Entrepreneurship is rewarding. However the reality most people won’t make it. People need stable jobs.Outside the military and government jobs there are few stable jobs in this day and age. What has helped me for focusing on certain industries.Focus on growth industries (healthcare, energy, elder care , death care,etc), not stagnant industries (education, construction, etc) or dying industries (newspapers, manufacturing,etc) .

I want to tell a story about a customer of mine who I wanted to do business with for 3 years now and finally succeeded to engage with only two months ago. High status customer, well connected to politicians, runs a charity, has a large network of content makers and can afford to work with anyone. My early cold reachout attempts yielded no response and I moved on. I kept networking with people in the industry and did a lot of good things to a lot of folks. After 2 years of doing good and expecting nothing in return I happened to work with someone who is very close to my client. All the good things I've done were speaking volumes about me and randomly (or it felt like it then) I was invited to an event that was organized by that client (which I didn't know about). Turns out that people at the event were well aware of my podcasting and other activities. When I showed up, the organizers asked to co-emcee the event, which put me in the spotlight. After the event the client approached me and said that they've heard a lot of good things about me. We talking about future plans, motivations, drivers and common interests. There I got invited to help with their next event. I showed up and delivered. Got invitation to next one with a bigger invoice and so on. Takeaways: 1. Do good to people and expect nothing back. That said have a framework to identify value takers and phase them out; 2. High status folks have a lot of options and direct selling to them is quite inefficient; 3. Elevate above the noise through action. People will talk about you, both good and bad things. Remember - words are nothing and actions are everything. It is difficult to deny good deeds. Do not listen to words, focus on being awesome (I'll attribute this quote to @Anthony DiRico ) 4. When you do good things for high status people, they reciprocate. Often very generously.

In the content creation market place there are a lot of salesmen/content creators that their content is just business ideas. Codie sanchez, my first million, koerner office etc. In honor of Veterans Day there is no podcast such as access Vegas a former military officer with a female panel talking about business ideas and how to turn fast money in forever money. The recent election has shown podcasts that have large male audiences are more powerful than legacy media. With a podcast that does 1 million in downloads you could easily sell $200k worth of adspace per episode.

This year I really wanted to push the Idea of business owning rather than running a business! One of said business hit its first large contract, 3 year 1.4M deal. Possibly the biggest win I've had with everything going on this year.

As some of you may know, I work in animation. A show that I've been helping these 2 writers with for the last 2 years, was picked up for the pilot, so we can add director to my fucking resume!