Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

SNM203: The Buck Stops Here. It's The Right Time To Take Responsibility

• Jonathan Green : Bestselling Author, Tropical Island Entrepreneur, 7-Figure Blogger

Share episode

The buck stops here when you're your own boss! Find out what that means in today's episode. 

 Being on the top is lonely. When I started my business 10 years ago, I've tried hiring friends, I've tried converting employees to friends and that always worked out poorly.

It’s is always better to have a distant and professional relationship with your employees. I really like the people on my team, but I am not best friends with them and that distance we have is one of the reasons why we work so well together. 

The level of responsibility you have as a boss means that there is a level of stress that you experience. Even if you're just a one-person operation, when you're your own boss, you have to decide how much money that comes in, goes to the business, and how much it goes to your family. The kids might want a new toy, but you need to put money aside for some software that you need to buy to grow the company. 

With my company, I always have the worst-case scenario possible in my head but I also have solutions if that ever happens. We are constantly trying to improve how much space there is between what we have and what we need, so we have more and more buffer. This is why even though I want to hire new people all the time, I learned to take a step back and consider whether that money would be better left in the company buffer. I don't like to hire someone until I have at least three months of their salary saved in a separate potential higher salary box.

  It’s always a good idea to keep a proper track of your money. You have to know how, where, and how much you are spending. The money you don’t spend is money you get to keep. Working for a big company and spending the company’s money is different than when it’s your own money. 

 

  Thank you for listening



▶️▶️▶️▶️

Resources mentioned:

Leave some feedback. We would love to hear from you!
 
Connect with Jonathan Green and Serve No Master:

 

The post SNM191: How to build an authorship business without breaking the bank with Ray Brehm appeared first on Serve No Master: The Buck Stops Here. It's The Right Time To Take Responsibility

