Now Is the Time to Start

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What’s shaking? Hey, I’m Rick Jordan, and today we’re going all in a lot of people who are going to need to hear this message today, this message about tough times and starting something fresh. And this has to do with the economy. This has to do with your job. This has to do with launching a business right now, a new business, or hanging on to the business that you have in this funky economic climate that we have now, when I started on my own when I first launched into entrepreneurship, full time, and I’m gonna say that full time, because prior to 2008 I was really just doing some side hustles. I mean, you know, like, right after the .com bust, I started to do web hosting, right? It was just like subscription payments, and then I tried to do web design for people, but it was already a very, very saturated marketplace. And plus, it was like pennies, right? I mean, that stuff, web hosting, has never been very expensive. It was very low ticket, you know, 20 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month, whatever it was at that point in time. 

And so I had these side hustles for a few years. And one thing I learned about that is that as long as you have a side hustle, something else is going to be your main hustle. And that main hustle was my full-time job. That main job shifted through a bunch of different things with working for Merrill Lynch, and that’s when I was in enterprise systems and computers and deploying no less than 15,000 servers and 120,000 computers, workstations across all their branch offices across the US than it was working for the Cook County Department of Planning and Development, through writing custom software and gathering data from homeless shelters around the area and other social service agencies, was able to get the county another $14 million in funding from the federal HUD Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was successful. Right then, I ended up at Best Buy as the very first Geek Squad agent in Chicago. And after that point, wrote the whole sales playbook for Best Buy for business, and then they completely shut down that whole division of B to B within Best Buy, when Best Buy was trying to become a computer full service business servers and all that, like consultancy, almost they shut that down, and I was a casualty of that right before 2008 before the big economic crash. 

So that’s when I’ve told the story before, the two new twins just came into my life. And you know, times are tough, and that’s actually when I started my business. That’s when I launched full board into entrepreneurship. Is because I was like, Well, I either can go out and try to find another job in this funky climate, or I can actually finally do what I was willing to do. And I was given this violent shove into going out on my own, and I had that encouragement the whole way. I mean, my very first client was a franchisee for Buffalo Wild Wings, who has several stores, very successful. He was a customer of Geek Squad of mine when I was at Geek Squad, and followed the whole way through, and just pushed me. And he’s like, I will be your first client. I’m like, That’s awesome, right? So I had already started building a network before that, and that’s how it ended up working out well for me, how I was able to do this right away, because I actually had some income from day one, and not much, not much at all. I’m talking like $1,500 a month. That’s it. So think about that right family of four, two infants. I mean, just the formula that they had to drink because they were spitting up everything else. The formula was a special formula with starch in it. 

You know, it was like Enfamil AR I think it was what it was back then. And that between the two was $75 a week. So you’re talking somewhere around $350 a month just in Formula. And my only source of revenue was from one client at $1,500 a month, plus you talk about mortgage and everything else, I’ve told that story, but those were very obvious tough times, and a lot of you are freaking out right now. And I say that in the most endearing and compassionate way, because stuff that’s going on in the world economically, it’s pretty easy to freak out about. It’s very easy to freak out. It’s very easy to be nervous, to be cautious, to be a bit fearful of what’s going on. I mean, things like the dollar, the US dollar, this hasn’t happened right since, like the shift from a century ago when the US dollar became the standard international currency that things were traded in, and now that’s going away in the dollar. The US Dollar doesn’t hold as much value as it used to, you know. So lending is going to be tight. It’s difficult to get loans, especially with interest rates where they are. Jobs are a you hear of layoffs all over the place, big companies, small. Companies. 

Everybody’s tightening their belt right now because they’re trying to figure out how to survive. Like, if we thought COVID was difficult from an economic perspective, this is probably at least twice as hard. And I’m not going to over exaggerate, but like, it’s 10 times, it’s 100 times. No, I’m being real. It’s probably like two times as hard, you know, which means we’re going to see twice as many people lose their jobs. We’re going to see twice as many people lose their homes. It’s just it’s going to be rough over the next couple of months. It’s going to be rough from a perspective of seeing everything that’s going on, and I see this stuff on social media, right? And it was very interesting to me, because I think back to everything that I just told you about how I really started into entrepreneurship when I had no more side hustle, when I just had my only hustle, and that was my business. And I still fully believe to this day that as long as your dream is a side hustle, you’re never going to see it come true. As long as your dream is a side hustle, you’re never going to see it come true. 

Your Side Hustle, if that’s really what you want to do, needs to be your only hustle. Side Hustle is a freaking virus to entrepreneurship. Now, when I did this and made that my only hustle, and I launched into this, right? Doing just business, computer consulting. It was tough. Times were tough, and you’re thinking that right now. But this stuff that I see on social media, people are saying, you know, like these influencers, if you want to call them that, bunch of BS, some of these things, and you’ll see why, as I talk about this, you know, they’re saying, like, now’s the time to be secure in your job. Meaning, if you work for somebody else, now’s the time to be secure in your job. Don’t change jobs right now. You’re safer where you’re at. Stay there. Be safe. You know, start eliminating some of your expenses. And then another thing that I see, along with the same line of thinking, is, do not start a business like they’re straight up telling you it’s like Now’s not the time to start a business. Granted, business statistics are horrendous. It’s like 50% fail in the first two years. You know, 95% of businesses fail within 10 years. That’s pretty rough. It’s like only 5% of businesses in the country actually survive more than 10 years. I’m really grateful that Reach Out is one of those. 

That it’s one of the 5% we’re still growing, and we’re leveling up. Went public. You know, going to go through more stages of going public and eventually ring the bell at NASDAQ. That’s my intention.it’s exciting. I’m creating this safe space for people, even during these times. But this BS advice that’s on there, because I’m going to tell you this, if you’re going to hold off right now because of the economic climate, there’s going to be something else three years from now, there’s going to be something else five years from now, there’s always going to be a reason not to do something. In fact, there’s always going to be, like, 127 reasons not to launch your business. The entrepreneur is one who finds that one single reason to actually do it right now, to take that risk, right? I talked about risk a couple of episodes ago too, like the risk of staying the same is way greater than the risk of changing. Changing pushes you forward. You can find all these reasons to not do it right now, but you, as an entrepreneur, if your side hustle is really what you want to be doing for your life, or at least for the next 10 years, it’s something you feel like you can do and succeed at, and you want to go after it. 

Find that one reason, find that one reason to do it that’s an entrepreneur. And as you’re thinking about all these things to not do, right, because you’re going to think of all these ways that you could potentially fail. And actually, even as you get into it, there’s going to be so many things that you can never predict, you know, and people who are part of my coaching program, right? My business coaching program for service providers always comes up with things like difficult stuff and issues they have to face, and all that. And it’s stuff that they can never see, and I can coach them through it, because I’ve seen a lot of it. Now, doing this for like 16 years, I’ve seen a lot of it. I’ve been through so much, and I’m really good at strategy. But the reason I got really good at strategy is that I have the scars, because I have the battle wounds, because I’ve experienced stuff, and I’ve fallen flat on my face, and I’ve chosen to look at those as temporary defeats rather than permanent failures. You will always find these things, and you are going to screw up when you start a business. 

You are going to screw up when you’re trying to grow a business. You are going to screw up when you’re trying to scale your business. Be encouraged, though I need you to hear this today, because you are never. Sure, this is a fact. You are never going to get everything right, but you’ll never get everything wrong, no matter how many times you keep pressing forward. You’re going to screw up. You’re going to mess up. There are enough things that are going to hit you out of left field, and you’ll be able to overcome those, because you’ll be able to continue to harden yourself, continue to gain knowledge, and continue to learn. But you have to start that process first. You have to do it. You actually have to take that step of faith in order to do that. So whether you do it now or five years from now, you still have to start at ground zero. And whether you do it now or five years from now, you’re still going to make mistakes. The point is, is that when you start, that’s when you begin to learn. When you start, that’s when you have the opportunity to grow. You can’t grow if you didn’t even start to begin with. So whether it’s during some of the worst possible times economically, within the world, within the country, within your town, within your family, or it’s in a moment of a little bit more stability. 

Five years from now, ask yourself this question: how am I going to decide to wait five years? What do I want to wait five years for? What do I want to wait five months for? If you don’t have a real big answer, a really good answer, and there may be something, there may be something, but I bet you there’s not. Because no matter how much you think you can save up, no matter how much you think you can prepare, you will never be completely prepared, and you will never get everything right, but you won’t get everything wrong. The time to start is when it’s the time to start. Nobody else can tell you that, besides you, not the media, not your friends, not your partner, not your spouse. The time to start is when you say it’s time to start. If you really want to go after this, your side hustle needs to be your only hustle. And you get to decide when you start, whether it’s right now, whether it’s five months from now, whether it’s five years from now. The sooner you actually begin, the sooner you begin to learn, the sooner you begin to grow, the sooner you can get those battle wounds, the sooner you can learn, the sooner you can look back and say, Man, I’m glad I started.