Jim Beach is a corporate speaker, leadership expert, best selling author, and award-winning radio host of the station School For Startups. In this episode, Jim dives into how he helps people become entrepreneurs and how you can grow your business. Learn Jim’s criteria to start a new business and the podcast infrastructure space with Pod24. Brett and Jim talk about diversification and the different income streams you can leverage for your family. Lastly, Jim shares the importance of rethinking how you start your business and figure out a way that reduces risk.

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Value Propositions and Growing Your Business with Jim Beach

Our next guest is focused on helping people grow their business and spread leadership and business ideas to entrepreneurs, business owners, or high net worth individuals. In fact, one way to put it is, many entrepreneurs and business owners struggle with growing sales, personal development, emotional intelligence, and looking for leadership content as a way to help their teams and grow their profits. Our guest is a corporate speaker, award-winning radio host, leadership expert, and bestselling author of a book called School for Startups. He also has one of the most listened to AM/FM radio stations, School for Startups. He’s presented all over the world, including Brazil, Dubai, United Kingdom, and all across America. He’s also presented at some of the top companies in America’s Wells Fargo, UPS, and some of my favorites like Sam’s Club, Chick-fil-A, they have one of the best chicken sandwiches out, Toshiba, and Grubb & Ellis. I want to welcome to the show, Jim Beach.

Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure. I am honored. Thank you.

Thanks for being here, Jim. Will you give our readers a little bit about your story and your focus?

The most important thing was I got fired from Coca-Cola at the age of 23 or something like that and my life was over. I had one goal in life that was to be the CEO of Coca-Cola and had done my entire academic career. Everything was designed with that in mind, including where I got my MBA and everything. They didn’t like me. They had two big guys ask me to leave the building and they helped me leave the building. I was devastated. I asked my friend who was a mentor at Coke. He’s the guy who invented drinks that you drink every day and the famous best selling drinks. He said, “Jim, you’re not cut out to be a corporate person. You should be an entrepreneur.” I’m like, “What?” He’s like, “You need to start a business.” It had never occurred to me and that thought was completely crazy to me, but I had no other choice, at that point, we’re talking ’93 or ’94. It was a bad job market. I kept getting job offers but all of them involved going back to Japan, where I come from and I didn’t want to do that. I was tired of that. That was the Coke thing. It was easier than to start a business than to find a job but that’s the exact opposite now. Back then, finding a job was difficult. I started my first business when I was 23.

What a story from trying to run up the corporate ladder to being fired to starting your own company at 23 and becoming an entrepreneur. Fast forward, what’s your focus now?

Largely, it’s helping other people become entrepreneurs, but I’m still starting businesses. I’m mostly involved in the podcast space. I don’t mean that from the fact that I have my podcast radio show. I’m talking about something different. I’ve started a business that I like. I hate this analogy, but I will use it and anyway, all of the people who got rich from the California Gold Rush, name some of those people. There was a guy named Wells, Fargo, Levi, and Strauss. All of those people provided infrastructure to people who didn’t make money in the gold rush and the podcast space is similar. I’ve started a podcast infrastructure business that will help podcasters in a significant way. That’s what I’m doing. I’m in the podcast space as a business, not as a content producer, though I do produce content.

That’s wonderful. Plug that right now if people wanted to learn more about that, where would they go to learn about that business?

It’s Pod24.com. It’s like Sirius or any other collection of channels. It’s a collection of podcast channels. If you don’t get enough listeners and you want to get more listeners, I can get you more listeners. We would sign you up to be part of this small business or maybe a financial planning channel on Pod24. If you want to learn about cooking, you go to Pod24 Cooking. If you want to learn about parenting, Pod24 Parenting. There you would find the 30 or 40 best parenting podcasts. Instead of being one of the 72% of the market who has no idea how to get a podcast. If you go to the mass market and say, “Go download a podcast,” They have no clue. If you say, “Go find a cooking podcast,” they still have no clue. Whereas you go to Pod24 and it starts making noise, which is what most of us are used to.