Connect with Jonathan Green

[00:00:00] The buck stops here when you're your own boss! Find out what that means in today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Bluehost. Choosing the right hosting for your online business is critical. Bluehost has reliable servers and beginner-friendly onboarding waiting for you at servenomaster.com/blue. [00:00:16] Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss, and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented [00:00:36] live from a tropical Island in the South Pacific by bestselling author, Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. Hello and welcome to my garden in paradise. I'm excited to spend some time with you guys today. I want to talk to you about furthering what it means to be your own boss and to go through this process and this is a process I've spent the last 10 years going through. I haven't had anyone who was in charge of me since February of 2010. And one of the first things that I've learned, and this is, of course, this is part of the “be your own boss” series. This is part two in this mini-series, which is that it's lonely at the top. [00:01:08] The captain of the ship has no friends on the ship. You know you watch those spaceship shows and the captain is usually friends with a doctor, because that's someone who's outside of their chain of command who works for them, but kind of doesn't. And I know what that's like. When I first built out my business model, I thought, oh, anyone who works me can be my best friend. [00:01:23] And I've tried hiring friends, I've tried converting employees to friends and that always worked out poorly. What you have to find is it a relationship where there's a distance, but you're cordial. I liked the people that worked for me, but I'm not best friends with them, and that distance allows us to work together really, really well.
[00:01:35] This took me a long time to learn. And that means that my life has areas where I could feel very lonely. If you go to an office where you're the boss, you spend most of the day with people that are not at your level and if you try to become friends with them, it will cause dysfunction within the company. [00:01:48] You can either erode their respect for you or erode how they operate their time and it can cause friction with the person at work that you're friends with or the other employees there. This is why, when people are promoted they're often moved to another office. When they're moved into management people in the military are moved to a different unit. [00:02:01] so the people they were equals with aren't suddenly underneath them because it's very hard to reassess someone and say, oh, this person is not my friend, now they are my boss. At the top, it's lonely. What that means is that I'm only friends with other leaders. It doesn't matter, and I've talked about this in previous episodes, [00:02:16] I know, but I want to really drill it down what it means to be your own boss is that you are a leader. There are some entrepreneurs I know who are number twos and they are amazing number twos, and I do not like talking to them. I hate when I talk to someone and they are not a decision-maker. Someone approached me last week and said, Jonathan, we want you to promote our thing. I said, okay, can I run Facebook ads to my existing audience? She goes, I don't know, I'll find out. Six days later, I find out the answer is no. And I said I'm not doing business with you guys. Don't reach out to me when you're not a decision-maker. If you're a minion and you have no authority and you don't know the answer to the simplest of questions, also, the answer was terrible. [00:02:48] Put a really bad taste in my mouth. I do not like talking to people that are not decision-makers and I hate when people who are not decision-makers reach out to me. I have non-decision-makers on my team that you can speak to. In fact, I've dedicated Paris with a great deal of authority to negotiate on my behalf so that when she talks to other people, they don't get that experience. She has the authority to set up a partnership promotion with someone, to determine what we're going to pay each other, to set up the dates, and to write the emails. So when people are talking to her, they're not really talking to a number two because
she's imbued with more authority than most number twos have, the most JV brokers have. [00:03:17] So when you're at the top, you want to meet with other people at the top. If I meet with someone and they're a one-person show, I would rather talk to them than someone who's number two at a multibillion-dollar company, because I do not have an interest in talking to people that don't have authority. It’s just something that happens and this isn't pretentiousness, this is simply, I can't be friends with the number for two, because I'm not a number two. We don't have the same experiences. When you're the boss, you pay yourself last and that's the first thing that people don't understand. Everything is your responsibility. We had a tech problem earlier this week..guess who stayed up all night until it got fixed? Me, because every single decision at the end of the day hangs out my door. [00:03:51] I'm the only one that works a night shift. Now that's because I don't have internet during the day, but the buck always stops with me. The responsibility is with me and every single week money comes in and on Friday or Saturday, depending on when people send in their weekly reports, I pay everyone on the team and I get to keep what's left. [00:04:06] I can't say to the team, hey guys, we've got a slow week, everyone's getting 80% of their paychecks. That not how it works, is it? So, at the top, you have more responsibility and you can end up with weeks where you don't make any money, but everyone else on your team does. You could have weeks where your employees make more money than you. [00:04:20] I've had those weeks. So on the slow weeks, everyone gets paid except for the boss and on a fast week that's where it's really magical at the top... you get to keep a lot that's left. If I have a massive week, I get to keep all that stuff at the top of that goes into a buffer for when we have these low weeks. It's hard to run a business on a weekly run rate, I just do it because it keeps me always pushing forward. It keeps me trucking, keeps me really putting in that effort because what I used to do on a monthly run rate, I would operate without working nearly as hard because if I had a really big week, that would take the rest of the month off now I can't. So I had to change the way I think
