How To Go From Struggling To Successful Entrepreneur

How to figure out what business is right for you to start so it succeeds in the long run.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a 24 year old viewer who is a struggling entrepreneur. He’s tried and failed at several businesses. His most recent business failure is a power bank mobile phone charging business. He’s very impatient and wants success and wealth to happen immediately. I discuss what he needs to do and what it takes to finally succeed long term. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

Hi, I’m Coach Corey Wayne, and this is my Video Coaching Newsletter. And the topic of today’s Members Only Newsletter is, “How To Go From Struggling To Successful Entrepreneur.”

Well, this particular email is from a young guy. He’s 24. He’s a struggling entrepreneur. And at this point in his life, he’s already tried and failed at several different businesses. And so his most recent business failure is a power bank mobile charging business. So I guess he was doing a lot of cold calling. He got like two clients. Spent and lost a lot of money on it and just closed it down and that went down to two. So he’s getting pretty demotivated and upset that things haven’t worked out.

And that’s kind of the life of an entrepreneur. And so one of the things that he’s gonna if he wants to succeed, that first and foremost he’s going to have to fix is his mindset. Because you could tell his mindset is he wants success right now. He thinks it’s going to come in a matter of days, weeks and months. And that’s unrealistic. And it doesn’t happen for most people. It is good that he’s trying a lot of different things to see what works and what doesn’t. But if he thinks that he’s going to start an entrepreneur and then become Mark Zuckerberg in six months, it’s like, that’s just not going to work.

And he’d be better off just getting a job because and work for somebody else. Because being an entrepreneur is not easy. If your business life, you got to read Mastering Yourself because I got my whole journey in this book. It’s a biography of everything I went through. And my experience as an entrepreneur. I’ve done both ways where I build a business in my spare bedroom, and then when it does well enough then I go do it on my own. And I’ve also done where you burn boats and you don’t work for anybody. You just work for yourself and you live off of your capital.

But depending on how much capital you have, you have a certain amount of runway before you run out of money. When you run out of money, well, you’re either out of business or you got to go back to work for somebody else and supplement your income until your business takes off. So it’s an interesting email. I know not everybody’s an entrepreneur, but if you want to succeed, you got to have the right mindset for it because it’s not easy. You got to be a little nutty. You know, I think, um, to be a successful entrepreneur, like, I think Elon Musk had the best quote.

He says, “being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” And so anybody that’s been through it and worried about for a long period of time, things don’t go your way. It takes many, many years. I mean, it took me just four years alone to figure out my business model in the right way to market my business. And I again, I wrote about that and detailed it in Mastering Yourself. And if you’re going to mark it, it helps if you have a really expensive product that you got high margins in. If you’re selling a cheap product, you got to sell lots of the cheap product and you got to make your pay per click campaigns work.

That’s why if you pay attention to who advertises on TV, usually it’s lots of cars, lots of car advertisements you see on TV, lots of pharmaceutical ads that you see on TV. You’ll see things like dish soap or body soap. The kind of thing that, like all human beings, need. You typically tend to see those on there. And so even though it might be a $10 or $15 or $20 product that they’re selling, everybody needs it. So their demographic of potential customers is huge. The more you have a niche thing, especially if it’s cheaper, like a book like mine.

When I started, what I realized was 95% of the self-help books on dating and relationships were read and bought by women. And most guys, I mean, how many of you guys that have been with me for a while follow me for a while, have bought like ten of these books and given them to your closest friends, and then checked in with them six months a year later to see how many of them actually read it. You’d be lucky if one out of ten actually reads it. Most of those guys. “Oh yeah, I got to get around. I’m not gonna listen to that guy. It’s like, I hate his voice.

He’s annoying. What does he know?” But when they’re in pain, when they’re having a breakup or a girl friend zones them, or they got served with divorce papers, they’re like, hey, what’s that dude’s name? Because those guys tend to be egocentric. But it’s true. There are riches in niches. You’ve just got to have a even if you’re into a niche type of product or service, where there’s not a huge group of people, of potential customers, if it’s a niche and if it’s a high enough price point, you can do well. Like what I do. I mean, I don’t ever see myself like having a year where I sell like 10 million books, it’s like, that’s not going to happen.