We have all of these devices in our house that we turn on or these things in our car. We turn it on and it makes noise. I don’t have to find the noise, the noise starts. Pod24 is the same thing. It’s designed to get you thousands and thousands of new listeners. In my show, I get about 170,000 readers a day six days a week. Most people don’t get anywhere close to that. That’s in the top 0.5% of podcasts. I can show you how to do that. Pod24 is designed to get those numbers for you. Secondarily, I’m on 25 AM/FM stations around the country. I can get a podcast host national syndication overnight and make them a nationally syndicated radio host overnight. That costs about $10,000 a month. I can do it for $220 to $225 somewhere in that ballpark. That’s what that business does.

Growing Your Business: In podcasts, creativity is not creative. It’s a 1% incremental change over something that already exists.

That sounds like an amazing business. It’s transforming radio and podcasts and seamlessly putting them together. If I’m a listener 24/7, I can turn on my radio, my TV, it’s coming and it’s doing. If I’m a podcast host it spreads my audience rapidly.

It’s mindlessly simple and stupid that there’s not a place you go and it starts making noise because that’s what we’re used to. We’re used to the TV and the radio. I turn the radio on, and it starts. It’s the same thing with a collection of channels on a particular topic. It’s cool. It’s designed for my mother and the people who listen but don’t have a clue how to find anything. For a lot of podcast hosts, that message will be compelling. It’s right up my alley in terms of all of the things that I look at a new business. I put it through all of my filters. Number one, I started this business for under $10,000. The risk is zero. My standard for risk is simple. Does it cost more than a week at Disney vacation for my family? I have four munchkin kids, me and my wife, we both want to go too. You add that up and that is $600 a day to get in the door. That’s $10,000 a week. It’s an easy vacation. That’s what I’m willing to risk on a business. I can afford to lose that and so it’s not a risk. It’s more of an investment. I don’t know what the word is, but it’s certainly not a risk.

It’s an investment if it succeeds but it’s not an unrealistic or unreasonable risk to take because it’s only $10,000. If your net worth is big enough and you’ve saved enough and it’s not so bad.

A lot of people go to Disney and they’re called the middle class. A lot of people can afford to lose that. I’m a little better than the middle class, I hope and so that’s my standard. Secondly, I don’t think there’s much creativity here. When I tell someone the idea, they’re like, “It’s like the radio or the TV, except for podcasts.” Creativity is not creative. It’s a 1%, incremental change over something that already exists, which means, I wouldn’t call it creative. I would call it an incremental improvement, which is what entrepreneurs are supposed to do. Don’t go try to be creative. Find some idea and do it better than the other people. Ninety-three percent of businesses are copies of other existing businesses, so why go try to do something new?

That makes perfect sense. Keep it simple and make a 1% incremental change and incremental improvement because truly, 93% of all businesses are copies. Keep going. What’s number three?

Passion. I am passionate about my munchkin kids and my beautiful wife. I’ve got two dogs that I love and even I hate to say this, a cat that I like.

What kind of dogs do you have?

Female Dobermans. As a matter of fact, there’s one right here trying to get into the room. We don’t have ear surgery, so we have floppy ears, not pointy ears because another one of my beliefs in life is, dogs don’t need plastic surgery, and buying plastic surgery on a dog is pretty much a pure indicator that you’re a moron. I’m not going to buy plastic surgery on my dogs.

That’s fair and reasonable. What’s number four?

Let me get back to number three. Number three is I’m passionate about my family, not the business, not any of the business stuff. I will sell the purses which I’ve done. I will sell leather jackets which I’ve done. I will sell furniture which I have done. I’m not passionate about a single one of those. I don’t use a single one or have a single one of my products. We have businesses that we don’t use, like, or even recommend the product. The people who buy the products are called morons but I will sell to morons all day long and have no moral issue. I will sleep well at night with that. Having said that, I like this podcast idea, but I’m not in love with it. I like it, but I still would rather be at Disney with the family and take the munchkins to Disney. It fits all of my initial criteria, plus, I can scale the daylights out of this thing. It doesn’t take many people who see that vision to make this successful, especially because I’ve invested less than $10,000 on it. Those are all my criteria. That’s what I’m working on.

