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Hey, everyone, I'm Brandon Turner, host of the Better Life podcast. And this is the finale of our six episodes of the Seven Figure Business Blueprint. And today I'm talking about how to buy back your time to use Dan Martell's line. How to hire people, right? How to build systems, how to create a business that runs without you. We're also going to see where Jake and Maria, if you've been following along, where they end up after three years. And hey, if you want a summary of everything I've covered in this entire series, because there was a lot of information, just go over to Instagram, go to beardy. Brandon DM me the word seven Blueprint. The number seven with the word blueprint after it, no spaces. And I will send you a PDF of everything we cover in the series. With that said, let's get to the last episode in this series. Let's finish strong. What's up, everyone? My name is Brandon Turner. Welcome back to the Seven Figure Business Blueprint series. This is it, the final video, the final lesson. Pillar number six, buying back your time. That's the whole point, right? This is why we build businesses in the first place. It's so we can buy our time back and go do what we want. Now, if you've made it through the whole series, drop a comment down below, let me know. You're one of the rock stars. I want to know who's been along for the whole entire ride. Now let me quickly bring you up to speed on where we've been in this journey. So pillar number one, video number one was mastering the mental game. You gotta get fed up, you gotta have a reason to do it, Decide, commit and then survive the dip. Pillar number two, choose what you're gonna build. You gotta see problems everywhere and boring beats, flashy and niche down. Pillar number three, build smart lean startup method. Validate with your money, with the money coming in and then work backwards from your goals. Pillar four, marketing, sales funnels. You gotta craft a grand slam offer. You gotta track every stage of your funnel. You gotta build a personal brand. Pillar five, master your money, Revenues, vanity, profit, sanity, cash is reality. Know your numbers are dying. If you haven't yet watched those videos, any of them go back. Links are in the description. Now each one builds on each other and so this one video today won't hit the same without the foundation of the other five. I know it's a lot, but what else are you gonna do? Now let's get to pillar number six. Let's finish it strong. This is the ultimate goal is a business that works for you instead of you working for it. Here's the thing, like if you disappeared for 30 days and everything falls apart, you don't own a business, buddy. You own a job. Now, maybe it's a high paying job, maybe it's a fun job, maybe it's a job you like, but it's a job nonetheless. The point of building a business is freedom. Time, freedom, location freedom, the ability to not work because you don't want to, or to work because you want to, not because you have to. So there's this classic book called the E. Myth Revisited by a guy named Michael Gerber. And this makes this distinction perfectly. When you work in the business, it means doing the tasks, the product, delivering the services, handling the day to day working in the business. Now, when you're working on the business, you're now improving systems. You're building the team, you're planning for growth. And most small business owners spend 99% of their time working in the business because it feels productive. You're doing stuff, you're busy, and you can point to what you accomplished. Look how great you are. But it's a trap, dude. It's a trap. And if you're doing all the work, you can never step away. You, you need to deliberately carve out time, even if it's a little bit at first, to work on the business, even just a few hours a week. That's when you create systems and document processes and hire and train people and remove yourself from operations. Now, it feels unproductive at first. It feels like you should be doing quote, unquote, real work. But building systems is the real work. It's the work that sets you free. But first, let me handle some of the excuses, because I know you're thinking them and I've heard them all first. Nobody can do it as well as you can. Okay, maybe. But look, 80% quality at 0% of your time is a massive win. And honestly, with good training, most people can get to 90 or 95% of your quality. Like, you're probably not as special as you think. And I say that with love. Also, if you're hiring people that you think they can't do it better than you, just check your ego for a minute. Like you're saying to me that you are God's gift to this earth and that Nobody out of 8 billion people could possibly be better at the thing that you're doing than you. Wow. Like, let's just be honest. It's just you haven't Found the right person and you haven't trained them right. Second, I need to be bigger or have more money before I need a team. Now that's backwards. You need a team to get bigger. The businesses that are stuck are stuck because they're doing everything themselves. Third, it's faster to just do it myself. Yeah, that's true today and catastrophically false over time. Look, not comparing the do it once versus training somebody once. You're comparing do it a thousand times versus train somebody