I’ve sold over the last 20 years and given away millions of copies of my book. But, you know, that’s over the course of 20 years. So it’s like I said, it’s a type of business that is a niche type of business. Even when you look at the dating and relationship stuff. Again, most of the books, if you look at what sells and in the category that my first book, “How to Be a 3% Man” is in, it’s still dominated by women. The books that sell consistently and do well are almost exclusively books that women read. Very few of them are the books that the guys read.

So it’s important if you’re going to start any kind of product or service. First and foremost, you got to really love it. You got to really have a passion for it. You got to really believe in it. Like when I started, I knew the stuff that I taught was life changing. It was a paradigm shift, but it’s hard work. You guys that that take, take learning this seriously and you read the book 10 to 15 times, this is not a quick fix. The stuff that I’m teaching is you’re not going to watch one video in, your life’s changed. You’re not going to read my book once and your life is completely changed. You have to read it over and over and over and apply it.

Go out on dates, talk to women, get into relationships, have breakups, go through breakups. It takes a long time to really master this stuff, because a big part of it really is your mindset and dealing with a lot of things that are uncomfortable, that are unpleasant to deal with. And it’s just much easier to avoid it. I mean, all you got to do is look at the fact that 74% of all Americans are either overweight or obese. So that’s like the majority of the people.

Most people tend to major in minor things. And when it comes to self-help, most people are just simply not interested. They’re not going to read a book like mine. It’s very. That’s why when you look at who the most successful people in the world are, it’s a small group of people. It’s not like everybody becomes a millionaire. There are lots of millionaires in the world, But when you take into effect, there’s what, eight and a half, almost 9 billion people now. Very, very few really make it in life.

Viewer Email:

Hi Corey,

I have been following your work for many years now, and it has really changed my life significantly. I am 24 years old, and your work has allowed me to be in an amazing relationship with my current girlfriend. We have been together for just over 2 years now, and she is everything that I put down on my list before I met her. It’s pretty crazy how she literally matched up with everything on my list. Everything is going pretty well in my life. I have a nice engineering job at a company with a good work culture. I recently left a company where the work was always really stressful with an infinite number of deadlines.

I have been at my current company for 9 months now, however, I am slowly starting to feel less and less content as each day goes by. I look around the office and I see people in their 40’s and 50’s doing the 9 to 5, conforming and being “socially acceptable”, and collecting their paychecks every 2 weeks. I really don’t want to spend the rest of my life having performance reviews, 4% pay rises, and waking up to an alarm clock.

Well, the crazy thing is, when you become an entrepreneur, especially when you’re doing a full time, you’re always working. Your business is always on your mind. Every single day I’m opening my computer, I’m looking at my stats. I’m looking at my data. I’m looking at the email subscribes. I’m looking at the paid membership subscriptions, I’m looking at YouTube. I’m looking at my ad revenue. I’m checking my website because things break. If you’re not paying attention, shit breaks. And before you find out that it’s broken, you could lose tens of thousands of dollars in a matter of weeks if you’re not paying attention. So there’s always things happening.

Like just in the past couple months, I didn’t get paid all my royalties from audible and my merch. The company that does all the merchandise, which is a company that YouTube recommends. It’s integrated into their system. I put in for, because I don’t always put in for payments. Every month I let things accumulate. Back in February, I put in a request to get paid and it never processed. They never processed it. And I’ve been emailing and corresponding with, “oh yeah, we don’t have an update. Yeah, we’re working on that. We’re working really hard to figure out what to get you paid.” Meanwhile, months and months have gone by.