I love that you share those four. I want you to connect that with our readers before. Before Jim was an educator, entrepreneur, a bestselling author, a speaker traveling the world to speak to companies, what gifts were you given as a child that help you shape how you help others?

The first thing I have to say is, I have the best and the most supportive, loving great parents in the world. They have not been replaced but augmented and supplemented by the best, most supportive, loving wife in the world, an entrepreneurial wife. I’ve had a non-entrepreneurial wife before I got divorced. I remarried and my wife is 100% in tune with being an entrepreneur. The first wife wasn’t. It’s my fault. I lied to her. When I asked her to marry me, she thought she was going to marry an architect and I didn’t turn out to be an architect. I lied about that and not lied, but it didn’t turn out that way. I got kicked out of architecture school. It was like getting fired from Coke. I’m seeing a trend. Having said that, I have the most loving supportive parents in the world, I’ll tell the watch story.

When I was 8 or 9 years old, I asked for a watch for my birthday. It wasn’t because I wanted to know what time it was, that was all I needed to know the time. I was insecure that I knew that if I went to our weekly assemblies at school, which were held at 11:35. I knew that if I got there at 11:34 no one would sit down next to me on the row. I would be incredibly embarrassed because the row would be empty because I was such a social pariah and the biggest loser on Earth. If I could hide in the bathroom until 11:36 or 11:37, using my new watch, I could sneak in after they had started for 30 seconds. I would not get in trouble for being late and sit down next to you and you couldn’t move because the assembly had already started. Therefore, I wouldn’t sit alone, so I got a watch for my birthday.

Something connected with finding a way to precisely determine how and when you would enter that auditorium so that you would not feel alone. Connect that with starting businesses, being an entrepreneur, and helping others do the same.

That connects so much more than you think. First of all, my first business was a summer camp business. We taught technology, computers, HTML, computer design, web design, and moviemaking at places like Stanford, MIT, Georgetown, UCLA, Sorbonne, Cambridge, Oxford, and 89 of the best universities in the world. In any particular city, we were at that city’s downtown significant universities like Stanford, MIT, Georgetown, SMU, UCLA, University of Michigan, Emory, the good school, and the big schools in town. We thought we were teaching computer skills in the first couple of years. We had 96 students.

Within seven years, we had grown to 20,000 students doing millions of dollars, has 700 employees and 89 locations because we figured out a secret sauce. Our secret sauce was we were taking unhappy kids and making them happy. We were getting them the watch that I got as a kid. We took a kid who was not a lacrosse, soccer or football player, cheerleader, or who was not on the cool table at school and taught them that there is a kid right here who wants to be your best friend. We gave them best friends and taught them that there’s nothing cooler in the world than being smart. A long time from now, that football player that you’re jealous of is going to call you, boss. It’s that stereotypical little joke that we’ve all heard.

It’s a true story and you are going to be successful because the skills that we’re teaching you are useful. Plus, this kid right here thinks you’re cool because you played the same video game and he would like to play with you. We would send kids home, happy, smiling, laughing with the best friend for the first time. What is that worth? What do you charge for that? How do you market that? We figured out how to market that. Once we got mom on the phone, within nine minutes, I had mom crying, getting out her credit card, because her child was the kid in the bathroom hiding with the watch. I would tell them the watch story and the mother would realize I was her child and that I was a happy, well-adjusted adult who was successful and could talk to people. I was happy and all their mother could do is think of how they could sign up fast enough to get their kid in a program that could show them that. How’s that for cool?

I love those two thoughts you put. Thank you, Jim, for sharing that story. There’s nothing cooler than being smart. Essentially, you were helping to reshape their identity, and also where they found their self-worth but also through connection and community, which is what we all need. We need a connection community, our place in this world. As a college-age student who’s looking for that place and the revolution of technology during that time and still going on, you were able to connect those dots. What a priceless gift that you can give to them and you happen to make some money while you’re doing it.

One thing, it wasn’t college kids. It was at college but it was for kids from 7 to 17. The college kids were our counselors. At Stanford, we hired 100 Stanford undergrads a year to be our counselors, but we’re talking about making eight-year-olds happy. It’s the type of thing that makes you cry. We would get them a letter in August and September. I would get hundreds of letters from mom saying, “I had not seen my child smile in 2 or 3 years and he came home laughing.” What do you do with that?

That makes all the difference and that’ll keep it going. That’ll help you start another ten businesses to try to change the world in that one story right there.

It proves many things. It proves that a profitable business can have a huge social impact. At 25, I wasn’t smart enough to see what we were. At 26 or 27, we figured it out because that became our growth engine. Once we became able to tell this, it became the way we would market the business. It is also useful for everyone and the fact that if you can figure out why your business is that sexy, you can also have a message that makes people cry or get their checkbook out or whatever. I believe that if we work hard, I can figure out how any business can be that sexy and that’s one of the talks that I do on the corporate circuit. It’s called Rock Stars in an Elevator. It’s fourteen songs that create perfect templates for elevator pitches or value propositions.

You can google Jim Beach Elevator Pitch Rock Stars Elevator on that YouTube thing, you can see a presentation of that and it’s cool. We take songs, maybe a couple of Kanye West, Beatles songs that everyone knows, some Johnny Cash and a little bit of Lady Gaga. Those songs are amazing elevator pitches for templates for your business. Lady Gaga, new, shocking, provocative, and everything she did was designed to provoke some emotion. She showed up at the Emmys or the Grammys in a dress made out of meat cutlets. Why did she do that? To shock and provoke us. It makes sense then that value proposition that shocks and provokes is also going to be useful.

Our first value proposition for the computer camp business was, we teach kids computer skills at summer camp, not horses. People back in 1994 would go, “I’ve never heard of that before,” because no one had ever done that before. Three or four years later, we had evolved into Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion. I got a letter from mom saying that their kid was happy for the first time. That’s what I do for a living. All of a sudden, the value proposition has changed because I understand the business better and the template has changed as well. There’s an Aerosmith template based on the emotional impact that you feel when you hear about the business.

Growing Your Business: Simply redefining risk, creativity, and passion have eliminated a lot of people’s excuses for inertia.

Shock and provoke. I also heard another way to market is to be surprising and delightful. These concepts of grabbing attention and enlightening or educating along the way as a second stage, and empowering the whoever the customer is with some tool or outcome, like yours is, for self-confidence and for getting connected with a community. If you’re doing those things, it seems like the finances would take care of themselves. However, Jim, we’re talking a little bit in emotion and connection. Let’s shift a little bit to the financial part of things. Walk us through what came first. The emotional connection with you perhaps that came first, but when did the financial connection to, “How to make these numbers make sense? How do we help people reduce taxes? How do we help business owners succeed?” Walk us through that part of your educational platform.

First of all, I need to say that I’m not particularly good at that. I’m the type of person that needs to hire you because I believe that entrepreneurs are good at certain things. I’m good at value propositions, growing businesses, and figuring out how to grow a business with no money and stuff like that. Once I get the money, I’m smart enough now and to figure out how I can hire someone to manage the tax stuff for me. I certainly love the tax benefits of owning the LLC. That is imperative for all of us, small business owners, to run as much through that as possible. Everything that your advisor or CPA will let you run through that should be a business expense all the way down to hiring your children to help stuff envelopes. We do that. We hire our kids. Our kids work for us and we have Saturdays or Sundays where every kid will do stuffing envelopes.

We have an Amazon business so we have a lot of stickering to do. We have a four-year-old and she stickers. Our CPA says, “You’re going to say that to the IRS?” I got my phone out and I was like, “Here it is. Here she is, stickering.” We had the whole family. I videoed it because I thought we were cute. I wasn’t doing it for the IRS. I was doing it because I thought we were cute. We’re having a family moment and we were watching Rapunzel. We were all watching Disney and doing financial planning together. I do highly stress the importance of, number one, a financial advisor. Number two, the LLC structure to put a lot of that stuff through. Does it make sense for your automobile to be in the LLC? Ask your guy. For me, I know my answer and for all of the other pieces.

