The Unsure Entrepreneur

The Unsure Entrepreneur Podcast
S1E13

Speakers: Brian Moran, Roger Pierce

Intro: 00:00
You're listening to The Unsure Entrepreneur Podcast with Roger Pierce. Whether you're scribbling business ideas on a napkin or wrestling with the "should I, shouldn't I?" question, get ready to explore the realities, risks, and rewards of entrepreneurship as we share the stories, scars, and successes of small business owners.

Roger Pierce: 00:22
Hello and welcome to The Unsure Entrepreneur Podcast. My name is Roger Pierce and I'm honored to introduce my guest. Brian Moran is a seasoned entrepreneur and business expert with a rich background in publishing and a deep commitment to supporting small business owners and entrepreneurs globally. With over two decades of experience in the corporate world, Brian has held prominent positions such as Executive Director of Sales Development at the Wall Street Journal, Associate Publisher at Inc. Magazine, and Publisher at Entrepreneur Media. In 2012, Brian founded Brian Moran and Associates, a hub for entrepreneurs and organizations in the small to medium business market. His initiatives include Small Business Edge, which has a very popular small business podcast, newsletter, and helpful resources aimed at increasing the success rate of small businesses. He also owns Bricks or Sticks, a company he co-founded that offers workshops and a podcast translating children's fairy tales into modern business strategies. Brian says his work is driven by his gratitude and passion for the entrepreneurial spirit. To quote him directly, he says, "I love what I do. I love the people I meet, and I love watching business owners realize their dreams." Welcome, Brian.

Brian Moran: 01:58
Roger, I am thrilled to be on your podcast. Thank you for having me today.

Roger Pierce: 02:04
So great to have you here. I appreciate the time. Now, aside from our obvious mutual passion for entrepreneurship, I know you're also a Bruce Springsteen fan.

Brian Moran: 02:12
I am. I probably have seen him 40 times in concert. Just a love of great music. You know what, he's, I think, 74 years old. And the amazing thing about him is I saw him in concert last year twice. He is somebody who just absolutely loves what he does. And he brings it every single night. The same can be said for business owners. When you find something that you're passionate about and you love what you do, you never talk about retirement. You never talk about giving it up. Why would I give what I do up when I love it every single day? So, I guess I see helping business owners the way Bruce sees a guitar.

Roger Pierce: 03:15
I love the comparison. That's great. He's successful in so many regards. And like entrepreneurs, he's just doing what he loves, right?

Brian Moran: 03:24
Absolutely. He found his calling and he's maximized it. So listen, Brian, I wanted to ask you about your very successful podcast to start, called the Small Business Edge Podcast. I encourage everyone to go and check it out. Now, you've been doing this since 2018, and I know it's won numerous awards, including Goodpods Top 50 Podcast in the management category. Now, there are so many great episodes there. It's hard to pick out a few, but you talk about everything under the sun, including supporting women entrepreneurs, to cash flow advice, to what Walmart is doing to help small business owners. So tell me more about the podcast and the other ones you're doing.

Brian Moran: 04:00
The Small Business Edge Podcast has really been a love for me, getting to talk to people. I got to have you on now. Right. So I plan to reciprocate, by the way, but it's been a joy because I get to talk to people: business owners, corporate marketers, association leaders, government agency people, and I look at the business world from all these different angles. I had a friend of mine, John Kavanagh, who runs all of the marketing and media for the Philadelphia Eagles. What an amazing story she has. Talk about somebody who loves what they do. She described what the offseason was like in football. You know, she had the Travis and Jason Kelsey on. The Kelsey brothers were very famous. They did a Christmas album, and we got to experience what it was like for her and the work that she does with her small business suppliers. I talk about things like the power of energy healing. I had a Reiki Master on, Mykaelian. And she talked about how there's positive and negative energy in everything that we do, from the plants that we have in our office to the paintings and pictures we hang to our view outside the window. And it was amazing. And I got such great feedback on something like that. In a similar vein, I just had a woman named Mary Stevenson on. She talked about the principles of balanced leadership. How important it was about, you know, the mind, body, spirit, because so many business owners don't think about that, like self-care. You're burning the midnight oil. You got to stay up. You got to make that one more phone call, one more email to send out, and you start to ignore your family, yourself, your health, and stuff. And you just say, "I just need to get to that, you know, level ground." And the fact of the matter is, if you keep it up, that level ground is never going to happen. I've really been kind of focusing more on that aspect of a business that you need to slow down to get ahead. But the podcast itself has been a complete joy. For me, the Small Business Edge Podcast, it's a fantastic quality show. And I again encourage everyone to go check it out, smallbusinessedge.com. But you're spending a lot of your time on this. As we talked about before we went live, broadcasting is becoming your life, isn't it?

