[0:37]Well hi there everyone First of all, I want to thank all of you for coming. This is this is just wonderful that you all are interested in business and finding out about what goes on in business and how to create a business in a new and exciting way. And for any of you who are watching at home or who are watching this video, I want to thank you very much for watching too and I hope that you're going to be able to learn some really new exciting things today. My name of course is Justice Chase and I'm known as the home business whisperer and the reason that I'm called that is because I teach people how to almost immediately turn their businesses around. How they can actually begin to create self-sufficient businesses, which means that they make money for the person by changing the structure and also helping people to scale their businesses so that they can actually have a business that is appropriate for what they want to do. So, let me let me give you a brief outline about what we're going to be talking about today, because we don't have a whole lot of time to go through things. But I want to spend enough time with you so that you understand some of the real basics of what I call the three S's. And we're going to be talking about those, which are structure, self-sufficiency, and of course, scalability. But before we do, I I want to take a moment or two and as I said, just kind of go over for you what it is that I'm attempting to do and what it is that you're going to learn, so you have an idea of what what today's going to be laid out as. So why would we even need to have somebody like me come in and talk about how to start up businesses? Because there's already copious amount of consultants, there's bank managers, there's government workers, there's people out there virtually everywhere that are willing to be able to teach people how to get a business up and running. And the problem is, at least in in my estimation, is that most of these people, though exceedingly well-meaning, aren't really being very successful at helping people to be able to create the kinds of businesses they want. And that's reflected in the business statistics or the business failure statistics, which say that almost 80% in the first year of businesses fail. By the time we take that up to three to five years, almost 90% of the people who have started businesses have failed. And these are people who have written complete business plans, they've really done their research, they've they've taken a look at what that business is supposed to do, and they believe they are motivated, they they have all of the pieces together in order to be able to make that business success a success rather, they believe. Uh these are people who have borrowed money, they have not only just um taken their savings, but for the majority of them, they've actually gone out and borrowed money from the bank, and yet they still fail. Over that five-year period, as I said, up to 90% of the businesses that are started are out of business within five years. And as far as I'm concerned, that's not good enough. What I try to do when I teach people how to start businesses, and when I work with people who already have businesses that a lot of times are having problems or are failing, what I attempt to do with them is to teach them what I call the three basics. Which are the structure of the business, turning the business into something that's self-sufficient for itself so it makes the money, and teaching people how to make that business, how to structure it so that it's scalable. In other words, they can make it as big or as small as they want. So what we're going to be doing today, or what I'm going to be doing with you is I'm going to be talking a little bit about those three S's, the structure, self-sufficiency, and scalability. And I'm going to be giving you more information about what those particular words mean and and what that means to you as a new business owner. We're also going to explore what I call the two great myths and these are two basic myths that are out there, they're being perpetuated by many people who are in the business to help individuals such as yourself, who are thinking of starting a business or who already have a business and in a little bit of trouble. And these two myths really get in the way of you being able to have a business that thrives. Uh we're going to talk a little bit about how these myths hold people back and some of the things that that prevent people from starting businesses because there's a lot more people want to start businesses than actually do. And there's some real good reasons for that, which we'll get into. And I also want to give you an example. We may have time for two, but at least one example of what I mean by creating a business that has structure, self-sufficiency and scalability. And how that differs from the normal, conventional type of business. But before we get started and we jump into that, I want to tell you a very short story. There is a a young farmer, uh he wasn't actually a farmer when he got started. He was a young fellow and he wanted to start up a hobby farm, and he moved from the city out to the country. And he'd spent most of his money getting his hobby farm set up, getting the getting the house all refurbished and all this kind of stuff. And he hadn't started with a whole lot, so he wasn't feeling as flush as he could. And it was time for him to get a new animal. So he thought probably getting a cow would be a good start for my hobby farm. He had noticed a farm just down the way, and the farmer there seemed to have a lot of cows, so he thought he'll just hop in his truck, drive down, knock on the door and see if he could buy a cow. So he did that, knocks on the farmer's door, an older farmer came to the door, and the young fellow explained the situation and told the farmer that he'd like to have a cow. Now the old farmer said, sure, I can sell you a cow, I've got lots and lots of cows in in my backyard here, and uh, I can get you a good one for two or three thousand dollars. Well, the young guy just was totally blown away by this, because he said, I can't spend two or three thousand dollars. I don't have it. In fact, what I've got to spend is a hundred dollars.
[7:25]So the old farmer kind of laughed and said, a hundred dollars. Well, I don't know. I I I do have one cow that I could let go for a hundred dollars, but she's old and not very healthy, and I don't know if you'd want her. And the young guy said, yeah, that's great. I I just want to get started, I want to get learning about how to look after livestock and everything, so this would be a great thing. So he peels off a hundred dollars, hands it to the old farmer, and asks the farmer if he could deliver that cow to him at the in the coming weekend. So the time goes by, and uh the uh the young farmer, uh does gets things ready at his farm for the cow to arrive. And the weekend comes, and the old farmer comes up to the young guy's door, knocks on the door, the young guy throws open the door and says, wow, great, did you bring my cow? And the old farmer looks at him and says, yeah, I did. But we have a problem because on the way over, the cow died. And the young guy looks out into the farm yard, and there in the back of the pickup truck is the cow laying with its feet sticking straight up in the air, obviously dead. So the old farmer kind of looks at him, and the young farmer looks back, and the young farmer says, well, that's okay. Just give me my hundred bucks back and, um, we'll call it a day. The old farmer looks at him and says, no, it doesn't work like that. You bought that cow last week. I held it for you at no cost, I drove it over here. The cow is yours, but I'm not going to be a complete nasty person. What I'm going to do is I'm willing to take the dead carcass back to my place and I'll bury it using my back hoe, so you don't have to worry about it. And the young guy says, oh, so the cow is mine. The old farmer says, that's the way it is. So the young guy says, no, that's okay, just take it around to the barn in the back, and I want you to drop him off, and that'll be fine. So the old farmer shakes his head, takes the carcass around to the back, drops it off and heads off down in uh, out onto the road back to his his farmyard. Well, about a month goes by, and there's a knock on the old farmer's door, and he opens up the door and much to his surprise, here's the young farmer again. And the young guy says, I'm ready to take one of those two thousand dollar or three thousand dollar cows. So the old farmer and the young one go out into the back, and they pick out a a cow that would be suitable for the guy, and the old farmer assures him that this is a great cow, it's certainly not going to die on the way over. But as they're walking back to the uh, back to the farmhouse, the old farmer says to the young guy, well, what happened? You know, like last month, you were broke, you couldn't even afford a hundred bucks for the for a cow, and now you're willing to pay two or three thousand dollars for one. Did did you get a really great job or strike oil on your land or what happened? So the young guy looks at him and he says, oh no, I sold your cow. You know, the one I bought for a hundred bucks. And the farmer looks at him and he said, you sold my dead cow that cow I dropped off at your place for a hundred dollars. How on earth did you sell that cow for a hundred dollars? And the young guy looks at him and he says, it was easy, I raffled it off. I just put an ad in the newspaper that said, get a cow, $10. I sold 500 tickets at ten bucks each, made $5,000. The old farmer looked at him and said, but the cow was dead, didn't anybody complain? And the young guy looks at him and said, only the winner, and I gave him his money back.
[12:29]Now, you may be thinking what on earth does that kind of a story about selling a dead cow, what does that have to do with starting a business? Especially what does it have to do with structure, self-sufficiency and scalability and being able to create a business that works right from the start. Well, the answer to that question is really quite simple. It's thinking outside the box, and though I don't want you to go out out there and start raffling off dead cows, what I do want you to do is I want you to start thinking in new ways. Because right now, at least 99% of all new small businesses are started in basically the same structure. That's the you go out and you start your business and you run the business, you work in the business. It's what I call an equity producing job. Basically, you start the business by being the employee within the within the business and being the employee that does everything. Now, as I said, that's the way that most businesses are started today. The problem is that that business model doesn't work almost all the time. That's why there's a 90 plus percent failure rate in small businesses. Because the structure that the people use to start their small business doesn't work.
[14:20]Now, before we talk a little bit more about the structure and about my three S's, I want to just kind of step backwards for a minute. And I want to take a couple of minutes and I want to talk about how people think about starting businesses. Because in over the last, oh, 20 years or so that I've been doing this, 20 plus years, I've found that when I've gone traveled around and I've done lectures and I've done workshops and such, well over 90% of the people that I talk to, want to be able to start businesses. And I've read different statistics that show that at least 80 or 90% of the population thinks about starting their own business at some point in time. The problem is that most of them don't, and the reason they don't is that they're worried that their business is going to fail. They don't think they're smart enough, they don't think they have enough money, they don't think they've got a good enough idea, they don't think they've got enough education. They don't have any faith in themselves. And the reason for that is because we have been brought up to believe that whether or not a business fails or succeeds is based entirely on you.
[15:53]In other words, if you do well, if your business does well, it does well because of you, because of your energy, your input, all of these different kinds of things. That's that's the the kind of reasoning that is out there right now about people starting businesses. So most of the focus on getting you ready to start a business is put directly towards getting you ready to run your own business, and that means usually taking entrepreneurial courses, which usually amount to not very much more than learning things like rudimentary accounting, rudimentary law, a few things about how you how you fill out forms, maybe a little bit about advertising, things that definitely should be passed on to professionals because you can't possibly learn enough in a two-week or ten-week or ten-month course in order to be able to be an expert in law and accounting. You need to have your own lawyer, you need to have your own accountant.
[17:15]But as I was saying, the work is done on the individual. Very little work is done, if any, in fact, is done on what I call the structure of the business. And that leads me to the first thing that we're going to talk about today, which is what I call the three S's. Structure, self-sufficiency, and scalability. These three things make up the backbone of the process that I use for what I call home business whispering. Because I believe totally if a business has the right structure, then that structure can create for itself self-sufficiency so that it starts making money right away. It doesn't have to wait for two years or three years for the business to start making money, it can start making money right now. It also allows that business to fulfill its function the way that the person who started that business wanted it, wanted that business to fulfill its function. And what do I mean by that? Well, I haven't heard of anybody who has ever started a business who says, I want to start a business so I can work 18 hour days. I can have no benefits, I don't get paid if I don't go to work, and I get to have all of the excitement of having to do not only the job that I do, but doing my own advertising, doing my own legal, doing my own accounting, doing my own uh, selling, all of this. Like I can hardly wait to get out there and do that and work 18 hours a day and end up making less money than I was making at my job. And if my business doesn't do well in a month, then what I have to do is I have to reach into my own pocket and pull out money and pay my business so that it can continue to go along. That's not why people get into businesses. People get into businesses so that they can actually have more freedom and more money. They want to be able to spend more time with their family. They want to be able to spend more money at the stores. They don't get into business to work 18 hours a day. But that's the way that most businesses, almost all of them, are structured nowadays. That's how people are taught to start a business. And the first step in whispering a business is to completely throw that out the window. To first of all, ascertain what is the best structure for this business that will allow me to start it for next to no money. I believe strongly in shoestring startup. It should not cost you more than a few hundred dollars, a couple of thousand at most, to start virtually any kind of business, and I mean any kind of business. So you want to want to really work on that structure, and that structure should lend itself to your business being totally self-sufficient. That means that it starts paying its own way and paying you within the first two to three months. So you don't have to put more money into the business. In fact, what I like to do is I like to have a business structured so that it becomes self-sufficient within the first 30 to 60 days, which means that it not only looks after itself, it starts paying you. The other thing that I want that structure to do is I want it to make that business scalable without having to spend a whole lot more money. So many businesses start off just great, and the owner thinks, I would love to expand this business, but I can't. Because in order to expand this business, what I have to do is I have to open up another business just like this one on another street, which means that I'm going to double my expenses. And a lot of businesses have gone under because people have attempted to do that, and it hasn't worked because the business structure is based entirely on the owner doing everything, and the owner can't be in two places at the same time.
[22:46]So what that means is that most times, most businesses are not scalable. They operate at the scale they're started at, they can't grow anymore, they can't be made smaller, they have to stay at that level.
[23:09]And I believe one of the structure or one of the functions of having the right structure is being able to make your business scalable so you can move it from the kitchen table to the boardroom table like that, if you want. You can do it easily, comfortably and quickly. So before we I I give you an example of what scalability and structure and self-sufficiency actually look like in the real world. I mentioned I was going to talk about the two big myths, and I want to take a moment or two, and I do want to talk about those because they are so important, especially for any of you who are new in getting into business, and you're just thinking, gee, I I'd like to get into business. But I don't know. I don't know if it's the thing to do, because it could be expensive, it's going to be risky. There are so many things that could go wrong. So I want to talk about these two big myths, because they are they are vitally important if you are to be really successful in moving your business ahead. So what are these two myths? The first one is what I call the better most trap myth. And basically what the better most trap myth says is that you have to have a better most trap. You have to have a better business idea than what's already out there. And people are striving, individuals who want to have their businesses, are striving all the time to try to come up with a better idea. They're thinking, oh, if I could only come up with a better idea to be able to do this, then wow, that would be wonderful. I'd be able to make all this money and things things would be great. And it is a myth because usually the most successful businesses are those businesses that are the closest to what is already successful right now. The reason being, that if you come up with a better mouse trap, you have to sell the whole concept of a better mouse trap. You have to educate people about the concept of a better most trap, and that all costs a lot of money. If you can find something that's already working and you can do it too, then most times you'll have a more successful business than coming up with a brand new idea. So a lot of people don't bother getting a their business going because they're so concerned and so afraid that they don't have a good idea, that they need to have a good idea. And you don't have to have a good idea. All you need to do is look around and find something that that is doing well, and then open that kind of a business, and chances are you will do well as well. Again, especially if you structure it the right way. Now, the second myth, that second big myth is the one that stops more people than just about anything else. And it is the idea that you have to have a whole lot of money if you're going to be having a successful business, if you're going to start a business. Most bankers, most consultants, most government people, agents that that are helping individuals to be able to start a small business, make a tragic mistake by telling people that if they're going to be successful in business, they have to have a lot of money. Usually, they're told they have to have enough money to buy or rent the premises.
[27:48]They're told they have to have enough money to buy or rent or get or however, all of the stock and all of the infrastructure. They have to buy the telephones and the light and and all the rest of this. And then they're told that they have to have a minimum of two to three years worth of salary put aside because their business isn't going to make any money for two to three years. That comes out to thousands and thousands of dollars. Individuals who are serious about getting started in business using conventional wisdom and conventional methods, usually use all of their savings and end up putting their house, their car, their peace of mind, their children's education, all at risk because they borrow, they not only do they use everything that they've got, but they borrow thousands of dollars over and above what they've what they've actually got. And one of the things that that does to the business right away is it puts it behind the eight ball. Because if you have to pay two or three or four or five thousand dollars a month out just to cover the bills, just to cover your mortgage on the borrowed money, then you're going to have to make an awful lot of money in order to be able to have your business be self-sufficient and in order to be able to start paying yourself. And that's not the way to go. And the thing is that businesses can be started for next to nothing. Most of the businesses I've helped people start over the last 20 years have cost somewhere between $50, and you didn't didn't hear wrong, $50 and two to $3,000. So somewhere in that range, virtually any kind of business can be started. And I mean any kind of business. People have told me, oh, well, you know, you can only start a a small home-based business doing selling crafts or something, if you're going to spend 50 or 100 bucks. And that's not the case. In fact, the example that I'll give you in a couple of minutes, I'll demonstrate how a person who thought they needed to spend $20,000 was able to start their business by changing the structure, having it be self-sufficient and scalable, and start making money within the first five days the business was open after having spent no more than probably $75 to $100 in order to get that business going. And as I said, the traditional consultants had told this person that they were going to have to spend a minimum of $20,000, and it was probably going to take them a year, maybe a year and a half before the business would be self-sufficient.
[31:16]But I'll get to that in just a moment or two when we actually talk about the uh, the examples and and I give you a real world experience of what changing the structure in a business is actually like.
[31:38]Before I do that, I just want to take a moment or two more, and I want to address this whole idea of starting a business on an on a shoe string or starting a business without a lot of money. A little bit further. Because as I mentioned, that myth, number two, and myth number one, which is of course, you have to come up with a good idea, are so ingrained in our psyche that we really, really have to think hard to get outside those. Our belief systems are such that we believe so totally we have to have a lot of money or we have to have a great idea that very often we don't even attempt to think outside the box, we just stop ourselves immediately. And it's so important that you don't do that. If if you want to be in business, you can get into business, and you can get into business right away. We can show you how to start your business on a shoe string, spending almost no money. We can show you how to structure your business so that it will work, so that it's self-sufficient and so that it's scalable. We can show you how you can actually turn your business into something that works for you, rather than you working for it. And that is so important. No matter who you listen to or what you do with your new business, make sure that that new business does what it's supposed to do, and what it's supposed to do is give you more time, more freedom, and more money. It's supposed to help you. It's not supposed to be a burden on you where you can't leave. You you or your wife or husband have to be in the business all the time, looking after it. That's not a business, that is an equity producing job that you have paid a lot of money for.
[34:16]So, um, I'm just getting the sign here that we're we're going to be having to wrap up fairly soon. So I want to jump to an example of what I mean by changing the structure so that a business can be self-sufficient and it can be scalable. And I want to use as an example a young lady who came to us. She had been to a couple of business consultants before, and she had been told that it was going to cost in the neighborhood of about $20,000 in order to be able to get her business up and running. And the business that she wanted to start was something that I'm sure you're all familiar with, it was desktop publishing. She was told, of course, that she'd need new new computers, new software, she'd need a building in order to be able to operate out of, she'd need telephones. She'd need all of these different kinds of things in order to be able to set herself up. Plus, she'd probably need somewhere in the neighborhood of a year to a year and a half before her business grew to the stage where it would be self-sufficient, and she could actually take an income out of it. She'd be making money all along, they told her, but by the time she'd paid off her loans, and by the time she'd paid for her rent, and she'd paid for all of these other expenses, of course, she wasn't going to be taking that money herself. It was going to be going to somewhere else. And the problem was that she didn't have $20,000, and she couldn't find anybody that was willing to borrow $20,000, so she came to us. And she explained the situation, and uh the first question that I asked her was, what is it about you going into the desktop publishing business that's going to make you a success? I wanted to find out what she thought was the most important thing for her about this business. And that would give me one of the one of the basic pieces of putting together the structure that would allow her business to succeed using her strengths rather than her weaknesses. And she told me that what she thought was going to make her business a success, why she thought that she could do it, was that she was a great saleswoman. She said that I'm I'm pretty, I can go out there, I can flirt, I can, you know, bat my eyelashes, and guys will buy from me, I can sell. And most of the people who have desktop publishing businesses, I've done my research, they're all kind of nerdy guys and they don't want to go out into the public, they don't want to sell, they don't want to talk to people. They want to stay at home in front of their computers. But I know I can sell, so if I could just get some desktop publishing stuff going, I could go out and I could sell twice as much as them. And I said, that's great. We're going to work on a new structure for you. So if you're willing to take my suggestions of this new structure, then what we can do is we can use those three S's. We can change the structure of your business so you can get started right away. We can do it without you having to spend a bunch of money, probably less than $500. We can make your business self-sufficient right away and we can make it scalable so you can make as much as you want as fast as you want. Or as slow as you want. And she said, yeah, that that sounds just great. So what we did is we sat down, we worked with her for a little bit, and we created some contracts, some agreements. And what she was to do was to go out to four of the other desktop publishing uh uh people in the community. Excuse me, and she was to sign an agreement with them that they would become subcontractors for her. This is a structure by the way, that that that I call middling. And they would become her subcontractors. In other words, she would get clients, they would be her clients. She wouldn't be just a sales person for them. She would get clients, and she would bring them to that that desktop publishing company, and they would do the work for a discount because they're doing it wholesale. They're they're acting like a a subcontractor. And the difference between their discount and what the customer was paying becomes her profit and her profitability, of course, in the business. So we worked out the agreement, and being a good saleswoman, she went out, and she was able to sign up four people within the first couple of days. She came back, and we then helped her to design a brochure. And it probably took us a week to a week and a half to get all of that together. And by the time she had finished, her cost into her business was approximately $75 to $100 based on the photocopying that she had that had to do, putting gas into her car, driving to the different places. So putting all of those expenses in, she had only spent approximately $75 to $100. Once she had that all together, she had her brochures, the next step was to go out for her and start selling her desktop publishing business. Now you have to remember that if she'd got the $20,000 and had the building, had all of the pieces of infrastructure, had the computers, she would still have to go out and sell it. Then she'd have to come back and do all the work, she'd have to do all the accounting, all of these other things. What we had her doing was just going out and doing the selling. Well, to make a long story short, what happened was she was as good as her word. She went out and she started doing a fantastic job of selling her concept of the desktop publishing, her ideas, all of this kind of thing. And she then took it back to the subcontractors, gave them instructions on how the job was supposed to be done, and they did the job. Now within about a month and a half, she was able to fill up two of the desktop publishers. Now remember, if she had had her own business structured the way that she was going to start it, what would have happened is she would have only been able to do half as many clients at that point in time. In fact, less than that because she would have had to be out of the office selling, she would have had to be doing all kinds of things as well as the desktop publishing. She could actually funnel all of the work she was able to get to the other two desktop publishers. Within another couple of months, she was able to fill up the other two desktop publishers. That meant that she was now at a stage where she had four times as many clients as she would have been able to handle had she been doing it on her own. And of course, if she wanted to scale up the number of of clients that she could have, then all she would have to do is two very simple things. Get contracts with more desktop publishers and hire some other sales people, which is exactly what she did.
[44:28]She moved to a larger center, took her entire idea about how the whole thing worked, she hired some more sales people, some sales girls, she taught them exactly what it was that she did, how she did it, how well it worked, all of that. And she got more desktop publishers signed up on her agreement, and the last time that I was talking to her, she was making somewhere in the neighborhood of $7,000 to $10,000 profit into her pocket every single month. And she was doing almost none of the work. Her work day consisted of getting up in the morning and spending a couple or three hours on the telephone to her sales crew, finding out exactly what went on, talking to a manager that she had hired to make sure that all of the subcontracting was being done the way it was supposed to, and then she would go out and spend the rest of the day sitting by her pool. That was truly an example of using the correct structure to create immediate self immediate self-sufficiency and immediate scalability, so that that person could create for themselves a really exciting and powerful business that just moved right ahead.
[46:17]By having that right structure, she avoided having all of the infrastructure payments that she would have had if she'd rented or bought a place. She avoided having to do all of the work of sitting down and doing all the desktop publishing, which would have limited to the number of hours she could put in, how much work she could do. It allowed her to scale the business to any size that she wanted to, again, something that would have been impossible had she started the business using a conventional method. So it meant all three of the major S's, it by creating the right structure that fit for her, it allowed her business to immediately become self-sufficient, and it immediately allowed the business to be scalable if she so desired to any size that she wanted. If she wanted to, she could operate using that same uh structure having people in 25 different cities. She could have a hundred cities, or she could bring it right back down to where she's running it from her kitchen table, and she's just got a couple of desktop publishers and she's doing the sales herself. It's totally scalable in either direction.
[47:56]So, I I hope that this has given you an idea of the different kind of structure. Now, of course, I should mention that this particular structure fit for her because of the way she was, what her strengths were. There's hundreds of different structures, and there's four major structures that I personally use that have derivatives that allow us to be able to do virtually anything with anyone. The trick is, though, talking to someone who can help you create the kind of structure that's best for your business. So whether your business is having problems and needs to be restructured, or whether you're in that lucky position of just getting ready to start that business, please get in touch with us. Give us a phone call, I do consulting over the telephone, and I also work in person, and sometimes over the internet as well. So, if this interests you, if you would like to learn more about how to structure your particular business and business idea, so that it has the right structure to make it self-sufficient and to make it scalable, then please get in touch with us. Now I know I'm getting the sign that I'm all out of time here, so I want to thank all of you for coming. Thank you very, very much, and for any of you watching at home, again, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to actually uh listen to the program, and I hope you've you've learned something. All the best, my name is Justice Chase, the Home Business Whisperer, and have a wonderful day.