When you take away a lot of those pieces, you take away 1/5 of your mortgage, electricity, and all of those. Whatever you’re willing to do and whatever risk level you’re willing to take, this is interesting. Whereas I’m not willing to risk $10,000 to start a business, I am willing to risk $10,000 to reduce my taxes or anything like that. Take those strategies, have a home-based business for the reason of having home-based deductions. I believe in those strategies. It’s important to do that. Also, you need to be growing. The third thing is, no matter what level you’re on, you still need to be finding some new income stream every year. I’m obsessed with the income diversification, the 6 or 7 streams that you should have.

Walk us through that, Jim. The average investor, entrepreneur, or business owner, walks us through 6 or 7 when you say diversify. Do you say it’s 6 or 7 different businesses or 6 or 7 different real estate investments? Walk us through what that might look like for somebody.

In a perfect world, either you or your wife has a job. I like a job and the reason I like a job is it comes with things called benefits, like health insurance. I do like some of the shared health insurance type plans. I don’t remember any of the names of them but I know there’s a Christian shared insurance network and there’s a Christian one as well. For your insurance, I love those for the entrepreneur. For $500 a month gets a family of four and share all of your bills. Those are great, so do that instead of traditional insurance.

I would like to have one of you to have a job. There’s income stream number one and it provides a little stability and gets your tax deduction or your first tax deducted automatically every year so hopefully, that is your tax bill, which plays back into the tax strategy. Number two, I want some real estate investment. The average entrepreneur should, over the course of the 50 years run, find enough money to throw off 5 or 6 rentals that pay the $1,200 to $1,500 per month rental. The 150,000 31 ranches and here’s another one of my criteria. They’re always within earshot of either a university or a Starbucks.

We have rentals, and all of them are within five minutes of a university, which means we always have renters and a new pool of renters. We believe that strongly. My goal for that is to have 5 or 6 paid off homes by the age of 65 that are producing $1,000 to $2,000 a month of mailbox money income. That’s strategy number two. Maybe you work your way up to owning a small duplex or a quad or a strip shopping center but I want to dabble in real estate. I personally have chosen rental residential close to a Starbucks and a university as my exact model. I’ll pay off 20% down and pay the rest over time for twenty years. It’s amazing how fast twenty years went and those things are paid off. My wife and I celebrated our anniversary but we still have the home that she lived in when we were dating. That house is now fifteen years paid off, only five years until it’s paid off. She’ll have a paid-off home at the age of 42 and that’s nice. That makes the second one go faster. There’s income stream number two.

The other spouse should have a primary income stream as well as an entrepreneur. For example, a real estate company that owns a trucking company, churches franchise or something that is a primary entrepreneurial income. For me, it changes and hopefully going to be podcasting next, but some income that produces $100,000 a year and that’s not that hard to find. You can easily go by a business that produces $100,000 a year with under $50,000 of down payment. There are a thousand business brokers that will sell you that business. With twelve million Baby Boomers retiring in the incoming years, that’s going to be thousands of businesses that need to be sold and these are businesses that do $1.2 million a year. They’re a landscaping business that has 30 commercial clients, a trucking company that owns twelve trucks or a Piston repair franchise.

I know a guy who owns three Piston repair franchises. I don’t even know what that means but he has a nice house. It’s something like that. You either start it, buy it, merge, or whatever. That’s going to be income stream number three. Income stream number four is, you’re already an industry expert. You talk about that. You should make $10,000 a year talking about that because you’re an industry expert and you own a business. Number five, I want you to start an Amazon business. Morons run Amazon businesses like my wife and I. Here’s a story that’s true and is so much more interesting. I gave her Skip McGrath, SkipMcGrath.com. I gave my wife his Amazon business template book and it taught her how to run an Amazon business. She spent $500 and made $76,000 in the first year of profit while working full time, taking care of four kids, and a needy husband like me. She and the family stickering while watching Rapunzel turned $500 into over $70,000 in one year. That’s income stream number five. My wife then started a business talking about that, and that’s income stream number six. We’re not even getting farfetched yet.

