The Transcript

An Entrepreneur s Guide to Investing in Yourself

Voiceover: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur, the show which reveals the fears, habits, and inner battles behind big name entrepreneurs and those on their way to joining them. Now, here is your host, Jon Nastor.

Jonny Nastor: Welcome back to Hack the Entrepreneur. I’m so glad you decided to join me today. I’m your host, Jon Nastor, but you can call me Jonny.

My guest today is a marketing expert, consultant, author, blogger for Fast Company Magazine, and a regular contributor to the Globe and Mail’s report on business.

He’s the author of Evergreen, which was an instant No. 1 bestseller in the sales and marketing section of Amazon. Evergreen describes how companies can become so obsessed with finding new customers that they lose valuable customers along the way.

Evergreen guides us on customer retention, experience, and strategy as my guest shows us how to cultivate enduring customer loyalty that keeps businesses thriving.

Now, let’s hack Noah Fleming.

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Welcome back to Hack the Entrepreneur. I am so glad to welcome a fellow Canadian to the show yet again. Noah, thank you for joining me.

Noah Fleming: Hey, my pleasure. How many Canadians have you had on the show?

Jonny Nastor: I’ve had a surprising number of them actually, which is great, but it always, always impresses me.

Noah Fleming: That’s fabulous.

Jonny Nastor: Yes. All right, Noah. We’re going to jump straight into this.

Noah Fleming: Sure.

Jonny Nastor: Noah, as an entrepreneur, can you tell me what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?

Taking Risks, Not Being Afraid of Failing, and Exhausting Opportunities to Their Fullest

Noah Fleming: Sure, a couple things. It’s going to sound cliché, but I’ll share a few things. One is I really am not afraid to try something and fail. That’s been in my blood for a long time, so I’m willing to give anything a shot if I truly believe in it. If I believe in myself, I will take the opportunities, and I will give them a good shot. If it doesn’t work out, then so what. I move on to the next thing.

That said, I’m extremely focused, so I don’t jump from one opportunity to the next. I don’t jump from one vision of where I should go to another. I’m very focused, and I try to really exhaust every opportunity to its fullest. Dialing for dollars, jumping from opportunity to opportunity, I don’t do that. I try and stay focused, so when I say I’m going to build a business or a consulting practice or whatever it is I’m doing, I stick with it.

Investing in Yourself and the Power of Mentors

The second thing and the most important thing that I believe is the biggest contributor of my success is I invest in myself. I talk about this a lot everywhere I go — whether I’m being interviewed or writing — but I invest in myself.

If I need a coach, I get a coach. Even though I’m a coach, I’ve coached over a thousand entrepreneurs, and I’ve worked with literally hundreds of business owners in different industries, CEOs, executives, if I need help, I will spend the money and get a coach. I have a coach. If I need a mentor, I’ll find a mentor, and I’ll spend the money. If I need to belong to a mastermind group, I will do that. If I need to get better at public speaking, for example, I will take courses on that, or I will invest in myself to do that.

Too many entrepreneurs, too many people trying to grow their companies, become better entrepreneurs, they’re afraid to invest in themselves. To me, it’s a huge flaw, but it’s also one of the biggest distinctions I see between very successful people and people that fumble and struggle along. They’re not willing to invest in themselves.

If you’re not willing to invest in yourself, then why should anybody be willing to invest anything in you? If you don’t have the trust and the faith in yourself, then who’s really going to trust and believe in whatever it is you do? That’s the key number two, and realistically, that’s probably number one, the ability to invest in myself and the willingness to do that.

Jonny Nastor: I totally agree with you, with getting a mentor, having a mastermind group, hiring a consultant, but what happens, Noah, when you’re just starting out and you don’t have maybe the resources, and if you do have the resources — because I get this email a lot — where do you find a mentor, or where do you find a mastermind group when you don’t have a network around you at this point?

Opening Your Eyes to the Resources Around You

Noah Fleming: Sure, so I’ll answer that a couple ways. First of all, the thing that we tell ourselves that we don’t have the resources, for most people, especially living in Western societies, it’s not true. Unless you’re broke and you’re up on hard times, and I get that, but for most of us, we have access to resources.

We have car loans, so we buy a car. We invest in ourselves, and we trust that we will pay our car loan. We take out mortgages because we trust and believe in ourselves that we’ll pay for the mortgage. We have credit cards. We have access to capital. We have friends with money. We have family with money. I know some people don’t want to go down that road, but saying that you don’t have any access to resources or to funds, it’s a little bit of a cop out.

There was a book a few years ago, Chris Guillebeau wrote, The $100 Startup. Chris is a great guy. He’s a smart guy. He’s built an amazing business, but to me, that book is wrong. Is investing $100 in your startup a smart decision, or is it really not smart enough? Should you be willing to invest whatever it takes, whatever your startup needs to grow it? It’s the same for you. It’s the same for me. It’s the same for people in business.

We can find access to it, but we have to be willing to take some chance, take some risk, take some opportunities, spend the money, recognize that we can pay them back, recognize that we need to believe in ourselves. Just like we take on a mortgage, we will make the payments on time to pay back whatever it is we’re doing — whether it’s an investment business or personal development, etc. That’s the first answer to your question, and we can discuss that a little bit more.

The second part is, how do you find those resources? For me, when I was building a consulting practice, I didn’t want to fumble along and waste money on the wrong places, so I went right to the top. I figured out who is doing this really well, who’s the top person in the world of consulting? I kept leading down to this guy named Alan Weiss who wrote Million Dollar Consulting, Million Dollar Speaking. He’s written 50-something books.

When I started to look a little bit deeper at what he was doing, I noticed there was a big community of other consultants involved in what he was doing. I got myself immersed in that, and there was a lot of money to be spent to do that. I realized that these people were doing something different. These people were really knocking it out of the park, building insanely successful practices, so I went right to the top.

Whatever field you’re in, whatever it is you do, there are these communities out there. There are leaders in the field. You just have to seek them out. We can find them pretty quickly. Then instead of wasting all this time and energy trying to cookie-cutter things together, just go right to the top. Find out who’s doing it right, and go right and start working with them.

Jonny Nastor: That’s awesome. Those are two brilliant answers. The first one, which is correlating it to car loans and mortgages, which everybody has no problem buying a brand new fancy car, but then to build their business or to change their life in some way, it’s like $300 a month is too much or $500 a month is too much. It’s shocking to me. I’m glad you mentioned that.

Noah Fleming: Yeah, I’m not telling people, “You should max out your credit cards to pay for a speaking development course or some new Internet marketing course that costs thousands of dollars because you think it’s going to change your life.” I’m not saying that, but what I’m saying is, the excuse that we don’t have access to the capital, and again, in some cases, that’s legitimately true, but for most of us, that’s not really true. For most of us, we have some access and some means, and again, I really do believe it comes down to this concept of faith and belief in yourself.

There’s no greater investment than investing in yourself. If you don’t believe it and you don’t believe in trusting yourself that you will follow through, you’ll take action, you’ll take whatever it is you’re spending money on and learn and continue to develop and grow, then if you go into it with that mentality, you won’t succeed. If you go into it, whatever you spend, even if it’s spending $10 on a book, that’s an investment in yourself, but you still have to take the time to read the book. Then you have to pick a few things and actually implement. That’s the issue that I see. One, we’re afraid to make those investments, and then two, we don’t really follow through on them.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. That’s a good clarification to make. Okay, at the beginning, you said that you’re not afraid to try things and fail. You said this goes back a long way. I want to go back. There seems to be a time in every entrepreneur’s life when they realize one of two things: either they have this calling to make something big, make this huge difference in the world, or simply, which seems to be the case most of the times, they simply cannot work for somebody else.

Noah, can you tell me when you found this out about yourself, and which side of the fence you fall on?

How to Write Your Own Paycheck

Noah Fleming: Sure. I found that out a couple times in life. I made a few mistakes like that. I’ve told these stories in other places, and I’ll try and keep them short here. I always had the entrepreneurial bug. I always wanted to make some extra cash. When I was just a young little guy, I don’t even remember the age, I would guess eight, 10 years old, my mother would take me down to the local marina in the town where I lived, and I filled up a little red wagon. We all had a little red wagon, but I put coolers in it with ice and some pop.

My mom would take me to the grocery store. I would buy a case of Pepsi or whatever. I would walk around the docks, and I would sell it to boaters sitting on their boats. I would spend whatever it cost for the case of soda. It was $10 or something. I’d go home with $30, $40 on that, and I’d repeat that. Some days I’d make $100, $150. As a little kid, this was a lot of money. Then that snowballed into things like baseball cards and all the stuff that kids get into.

Then when went through school and I went through university, I started to believe that I had to follow the path, the career path set out and laid before us. I had to go to university. I had to get a job, and when I came out of university, it took me a year to find a job. When I finally found that job, I truly realized it within the first day. I got there, and I was just miserable. I realized that I had made a big mistake, but I stuck it out for about a year. Then after that year, I walked away from it. That was about 15 years ago now. I walked away, and I haven’t been back since.

There was another time before that where I thought I was going to take a break from school, from university, from college. My father, he said, “Well, if you’re going to do that, you have to do something. You have to work.” I went to work for somebody else. I woke up at 6 in the morning. I went to this factory, and by 10:00, I realized I couldn’t do this. There’s a mix of those things. It’s realizing I couldn’t work for other people, realizing I had to do it on my own, and then also realizing I wanted to be in control of my own destiny.

One of the things my father always said to me growing up is this quote he used to say, “Write your own paycheck.” He used to always say that. He said, “Write your own paycheck. My paycheck is determined by someone sitting in an office somewhere that accumulates how many hours I work and then writes me a paycheck for that.” He always said, “Write your own.”

I look back at that now, and my brother and I are both solo professionals. We both work for ourselves, so I think that quote, that thing that he said to us, really stuck with us. I’ve followed that ever since.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. I love that. Write your own paycheck. That’s good. Okay, Noah. We’re going to move into work now. You work for yourself. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you work from home like I do.

The Benefits of Writing Your Own Paycheck

Noah Fleming: I do. I’m actually in my basement office right now. I’m looking out my window, and I don’t know if your audience will hear it, but there’s a hum of a lawnmower. There’s somebody outside cutting my lawn right now. It’s actually my father-in-law who lives close. He’s retired, and he loves to cut the lawn and do this. I’m definitely not going to complain with that.

Jonny Nastor: Totally to remove the magic from all this for the listener out there, but I’m in my basement office as well. I’m fascinated by this because you have a daughter, a wife. You have things to do at home that you like to do, but you work from home and stay productive in some way. Let’s talk work.

Today’s a work day. You woke up at home. You had to...