once and then they do it a thousand times. It's way faster to not do it yourself when you think about it that way. In fact, I'll do it to do it myself is like the most expensive sentence in business. For a tangible example how this works, here's a quick story of how I first learned the power of delegation. So I was building up my rental property portfolio. I was managing around, I don't know, 20 different tenants at the time. And they, you know, had my number and they were, you know, I was the one doing 3am Sync repair jobs. I was screening tenants, I was taking phone. I was doing everything right, everything. But then I realized something. I hated talking on the phone to tenants. I just hated it. Like it's, yeah, it's, it's like maybe 20 minutes a day at worst. It's nothing crazy, but I just hate it. It puts me in a bad mood and I don't want to do it. It interrupts my more important work where I should be out there finding deals and I should be out there, you know, networking. And no, I'm sitting there working on the sink and I'm answering phone calls. So I hired my mother in law for just a couple hundred bucks a month. Like it wasn't, I think it was like 150. And I asked her, can you just answer phone calls and just text me if you don't know how to answer the question? And instantly like day number one, my life dramatically improved. Like, yeah, it was a few minutes a day, but it was the thing that was draining my energy the most. And now I didn't have to do that anymore. I could work a little bit more at finding deals, which I did. And I found more deals. And once I realized the power of this, I couldn't stop. Like, I hired people to fix sinks at 3am I hired people to screen tenants. I hired people to drop off eviction notices. And I reinvested all of that time I was saving, like into the business, into the more higher dollar value activities that grew the business. So I started Working on the business more than in the business. And the business grew from 20 units to 30 and then 30 to 50 and to a hundred, then a thousand, then 5,000 and now like 13 or 14,000. It didn't happen overnight, but it happened because I continually would find other people to do the stuff that didn't give me energy and were not the highest value tasks that I could do. I look, I could hire someone to mow lawns for 20 bucks or 30 bucks an hour, but I can't hire someone for 30 bucks an hour to negotiate a $10,000 discount on a piece of real estate. Now some of you, like me, you were raised in these hard working families that just glorified like put your nose to the grindstone and work hard. Now that's good, but that's like we're not talking about laziness, we're talking about leverage. You're being strategic about where you spend your limited time. If your time is worth 100 doll hour on the business while spending time doing $10 an hour data entry like you're losing money. So if you can switch it, you get a 10x return. Now let's talk about how tactically how to do this. When you're ready to start delegating, there's a natural progression. Think of it like a ladder. You start at the top rung, right? And you work your way down. First rung, you automate it. So before you hire anybody, ask, is there any software that can do this, like scheduling tools or email automation, accounting software, like might cost you free to 50 bucks a month, something like that. And it works 24, 7. AI is really good for this. Like it never calls in sick. It's really intriguing. But you also have to be careful with AI. There's a ton of hype around it right now and a lot of people will spend 10 hours with AI to automate something that could just save them like five minutes. Now that's coming. AI is coming. By the time you watch this video, maybe it's here and perfectly. But like there's a lot of hype and exaggeration right now. Now the second rung you can outsource to specialists. Some things need experts like accounting, legal, technical work. You can pay for expertise rather than lear learning it all yourself. Like you don't need to become a tax expert, you need a good accountant. You don't need to be good at bookkeeping. Get a decent bookkeeper. They're not that much money. Now the third rung, overseas virtual assistants. Like it's four to 15 bucks an hour. They can do admin, customer service, they can research stuff, they can do social media, data entry. It's where most people actually I think should start their hiring. You just really cut your teeth on it. The fourth rung is US based VAS. And like freelancers you might pay 20 to 40 bucks an hour, maybe more. Like complex tasks and customer facing tasks might pay a bit more. The fifth rung is like part time local employees. So tasks that need someone physically present. Sixth rung, full time W2 employees, dedicated people committed to your business. And the seventh rung would be partners. They share in the risk and the reward and you gotta use that sparingly because partners are hard to undo and they're expensive. So you just start on the first rung and you're work, you work your way through. You don't jump straight to a full time employee when a VA or a piece of software could handle it. Now I hear this all the time and you've probably been thinking the whole time, look Brandon, I just can't afford to hire help. Well, that's kind of backwards. You can't afford not to. I mean if you're spending again 10 hours a week on tasks that could be done at 15 bucks an hour, that's $600 a month. If you could free up those 10 hours to do just one more sale that generates a thousand dollars in profit, then the hiring of the person is saving you money. The right hire will free you to do higher dollar per hour work. That's not an expense, that's an investment with a measurable return and an immediate return. And look at my example. I didn't have thousands of dollars to hire a full time employee, but I couldn't use software for it. So I didn't need that. I just hired my mother in law at 150 bucks, right? Like that's it for a couple hours a week. Now that was enough to start this kind of virtuous cycle in which I could focus on higher leverage tasks in which I'd make a bit more money from. And then I could hire more people, even just part time. And it took a few years to get through that cycle enough where I could hire full time employees. But I did get there and so will you. So we got the why out of the way. But what about the how? Like how do we hire people and manage them right and make sure it's done right? How do we make sure we don't just end up in like middle management hell? I used to say that all the time when I was like before, hiring people, as I said, I don't want to be a middle manager. Well, I'm going to break that down into a few simple rules. Things that I've learned to avoid middle management. So first of all, let's talk about how to find the right people. We'll talk about how the importance of processes and systems with managing people. We'll talk about managing people with the 108010 rule. And we'll talk about working inside of an operating system. So let's start with how to find the right people. And I'll explain how. Most people do it wrong. And I've done it wrong many times, badly. So here's the most common mistake that I see. The convenience hire. Like, your buddy needs a job or your cousin is looking for something. Your neighbor's kid seems like a hard worker. They're available. Let's see what they can do for you. Like, they're nearby. You know them, they have a heartbeat. So you hire them. Anybody ever done that? I have done it so many times. Six months later, like, you're miserable. Like, they're just not performing. They're not good enough. But now you can't fire them because you're your buddy or your cousin or your, you know, whatever neighbor. You see their parents at the grocery store every week. So here's the truth. Hiring someone because they're convenient is like marrying somebody because they live next door. Proximity is not qualification. Like the people closest to you. Like, they rarely are the best fit for the role. And when, like, think about it this way, 8 billion people in the world, you're telling me the best person out of 8 billion people happens to live next door to you, Happens to be your cousin, Happens to be your sister? Come on. There's no chance that the odds would put the best person in the world right there. So then you have to admit they're not the best person, they're the convenient person. And that's why your business is struggling. So if you don't want to damage your relationships with family and friends, don't hire them unless they truly are the best person. So how do you actually find the right people? Well, remember back in pillar number four, we talked about funnels. The same principle applies here. Hiring is a funnel. You start with a wide pool of candidates. You progressively filter down the best ones. Just like marketing. You get awareness, engagement, interest, purchase. Except now it's like applicants or awareness applicants. Screening, testing, interview, hire. So let me walk you through the process there. Now, first, before you post anything For a job posting, you need to define the role clearly for yourself. What task will a person do? What does success look like? What skills are required versus nice to have? What's the pay range? Is it part time, full time, contract? And critically, where does this role fit into your org chart? Like, even if you have a tiny company, you should have a simple org chart that shows who reports to whom and what each person is responsible for. And so when you add a new role, you should know exactly where it fits in that. So this clarity is going to help you write a better job description. It helps candidates understand what they're signing up for and it prevents the like do everything trap where you hire someone without clear responsibilities and then you wonder why they're not performing as good as you now. Second, hey, by the way, I did build an AI tool if you want to play with it. I mean you could chatgpt it as well or whatever. But if you want to use an AI tool that I built to help build job descriptions like this and fit into an org chart, just go to firstdeal.com jobdescription and you can check it out. All right. Second, you need to cast a wide net with an amazing job description. Now, most job descriptions are boring and vague. Like quote looking for a motivated self starter to join our growing team. Oh yeah, Jan, your job description is marketing. It's the offer for the role. Make it compelling. Be specific about what the job actually involves and be honest about why it's hard and what's hard about it. Describe your company culture. Explain why somebody would want the job, not just why you need to fill it. And then post it everywhere you can. Don't just ask your friends, don't just post it in one place. Post it on Indeed and LinkedIn and Facebook groups and industry specific job boards. If you're hiring a va, try onlinejobs PH for Filipino talent or use an agency or upwork. The goal is to get a lot of applicants. You want options. You can't pick the best if you only got two candidates, right? Third, you gotta filter with increasingly complex tasks. Now this is where most people just go wrong. They get 50 applications and they immediately start scheduling interviews based on when the applications came in. Like that's so backwards. Interviews are expensive. They take your time. Instead, create a filtering process that sorts candidates before you ever talk to them. Like the first filter did they follow instructions like put something specific in the job posting. Like include the word garbage in your subject line. You'd be shocked at how many people don't Even read the posting. So instant elimination. Second filter, maybe a simple task like ask them to answer three questions in writing or complete a short skills test or record a two minute video. Introducing themselves like that takes like a few minutes for them. If they won't do it, they're definitely not serious about your job. And if they do it poorly, well then you know. The third filter, a paid test project, like for your top five or 10 candidates. Give them a small paid task that mimics real work. You can pay them, you know, pay them 50 to 100 bucks for a few hours of effort. That shows you their actual skills and it shows you their communication style and it shows you their attention to detail. So every filter you get through should be more and more complex than the last. Each one eliminates more and more people. By the time you get down to interviews, you're only talking to people who have already demonstrated competence and commitment and intelligence and they've, they've stuck it through. Now fourth, you're going to interview your top three. These interviews are different because you already know that they can do the work. You've seen it, now you're evaluating fit, like culture fit, attitude, communication. You're going to talk about their past experiences, how they've handled difficult situations. Ask what they're looking for in a job where they want to be in a few years. And then you kind of gotta trust your gut here a little bit. Like skills can be taught but attitude can't. So for super vital roles, also, don't just do it yourself. Have one or two other people in your organizations or even like colleagues or friends, interview them so it's not just you. And fifth, make the offer. So pick the best one. Be clear about expectations, compensations, and do a trial period. Those have always worked well for me. I like do 30 to 90 day trial period where either side can walk away because you don't really know how someone's gonna be until you work with them. So give yourself an easy out if it's not working and them as well. This process can take a little bit more time up front for hiring somebody than just calling your cousin. But dude, it will save you months of pain and it'll save you awkward conversations and eventually having to fire someone that should have never been there in the first place. Hiring is a funnel. Treat it like one though. Even if you followed all of this though, you still might hire a dud. And that's fine. That's life. Hire slow, fire fast, and then do it again. This one time I was hiring for a Role. And I spent months, I read a couple books on hiring, did the whole thing, job interviews. I mean, everything I just said, I did it perfectly. And then the guy lasted a week. But you know what? It's better like getting rid of him after a week than hanging onto somebody mediocre for six months or two, five years. Like, you might kiss a couple of frogs, but that one prince is worth a hundred frogs. So don't get discouraged. All right? So now that you've got the right people, you need to give them something to follow. This is where systems and processes come in. And I know systems and processes sounds boring. It's some like corporate thing. Like remember Office Space, the movie? It feels like something like that. Like today's Hawaiian shirt Friday. Look, here's the reality. Without systems, you are the system. Every question comes to you, every decision flows up to you. Every time somebody doesn't know what to do, who do they call you? That's not a business, it's a trap with your name on it. So a system don't get overwhelmed by this. It's just a documented way of doing something. It's like the answer to how do we do this? And you write it down so you don't have to explain it every single time. That's all a system is, or a process. The most common form is called an sop. A Standard Operating Procedure. Fancy name, simple concept. It's just a checklist or a set of instructions that anyone can follow to get a consistent result. I like to think about it like a McDonald's. Like McDonald's isn't successful because they hire geniuses. They're successful because a 16 year old with no experience can walk in and make a Big Mac that tastes exactly like every other Big Mac on the planet on day one. That's the power of a system. The system does the work, the person just follows the system. So here's how to start building your systems. Every time you do a task that you're going to have to do again or that somebody else will eventually do, just document it, just write down the steps. Or if you're a digital person like me, just record a quick video of yourself doing it. Like on Loom. Loom is a great website to just capture your screen while you talk through the process. It doesn't have to be fancy, it just needs to be clear. I do this and then I do this. You know, I like to say that a good SOP should allow, like a reasonably intelligent stranger to complete the task without asking you a single question. That's the bar. If they have to call you for clarification, then the SOP isn't done yet. So start with your most repeated tasks, like how do you respond to a new lead? Or how do you schedule a job? Or how do you follow up after a job's completed? What do you do with your email? How do you handle a customer complaint? Each of those should have a documented process. Then when you hire someone, you don't have to train them from scratch. You just hand them a system or say, here, watch this video or follow this Google sheet or this Google Doc and it's a checklist. Let me know when you're done. And so now training takes hours instead of weeks. And the result is consistent instead of random. And if somebody leaves or you have to fire them, the next person comes in. It's pretty easy. Here's the other benefit nobody ever talks about. Building systems actually forces you to think through your processes and you're going to find inefficiencies that you didn't know existed. Like, you'll realize you've been doing things the hard way for years. So the act of documenting just makes everything better. Systems actually set you free. They're the difference between owning a business and being owned by your business. So build them. Now, even if you're the only person in your company, you're the only employee your future self is going to thank you. Now, before we move on to managing those employees, let's get back real quick to Jake and see how he's dealing with this stuff. So if you haven't been following along of the last five videos in this seven figure business blueprint series, or maybe you just don't remember, that's okay, I gotcha. Every one of these episodes, I'm including a lesson. An ongoing story about a guy named Jake who's trying to build a seven figure business so he can retire his wife, get her out of her job at Starbucks, increase his income so he makes more, decrease the number of hours he's working and raise some kids and get rich. Now, over the past few videos, Jake went all in on getting his wife out of her job. He picked his niche garage organization. He made a functioning lean version of the business so he could start getting real money coming in. He set up a marketing funnel that helped him scale and dialed in his budget and finance skills so he could actually see how much he's making or not making at any moment. So that brings us to Jake. His first hire was a convenience hire. It was his buddy's son and Honestly, it actually did work out okay. But Jake kind of got lucky. The kid happened to be a hard worker. And, you know, since Jake had been working with that buddy every single day, or the buddy's kid every single day, of course the guy was working out well, he was working with the boss. But Jake knows he can't just keep rolling the dice. And if he wants to get out of having to do any work on the garages, he knows he needs to replace himself with someone even better than his buddy's kid. Kid. So Jake builds a hiring funnel. He writes a detailed job description that explains exactly what the job involves. The heavy lifting, the customer interaction, the early mornings, all of it. He posts it on, Indeed, Craigslist and three local Facebook groups. And he gets 47 applications in week one. But instead of interviewing every single one of them, he starts by sending a simple filter Record a 60 second video. Just tell me why. You'd be great for the job. You know what, out of all the people that applied, only 18 people actually did the video. And of them, he picked the top six. He paid each of them 75 bucks to come help on an actual job for an hour. Two of them showed up late, one complained the whole time, and three were really great. And so he talked to all three in a more in depth interview and he picked the best one and he offered him a job with a 60 day trial. That whole process, yeah, it took a couple weeks, but Jake now has someone he's confident in instead of someone he's hoping works out. Now here's where the sops come in. Jake realized that every time he trained somebody new, he was going to have to. He was just going to have to repeat himself for hours. So he spent one Saturday with his new employee just documenting everything. He recorded a video as he was walking through how to load a truck and how to clean the garage and how to do the. The everything. And he created a checklist, and now he has it. So for every future employee that he comes up with, he's going to have that document and he can show them. He even documented how to use the app, how to handle customers, questions, how to do the walkthrough before collecting payment, all of that. So when any new guy starts, Jake can just hand him a tablet and says, here, watch these videos, study these checklists, shadow my other crew for three jobs, and then you're on your own. And what used to take or could take months to get mediocre work now takes a couple days with phenomenal results. And the result is Consistent. Every crew does a job the same way. Every customer gets the exact same experience. That's how he really begins to scale. And the word of mouth takes off. But hey, back to the lesson. Now, you can hire, but how do you manage that team? How do you make sure the work is done at the right level, at the right time, with the right quality? Are they following the SOPs? Well, let me give you the framework that makes delegation actually work without losing quality. And this is from Dan Martell's book, Buy Back youk Time. Somebody I've interviewed a couple times on the Better Life podcast. I love Dan. And he calls it the 108010 rule. It's brilliant. And for any project or task, there's really just three phases. There's the first 10%, where you set the vision, the direction. What does success look like? What is the standard? What's the SOP? What does done look like? And then the middle 80%, that's where somebody else does it. They execute. Your team does the work, or AI does the work. And then here's the hard part. You stay out of the way. You don't micromanage. You let them do it. But the final 10%, you review it and you refine it. You check the work, you make adjustments, you add your polish if you need to. You send work back if you need to get fixed. That's how you scale without losing quality. You maintain control over the vision and the final product while delegating the bulk of the messy middle. You get 80% of the output while investing only 20% of the time. And there are volumes of books written about managing people, and they're mostly boring. But I would start with Dan Martell's book Buy Back youk Time. And then make sure to read Traction from Gino Wickman, which helped me scale to well over a hundred employees while working less and less along the way. Because Traction is all about having an operating system. So let's talk about that real quick. This is so important. Once you've got SOPs for individual tasks, you have a team. You know how to manage them. And the next level is putting your entire business inside of an operating system. Now, I'm not talking about an operating system like Windows or a Mac. I'm talking about a framework for how your whole company runs, works, and fits together. How you set goals, how you run meetings, how you hold people accountable, how you solve problems, how you communicate with each other. Like, the most popular one is called eos. It's the entrepreneurial operating system. It's based on that book, Traction from Gino Wickman. But there are others. There's scaling up. There's four disciplines of execution. Even my own framework I use in my real estate called reios. Like, the specific system matters less than just having one at all. So here's what an operating system does for you. You. It gives everybody clarity on where the company is going and kind of what their role is in getting there. It creates a rhythm of meetings so problems have a way to get solved weekly instead of filtering and festering for months. It builds accountability so that like, every key responsibility has one owner. Not a committee, not, well, I'll share it. It's one person who owns the outcome. And it gives you a common language to use like, so when you say, hey, what's your priority this quarter? Everyone knows exactly what you mean. And everybody's got goals that line up to the division go, which line up to the company goals, which line up to the vision. Now, without an operating system, your company just runs on you. You're the one who remembers what needs to happen. You're the one who needs to follow up. You're the one who holds everything in your head. And when you go on vacation, just things fall apart. With an operating system, though, the structure holds everything together. The system creates accountability, not you chasing people down. The system surfaces problems in weekly meetings, not you discovering them when it's way too late. So the system keeps everyone aligned on the vision, not you repeating yourself in every single conversation. So most businesses under a million dollars don't think that they need this. They think that operating systems are for just bigger companies. But I honestly believe that is just backwards. But the businesses that implement an operating system early, they're the ones that grow into million dollar companies. The ones that wait are the ones that stay stuck with the owner doing everything. And they're burning out and they're wondering why they can't get past a certain revenue ceiling. Like, the ceiling isn't the market. The ceiling is the lack of structure. If you want to buy back your time, you need systems that run just without you. Look, an operating system is how you make that real. All right, so let me bring this all together. The whole point of building a business is freedom. It's not trading one boss for a thousand customers who now are your bosses and own your time. It's not working 60 hours a week on something you built instead of 40 hours a week on something somebody else built. Real freedom, time freedom, the ability to step away and have everything keep running even better than when you're there that starts with a mindset shift, working on the business instead of in the business. And yeah, you can find people who do things 80 or 90% as well as you and maybe even 150% as well as you. And yes, you should hire before you feel ready. And yeah, your first hire will pay for itself if you use that time for higher value work. And the excuses that keep you trapped are lies that your fear tells you. Then it's all about just building infrastructure. And you hire through a funnel, not through convenience. You cast a wide net, get filter ruthlessly with tasks and with tests and interviews and you only interview a few people that make it through. And you document everything, the sops so the system does the training, not you. And you have your whole company inside an operating system. So there's clarity and there's accountability and there's rhythm without you being the one holding it all together. That's the goal. Not just a business that makes money, but a business that makes money without requiring your presence every single day. That's freedom. That's what we're building here. This is how you build a business that puts a million bucks a year in your pocket. So to wrap up this entire video series, let's close with Jake and Maria and see the result of all this work. So it's been three years since that night that Jake was staring at the ceiling and he made that decision. He was finally fed up. Jake now runs a junk removal and light demolition company with eight two man crews doing 20 garages each. Every month they average 1600 in revenue from each sale, bringing 256,000 per month in revenue in he's got a full time salesperson, an office manager, several other key hires and his monthly payroll, it's like 126,000. Spends another 41 grand on marketing and other overhead expenses. Leaves him 85 grand a month in profit for himself. That's just over a million bucks a year. He's no longer making a dollar an hour. We talked about like that in video five. He's now making more like twelve hundred dollars an hour. And he loves every single hour of it because he's working on stuff that he loves to do. You know Maria, his wife, she quit Starbucks like 18 months ago. Their first baby, 6 months old. And Maria's home with her. Not because she has to be, because she gets to be. Jake works maybe 10 hours a week, 15 on a busy one, mostly on growth and strategy and networking. He works on the business, not in it. He hasn't touched a Piece of junk. In over a year, he takes Mondays off to be with his family. Spends every Friday golfing with local business leaders. And look, they're not like jet rich yet, they're not private jet rich, but they're free. They got options, security, margin, and they got a business that grows whether Jake is there or not. And it all started with that decision three years earlier. Now you remember all those people, if you were in following along the whole time, they got angry at my tweet. The ones who said it couldn't be done, who had every excuse, it must be nice. Look, most of them are still going to be at the same job 20 years from now and 10 years from now. Most of them are still at the same job. In fact, many of them lost their job due to AI. But they're complaining about the economy, they're complaining about their boss, about their situation. They think someday they're gonna do something, someday they're gonna get out. But you know what? Someday is not a day of the week. The only difference between them and Jake is that Jake decided he stopped arguing for his limitations. He started building something. Look, he wasn't smarter, he wasn't better connected or luckier. He just refused to let excuses win. I am not smarter, I am not luckier. I just refuse to let let excuses win. And you can do the same. So you've now watched the complete seven figure business blueprint series. Six pillars, million bucks a year for your business. And that is possible for you if you want it. But look, this was a lot of information. So here's my challenge. Pick one thing from this series and go do it this week. Don't just think about it, do it. Decide in your vehicle, post your first piece of content. Maybe you gotta raise prices on your service. Maybe you gotta hire a VA for five hours. Maybe you gotta go read profit first or launch something uglier. You know, just pick something and then pick another. That's how businesses are built. That's how freedom is run. Not in one dramatic leap, but in thousands of small steps. Moving the ball down the field four yards at a time, five yards, three yards, you get a first down, all the way to the end zone. Look, your future self is watching you. Your family's counting on you. What are you going to do about it? Now if this series helped you, do me two quick favors. First share with one person who needs to hear it. Maybe somebody who's been stuck, somebody who's been making excuses, somebody who needs a quick wake up call. Text them a link to the video series. And second, leave me a comment below. Tell me what business you're going to build. Love reading those comments. And if you want more content like this, frameworks, strategies, real talk about building businesses and financial freedom and some real estate investing. Follow me. Erdybrandon Look, I'm not done helping you. This series was just the beginning. So love ya. For firstdeal.com For Opendoor Capital, for Better Life, Real estate funding and a dozen other businesses, My name is Brandon Turner signing off.