I’ve reached out to YouTube and they’re like, “well, they’re their own company.” It’s like you guys are recommended these people. So those are the things you have to deal with. And, you know, it’s not like you pick up the phone and call somebody. You got to send an email and you got to wait at usually a day or two to hear back. And then, you know, I don’t know if that means that this provider spring or whatever is having financial problems or they’re just totally, incompetently managed. I don’t know what the deal is, but YouTube ain’t willing to do shit about it. I reached out to them. I’ve ripped them a new one. It’s like they don’t fucking care.

I just, you know, it’s just not worth the time to fuck with because you got to look at how much time are you going to spend. And it’s, you know, so you got to you got to, these are just the things that come at you. You know, it’s upsetting when you have a company like a big company like an Amazon that just, “Oh yeah. Well, we decided not to pay you your royalties. Well. Oh we got a little behind. We’ll get we’ll have a makeup next month.” It’s like, what are you going to do. Who you going to bitch to? And that’s the way it is. So working for other people sucks. But work for yourself. It’s your success or your failure, it completely depends on you. And it’s not easy. Most people are not cut out for it.

I started a company at the beginning of this year. The idea was to install these power bank stations where people can rent a power bank to charge their mobile devices. Unfortunately, this business failed about 3 weeks ago due to many factors.

Yeah, just listening to that. You go, I mean, people got a charger, you can plug it anywhere. You know, as long as someone’s got an electrical outlet, that’s all you really need.

My girlfriend is in another city (we are doing long distance right now), and I want to move back to that city. I moved to my current city for the job I am currently working at. I realized that if I continued the power bank business, I would be locked in my current city and not be able to move. I cold called and emailed a crap ton of places, but only 2 locations accepted my proposal. There was also the risk of the power banks catching fire because they are made out of lithium-polymer, which made me feel very uneasy.

I mean, this is what entrepreneurs do. When you talk to entrepreneurs. I mean, again, I wrote about in my book when I was in my early 20s, I was in, I was really big in a saltwater reef tanks. And I thought about, hey, I can make wet dry filter systems out of the Lexan that they would use for those things. And once I actually bought a piece and started working on manufacturing it. I was like, this really sucks. But that’s how you learn. You try something, you go, well, this really sucks, but when you really love it and you’re passionate about it, like this particular business, having spent four years trying to figure out my business model, and then I spent four years sleeping on my dad’s couch before things really started to take off.

I mean, and I worked part time for about ten months waiting tables to supplement my income, to give me some additional money to experiment with and pay per click, campaigns and stuff, and paid my web developer to screw around my website and come up with landing pages and test things. When I was trying to figure out how to market the business. But I knew the product was great. The people that I was actually helping were like, man, this is amazing. Changed my life. I got my wife back, or I got a wife, or I got a girlfriend, or I lost my virginity. Or my relationship that was on the rocks is better than ever. And so I knew the product worked. I knew what I taught worked, but marketing it was the hard part.

Because, you know, I was no longer spending 50 grand a month on television advertising and selling $300,000 houses and making $20,000 in loan and real estate commissions. You spend 50 grand a month, you have two, you know, three closings, three closings, all you need to break even on the advertising cost. But you’re selling a $20 book, a $10 Kindle. It’s like you got to sell lots and lots of those just to recoup the costs of the advertising. And so the amount of money that it costs to reach the advertisers, just the product doesn’t really justify it. That’s why the organic content is the best thing. You got to give a lot of information away for free.

And I’ve been doing it for 20 years, and so I’ve got so many clients that I’ve had over the last 20 years that I’ve been doing this, that some of them come back like, you know, uh, the video that I did that was the free one for today. That was a guy been following me a long time, seven years or actually. No, I take that back. He started following me back in 2014. So that’s 11 years he’s been with me. He’s been with his girlfriend for seven years. They got two kids now and then last year he has been working at all. He’s been studying and trying to trade. And meanwhile his girlfriend’s got a successful business and she’s not liking it. So. And it looks like he just came back to me now because he’s starting to have problems. And so that was a pretty good, uh, Video Newsletter. But anyways, it’s just not easy.

