula,” “Vlookup Excel formula,” “text to number in formula Excel,” “CAGR formula Excel,” and so on. Any one of these could be my niche business. I could create an entire business about Vlookup variations in Excel. This is how you will use Semrush to analyze your own business ideas. For more examples and detailed instructions on how to conduct the analysis in Semrush presented in this chapter, I have included a full suite of tutorials and examples in the companion course at quityourjob.life/course.

Competition One thing to consider when analyzing your niche is the competition, and Semrush is a big help in this area. As I noted above, when you search a topic in Semrush, it will give you a KD score. This is one of the primary reasons for using Semrush. It is a proprietary score assigned by Semrush that indicates the competitiveness of a given keyword. KD scores range from 0 to 100 and indicate whether there are other highly authoritative websites in this same niche that are relevant to this specific keyword; that gives you a sense of how difficult it would be for your website to show up on the first page of Google results when someone searches for the keyword. The higher the score, the more difficult it will be for your website to appear on the first page of Google results when someone searches for that keyword. As a general rule, a score below 30 is good; it means that there is relatively little competition for the keyword in question. This is an excellent gauge of competition within your niche and indicates whether there are already authoritative sites in the same niche that would be tough competition for your business. Using KD scores can help you find a niche within a niche. Naturally, your root niche will have a high KD score and thus be very competitive. For example, the topic “Excel” has a score of 100. That’s okay; that is the broad area of your business, but if you can find a focus within that area with a low KD score, it will be easier to stand out from the competition.

For example, “Excel formulas” has a KD score of 88, but the keyword “Excel reusable process” has a KD score of only 28. Based on this analysis, I might choose to focus my Excel niche on teaching reusable Excel processes and Excel VBA. Niche within a Niche Remember, the riches are in the niches. There is so much power in that statement. Consider the following analogy. Imagine you are drilling for oil; to strike oil, do you want to drill into the earth one foot deep and one mile wide, or do you want to drill one mile deep and one foot wide? Which approach is more likely to strike oil? The answer, of course, is drilling one mile deep and one foot wide: that is how you strike oil. The exact same concept applies in business. The more focused you are, the larger your actual market becomes, because there are more motivated buyers and fewer competitors. Don’t try to reach the masses; don’t try to reach everyone. Instead, focus on reaching a specific subset of people with a very particular need. If you try to reach everyone, you will reach no one. Don’t go broad: go niche, because the riches are in the niches. For example, I don’t want to start a business about Excel. That is far too broad and too competitive. There are already a lot of Excel gurus providing general Excel tutorials, so I would soon be buried under the competition, trying desperately to be seen. I want to find something specific within this niche—something with less competition—that I could focus on with my business. With that in mind, as you go through the Semrush process, I want you to ask yourself, “Is there a better niche within my niche?” Is there something narrower, or more specific, that you see in your analysis that might offer a better opportunity? Semrush will help you with this effort. When you search for a topic in Semrush, it will give you thousands of suggested keywords. It will also give you category groupings. On the left side, you will see a table with groups. If you click a group, it will filter your search results to that group of keywords. This is incredibly useful for finding a niche within a niche. For example, when I search Excel as my seed keyword, I see groups for “Cell,” “Formula,” and “VBA,” among others. If I click “Formula” in my group, it will filter my search results to only show keywords including and related to Excel

formulas. This can help me find a niche within Excel so that I can focus on something like Excel formulas or Excel VBA. Looking at another example, when I analyze Salesforce in Semrush (one of the programs on my brain dump list), I see that 673,000 people search for the term “Salesforce” every month, but it has a KD score of 78. That is very competitive, so this topic is too broad. From my Semrush research, I would ask myself whether there is anything in Salesforce—a niche within a niche— with an adequate market size that I could focus on. One possible answer is Salesforce certifications. I see this as a category group within Semrush. I see that 14,800 people are searching for “Salesforce Certification.” I see subcategories such as “Salesforce admin certification” (6,600), “Salesforce developer certification” (720 searches), and “Salesforce marketing cloud certification” (480 searches). This looks like a niche within the Salesforce niche. I could start a business teaching people how to earn these different Salesforce certifications. Do you see how easy it is to use Semrush to analyze your market and, if necessary, find a niche within your niche? Do this for each of your 10 business ideas. Go through your list. For each idea, ask yourself if you can dive deeper; is there something more specific that you could focus on for your business? Look in Semrush and analyze the results; is there a niche within your niche on which you could focus?

Goal As to target market size, I generally look for a search volume of 10,000 or more in the root niche. The root niche is your high-level topic, the main focus of your potential business. You want to see at least 10,000 people per month searching for that root niche. This ensures that there are enough people in your market to sustain a profitable business. I have found that a minimum of 10,000 monthly searches of the root niche is necessary to build a business that generates at least $5,000 in revenue per month. For example, if my niche business is about Salesforce certifications, I want my analysis to show that at least 10,000 people a month search Google for the “Salesforce certifications” root niche. In this case, there are more than 14,000 such monthly searches, so this topic meets the search volume criterion. Stop now and conduct your analyses in Semrush. Check the search volumes for each of your business ideas and review the niche possibilities to see if there is a niche within a niche that you can focus on. I have added additional examples of the Semrush process in the back of this book, in the appendix, and in the companion course.

Manual Estimation There are always exceptions in life, and this analytical process is no different. Some business ideas do not fit the mold of analyzing market size using Google search volume. If your business idea is not regularly searched on Google, you will not be able to validate your market size using Semrush. For example, say a school teacher wants to sell course guides to local school districts or a leadership expert wants to sell live training to CEOs in marketing. Both are hard to estimate through Google search volumes because the service is purchased by the company or school district, the end consumer is not searching for the product on Google. In 99.9% of cases, you do not want to start a business in a market with a monthly search volume below 10,000. The exception is for the rare niche that is not commonly searched on Google. If you have a unique niche and know another way to validate your market size, that is perfectly acceptable. Just make sure there are enough people in your market before launching your business. Frank Lipski is a great example of this. Frank has worked in fire and EMS services for over 24 years; he is a fire instructor and training officer. Frank has a successful online business, modernfireinstructor.com, with a successful membership program generating thousands of dollars in income by teaching fire instructors and training officers how to advance their careers and develop effective training programs. However, when I analyze Frank’s business, it does not meet the criterion of at least 10,000 searches for the root niche. There are 4,400 searches for firefighter training, 320 for fire department training, and 90 searches for fire instructors. These numbers are low because this type of training is not regularly searched on Google. Fire instructors typically do not search Google for fire instructor training, but that training still occurs, and those instructors regularly undergo training. Having worked in the field for almost 25 years, Frank understands what is going on. He primarily sells his product directly to fire departments and fire instructors, often through word of mouth, industry connections, and speaking engagements. Frank’s market validation is a lot simpler. All Frank had to do was research how many fire departments there are in the United States;

Google reports that there are 29,705. That means Frank has a market size of well over 10,000 prospects. If he sells his membership at $57 per month to just 100 fire departments, Frank has a business generating $5,700 a month in revenue. That means he needs to sell his product to just 0.3% of the market. That is doable! Consider the product you are selling. If Frank was selling a $5 eBook to a market with fewer than 30,000 departments, he would not generate enough revenue to quit his job. This only works because he has a high-value product with a recurring revenue stream, so he does not need as many sales. Consider this for your business. If you are selling a $15,000 live training seminar to companies in the tech space, then you realistically only need to book four clients in a year to generate $60,000. You don’t need a market of 100,000 prospects. If you can convert 0.1% of the market into buying customers, you only need a market of 4,000 prospects to sell four trainings a year, and remember that you can go back with your live training every year to teach new employees at the same company. Tom Heffner is another great example. Tom sells his innovation workshop training direct to corporations, but only 320 people per month search for innovation training on Google. The reason is that this is a highvalue, low-volume product that is not commonly searched on Google. Like Frank, Tom generates leads through networking and referrals. There are hundreds of companies, with thousands of employees, looking for corporate innovation training, but that market doesn’t show up in Google search volumes. Tom knows his market. He has taught innovation at engineering firms and tech firms his entire career. He has a LinkedIn network with nearly 3,000 followers and over 1,000 connections. To validate his network, Tom attended other innovation trainings, networked with companies in his industry, and contacted his LinkedIn connections. Tom determined that there was a large enough market to support his business financially by booking just a few corporate clients each year. With Tom’s network and corporate connections, he was able to successfully book enough corporate clients to quit his job. Like Tom and Frank, you might need to verify your market size manually if your business idea does not fit the mold of the Semrush analysis. Be

conservative in your estimate. Be realistic and lean toward underestimating, because overestimating will only hurt you. Careful assessments of market size can be used to filter out bad ideas with markets that are simply too small. The goal of this analysis is to validate your market size. The process outlined in this chapter is nearly foolproof; it has worked for me and my eight businesses, and it has worked for thousands of other entrepreneurs who have gone through the process of estimating a baseline market size. This is what I recommend, and I recommend it because it works. That being said, if you have a unique niche (like Frank and Tom), you will need to validate your market outside Semrush to ensure that your market is large enough to sustain a profitable business. Stop Here: Choose Three Stop here, review your market size analyses, and remove any ideas from your list that do not have a viable market. Remember that I typically look for a minimum of 100,000 people in my niche market. If an idea does not look like it has the market potential to generate a minimum of $5,000 in revenue per month, remove it from your list before moving on to the next phase of your research. You don’t need to waste your time researching ideas that don’t have potential. My recommendation is to choose three ideas from your list of 10 before moving on to the next section. Choose the three ideas that offer the best opportunity in terms of market size and profitability. If all your ideas seem more or less equally viable, then choose the three ideas that excite you the most. You will continue to research these ideas and choose the very best business idea in the next section. The final step in your journey to choosing the perfect idea to launch your first business begins now. You will soon be ready to use your job to quit your job.

Five Chapter Five:

Target Market

T

he year was 2013; I sat in my bedroom anxiously awaiting my first sale. I was a senior at the University of New Hampshire and had just launched Directmailleads.com, my first attempt at online business; I was selling residential and commercial addresses to local small businesses for their direct mail marketing campaigns. I thought it was an amazing idea. I leveraged a database that I could access through my university to export thousands of addresses into an Excel file, based on demographic criteria that I had set. I would send this Excel file to small business owners for their targeted mailing campaigns. I launched the business and started blogging, tweeting, and making cold calls. It was time to get rich and pay off my college debt. I had the idea, I launched the business, and I assumed the money would follow. There was one small problem; I was not solving anyone’s problem. No one wanted what I was selling. I called dozens of small businesses in the area: pizza parlors, CPAs, and even the University of New Hampshire marketing department. I pitched hard to sell my service. I was laughed off the phone more than once; those who were nice enough not to laugh explained that my value proposition was way off the mark. Their business did not need my services, and it was unlikely that any other small business would need them either. The reason for this failed first attempt at entrepreneurship boils down to one glaring flaw in my business plan. I never talked to anyone in my target market. I did not understand the pain points of a small business owner; I did

not understand their struggles. I assumed that all small business owners faced challenges with marketing and that all small business owners struggled to find leads for their direct mail campaigns. I was wrong. I was not solving anyone’s problem with my business. Furthermore, I did not analyze the competition. I did not understand that small businesses already had access to free databases that could pull thousands of addresses for their marketing campaigns. I did not realize that there was already an oversaturated market of full-service marketing corporations meeting this need by compiling mailing lists, creating marketing flyers, and mailing the flyers directly to prospective customers. They were doing far more than I was offering, and they were doing it for half the price. I learned the hard way. Research your competition and talk to your target market first. Learn the struggles and pain points of your market before launching your business. That is what you are doing in this chapter. Analyze your target market and competition to determine the pain points facing your market. This research, a final deep dive into your three business ideas, is critical. You will have a better understanding of your target market and the competition long before you begin to conduct business. This will help you determine which idea offers the best market potential and the best opportunity for success. By the end of this chapter, it will be clear which of your ideas is best, and that will be the business idea you pursue. It starts with target market research.

Target Market Research What is the single biggest pain point or challenge that your target market is facing? That is the most important question you need to answer for each of your final three business ideas. The purpose of a business is to provide a solution to the target market’s pain points. If your target market faces a big enough pain point, one that people are willing to pay to solve, then you have a viable business. The success of your business depends on how successfully you can solve the problems and challenges faced by your target market. Research

Answer this question now, before you start your business. Do this research for each of the three business ideas you have chosen. The results will help you determine which idea offers the best business potential. Ideally, you want to choose a business with a large market size and a common pain point. That pain point will become the focus of your business, and solving that problem for your target market will become the value proposition of your business and the basis of the products or services you offer. This means that when comparing your three business ideas, you should choose the idea with the biggest pain point felt by the largest number of people in the relevant market. For example, at The Entrepreneur Ride Along, I found that most of my target market faced the same challenge with the same pain point. People wanted to start a business but struggled to find a viable idea, so that became the purpose of my business and the reason for writing this book. With this understanding of my target market, I validated the market potential of my business, launched with a strong value proposition, and determined the product I would sell—this book—to solve my target market’s problem. That is what I want you to do now. Determine what challenges and struggles your target market faces. This will give you clarity on each of your business ideas to determine which idea offers the best business potential. There are four primary ways to conduct this research: Survey Conversation Observation Semrush Analysis These research methods are easy and will take you no more than one to two hours each. Carry out all four research methods for each of your three business ideas. Survey The easiest way to determine your target market’s pain point is to ask them. The internet, especially social media, makes it incredibly easy to find and segment your target market where you can conduct this research. The easiest way to conduct this research is to create a survey to ask your

target market about the challenges they face. I recommend setting up a fairly formal survey using a program like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey. These programs allow respondents to reply anonymously and seamlessly collect survey responses for ease of analysis. Your survey should contain only one question. That’s it: just a single, simple, open-ended question. You do not want to create a long, drawn-out survey that will both turn people away and generate far more data than you need right now. That one question should be “What is the single biggest challenge you face related to X?” Replace the “X” with your business idea or topic. Phrase the survey question so that it flows naturally and makes sense to the reader. For example, if I were creating a survey about the Xactimate idea on my brain dump list, my survey question would be “What is the biggest challenge you face with Xactimate?” That’s it. That is the only question I want you to ask, but its answers will be very revealing. They will provide invaluable insights into your target market. The open-ended approach allows people in that market to tell you in their own words what they are struggling with, which is better than your guessing their pain points. For example, when I conducted this research for my niche website about the CPCU® Designation, my one-question survey asked, “What is the biggest challenge you are facing right now related to the CPCU® Designation?” Over 75 people replied to my survey to tell me, in various ways and in their own words, that they hated the available study methods because they did not feel prepared for their exams and the material took too long to digest. That was powerful information that shaped the purpose of my business. That is what you are searching for: that is the purpose of the survey question. Find your target market’s biggest challenge and pain point. Validate that there is a problem your target market is facing and solve that problem. If you can do that with a product or service, you have a business. Go ahead and create your one-question survey now. I recommend using one of the various free survey software programs; I prefer Google Forms. In the companion course (quityourjob.life/course), I give you access to one of

my Google Forms surveys and show you how to take my template and modify it for your research. Make three copies of this survey, one for each of your business ideas. Once you have tweaked the question for each of your business ideas, you can begin posting the surveys to collect responses. The key at this point is to post your survey where your target market is located. Don’t simply post this survey on your Twitter or Facebook timeline for friends and family to see (unless they are your target market). You want survey responses from people in your target market, not your mom and dad. If I were researching my Xactimate business idea, I would post my survey online in groups and communities related to insurance industry employees, preferably those working in the claims department. That way, I would collect responses from actual Xactimate users. You want real people in your target market to answer this survey with actionable information about their challenges and struggles. My favorite place to post surveys and conduct research is Reddit, a popular social media platform. It is essentially an enormous forum that is divided into subforums called subreddits. On Reddit, you can find sub-groups related to almost any niche. For example, I found individual subreddits for insurance, insurance employees, and CPCU® studying. This is where I posted my surveys to conduct research for AssociatePI. In addition to these nichespecific subreddits, there is a community on Reddit dedicated to surveys and market research. Go to quityourjob.life/redditsurvey, and you will be redirected to a community group on Reddit where you can post your survey to collect responses. More than 150,000 people are members of this community, the purpose of which is to answer surveys. Make sure to read and follow the subreddit group’s rules before posting your survey. Don’t worry; the rules are very simple and easy to follow. I also recommend finding communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other internet platforms where you can post your survey. You can go into these groups, announce that you are conducting research for a new study, and convey your appreciation to those who take the time to reply to your onequestion survey. For example, when I posted my survey to a Facebook group to collect responses, I created the following post: Hey everyone, I am doing some research on the CPCU®

Designation. For ease of research, I created a survey to collect responses. If you have a free minute, would you mind taking this one-question survey? I will be happy to share the results once the research is complete! That’s it. A simple post like that helped me collect responses from my target market. Create your survey now and begin collecting responses to the question, “What is the single biggest challenge you face related to X?” Those answers will be critical to understanding your target market and help you determine the biggest pain point faced by that market. Conversation Conversations are one of the best ways to learn about your target market. I am an introvert; I do not have the courage to strike up conversations with strangers on the street. Instead, I conduct this research and have these conversations online, primarily through social media. I find groups where my target market is congregating on Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and other online forums. I enter these groups and create a new post to ask a variation of the same question that you asked in your survey: “What is the single biggest challenge you face related to X?” The goal of this post is to kick off a conversation, encourage engagement, and start a dialog with people in your target market. When conducting this research, I make one slight modification to the survey question. I don’t ask “What is the single biggest challenge you face related to X?”; instead, I tweak the question to make my post more personal. For example, when posting to a forum and conducting research for my Agile Exam Academy website, I posted this question to a project management forum: “What would you say is the #1 most challenging or difficult part of the PMI-ACP exam? Just trying to cover my bases before I jump into the studying!” As you can see, this is more personal and encourages dialog. Post your question to Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, Reddit communities, and any other forums related to your target market. You will get replies, generally by people commenting on your post to answer the question. Read and reply to each person who comments on your post. Ask follow-up questions, thank people for their insights, and have real conversations with people in your target community who want to engage

more deeply. Learn exactly what their problems are, why they occur, and how they are currently trying to solve them. You will learn a lot about your target market through these conversations. When you post this question, you do not need to announce that you are starting a business. In truth, you do not know if this is the right business for you. When I make these posts and start these conversations, I ask inquisitive questions to learn as much as I can, because I am genuinely trying to better understand each person’s pain points. I am not trying to sell anything. I am not acting as a businessperson; I am just treating this as a normal conversation and trying to learn from someone with experience. This process is very similar to conducting a survey, except that you are posting your question to a forum or on a social media platform. This approach encourages engagement. Unlike a survey that is posted and collects responses anonymously, social media posts are not anonymous. They are tied to your name, and respondents reply from their own accounts. This gives you a chance to have real conversations with real people in your target market. You also have the unique advantage of working with your target market in your day job. Talk to your boss and coworkers. Ask what they find challenging about the topic of your business. Taking my Xactimate example, I could have sent an email to my colleagues on the claims team saying “I’m considering learning Xactimate to help with my analysis. What should I know when I’m just starting out? Anything in particular that is most challenging for a newbie?” Or, if I see one of our claims reps heading for the breakroom, I can casually pop in to tell them that I am learning Xactimate and spark a conversation about their experience using the tool. You don’t need to say that you are conducting business research. At this point, you don’t even know if this will be your business. You are just starting a conversation to learn about something related to your work. This is how I conducted research for AssociatePI. I had a group of colleagues at my job who were also studying for the CPCU® Designation. I simply asked what they thought was the hardest part about studying. I got great feedback. I didn’t tell anyone I was considering building a business based on their feedback; I was just starting a conversation so that we could help each other study and learn. I discovered that people struggled with the

long, dry, boring study material, that they hated how long it took to study, and that they thought the practice exam questions our company provided did not accurately represent the questions they would see on the actual exam. I also surveyed and talked to people on Reddit and LinkedIn about these exams. The feedback was very similar. This became my value proposition: pass your exam in less time, with less studying, guaranteed. If you are comfortable and not a nervous introvert like me, you can use this same process with people offline. Go out into the real world and conduct this same research. Go to a store and start conversations with people in your target market. Again, you do not need to tell people that you are considering starting a business; just strike up a friendly conversation. If you want to start a business about chainsaws, go to the power tools section of your local hardware store and start chatting with the other customers. Ask what chainsaws they are using and why they chose a particular chainsaw. Talk to the store employees and ask questions like “I’m looking to purchase a chainsaw, but I don’t know what I’m looking for. What do I need to know before I buy?” This is a great way to learn more about your target market. Pay careful attention to the exact words that people use in these conversations and to the struggles or challenges that are mentioned. These conversations will help you better understand how you can serve your target market. Starting a conversation is that simple. Strike up a conversation with people in your target market, whether in person or online, with a variation of “What is the single biggest challenge you face related to X?” Follow up with everyone who replies, asking questions that will best help you learn from and understand each person you engage in conversation. This is a great opportunity to go deep with people in your target market to truly understand their pain points. Observation You are not the only person on the internet asking this question. You are not the only person talking about this target market. Some version of this conversation is already happening on various social media groups, likely more than once a day. You can go into these groups and read conversations from real people in your target market discussing their pain points. That is the beauty of the internet. These conversations are archived, public, and

searchable; you can easily look for conversations and see what questions or problems your target market is discussing. You can observe your target market and learn about its challenges using Google and social media. Find groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other forums related to your niche. Search through recent posts and the most popular posts and take note of what people in your target market are asking about and discussing. For example, when I observe the CPCU® Designation niche, I see a post on Facebook asking a simple question: “What is the hardest part of the CPCU®?” Another post on Reddit asks about things to know before starting to study. These two posts each have more than 20 people engaging and discussing the designation. I read all the comments and conversations on these two posts. Common topics include discussions about the complex concepts of each exam, difficult phrasing of exam questions, and the length of time needed to study. In this one quick search, I found three common pain points related to the CPCU® Designation. Search Google for your topic. Use quotation marks in your Google search to find pages with a specific phrase or word. For example, if I search for “‘CPCU® Exam,’” Google will only show me pages that include that phrase in that order. If I search CPCU challenge without quotations Google will return pages that have the phrase “challenge” and “CPCU” anywhere on the page in any order, no matter how far apart from each other they appear. From this search, I see forum posts with people asking questions like “What is the biggest challenge about studying for the CPCU®?” By reading through this conversation, I can gather more information about my target market’s pain points. Google can also be used to search specific websites for specific phrases by using Google’s site: search function. If I wanted to find posts on Reddit related to the CPCU®, I would enter the following: “CPCU” site:reddit.com. This would return search results for any Reddit post that has the term “CPCU®.” Use this feature to search forums for specific topics related to your business idea. For example, when I was conducting research for the PMI-ACP exam and my Agile Exam Academy website, I searched the following on Google: “Hardest part about PMI ACP.” This search returned blogs and forums discussing the PMI-ACP exam and why it is difficult.

“PMI ACP” site:reddit.com. This search showed me a few Reddit groups and specific posts discussing the PMI-ACP exam. “PMI-ACP” site:projectmanagement.com/discussion-topic. This search showed me specific posts related to the PMI-ACP exam on the projectmanagement.com forum. Observe your target market. Use these tips to search Google for your business idea and read through the conversations in social media groups related to your niche. You will find that your target market is already on the internet, discussing your niche and asking for help. Track this information and keep note of what your target market is saying. Use this to tally the most frequent comments and discussion points related to your target market. This will support the research from your surveys and conversations and help you determine your target market’s biggest pain point. Semrush Questions One of the best ways to conduct research is using Semrush. Use the “question” toggle. This allows you to see the questions your target market is asking. You can sort by search volume to see a ranking of questions by popularity. This will help with your target market research; by seeing what popular questions people are asking, you will find their major pain points. For example, when I type in Salesforce as my seed keyword and use the “question” toggle, I can see the most frequently asked questions regarding Salesforce. Here I see that people are asking “how to create a historical report in Salesforce”, “how to link an opportunity to a custom object in Salesforce”, and “how to set up a Salesforce price book”. These are a couple of tutorials that I could add to my Salesforce education business. I know that they are questions that thousands of people ask every month. I can create tutorial videos on YouTube to answer these questions to drive traffic to my business, I can add this to my tutorial training, and I might even be able to develop a full-fledged product if enough people are asking the same question. Ty this for your niche at quityourjob.life/semrush.

Your Goal Interact with at least 30 people in your target market through surveys and conversations and observe at least 20 other people. In the end, you should have at least 50 data points. If you can do more than 50, do more. The more the better. However, there is a limit, known as saturation, at which you are not likely to receive enough new information to make the additional effort worthwhile. You do not need thousands of survey responses: if you meet the minimum of 50 and stop at, say, 150, you will have plenty of data to determine the biggest problem facing your target market. I recommend keeping track of each survey response, conversation, and observation in an Excel file so that you can refer back to the exact words that each person used to describe the pain point. This will help you summarize and tally your research to determine which pain point is most common. To make this easier, I have included a pre-formatted Excel research file in the companion course. It will help you keep track of your responses, summarize pain points, and quickly tally the results to easily see which pain point is most prevalent.

Value Proposition The purpose of the pain point is to determine the value proposition of your business. Your value proposition is what your business will offer to potential customers. It addresses the pain point in your target market. A value proposition is different from a niche. For example, my niche is the CPCU® certification, but my value proposition is “pass your exam in less time, with less studying, guaranteed,” because the biggest pain point of my target market is the length of time required to study and pass these complex exams. Based on the pain point and value proposition you identify, you can come up with ideas for products or services that meet the needs of your target market. This is the purpose of conducting surveys and competitive research. Using the pain points, reviewing the competition, and identifying your value proposition will help you determine which of your three business ideas offers the best opportunity; that is the one you will choose for your first business venture. Based on the research in this chapter, what are the value propositions for each of your three business ideas?

Ease of Entry (Competition Research) Competition is a good thing. You want to see that other people in your niche are already operating a profitable business. This confirms that there is a viable market in your niche and that there are already people willing to spend money to address the challenges they are facing. Now, all you have to do is figure out how to differentiate yourself from the competition. That is what you will do in this section: review your competition, analyze the businesses selling products and services in your niche, and determine how you can differentiate yourself to beat the competition. Conduct this research for each of your three business ideas. The goal is to answer the following questions: Is anyone making money in this niche? What value do they offer? How will you differentiate yourself? Competition Research

In this step of the research phase, you will find and analyze at least five competitors. This process should be quick and simple; it is not a full, in-depth competitor analysis. You are simply conducting quick, baseline competitor research. You don’t need to spend more than 15 minutes per business idea conducting this research, which means it should take no more than 45 minutes to research all three ideas. There are three places I recommend searching to analyze your competition. Start with Google, which is the easiest way to carry out this kind of analysis. Simply search Google for your niche. If your business idea is to help attorneys pass the bar exam, go to Google and search for “bar exam preparation” and “bar exam prep.” Look for websites, blogs, and other resources related to bar exams. Go check through the first few pages of the Google search results. Use the Google search techniques detailed in the previous section to look for specific products or competing businesses. For example, you could use the search query “bar exam” “study guide” or “bar exam” “course” to find web pages focused on selling study guides and courses for the bar exam. Review your competitors. Click through the blogs and websites to see what products and services your competitors are selling. Note the product’s price, type, and what people like and dislike about it. To track the likes and dislikes of a product, go back to Google and search for product reviews. For example, if I see that my competitor XYZ Bar Exam Prep is offering The Ultimate Bar Exam Course, I would search Google for XYZ Bar Exam Prep Course Reviews. I would then look through the results for websites, blogs, and social media posts discussing that course. You will probably see posts on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter talking about the specific product or service your competitor offers. Read these posts to see what people are saying. What do people like about the product? What do people dislike about it? What do people like and dislike about your competitor? The answers will help you understand how your potential competitors are—or are not—already meeting the needs of your target market and how you can differentiate yourself from those competitors. Next, conduct competitive research on Amazon; go to Amazon.com and search for your niche. For example, if you are continuing to research a bar exam prep business, search Amazon for topics related to studying for the bar

exam. See what products and books your competitors are selling on Amazon. Are they selling physical books? Are they selling eBooks and audiobooks? If so, look at the reviews. Do the products have thousands of reviews? If so, that is a clear indication that the competitor is selling a large volume of its products. What is the average review on these products; is it four stars or one and a half? Read the reviews. Why are customers leaving a good review? What did they like about the product? Why are customers leaving bad reviews? What did they dislike about the product? This research will help you understand the range of products being offered in your niche and learn what your target market likes and dislikes about the products available in your niche. Track all this research in your Excel file. Lastly, check Udemy, a marketplace for entrepreneurs to create and sell courses; essentially, Udemy is Amazon for online courses. You will find courses about gardening, golf, dog training, and just about anything that can be taught as a course on Udemy. Go to Udemy.com, search for your niche, and review the relevant courses. What courses are your competitors offering? What problems are your competitors solving with their Udemy online courses? On Udemy, you can see how many people are enrolled in each course, you can see which courses are most popular, and you can see user ratings for each course. Look through the courses to see which courses and course topics are most popular in your niche, based on how many people are enrolled. This will help you understand the severity of your target market’s pain point. The more people taking courses to solve their problems, the more severe those problems are. Look at the reviews for each of your competitor’s courses, both good and bad. What does your target market like and dislike about each course? Did a particular course solve their problem, or was it missing something critical? This research on Udemy will help you better understand your target market’s pain points, help you grasp the size of your market based on how many courses your competitor is selling, and help you learn how your competitor is (or is not) meeting the needs of your target market. When I conducted this research for my insurance education business, I learned exactly what my target market disliked about the competition. The reviews often had phrases like “the practice questions did not prepare me for the actual exam,” “it took too long to study,” and “the content is too dry and

too long.” Based on this feedback, I created an online course that cut out the fluff to focus only on the most important topics, allowed students to pass their exams with half the study time, and added realistic practice exam questions designed as closely as possible to match the actual exam. I used this insight to create my value proposition, “pass your exam in less time, with less studying, guaranteed,” and that is why people buy my courses. I want you to conduct this same kind of competitive research for each of your three business ideas. Complete this competitive analysis for at least five competitors for each business idea. Track all the research in your Excel file. Determine who your biggest competitors are and then research their product offerings, value propositions, and reviews. The results will indicate whether there are already competitors making money in your niche (remember that competition is a good thing), give you a sense of the profit potential in that niche, and help you differentiate yourself from the competition.

Take Action (Next Steps) Do this research. Stop now and conduct this research for each of your final three business ideas. Interact with at least 30 people in your target market through surveys and conversations and observe at least 20 others. Determine the biggest pain point of your target market. Analyze the products and value propositions of at least five competitors. Determine how you can differentiate yourself from the competition. Keep track of all this research in your Excel file. Stop and do this now. This is how you will choose the best idea, the one idea that you will pursue in your first business venture: the one that will let you use your job to quit your job.

Six Chapter Six:

Make Money

Y

ou have an idea. You know there’s a market for your idea. You know there is a need in your market. Now, it’s time to decide what type of business you will start, and how you will make money.

I have one recommendation: online business. Your first business should be online. Simply put, online businesses are inexpensive, easy, and profitable. Sounds like the perfect business model, right? Let’s quickly cover why all my businesses are online and why your first business should be online, too. It’s Easy I don’t care if you are nine years old or 90 years old; you can start an online business. You don’t need investors. You don’t need capital. You don’t need coding experience. You don’t need a warehouse full of servers. You don’t need a database management system, and you don’t need a complex business model. You are not trying to create the next Amazon … at least not yet. Online business is much easier than you think. Put a website online, and you have an online business. Buy a domain, arrange for hosting, and follow the step-by-step instructions from your host to put your website online. Use a drag-and-drop page builder to build a professional-looking website and set up an online store (I use WooCommerce with WordPress). It is an incredibly easy and streamlined process. It will take you no more than an hour, and there is no need for HTML, CSS, or C++ coding; in fact, I am not even going to explain what those abbreviations stand

for, because you won’t need to know them. In the companion course at quityourjob.life/course, I give you step-bystep instructions to put your website online. It’s Inexpensive Contrary to popular belief, starting a business is inexpensive (if you start online). You do not need to invest $100,000 to start a business. You do not need angel investors, partners, or startup capital. In fact, you can start a business and start making money online for about $50. As I write this book, you can buy a domain name on GoDaddy for $0.99, you can obtain web hosting from SiteGround for $49, and you can sync that up with a free WordPress platform to build your website. That is all you need to set up an online business for just $50. In the companion course, I break everything down for you using step-bystep instructions. For now, I just want you to understand that the process is easy and inexpensive. For reference, my first successful business selling online courses to insurance industry employees cost me $50 to start. This business has since generated roughly $60,000 in revenue per year, all for an initial capital investment of $50. If my math is correct, that is a return on investment of 600,000% in five years. Not bad! Remember, you do not need a milliondollar capital injection to start your business. You do not need to pay $3,000 for a fancy web designer. You do not need employees (yet). You do not need a mobile app yet. You do not need the biggest hosting plan yet. You do not need a database yet. You do not need a warehouse yet. You do not need a team of coders yet. You do not need an office building yet. Start small and grow from there. Start with the basics: just a $50 investment to put your business online. After it is up and running and—most importantly, profitable —then you can invest in systems, teams, databases, and anything else you need to scale your business. It’s Profitable Online business can be incredibly profitable. I love online business because you can charge a premium for high-ticket items. You can sell an online

course for $500. You can sell coaching at $1,000 per session. You can sell a training workshop for $10,000. Think about that. Sell 10 online courses in a month: that’s $5,000. Book 10 coaching clients, and you have $10,000 a month. Sell just five training workshops in a year, and you have generated $50,000 for your business. Most importantly, your profit margin is nearly 100%. There is almost no overhead. Your only expenses are paying for the domain and website hosting. My profit margin is typically around 80%, and that’s because my businesses are big enough that I’ve expanded into hiring contractors and investing in automation. Most entrepreneurs I coach have profit margins of 90% or higher. This means that their businesses are operating with very limited expenses while they keep 90% of the revenue as profit. Sell Information Sell what you know. It’s the easiest way to build a business and make money. Right now, that is what you are working toward. Finding the quickest path to build a business and quit your job. The easiest way to do this is by selling information. It’s intangible: there is no production, no inventory, no raw materials. You don’t need to invent anything. You don’t need to manufacture anything. You don’t need to hire programmers or software engineers. The information is already in your head; you just need to figure out the best means of delivering it to the people who need it, the people who will be your customers. Compare the two alternatives. Would you rather invest hundreds of thousands of dollars at the outset to hire programmers to build a software program, pay for a climate-controlled warehouse full of servers, and hire a team of engineers to keep the software up to date? Which means you would need hundreds or likely thousands of paying customers to break even on your investment. Or, would you rather send a direct message to a few of your connections on LinkedIn to pitch your training program and make a $20,000 profit in a weekend? That is selling information. This is what I do. It’s why I love online business, because online businesses are perfect for packaging and selling information. I teach people how to pass the CPCU® exam with my online courses. I teach people how to

start their first online business with my books and membership program. I teach people how to train the Pomsky dog breed. I help people pass the PMIACP™ exam. I am selling what I know. I am packaging the information I have learned from my own experiences and selling it in the form of courses, books, and memberships. This is where I recommend you start. Start online by selling information through consulting, coaching, books, courses, and memberships. Then branch out and build your SaaS product, launch your clothing line for electricians, or open your brick-and-mortar retail business. But first, start online by selling information. Digital Products The best way to sell information is using digital products. Can you type a few words into a Microsoft Word document and then save it as a PDF? Great! Then you can make a digital product. I love digital products. They are my go-to medium with every business that I start. A digital product is simply a product that does not have a physical form. It is an intangible piece of media that can be sold and distributed repeatedly online without the need to replenish inventory. This is usually some type of downloadable or streamable content such as PDFs, MP3s , and videos. Digital products include eBooks, PDF guides, online courses, video courses, membership sites, newsletters, and audio programs. I could go on and on listing digital products. The point is that they are easy to create and easy to sell. They are the perfect product offering to begin monetizing your first business. I built up my entire portfolio of online businesses selling digital products. The beauty of digital is that you create one product and then sell it over and over again without incurring additional costs. Think of an eBook. You write a quick book or guide that is no more than 50 pages long, save it as a PDF, and then sell that PDF to new customers every day. You did the work once, but then you keep selling the digital product to new customers with no inventory, no overhead, and almost no expenses, other than the time you invested in writing the book. Here are some reasons why I love digital products.

Scalable without inventory. You don’t hold inventory, and you can keep selling the same product; there is no limit to how many digital products you sell because you cannot run out of inventory. No logistical upkeep. You don’t hold inventory, and you don’t need to package anything. There are no shipping fees and no manufacturing struggles. Logistics are easy with digital products. Use a simple platform like WooCommerce that automatically sends the digital product to the customer after payment is received. No upfront cost. There is no upfront cost to creating a digital product other than the time you invest in making it. You do not need to pay anything upfront to purchase inventory or warehouse space. No initial capital investment, overhead, inventory, or employees are needed. High profit margin. There is no cost of goods sold with digital products. You create an eBook, save it as a PDF, and sell it. That is a 100% profit margin. Every sale, every dollar you generate, is 100% profit. Automation. Digital products are easy to automate; in fact, you can automate the entire selling and distribution process. That’s how you earn passive income. The customer finds you, the customer buys from you, and the customer receives your digital product without your ever lifting a finger. This is the beauty of online business. You can sell digital products with no inventory and very low overhead costs to build a highly profitable business. This is why you should start online by selling digital products. Passive Income An online business is one of the easiest ways to earn passive income, which simply means revenue generated without trading time for money. Your business does not need you to be there to make money; everything happens automatically. Unlike a service business, where someone must be present at a worksite and charge an hourly or daily rate, an online business generates passive income without your having to work for it. That is the type of business I want you to think of: a business where you do not need to trade hours for money. Instead, you do the work upfront, turn on the autopilot, and let the money flow in.

If your dream is passive income and building an asset that will pay you recurring revenue while you play with your kids and prioritize living instead of working, online business is the way to go. Of course, none of my businesses are 100% passive. I spend 5–10 hours per week on each business, answering emails and implementing new products to grow revenue. If you want your business to grow, you need to put in the time to nurture your business. That’s not to say I can’t step away for a bit and let them run on their own. When my daughter was born, I took six months off from work to spend time with Brooke and our new baby. Other than hosting monthly trainings in The Entrepreneur Ride Along Membership and answering a few priority customer service emails, I did not do a single hour of work for those entire six months. If I wanted to, I could absolutely step away for months at a time and let my businesses generate truly passive income. But that’s not me; I cannot sit still for longer than 20 minutes. I like to tinker, scale, and improve my businesses. They are my babies. So, I spend time on them, nurture them, and grow them. They are passive income-based businesses, but I choose to put in the time to scale and grow that passive income. It Does Not Have to Be Online … But it Should Be In this book, you have identified over a hundred possible business ideas, and they aren’t limited to online business. The brainstorming and validation processes I outline in this book are not exclusive to online business; an online business is simply a highly effective means to promote your product and generate revenue. It is my favorite means of generating revenue. You might find, after going through this process, that you have an idea for the next software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, an Uber-like app, or a great idea for an arcade-themed bar. All those options are possible; don’t stop yourself from thinking outside the box. There are no rules when you are an entrepreneur. I have seen entrepreneurs come away from this process with ideas for a real estate business, a home-based Chinese tutoring business, and a custom Dungeons & Dragons dice business. All those ideas came from the same process you went through in Chapter Three. With all that said, as I have said more than once above, I strongly encourage you to consider an online business first. Start online before scaling up and leasing 10,000 square feet of warehouse space. If you want to patent

and sell a new and improved spatula for Hibachi cooking, start selling them online before you open up a storefront in downtown Manhattan. Make sure that Hibachi chefs want your spatula, test to confirm they like your new design, and build up a loyal following of online customers first before you drop $250,000 to order inventory and open a brick-and-mortar business. Online businesses are inexpensive, easy to start, and easy to scale. The internet is the perfect place to validate your business before even thinking about opening an offline shop. Remember, this is your first business. This is your first stepping stone. Start with one small profitable business idea. You need one small business and a couple hundred loyal customers (or even fewer) to build a highly profitable business that can support you financially. If a thousand people pay you $100 per year, you have a business generating $100,000 in annual income. That is achievable: that you can do.

How Will I Make Money? The purpose of a business is to make money. A business that does not make money but takes up your time is called a hobby. In this section, I break down a few revenue streams to monetize your business idea. Remember, there are many strategies to monetize that idea and build a successful business. The ideas laid out in this chapter are just a few of the monetization strategies I have used and can thus recommend with confidence. This is the last phase of your research. All of your work on market size, pain points, and competition in your niche has led to this. Now that you understand the pain points of your market and what the competition is selling, you can determine what product and service you can sell in your niche. To do this, look back at your research. Review the target market research that you conducted to identify your market’s biggest pain points. Look at what your competitors are selling; see how they are addressing those pain points. Look at what your target market says about your competitors and what that market likes and dislikes about your competitors. Use this research to brainstorm the best product or service for your business. In this chapter, I break down 21 viable revenue streams and help you choose a product or service for each of your business ideas.

Consulting Consulting is the easiest and most natural way to transition from your day job into entrepreneurship. Consulting is essentially taking what you do in your current job and rather than working and performing tasks for one employer, you take your skills and sell them to multiple companies (and get paid a lot more for it). You are doing the same work, using the same skills, but you are applying it to different companies. Can you turn what you do in your day job into a consulting practice? This will take you into entrepreneurship, allowing you to generate revenue and get a feel for building up a sustainable business. You can use consulting to pay the bills as you get started, but I encourage you to develop passive revenue streams while you are consulting. As a consultant, you are trading your time for money. You will have some control of your schedule and more flexibility in the work you choose, but you will essentially be working the same old day job, just on your own time. I recommend using consulting to hold you over financially as you develop passive products such as online courses and memberships. That way, you can start to generate passive income, stop trading time for money, and eventually step away from consulting and let passive product sales support you financially. This is what David Shriner-Cahn did. David worked as an executive in the non-profit sector for over 20 years. When he was laid off, he decided it was time to pursue his dream of entrepreneurship. Naturally, having enjoyed working in the nonprofit space in his previous career, he chose to start his business as a consultant in nonprofit management. Using his expertise, having managed nonprofits for over 20 years, and leveraging his connections, David was able to quickly book his first consulting clients. All he had to do was tell his connections that he started a consulting practice, which led to referrals and clients. Soon after, David used his expertise in business management and expanded into for-profit business consulting. Years later, after building a profitable consulting practice that supported his life as a fulltime entrepreneur, David started a new business at smashingtheplateau.com, where he helps consultants, coaches, and professional service business owners learn how to be more successful entrepreneurs. You can see how David used his expertise in nonprofit management to start his consulting

practice, which soon expanded and then led to his business teaching consultants at Smashing the Plateau. Consulting can be a viable and easy option for your first business. Take what you know from your experience in your day job and sell it. Start with consulting; use it as a stepping stone into entrepreneurship, and then build your next business just like David did. Courses I love online courses; they are one of my favorite methods of generating revenue. A course could be a series of instructional videos teaching a particular subject, like my courses on how to build and scale an online business, or it could be a text-based course like my insurance courses for the CPCU® Designation. There are dozens of platforms designed to host and sell online courses, making it easy to publish a course without the expense of custom coding or web design. My favorite platforms are Teachable, Thinkific, and Thrive Themes. I have used each of them to host and sell my online courses. You can charge a premium for an online course. At a minimum, you should charge $200 for your course. Depending on your niche, especially if this is a corporate training or B2B business, you can charge $5,000 or more for your course. So, rather than writing and selling an eBook for $5, turn it into a video-based online course and sell it for $500. This is a profitable way of generating substantial income from your online business, and it doesn’t have to be a lot of work. You just need a few hours of video content (and maybe less), as long as it solves the pain point of your target market. In fact, your course should solve your customers’ problem in the least amount of time possible. They are buying your course for a fast and effective solution, not for hours and hours of content. Your customers don’t want to watch 60 hours of video; they want a quick proven method to solve their problem. If that can be done in two hours and costs $500, then it will be worth the price to your target market. This is what I do. In every one of my businesses, I sell online courses. With AssociatePI, I sell text-based courses to help students pass the CPCU® exams. At Agile Exam Academy, I sell practice exams to help students pass the PMI-ACP Exam. At The Entrepreneur Ride Along, I sell the Build a Business and Scale Your Business online courses, both of which are video-

based instructional courses teaching early entrepreneurs how to start and then scale an online business. In one of my past businesses, Pomsky Owners Association, I sold video-based courses teaching people how to train Pomsky dogs (I sold this business for $95,000 in 2021). Online courses are one of the easiest ways to generate passive income. Do the work building the course once, teach what you know, and then sit back and sell the same course over and over again to generate passive income. This is one of the most popular ways to scale an online business because it’s easy, it’s profitable, and it’s passive. Coaching You can be a coach for anything. Simply put, coaching is the process of getting paid to help someone. You can be a corporate coach, a coach for executives, a coach for business growth; really, you can be a coach for just about anything. Unlike consulting, where you are paid to perform a specific task, coaching is the process of providing high-level guidance. As a coach, you are not working in the business; you are working with a person to provide an outside perspective on a problem or challenge. In the end, the client is responsible for sitting down and doing the work; you simply act as a sounding board and guiding voice. There are several types of coaching that can be monetized. One-on-one coaching. This is the process of coaching and helping someone in a one-on-one setting. It is completely free to be a coach, and you can easily charge $1,000 or more per client. It is highly profitable and easy to start. Group coaching. Group coaching is very similar to one-on-one coaching, except that you coach multiple clients at once. I run a group coaching program for my Build a Business course. I charge $1,000 per person and, over six weeks, teach a group of would-be entrepreneurs how to build and scale their first business. Much like coaching in general, this is highly profitable and easy to start. Paid mastermind. The mastermind business model is similar to group coaching. The only difference is that a mastermind involves a group of clients who meet together weekly, with you and all members

of the group present; one member of the group sits in the “hot seat.” That member is given the opportunity to bring any topic or problem to the group for advice. With a mastermind, you are creating a group of like-minded individuals who come together in a group coaching call every week. Each member participates to provide help and guidance to one another. With a mastermind, you leverage the knowledge of all members to help everyone in the group advance toward their own goals. You, as the leader of this group, facilitate the mastermind and provide group coaching when needed. This is a highly profitable revenue stream; you can charge between a monthly fee of $500 to $3,000 a person to host a paid mastermind. I paid $1,000 a month to be in Cliff Ravenscraft’s paid mastermind group. Cliff generates upwards of $30,000 per month in revenue by hosting two paid mastermind groups. This is one of the easiest ways to generate revenue from your business. I offer coaching as a supplementary product for every one of my businesses. At a minimum, you should charge $100 per coaching session, though you may be able to charge much more. For reference, when I first started The Entrepreneur Ride Along, I was charging $1,500 for three coaching sessions. That rate increased as I perfected my coaching practice. Coaching is an easy and profitable revenue stream to start your business. Training B2B training is one of the most profitable business models you can choose. It usually involves seminars or live coaching delivered to a group of employees but paid for by the employer. This can be done onsite or online through a program like Zoom or Microsoft Teams. This is what Kevin Namaky does. This is how he used his job to quit his job. Kevin worked for 20 years in marketing and brand management before starting his business at gurulocity.com. Kevin now works full time hosting training workshops for corporate clients, where he teaches brand management. In these trainings, Kevin and his team focus on a particular subject or skill related to brand management, such as “how to write a great creative brief”; the exact topic depends on the needs of the client. In his live training sessions, he works directly with the client’s creative team to provide

constructive feedback on the company’s marketing and branding campaigns. Kevin simply took what he knew from his job and his expertise from 20 years in brand management and turned it into a training workshop that he sells in the B2B space. This can be your business model. You can use your job and the skills you have learned on that job to create a business selling trainings and workshops. The best part is that your professional network is a ready-made client list. Like Kevin, you can reach out to your connections on LinkedIn, tell them about your career change (without selling or being pushy, of course), and let the clients and referrals flow in. Books You can self-publish a book on Amazon or Barnes and Noble for free. It costs nothing to do this. You do not need a professional publishing company. There are three types of books you can sell: eBooks, audiobooks, and print books. This is how DJ Eshelman is scaling his business. After 15 years working in the information technology industry focused on the Citrix program, DJ used his job to teach what he knows writing Be a Citrix Hero: Rescue Your Users from Poor Performance and Advance Your Career. He later published the book Just Do This: A Simpler Way to Succeed in IT. These books have helped position DJ as an authority in the IT industry, especially in the Citrix niche, where he is one of the most widely respected and highly sought-after consultants. These books generate leads for DJ’s coach practice, speaking engagements, and mastermind groups. The only downside to this revenue stream is the profit margin; books are low-margin products. For reference, when I sell a print book for $19.99 through Amazon’s KDP book printing program, I take home a profit of approximately $8.00. For audiobooks, I only make around $4.00 per sale. You need to sell a lot of books to make a living from selling books. Books are a great tool for building an audience and building authority, but if you want to make a living from selling books you will need to sell more than 600 copies a month, which is not an easy feat unless you are already an established writer.

Affiliate Marketing I love affiliate marketing; it is one of the easiest ways to make money online without spending anything. As an affiliate, you recommend a product to someone. If that person buys the product, you earn a commission, typically between 5% and 30%, on that sale. It’s completely free to you. You can sign up for as many affiliate relationships as you want. As an affiliate, you have a unique affiliate URL that keeps track of who clicks on your link and who buys after clicking on that link. Typically, you are credited with the sale and earn a commission if a person who clicked your link buys within 30 days. Here’s a pro tip: look for affiliates that offer recurring commissions. For example, I’m an affiliate of ConvertKit. Whenever someone signs up for ConvertKit through my link, I get paid a 30% commission per month. It’s like building your own membership platform without doing any of the work; all you have to do is recommend someone else’s product! I make, on average, $20 a month for every member who signs up through my ConvertKit affiliate link. If I have 50 active members who subscribe through my affiliate link, I make $1,000 in revenue a month simply for having recommended someone else’s product. That’s easy money! I have one cautionary note about the affiliate business model. I recommend it solely as a supplementary revenue stream. I highly recommend that you have your own product, whether that means a book, course, membership program, or coaching. Affiliate programs are great and can make you a healthy amount of money as an affiliate, but you do not control the product. You do not own the product. The company that owns the product can discontinue its affiliate program at any time, instantly wiping out your revenue stream. Or the program could cut affiliate commissions in half, which happened to me with the Amazon affiliate program. I still recommend the affiliate revenue stream but only as a supplemental revenue stream, not your sole source of income. Membership Programs I love the membership revenue stream. There is a bit more work upfront, but membership-based sites can scale quickly. There are hundreds of platforms that facilitate the whole membership process for you; I use Circle.so to host the membership community for The Entrepreneur Ride Along. It handles

everything for me: setting up customer accounts, processing payments once a month, and managing cancellations. The entire membership process is handled by the Circle.so platform. Membership sites can be very lucrative, but they can be tedious to start and slow to ramp up. Typically, memberships run between $20 and $200 a month. This revenue stream is slow at first because you need to work hard to get new members. Then, once you get a few members, you have to work hard to keep those members happy—and thus paying customers—and then you need to work hard to keep new members coming in. But things can snowball quickly. For example, in The Entrepreneur Ride Along Membership, my members get access to me, my coaching, my community, my books, and all my courses. I help my members start a profitable business, with the goal of getting their first sale from a validated online business in just three months, with step-by-step instructions (and my personal help) along the way. As I write this, the membership rate is $50 per month. If I book three new members and lose one member a month, that means I’m making $100 after a month (two new members minus one cancellation). After two months, I’m making $200, and after 12 months I’m making $1,200 per month. After two years, I’m making about $2,400 a month, all by adding only a net of two members every month. That’s easy! You can see how membership programs snowball quickly. Advertising There are two common types of advertising: pay-per-click (PPC) and sponsorship advertising. PPC advertising is easy to set up. You can use a program like Google AdSense, sign up for free, and place advertisements on your website. Any time a website visitor clicks that specific advertisement, you earn a commission. The commission varies depending on your niche and the quality of your website. In my experience, you can expect to earn a commission of $0.50 to $1.50 per click. Sponsorship advertising means a company pays for an advertising spot on your website or podcast. For example, I once charged a flat rate of $500 a month for a company to display a banner advertisement on my website homepage. Advertising is my least favorite revenue stream. I see far too

many entrepreneurs start with advertising, expecting to quit their day job within a few months of signing up with Google AdSense. It is possible to make substantial revenue from advertising, but it takes time and volume. You need a lot of traffic for this revenue stream to be profitable. At $1.50 per advertisement click, you need around 3,300 people clicking on your advertisements every month to make $5,000. For sponsorship advertising, you likely will not garner attention from sponsors until you have tens of thousands of website visits a month. Having said that, sponsorship advertising can be very profitable. At the time of writing, it is common to see fees of more than $2,500 for a 60-second podcast advertisement, if there are enough listeners. The advertising model is profitable if you have the scale and traffic for page views and ad clicks. Speaking You can be a public speaker who is paid to talk about a topic you are passionate about or a topic in your area of expertise. Typically, new speakers can charge up to $2,500 per gig, and experienced speakers can charge anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 for each speaking engagement. Speaking is a highly profitable business model; if you book just two speaking engagements a month, you can easily generate $5,000 in monthly profit. Much like coaching, it takes a bit of work to make connections, prove your expertise, and book gigs. The bulk of your work will involve proving your expertise on a given topic and then connecting with the appropriate host for conferences and events. The only downside is the number of available events in your niche. There may be too few opportunities and too many competing voices to book a full-time schedule of speaking engagements. In that case, speaking is an excellent high-margin supplementary product to upsell, on top of your books, courses, and memberships. I highly recommend Kent Julian’s Paid to Speak Conference if you are considering the speaking revenue model. You can learn more at quityourjob.life/speaking. Print-On-Demand Print-on-demand is a program that prints your products and ships them directly to your customers after the order is placed. For example, if you create

a t-shirt design, a print-on-demand company will print your design on a tshirt and ship it to your customers. This means you don’t hold any inventory. The customer places an order through Amazon or your online store, and your print-on-demand company prints the product and ships it directly to the customer. You pay a small fee for the printing and shipping, and the rest is profit. For example, if you are selling a t-shirt, you pay $10 for the t-shirt and printing, but you earn $5 in profit on the $15 that the customer is charged. The biggest benefit to the print-on-demand revenue model is that you don’t hold inventory and only pay when a sale is made. There is no upfront cost other than hiring a graphic designer. With this revenue stream, your print-on-demand company will do everything for you. You just need to create the product. They will conduct all transactions, print your products, and ship them to your customers. I use Printful (quityourjob.life/printful) for my print-on-demand products. They have a ton of print-on-demand products: t-shirts, sweatshirts, socks, hats, backpacks, totes, coffee mugs, canvases, blankets, dog bowls, and much more. The program syncs with just about any website platform and marketplace including WordPress, Amazon, and Etsy, which makes it remarkably simple to use. All you need to do is upload a graphic design and drive traffic to the product; Printful will do the rest. Dropshipping Dropshipping is a business model in which you sell a physical product without holding any inventory. You are essentially a broker. You work with a supplier or manufacturer to sell its products through your store. When you make a sale, your supplier ships the products from its warehouse straight to the customer. The supplier charges you a flat rate for the product and shipping, and you charge the customer a higher price that includes your profit margin. For example, in one of my past businesses, I used dropshipping to sell dog toys through my online store. I charged $20 for a rubber dog toy, and the supplier charged me $10 for the toy and shipping. When I made a sale, the customer paid me $20, and I paid the supplier $10. I made a $10 profit, and the toy was sent directly to my customer from the supplier. Dropshipping is a bit like a retail store that sells a product from a manufacturer or supplier to the end consumer. The only difference from a

retail store is the product I sell is white labeled, which means it looks like I own and manufacture it and only my store sells it. Dropshipping is becoming an outdated, saturated business model. I use it only as a supplementary revenue stream; it is never my primary source of revenue. Customers care a lot about the value and differentiation of your business. When you dropship a product, you work with a manufacturer that sells the exact same product through dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other online stores. A customer could theoretically buy the exact same dog toy from a different online store using the same supplier. For this reason, it is difficult to differentiate your website from other dropshipping websites: everyone is selling the same product. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Examples of SaaS include DropBox and Salesforce. The software itself is the product, usually sold as a recurring membership directly to either consumers or businesses. This is one of the most complex business models you can choose, so I do not recommend starting with a SaaS product. SaaS requires advanced coding, server space, and upkeep, all of which are hard to accomplish without startup capital and investors. It is expensive and can be financially catastrophic if you jump in too soon and invest money in creating a SaaS product that no one needs or purchases. I recommend starting with something simple first, like a course or training program to learn about your market, validate your idea, and grow your following. Then, once you have built up a following and better understand the needs of your market, launch your SaaS product. Remember, this is the type of business that Chris Ronzio is operating with Trainual.com. Chris is an experienced entrepreneur; he did not jump in and start his first business with a SaaS product. After years of consulting and managing businesses, Chris learned the pain points of his target market. His first iteration of Trainual, in 2015, was a self-made compilation of Google Sheets and Dropbox folders. His next iteration was a simple web-based editor that enabled an organization to assign tasks and track progress, which he designed as a wireframe and outsourced to a designer on Upwork.com. Not until 2018, after three years of testing and getting feedback on his minimum viable product, did Chris rebuild and relaunch Trainual with a Facebook

advertising budget of $3,000 per month (increased to $60,000 a few months later). It took years of tweaking, and funding from investors, for Trainual to become what it is today with 10,000 customers worldwide. It’s doable, as Chris has proven, but it takes time and careful testing to do it successfully. The SaaS revenue stream can be highly profitable if done right, but it is far too complex for your first product. Don’t start with this business model; save this product until you are positive that you understand your market and know your SaaS product will be successful. Mobile App Similar to SaaS products, building a mobile app is a difficult business model to begin with. Mobile apps are low-value revenue drivers. Apps are typically monetized with PPC advertising, monthly memberships, or sold as a premium app generating $1.00 to $5.00 profit per sale. A lot of work and money goes into coding the app and updating it when phone software changes, and there is little payoff for all that hard work (trust me, I’ve tried). Mobile apps are great as a supplementary product, something you could consider adding to your business in the future. They can be incredibly profitable when launched in an existing market, when you already have thousands of interested customers ready to download your app. But don’t start with a mobile app as your first revenue stream. You can consider launching a premium app (with a membership feature) as a secondary product only after you build up an audience. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) FBA is the process of selling physical goods on Amazon through its inventory and delivery program. In this process, you work with a manufacturer to create a product, buy inventory, ship it to Amazon’s warehouses, and sell the products on Amazon, which fulfills the orders and ships the products to your customers. I do not recommend starting with this revenue stream. It is a challenging and expensive business model; you will need to invest upfront capital to buy inventory, and your profit margin is reduced by Amazon’s numerous fees. For reference, I paid $10,000 for 500 units of inventory for an Amazon FBA product and struggled to turn a profit. Additionally, it took months to find a

viable manufacturer and weeks to understand the logistics of shipping goods from China, through US Customs, to Amazon warehouses. If done properly, this approach can be profitable, but it is a difficult revenue stream to start with. Greg Mercer of Jungle Scout runs a Million-Dollar Case Study every year that shows how to launch a profitable Amazon FBA product. If this is the revenue stream you choose, I recommend following along with the Jungle Scout Case Studies at quityourjob.life/junglescout. Marketplace If you are selling a physical product or craft, one of the best places to start selling and validating your product is through an online marketplace like Etsy and eBay. They are great ways to introduce your product to the world, quickly get it in front of potential buyers, and start generating revenue. If you do choose this route, I highly recommend that you also start building your own online store to create a following, because marketplaces like Etsy and eBay charge transaction and processing fees that reduce profits. That being said, a marketplace like Etsy is a great place to start and build up a client base. Freelance A freelancer is a person who works as a contractor, offering services to people and businesses for a fee. This is a very broad definition. A freelancer can do video editing, answer emails, design logos, record voiceovers, carry out SEO work, or conduct marketing campaigns. A freelancer can provide pretty much any service for a fee. There are a number of freelance marketplaces where you can list your services and book clients as a freelancer. The two places I recommend for hiring freelancers are upwork.com and fiverr.com. Freelance marketplaces are a good place to start, especially if you are offering a service in a competitive niche such as graphic design, video editing, audio management, or social media administration where traditional marketing methods are not as effective. Once again, I highly recommend building up your own platform, because marketplaces like upwork.com charge fees that reduce your profit. Still, a marketplace like that may be a great place to start generating revenue and build up a client base as you work

on your own platform. Retail You can sell physical products through a retail store. The retailer will purchase products from you and mark them up to sell on their shelves. Instead of selling directly to the consumer, you are selling to the retailer. You will need to consider advertising, labeling, packaging, storage, manufacturing, distribution, pricing, and logistics. All of that can be outsourced, for a fee, to any number of different third-party services. With this business model, the profit margin is smaller, since you need to consider all the expenses of manufacturing and distribution, but this can help with volume to get your product in front of an audience quickly. Remember, this is what Aaron Crowley did. He took his 30 years of experience working in the stone industry and developed his own line of physical products for fabricators including protective jackets, sleeves, and aprons, which he sells through specialty retail shops. Service-Based Offerings When I say service-based offering, I mean trading your time for payment by providing a service. This is a broad type of offering and includes fields like landscaping, home repair, and cleaning services. In all these cases, you need to physically show up at a location and perform a service to be paid. Eventually, you can scale your service business and hire employees to do the work for you, but typically this type of business starts with your doing the heavy lifting, trading the hours in your day for revenue. This is a viable business model; thousands of service-based businesses are started every day. You could start a lawn care service business right now and go door to door, booking new clients at $50 an hour. This type of business is easy to start and easy to monetize. The downside is trading your time for money. If possible, I recommend choosing a passive income stream like online courses or memberships instead of a service-based business. Remember, this is how Chuck Marting started his business at coloradomobiledrugtesting.com. He took his experience as a drug recognition expert and began selling employee drug testing and workplace safety audits. What started as a mobile drug testing business, with clients booking through

his website, has now grown into a brick-and-mortar business with nearly $500,000 in annual sales. This is how you can take your day job to start your service-based business and then pivot to a more passive business model. Physical Product A physical product is anything you can design and manufacture. You can sell it in stores, online, or both: I recommend selling online. The beauty of physical products is that you can start selling right away. There are marketplaces on Amazon, Etsy, and eBay where people are currently searching for your product. You can launch a viable product tomorrow and start getting sales. This is how Rose Griffin built her business and quit her job. Rose is a speech language pathologist and board-certified behavior analyst. She worked in a public school system for 20 years, specializing in helping autistic learners find their voice and a way to communicate with the world. Rose started the business ABA Speech, an online business dedicated to helping, teaching, and training speech language pathologists. She started by selling a physical product called Action Builder Cards, a set of 100 flashcards for autistic learners and those with language delays. The cards are used by speech language pathologists to work with learners and help students generalize their language skills. Rose worked with a designer to produce her flashcards, which she sells through Amazon and other retail distributors in her niche. These flashcards are sold directly to school districts and speech language pathologists. She has since grown the product offerings at ABA Speech to include digital products that help parents and therapists work more effectively with students with autism, along with a suite of online courses for speech language pathologists to earn continuing education credits. Rose successfully took what she had learned in her career as a speech language pathologist and turned it into a full-time business with physical and digital products teaching speech language pathologists. Ellie Dix did something similar. An educational specialist, Ellie managed the largest team of school behavior specialists in the UK. She took her years of expertise in teaching, behavior education, and learning through gamification to build her business at TheDarkImp.com, where she designs, manufactures, and sells education-focused family board games. She sells

everything from coasters containing strategy games to downloadable print games to full-blown board games with little character pieces that look like gnomes. She even wrote The Board Game Family, a book about board games and integrating board gaming into family life. Ellie combined her passion for board games with her professional expertise in behavioral education to create and sell an entire suite of physical products in the board game niche. Compared to other revenue streams, selling physical products comes with a bit of complexity. This is why I prefer selling information and digital products. I create my course once, publish it once, deliver it to the customer in an email, and re-sell it forever. I do not have to worry about production, design, product defects, shipping, importing, exporting, storage, or the complexities of monitoring supply and demand to ensure I am not overordering or under-ordering new inventory. This is why I recommend you start online by selling digital products. Learn about your target market by selling digital products first; then, you can branch out into selling physical products after you have validated your market. Brick and Mortar Brick-and-mortar businesses encompass a wide range of offerings: restaurants, retail stores, insurance agencies, and so on. You can start a brickand-mortar business to attract foot traffic, but this is much more complex and expensive than starting an online business. With the brick-and-mortar business model, you will need to consider rent, utilities, insurance, marketing, and overhead. These add up quickly, and every expense reduces your profit margin. Remember, I recommend starting online to validate your idea and work the bugs out of your business before even considering a brick-andmortar location. Social Media Influencer It is hard to make money, let alone a living, solely as a social media influencer. Growing a large following on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or any social media channel can be a great way to grow your brand, but a large following in itself will not make you money. I see far too many new entrepreneurs start with YouTube, expecting

YouTube revenue to provide them with a full-time income. For reference, the average YouTube channel earns about $3.00 per 1,000 video views. To make $5,000 a month, you would need a YouTube channel that gets 1.6 million views a month. That is a lot of work for very little payoff; it is extremely difficult to reach a million monthly viewers. To make money as a social media influencer, you need something to sell to your audience; the social media platform in itself will not generate enough revenue to support you. You will notice that the influential people you follow on social media, the ones who appear to be making a living as influencers, are frequently promoting products. These are digital products they created, products they are paid to promote (advertising), or commissioned products (affiliate). Social media is certainly an effective tool for growing your business and expanding your reach, but without millions of followers, the social media platform itself will not generate enough revenue to support you financially. Estimate Profit When determining which product or service is best for your business, start by estimating the profit you can generate from each revenue-generating idea. To determine which revenue stream is best, start with the end profit goal in mind and think through how easy or difficult it would be to meet that goal. For example, say your goal is $5,000 per month in revenue. Now, consider how many sales you would need from each revenue stream to meet that goal. If I were selling an online course at $200 per course, I would need 25 sales a month to generate $5,000 in revenue. That is doable. If I were selling a group coaching program at $500 a seat, I would need 10 sales per month to generate $5,000 in revenue. The problem is that group coaching is not a passive revenue-generating method. I would need to invest a lot of time—trading my time for money—to sit down and conduct these group coaching calls month in and month out. Ten group coaching sales per month is doable, but you will need to consider how much work it will take to run a new group coaching program every single month. If I were to implement an affiliate revenue stream and generate $50 in commission for each sale, I would need 100 sales per month to generate

$5,000 in monthly revenue. If I were to start a membership program charging $20 a month, I would need 250 members to generate $5,000 in monthly revenue. Membership programs are very lucrative but can be slow to scale. In this case, if my goal were to reach 250 members and thus $5,000 a month in my first year of business, I would need to add around 21 new members per month, without losing even a single member. If I were to generate revenue through Google AdSense, assuming I made $1.00 every time someone clicked on my advertisement, I would need 5,000 clicks every month to make $5,000. Assuming that 1% of my website visitors clicked on my advertisements, I would need 500,000 people a month visiting my website. That is very difficult to achieve, which is why I am not a fan of the advertising revenue model as a sole source of income. Advertisements can also clog up your website and distract website visitors from your value proposition. PPC advertising only works if you have scale and generate a lot of traffic on your website. When choosing a revenue stream, think first about your business and revenue goals. Work backward from there and consider how many sales you will need each month from each revenue stream to meet your overall revenue goal. The specifics of this analysis will depend on your niche. For example, I can envision the possibility of selling a $5,000 coaching package in the executive coaching niche, a package that teaches clients how to grow their businesses over the course of 10 coaching sessions. However, I cannot envision the possibility of selling a $5,000 B2B coaching package to a momand-pop retail sales associate. You should also consider your pain point research and the value proposition for your business. What product or service should you sell to best solve your target market’s biggest challenge? If the pain point is struggling to get promoted in the insurance industry, then you might want to offer one-onone-coaching. If the pain point is struggling to use Excel automation, then maybe your product will be a course or a membership program. Considering the pain points you solve and the value proposition of your business will help you determine exactly what product or service you will offer. My Strategy

I use a mix of revenue-generating strategies. I implement multiple revenue streams in every one of my businesses. To turn a profit as soon as possible, when I first start a new online business, I start with affiliate marketing. I find one or two lucrative affiliate partners, ones I know and trust, and begin recommending their products to my audience. This is an easy way to begin generating revenue that does not require much work. It takes less than five minutes to sign up with an affiliate partner that you already trust. Then, all you need to do is get your unique affiliate URL from the affiliate partner and begin recommending the products to your audience and website visitors. If someone clicks your link and purchases a product from your affiliate partner, you earn a commission. You do not need to put in any work building a product or service; you simply recommend someone else’s product, which has already been tested and proven. This is an easy way to begin generating revenue from your website. In addition to the affiliate revenue stream, I sell at least one high-value product that I own and control in each of my businesses, whether that means coaching, online courses, or memberships. I sell something that I control and for which I can charge a premium. I charge more than $400 for my online courses, more than $500 for each coaching session, and at least $40 a month for my membership programs. This is how to quickly scale a business and meet that goal of $5,000 per month. This is harder and more time-consuming to pursue, but it is much more lucrative than the other avenues, as you keep 100% of the profit you generate from the products you own. You will need to spend a few months developing your course, writing your book, or creating your membership program. That means putting in more work on the front end, but selling your own product is vital to the long-term success and profitability of your business. I highly recommend you sell your own product, something that you create and own. Affiliate partnerships and advertising relationships can change without any input from you. Your affiliate partner could cut its commission or choose to stop its affiliate program altogether. This could erase your revenue stream overnight. This happened to me when the Amazon affiliate program cut its commission for pet products from 8% to 3%. That revenue stream was cut by more than half overnight. Fortunately, I had other revenue streams with my membership program and books that kept my business

turning a profit, but other online businesses were not as lucky. A number of businesses that relied solely on being Amazon affiliates lost most of their revenue overnight. That is why I recommend you build and sell something you own, control, and sell through your own website. This is my process, and it is what I recommend to new entrepreneurs. Use an affiliate revenue stream to begin generating revenue quickly and easily and mix in your own high-value product or service—a digital product, coaching, online courses, or a membership program—to bolster your revenue. My Revenue Streams As you have likely determined by now, I am a huge fan of digital products, especially online courses. Here is a breakdown of how I make money from my businesses. Online courses. I generate more than $5,000 per month selling online courses; that is my biggest revenue stream. My courses are priced between $200 to $400 each, and I sell between 15 and 20 courses a month. Coaching and group coaching. I charge clients between $500 and $1,000 on average and book roughly one client a month. Print books. The print version of my books are sold for $19.99 on Amazon. I make a profit of around $8.00 per sale (after Amazon fees). I sell 40 to 60 books a month for a monthly profit of around $300 to $500. Audiobooks. The audio versions of my books are sold through Amazon’s Audible program. I make a profit of around $4.15 per sale (after Audible fees). I sell 30 to 50 audiobooks a month for a monthly profit of around $120 to $220. eBooks. The eBook versions of my books sell for $9.99 on Amazon. I make a profit of $6.67 per sale (after Amazon fees). I sell 10 to 20 eBooks a month for a monthly profit of around $70 to $130. Memberships. I have a membership program at The Entrepreneur Ride Along; some members pay monthly, and others pay annually. My membership is currently priced at $50 a month or $500 annually. I can expect to book a few new members per month. If I have just 50

members, that is $2,500 monthly in recurring revenue. Affiliates. I have a wide range of affiliate programs for each niche business I own. Some of these affiliate programs have very low margins (3% per sale on Amazon), while others offer high margins and recurring commissions ($20 a month). This is supplementary to my other products. Typically, I can expect to take in around $500 per month from affiliate programs. Selling marketing. I am just beginning to experiment with selling marketing space on my websites. I receive a few emails a week from brand managers looking to bolster their marketing reach, so I have started selling blog space. I charge $50 to link to their website and provide exposure and $100 for a full guest blog post. So far, this is bringing in around $200 per month. Selling the business. Don’t forget that you are building an asset. You can sell your business for a substantial profit. On average, you can expect to sell a website for 30 to 60 times your monthly profit. For reference, I sold my Pomsky dog breed website for $95,000, which was 55 times my monthly earnings. There are a number of brokers and marketplaces that can help connect you with buyers. I use empireflippers.com when I am selling an online business. You can see how I am using multiple revenue streams, combining digital products, coaching, and affiliate programs to average revenue of more than $7,000 per month. You can see that the bulk of my revenue comes from selling online courses and coaching. I have supplemental revenue streams with memberships, books, marketing, and affiliate programs that help my bottom line. Prioritizing a high-value product (online courses selling for $400 each) is an easy way to quickly reach high profit margins. It’s a lot harder to get to $7,000 in revenue with Amazon affiliates, at around $2 commission per sale. That is why I recommend digital products like courses, memberships, and coaching as your priority, supplemented by affiliate and other revenue streams. All this is to say that you can do a lot to make money from your business. You don’t need to make a final decision right now. This will change; you can pivot as you learn more about your target market and the value your business will provide. For now, I just want you to understand what is possible and how

easy it is to generate revenue from your business idea.

Seven Chapter Seven:

Choose One

Y

ou have done the research; you have come this far. Now, it’s time to choose one business idea.

Look at your three final business ideas. Look at the research you conducted for each of your ideas. Compare the three business ideas to one another. In this final step, after all of your hard work progressing through the steps in this book, I want you to take one last step. Ask yourself the following series of questions about your three business ideas and the research you have conducted to help you determine which one idea you should choose for your first business venture. Target Market Look at your three business ideas and compare their target markets. Ask yourself the following questions: Which target market has a clear and definite pain point that needs to be solved? Which target market are you most excited about; is there one that best suits your personality? Which target market offers the best business opportunity? What would be the value proposition of your business? Competition Take another look at your three business ideas. Consider the competitive landscape of each one and ask yourself the following questions:

In which market is there a clear need for your business that is not being solved by the competition or that could clearly be better solved by your business? How can you differentiate yourself from the competition to better solve the pain point of your target market? Which market is large enough to support multiple businesses so that they all make money selling products and services in the same niche? Revenue streams Lastly, look at your three business ideas and compare the profit potential. Ask yourself the following questions: What product or service would you sell in this niche? How many monthly sales would you need to meet your profit goal? Which business idea offers the best profit potential? Your Best Idea Ask yourself these questions, and really think about how you answer these questions based on the research you have conducted. Which idea stands out as the best idea? Which of these three business ideas are you daydreaming about? Which one do you envision yourself pursuing as your first business? Think back on all the work and research you have conducted throughout this book. You have been through a lot. You have gone from no ideas to over a hundred ideas and back down to one idea. There is one idea on your list worth pursuing for your first business venture. The good news is that there is no wrong answer. Any business idea that has made it through the process this far could be your first business venture. Each of your three remaining ideas has made it through the brain dump list, the narrowing questions, the market size analysis, and the final target market deep-dive analysis. You can make any of these businesses work; the process and research laid out in Chapter Five will simply help you choose the best idea with the greatest chance of immediate profitability and success. That in no way means that your other ideas will not work. When you choose one idea to pursue for your first business, the other two business ideas are not going anywhere. If you change your mind a year from now, you can always pivot and come back to this book and these other business ideas. But you need to

choose one now, one business idea that you will take and run with: the one that will let you use your job to quit your job. Choose One Ask yourself one final question: “Which idea stands out as the best?” That is your business idea. It is the one idea you will take and pursue as your first business venture. You know the answer; now, make the choice. Choose that one business idea and take the first step into entrepreneurship.

Eight Chapter Eight:

Get Started

Y

ou’ve got your idea. Great! Now it's time to get started. It’s time to launch your business. But where do you start?

As I emphasized in Chapter Six, I highly recommend you start with an online business. Start online first. It’s the best way to validate your idea before investing in overhead and moving into a physical location. You might find, after getting started online, that you don’t need a physical location after all. I’m going to keep things simple. In this chapter, I will tell you what you need to start an online business in its simplest form and the first steps you will take to start your business. First: Build A Website To start, all you need is a website. Don’t worry, it’s easy. Here is what you need. Buy a domain name from GoDaddy at quityourjob.life/godaddy ($1 for the first year). Do not get hung up on this. You can change your business name later. Buy hosting from Site Ground at quityourjob.life/siteground (around $50 for a year). Choose the smallest plan to begin with; you can upgrade later when you get more traffic to your website. SiteGround will prompt you to create a WordPress website. Go ahead and set up your account. Buy Thrive Themes at quityourjob.life/thrivethemes (around $200 per

year). This is optional but highly recommended. This is an incredibly simple drag-and-drop website builder. It’s what I use for all of my websites and is the easiest way to create a professional-looking website. Buy a logo from Fiverr at quityourjob.life/fiverr ($5). Again, do not get hung up on this. Give the designer some examples of logos that you like. It doesn’t have to be perfect; you can change your logo later. Signup for Stripe at quityourjob.life/stripe (2.9% fee per transaction). This is your secure payment gateway. This holds your money and deposits it into your bank account. Download the WooCommerce plugin to your WordPress website at quityourjob.life/woocommerce (free). This is your online store and how you sell products through your website. Once you have those features, you can begin building your website. I have included a full suite of step-by-step instructions to get your website up and running in the companion course. That being said, there is one major caveat to this step, one condition that you must obey: do not spend more than two days building and perfecting your website. I see far too many entrepreneurs waste months tweaking and perfecting every little detail of their website. They tinker with every word, color, and image before finally launching the business, but no one ever sees it. They never actually launch the business because they burned themselves out writing and re-writing the About Us page. Don’t do that. The process of building a website is theoretically endless, and it will take all of your time if you let it. Set a limit for yourself; don’t spend more than two days building your website. Your website is an ongoing project; you will always be tweaking and perfecting it. At this stage, however, getting people to visit and buy from your website is far more important than a perfect-looking website. This is the first iteration of your website. Think of it as a first draft that will change dramatically in the months and years to come. For now, you only need to set up a website with a home page, contact page, blog page, and sales page. That is all you need right now. It is more important to focus on content, traffic, and sales right now. You can perfect your website later. Second: Start Selling

The purpose of a business is to make money, so that’s what you should do: start selling right away. Once you have your website set up, you can start selling. You don’t need to wait until you have an email list of 10,000 subscribers, or 50,000 Instagram followers; you don’t even need to wait until your product is ready to deliver. The website traffic, social media followers, email subscribers, and all the rest will follow. They will grow slowly at first and snowball over time. So don’t wait: start selling now. You should set the goal of making your first sale within three months of launching your business. Whether you start with an affiliate revenue stream, coaching, courses, books, or some other revenue stream, selling is the best way to validate your business idea and your product offering. Your business is officially validated when strangers start pulling out their wallets and paying you for your product or service. When someone pays you, it means you have successfully understood your target market’s pain point and solved their problem with your product or service. That is the definition of a validated business idea. You can start selling now, even before you have perfected your product. It’s called “pre-selling”; it means you sell the product to your target market (at a discounted rate) before you finish creating it. This process works well for product validation, especially if you are writing a book or creating a course because several months will pass before the final product is ready for sale. With a presale, your customer pays a reduced rate for the product that you are creating; in return, they get first access to the final product when it is finished. I do this for every product I sell. Before I invest the time and effort into writing a new book or creating a new course, I validate that people want what I am selling. I see far too many entrepreneurs spend months creating a new course, only to launch and find out that no one wants to buy what they are selling. The presale validates your idea; it ensures that you are building a product that people want and proves that your product idea is so good that someone is willing to pay for it even before you have finished creating it. When I launch a presale, I create a Founding Members Group. Anyone that enrolls in the presale is included in a small group of founding members who get direct access to me and have the opportunity to provide input or

feedback to ensure that the final product meets their specific needs. When I pitch the presale, I create a sales page describing the product I envision. I make it clear that the product is not yet finished, but all founding members will get access to the product as it is being created and will receive access to the final product once it is finished. I price the presale at a reduced rate, usually a 50% discount, to encourage early adopters to take advantage of the significant savings. This is how I validate each of my businesses and every product I sell. I presold this book. That is how I validated the idea for this book. I went to Reddit, joined the entrepreneur community, and started helping entrepreneurs by answering their forum posts. I made 30 worthwhile connections. I pitched my book idea to these 30 entrepreneurs, described my vision for the book, and offered them a Founding Member spot for $10. I sold 10 copies of the book before I wrote the first word. I validated that people liked the idea, I validated that people wanted to learn from me, and I validated that my solution was so powerful that strangers were willing to pay me for the book before I started writing. That is a validated product. That is what I want you to do. You do not need to create your course, write your book, or finish your product before you start selling. Start selling now with a presale. Selling is a lot easier than you think. At this stage in your business, you can spend 10 minutes per day on social media connecting with people in your target market. Build rapport and send each connection a direct message to pitch your products and services; you will automate this process later. Look back at the 50 people you surveyed and connected with in Chapter Five. Those are 50 people in your target market; they have already shown that they are interested in what you are selling. Some of those 50 connections could be your first customers. Now that you have an idea for a business, do not waver. It is a good idea; go get some sales and make it happen. Leverage your LinkedIn connections. Your first consulting client is sitting right there on LinkedIn. Go and reconnect with people that you have worked with that have moved on to different companies, reach out to your past employers and managers, and make new connections in your niche. Strike up a conversation, tell people what you are working on, and ask how

you can help. One-on-one selling and connecting is the easiest way to get your first sale. It might not be pretty, and it is certainly not passive, but it works. This is what Kevin Namaky did to start Gurulocity.com, his corporate training business for brand managers. In starting his business, Kevin booked his first clients through a simple outreach strategy. He downloaded his list of connections from LinkedIn and emailed a few people per day to let them know he had started his own business: Hey, it's Kevin. I just wanted to reach out to say hi and let you know what I'm up to. I recently started this new business at gurulocity.com, and I'm reaching out to let everyone in my network know what I'm doing these days. I'd love to hear what you're up to as well. Let me know if you're up for a chat. That’s it. He didn’t do anything crafty. He didn’t put together a sleek sales deck or elevator pitch. He didn’t spam posts to his network. All he did was message his connections on LinkedIn. That simple message started the conversation and resulted in a 60% response rate, which soon led to a backlog of clients and referrals. It’s that simple. Send five messages a day and you can grow a business that will replace the income from your day job. Once you get your first sale and work as hard as you can to deliver the best service possible, ask for a referral. Your first client knows people. They are connected with hundreds of other people on LinkedIn at different companies with the same challenges. Ask your clients for a connection, just a foot in the door to start the conversation. Your first client will lead to your next client. This is how you can get started manually selling your products and services to one person at a time. Then, you can scale and eventually automate the process. But you need that first sale, so go out there and start selling. That is how you validate your business. Third: Content Marketing You need to provide amazing value, for free, to attract people to your business. Remember, you are new in this space. At this time, no one knows you or trusts you. That is why you need to put out free content: to show your value and expertise. That could mean free consulting calls, a free coaching call, a free sample, or free tutorial videos. Whatever it is, you need to give away something of value to attract your audience, prove your expertise, and

build trust before your audience will be willing to pay you. In online business, the way to do this is with content marketing. In online business, content is king. Content marketing is the process of creating free resources to help your target market: think blogs, vlogs, webinars, eBooks, and podcasts. It’s your voice, answering questions, and creating helpful resources that are relevant to your target market. This attracts potential customers to your website. It shows that you are knowledgeable on the topic of your business, builds trust, and creates leads who may later buy your products and services. This is a long-term strategy, something you should be doing on the side while you continue pre-selling or selling your minimally viable product. The purpose of content creation is to help your target market, for free, to become known as an authority in the niche, and to attract new people to your website, where they will see your products and services. At The Entrepreneur Ride Along, I write blogs and record podcast episodes discussing entrepreneurship and online business. I create helpful free content to assist entrepreneurs in building their first business. That content is how people find my website, and that content is the reason people join my email list, learn to trust me as an expert in the industry, and, ultimately, buy my products. Create content for your niche. Choose one method of content creation to start with (blog, video, podcast). Choose topics in your niche, ideally ones that will be helpful for your target market, and create content about those topics. That content will attract people to your website, bring in new leads and new customers, and help you become known as a trustworthy business. Fourth: Scale The final step is all about scale. This is intentionally broad because scale depends on your business model. If you are selling a corporate training program to marketing managers, scale will mean using LinkedIn ads, attending industry conferences, growing your following, increasing your authority, and expanding your referral base. If you are selling medical scrubs through a retail store, scale will mean connecting with more retailers, improving your in-store visibility, and improving your packaging to increase conversion.

For me and my online businesses, scale is all about increasing the website’s organic traffic and email leads. That means writing more blogs, writing more books, podcasting consistently, and connecting with more coaching clients. That brings new people into my world who then learn to know, like, and trust me. Those become customers of my courses, coaching, and membership programs. No matter your business, scale comes down to three key aspects: 1) Traffic. Get more eyeballs on your business, products, and services. Keep leveraging new strategies and platforms until you find the method that brings in consistent traffic to your business. For me, this is blogging and using SEO. This could also mean paid advertising through Google or Facebook or growing your social media following on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms. Find the strategy that works for you and stick to it. Don’t try to do it all. Just pick one strategy that works and master it. 2) Conversion. Keep tweaking your offering to better convert visitors into paying customers. Maybe this means you need to improve your sales page, perfect your sales pitch, work on getting referrals from your current clients, pivot your product to better meet their needs, or even create a new product to upsell your current customers. For me, this means tweaking my email automations. All of my conversions come from people that join my email list. 3) Automation. This is the key to scaling. How can you automate aspects of your business so you can spend more time on the profit-generating activities? You could hire an assistant to answer emails and process orders or invest in systems to automatically tally inventory and process orders or build an automated email marketing funnel, just as I did. Find a way to automate your daily tasks and sales funnel so that you can scale rapidly, without the need to personally hustle to make every sale. Start Now It is really that simple. Build your online presence with a website, start selling your minimally viable product, create content, and scale. There is nothing stopping you from getting started. So, what are you waiting for? Go and get started now!

Nine Chapter Nine:

Quit Your Job

“H

ey David, do you have a quick five minutes to jump on a call this morning?”

My heart was pounding as I awaited a reply from my boss. Today was the day I was giving my two weeks’ notice. I was taking the first step into full-time entrepreneurship, knowing I would never look back. Just an hour earlier, as I was putting on my polo preparing for a dreadful day sitting in Zoom meetings, Brooke walked into the room and said, “How about today?” “What?” I said. “Give your notice today. Now is as good a time as any.” Do you know what I said? I said no. No, it wasn’t the right time. “Let’s talk about it after work and find a date that works,” I said. “I have this big forecasting project at work; I’ve been working on it for weeks. I can’t leave my team hanging. Anyways, I should wait until I publish my next insurance course and I’m consistently hitting $10,000 a month. Also, we should probably put down a deposit on the inground pool first. We will need my double income for a little bit longer; we have a lot of expenses coming up. Let’s wait until next year after I get my bonus in January. That’s only nine months away.” Every excuse under the sun came bumbling out of my mouth. Can you believe that? All that hard work building my business for years on the side, working mornings, nights, and weekends waiting for this day—and I said no?

Yep, that’s how my Leap Day began. Luckily, my wife knows me better than anyone. She knew it was fear of the unknown. She didn’t buy my excuses. We had talked about this for over two years now, waiting for the right moment, trying to get everything perfectly lined up before I took on my business full time. I’m the type that likes to have everything planned out in advance, to ensure I know exactly how the future will pan out before making a move. She knows that. She had seen me deteriorating over the past year, struggling more and more to balance a nine-to-five job while trying to grow my business. It was wearing me down, which is why her reassurance, deflecting every one of my excuses with a counterpoint, pointing out my fear, and giving me a look that said “Are you kidding? This is what you want” was exactly what I needed. That little push and her support helped me make one of the easiest but most nerve-wracking decisions of my life. Poor David. He didn’t see it coming. He had no clue how successful my side businesses were. It was a complete shock, especially since we had just finished my quarterly review and talked about my growing into a management role in the future (yuck). As I disconnected the Zoom call after breaking the news to my boss, I felt I had simultaneously had a huge weight lifted off my shoulder and been kicked in the gut. The strangest mixture of relief, excitement, and fear crashed into me like a linebacker. I had done it. I had made the leap. Leap Day Friday, April 16, 2021, was one of the best days of my life. It’s the day I gave my two weeks’ notice, and for the first time in my life admitted to the world that I was an entrepreneur. Friday, April 16, 2021, was my Leap Day, a term I first heard used by Chris Nelson to describe the day set in stone to leap into full-time entrepreneurship. You have your idea for your first business, and now it’s time to start dreaming about your own Leap Day.

It’s Your Turn You have an amazing business idea. You know how you will differentiate yourself with your idea, and you know how you are going to make money. You are days away from launching your business. You are an entrepreneur.

You feel like you are ready to leave the corporate world and leap full time into entrepreneurship. Time to quit your job, right? Not so fast … Don’t Quit Your Day Job (Yet) Don’t do it; don’t quit your job. Keep your day job (for now). This is not the time to cut ties and leap into full-time entrepreneurship. Slow down; get your business up and running first. Start your business on the side while working your day job and use the steady income from that job to invest in your business. Start making money from your business on a regular basis. Be sure your business is systematized for success before making the leap. Make sure you are set up with an LLC, paying taxes, and giving yourself a livable wage. Then, after everything is in place and your business is fully operational (and profitable), you can think about leaving your day job, making the jump into full-time entrepreneurship, and taking on that business full time. It will be hard. I was ready to quit my job the day I made my first sale, but I’m glad I didn’t. I still had a lot to learn and a lot of work to do before I was prepared to quit and take on full-time entrepreneurship. It took me seven years after starting my first business to quit my day job: my first few businesses failed. I did not quit until I was regularly generating income of at least $5,000 per month. Start on the Side Start your business on the side while you are still working full time. I can’t stress this enough. A lot goes into running a business, a lot you don’t know yet. Things don’t always go according to plan. The best thing you can do is start your business on the side while you continue to work full time. Don’t make the leap into full-time entrepreneurship just yet. Go slow, get your website set up and start selling, and figure out the business before you quit your job. Talk to Your Employer One important thing to consider before you start your business is ensuring that there is no conflict of interest with your employer. It might be stated in

your employment contract that you cannot take on outside work. It is essential to be upfront with your employer. Talk to your human resources department before you make any moves, but do not let it hold you back. This is what happened to Chris Nelson. After years of teaching at a school for banking executives, Chris was told by his employer that he was no longer allowed to continue outside work and that all executives should be focused on the goals of the company rather than their personal gain. But that didn’t stop Chris. Although he couldn’t be out there drumming up business and driving sales, he could work on some of the logistics behind the scenes: maintaining relationships, setting up an LLC, building a private website, and planning his next moves so that when he did quit his job, he could hit the ground running. When you talk to your employer, don’t discuss your plan in great detail. Do not walk into your manager’s office and say, “I’m using my job to quit my job”; that will not go over well. I did not tell my boss, “I want to take these exams so I can create my own study material and quit my job.” Instead, I told my boss up front that I wanted to do some tutoring on the side. I told my boss that I wanted to help others pass their CPCU® exams. Eventually, I would charge for my services but for now, I just want to create a website and share what I was learning. All I needed to do was fill out a form, which was sent to human resources, to formally disclose my side project to the employer. In many cases, this is perfectly fine, and your employer will have no problem letting you start a side business. If it’s not allowed, then start looking for a new job! That is what I did when my job got too demanding. My day job was taking up all the time I needed to work on my business. So, I spent a few months interviewing and found a new job that allowed me to work from home. This gave me more time and flexibility to work on my business. Talk to your employer first. Then start your business on the side, build up your client list, and figure out the logistics before you quit your job. Make Time You need to make progress on your business every single day. I often hear entrepreneurs say, “I have no time. I work, and when I’m not working, I’m taking care of the kids.” Challenge that thought. Is that true? Do you really

have no time? Do you commute to the office in the morning? If so, buy a digital recorder and record podcast episodes while you drive to work, or use the speech-to-text function on your phone to dictate blogs while you drive. I wrote my first book, a dog training book for one of my niche sites, on my daily train ride to work. For half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening, on the way to and from work, I sat on the train with my laptop, typing away in Microsoft Word. Do you have an hour's lunch break at work? Bring your laptop and write up another module for your online course. Do you have 15 minutes between meetings? Pull out your phone and connect with prospective clients on social media. Do you have an hour’s wait at your kid’s soccer practice? Bring your laptop and type up a blog post or bring your phone and call up your coaching client. Can you wake up an hour earlier? Get up early and answer emails while you make breakfast. Can you open your laptop while you watch Netflix in bed? I know you can! Sign up for a new affiliate product while you bingewatch the latest Netflix original series. You have the time; you just need to spend that time more wisely. If you work two hours a day on weekdays, that is 10 hours per week invested in your business. That simple commitment, week in and week out, will go a long way. I did that for seven years as I scaled my businesses. I worked half an hour on my commute to work, an hour on my lunch break at a local cafe, and half an hour on my commute home from work. In just two hours every weekday, I built four businesses, launched more than 20 online courses, wrote more than 300 blog posts, recorded over 100 podcast episodes, wrote a dog training book, coached hundreds of clients, and generated enough revenue to match the income from my day job, which I have now quit. That is what you can do with just two hours a day. That is all you need. Find the time to work on your business and make progress every day. Knowing When to Quit You do not need to wait seven years like I did; I was slower than most, but you should still take it slow. Give yourself at least a year and dedicate yourself to your new business. Starting a business is stressful enough, so give yourself the time to start this business on the side while working your day

job. Get your business up and running and generating regular revenue before taking the leap into full-time entrepreneurship. The hard part is knowing precisely when to quit. I struggled with it, and there’s really no right answer; it is different for each person. That being said, in my experience, there are three ways to know whether it’s time to make the leap. 1.

2.

3.

Running out of time. You run out of time in your day; if you had more time, you could grow your business. This happens when the time spent on your business is more valuable than the time spent on your day job because you can make more money in your business. There is no ceiling to how much you can make from your business, unlike your day job, which gives you a raise of 3% per year. Making half the money AND enjoying it more. When I started making half of my day job income, I started taking my side business more seriously. At that point, quitting my job became a real possibility. I was spending 10 to 20 hours per week on my business, and I was able to make 50% of my salary. Imagine what I could do with a full 40 hours a week! I soon started making more money from my side businesses than I did from my day job, so I quit my job to pursue entrepreneurship full time. You don’t have to wait that long. When you hit the 50% mark, it’s time to start considering an exit plan. You should also seriously consider whether you enjoy what you are doing on the side; is it really what you want to do full time? Do you want the freedom to be an entrepreneur? If you like what you are doing, crave the feeling of being your own boss, make at least half as you do in your day job, and see the potential for growth, it is time to start considering taking the leap into full-time entrepreneurship. Set a date, save, and make the leap. The best way to make the transition is to be sure you have a safety net with a liquid savings account in the bank. This is what I did. The beauty of building your business on the side is that you build up a nice little pile of cash because you are earning two incomes: one from your day job income and the other from your business. However, there is a hidden danger here; that double income can be hard to walk away from. I’ve seen many entrepreneurs get stuck in these “golden handcuffs,” so always

keep in mind why you wanted to pursue entrepreneurship in the first place. It probably wasn’t the money; it was most likely the freedom, the passion, and the excitement, with the money being a necessary and nice bonus. I had a double income for years, and it was amazing. It helped me cover expenses while my wife was in law school, pay off debt, buy an engagement ring, pay for a wedding, and save for a down payment on a house. I got stuck in the trap of double income for a long time, and it can definitely be life-changing, so you need to set a savings goal and a date when you will leave. This safety net is your fallback. If something goes terribly, terribly wrong, like you receive a cease-anddesist letter and need to completely shut your business down, the safety net will be there to cover expenses while you rebuild your business so you don’t have to go crawling back to the corporate world begging for a job. I set a goal to save enough to cover six months to a year of expenses, which ended up being a safety net of around $60,000; I still have it, because I haven’t needed to use it yet. I calculated how much I would need to save each month to meet that goal. I ended up putting away $4,000 per month for a little over a year. Almost every dollar earned from my business was saved in my safety net fund. Brooke and I spoke, and we agreed on a date in April 2021, a few months after we bought our house. That made for an easy transition into full-time entrepreneurship. I had the safety net and the date set long in advance. This way, when the day came, even though it was still incredibly nerve-wracking—and I tried to chicken out—I felt prepared to make the leap. Except that—because I had prepared so carefully and saved so faithfully—rather than a leap, it felt more like an easy step into the next phase of my professional life. I’ll give one prerequisite to the decision to quit your day job. You must actually start your business, operate it for a while, and have solid revenue generation before you make the leap. Don’t quit right away. Get your feet wet, get some clients, and get the kinks out before making the jump.

Considerations Before You Quit Ready to quit yet? I know you are: I was. Before you make the leap into fulltime entrepreneurship, there are a few considerations you need to make.

How Much Do You Need to Quit? The big question to ask yourself is how much money you need to quit. Do you really need to match your day job salary of $120,000 per year, or can you take a pay cut? Can you downsize and live a temporarily less frivolous life for a year or two while you scale your business? Maybe you really only need $60,000 to cover your expenses. That means you just need $5,000 a month in profit from your business. That’s doable. If you have a training business selling a training program for $10,000, that’s just six clients a year and you can quit your job! Determine your number. Make sure you are hitting that number regularly before you quit your job (or know you can reach that number by focusing on your business for 40 hours a week). Transitional Job Before I made the leap into full-time entrepreneurship, I made a lateral move. I moved from my long-time office job to a company that allowed me to work from home full time. This helped me acclimate to the lifestyle of working from home and figure out my schedule. More importantly, it gave me an extra three hours per day to work on my business to scale and make final arrangements before making the leap into full-time entrepreneurship. With my old schedule, I would wake up at six am, leave the house by seven am, drive to the train station, take the train for half an hour, walk from North Station in Boston across the city for half an hour, and arrive at the office around nine am. Then, I had the opposite commute back home. Approximately three to four hours of commute time, and I got all that time back. With my new job working from home, I could wake up at six am, work for three hours, shower quickly before nine am, and jump online when my other workday started. On slow days (which happened often), I could pull up my personal laptop and get in another hour or two working on my business without worrying about working on the company laptop. This allowed much more flexibility and freedom. Now, from the comfort of my own home and without my boss peeping at my work productivity every few minutes, I had the freedom to record videos, record podcasts, and conduct coaching calls. This extra time allowed me to scale my business portfolio from $60,000 in annual revenue to $90,000. At that point, I quit my transitional job.

End on Good Terms Don’t burn any bridges with your employer—whether long term or transitional—on the way out. End things on good terms. Give your two weeks’ notice, share and be open about what you are doing, add your coworkers on LinkedIn, grab a beer with your boss, and tie up the relationship in a bow on your way out the door. Not only is this the best approach to being a good person and wrapping up your work relationships, but remember you are talking to a potential client. Anyone you have ever worked with and any company you have worked for could turn into a client. Your connections are your best lead generators. Chris Nelson’s employer became his first paying client, hiring him to continue advising the company on a consulting basis. Tom Heffner has leveraged his connections with past coworkers to get his foot in the door at companies including Starbucks, Porsche, and Google. Frank Lipski connects with firefighters from other departments at corporate events; these connections end up becoming his clients joining his membership and buying his SaaS product. Your employer might be your first client, and your coworkers can be your first group of leads. Don’t burn any bridges: end on good terms with your employer when you leave. Fees It is important to consider the fees associated with your business that might eat into your profit margin, like taxes and annual state filing fees for your LLC. As a general rule, in the United States, you can plan on paying 30% of your gross revenue in taxes. Once you start generating revenue, you will be paying quarterly tax estimates. Consider hiring an accountant. It’s affordable and will save you time. I pay my accountant $60 a month for quarterly tax estimates. LLC Set up an LLC for your business. It cost me $500 to set up my LLC in Massachusetts, and that’s one of the most expensive states in which to incorporate. Setting up an LLC is an easy and inexpensive way to protect your business and, especially, personal assets. It will only cost you a few hundred dollars and will ensure that your savings, house, and car cannot be

part of a business-related lawsuit. Use a company like Incfile.com to do this for you (that’s what I did). Don’t concern yourself with the legal paperwork; let a professional handle it. Work Schedule Setting a schedule is absolutely imperative. When you go into full-time entrepreneurship, you will have unlimited time to work, but don’t use it all working! Set boundaries. Don’t work all night. One reason to be an entrepreneur is to enjoy flexibility. You can eat lunch with your spouse now. You are home for dinner now. You can leave work to catch your son’s soccer game. So, what’s your work schedule going to be? You are in control now. You don’t have to work from nine to five. How many hours are you going to work? Are you a morning person? Great, then use your mornings. Do you really need to work eight hours a day? I work from one pm to five pm. Typically, I get more done in four hours of dedicated work than I do in eight hours of scattered, energy-draining days. Logistics What else do you need in place before you quit? Can you join your spouse’s health insurance plan, or do you need to buy a health insurance plan before you quit? What will you do to save for retirement? Can you open a new retirement account to continue contributing and saving for retirement? Set up a business bank account and consider if you need an accountant or bookkeeper. Think through the logistics of your situation before you quit. Make sure everything is ready for you to leave your day job. Talk To Your Spouse You are not normal. The fact that you are reading this book and looking to start your business means you are different. You do not think like most normal people, and no one will think you are normal. The second you start talking about how you plan to quit your nine-to-five job to be an entrepreneur and pursue your business full time, you will be hit with doubt. Doubt from others will make you doubt yourself: I’ve been there. Start having these conversations early and often, especially if you have a family. I had these conversations with Brooke for years, talking through how

it would work and what it would look like if I left my cushy corporate job. Not being normal is the reason I started The Entrepreneur Ride Along membership program, because there aren’t many of us out there. I don’t know anyone in my immediate area who is an entrepreneur pursuing online business. So, we take to online communities to meet others like us with the same dreams, goals, and ideas. Your brain works differently than most people in this world. Most people are not entrepreneurs; they do not want to take risks and go out on their own. They enjoy the consistent, slow, nine-to-five corporate climb. When you talk to corporate people about your business, you will stir the pot. It will be like showing up at a party at your friend’s house speaking German when everyone else is speaking English. You will get funny looks, you will get questions doubting your sanity, and you will have to defend yourself. Don’t take any of it to heart. Speak early and often with your family about your entrepreneurship goals. Get on the same page. Don’t spring it on your significant other as I did. She didn’t know I had this burning passion and desire in my life (because I didn’t know it existed yet). My wife and I dated through college; she was expecting me to become a financial analyst working my way up the finance department the way I had always studied for and planned. Imagine her surprise when I told her I hated what I was doing and wanted to quit my job to start an online business. It sounded ludicrous! She probably thought I’d hit my head and got a concussion on the way home from the office. You think differently, so give people the opportunity to ask questions and understand; it will take a while for them to get on the same wavelength as you. This is especially true of your significant other; this may come as a shock to them. Give them time to get on board and see the success you are having; this is another perk to building your business on the side. You can show the viability of what you are building before you make the leap into full-time entrepreneurship. If they doubt you, ignore it and prove them wrong with your incredible success. You are on the right path now. Do It!

When the time is right, make the leap. There will never be a perfect time, so I can’t tell you with absolute certainty when you will be ready to quit your job. For some, it will be within a year. For others, like me, it will be seven years down the road, after they have built up enough capital to replace the income from their day job. Remember, this book is just the beginning; it is only the start of your journey of self-employment. Don’t put pressure on yourself to quit tomorrow. Give yourself the time and the space to grow. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Take your time building your business and grow it on the side; when you are ready, make the leap. Once the time comes, don’t doubt yourself. If you start getting the itch, if you start to feel like your day job is holding you back, if you feel like you could double your sales if you had more time in your day, then you know it’s time to make the leap and quit your job.

Ten Chapter Ten:

Conclusion

I

cannot wait. I cannot wait to hear from you in a few months about how you started your business and took the first steps into entrepreneurship, the same steps that took you closer to quitting your job.

Having read this book, you are officially one step closer to quitting your job. The blueprint has been laid out. You now have an idea and a plan for your first business. You just went through the rigorous process of reading an entire book and conducting the exercises in that book to find this one idea for your first business venture. In Chapter Two, you learned all about the blueprint and why you should use your job to quit your job: it’s the easiest and quickest way to success. In Chapter Three, you went through the brain dump exercise and came up with over a hundred business ideas. You dug deep into your current day job, experiences, and expertise to create a list of potential niche businesses. In Chapter Four, you conducted research using Semrush to validate the market for your ideas and analyzed your niche to choose the three ideas with the best market potential. In Chapter Five, you took a deep dive into those ideas to determine the pain points in each target market. In Chapter Six, you used these paint points to choose the best revenue stream for your business idea. Finally, in Chapter Seven, you used all of this research to select the best idea for your first business. You chose one idea for your first business venture: one that will not fail. Finally, in Chapter Eight, you started taking the next steps to push your business forward, the next steps in launching your business and continuing on the entrepreneurial

journey, and in Chapter Nine, you started preparing to quit your job. You have come a long way since starting this book. Think back to Chapter One, dreaming of one day quitting your job and living a life of pursuing the entrepreneurial dream. Now look at where you are. You have one strong business idea and a plan for the next steps to building your business. You are set up for success as an entrepreneur. You’ve laid the groundwork. You did the work and found the best possible idea; now comes the fun part. It is time for your personal touch and ingenuity to launch this business and bring your vision to life. Now, you get to enjoy launching, nurturing, and growing your business; the revenue will follow. You have the tools, you have a valid business idea, and you know what to do next. Now go out there and do it: use your job to quit your job.

Author’s Note

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hank you for reading Use Your Job to Quit Your Job. This book has been a lot of fun (and a lot of work!) to write. I’ve been thinking about writing this book for nearly a decade. I’ve been teaching its content for years now and have finally translated that into a blueprint for others to follow. This is one of my absolute favorite subjects to write about, and I am grateful to everyone who picks up this book and welcomes me into their world. If you have made it this far, you have completed Use Your Job to Quit Your Job. You have done the work, so now it’s time to launch your business. If you have any questions, please reach out to me at [email protected]. I love meeting new entrepreneurs; I am more than happy to connect and talk about your business. I Need Your Help Did this book help you in some way? If so, I’d love to hear about it. Honest reviews help readers find the right book for their needs. If you enjoyed reading Use Your Job to Quit Your Job, would you mind visiting the Amazon sales page to leave an honest review of this book? It would be a huge help. You can leave a review on Amazon by going to quityourjob.life/review and click on Write a Product Review next to your order for Use Your Job to Quit Your Job. Your positive feedback really helps! I have already received some great feedback about Use Your Job to Quit Your Job, and you can be sure I read every review. Because of this feedback, I have been able to tweak the book and companion course to ensure I cover every topic and answer every question a new entrepreneur could be expected to have. I greatly appreciate your help. I absolutely love hearing from

entrepreneurs; your feedback means the world to me! TO LEAVE A REVIEW, VISIT quityourjob.life/review

Companion Course

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ll the chapters in this book include actionable steps to brainstorm, validate, and ultimately choose the best idea for your first business venture. Although it’s not required, I highly recommend that you access the free companion course that I have created for you to follow along with each action step at quityourjob.life/course. In this free course, you will have access to supplemental material like downloadable worksheets, video content, and other resources mentioned in this book. The supplemental materials in this free course are organized by book chapter and section, making it easy for you to find what you need as you read along. FOR COMPANION COURSE ACCESS, VISIT quityourjob.life/course

Appendix

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ow that you know the process and see how easy it is to use your job to start your first business, let’s look at some real examples that can help you find your first business idea.

Examples, Examples, Examples

This chapter consists entirely of examples that you can use to spark additional ideas and insights for businesses that you could pursue. Below, I go through a quick run-through of the process laid out in Chapters Three and Four, answering a few brain dump questions and finding viable options through Semrush. This is just to show you that there are opportunities connected to every job, career, and sector. I do not answer every brain dump question or conduct an in-depth analysis of each market, because that would be overkill for the sake of example in this book. I ask myself three or four brain dump questions and show you how just a few of those questions can spark an idea for your business. Finance Griffin Nuttall is a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) manager for a military defense company. He is responsible for modeling and forecasting financial data in order to generate a forward-looking view of the company’s finances, with a focus on orders, sales, profits, and cash flow. Brain Dump Ideas Going through the brain dump exercise, Griffin came away with a number of viable ideas. I have summarized a few below. Skills. Modeling, leadership development, conducting new hire interviews,

intern development. Software programs. Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, Hyperion SmartView Excel Addon, Adobe Pro, Microsoft Power BI. Physical products. Blue light eyeglasses and loafers. Learning. Mergers and acquisitions activities. Tools and software used by other departments. Alteryx, Excel macros. Analysis I analyzed the market for each idea using Semrush. I started by analyzing the main focus of Griffin's job, FP&A. I found the following results: “FP&A” (22,200 monthly searches), “Financial planning and analysis” (2,900 monthly searches), “FP&A Consulting” (590 monthly searches), “FP&A Certification” (480 monthly searches), “FP&A Course” (170 monthly searches), and “FP&A Training” (90 monthly searches). These results show a clear niche opportunity for FP&A training resources with plenty of lowcompetition keywords specific to FP&A terms like “FP&A interview questions” (390 monthly searches) and “FP&A manager resume” (210 monthly searches). There is an opportunity here to build a business providing FP&A training and consulting. This is the easiest path Griffin could take to start a business; he simply has to teach what he already does in his day job. Next, I analyzed leadership. I found “leadership development program” (3,600 monthly searches), “operations leadership development program” (1,900 monthly searches), “leadership training programs” (1,900 monthly searches), and “executive leadership development program” (590 monthly searches). There is some opportunity here. Remember that we are looking for a minimum of 10,000 monthly searches on a given topic to verify the market potential, unless there is a high-value product to sell. In this case, I could see Griffin selling a B2B leadership development training program for $10,000, so he does not need a large market. That being said, there looks to be a lot of competition here. This is probably too broad for Griffin’s business. Moving on to the software Griffin uses, I looked into Oracle Hyperion. There was not a lot of opportunity in this niche: “Oracle Hyperion” had 1,300 monthly searches, and “Hyperion Smart View” had only 170 searches. This is

too narrow a niche; there is simply not enough search volume here to support a business. It would be a struggle to generate a minimum of $5,000 per month in this niche. I then analyzed the potential of Microsoft Power BI. I tried “Microsoft Power BI” (135,000 monthly searches), “Power BI Training” (6,600 monthly searches), “Power BI tutorial” (2,900), and “Power BI Course” (880 monthly searches). Although there is a lot of competition in this space, with a Semrush Keyword Difficulty Score above 80 for every one of these search terms, this is a large enough market that there is still an opportunity to carve out a niche. I see plenty of low-competition topics that could be turned into tutorials or trainings such as “Power BI Sum using weeknum for multiple fields” (9,900 monthly searches), “Power BI Transform Data Add Row” (1,900 monthly searches), and “Power BI Standard Deviation” (720 monthly searches). There is an opportunity to build a niche business here providing Microsoft Power BI training and tutorials. Griffin would simply have to find a way to differentiate himself from the competition. Next, I analyzed the physical products Griffin uses in his day job. In the finance field, there are not too many physical products used on a daily basis, but Griffin was still able to list a few, including blue light glasses. I found that “blue light glasses” had 165,000 monthly searches. There is a lot of niche opportunity in blue light glasses, including “kids blue light glasses” (2,900 searches), “Ray Ban blue light glasses” (2,900 searches), “Quay blue light glasses” (2,900 searches), and “Zenni blue light glasses” (1,300 searches). There are also a number of low-competition topics that Griffin could turn into content on a website, such as “how to clean blue light glasses” (590 searches) and “how to test blue light glasses” (590 searches). I could see this becoming an affiliate website reviewing and recommending the best blue light glasses and accessories; it could even turn into a physical product business selling Griffin’s preferred brands of blue light glasses, cleaning kits, and related accessories. Loafers are the other physical product Griffin listed. I found that there are 90,500 monthly searches for “loafers.” To narrow the scope, I found the following results: “men’s loafers” (27,100 monthly searches), “platform loafers” (22,200 monthly searches), or “chunky loafers” (12,100 monthly

searches). There are also a number of low-competition topics that Griffin could turn into content on his website: “do you wear socks with loafers” (720 searches) and “how to style chunky loafers” (260 searches). Like the blue light glasses niche business idea, I could see this becoming an affiliate website reviewing and recommending the best loafers or a physical product business selling loafers and related accessories. There might even be a group of loafer enthusiasts out there who want to sign up for a loafer membership, join a loafer community, or buy a loafer lover monthly gift box subscription. There are clearly opportunities here. Griffin mentioned the software program Alteryx, a data tool used by another department at Griffin’s company. This is a tool he could learn and turn into a business. There are 40,500 monthly searches for “Alteryx.” Other popular topics in terms of search volume include “Alteryx certification” (1,600 searches) and “Alteryx training” (590 searches). There are a number of content topics with low competition in this niche, including “Alteryx data types” (260), “Alteryx date time format day of week” (140), and “Alteryx formula split string” (210). There is a niche opportunity here, with relatively low competition. Griffin could develop a corporate training business featuring Alteryx online courses, books, a membership program, live trainings, group trainings, and coaching. Business Ideas You can see that even a partial brain dump list combined with Semrush can lead to a number of viable ideas. Looking back at this list of ideas, I see the most promising opportunities are creating an FP&A training or consulting business or a Microsoft Power BI training business. These are the two ideas where opportunity is most closely aligned with Griffin’s expertise. He is his own target market, so he already knows the needs and pain points of his potential clients. He doesn’t need to learn anything new or step out of his comfort zone; he can simply turn around and teach what he knows. That is how he can use his job to quit his job. I also see viability in other ideas on Griffin’s list, including Alteryx, blue light glasses, and loafers, but it would take a bit more work to learn the target market, understand the niche, and deliver a product that meets the needs of

that market. Occupational Therapist Erin Donovan is a senior occupational therapist. She works with patients in an acute care hospital to evaluate their functional performance and work toward goals for improvements prior to the patient’s discharge. Brain Dump Ideas Going through this brain dump exercise, Erin came away with several viable business ideas. A summary of her brain dump ideas appears below. Qualifications. Board Certified Occupational Therapist, Massachusetts Occupational Therapy license, CPR, myofascial release I certification, myofascial release fascial-pelvis certification, left-ventricular assistive device training, Fundamentals of ICU Rehab CEU course (2021), Yoga in Rehabilitation CEU course (2018), certified brain injury specialist test. Software programs. EPIC, SharePoint, PeopleSoft, REDCap, MedBridge. Physical products. Stethoscope, automatic BP cuff, pulse oximeter, goniometer, Theraputty, T-foam, Theraband, scrubs. Physical products in other departments. X-ray machines, CT machines, ultrasound machines, AEDs, alternative feeding devices (TPN, G-tube, NGT). Analysis I analyzed the market for each idea using Semrush. I started with the central feature of Erin’s job: occupational therapy. I found the following results: “occupational therapist” (40,500 monthly searches), “Occupational Therapist Salary” (22,200), “How to become an occupational therapist” (3,600), “Occupational therapist program” (590), “occupational therapist online programs” (260), “occupational therapist license” (140), “occupational therapist education requirements” (590), “live CEU courses for occupational therapists” (170), “occupational therapist training” (170), and “Massachusetts occupational therapy license” (170). It’s clear that people are searching to learn how to become occupational therapists, especially how to get trained, licensed, and earn continuing education credits. This could be Erin’s

business. She could teach people how to enter the field, how to get licensed in different states, offer training for the licensing exams in one or more states, and provide continuing education courses for occupational therapists. This reminds me of Allison Strickland and her AT Study Buddy business, which I describe in Chapter Three; it provides training for entry-level athletic trainers and the BOC Exam. I can see Erin building a similar business providing training and guides for occupational therapists, along with courses that provide continuing education credits. As to Erin’s certifications and trainings, “CPR certification” has 74,000 monthly searches. Additionally, I found people searching for topics like “CPR Certification online” (12,100), “CPR AED certification” (2,400), and “CPR certification class” (880). There is plenty of search volume here, but there is also a lot of competition. This looks to be a great opportunity to build a service-based business, teaching CPR in live training classes, but this idea would need more research to see what else related to CPR certification could be turned into a business. I also found searches for “Myofascial Release certification” (170), “Myofascial Release Certification SIP” (170), and “Myofascial Release certification course” (50). These are all too narrow a niche. The search volume is very low for this certification. That being said, the competition is also extremely low in this niche. While myofascial release cannot be the sole purpose of Erin’s business, it could be a valuable part of a set of offerings. I could see this being a product or course that Erin develops as one of her revenue streams. Next, I analyzed the software programs Erin uses in her job. One of the main ones was EPIC. I found 22,200 monthly searches for “EPIC Systems,” 6,600 monthly searches for “EPIC Software,” and 4,400 searches for “EPIC EHC.” I see notable searches for “EPIC software training” (1,000), “EPIC training modules” (720), and “EPIC training courses” (140). There is definitely a niche opportunity here, and there is relatively little competition. Erin could turn this into a corporate training business featuring EPIC online courses, books, a membership program, live trainings, group trainings, and coaching. Next, I dove into the physical products Erin uses at work. As you can

imagine, Erin uses quite a few physical products as an occupational therapist. Two niche products that stood out to me were Theraputty and Therabands. For the former, I found the following search results: “Theraputty” (4,400), “Theraputty exercises” (1,000), “Theraputty exercises for kids” (320), “Theraputty hand exercises” (210), and “printable Theraputty exercises PDF” (90). For Therabands, I found the following results: “Theraband” (12,100), “Theraband flexbar” (2,900), “Theraband exercises” (2,400), “Theraband exercises for arms” (390), and “Theraband exercises for shoulder” (390). There is a definite niche opportunity here. Theraputty by itself does not meet the criteria I set with a minimum market size of 100,000, but combining it with Therabands could offer Erin a route to build a business with courses, books, guides, memberships, and live trainings focused on how to use these products. She could target B2B courses teaching other occupational therapists to use these products or she could target B2C teaching consumers how to best use these products. The one downside is that Theraputty and Therabands are patented and trademarked brands, so a little more legal research is needed before Erin could sell any type of physical products related to Theraputty and Therabands, but there is an opportunity here to build a physical product in this niche as well. Looking further into physical products, I found search volumes of 165,000 for “pulse oximeter,” 6,600 for “fingertip pulse oximeter,” and 1,600 for “how to use pulse oximeter.” There are also several low-competition topics that Erin could turn into content on her website, such as “what should you do when the pulse oximeter alarms” (170 searches). I could see this becoming an affiliate website reviewing and recommending the best pulse oximeters. Erin also listed goniometer, I found 14,800 monthly searches for “goniometer.” There are several low-competition topics that Erin could turn into content on her website: “goniometer measurements” (480 searches), “finger goniometer” (260), “goniometer hip flexion” (210), and “how to use a goniometer” (210). As with the pulse oximeter niche business idea, I could see this becoming an affiliate website reviewing and recommending goniometers. It could even turn into a physical product business selling Erin’s recommended brands of goniometers and accessories.

Business Ideas In general, there is a lot of opportunity in the medical field: between nurses, physicians, anesthesiologists, radiologists, therapists, and other allied health professionals, there are countless niche training and physical product opportunities. Looking back at Erin’s brain dump, my favorite idea is in the Theraputty and Theraband niche. I see a lot of viability here for an online business with courses, books, trainings, and a membership program providing exercises using Theraputty and Therabands. Additionally, I see a lot of opportunities in occupational therapist education. Erin can narrow her focus to a specific topic such as occupational therapist licensing, occupational therapist continuing education, occupational therapist training, CPR training, or myofascial release certification. These are ideas that Erin can take and turn into a business without much effort. She is already in this market; she knows the pain points and has the expertise to teach what she knows. This is how Erin can use her job to quit her job. Landscaper I wish I had technical trade experience, something like landscaping, HVAC, or a handyman. There are so many opportunities here. I have worked with a number of clients to turn physical work like landscaping into a niche online business. I did a bit of landscaping when I was younger, as my first part-time job working with my uncle, so I have enough knowledge to complete this brain dump exercise. For this example, I asked myself only three questions: What do you do in your current day job? What physical products do you use in your job? What do you wear to work? My answers were as follows: mowing lawns, weeding, and planting shrubs; weed whacker, leaf blower, and hedge trimmer; gardening gloves, steel-toe boots, ear muffs, and safety goggles. Again, this is a mini-brain dump. I could have gone much deeper into a specific subject or tool such as trimming hedges, lawn care, drainage, fertilizers, shovels, and so on.

Here’s what I found: 165,000 people per month are searching for “rhododendron,” 135,000 are searching for “steel-toe boots,” 110,000 for “leaf blower,” 74,000 for “landscaping ideas,” 74,000 for “rock landscaping,” 60,500 for “hedge trimming,” and 18,100 for “safety goggles.” There is so much opportunity here, and I have only scratched the surface. This brief brain dump could turn into a specialty website about rock landscaping, recommending the best products and layouts and offering other advice about rock landscaping. You could start a website recommending the best weed whackers and accessories. You could start a hedge trimming education business that teaches people about properly trimming hedges, the best tools to use, and the best practices to follow. You could build an entire business about a specific type of plant or shrub, like the rhododendron. There are so many ways to generate revenue here. You could create a membership program for landscapers that helps them book gigs, become better landscapers, and grow their businesses. You could generate affiliate revenue by reviewing and recommending the best landscaping tools. You could build a mobile application specifically for landscapers to help them better manage their schedules. You could even sell physical products and offer only the best tools, work belts, work gloves, and boots for the landscaping niche. Do you see how just a couple of questions from the brain dump can generate several ideas that can become your first business? You can use your job and experience as a landscaper to quit your job. Electrician William Browner is an electrician. Will’s brain dump included ideas such as installing and repairing electrical panels, installing and repairing electrical outlets, installing light fixtures and ceiling fans, and installing home generators; journeyman electrician’s exam and master electrician license; wire strippers, voltage tester, and electrical tape; electrician’s gloves, PPE layers, and arc-rated FR shirt and pants or FR coverall. Here’s what I found. 14,800 people per month searching for “how to become an electrician,” 8,100 for “electrician test,” 8,000 for “journeyman electrician,” and 3,600 searching for “master electrician.” There were 12,100

monthly searches for “how to install a ceiling fan,” 49,500 for “home generators,” and 12,100 for “voltage testers.” I also found thousands of searches for various aspects of fire-resistant electrician clothing such as “FR rated clothing,” “PPE electrician,” “PPE gear,” “fire resistant coveralls,” and “Carhartt fire-resistant pants.” From a possible business perspective, how to become an electrician looked enticing. Lots of people searched to learn about the process of becoming an electrician, with many looking specifically for the journeyman electrician or master electrician exams; they were looking for practice exams and preparation materials. Furthermore, the licensing requirements of an electrician vary by state, so coaching or courses could offer to niche markets in each state. I see this as a great opportunity to copy the structure of AssociatePI. Will could sell online courses or coaching programs to help electricians pass their exams and offer additional coaching as an upsell to teach electricians how to become licensed electricians and grow their businesses. He could even have a membership program for electricians, helping new electricians learn how to get licensed and build a community that grows together to expand one another’s businesses. I see a big opportunity in the fire-resistant clothing market targeting electricians. Will could build an entire website recommending the best coveralls, PPE clothing, and electrical gloves. He could dive deep into this niche and earn affiliate revenue by recommending the best fire-resistant clothing and even earn sponsorships from major manufacturers such as Carhart and Dickies. There is ample opportunity in the how-to space for electricians. I found searches about how to install ceiling fans, home generators, and chandeliers. This is a bit competitive; there are already a number of people teaching these subjects on YouTube, but there is a big enough market that Will might still be able to come in and carve out a niche. He could focus on specific brands, such as picking the ceiling fan brand he knows best and teaching people how to install each type of that brand’s ceiling fan. There are a lot of opportunities to build a passive income-based online business as an electrician. Will can use his expertise and use his job to quit his job.

Police Officer I don’t know anything about becoming a police officer, so I used some Google searches to see the training that is required, the gear police officers use on a day-to-day basis, and the software programs that police forces use. For this example, I asked myself three brain dump questions: What training is available to you? What physical products do you use in your job? What do you wear to work? What software programs do you use in your day job? I found lots of opportunities in the police gear area: 9,900 people per month searched for “Maglite Flashlights,” 60,500 for “CB radios,” and 5,400 for “police boots.” You could take one of these topics and build a niche site about CB radios, teaching people how to use specific radios such as the 800 MHZ portable radio, the P25 radio, and the Uniden BEARCAT CB radio. I found thousands of searches for “ArcGIS Solutions” and “Odyssey law enforcement software,” two popular law enforcement programs. Either or both could be the topic of your business. You could provide training resources, offer trainings in a live group coaching setting, travel from department to department and provide hands-on training for these programs. You could create a membership program with ongoing support and coaching for anyone new to these programs. You could even create courses or write a book about these training programs that you sell B2C to current or aspiring police officers or B2B (to police departments). There are thousands of searches for specific training such as “police K9 training,” “how to become a criminal investigator,” and “CPR training.” Any of these topics could be its own business. You could build a local training business that hosts live classes for departments in your geographic region or turn this into an online business with evergreen video-based courses that you could sell directly to departments all over the country. There is viability here. In fact, it’s been validated by niche site expert Pat Flynn. He built a security guard training business in 2010 called SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com. This simple website provides training for security guards and recommends the best gear to use on the job; it was

generating $3,000 a month when Pat sold it in 2020. Do what Pat did. Build a training website for a specific subset or type of job in the law enforcement niche teaching how to use a software program like ArcGIS Solutions. Like my Excel example in Chapter Four, don’t try to start a business about something very broad like “law enforcement”; start a business about something specific like K9 training, CB radios, or ArcGIS Solutions software. Take your expertise in law enforcement and use your job to quit your job. Restaurant Servers If you work in the hospitality industry, spend your hours, days, and weekends on your feet, and are desperate to stop the manual grind, there is a way out. You can take your expertise in hospitality and use it to build your first business. You can use your job as a server to quit your job. For this example, I asked myself four brain dump questions: What do you do in your current day job? What qualifications or certifications do you have? What physical products do you use in your job? What do you wear to work? I have never worked in the hospitality industry, so I looked up simple things like the best POS system for restaurants, training for restaurant servers, restaurant equipment lists, and the best clothing for servers. I came up with a few brain dump ideas related to the restaurant and hospitality industry: wait staff training, industrial sinks, commercial kitchen hoods, dinnerware (commercial silverware and crockery), server clothing (Mercer shirts), and POS systems. Here are some of the results. There is a lot of opportunity in the POS space. 22,000 people a month search for “toast POS,” 14,800 per month for “square POS,” and thousands more for “lightspeed POS,” “Upserve POS,” and “TouchBistro POS.” This could be your niche; you could pick one of them and specialize in that POS. As of the writing this book, Square POS offers an affiliate program. You can earn money by recommending this POS to local restaurants. You could sell a service setting up entire POS systems for restaurants. You could publish training guides and courses teaching restaurants how to seamlessly integrate

this POS into their operations. There are also opportunities in the hospitality product niche. Thousands of people are searching for information about commercial-grade restaurant hoods, including 2,900 people per month searching the brand “Fotile range hood.” Your niche could be commercial-grade hoods, sinks, crockery, or silverware. You can pick any product commonly used in the hospitality niche and turn that into your business. I even found an online business that must be generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue by recommending the best clothing for servers such as the Mercer culinary shirts and Henry Segal hospitality shirts. This could be your niche. You don’t have to be the expert yet; you can learn. As a server, you could work with your employer to learn more about the products you use in your job; you have the training opportunity right in front of you, and you could turn that into your business. You could recommend the best commercial hoods and earn an affiliate commission for your recommendations or even learn how to install the Fotile range hood and start a service-based business. I even found that a thousand people per month are searching for “commercial hood cleaning,” and there is a low level of competition. You could build a service-based business, hiring local contractors in each region, to build a service specializing in commercial-grade hood cleaning. Training is another opportunity. Selling information is one of the easiest ways to start a business. Though there are only a couple hundred searches per month for “restaurant server training” and “wait staff training” (with low competition), there might still be an opportunity here. Do the manual estimate discussed in chapter four. Call up a few restaurants in your area and ask if they would be interested in your training services. You can go from restaurant to restaurant providing live trainings that teach best practices to waitstaff; you could even narrow your focus to fine dining establishments. Furthermore, you could build an entire suite and portal of waitstaff training videos and tutorials that you sell direct to restaurants to use when they hire new servers. Do you see how you can think outside the box? Even though I have never worked in the hospitality sector, I came up with a few ideas that I could turn into viable businesses. If you do work in hospitality, you are sure to have

much better ideas and insights. Use Your Job to Quit Your Job There is opportunity in every job. No matter what your job is, you can use the brain dump exercise and Semrush analyses to find an opportunity for your first business within your day job. This is how you look at your job: find a topic of expertise and turn it into a business. This is how you use your job to quit your job.

Resources

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ere is a list of books, articles, podcasts, and tools that I have referred to in this book, along with other resources that I have found helpful.

Semrush is my favorite keyword research and business analysis tool, and the one tool I recommend to every new entrepreneur. Go to quityourjob.life/semrush for a free trial. ConvertKit is my preferred email management tool; I use it for email marketing. For a free trial, go to quityourjob.life/convertkit. Thrive Themes is my favorite website page builder. It’s a drag-and-drop tool that is extremely easy to use: no coding required. I use it for all of my websites. To learn more, go to quityourjob.life/thrivethemes. SiteGround is the company I use and recommend for website hosting. Go to quityourjob.life/siteground to learn more and review the best hosting deals, plans, and discounts. WordPress is the platform I use for all my websites. Go to wordpress.org to set up an account. WooCommerce is the WordPress Plugin I use to accept orders and build online stores on my websites; go to woocommerce.com to learn more. WooSubscriptions is the WordPress Plugin I use for my membership programs. This plugin syncs with WordPress and WooCommerce to process subscription payments; go to quityourjob.life/woosubscriptions for more details. Stripe is the program I use to accept payments. It syncs with WooCommerce,

collects payments, and distributes funds to your bank account. Go to stripe.com to learn more. Circle.so is the program I use to host my community for The Entrepreneur Ride Along Membership; go to quityourjob.life/circle for more details. Teachable is the program I use to create and sell online courses; go to quityourjob.life/teachable for more details. The SPI Podcast by Pat Flynn is one of my favorite online business podcasts; go to smartpassiveincome.com/shows/spi to listen. The Million Dollar Case Study is a series published by Greg Mercer of Jungle Scout that shows how to launch a profitable Amazon FBA product; go to junglescout.com/mdcs to learn more. Paid to Speak Conference is a conference hosted by Kent Julian; go to paidtospeakconference.com for details on registration. Cliff Ravenscraft is my coach and mentor. I highly recommend Cliff’s podcast and all the resources at cliffravenscraft.com. Jocelyn Sams is an entrepreneur at flippedlifestyle.com, where she and her husband Shane help entrepreneurs build and scale online businesses. Jocelyn’s story is featured in Chapter Three.

Step One Step One: The Surprisingly Simple Process to Research, Validate, and Choose the Perfect Online Business Idea. Want to start a business but don’t know what to do? Start here, with Step One. This business idea book is the missing link that will give you a kickstart into entrepreneurship. This is your first step to becoming an entrepreneur. In Step One, you will research, validate, and choose the perfect online business idea. By the end of this book, you will come away with a validated online business idea and a plan to launch your first business. Get your copy at steponebook.com

Sources CPCU® and API™ are trademarks of the American Institute for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters (“The Institutes”). The Entrepreneur Ride Along is not affiliated with, associated with, endorsed by or otherwise supported or recognized by The Institutes in any way. PMI-ACP® is a trademark of the Project Management Institute. Agile Exam Academy is not affiliated with, associated with, endorsed by or otherwise supported or recognized by The Project Management Institute in any way. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google LLC; used with permission. Microsoft Excel is a registered trademark of the Microsoft group of companies; used with permission from Microsoft. Semrush and the Semrush logo are registered trademarks of Semrsh Inc. Jocelyn Sams’s story can be found at https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/podcasts/teachers-online-businessshane-jocelyn-sams/. Shane Sams’s story can be found at https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/download/transcript-SPI122.pdf Pat Flynn’s story can be found on the SPI Podcast at https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/shows/spi/ Amy Porterfield’s story can be found at https://www.amyporterfield.com/about/

About The Entrepreneur Ride Along

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he Entrepreneur Ride Along (theentrepreneurridealong.com) is a resource created and managed by Jake Lang to help entrepreneurs start, build, and scale a successful online business. The Entrepreneur Ride Along includes step-by-step advice, case studies, and courses to help you launch and grow your first business. The Entrepreneur Ride Along includes a variety of free resources to assist you: The Entrepreneur Ride Along Blog. There are resources, articles, and step-by-step guides to help you build your business at theentrepreneurridealong.com/blog. The Entrepreneur Ride Along Podcast. A weekly podcast, with case studies, interviews, and stories, including a full breakdown of Jake’s businesses from start to finish; it can be found at theentrepreneurridealong.com/category/podcast. Entrepreneur Ride Along Membership. You can get direct access to coaching from Jake, along with all courses, books, and the community at The Entrepreneur Ride Along, at theentrepreneurridealong.com/membership. The Companion Course. At quityourjob.life/course, you will find a free course with access to supplemental material like downloadable worksheets, video content, and all the resources mentioned in this book. Step One. Jake's first book, Step One: The Surprisingly Simple Process to Research, Validate, and Choose the Perfect Online Business Idea, is available at steponebook.com. Online Business Case Study. You can follow Jake’s entrepreneurial pursuits at theentrepreneurridealong.com/obcs.

Five Niche Website Ideas. The five niche websites that Jake would start today (if he had more time) and how he would monetize those ideas can be found at theentrepreneurridealong.com/ideas. The 1K Traffic Challenge. Jake shows you exactly what he did when starting The Entrepreneur Ride Along to drive 1,000 organic website visitors to theentrepreneurridealong.com/traffic in the first week. He gives you the step-by-step process he used and challenges you to increase your traffic by 1,000 organic visitors. Income Reports. Jake’s quarterly reports show revenues, expenses, and net profits from each of his online businesses at theentrepreneurridealong.com/incomereports. Jake wants you to see his successes (and the mistakes he has made) so that you can begin making money online. [email protected]. If you have any questions, please email [email protected]. Jake loves meeting new entrepreneurs; he is also more than happy to connect and talk about your business.

About The Author ake Lang is an author and founder of several successful businesses, including The Entrepreneur Ride Along, which helps aspiring entrepreneurs start and scale their first online business.

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It’s Jake’s mission to start a new online business every year and share everything behind the scenes on The Entrepreneur Ride Along Podcast and The Entrepreneur Ride Along Blog so that new entrepreneurs can learn from his mistakes, understand the struggles of starting a new business, and find their own paths to entrepreneurial success. Jake lives in Maine with his wife Brooke, his daughter Isabella, and their four dogs Miley, Millie, Penny, and Albus. You can follow his work at theentrepreneurridealong.com.