Everybody knows that “build it and they will come” doesn’t really work. And thus, for the last few years, every entrepreneurship podcast worth its salt has discussed ways to get “them” to come.
On today’s episode we discussed an exciting way to quickly build your credibility, reach, and most important — bottom line: speaking engagements.
As you’ll see today, speaking engagements create the perfect opportunity for you to be seen as the expert, deliver value, solve problems — and get paid for it.
Business Building Strategies We Discuss In Today’s Episode Include:
How to use speaking engagements to deliver value, help your audience, AND make sales
How to create your speaking engagement opportunities
How to become a speaker at the conferences that matter the most to your audience
How to pitch yourself as a speaker, and more important — how to follow up!
How to steer clear of the “friend zone” when speaking, and maintaining a professional presentation… without boring people out their minds!
How to sell from stage without being a douchebag
Today’s Guest
Joleene Moody of JoleeneSpeaks
Today’s guest is Joleene Moody, an expert in breaking into the world of paid speaking and entrepreneurship. For a former TV reporter and anchor, she turned into a transformational speaker, a business coach and an author.
Her expertise are: how to convert the room to high-paying clients, how to generate sales and profits through speaking engagements, how to create your own speaking engagement opportunities, and how to become a better closer.
In today’s episode Joleene shares her journey from TV anchor — bored out of her mind and feeling she’s not serving her purpose — to a purpose-driven entrepreneur bringing change to the world and helping others create the freedom they always crave for.
While many people think that being a TV anchor is an incredibly exciting job, in reality, according to Joleene, things could not be more different. Worst of all, Joleene felt she’s not living up to her calling and potential. She didn’t have the fulfilling life she wanted, nor the freedom she craved for.
First Time On Stage
While Joleene had many opportunities to be on stage in her previous career, in all sorts of professional conferences and gatherings, the first time she was on stage as an entrepreneur was truly memorable. Unfortunately, it was memorable due to how bad it went.
A few hours before her first-ever speaking gig as an inspirational coach, Joleene pass a kidney stone. “I couldn’t even make it to my first speaking gig. I thought I blew up my speaking career even before it started!”
Today, Joleene has been a speaker for over five years, and the first three of those were not easy. The only way she made it work was to carry on, show up and do the work.
I felt the same about my first business engagements (whether it was speaking gigs, webinars, or creating my own video course): things don’t go that well the first time (and thank God I didn’t pass any kidney stones!).
Reflecting on all guests on the show so far, it truly happens to everyone. The one thing separating the successful from the unsuccessful is showing up again the next day.
Creating Your Own Speaking Opportunities (And Making Money On Stage)
In today’s episode, Joleene outlines several ways you could create your own speaking opportunities right now. These include:
Retreats
Speaking at conferences
Speaking at networking group/events
Hosting a live webinar
Hosting a live teleseminar
Etc.
For one of her first retreats, she simply picked a date and contacted personally the people she thought would make a good target audience. She charged a few tens of dollars just to cover Facebook ads, renting the place for the day and food/beverages.
She kept the event at 15 people, and most of her expenses were covered by the Signup fees. She ended up selling in services and products throughout her retreat and making 5-figure profit from sales of products and services throughout and as a result of that day.
That’s why Joleene challenges every listener of the show to open the calendar, pick a date three weeks from now and just invite a couple of people that would be interested to learn about your services.
If people show up to the event, she explains, they have a problem that they think you can solve. It’s your responsibility to show them how you can solve their problems. Sure, you might feel awkward about taking their money, so focus on the serving instead of on the selling.
Would you accept the challenge? Comment below and let me know!
Podcast Starter Kit
As mentioned in today’s episode, I’m really excited to announce my new free course: The Podcast Starter Kit.
The Podcast Starter Kit is a 7-day video course that will take you from knowing nothing about podcasts, to planning, recording and launching your successful podcast show, ranking in the top of Apple New & Noteworthy ranking, building your list, your brand, and your authority in whatever niche you’re in.
If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people!
Affiliate Disclosure: Please note that some of the links above are affiliate links. There is no additional cost to you, and I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase.
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Business acumen is incredibly important to entrepreneurs, but why?
From a detailed survey that I conducted this morning, by asking the first 3 people I saw online (okay, maybe it’s not that detailed…). It turns out that many aren’t sure what exactly the word means. To be honest, I wasn’t so sure myself. I knew it’s important — I just didn’t know how important it is.
Acumen: the ability to make good judgements and quick decisions in a particular domain.
When presented this way, I don’t need a survey to know that every entrepreneur would understand the importance of having the ability to make good judgement and make quick decisions in business.
While business acumen is traditionally something spoke of in large corporate and MBA programs, I believe it’s time for entrepreneurs to catch up. And this is what today’s episode is all about.
Business Concepts In Today’s Episode
In today’s episode we will cover:
The 5 performance metrics that drive all Fortune 500 companies, and how they apply to every entrepreneur.
How to build your business acumen without getting an MBA and without spending tons of time on it.
How to become the CEO your entrepreneurial business needs.
Why growth can sometimes be the worst thing for business.
A free giveaway of my guest’s book.
Today’s Guest
Kevin Cope of Acumen Learning
Over the last 12 years, Kevin and his company had helped 18 of Fortune50 companies train and educate their employees on business acumen — on understanding what makes a business succeed, on what makes a business work, what makes a business money.
I don’t even remember how Kevin and I got talking, but I have seen Kevin’s latest book titled “Seeing The Bigger Picture”, and I have seen some reviews about it, saying that it’s a 180-page MBA. And I thought, “Maybe that’s a great idea for the Inspiring Innovation Podcast.”
If you’re anything like me and you never had an official business school education, I thought you could benefit as much as I could from having Kevin on the show doing Business Acumen 101 and just walking us through the basic and different things that we should be monitoring and paying attention to just like major companies do.
While we might not be a CEO of a corporate, we are the CEO of our own entrepreneurial business.
Unlike corporates that have their investors’ money, the money that we have is our own — it’s our own savings, our own family’s support or whatever it is — and we need to make it work. We need to be good CEOs to our entrepreneurial businesses.
So this is what today’s episode is all about.
Free Giveaway!
If you’re interested in developing your business acumen, Kevin has generously contributed 5 copies of his latest book to be given away to listeners of Inspiring Innovation.
How can I win a copy?
All you have to do in order to receive one of the free copies, is leave Inspiring Innovation Podcast a 5-star review on iTunes (you can do that at iipodcast.com/itunes) and then e-mail me at [email protected] to let me know you’ve done so. The first 5 listeners/readers to complete these steps will receive a copy free of charge.
For those interested in a more detailed approach, Kevin has also made his online course available to listeners of Inspiring Innovation at a 50% discount that you can claim here: http://seeingthebigpicture.com/innovation/.
But I’m An Entrepreneur! Do I Still Need To Develop Business Acumen?
I would argue that in most cases, being an entrepreneur means that business acumen is actually more crucial to you than it is for a corporate employee. While lacking business acumen will slow you down in climbing the corporate ladder and would limit how high can you climb, lacking business acumen as an entrepreneur increases the risk you take and hinders your chances of success.
I’m not saying you need to get an MBA in order to become a successful entrepreneur, but it does make sense to know the 5 key metrics every business, whether it’s your corporate job or your entrepreneurial business, should be paying attention to.
After all, while your corporate employer has the backing of banks and investors, your backing is your savings, your checking account, and perhaps some help from family and friends. For me that makes the best case why every entrepreneur needs to spend the time understanding how companies make money.
The 5 Performance Metrics You’ll Need
In today’s interview, Kevin shared the 5 performance metrics that you’ll need in order to get the full picture of how your entrepreneurial business is performing financial-wise. While many experts would recommend 5, 10, 15 more metrics to monitor, the following 5 are the most crucial and simple of them all, according to Kevin.
Cash
Profit
Assets
Growth
People
As you’ll soon see, these 5 metrics are all interconnected. Affecting one of them always affects the others, but often in unexpected ways (at least until you think about it).
For instance, many entrepreneurs believe that more growth equals more cash and bigger profit. Not necessarily so: Depending on the engine of growth, growth may actually be achieved by spending more money on marketing, which immediately cut cash and profit.
If the growth is too fast, quality of service might decrease, causing a further loss of sales and existing customers and making the business take a hit in cash, profit and people (in this case customer).
If I mentioned people already, rapid growth might also take a hit on your employees, who might become too overloaded with work and provide a work service or simply leave. Employees are another aspect of the people metric. And in fact, rapid growth is what caused the people of my first software business, in that case me and my 2 employees to burn out and leave.
Cash
When it comes to cash there are two measures you’ll want to pay attention to.
Cash-on-hand
Cash flow
Cash-on-hand, basically means the amount of money you currently have on your savings or checking account. That’s the amount of money your business have in order to run. I don’t believe I need to explain in detail why this is a key metric since it’s pretty obvious that when cash-on-hand goes negative, the game is over.