So you got to really examine carefully examine your reasoning. I would never recommend, or I should say, the best way to build a business if you want to be an entrepreneur is keep working your normal job and then build something on the side. And then when it does well enough and you’re close to replacing your existing income with your side business, then you can quit and do your side business full time. Because unless you’ve got a lot of money in the bank and you got a lot of runway or you got equity investors, it’s really tough. It’s really tough to figure things out. Most businesses fail. Most businesses fail within five years, and it’s usually because they’re undercapitalized.

Or they just like this thing here with the chargers, that just doesn’t seem like a good business that’s going to be in high demand. So if you’ve got a product or service that; because it’s like mine when you talk to, “oh yeah, that’d be great. I’d love to read that book.” But you give it to a guy and he actually reads it. Very few of them are good. So again, that’s why the title is “How to Be a 3% Man”. Most guys are 97%’s. Even a lot of guys that buy the book, they’ll read it once or twice and they’ll never go back to it because that’s the way it is. It’s hard.

So now I am sort of working on a few online businesses, but I am feeling pretty depressed as I’ve spent so much money, time, and effort, and I haven’t made a single dollar yet.

Welcome to the club. That’s part of being an entrepreneur. It’s a lot of suffering, a lot of time, a lot of money. So it always takes way more time than you think to make it successful, it always takes way more money, usually 2 to 3 times. So if you think your business will be successful in 2 or 3 years, probably take you a decade. When you’re an entrepreneur, you got to think in terms of a decade. Everybody didn’t hear about Facebook when they first started it, but after about ten years, pretty much most people knew who they were. So success is long in coming. And if you don’t have a really burning desire to make your product or service happen and sell it to people, as soon as things get difficult, you’ll give up.

And that’s what happened here. He chose something he thought was a good idea that was convenient, and he worked his ass off trying to sell it, and almost nobody was interested. I mean, he got a couple of people, but unless he really had a burning desire and was totally in love with his product, I mean, as he said, the thing made him feel totally uneasy. I always felt good about my product and service. I knew how much it had helped me and how much it could help other people. It was just finding the right way to market it. And when you need to get your message in front of people so they could see your value.

I know a lot of people selling things like dog beds or blankets and making millions of dollars. I’ve tried doing things like that since a few years ago but have always given up after a couple of weeks.

Yeah, if you’re only able to stick with something for a few weeks and then give up, you’re never going to be a successful entrepreneur, Dude. You got to think in terms of years and decades in order to be successful. That’s why you got to fall in love with your product or service. And if you’re not in love with it, as soon as things get hard, you’ll give up. And that’s what happened here. He tried a bunch of different things, and he didn’t become a millionaire in a couple of weeks, so he gave up. He might be better suited to be just an employee working for somebody else.

I’ve tried writing books and selling them.

It’s not easy. It takes years.

I’ve tried YouTube and coding a website but just end up deleting everything. I’ve done so much stuff but haven’t gone anywhere with these businesses – it’s like going to the gym for years and looking exactly the same as day one.

That’s the rub, dude. This is why most people give up. The sane thing to do is to quit is to give up. But unless you have a fucking burning desire to do this, to do whatever your product or service is, as soon as things get tough, you’ll quit. You’ll give up because you didn’t really believe in the product or service to begin with. Probably the reason why you did this online selling was because he saw other people who were making lots of money. And guys like me, we make it look easy, but it’s like all I got to do is scroll through Instagram and I’ll probably come across 20 or 30 dudes that have ripped off my work and are trying to basically copy it and do it themselves, and they’re just spinning their wheels.

It’s not easy to do. I make it look easy, but it’s not your friends that are successful selling stuff online. They make it look easy. Maybe you should go work for them. Maybe you should work for free or intern with them on the side just so you can learn the business and find some kind of products that you could sell online. Because again, if you’re selling stuff online, it’s not easy either. You got to really love what you’re doing and be really passionate about it. You got to be, you know, two things that every business has to do successfully is, number one, you got to market.