about my business because I have to be my own boss, just like you want to be your own boss. So when you pay yourself last, it's a really lightening experience when you go, wow, look how much money we made this weekend? You go ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Wow, we didn't make anything. And it forces you to grow or to expand it, to make smarter financial decisions. When you're at the top, it's all your responsibility, everything that goes right [00:05:08] and everything that goes wrong. When there's a really big win, it's all on Jonathan, and when things go really bad, If something bad goes out the door, if there's a sales page with a misspelled word if there's a broken link, If there's an email with a video that's improperly edited, or if I say email when I meant to say video, and it doesn't get edited out it's all on me. You will blame me. If you email me and say, hey Jonathan, I checked out the sales page and the link is broken, I email you back and go, oh, that's so, and so's fault on my team. How would you respond? You would not like that. It's not cool when a boss blames their employees, the buck stops with me, the responsibility stops with me. So I get paid last and everything that goes wrong is my fault. Now the good thing is I get credit when things go right. That is one thing, but things go wrong all the time, it's in every business. I was talking to some people at my bank about tech stuff, and I was like, you know what? [00:05:54] No matter how much something is working one day, it could just stop the next day and you never know why. And they're like, yep, that's how the technology works. Every company knows that, because you can have everything working, the website could be perfect and the next day just stops working no one knows why. You have to bring in a tech wizard to fix it. [00:06:07] It's just part of life. But that level of responsibility means there's different stress that you experience. Even if you're just a one-person operation, when you're your own boss, you have to decide how much money that comes in, goes to the business, and how much it goes to your family. The kids might want a new toy, but you need to put money aside for some software that you need to buy to grow the company.
That's a tough feeling, it's a gross feeling and it's something you have to grow through to get bigger and bigger. And that brings me to what it feels like to spend money. There's a huge difference between working for other companies, having a company credit card, and spending your own money. People who work for another company, they go on a trip, they get like a per diem, [00:06:38] they get their hotel paid for all the stuff, and they don't really pay attention to it. When I go to a conference, my main conference every year, it's grown and grown. The first time I went to was a couple of hundred people and now it's somewhere north of 6,000 people and about 90% of the people are employees. They are there on someone else's dime and you can tell. People act very differently when they're spending someone else's money. Now, when I'm out networking, sometimes I got to buy around a drink, sometimes I got to pay for a taxi, all of those things because it's my own money, I think about it very differently. [00:07:06] You would be surprised how often I will walk home rather than take an Uber and you go, well, that's dumb. Any money I don't spend on that Uber that taxi or on that next round of drinks is money that I can invest in my team or my company. So sometimes absolutely that's the right investment, but every time I spend money, it's that mindset that we talked about in our first episode, the business mindset I go, this is a business expense, is this the best way I can deploy this $10? Is it $10 at a shot of tequila for me or for this person I want to do business with. Sometimes it is. I have absolutely, schmoozed some people in my life and sometimes people schmoozed me and that’s a part of it. You go out, you go to a bar, you buy drinks, I buy rounds of drinks so that that person will remember me, but I do it because I see the long view. [00:07:44] I don't just do it to do it. I'm always thinking about that growth cycle. So when you're spending the company's money, it doesn't really feel like a big deal. You go, oh, this company, they got millions of dollars, it doesn't matter what I pay for something. That's why business to business software is still expensive. It's insane. There's the business to business software that's hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a month. This is a massive cost and I pay more for software for my team than I would ever pay for myself, but I just look, we just switched our
time-tracking software. I'm gonna talk about that in our next episode, but just, I looked at something and said, oh, you know what? [00:08:14] Each time we add an employee, this is $15 per month per employee, $50 per month when you're by yourself, it's not that big a deal. When you have 20 employees you're like: wait a minute, that's a lot of money. And I was starting to spend more and more money on my project management and our internal team chat software, so we pivoted. It was not easy. Changing software platforms that 10 people are using is really, really hard because you have to retrain everyone and everyone is going to have different problems, including me. There's a lot of stuff I used to know how to do that I don't know to do it anymore. I'm getting there, [00:08:40] slowly. I used to be the person on my team that understood our project management software the best. Now I'm probably in the bottom 20%. Other people have really taken the lead and they've been able to translate their knowledge from one platform to another, and that's great. That's what's beautiful about having a good team. So when you make financial decisions, it's very different when you're spending your own money. And even every bill that I pay, every time I spend money, it's me spending my own money. Cause if I can save $10 in company resources, I can just spend it on my family. I can redirect it, okay? Adults, they do keep a bussines bank account and business budget, all of those things, but that's how I see the money. [00:09:13] So when I'm paying everyone's salaries, I'm not just paying from the company's accounts, I'm paying from my account because my name is on that account too. A big part of taking responsibility and being your own boss is financial forecasting. When everyone went under lockdown around the world and my team started getting really worried about money because they all thought they were going to get fired because none of them were dialed into my financial forecasting. I know our run rate, I know our costs, I know what everyone gets paid per hour. I know all of those things. My bookkeeper does too, okay? So when we have conversations with the bookkeeper, I go: give me ideas for how to spend money and save more money every month?