Cash flow basically stands for how much cash is coming in minus how much cash is being spent. Most businesses end up launching with a negative cash flow. This means that every month, the amount of cash-on-hand decreases steadily.
One of the key things every business strives to achieve is a positive cash flow. In the startup world as well as in entrepreneurship, we need to achieve positive cash flow as fast as possible before you ran out of cash-on-hand.
But even if your cash flow is positive, you’ll still want to be monitoring it to see how you can make the cash flow bigger, which means you’re making more money compared to what you are expending.
Kevin outlined 5 quick ways to increase positive cash flow.
Sell more
Reduce expenses
Better manage your inventory (if that applies to your kind of business)
Pay slower — negotiate your payment terms to allow you to pay slower and reduce the negative cash flow.
Get paid faster — if your business is going under, and you have customers owing you over $10,000 (as I had), it’s not hard to understand that paying more attention to your account receivables and being more proactive in collecting the money you’re owed, can make a huge impact on the success of your business
Profit
Not too different from looking at cash flow, profit is how much money being made on sales minus how much money is spent on expenses. An interesting metric to look up when it comes to profit is your profit margin. This is basically a percentage of how much more money you’ve made out of each sale compared to the business cost of making that sale.
According the Kevin, a typical profit margin across major companies is around 9% and he has found that to be the case in many other industries as well.
A benefit of monitoring your profit margin is that it’s an indicator of the financial risk you’re taking in your sales. Often, growing companies take a hit at their profit margin and sometimes they go too far.
Your profit margin metric will make sure you’re not only making enough money to float, but actually make enough money to grow. In fact, you’ll find many entrepreneurs you’ll read and hear recommends a profit margin of at least 8% to 12% for an entrepreneurial business.
Assets
Your house, your cash savings and your investments are all assets that you own. While none of them necessarily is used to produce revenue, they do support a certain standard of living and allow you to pursue your lifestyle and personal growth.
Likewise, your entrepreneurial company has assets that should be used in its growth by producing revenue and profit. Without the right assets, no business can grow; it simply cannot be profitable.
Your assets might be an inventorial product, your laptop/desktop that you bought, or the workroom at your home where you’re building your business from. Assets might be transportation you use, etc. Your account receivables (the money people owe you) are also an example of an asset. Intellectual property and your knowledge can be an asset.
When it comes to assets, there are two metrics you’re looking at:
Asset strength
Asset utilization
Asset Strength
When it comes to asset strength, you’re looking at 2 factors: Liquidity and the nature of the asset (particularly, can these assets be used to generate revenue versus those that can’t).
Liquidity means how easy it is to quickly generate more cash in order to solve unexpected problems or writing out down market using the assets you have.
The second factor, the nature of the asset themselves, is pretty self-explanatory. You want to have as little amount as possible of assets that aren’t used to generate revenue.
Asset Utilization
Asset utilization. Accumulating assets, even if they are liquid aren’t necessarily very helpful. At the end of the day, explains Kevin, if your accumulation of assets, whatever those assets are, does not directly contribute to making a bigger revenue is probably assets you don’t need.
Growth
Second to cash flow, growth might be the most discussed metric. I’m assuming that I don’t need to explain in too many details what growth is. At the end of the day, it boils down to are you more sales and getting more customers.
But one caveat that Kevin mentioned in today’s interview is this: A few years ago, Toyota was hard on focused on growth while losing sight of their quality control. When the quality suffered and they have to issue recalls, their bottom line suffered heavily.
Another example is the dot-com era: So many companies were solemnly focusing on the growth metric alone that completely lost sight of their profit margin, of their cash flow, and worse of all, on their cash-on-hand.
Rapid growth can be expensive and focusing solemnly on growth while ignoring its effect on the other metrics, can mean a deadly blow to your business.
People
Team Inspiring Innovation
The last but not least metric is people. These include both your customers and your employees. It’s pretty obvious the importance of the customers metric: Are they happy? Are they satisfied? Is your customer service quick and efficient?
Are your employees satisfied? Are you helping them grow? Are you treating your employees as well as you’d like them to treat your best customer? Neglecting either your customer’s happiness or your employees’ happiness can bring down the most financially stable company.
So these are the 5 metrics Kevin recommends you to pay attention to. I’d love to hear in the comments section what’s your take on each, and if there’s any metric you really think you should start paying attention to
Podcast Starter Kit
As mentioned in today’s episode, I’m really excited to announce my new free course: The Podcast Starter Kit.
The Podcast Starter Kit is a 7-day video course that will take you from knowing nothing about podcasts, to planning, recording and launching your successful podcast show, ranking in the top of Apple New & Noteworthy ranking, building your list, your brand, and your authority in whatever niche you’re in.
If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people!
Affiliate Disclosure: Please note that some of the links above are affiliate links. There is no additional cost to you, and I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase.
Don’t Miss an Episode! Subscribe Below:
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“Emotion doesn’t make money; Logic does.” Click to Tweet
Episode Highlights:
How to join the entrepreneur fastlane by buying successful businesses and making them better rather than building from scratch
How my guest, Jock, turned a $10,000 investment into a multi-million dollar business
The behind the scenes of online business brokerage
How to valuate the worth of your online business, and how to quadruple it
The most important entrepreneurship lesson you can teach your children or yourself
Creative ways to finance online businesses that you might have never considered
Today’s Guest: Internet Entrepreneur & Online Business Broker
Jock Purtle, CEO and President of Digital Exits
We are joined today by Jock Purtle, founder and CEO of Digital Exits — a business brokerage firm focusing on buying and selling online businesses.
Jock, 24 years old, grew up in Sydney, Australia in an entrepreneurial family. His family has a brokerage business and they made him a part of it by the time he was 8 years old. The foundation that he got from being in the family business, learning how to evaluate the worth of goods and how to resell them for profit, has proved to be extremely helpful for the rest of his career.
At 2009, he bought his first online business for $10,000. That website made most of its money with ads. A few months later, he made his money back and resold the business (website) for just shy of $18,000. From that point on, Jock repeated the process each time with a bigger deal, leading him to 2014 where he expects to complete between 20 to 30 deals, each one with a transaction value between $100,000 to $4.5M.
The Beginning
In the interview, Jock shared how grateful he is for his mom and dad taking him when he was young to every business meeting, sharing the profit and loss sheets, and teaching him how the business works.
He remembers at one time when he was young, he wanted to buy something that cost about a thousand dollars. When he asked his father to buy it for him, his father refused. A few days later, he came back and gave him five hundred dollars: “If you can take these five hundred dollars and turn them into a thousand, you can buy whatever you want with them.”
That exercise taught Jock about the power of putting money to work for you and reshaped his mindset for the rest of his life. In fact, he believed it’s a truly crucial exercise for anyone to do, whether for themselves or giving it to their children. “It doesn’t need to be five hundred dollars or a thousand, it can be as little as twenty. It’s the idea of putting the money to work for you, by investing in something that will yield more than the investment in return — that is the key.”
Today
Today, besides running Digital Exits, Jock also hosts a podcast covering the subject of buying and selling online businesses — whether as a buyer or as a seller or as a broker, frequently writes content for his blog about the same subject and has also released several free e-book guides on the subjects that you can find in the mentioned resources section.
Podcast Starter Kit
As mentioned in today’s episode, I’m really excited to announce my new free course: The Podcast Starter Kit.
The Podcast Starter Kit is a 7-day video course that will take you from knowing nothing about podcasts, to planning, recording and launching your successful podcast show, ranking in the top of Apple New & Noteworthy ranking, building your list, your brand, and your authority in whatever niche you’re in.
If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people!
Affiliate Disclosure: Please note that some of the links above are affiliate links. There is no additional cost to you, and I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase.
Don’t Miss an Episode! Subscribe Below:
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On Today’s episode, Internet Entrepreneur James Schramko Shares:
How to make the switch from working a full time job (even when you have mortgage, debts and four children to support) into a full time entrepreneur, running a 7-figure business.
How to use what you already know to create a profitable business.
The “chocolate wheel” strategy to create businesses where customers buy from again and again and again.
How to systemize your business so you can outsource all time-consuming tasks.
Two frameworks that you can use to make your communication both in sales and in training a lot more effective.
3-step action plan to get started today.
Today’s Guest
James Shramko, Internet Entrepreneur
James Shramko is an Australian internet entrepreneur. In 2005, he was working in a car agency, and while he was bringing in a nice income, not much of it was left every month after paying his mortgage, his debt and the cost of being a parent for four children. James made a decision to create his own wealth instead of working all the hours helping someone else create their own wealth.
Unlike previous guests on the show, James’ beginning wasn’t easy. For the first nine months trying to do online business — he made zero sales. He had to learn a lot, and he struggled a lot. In today’s episode James shared the processes he had to go through, the things he tried, and the lessons learned on the path to becoming a successful entrepreneur.
There are several key takeaways from today’s episode, perhaps the most important one is James’ emphasis on actually doing the right thing. There are two things to pay attention to in this — one is doing and the other one is the right thing. As James says, “Knowing what the right thing to do can be very hard.” And you will have to listen to today’s episode to find out how he chose the right thing and how you can do the same.
SOPs and Creating Fast Business Systems
One of the things that James is most known for is his insane ability to crank out new products every single month.
In order to be able to create content at this astounding pace, James has systemized every aspect of his business in order to make sure he doesn’t need to do any repetitive task that isn’t related to content creation.
Systemization Example: Systemizing Your Podcast
For example, take podcasting: James hosts and co-hosts more than 5 different podcasts. If he was to try and edit those shows, write the show notes, and share them on social media — on his own. That will probably be a full time job.
Instead, the entire content creation for his podcast is fully streamlined:
First, James records the episode
James places the recording in Dropbox
James’ team starts working on the podcast
They will remove the “uhms” and “ahs” and clean up the sound
They will add intro, outro and other bumpers
They will export the file, convert to mp3, complete tagging and add all the information to it
They will transcribe the file
They use transcription to write it as a blog post and someone else from the team will create a sharable infographic from the same content
The team shares the podcast episode when it goes live on social media, etc.
What Should You Systemize?
As James put it, “Anything that has to be done more than once in my business needs to be systemized.” For him, SYSTEM is an acronym that stands for Save Yourself Some Time, Energy and Money.
The way he developed his System is by documenting every step he takes when doing a task. Next, he gets together with his team and briefs them whether they’re online or face-to-face about the system.
The briefing includes the raw material (or what’s been input into the system), the steps he take and the expected outcome. His team is encouraged to change the process, update it and add/remove steps as much as needed as long as the end product remains the same. Then he will sit together with the team member that will do the task and will show him step-by-step how it’s done. Then the team member will do it step-by-step with James watching. When it’s been done correctly, James will let the team member complete the task on his own next time.
The Key Thing For Making Your Systems Truly Work
Here’s the caveat that many people miss. On the episode, James explains that the most important thing to do the first time your outsourcer or VA does a task on his own, is to check it thoroughly and make sure it’s perfect and return with at least 3 cycles of comments for improvement before you accept the final product.
Please allow your VA to know your boundaries for quality control and the kind of quality you expect from this deliverable. Well, this might sound tedious, but after that is done, James found that his employees can crank the deliverables time after time after time for years over years, have the same quality without him ever needing to spend time on this task again.
Creating Additional Income Streams
James has a unique view of online business that arises from his history working on a car dealership.
“I have this philosophy called the Chocolate Wheel and that is that a customer might come in to one part of your business, but sure enough they’ll move around the other parts. So it’s like this big wheel, where the slices of the wheel for each product and service and they fit well together because you typically have the same customer in the middle of that wheel. And that’s exactly like a car dealership.
“If you think about it, someone buys a car and they’ll come back to service it; or they service a car and they eventually renew their car; or they break something or they wanna update their accessories so they go into the parts department and they buy parts or accessories. Maybe they wanna finance their vehicle so they use the finance department; maybe their finance runs out and they wanna renew it so they renew their finance, and then they come back to you and they see another car and they buy a new car…
“So, the thing is, the dealership has one customer, but they’re experiencing all the different products and services. They’re buying stock, they’re buying time and they’re buying money. They buy 3 different things from the dealership on the different department labels.
“So the way to build a profitable business is to start with your one customer and see what else you can provide that they’re already consuming and that they absolutely need. And usually they’ll ask you if you provide that.”
Becoming an Internet Entrepreneur
Finally, James provided his 3-step action plan to making a transition and becoming a successful internet entrepreneur.
Be honest about your situation. Accept the fact that you’re going to have to do it yourself. You will never win a lottery not will you get a huge inheritance. So what can you do to start building your wealth?
Carve out new routines. Add repeating events dedicated to working on your business to your calendar and make sure that you stick to it. Watch less TV if you have to. No one said entrepreneurship has no sacrifices.
Start building. Focus on doing the right things. And as mentioned above, the focus is both on the act of doing as well as on the right thing. James suggests starting what you’re known for.
What do people ask you about? What type of services are you already providing? If nobody asked you anything, ask yourself what services did you need and you learned to do 2 years ago.
For James, a cornerstone of his business was to use the skills he learned in building websites, doing SEO, and writing himself checklists on how to use properly programs and repackage them as an offer he could sell online.
What have you learned in your journey that you can share with others to help them in theirs? What struggles did you say and wish there were clear resources that could help you out? All of these are great places to start and all of these are promising “right thing” to do.
Podcast Incubator – The #1 online training and community to build a podcast from zero to a successful launch
I Need Your Help!
If you haven’t already, I would love if you could be awesome and take a minute to leave a quick rating and review of the podcast on iTunes by clicking on the link below. It’s the most amazing way to help the show grow and reach more people!
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The similarities between the 9 to 5 hamster wheel and prison – and they key to escaping both of them.
The inspiration and lessons to be learned from the story of Andy Dufresne, and how to apply them to your escape to freedom plan.
The worst mistake you could make when trying to launch the brand of you, and how to do it right.
Why buying an Olympic gold medal on eBay doesn’t make you a champion (and what does).
Some of the things that amateurs do that break the trust and prevent people from following them – and how you should avoid them!
It’s Time To Escape The 9-5 Prison
I got a phone call last week. It was my old boss, wanting to know if I can do some consulting work for him.
As we finished talking (for the first time since I left corporate world) and I hung up, memories starting rushing through my brain.
I could see myself sitting in the company’s brand new light-blue Hyundai, playing with the radio, trying to find my favorite sports show to make my long way home more interesting.
It was only a 25 kilometers drive, but sometimes it took almost two hours to get back home.
I remember feeling trapped – by going corporate I’ve ditched my business, and now I was on the hamster wheel, building somebody else’s business instead. It hit me, that I replaced running in circles for my own good, with running in circles for someone else’s own good — with no prospect of it changing.
The Good Old Hamster Wheel
Life has become more and more about the job.
I found myself working 350 hours a month – sometimes 400. I was busy all the time. When I wasn’t at work, I was on the phone with work, or talking about work with Julie. I felt imprisoned.
Almost two years have passed this way – without me noticing, or doing anything about it.
Looking back, I know now that I fell in the most common loop the western world has to offer: I got busy dying.
This video is from one of my favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption. The film tells the story of Andy Dufresne, a banker who spends 19 years in Shawshank State Prison for the murder of his wife and her lover despite his claims of innocence. While everyone around Andy loses hope for achieving anything with their lives – within or beyond prison – Andy has different plans.
In the movie, Andy holds in his mind a painted picture of breaking free and building a cheap motel on a Mexican beach in front of the Pacific Ocean.
Through many hardships, beatings and pain, the movie ends with Andy making it alongside a fellow inmate named “Red” (played by Morgan Freeman), to Zihuatanejo, Mexico (you’ll have to watch the movie for the full story of how he did it).
Today’s Guest
As it turns out, I’m not the only one who’s been inspired by the The Shawshank Redemption. In fact, today’s guest wrote his book, From Day Job To Dream Job in the same cell where Andy Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins, spent his days of confinement.
Author, life coach, and speaker Kary Oberbrunner is on a mission to help people escape their own ‘Shawshanks‘ and launch their dream jobs.
Kary recently wrote the Dream Job To Day Job, a book targeted at helping readers “jailbreak” from their day jobs without relying on an MBA, investors, or a lucky break. Instead, he offers his tried-and-tested 9 step plan.
Much of the book was written inside Shawshank Prison (The Ohio State Reformatory). Kary sat inside the same prison cell where Andy Dufresne served solitary confinement as punishment for playing his famous anthem of freedom, and for Kary – this book has the same goal: Playing the anthem of freedom for millions of people that feel burned out in their day jobs.
The Disturbing Facts (Or: How The 9-5 Is Killing Millions)
Here are some very disturbing facts about what the 9 to 5 is causing1 in America today:
The Los Angeles Times reports that there is a 33 percent increase in heart attacks on Monday mornings.
According to the NCDC, more people die at nine o’clock Monday morning than at any other time of day or any other day of the week.
Male suicides are highest on Sunday nights. This is assumed to be because of them realizing that their careers — and possibly their finances as well — are not where they want them to be.
According to Kary, millions of people are squandering their talents and wasting their time in jobs they don’t love. If you feel that you are one of them, tune in to today’s episode, and then download our free PDF: Kary’s 9 Step Action Plan To Creating Your Dream Job!
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Research from 48 Days to the Work You Love by Dan Miller. ↩