And number two, you got to innovate successfully. You got to innovate a product. Obviously my product is very innovative. It’s very difficult. And I make it look easy. That’s why everybody tries to copy me. But you know, very few actually succeed because you got to have the expertise. Number one, you got to have the experience and you got to be a good communicator.

Just wanted to see what your opinion is on this, as I can’t seem to find a way through this at the moment. Thank you.

Kind regards,

Bob

Well, all you really lacking is another idea. You got to find a product or a service you really love, and even if it takes you ten years to build it, you’ll do that. And so I know what it’s like to work for somebody else while it sucks and you need cash flow, you got to pay your bills and you need capital because your business, until it’s making a profit, until it has revenue. You just light money on fire, basically. You learn a lot. But the smart thing to do is to be to find a product or service you absolutely love. You absolutely believe in and find somebody that’s already doing something similar and succeeding at the highest level. You said, you know all these people that are making millions selling online, well, go talk to them. Find a product or service that you could sell that lots of people want.

Because again, the bigger your demographic, the easier it’s going to be. The more of a niche it is, the harder it’s going to be. And it’s like, again, like with my with what I do, I mean, again, there’s thousands of YouTube people that are trying to do this and they don’t get any traction because they’re just not very good at it and they’re not very convincing. And quite frankly, most of them don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. They just they got laid a few times, like, “oh, this is easy. I can do what Corey does.” It’s like I make it look easy, but it’s not. This is hard stuff.

And you’re dealing with people’s lives you better know what the fuck you’re doing if you’re going to get into this kind of business. So the way I look at it is, you haven’t, number one, you haven’t really, truly believed and had a burning desire to make your product or your service viable. You weren’t willing to stick with it and continue to lose money. You were willing to lose money for a few weeks and then you just gave up. So if you just give up after a few weeks, you’ll never be a successful entrepreneur. That’s why you got to find a product or service that you really love. You really believe in. When I went into real estate again, I wrote about this, I detailed this stuff.

I have several careers that I went through, several businesses I’ve had over the course of my life. I always had a burning desire when I was young to buy, fix and sell single family homes for a profit. I went to school for construction management, I did that. I was working full time in the industry because I wanted to learn how to build, because I thought, well, if I’m going to renovate houses, I better learn how to build and renovate them. And so that was the path that I took. And then I worked for other general contractors. I got experience. And I kept looking for properties on the side.

And I eventually came across a company that was in Orlando at the time that had the properties. I had the money and I had the desire and I had the know how, and they had the properties. And so as I started buying properties from them, I realized within about four months, five months, I was going to run out of money because a house could sell in 30 days, or it might take 6 to 8 months. You just never know. Some houses look amazing. You’re like, oh man, it’s going to sell in two weeks. And then six months later it’s still sitting there. And you have other houses. You’re like, ah, that one’s going to do well. And then boom, you get a contract. The first week it’s on the market. You just never know.

And you got to have cash flow. And so I ended up talking my way into a job at the company I was buying my properties from, so I could learn the acquisition side of things. I could learn how to finance my end users. I could learn about being a loan officer doing those things because most of them sucked. I learned how to sell properties because the people that I had listed my properties with weren’t doing shit to sell them, and by working for them, I got to cherry pick deals for myself. I made a lot of connections, had a lot of access, and that’s why I think the best thing for you is to find a product or service that you absolutely love, and maybe go work for those people part time.

Or if you know people that are already succeeding selling online, figure out what they’re doing successfully. Maybe you can joint venture with them or partner with them or go work for them. But I would keep your job and keep looking for something. But if you just give up after two weeks, you’re not going to be successful. You might as well find a company, a product or service that’s doing really well and work for them. And because again, most people are not cut out to be an entrepreneur, it’s not fucking easy.

And if you’re an entrepreneur and you want to run your ideas and things by me, or have me help you come up with a plan, I would suggest booking a phone session go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen on any page, and book a coaching session with yours truly. Until next time, I will talk to you soon.