[00:09:45] We're always trying to come up with ideas, that's part of his job. It's to look for opportunities for me to make smart decisions or to decrease costs. When you're your own boss, you have to do financial management. You have to pay attention to what your run rate is. I see these companies because I love watching investing shows. So you're gonna hear me talk about them all the time. I love watching startups and investing shows and they say things like what's your burn rate? And they have these burn rates that are insane to me, they go, oh, our burn rates like a hundred thousand dollars a month. I'm like, whoa, wow! There are companies that have spent a billion dollars and haven't made a dollar yet. [00:10:15] Why does anyone let you do that? I don't know. You have to be really, that'd be much better at sales than me. I could never convince someone to give me a billion dollars and say: I might pay you back one day and yet, people do that. They invest in these companies over and over and over and over and over again, and they're like, well, they're gonna make money someday. And it looks to me like throwing good money after bad, but maybe they see something I don't see, that's not my world, but you have to be tight on your financial forecast. The reason I didn't get worried is to go, okay, here's how much money we have in the savings account here, much money we have in our buffer, [00:10:42] here's what our costs are, here's what my family's cost of living is, here's what their operating costs are, here's what the team costs are. And I say, okay, these are the things we can pull back, to adapt. I said we can afford to go this many months with making $0 without a problem. We're never going to hit that. [00:10:56] We're never going to get that bad because we adapt really strongly, but that's our core worst. We always have our worst-case scenario planning and already we have improved that situation. We constantly are. I'm constantly trying to improve how much space there is between what we have and what we need, [00:11:10] so we have more and more buffer. This is why even though I want to hire new people all the time, Paris tempers me, let's just wait a little bit while, so we have more buffer. And that's a good idea. I don't like to hire someone until I have at least three months of their salary saved in a separate potential higher salary box.
So I just put it in that special account specifically for that purpose. Then I go, okay, I've got this person three months formerly worried about them, but the financial forecast means you gotta know what you're spending. This is why in episode one of this series and the first part of the be your own boss series I said to you create a separate bank account and track what's going on in there because then you can do the stuff really easily. I'm absolutely guilty of not tracking my numbers for years. I went almost four years without it. Terrible mistake, I don't want you to make that mistake. Knowing your numbers, having your software in place, If you're wondering what I use, I use Xero, you can go to servenomaster.com/xero to see the exact software that I use. [00:11:55] It's not very expensive, it’s really easy to set up, it pulls all your data and you can just categorize where the money is going and eventually you’ll have a bookkeeper do that for you and you can see where you're spending money and where these bills are coming from and where you're getting all these little dings. [00:12:06] Like, when I started to realize that I was getting all of these massive dings and fees and bank fees from Chase that's when I go: I got to close this account and that's why I use Novo. Just switching bank accounts at my level, it's like increasing my revenue by about $5,000 a year. They did not leave me with a warm, fuzzy feeling, they were merciless. Even when they would make a mistake, I would get a deposit. And they said, oh, your deposit hasn't cleared even though you paid someone the same day, I go, wait, the deposit went in two hours earlier and they go, we didn't clear it yet. It's just our way of saying, we decided to charge you a fee because we can. [00:12:34] And by looking at your numbers and doing your financial forecast, and you can see when you need to make decisions like changing out an employee, giving an employee a raise because they're doing a great job and they're generating more revenue than they're costing or when you have to say to an employee, this isn't working out, or you need to change banks or financial services, or when you realizing that using that corporate credit card was a massive mistake because you're building up debt and that you could have an extra couple of hundred dollars in your bank account
every month If you weren’t paying those credit card fees, all of that comes from financial forecasting. Cutting costs and cutting fees means making more money. [00:13:00] It's easier for me to save a dollar than to make a dollar. It looks like it's easy for me to make money, and I appreciate that. It looks that good, thank you for saying I'm not much of an expert, but in reality, it's a lot of work. When you compare it to saving money, it's a lot easier to fire an employee than it is for me to boost our revenue by their salary per month. Of course, it is because one is a single conversation. Now, obviously there's a lot more to my employees than simply what they cost, but when you look at fees and what you're paying for things and software and tools if you can change platforms and save a little bit of money over time, it becomes really, really, worth it. If you can decrease the bill by $10 a month, that's $120 a year. That really adds up. I'm constantly doing that, trying to negotiate higher fees that people pay me and lower fees that I pay for services and tools and resources. It's a big part of growing. The secret to super-wealthy people is that they never spend any money. [00:13:50] The real secret to wealth is spending as little as you can. Rich people like free stuff more than poor people. The word swag comes from the free gift you get when you go to a show or an award ceremony. The free gift bags, that's how the iPod got big. Every celebrity got a free iPod, like 15 or 20 years ago, [00:14:05] nd they go, yeah, look at me. Or maybe it was an iPhone, but that kind of stuff, they get it in their hands and they use it, then people see them using it on social media and then they want to buy it. I get a certain amount of free stuff because of my level. Now, people higher up, get more free stuff and better free stuff, but sometimes, not always I'll get free access to a course that I want because they want me to promote it. I'll actually go through it to improve who I am as a person. It’s very easy for me to say, Hey guys, I went to this program, here's why I liked it. This is why when I promote big programs oftentimes hey, I'll go through this with you because I already planned on doing that. [00:14:33]I will record short videos just talking about that. So any time I can cut a cost, get a program for free, get a discount version I do that because it decreases my costs over time. It's very important to look at things that way. You might say a dollar a
because it's such a good experience. Large financial institutions are living like dinosaurs, they don't know how to deal with people like us. When you're banking, it's easy to go oh, I want the convenience of having a brick and mortar place I can go when I want to complain. Go in and complain, see how much authority they actually have. Those tellers can't do anything. Do you know what happens when you get banked by a fee that's not your fault? [00:16:38] They made a mistake and they glitched it? You go in there, you talk to that person the teller, they point you to the red phone in the corner, they go: oh, here's our phone. What that phone does is just automatically dials the 800 number. That's it. Oh boy, I'm sure glad I have the convenience. I'm sure glad I'm paying the salaries for everyone in this building to not help me. For certain types of corporate customers, I'm sure that large scale banking or traditional financial institutions are good, but for people like us with less than 50 employees, they're an absolute and total waste of time. All you're doing is wasting money. If you have a bank account with a minimum balance, that means that everything below that isn't your money. I was talking to my rep at Novo last night and they said, what's your favorite thing about this account? [00:17:09] I said, you know what? Right now, worldwide there's an economic downturn. If I had a minimum balance, I wouldn't have access to all that buffer that I need to make sure my team is secure. If I said, Oh, I can't go below $5,000 in each of my accounts that means that there's $5,000 in it that’s not actually mine, that if I try and spend my own money, they'll take it. You know, who treats you like that? Jerks. I don't want that. I want someone that takes care of me that understands that I would rather have fewer fees than more convenience. I don't need to go into a bank. Very few someone did recently paid me with a check. I couldn't even believe it. I told him, I said, please just send me a picture of the check, [00:17:39] cause then I could deposit it. So I bought it in my post office box, right now I got to remember to get it sent to my dad so he could take a picture and send it to me. There's a check for $300. They're annoying. I said, what are you. a dinosaur? Who pays by physical check anymore? But the cool thing about strategic banking is you can take a picture of the check and then they'll deposit it instantly.
[00:17:54] Some old financial institutions now offer that service. I'm like, oh, that's really cool. Thanks, dinosaur. Your apps are slow, your tech doesn't work, you don't know how to do notifications, they're always slow moving and they're not the right fit for us. Yeah, If you have 4,000 employees, maybe it's the right fit. But if you have 40,000 employees you're probably not thinking about what it's like to be your own boss. So I recommend that from the beginning, you kee this idea in mind of how can I minimize my fees. When you're looking for a credit card, you don't want the credit card with the biggest limit, you want the lowest fee.Everything you do needs to come from this mindset of it's all my responsibility. Money [00:18:25] I don't spend is money I get to keep. If you work for someone else, the money you don't spend its money your boss gets to keep so you don't care about it as much, but now you're the boss. And finally, you need to start with the process. in our next episode which is going to be part three of the “be your own boss” series, I'm going to go into really deep detail about my current process and how I do everything. [00:18:43] I made some big mistakes throughout my career, and one of them is that I didn't work on the process until 2019. One time I did a partnership with someone and they said, I will teach you copywriting If you teach me your product creation method. And so I wrote out my process and he goes, this is 69 steps… you didn't have that written down until now? I go, no, I never codified it. Lack of codification has limited my growth and led to problems throughout my business for an entire year 10 years. Because when you have qualification, when you have your process written down a series of steps, then you can go through that checklist and say, check, check, check, check this one's missing [00:19:15] and you fix it. But if you don't have that checklist in place, it's just in your head, then one little step can slip through your brain. Little steps slip through the cracks with my team and with me all the time, it's natural, It's going to happen. And every time it happens, I go, let's make sure we add that to our process, so what this means is that you focus on what steps you took to make something happen. If you're just starting out in your first part of this task, the first thing you're doing is starting a blog. What is your process for writing a blog post? What is the series of step you go through? Number one, coming up with an idea.
Number two, do you do any type of SEO or keyword research? Number three, how do you choose the images that are going to go inside that blog? Post number four, how many words should the blog post be? Number five, how many words are there in each paragraph? How are your posts broken up? What is the linguistic style? [00:20:00] Is it really authoritative? Is it really friendly? Is it somewhere between, is it corporate speak, or is it casual? Is it slang heavy? Is the grammar perfect? All of these are part of your process which will be different than my process. And only now am I realizing we write it down all the time, the majority of my conversations, and I know I'm jumping into our next episode are about the process with my team because we're filling backfilling in these gaps. I often have to record a video of me doing something and say, hey, turn this into a process. And once you have a written down once, so your process is on a PDF then I feel really good about it. What process means is that you can then have someone else do that process and you can master the next one. [00:20:37] And we're going to dig deep into that next week in part three of the “be your own boss” series. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of serve no master. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss another episode and we'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master.com/podcast now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller “serve no master”. All you have to do is leave a five-star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday