background, primarily food and beverage. I worked in the nonprofit world and I founded a and ran a charity organization for several years and when I was doing that during the pandemic it was almost impossible to find people to work you know it's during the pandemic everything shut down so I really had to try to find ways to amplify my impact as a solo founder you know for things like data entry email follow-up donor outreach and so that's when I first experienced uh automation eventually I started gravitating towards more of the tech world and started moving away from the nonprofit and that's when I came across your video tutorials and I watched a ton of those. At the time though, I don't think you had any communities going on or mentorship, you know, any form of mentorship. So, I had joined a couple of other kind of coaching programs that they just weren't super well organized. They were I think I overpaid for not the best result. The community aspect was underdeveloped. And so I started, you know, I kept networking, kept taking on small jobs like with family members, friends of family, but it was very spotty, you know. So I was still doing, you know, other work in consulting, uh, business operations for bars and restaurants and stuff like that. — Um, and then eventually I saw that you had opened up your school community. I was like, "Oh, perfect. " Like I already know this guy's content is going to be good. There's no like guessing. — Cool, cool. So that was the journey to get to I guess maker school specifically. And when you were saying you were doing some consulting before like what sort of what sorts of consulting relationships were you having? You said bars and so on and so forth. — Yeah. So primarily so from my hospitality background I was a bartender for many years. And so I would go in and if a new bar restaurant was like hey we want to open up a bar program. I would come in consult them on like okay here's how you set up your bar program. This is how you deal with dist distribution. this is how we're going to do basic marketing. But I had to kind of step away from that area just because brick and mortar never really worked that great with automation. And I tried doing certain you know like uh you know outreach when people come in and scan a QR code, but it's just not the same. You can't hit the volume. — Yeah, for sure man. It's like square peg in a round hole. I did the same. E I was um operating a video marketing agency right around COVID and so a lot of our clients were like local and I was implementing automations and stuff and it was working okay for some things obviously like emails and whatnot. Duh. But yeah, CO hit, shut us down and I was like, okay, I don't think the local play is the angle anymore. I got to find something else. — Yeah, — that's cool, man. Um did you have any major financial goals when you were just getting into this stuff? Were you just like, I'm paying my bills? — Yeah, to be honest, for me, I just wanted to make something online. I think that like for the longest time I sort of had this I don't know what it was. It was like this invisible wall with making money online. Um and it was probably a combination of like just not sticking with one online side hustle long enough or struggling to like ask people for to pay me what my time was actually worth. Um or you know just my time being spent elsewhere that I didn't follow through. But like I consider myself to be a pretty capable business mind. Um, but I've always been better at doing business in person, just, you know, bartender or just like talking to donors or, you know, whatever. Um, but online money sort of just escaped me. I don't know what it was. Um, so my mantra starting out was just like, I want to break that invisible wall, like whatever that is. Um, as things have evolved, I think, you know, now my long-term goal is I want to hit 500K a year, uh, in combination with, you know, salary or however that looks. Um, that's kind of my long-term goal. So, I still have a ways to go. Um, but I think it's good to have, you know, your eyes on set goals. — Yeah, for sure. And I think there's like, you know, different types of set goals. You know, a lot of people, I think, make this grand declaration when they just get into business. They want to make like $10 million a year or whatever. Um, but you know, I find that the steps required to make large amounts of money like that tend to be different from the steps required to make smaller amounts of money, which you need to do in order to get there. So, — I feel you I think 500k a year is like really reasonable. — Um, I think one of the things that was really interesting about you was you were saying that you were making $11,000 a month part-time. — So, uh, describe part-time for me. Like, run me through exactly what that looks like. — I do hesitate to use MR just with the part-time model. I mean I think that people kind of looking from the outside in like a lot of the work that I do it does not fall into a retainer model anymore just because I do have to have kind of the freedom for things to fluctuate you know so for example like uh last month when I relocated I just relocated to San Jose for a new role at my full-time job and you know I recently got engaged so I'm planning a wedding and so it's like I have to have that freedom to like fluctuate. July was, you know, closer to like 5K. The month before that was like 11K. This month MR will probably be around 15K. And so I'm able to project those and feel pretty consistent just because of the systems that have like the maturity of the systems in place. Um, but for the most part, I don't do a ton of monthly recurring unless I like have outsourced like specific people to be like, "Hey, you're going to be doing this and you're going to maintain it. " But the way that it looks like is I do outsource a lot. So I would say that my business model is probably pretty different than a lot of the stuff that you push on your community and I would not recommend people emulate me unless they are prepared to grow very slowly. I was able to have the luxury of scaling a little bit slower because I did have my job to pay for food and stuff like that. Um, and so things like I didn't have to niche down super quickly. I'm still able to kind of take those bespoke custom automations, which is terrible for like scaling quickly. But yeah, so what it looks like a lot is I spend most of my time on sales and lead genen. I found that if you can close a contract, there is no shortage of people who can build it. — Yeah, very true. Like the supply side of the people that are willing to do work versus, you know, the number of contracts out there. Very skewed. That's cool, man. Uh, wow. Really sweet. Uh, just out of curiosity, what are you doing in your full-time job then? You don't have to name the company or whatever. — Can I work in tech? I am a technical account manager. So, I kind of there's some overlap. It's enterprise level. I do a lot with data analytics, marketing, automation, marketing tech. The reason why I'm able to kind of have both of these worlds is because they don't really compete with each other. — Yeah, makes sense. I mean, you know, one's probably more SMB focused. Um, and then you know, you have this enterprise focus. So, you get to speak the enterprise language, but you don't necessarily step on your own toes. — Yeah. — That's really cool. — It's part of the reason why I am sticking with and kind of prioritizing like the fulltime is that, you know, my goal is to stay in this industry in one capacity or the other, like long term. And maybe in the future, I'll get to a point where like I feel like, hey, I've got enough experience in this enterprise world that now I've got like that really good social proof. Uh, I've got that experience that other people don't have and now I'm like ready to go all in on whatever that looks like. But for now, like I'm kind of pacing myself. I think that we're still early on in the industry. I think a lot of people are kind of rushing. They're rushing themselves to be like, I need to learn all of these things. New things are coming out every day. And my recommendation is like, there's no way you're going to keep up with everything. So, so might as well just pace yourself. — Yeah, there's like 10 model drops a day, man. Like, what the no way I can keep track of them. And they're all such interesting names. And no, it's just Yeah, it's like studying for your freaking medical board exams or something, man. Um, — yeah. — Well, in terms of the actual Okay, cool. So, now I understand, you know, you got like the full-time and then you're supplementing it with part-time. Sounds like the vast majority of the part-time ones are they're either onetime projects or the recurring they're follow-up projects for clients, but they're not like on a recurring basis and then you're working in SMB in your agency and then mostly enterprise in your like day-to-day. — Yeah. Let's talk about the actual I guess strategy that you followed then. So, first time that you like jumped into maker school. Um, and you know, you started doing like the day-by-day steps. I know you're talking about how you're outsourcing and you're basically, you know, you're running an agency. You're not doing the freelancing, right, which is what I usually recommend. Uh, but like walk me through like first client. Um, how did you get them? What sort of approaches did you take to land that and break that, you know, internal glass ceiling for yourself? — Yeah. So, one thing that I will preface is that I did do the freelancing side of things starting off. Like I think you have to I think that you have to get some experience — like on the ground and like get your hands dirty of like solo freelancing what that looks like. So Upwork was you know where I started off. Um Upwork I think is great place to get a little bit of like the market research of like what are people paying like how do you interact with clients? Um what kind of clients do I like working with? So, I did all that and so I think like my early jobs were following your program pretty to the tea. Um, that was kind of what got me to a place where I felt comfortable enough vetting and outsourcing other people to do it. I think that you have to know how to do it before you can be like, "Hey, this person is going to be able to do it for you. " My first jobs were the typical like reaching out via cold email. You know, I know on my post that I talked about like having struggling with cold email and a lot of people saw that post and kind of were like, "Oh, so how do you do this without cold email? " I'm like, "Don't get it twisted. Like, you still need to do cold email. " Like, that's still this still a you know, a must have. My strategy starting off was just work extra hard. So it's like wake up early, do the sales in the morning, go to work, um come back from work, fulfill if I can, uh you know, and then you get start getting better at like how to balance your time. And I think the biggest change for me point of growth was that understanding like what level of access I should give to me. I think my background in hospitality my nature is to be like I need to give them 100% of myself all the time and that's just not conducive to running any sort of business like especially when you start scaling and so it's just — I had to use strategies like let's set up a Slack channel so that like they I can respond to certain things they feel like I'm going to get to it but they don't have full access to like hey we're going to set up a meeting or like hey Jake like this broke I need you to get on call right now. Um, and so that was a big shift in my strategy once I started. — Yeah, that's really cool to hear because I think like productizing the comms, it's a really big chunk of successful agencies simply because client expectations are all over the freaking place. You can productize the deliverable, but you know, if you only do that, you're only really getting halfway there. — Actually templating out like when you're communicating with clients, what you're communicating about, clear defined expectations like time windows, how long it'll take for you to get back to them Monday to Friday. Like dude, I can't tell you how many people they don't even understand the product side or how to like fulfill an automation, but then they get that down and they easily scale to, you know, 20 25 grand just cuz that ends up being um the big sync, right? Like — I don't know if you attended I had a call uh last week where somebody asked me a question basically about this. they were on full-time for the most part. Uh one of their client contracts they got for like I think it was 7 or 8,000 bucks a month or something ended up kind of growing and bloating into more than the initial scope. And so they went from getting this client on which they thought would just be one of multiple on their roster to basically being like full-time for this person for seven or eight grand a month. And uh I was like where's all your time going? Then they kind of ran through and then they like told me and the vast majority of the time it was like a hour and a half two hour long call every single morning that they needed to be on plus random voice huddles and it's like you can't do that if you really want to like scale a successful business. So I can totally see the two wolves within you, you know, hospitality Jake and then you being like boundary Jake constantly tugging. — I imagine that was probably pretty tough to make it through. — It's and it's still tough. It's something that like there are times where I'll break the rule and like and luckily because of the business model that I have where my priority isn't necessarily like growing really quickly. I think I am able to sometimes like go above and beyond and be like hey I'm going to spend a couple extra hours to fulfill this in a way that like you know might be a little bit out of scope which I try to tell myself don't do that. Um, but you know, it's just it's part of it. And I think that what I found is that if you're able to work with the same client and over time, I think that their expectations um it becomes a little bit easier because they know that when you say like, okay, it's going to be 48 hours to 72 hours. You they know that like, okay, that's actually going to happen. And so they give you a little bit of space to be like, okay, this person is going to follow through with what they said, so I don't need to like keep checking in on that. I mean, that's why I always pitch like retain relationships, recurring relationships, follow-up relationships. Um, a couple reasons, obviously, the first being for the benefit of people that don't know, uh, on a follow-up engagement, you don't have the cost per acquisition. So, you don't have to spend that customer acquisition cost on whatever it is. If it's Upwork, it's connects. If it's cold email, it's like your time and the money you're spending on the lead. — U, but then two, you get to know the business. And so, you get to be able to like, you know, vibe out the client. They get to understand what is reasonable for you to fulfill in a reasonable amount of time. and they just like lose a lot of that friction. I bet you and I haven't plotted this but maybe I should but like average time spent per client per project overtime probably just so your internal hourly rate goes and — yeah I mean you know like 15 grand uh a month you know like I think it's achievable for most people but I think if they don't understand that then they'd be running themselves ragged and they certainly wouldn't be able to do it part-time as you are. — Yeah it's tough. I do get a lot of, you know, because I try to stay networking with a lot of people in the community. Um, and I do get a lot of people reaching out and I'm always very upfront about like, hey, like this didn't happen within the 90 days or like however long you're going to be, you know, doing the community. Like I was trying to do some form of consulting with automation, maybe not fully automation for years, you know. It's like I had to build up slowly to get there. And the luxury of having a full-time job was what allowed me to get there. Cuz some months are going to be really slow and some of them are going to be a lot better. [snorts] But I think that when you start getting in your reps, you start to realize that it's kind of inevitable inevitable. Like once you start getting in the reps, you start to realize like it's going to be pretty hard not to have success. Um and that's what was different about this quote unquote side hustle for me was that like, hey, I started to see like just put in the reps. you're going to start seeing results. Um, and I think that's hard for people to see coming into it. Um, that like just keep applying to Upwork, keep doing cold email, like eventually you're going to get people to respond. That's really the problem to solve. I would say I've always considered it like once you solve the problem of lead genen, you sort of just fall forward. And you may fall quite a lot, but you will be falling forward and eventually you carve out that path. You ever play like uh I don't know Pokemon way back in the day when you enter like a little dungeon or a little cave and like your guy doesn't have the skill — and then you — Yeah. Yeah. You know exactly what I mean, right? So you can't actually see anything. Um you basically are just constantly doing that, you know, one client at a time, one engagement at a time until looking back you've carved out the entire thing and you're like, "Okay, well that kind of makes sense. " — Um yeah, so many video games. I think that applies to Starcraft, Fog of War. You play video games? — I do. — Yeah. What's your favorite one? I I'm not a huge gamer these days in terms of like kind, but um but yeah, I I grew up playing video games and occasionally I'll hop on a Switch or something. — Hell yeah, man. That's what I'm talking about. You know, I'm looking for like that future eventual client relationship where I can like, you know, throw down a game of League with uh one of my clients or something. I feel like that'd be that's an awesome goal to shoot for. — That's a good goal to have. That's funny. — We'll do our client calls over League of Legends. — That's when you know you've made it, Nick. — Um, okay, cool, man. So, then like as you scaled, because you did scale, uh, how did your approach change exactly? Like I know you started with Upwork and then, you know, you dove in and did some cold emails. Did you find a lot of referrals come in or like what was the main strat? — Yeah, so referrals was a big one. I started prioritizing other channels of acquisition. So, at the beginning, Upwork and Cold Email were my main ones. And like I mentioned in that post on the community, like cold email still is one that just doesn't resonate with me a ton. — Um I know that it is essential I think and I hesitate to like push people away from it. But just for me personally, I think that it's hard for me to stomach almost just like the idea that I'm putting out like all of this and so I mean that also kind of comes through with like how I try to uh frame my copy is like I really try to put thought into it so that it doesn't feel disingenuous. I think that I got better at making executive decisions. saying no. I think my mindset towards lead genen and sales changed. This was the first time that I ever really experienced what it like what high volume meant even [clears throat] doing like the Upwork when I was kind of slapped in the face when I joined your program and like I realized like how many applications I needed to get out. And so, — you know, in terms of like streamlining those types of workflows, those manual workflows of like you got to apply to a bunch of these places and you got to record the Loom videos, that was kind of new to me. But then cold email was even more new to me. you know that now we're talking about thousands of you know points of outreach and so my mindset towards that changed in the sense that like I started to have this mantra of like it's better to race to a no than get stuck at a slow maybe — and so what before when I would get these like oh yeah like that sounds good but like I don't know I you know like at the beginning I was like I need to work this lead I really need to like you know change my offer or I need to reduce and give them a discount and that just is it doesn't work. Um or I found for the most part it's just not worth my time. Um and so now you know eventually it became like a okay unless they are fully on board um I'm not going to spend that much time on them. Um and I learned that most people who are ready to do this like you know like you can tell that they're like ready to make that decision. And before I was just like I need to like latch on to this lead because they're giving me some inkling of you know positive feedback and then they you know they'll shake your hand and then they'll ghost you at the invoice. Um and then I just wasted the whole day you doing like this proposal for them when it was very clear that they were you know not there yet. — Yeah. And it's like how much more could you have reached out to in the time it would have taken to try and nurture that one lead? Honestly, I feel like that's the hardest thing in sales is just to know like when to stop pushing a specific lead towards something. I come from sort of a high I want to say like high urgency, high ticket closing background where you know we force people to make the decision right there on the spot. So we were going door to door and hitting 50 to 80 businesses a day and you know we convert maybe I want to say like 8% of those into meetings. But the whole goal of that meeting was I came with a little paper contract. I walk into their office and I'm like one way or another I'm gonna get a yes or a no. So like the degree to which you had to push people that were like you know maybe in a good place to make a decision but also maybe not. Um never really I don't know it just never really like felt right to me you know like how that sat in my mouth. I would get people that were like oh yeah maybe we'll do this next week. It's like no you need to make that decision now. You have all the information you need. Yes or no. I'm not going to give you the deal if I walk out of this room. and it was great and it worked, right? But then now, you know, the AI automation side of things, I think I went like a little too far in the opposite direction where I was like, "Hey, you know, don't sweat it. It's going to be somewhere in the ballpark of this. Here's a proposal and you can get back to me in a year. " Uh, but I definitely resonate with what you're saying, right? Like if you approach 100 leads or something or let's say 100 people say yes to your thing and want to do a call, like 30 of them will just be like, "Hey, yeah, that sounds great. Let's do it. " You know, like this is exactly what I need and it just so happens to cross my desk at exactly this right time, so let let's do it. assuming you're pricing appropriately and you're an okay saleserson. — Yeah. — Like another 30% of them are kind of like screw you. I'm never ever doing this and it's pathetic that you would even resh me so go die. And then there's like that like middle 30 or 40% and like that's really like what we're talking about here. Like that's really what you can move and play with. I would much rather speak to the needs of that first 30%, the people that say yes, and like try and give them the best experience humanly possible, than try and work my way pushing people that are nos or kind of in the middle towards me, if that makes sense. Cuz you can just solve that through volume, right? — And I think that a lot of people — starting out, and I know that I did, overestimate how much you really need to like start getting some decent financial success. like you can get five or six, you know, clients and be looking pretty good if you, you know, get have a few of them on, you know, recurring and as like one or two off jobs. Like that's enough to keep that engine and that cycle kind of running. And so you don't need to be worrying too much about like the, you know, I'd almost prefer to deal with the people who like go kill yourself. — Yeah, true. It's either like a hell yes or a hell no, right? Dude, I remember back in the days when like uh and actually I came up on the little note that I wrote in a journal app forever ago. My goal is $2,000 per month. — In order to get there, I will need to sell eight to $250 a month packages. I was like, "No, you actually — That's awesome. — It's like one client, you know what I mean? Like it's like a half a client. You don't need to. " — Yeah. — Anyway, there's also that overestimation flipped. So, there's an underestimation of the amount of volume to be clear that you need to do in order to get a client. And then there's like an overestimation like the number of clients that you need in order to like see results. It's very odd. very odd. — Do you have any um like crazy client stories that you'd like to share with the class? That'd be interesting. Everybody has always got at least one. — Uh so to be honest, I think that I had one that was like not great. I don't have any like super crazy ones. I think after this one I was like semi unfortunate like I became a little bit more selective and uh and I can be selective because of the part-time aspect of my business model. But — she started off fine like the clients started off fine and they seemed excited and then they just became like really um hard to communicate like would not respond to like any of my LON updates. She referred me to her husband who was like had a recruitment firm or something like that and um kind of made it seem like was like really excited about you know what I was doing and then they kind of strung me along for a while and then she just stopped paying me like we had like a recurring monthly and like would come into Slack and like pretend like this wasn't happening like this they weren't just not paying me and I kept like saying like I'm not going to do any work and then at the end they ended up like just shutting down their whole business shut down her whole Upwork account. Um, and then like I like a couple weeks later I saw that like they had she had like opened up for a new Upwork account with like a new business name um asking for the same thing. And [snorts] I should have known though because like I looked at the like looking back like there were some reviews on like the Upwork that were like this person is trying to like pay me you know. And the thing is like the job that I like I was doing it was probably like $400 total and it was just like increments of $100 and I was just like what are we doing? — Like the amount of time in order to orchestrate that elaborate fraud is way more than if you just done some work and made the $400. Dude, that's brutal. — There's definitely some freaking cookie cutter nickel and dime stock clients on the platform. Um when you were — What was one of your craziest? my craziest I had somebody cl uh threaten to sue me for uh taking not taking but I built them like a cold email system and they had this revolutionary amazing idea that we would use AI to personalize the ice breakers of the emails and I was like yes that's that that's the system that's what I'm doing and then he found me selling that system later and then threatened to sue me for it saying that I was stealing his genius idea that he was going to take to market make a million dollars [snorts] — so I ended up re I ended up refunding him completely I was like, I want nothing to do with you. Like, get just take your freaking money and run. — But, uh, he was a he was a thorn in my side for quite a while. — I can't blame him, you know, like, — yeah, — it does seem very revolutionary to people that don't understand it. We're in the market, so it's like we use a personalized stuff. Yeah. — Anyway, um, yeah, man, that's cool. So, okay, let's just talk a little bit about that goal then. So, 500 grand uh 500 grand a year. So, let's say you're, I don't know, hypothetically, averaging, let's just say $15,000 a month with us. That's uh about 200k. Probably got a full-time job. You don't have to tell me how much money you're making, but presumably that makes up another chunk. How are you going to get to 500k a year? Like, do you have any additional things uh that you're planning on doing? Are you going to keep on scaling the agency? Like, what's the plan? — It's a good question. I think I'm at a place where like my client load is good. I'm kind of acclimating to the new role. Um, you know, I do have kind of other irons in the fire. Um, I'm working on a SAS development project within kind of the automation space as well. Um, but I would say that like where I'm at right now is kind of like good. I'm feeling it out. Um, and because it is a lot of work and it is something that I don't know that I would be able to I think I'm at the threshold of my time and and like you know it is kind of I could but it's at a point where I don't know if I should at the moment um just time wise um I am exploring uh a new area of offer that I think is compelling and that's um community uh development in terms of like uh helping people automate communities. I think that this is kind of in my mind like the natural progression for um lead generation. Um I think that — cold email and maybe it's because of my bias towards cold email. Um but um I think cold email is not going to exist as it is forever. Um I know that you say that and how that's going to change or when I don't know. Um, but I think that people are gravitating towards uh um community in general. And I think that uh it would be a cool offer to be like, hey, you know, I'll get you, you know, a Discord community or a subreddit and, you know, uh it'll come with, you know, a thousand people and then it'll we'll automate your, you know, your followup for onboarding people to the community. — Um, you know, follow up like, you know, weekly posts or whatever. I think it's an interesting area and so I I'm going to explore that. I think that that's something that um resonates with me a little bit more because I think it is a little bit more genuine of a value ad to just the industry in general because it includes like a actual relationships rather than just like I'm spamming people with emails. Um, so I think there I would like my SAS project to kind of also be a supplement to the the financial goal. — What's the idea with the SAS? Run me through it. — Yeah. So the SAS we are we've been working on for the past year. Um, so it is called Abacus. And so it's a tool that lets users uh instantly project ROI for crossplatform AI automation and uh essentially turns a use case into a sharable ROI report that consultants can uh put in a proposal. Um and so the idea is that we're making a bet that ROI visibility is going to become more and more important as the field advances. Um, and we think that people need something a little bit more than an just an ROI calculator in Excel. Um, and so we want this platform to be a place where businesses and consultants can explore and understand uh and act on ROI uh for automation. Um, and I think that there's a lot of nuance once you start getting into that like area between well definitely in enterprise level but even like the medium to enterprise level. Um I think that there's a lot of nuance in how to project ROI. So things like — different tasks are going to be more revenue touching so they should have a you know higher weight. Um leverage model modifier where it's like how many people does this automation system benefit per run. — Um opportunity cost like does this unlock work for you that you couldn't have done before? um you know uh things like leakage like not every hour that you save is going to be put towards you know something productive. — Um so yeah, so there's a lot of there's a lot of you know aspects to ROI that I think that should be explored. Um and so right now we're kind of focusing on just the ROI report, but eventually we would like to be a platform that is kind of ROI observability. Dude, that's really cool because I imagine this is you probably built some of this out as like an internal tool just to like help you model your own client's ROS. Now you're like, "Well, this add value to me. I bet you I could sell it to other people. " — What's um what's like the monetization scheme that you're going for? Is this going to be like low touch? Is it high touch? Like what are you going to do? — Yeah. So, as of right now, like it really will depend on like what I think like community the community gets out of And when I say community, I mean like whether it's people in your community or just in the automation community in general. Um you we would like to see you know like affiliate monet monetization. And so it's like if someone comes into this platform and they enter a use case, we can like optimize be like hey there's another tool that does this same thing but for cheaper or you know a business owner comes in and they don't have an account on you know nad um you know like we recommend NAN or Zapier or whatever and they can — um but uh you know eventually there probably is going to be an aspect of like premium where it's like if you want to monitor your token usage on your LLMs via this or if you want to, you know, use our AI assistant, you know, of course. Um, I think right now though, our primary focus is usage data because I think that our projection model is going to get better as we get users and that to me is more important right now than monetization is to get people on there and um making our projection model just better. — Yeah. Make that product as great as possible. That's sweet, man. Seems like a very natural conclusion to somebody that has your experience working with enterprise now with SMB. Thought quick questions. If you had to start over from scratch tomorrow with what you know now, what would you have done differently? — I would have started cold email faster. There we go. Cold email. And um I would have just focused on selling. I think I spent too much time like trying to be like which platform do I use? Do I use Zapier? Do I use make? um do I uh you know which automations should I learn? And I realized pretty quickly that I learned the most on the job and to take those jobs that are just above my skill level. Um I know you're a big proponent of that is like put yourself in uncomfortable situations and that's just the truth is like you learn when you're kind of forced to. At least I do. Um, but I think that was I would say that the school community hands down my number one benefit from your school community was having other people in there. You know, when you're doing something on your own, you don't have a boss to be like, hey, this is how you do it. This is how you troubleshoot this. — Um, and having that safety net of like, I don't know how to fix this node or to, you know, do this use case. Um, and having a ton of people to be like, "Yeah, this is how you do it. " was so important for having any sort of success or just having that confidence to like put yourself out there. I'm glad to hear you say that cuz that was a big chunk of the reason why I put maker school together. I remember back when I was starting all the stuff and going door to door like I would have killed to just know that there was anybody else doing what I was doing cuz I just felt like I was blazing a completely new path and in a way I think I was because I didn't know any of that. But just like you know we are consensus creatures, right? Like if the average of a group is higher than you are, then you will naturally gravitate towards the average of that group. And you know, I think we've assembled a pretty damn cool high average that includes performers like — it's honestly like pretty crazy and um you know, like there are because I've been doing a decent amount of um networking calls or just kind of just connecting coffee chats and um one day it'll be like someone xfang and the next day it'll be someone who, you know, like 16-year-old who's just like a you know, super ambitious and then the next day it'll be like somebody who's 30 years in, you know, backend dev. It's like it's pretty awesome to see the the wide range of um experience and um just there's just a ton of experience that you can get there. — For sure. I completely understand why you're doubling down on that community model. I think I would agree with you. The way that I always see these things is it's like social media, but it's like a group of so people on social media that are like suffering from your exact same problem that like have access to a bunch of the exact same resource. I mean, you know, I could sit here and talk about how great my community is all day, so I'm not going to. But anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is it's just like hyper social media. So, it's like social media was sold to us is the premise of it being like, you know, connects us and like makes us better and blah blah. And it just turned into like algorithmic slop garbage where we're just like hooked on, you know, dopamine reels. Um, I feel like this is like social media, but it's like a positive career improving premise. — Um, and I, you know, I totally resonate with your idea of, uh, of tackling that with an offer. So, keep me in the loop, dude. We'd be great to hear. And uh yeah, congrats again on the uh on the massive milestone. Yeah, the part-time case study part is huge for a lot of people in the group that are like juggling full-time jobs and stuff. — And one last thing that I will tell people who are out there um you know listening about the part-time thing is that like use your job as this your superpower. You know, it's like that is how you know, like not having to have that urgency to like put food on the table is going to be part of the process of getting success if you want to do it part-time. But also understand that the business model for part-time is going to be very different than, you know, scaling something if you're going all in. But I think that part of the reason that most of us get into this consulting beyond just the money is that the idea of like having freedom to do things the way that you want to do it. And so I highly encourage people to really reflect on like what is important to them in terms of you know is growth important is like just going purely you know financial milestones like important to you or is like the freedom aspect and so it's like I always recommend people to take my advice for grain of salt with a grain of salt take other people's advice and do what works for them like you know Nick may say like hey we should only do solo you know not that you're saying that but you should only be solo freelancer and never outsource and then I may say like hey it's okay to outsource um it's up to you like that's the whole reason why we do this like don't constrain yourself into to one way of doing things because you think that that's the only way that is available — yeah absolutely that's the whole definition of being an entrepreneur right figuring it out so you can build whatever you want into your own business and that's why business is so amazing well said Jake all right my brother thank you very much for coming on looking forward to the next time we chat — yeah take care Cheers.