Brian Moran: 06:10
Yeah. So, you know, it's just the evolution of Brian Moran. And, you know, I spent a lot of time, I always like to say I do two things: my team and I, we help business owners run better companies and we help marketers better target the small to midsize business market. And we go back and forth about where are we putting our priorities. And so, in 2020, for a lot of it has been on helping the business owners themselves. We do workshops, I do speaking engagements, webinars, podcasts, blog posts, but really with an emphasis on the business owners themselves. We picked up more business owner clients this year than we had in probably the previous four or five years. There's that focus now. And I love it because a lot more people are looking to start a business. You're finding that too?

Roger Pierce: 06:55
Oh yeah, record numbers.

Brian Moran: 06:57
And they're smart. They've got the money that they need. They've got an idea that they want to pursue. Maybe it was a side hustle they want to turn into a full-time business. And they're saying to me, "How do I do it? How do I do it smartly?" In the workshops that we do for Bricks or Sticks, that's foundational work. That's not going to be, "Okay, how to do 10x your marketing, you know, into building a bigger, better pipeline." It's all about foundational work in your business. And a lot of business owners overlook that, much the way they overlook self-care and taking time for yourself. You know, when you look at the foundation of your business, you say, "Where are the cracks in it? Where are the cracks in my foundation so that if something like a pandemic were to hit, or this platform that I'm building on the foundation to take my business to the next level, if the foundation can't support the platform, the crack is going to get bigger. And eventually, the whole thing is going to come crumbling down." Whether it's sales, whether it's finances, whether it's your brand, HR, or any of the supporting elements of the foundation, that's really been eye-opening for a lot of the companies that have gone through our workshop.

Roger Pierce: 08:05
An important resource. So you'll teach things like how to develop recurring revenue streams and that kind of thing?

Brian Moran: 08:11
No, what we talk about is like in the Bricks or Sticks workshop, we talk about, we have nine components to a GPS plan. So I'll walk you through this. Roger, where do you want to be at the end of 2024? I want you to picture you and I having lunch. It's New Year's Eve. We're in Toronto. And are we celebrating our success this year? So I'll say, "Roger, did you hit your strategic goals?" It could be revenue, it could be new clients, it could be whatever the measurable strategic number is. Now you have those numbers. And then what I like to do is I like to back it out. So here we are today. How are you going to get from where we are today to where you want to be at the end of this year? And it becomes, most people think of a business plan. I call it a GPS plan. Because if it's done correctly and you put in the right numbers and then you follow it, it should take you to your goal on time with money in your pocket. And it's a success. It would be the equivalent of if I gave you the address to my house, you put it in your phone and you go, "Okay, from Toronto to New Jersey, here's how long it's going to take, how many miles, where I can stop if I want to spend the night somewhere, where to get gas, where to get coffee, all those great things." So when you take your smartphone and you get into your car and you've got all of your resources in your car, you don't put that phone in the glove compartment. You don't put it in your pocket. You put that up on the dashboard and you're going to follow that every step of the way because you're going into a destination that you've never been to before. Maybe you've been to New Jersey, but you're going to a destination you've never been to before. So you're going to rely on this. The best part is it's not a straight line. And there could be traffic jams. So all of a sudden you come up to a traffic jam and you're asking yourself, "Is this five minutes or is this five hours?" And a good GPS plan on your phone is going to alert you ahead of time. It's going to say, "Hey Roger, this highway had an accident. Get off here and take this route and you'll save two hours of time. You know, you're still going to be behind a little bit, but you're not going to be behind nearly as much as if you had stayed in that traffic." So imagine having a GPS plan like that for your business. And so when you look at opportunities that come along the way, so you go, "Okay, this is how I'm going to make my money." But you're successful and people want to do business with you. So somebody comes along and they say, "Hey Roger, I would love to partner with you on this opportunity." What do you think? Now if you don't have a GPS plan, you're going to say, "Yeah, sure, that sounds like a good idea." You know what you just did? You made a wrong turn. You made a wrong turn. And now you have extended the amount of time it's going to take to get, because you're going to take on this opportunity. Now you need to add it to all of the work that you're doing. So you've just cut into your resources of time, human capital, and money. And you didn't take anything off of the plate, right? You just keep adding to it. And all of a sudden, something goes sideways. A big account leaves, your star salesperson leaves, your building burns down, your customers are late paying you. A good GPS plan, you play the what-if game, you anticipate that. So all of these things that we do really talk to the foundation of your business and how you run it and how you anticipate it. And it gets your buy-in and your commitment to achieving your goals.

Roger Pierce: 11:40
A GPS plan as opposed to a business plan which is more rigid, right? GPS, I like that, allows for some variance. And what you described is so true. I've been guilty of the shiny object syndrome. And it's true, there's an opportunity cost for everything, right? Like you just described.

Brian Moran: 12:00
What it does, it allows you to say, "Roger, I've got a great opportunity for you. I want to do a new podcast with you." You look at it and you say, "Okay, hold on one second. Does this new podcast get me closer to my goal than what I'm doing right now?" And if the answer is no, very easy. "Brian, I'd love to talk to you about it, but can we push this back to 2025? Because I've got a full plate right now. And I really need to see these things through for this year." So the answer is no, that's easy. But if the answer's yes, "Okay, I'll do this podcast with you." You need to have the discipline to go back to what you have on your plate right now and say, "Okay, what am I going to put on the back burner? What partnership am I going to get out of? What am I going to stop allocating resources to so now I can bring this podcast opportunity in and dedicate those resources to the podcast so that I can hit my goal."

Roger Pierce: 13:00
So wise. What fascinates me about you, Brian, is you've got this fascinating background and path that brought you into what I call the small business industry, small business entrepreneur leaders. You know, you're part of a small group of people out there, including our friend Rieva Lesonsky and some others we talked about before we went on air, who are really helping entrepreneurs navigate entrepreneurship, find the advice and support and resources they need. Can you expand on my intro a bit and tell me why you got into this? Because I know you had a corporate background before.

Brian Moran: 13:32
I did. But my corporate background, so I really got into publishing 34 years ago. 1990, I started at Success Magazine. My girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife of 33 years, was at Seventeen Magazine. She had a friend over at this company and they said they were looking for an account executive. Now I went to journalism school, so I have an appreciation of the written word and oral word, but it was on the business side. And so they said they're looking for a sales rep. And I said, "I'm in." And it was Success Magazine. I took to it like a fish to water. I love the stories. I love everything about it. I love talking about it. I love listening to people. And so that just became my path. And the thing is, once you see it enough, and I had seen it really for about 13 years before I made the leap after Inc. Magazine, you start saying to yourself, "I want to get into the arena. I want to try this myself." So the next logical step after Inc. Magazine was to start my own publishing company. I kept true to my corporate roots, but I started doing it on my own.

Roger Pierce: 14:43
And from there, then you got into helping entrepreneurs with your content.