Growing Your Business: Being passionate about crap is called materialism.

Let me make me do a summary. A W-2 job is the first one someone has it, you and your spouse.

Even Tony Soprano owns the garbage business on the side. Do you remember that?

I do remember that. The second one is, own some real estate. Six or seven rentals by 65. Have some goal where 5 or 6 of those paid off 20% down and collect the rents that are $1,200 to $1,500 a month near universities or Starbucks. The next one would be the entrepreneurial part of the spouse or side business earning somewhere around $100,000 a year. It could be a franchise, real estate brokerage, or trucking company. The next one is to become an industry expert and get paid $10,000 or so a year talking about that, which moves into maybe the stay at home mom. Jim, I have five kids, so if I show my wife this episode, I’m going to connect with your wife because I’m going to say, “Jim’s wife with four kids watching Rapunzel was able to turn $500 into $75,000 in profit through an Amazon. She read this book by Skip McGrath. She went for it and she’s doing great.” From there, I’ll say, “If you do well there, we’ll put you as an industry expert where you can go around and talk about it.”

Teach that class to other people in the neighborhood. Other wives in the neighborhood want that business but they won’t do it. We’ve had classes in our house where we charge $20 and we advertise it next door and Facebook. We have 40 people show up for an hour class and we’ve made $800 for 1.5 hours of work. Here’s the cool thing, my introverted, can’t succeed wife has learned that she can become a successful entrepreneur and have people who are interested in what she’s doing are willing to pay to come to her house and listen.

She’s changed as a person because of the entrepreneurial success that she’s had. It’s made her a better at everything. A better mother, wife, and lover. Everything is better because she’s more confident. She knows that she can turn $500 into $76,000 and that’s a huge driving force. The question is, “What do you sell?” I’m going to go ahead and address that. The question is always, “What do you sell?” Anything you can get your hands on in bulk. We sell anything. We’ve sold horse cleaning kits, brass cleaning kits, baby supplements that we don’t believe in but we sell it anyway. Can I get a little bit edgy?

Please.

Gluten-free, organic, non-GMO sex lube. It’s a good seller for us. We don’t use it. We like gluten packed lube sex lube at our house but I don’t even know what that means. I’ll tell you, we don’t care what the product is. If we can find it in bulk, we buy it by the case. We sell it on Amazon by the single and make money.

This is inspirational and encouraging. I heard the major reason for setting goals Jim is not what you get but what you become. Similar to you, my wife is more of an introvert. I could see how that can empower individuals to get outside of their shell because too often, introverts are told that there are certain things you can and can’t do. Unless you’re an extrovert, you can’t be an entrepreneur, you can’t be successful, can’t lead a team and it’s all these false narratives we’ve grown up with or we accept in society. That’s a powerful way to grow as an individual. Thank you for sharing that. Shifting a little bit here, after helping so many people do what they do better what they do, what is the best way that people who work with you grow and leverage your expertise to grow their business? In other words, what tools, or what are they going to do to connect with you, get educated, or learn from you? What’s the best way they’re taking that to grow their business? What can business professionals do?

The first thing that comes to mind is, I hope I changed your mindset about what it is to be an entrepreneur. I hope that simply redefining risk, creativity and passion have eliminated a lot of people’s excuses for inertia. “Why are you not an entrepreneur?” “I can’t take that risk.” My boys are about to go off to school, it is not a good time, but when I get my creativity lightning bolt when God hits me with my new idea, I’m going to go crazy then. I’ve eliminated both of those excuses. You no longer have those excuses, so I hope that the inertia is busted through. My second thought is I hope that I changed your perspective on starting a business that bootstrapping is still the preferred route. No one will tell you that the media doesn’t think that’s sexy and no one wants to talk about that. If you can’t figure out how to bootstrap it, I wouldn’t do it. A lot of people come and say to me, “You’re wrong because, in this industry, you need $1 million.” I’ll go, “Listen to my radio guests from a year ago, who did it with $800 and come back and say you need $1 million.”

One of my favorite stories and I love to tell is the story of Joey Tatum. He wanted to be a restaurant owner or bar owner. A lot of men think that owning a bar with your name is cool and there’s nothing cooler than that. He only had $5,000 and he was already 35. He said, “I have to start. If I’m ever going to do this, it is the time.” He started a bar with $5,000. Think about a dump that the place would be. It used to be a barbershop. It still had the big round circles on the floor where the chair made the impression, the barbershop chair. Those circles were still there. He couldn’t remodel. The only thing he did was add a bathroom so we could get up to code and he spent $4,000 doing that. He didn’t have enough money the first weekend to have kegs. He only had twelve-ounce bottles and cans. He stayed in business long enough to have weekend number two.

He used the money he made weekend number one to have weekend number two. That made enough money to have weekend number three. Four or five years later, someone came in and spent $3 million building one of those places across the street that had the big brass brewing thing. He walked through the lobby and you could see them making the beer and everything. The question is simple, “How many beers do you have to sell to recoup your $3 million investment,” versus, “How many beers do you have to sell to recoup your $1,000 investment or your $5,000 investment?” The end of the story is, Joey owns the place across the street and 22 bars and restaurants in that little college town. He owns the college town, in other words, including and this is my favorite part, the ATM in the stadium, where a top-five football team plays eight times a year.

Starting and surviving with next to nothing week after week, keeping the expenses low, reinvesting the profits that he receives, eventually outlasting the competition across the street and expanding rapidly. That’s the American dream, Jim. What else is to add there for the business entrepreneur.

School for Startups: The Breakthrough Course for Guaranteeing Small Business Success in 90 Days or Less

Joey Tatum is my brother in law and my daughter’s name is Tatum. He’s a great model for all of us. It shoots down this, “I need a $1 million to start my blank.” No, you need to rethink how you’re starting your blank and figure out how to do it in a way that reduces the risk, so you don’t lose your house.

You’d be devastated. Shifting to our last question, Jim, as we’re running out of time here, you are optimistic and your energy is contagious. How do you stay centered first of all in your values and keep from becoming discouraged? In other words, are you naturally optimistic? Growing up, were you always the optimist?

I was the guy hiding in the bathroom, looking at my watch. I wanted to get hit by a bus because I hated life. Didn’t you hear that part of the story?

No, I remember but I want you to connect it. Tell me, Jim, when did you change or what choice did you make to change your perspective and how do you keep becoming discouraged and going back to those natural tendencies?

I made a conscious decision not to be the person that I was. When I went to college, I went to the furthest University from my hometown I could find, which was 1,200 miles away. During high school, I spent a big chunk of high school in Spain so I could hide. I went and lived in Japan so I could hide. I lived in Honolulu so I could hide but also during that time, I learned to like myself and to be happy as an introvert, extrovert, or whatever I wanted to be. This is the topic of my next book called Personality by Decision. Decide who you want to be or what your life wants to look like and hack your way into that. I am an introvert, who has decided to be an extrovert for a living.

I am 100% introvert. I like to go and sit by myself and recharge. However, I know that it’s hard to be an introvert and sell, speak, be a radio host and write books and stuff like that. I’ve decided to do that and over years and decades, Personality By Decision, I have done that. I have a good friend named Doug. Doug is the guy who goes into a bar and gets ten telephone numbers in ten minutes. He’s not particularly good looking. He’s got a weird eye. He got shot in the eye by a BB gun when he was a kid but he’s still the hottest guy in the bar somehow. I decided I wanted to be the hottest guy in the bar. I’m a solid four on a scale of 1 to 10. I accepted this.

4.5.

Thank you. I learned that I can be like Doug. He doesn’t go into the bar and asks, “Do you come here often?” He goes and asks a smart question. If he knows the girl is interested in art, for example, “If you’re stuck on a desert island and you can only look at one painting for the rest of your life, what painting do you want that to be?” You will spend twenty minutes talking to that girl if you want to and that girl will think you are interested after twenty minutes. I promise you that. Even if you say, “I don’t know what that painting is. Tell me about that painter.” The girl is going to find you to be an interesting person and an interesting conversationalist. You’re going to get her number. That’s what Doug would do.

He asks a stupid question that no one’s thought of before, “Blue looks good on you. Did you go to one of those colorologists or do you happen to wear blue? Did someone teach you to wear blue? Tell me about your history with the color blue.” Twenty minutes later, you’re probably still going to be talking to that person. Mike is the classiest guy I know. You go out with him and he sends you a thank you written note still to this day. He’s impeccably honest. He was a roommate of mine. He’s the type of guy who says, “I’m going to be paying $20 more a month, so I’m going to get the bigger bedroom, the one that directly connects to the bathroom.” He’s the classiest guy I know. I’ve decided to be a little bit like him and I’ve taken a little bit of his personality. I’m hacking it to try to learn to be a better classier person because that’s something that I want my personality by the decision to be.

Excellent. I look forward to reading that book. That sounds amazing. When is it going to be released?

I’m working on it. I’m already doing the speaking for it so the speaking is helping to find out what resonates with the audience and things like that. I dated Ellen for three years after asking her what painting would you like on a desert island. She thought it was the sexiest question anyone ever asked her. She was an art history major at Wellesley. We dated for three years because of my amazing first question. It’s like if you’re dating online. Sally Hogshead, I don’t know if you know her. She’s an amazing speaker and one of the top speakers out there. She met her husband online. She liked him because he went through every part of her profile and made fun of it. Her profile said, “I love to go hiking.” He responded, “You live in Orlando. There’s no we’re good to hike in Orlando. Don’t lie to us.” That response to her online profile got him the first date and now the wife. I don’t know why I thought of that, but I did.

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My friend is getting married and he met his future spouse online. He’s a real introvert as well. We were always encouraging him to get out there. It took him a while to even get out there but he did. He found her and that’s fantastic. Jim, I want to thank you for your time and for sharing your wisdom. Our time is coming to an end. You’re an inspiration on becoming an entrepreneur, finding your passion, serving other people, and doing it in a fun way where it doesn’t have to be so complex and serious, but also can be inspirational for improving the lives of other people. Do you have any last thoughts or places to find you? You mentioned Pod24, School for Startup Radio, JimBeach.com. Is there anywhere else that people can find you?

That’s enough places. Remember that your passion can be for your lifestyle. I’m passionate about being an entrepreneur, not the junk that I sell. I love my lifestyle. After we get done here, I’m going to go pick the kids up from school, take them to soccer and have the rest of the day devoted to my family and my passion. I’ll work late until the night because I’m an entrepreneur. Be passionate about the lifestyle, the freedom, the opportunity, not the crap you sell. Being passionate about crap is called materialism.

Well said and thank you for sharing. I want to thank our readers again for reading another episode of Capital Gains Tax Solutions show. We believe most high net worth individuals and those who helped them struggle with clarifying their capital gains tax deferral options. Although we didn’t talk about capital gains tax deferral options in the show with Jim, we did talk sorry LLCs and informing businesses in a way that will be more tax-efficient and have some tax savings. As well as other income streams that you could start to add to your portfolio of wealth, which also has tax deferral and implications for savings. Not having a clear plan is the enemy, so we encourage you to get a clear plan. Work with someone who has a proven track record and so you can create and preserve more of your wealth. We look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

Important Links:

• School for Startups
• School for Startups – Podcast
• Jim Beach
• Pod24.com
• Rock Stars in an Elevator – YouTube Video
• SkipMcGrath.com
• Sally Hogshead

About Jim Beach

Jim Beach has started businesses and has taught entrepreneurship around the world. At the age of 25, Jim founded American Computer Experience and grew the company with no capital infusion to $12 million in annual revenue and to over 700 employees, operating in 39 states and in three countries.

Jim’s first book, School for Startups, was published by McGraw-Hill in June 2011 and went to number 9 on the best sellers list.

He has been featured in a UPS commercial, CNN called him the “Simon Cowell of small business,” and corporations like Wells Fargo, Toshiba, UPS, and SunTrust have hired him as a speaker and consultant. His award-winning radio show is nationally syndicated on 25 stations.

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