Brian Moran: 14:47
Yeah, and again, everything has been a logical progression with me in that I keep following what I love to do, but I find ways to do it differently. So I had my own publishing company and I got to write about all of the great people that I saw over the years and things that I thought were important to business owners. And of course, when the Great Recession hit, it killed companies like mine. I went back into corporate America, but I told my wife then, I said, "This is a two-year deal." Right at the beginning, I said, "I'm here for two years and then I gotta get back out." I just got to get my, my, I didn't shut everything down in my company. I ghosted. Like I said, "Okay." So the Small Business Edge website, which had been around since about 2004, I just put that on kind of hiatus. And in 2012, when I started Brian Moran and Associates, I brought smallbusinessedge.com. I dusted off the cobwebs and everything and I got it. Again, that was, I looked at it and I said, "We're moving into the digital world. Everything's moving to the cloud." The iPhone had been around for about five years ago. I saw these fundamental changes happening. Social media, which I had been involved with since about 2006, I saw where that was going. And I said, you know, there's a great quote, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." And I laughed. I said, you know, I don't know everything about social media. I don't know everything about digital media. But I know more than a lot of these business owners that I'm seeing. And I said, so maybe I can help them. And that's really kind of the next chapter of my life, my career.

Roger Pierce: 16:27
Amazing trajectory. Amazing. And, you know, that's a good segue into a little chat about what are some of the common challenges facing small business owners today? You may have experienced some of them on your own path. You know, we've got economic fluctuations, interest rates, etc. Tech, a lot of entrepreneurs struggling to master their tech. What are some of the challenges you're seeing entrepreneurs struggle with right now?

Brian Moran: 16:48
Everything you said. You know, everything you said. The basic question is this: What does the future look like? How much is my industry, my business, my marketplace going to be disrupted by AI? How do I get access to capital in this volatile market? You know, where do I get it? So all of these things that historically we've been dealing with. You know, if you look at business, it runs in cycles. So a good business owner isn't looking to the past to see how businesses responded to an economic recession or innovation, things like the smartphone in 2007. How did that change? Or how did broadband change the way we do business? Right? When it was dial-up, you know, back in the late 90s, all of a sudden broadband comes around, what happened? How do people respond? Everybody went online. Then all of a sudden we're all in the cloud. And now we're introducing e-commerce. And now we're paying for things on our phone. Like, history will tell you everything you need to know, almost, about the questions that you have right now. You just need to be a good student of history. And if you're not, get a board of advisors who can help you. So get older business owners, get older advisors, people who've been around since the 80s and the 90s. Have men on it, have women on it, have different ethnicities, different races. When I talk about a board of advisors, if you're serious about your business and you're not talking to people who can give you as close to a 360-degree view of your world, you're cheating yourself, Roger. If I have four advisors to my business and they're all white and they're all males and they're all middle-aged, my view of the world is about 65 degrees. They're not going to be able to tell me what a Gen Z customer is thinking. Or about my marketplace. If my marketplace is in the inner city, expand your board of advisors, expand your view, and then bring your questions and your problems to them. See how they respond, what answers they come up with.

Roger Pierce: 19:02
Wow. And we talked about this earlier too. I know you do a lot of work with SCORE and other organizations. There's the SBA, but you know, what are some of your go-to resources you recommend to entrepreneurs to help them out?

Brian Moran: 19:15
That's a great question. You know, I love some of the newsletters that I get. Barbara Weltman does something. She's one of the top tax experts in the United States. She has something called the Idea of the Day. It's her newsletter. So 365 days, she comes out with it. I am probably either forwarding that to somebody or using it myself at least 75 of the 365 days, which says a lot because not everything is applicable to me and it might be more than that if I really measured it. So Idea of the Day, Barbara Weltman. I think on Twitter she's Big Ideas for Small Business. Rieva Lesonsky, you mentioned her. She does a fantastic newsletter called Currents. I love that. Karen Kerrigan from the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council. She has her finger on the pulse of everything that's happening in Washington: regulation, legislation. She has a newsletter and her website is always filled with really important information. You know, we're having discussions now about the minimum wage and about overtime and about the gig economy and labeling freelancers as employees. You want to be in the know and you want to tap into these resources. But you also mentioned things like SCORE, small business development centers, SBA district offices, local chambers of commerce. There's an abundance of resources, especially in the US, for business owners that are free and that are close to you. All you got to do is pick up the phone, send an email, write a letter. And anybody who fails because of something that they didn't understand can only blame themselves. I have no sympathy for somebody like that, that didn't take advantage of these resources. It's like somebody's drowning and 15 life preservers come out and they're waiting for something better. Hey, no. All right, well, one less business owner.

Roger Pierce: 21:22
You're raising a good point. It's worth repeating. This is what I call the era of the entrepreneur. You know, there are so many resources. Never before in the history of modern commerce has there been so many support mechanisms and resources for entrepreneurs. And you've just named but a few of them. There's access to financing like never before. There's access to resources. There's communities. Go on Facebook and type in "small business" and you'll get hundreds of different micro categories pop up. There's meetups, there's all kinds of resources, there's media, the stuff you're doing, the advice available in the airwaves and on the internet. This is a great time to start a small business, isn't it?

Brian Moran: 22:01
There's no perfect time, but there's no bad time to start a business. Because in downturns, the Chinese symbol for crisis and opportunity is the same symbol. They're embedded. So within all crises and chaos is opportunity. So when there's a downturn in the market, I have a real estate client who's absolutely crushing it on Long Island. She's got just a couple other agents with her. She's beating agencies that have 80-90 agents. She has two or three. And she's getting more listings and more sales than them. And it's because she has, she started her agency in the middle of the pandemic. She left a big agency, started her own agency. She's about four years into it and she's absolutely crushing it. And she said, "If I had listened to my boss, I would never have left the agency I was at because he told me I was crazy. I'd be crawling back to work in six months." Yes, to answer your point, today is the best time to start your own business. But if you're gonna do it, do your homework. Do your homework, because most businesses that fail will fail within the first year. Because you'll either invest too much in technology or office space or you won't see that pothole coming up. And the stages of growth, you know, there's proof of concept. If one person needs to buy your product or service, that's proof of concept. Okay, I'm in business. I'm a business owner. Then there's sustainability. That's the end of the second level. I can now afford to run my business without putting outside capital into it. I can pay the rent, light and heat. I can pay myself a little bit of salary. So this thing is, it's like the deer, you know, the horse, the baby horse, it finally gets its legs. And now I'm standing on solid ground. The next part is growth. Where do you want to take this business? Have you thought about it? Roger, we talk a lot about entrepreneurship, entrepreneur and small business owner. A lot of times we use those words interchangeably. And what I realized a long time ago is that they are literally at the opposite ends of the spectrum. So when people start a business, the first question I ask them is, "What type of business owner do you want to be?" And they say, "Well, what are my choices?" I said, "Well, one end, we have a small business owner." A small business owner is somebody who is, they look at every purchase as an expense. It's a lifestyle business. You don't want to work for anybody else. You like, maybe it's a pizzeria, nail salon, a restaurant, a small retail store, a home-based business, or a consultant, whatever it is. But you're like, "This is what I want to do. I want to make enough money. I want to be profitable. I want that work-life balance. That's important." Okay. You know who you are. At the other end of the spectrum is the entrepreneur. Now, they're all about growth. So every purchase is an investment into the business. Work-life balance, maybe not as important as it is to the small business owner. We know where they want to be in three years. They want to be 10x. I want 15 locations in 10 states. And really, for years, that's all we've ever had to choose from. And people say, "No, I'm more than a small business owner." I get this impostor syndrome when people start saying, "I'm an entrepreneur." And I'll tell you something, women have a lot of problems with that. I promise you, I'm not being sexist, but I'm kind of putting it out there that women get that impostor syndrome. Women business owners, very successful women business owners, when somebody calls them an entrepreneur, "I'm gonna get busted. They're gonna realize I'm not Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or some, you know, Michael Dell, his name, the owner of Spanx, Blakely." I said, there's a group in between small business owner and entrepreneur. And that's the fastest growing group, in my opinion, today. And I said, they're passionate about what they do. They love what they do. They don't mind investing in their company and they want to grow their business. So maybe they have three locations or four. Or maybe they hire 10, 15, 20 employees, but they don't want to be that entrepreneur, at least not yet. I call them passionate business owners. Passionate business owners. So we did this workshop for Bricks or Sticks. We had about 200 businesses go through it. And when I ran that exercise with the business owners, 90% of them, 90% identified themselves as a passionate business owner.

Roger Pierce: 26:35
I'm glad you brought that up because it's a conversation I have with entrepreneurs too. This kind of misconception or perception about money. Let's talk about money. Briefly, I know we're running out of time. But according to payscale.com, the average entrepreneur makes around $64,000 a year. That's $33,000 less than the average American salary, $97,900 per year. But obviously, most entrepreneurs aren't rolling around in their money. However, on the flip side, according to Forbes, 70% of billionaires are self-made. All right, so this podcast is all about printing the good and the bad of entrepreneurship. I tell entrepreneurs, look, at the beginning at least, you're probably going to make less than you would in a job of comparable scale, maybe. But there's, of course, unlimited income potential.

Brian Moran: 27:21
The ones who win are the ones who have, you know, Sun Tzu said, "All great battles were won before the first shot was ever fired." Right? The best time to have a GPS plan for your business is before you start it. And by the way, that first year, if you save your first GPS plan, you wrote it in November to start in January. If you keep it through the end of the year, you will have so much red ink and cross-outs. And you'll be amazed at how wrong you were on your predictions of where you thought your business was gonna go. But if you miss your goal, you'll miss it by an inch. You won't miss it by a mile because you are true to the plan. You execute the plan. It's all about the plan. Right? And execution. I talk about in our workshops, the secret sauce to success is called DCA: discipline, commitment, accountability. Do you have the discipline to succeed, to go through whatever swamp, that filthy swamp and sores that you're gonna have to go through in your business, and the fear, and the anxiety, and the indecision to get to where you want to go? So your biggest customer just left you. You want to crawl into bed and not get out for a couple of days? No, that's where you need the advisor to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and say, "Okay, how are we going to replace that business?" Well, your star salesperson left, or your building burned down, or you didn't get the money that you thought, or you, you went bad debt. There are a million things that can go wrong. And if you allow it to, it will discourage you. It will beat you down. You have to have the discipline to get up and go through it, which gets to the second point, and that's commitment. And by the way, the other thing about discipline, there's discipline and there's faith. Sometimes faith is the only thing that carries us through, like some higher being, the universe, karma. "Man, just, Jesus take the wheel," as I like to say, because I'm so beaten down from this. But you keep going. Commitment, the difference between commitment and motivation. I'm motivated by success. We all are. We all want a million-dollar company. But are you committed to it? And that aligns itself very well with discipline because commitment is, okay, I hit a traffic jam. I'm gonna get around this. I'm going to see this through. I'm committed to this. There are no extenuating circumstances in business. You can never, ever, ever, ever open the door to extenuating circumstances if you want to succeed. What is an extenuating circumstance? When you make an excuse for failure. Clayton Christensen called it the 98% rule. 98% is when you allow one excuse to kind of creep in and get into your head. Okay, I'll allow that because this is why I failed. And this is why I failed here. And this is why I failed here. 98% of success becomes 94, 92, 88. And before you know it, you're so far away from your goal, all you want to do is go home. And then the last part is accountability. Because if anybody listening to this podcast right now thinks that they can do it on their own, they're crazy. When people tell me, "Nobody's going to hold me more accountable than myself," I laugh and I say, "Challenge." You need somebody who is going to see things and hear things that you don't hear. That's going to hold you accountable. And they say, "You know what, Brian? Tough shit. You said you wanted to be this in December. Yeah, you hit some. Where's the discipline? Where's the commitment? Get up and get back to work and go find a new customer. Go find a new salesperson. Go find a new vendor. It's out there. The answers are always out there." And I'm very passionate about this because this is what makes people succeed instead of fail. And you have to have that. You gotta have the passion. You gotta have the desire. You gotta have the will to win. But you gotta have the discipline, commitment, and accountability.

Roger Pierce: 31:28
DCA, I like the way you boiled it down so succinctly. It's like a secret sauce for entrepreneurial success. I love it. And you know what, as we head towards the wrap-up, that was one of my questions for you too. I'd love to hear your comments. You know, we've got over, what is it, 582 million entrepreneurs globally?

Brian Moran: 31:47
We want more of them.

Roger Pierce: 31:48
Yes, that's a lot of clients for someone.

Brian Moran: 31:52
I couldn't handle them all myself.

Roger Pierce: 31:53
Yeah, I'll take half. You take half. I'll send some your way. But you know, what can we do, Brian, to encourage more people to start up and enter this life?

Brian Moran: 32:03
You know, some people do it. People start their own business for so many different reasons. Some people start it because they have to. I got laid off. I can't find another job. You know, I call them the accidental business owners. Some people, they retire and they go, "I'm bored. I'm bored. I don't want to be retired. I have 50 years of experience. I'm going to start my own business. I'm going to become a consultant." Some people, it was a side hustle. And they really like it. And you know what, I don't want to work. Look, so much has changed about the way we work in corporate America, at least, you know, Canada's probably the same, right? Where you got remote workers, you got hybrid workers. It's, people just want to be in control of their own destiny. Find out what it is that motivates you to be dumb enough to go start your own business. I say that facetiously. But what motivates you? Because it starts with a motivation. It starts with a passion to say, "I want to do this, and I really want this to succeed." And then do your homework. Talk to people. Take copious notes. And really, that first year is so important. Take in as much as you possibly can. Listen to podcasts. Go to local centers, small business centers near you. Follow people online. Read their blog posts. Listen to their webinars and take all of the notes that apply to you. And then create a board of advisors and flesh out your plan with them. And then remember, proof of concept, sustainability, growth. Who's going to buy my product or service? How quickly will they buy it? How quickly can I get to sustainability? And then where do I want to take this business? Am I a small business owner, a passionate business owner, or an entrepreneur? If you do these things and you create that GPS plan, I'm not guaranteeing your success. But I promise you this: you will be exponentially closer to success than if you just open your door and go, "Okay, I’m open for business."

Roger Pierce: 34:03
Great advice. Thank you for sharing that, Brian.

Brian Moran: 34:06
That's a lot of years it took me to figure that out.

Roger Pierce: 34:10
Well, you know, you say these things so well. You know, it comes from a lot of years of experience and working with entrepreneurs and listening to industry folks. And man, you've done a lot. And I want to say to you, Brian, you know, thank you for your work and thank you for being such a small business champion. You've certainly contributed tirelessly through your podcasts, your blog articles, your webcasts, your media appearances. Oh my God, you've contributed so much to entrepreneurs. And I want you to know your work is definitely appreciated.

Brian Moran: 34:40
Thank you, Roger. I really do appreciate that. And like I said, you know, if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. And so anybody who's listening, you know, if I can help you in any way, connect with me on social media, mention this podcast, but connect with me on social media, email me, tell me what you're up against, and I'll give you my response. So I'm happy to help.

Roger Pierce: 35:01
I'm glad to hear that. So I was just going to ask you, if someone wants to get in touch, what's the best way to connect?

Brian Moran: 35:06
Brian at smallbusinessedge.com. I'm on Twitter. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Instagram. I don't do TikTok yet. I haven't mastered that yet. And you know, you can listen to my podcasts. Any, any, you'll find, you'll find me online if you want. If you want to reach out.

Roger Pierce: 35:28
If you want some help with TikTok, my teenage daughter can probably help you out there. She's all over it.

Brian Moran: 35:36
Oh my God, my kids would never let me live it down.

Roger Pierce: 35:39
Well, excellent. And again, I encourage everyone to check out smallbusinessedge.com and the amazing podcast and lots of other resources that Brian's put together for you. Thanks again, Brian. I really appreciate your time. And to our listeners, thank you for being here. And be sure to tune in next time for more insights from The Unsure Entrepreneur. Bye for now.

Outro: 35:59
That's it for this episode of The Unsure Entrepreneur Podcast. Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss other candid conversations with small business owners. And be sure to check us out at unsureentrepreneur.com.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai