Be Clear On What You Want
Moshe Amsel
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs11/24/2021
Be Clear On What You Want
The Inventive Journey
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
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to get really clear on what it is that you want i am in the position now where i work with hundreds of business owners and most of them have gotten lost on the journey and forgotten why they started in the first place and the truth is is that we usually tend to over complicate what we're doing we usually tend to add on more than we want make it more expensive than it needs to be and if you really get get in touch with what is the result that you want what is the lifestyle you want and you build your business around that you'll avoid a lot of detours that are unnecessary and the last thing you want to do is to build a successful business 20 years from now look back and say i don't even like what i built i don't even like where i'm at and that's what a lot of people are on the path to do [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com and grab some time to chat with us now today we have a fun guest on here and we'll get to a little bit of intro but it was fun it was one of the i think it was either the well i don't know if it was the first it was one of the first podcasts i was on i was i had an opportunity to be a guest on which is he uh does the profit with law podcast so so one if you're an attorney you're doing legal related services um that is a great podcast and one that i definitely recommend and listen to frequently myself um but with that it was one that i kind of started a bit of uh my podcasting experience and has grown since then and it was a genesis in part on this podcast and so i'm excited to turn around a bit and have him as a guest on the podcast for once and to talk to a little bit of his journey so with that we will uh go ahead and uh dive into a bit of his journey and have a good conversation so welcome on the podcast moshe oh thank you so much devin for having me it's a it's an honor to be here um and i i mean i love podcasting i you know i listened to podcasts back in when you had a downloaded and put it on an ipad ipod um so i'm an avid podcast listener and i love the opportunity to be on somebody else's show so i appreciate you having me here and hopefully i can add value to your listeners you know it's uh it's always fun it's fun to be or to be on both sides of the microphone so to speak uh being able to uh be the the host as well as to be the guest and it's always a different experience so now i'll just congratulate you in front of the audience so moshe just had a child is that right yep a baby boy baby boy so if if you if you get tired or you're not off or anything else definitely understand why because uh i have uh four kids that are ages uh five to eleven so been through that four times and definitely understand the the the little bit of the losing sleep and otherwise being distracted so appreciate you you fitting us in after after that having the newborn yeah you know what i'm just trying to catch up to you you know i this is my sixth sixth child but my three older ones are you know much older so i want to get that bunch of four in this in that small age group so uh just give me a couple more years well we'll be up we'll be back and talk about the fourth one all right well it's a good aspirations and something there's definitely a good goal to shoot for so with that we'll go ahead and dive in and then and as the listeners are used to we do go through the journey of kind of how you got to where you're at today so maybe a given introduction started the high school college time frame but kind of get us give us an idea of how your journey gets started and led to where you're at yeah it's you know what everybody's got their own unique journey and uh mine is definitely unique so i don't know how many of your listeners have been exposed to the orthodox jewish community but i was raised an orthodox jew and i didn't necessarily buy into the way of life that orthodox jury provided so being an orthodox jew has a lot of limitations on what you can do it's very restrictive and i didn't know it at the time but i was in constant rebellion so my high school journey was very interesting because uh give me a year and i was in a different high school um so i bounced around just declared so you went to four different high schools over four years that's correct that's correct so uh whether whether it was my doing or their doing and somehow you know somehow either they didn't want me back or i didn't want to go back and gave my parents a run for their money for sure uh but it was all private schools and and you know the first one was way too religious for me uh you know i was just there was two different things at play one is that you know i'm i'm very smart i don't want to toot my own horn that's not the point but the classes were boring to me uh i would read the textbook in the first three weeks of school and i knew the curriculum for the year so the rest of the year was just how can i enjoy myself in the process so i'd be sitting in the back of the room and i was the jokester in the class and i would you know and constantly eating snacks during class stuff like that just and that was just how i carried on through through high school um but i never really found my place because i just wasn't comfortable with where i was uh and in that process uh my father has been a i don't want to call it an entrepreneur i think there's a better word for it but he was constantly doing a new business every couple of years uh but he never hired staff so it was always like um solopreneur you know in an entrepreneurial fashion uh but he was always looking for the next you know get rich quick scheme and uh never really built a business the way that a business needs to be built which is to bring on people to do the job that you'd be doing and then you reap the rewards so in his venture of not hiring staff he put his kids to work so i have a very eclectic background throughout my childhood we had a flower shop we had a gold refinery these all happened in our basement by the way um we had we had a a business where he would buy all this inventory that couldn't be sold and then we'd sit down and say okay why didn't this sell so there was like a board game called plutocrat that when you opened the box there were no instructions so there's a whole bunch of game pieces but it doesn't tell you how to play so like oh of course this didn't sell so we sat there and we made up a game and then we wrote wrote up a rulebook and we repackaged the game nicely and with the instructions inside and then he turned around and sold it for a profit so those are the kinds of things that i was being exposed to as i was growing up and when i was in high school he partnered with a israeli software company that was creating um jewish software for talmud and and the old testament and stuff like that so there's like bible scholar and tourist scholar and the talmud scholar was the names of the software and he basically was starting their north american division this is the only work that he did that he actually brought on staff so he he hired the support personnel to take tech support calls and i would come in at night from school and of course i did my homework on the way home and i was bored when i got home and i would sit there in the office and i would answer the support line i would start helping people with their computer problems and most of these people were just they just didn't know how to operate the computer so you just needed to kind of like walk them through where they needed to go um but it let my parents know that i had a knack for technology so after my stint of four years walked through and within at least four years you went from boardgate sales they're board game salesmen you did flower shop you did gold refinery and you did i t customer service at least not all not all that happened during high school so that was i don't know the time span of that but my guess is probably like third fourth grade okay all the way through the end of high school um but this software company was the last two three years that i was in high school was when the software company was happening ultimately they ended up taking it back over he stepped away he just again it came back to he likes to do he likes to own the tasks and i don't want to make this about my dad but he likes to own the tasks and i think he had a really hard time with the delegation aspect so it really didn't work out um and he moved on to the next thing that he set out to do which is um microsoft access database programming which he's still doing today interestingly enough so he's been that longest [Laughter] so now he found his niche now on your journey as you're saying okay had this kind of bounced around through different high schools also is doing entrepreneurial and endeavors and you're now saying okay i'm graduating from high school was it a straight shot to college and you know how did the or what did you figure out or how did you figure out what you wanted to do in college or kind of how did that next phase of your journey go okay so the interesting thing is is that in there's different gradations of orthodox jews but the modern orthodox they they feed into the college system just like the rest of america but the rest of the orthodox community they either don't go to college or they only go as needed like so they stay and study torah for a certain amount of time and then when they're ready to go out into the workforce maybe they'll go to college maybe they just start working so i was not being roomed to go to college that wasn't part of the plan and college really wasn't on the radar when i finished 12th grade i really didn't have anything that i needed to do like what's the next step like the normal next step for somebody in in the circles i was being brought up in was to go to a talmudic college which is you know it's they don't call it that um but that's basically what it is and i had no interest in doing that so here i was an adult i can make my own decisions i'm not taking that step so what did i do i went out with friends and i live in a suburb of new york city so i went into manhattan every night and we went clubbing so i'd be out until three four in the morning i come home and what do you do when you're up till four in the morning you sleep to one in the afternoon so i was at this place where i really had no purpose and um as far as my mother was concerned she raised a bum and she was like totally like she was coming off of that reception on her head that it at least the outward perspective that is what it would probably look like yeah so she was really really mortified by what what had happened and she said you know what i he needs to have some sort of responsibility so she went to a local computer store and she had a conversation with the owner and she said look my my son really doesn't have direction in his life right now and i really think that he'd be amazing at whatever you do in your computer store would you take him in and he said i'd like to meet him first but yeah i'd probably give him a shot so my mother comes home and she says you know i set up a an interview with you for you and you know just go meet with this with this computer store owner so i was like oh what the heck why not so i went and i sat down with him and he basically told me what they did uh which at that time what a computer cost two and a half thousand dollars so there was a big business to just assemble and sell computers because if you bought it from dell for two and a half thousand dollars we can assemble it with the bare material costing about five six hundred bucks so we can make that two thousand dollar profit right so there was a lot of a big business and actually just created you know building the computers and selling it to uh to the clients so he basically said look i'll take you on as an intern and the first moment that i can send you out to a client site to work and you're able to bill on your own is when i'll start paying you and i'll pay you 200 a week cash so three weeks later i went on payroll um i was doing that for a very short period of time uh probably if i had a guest probably about four months and he sent me out to a client in new york city and i'm at the client the way that he did this was he would have you go with a book you know like just a blank receipt book that had a carbon copy and you'd write a bill when you were there so he had us call before we left the site and and write a bill so i called him up and i said okay this is what i did i basically spent an hour there and i did you know i tweaked a couple of things in their software and i fixed their problem they were happy as can be and he had me write the bill and he had me write a bill for ninety dollars for my hour of work and he also had me add another fifty dollars for travel and i handed a hundred and forty dollar bill to them and they gave me a hundred forty dollars back and in my infinite wisdom of business i came back and i said i want to raise hey i got i made you money give me more so how did that go look i looked at it i said he's billing me at dollars an hour quick math that's thirty six hundred dollars a week i'm getting two hundred dollars a week something's wrong here right now clearly i wasn't billing at 40 to 40 hours a week but that was my that was my mindset so i asked for a raise um he said i'm going on vacation to israel when i come back let's talk about it he went on vacation i think he's coming back and i'm going to be a rich man um and he gets back and he says you know i really thought about it and i'm not in the position to give you a raise right now and i said what do you mean you're not in the position to give me a raise an hour off for me how could you do that right well it could get me to 300 an hour it only takes two and a half three and a half hours for me to for me to break even for you every week like this is a no-brainer but bottom line is is that i came home and i told my mother what happened and she said well i have somebody that i want you to meet and she puts me in touch with the i.t company that was doing the i.t support for her office and i went and i met with them and they turned around and offered me a real job with a real paycheck where i get to pay my taxes on it and and i started working for them to pay the tax well you should pay your price as you have to but yeah right well i was getting 200 cash and as a teenager earning cash taxes wasn't on my radar none of that you know none of that adult stuff was there but i was earning money but i realized that i was not earning enough that made sense for what the work that i was doing um and that the next job uh i got i think i started there at 23 000 a year salary um but while i was there the a few things happened number one the owner of the business it was a novel shop novell is something that nobody today knows what it is but um what microsoft is today novell was back then so essentially they held they they had the the server business um for for small businesses or even large businesses everything ran on novell netware and microsoft was new to the was new to the game when it came to server side you know corporate networks and there was a certification called a microsoft certified systems engineer where you can get certified on the microsoft server operating system and that was a six exam certification and it was at the time was very valuable um at the same time i got married now mind you i'm 19 years old um and i got married and that goes back to the way i was raised the jewish orthodox traditions and uh you can't really be with a woman unless you're married so i fell in love with a girl and the only way for us to be together was to get married so that's what i did now um i don't have any qualms with what happened with my life and where that took me but at 19 before i turned 20 i already had my first child and so my oldest is is now 20 she also works for me she's a podcast producer here at my podcast profit with law um and she's a college student at suny empire state um but i am 42 years old i've got a 22 year old daughter uh so at 19 i was i just gotten married and i had her now a pregnant wife and i started to realize that my 23 000 salary ain't gonna cut it and that's where i think that a lot of my motivation on my career path was driven by necessity rather than by what i you know i desired or wanted or thought about that i wanted to do because it was one step after another always trying to keep abreast with the added responsibilities i created for myself so i went into my boss my new boss i was there what nine months or eight months when this happened and i said look i want to know if there's a way for me to earn more money here and he said well yeah actually there is if you get this microsoft certification then i will give you a raise and i'll raise you from 23 000 to 27 000. so i went through and i built my own two computers at home and i made a server and a workstation and i went through the material and i took the test and i worked really hard to get the certification and when i was done it was right around the time that my baby was born and i went in i got my raise and i was feeling really good and then i read an article that said that the average mcsc was making seventy thousand dollars a year yeah i got a raise and i'm way underpaid exactly so i started to shop around what's out there and i ended up getting a a job at a pre-ipo company now mind you this is 1999 and everybody was going public so like the place to be was a pre-ipo company now let me just ask one question on that so you're working at novella and just as a complete aside so people some of the listeners at least i know who nobel is because it was started in utah so because it was started in utah it was actually started in provo which is where i went to school for undergrad there's at least a very tangential connection between you or between nobel and why i would actually know what it is because you're right most people would remember it but now you so you go before you made the jump to going to kind of the pre-ipo did you go into the boss did you say hey i can make double if i go somewhere else or he's just saying hey we're not we can't we're not in a position to pay you or kind of what made you decide to make that leap or make that jump from working to noelle which was a big company at the time to going to more of a pre-ipo company so it's exactly how it happened so the owner of this business that's basically was a a computer support company um a small shop we had five of us that were working for him he was in his 70s and i went into him and i said look you know i i really appreciate what you're paying me i appreciate you taking me in i'm working hard for you um i know that we're making we're making money i don't know if it can support this but here's what the industry is paying people that are doing what i'm doing with the amount of experience that i have um is there anything that you can do to improve my salary and he said um no that's the best that i can do and i actually i my recollection may be off i think he may have given me a small raise i think he may have bumped me up another few thousand dollars but that was it um then i went and i found a job um and i and and the job was gonna pay me 54 000 was the salary so it was it was practically double or just shy of double of what i was earning so i went into him and i said look i now have a job offer before i take it i just want to double check nothing nothing doing here and he said nope nothing doing and i said okay um here's my two weeks notice so at that exact moment he called everybody together into the office into the conference room and he said i just want you all to know i'm retiring and moshe's leaving he got another job and i'm going to um if you guys want it these two people i'm going to hand the cut the clients off to you uh we'll we'll make some financial arrangements and that was that was it my exodus was basically the demise of the company that i was at uh not my doing he was held a company together well i think he was ready i think he was like you know and i think he knew it was coming so i think he waited until he didn't have to let another person go um and it just gave him the peace of mind that he can move on and retire in peace so i started the software company at the software company uh i did most of the work on the team that i was on a lot of the guys were smokers and every 15 minutes they went to smoking breaks and you know i ended up carrying the carrying the bag for a lot of the work they did and i turned around and very quickly asked for a raise from them um and they turn around and my manager basically gave me the run around for a while and ultimately came back and said he you know he can do an 800 dollar raise um and i guess it's better than nothing but not a whole lot yeah it was like a and basically the conversation he had with me was very like this is not how to have employees he calls me into the office and he says you know yeah mcses are a dime a dozen so i was able to work out an 800 raise for you you know like you owe me the world so um at that time it was shortly thereafter i walked into my father's house and it was a sunday morning he was meeting with a gentleman who was installing a phone system in his house so he was having this meeting with this guy and i walked in and i said hi and i said hello to this person and i went up to talk to my mother and when i walked out of the room he turns to my father and he says oh what does he do and my father says oh he's in computers he does networking blah blah blah he says well i have a company that does phone systems i would love to add computer networking to the mix of what we do is he looking for a job so my father tells him i don't think so he just started at this uh at this other place why would he be looking already yeah so he turns around and tells me this conversation and i said well wait a second i want to hear what he has to say so i sat down with this i sat down with him and i had a conversation with him um and he told me what he wanted to do what his vision was and i said i would love to start your it division for you i'd love to be your director of i.t i said i don't have the experience of managing people i understand that you're taking a risk with me but i've never let any of my employers down i've always worked really hard i've always made sure to get the job done and i will do the same for you i said and on top of so he wanted to know what i wanted to earn i said seventy thousand dollars a year and he hemmed and one he wasn't sure i said i'll tell you what i i see that this is a difficult dollar amount for you to for you to swallow i said i will go i will start at sixty thousand i'll work for three months if after three months you're not happy with my work you think that you made a mistake i walk away you know you saved a little bit of money if you are happy you give me a raise to 70. and he agreed and i started working there i ended up working for him for six years um and i developed his i.t department into a dozen technicians i flew all across the country i sold over 30 million dollars in sales for him um and it was it was a it was the it was a great place to land um it was a great place for me to flourish but more importantly it gave me a ton of experience in basically starting a business running a business where i didn't have the the same challenges as somebody who owns a business does because i didn't have to worry about where the money was coming from necessarily right um so i didn't lose sleep at night but i learned a ton about vetting people hiring the right people managing them um you know criticizing them in a way that's constructive and be able to get them to to to be team players and work with you uh it was a very impactful job for me but during that time i know that we're probably going to be running out of time soon so try to rush the story up a little bit during that time i went through my divorce and it was the last couple of years i was working for him and when i went through my divorce i basically my ex-wife wasn't working and i was and i was earning at that point i was already earning six figures over six figures i actually got to a hundred thousand dollars in salary before i turned 21 and and i owned my first home before i turned 22. so i was like really always on this fast track of rushing to get somewhere where i was rushing to who knows but i always thought that somewhere well you know what i had this i had this belief that you know people work their whole lives to reach retirement and then they get to retirement they get to enjoy life and they're too old to enjoy it oh i agree it's like finally when you have your house paid for you have the money you have the means and then you're saying now i'm too tired i'm too old and i can't do anything to enjoy everything that i built and so then it almost seems backwards but when you're young you know so it's kind of you know retirement is wasted on the old and you know and there's some truth to that so now help us so i had this i had this idea that i would have all my kids out of high school and you know through college by the time i was 45 i'd be retired and i'd be able to live and enjoy life so um you know that's so i was always on this rush because i had created this this you know time frame for myself that was a lot shorter than what most people would have their careers in now mind you i never went to college at this point and i also had something that i was doing on the side so i wasn't uh i was an emt an emergency medical technician volunteering for the local ambulance corps um and that was something that i just did as a hobby on the side had nothing to do with you know my my uh my career so i went through my divorce and in the process um first of all my work um fell off the cliff when i you know like i just my head wasn't in the game i wasn't motivated like everything that was motivating me was my family and my family was falling apart um and then i got to this realization where logistically it made sense since i was the breadwinner that i would have the kids only one night a week and every other weekend and she would have them all the other times which and you know in hindsight that was the stupidest thing for me to agree to but it is what it is water under the bridge it makes sense and it worked or you thought it would work and come to find out different right so then i had all this free time in the evenings i was like what am i going to do with it so i actually decided to join a paramedic program and put myself through a paramedic school and the paramedic program is a 2 000 hour program so that's like the equivalent of a full-time job and i was doing this while working my job so i would go to i would leave work and i would go to class in the evenings we had class from 7 to 11 and then i had to do three eight hour rotations a week at at the hospital so some nights i would stay there do my eight hour rotation from eleven to seven and then go to work at seven a.m the next morning uh and sometimes i did it on the weekend when i didn't have the kids somehow i balanced it i figured it all out it was a very difficult year but at least i felt like i was doing something at the same time that i finished my medic program things really got bad at work the company wasn't doing well they were having a hard time my performance had fallen off the map most of my team was already gone and my boss started to fall behind in payroll and it got to the point where i was like you know what there's really there's no future for me here i went into his office and i said look either catch me up or i'm gone and he said okay see ya so i'm donating the extra money that i didn't pay you so now so now that's kind of fast forward so you're saying okay i'm in a transitional point in life i you know going through divorce you're also saying okay i'm gonna do emt school now where we where we intersected was a bit more of now with profit with law which is more right right business so how did you make that jump or that transition because it seems like it's a fairly big departure from what you were used to or what you're doing uh before then yeah so what happened was i started working full-time as a paramedic and a paramedic on a 9-1 unit it could be a very um adrenaline rushing job it could be very emotionally draining but one thing that it had was a lot of downtime so there was all this time that i was sitting there and what did what did they do right they sit and watch tv right now i'm sitting there i'm in the medic station and i'm and i'm three hours downtime between calls or whatever it is and we're watching tv and at some point i'm like what am i doing with my life like why am i not being more productive with this time i'm getting paid for it i may as well do something with it and that's when i said you know what i'm going to go to school i'm going to get my bachelor's degree i never did it i always wanted to do it i'm going to do it so i i enrolled at suny empire state which had an adult learning distance learning program and i started going for my bachelor's and when i had to start selecting what my major was going to be or what classes i wanted to to take i knew that business was where i wanted to be but i looked at my experience and i said what am i missing from my experience and i realized that i never was involved in the financial side of the business because i was only involved in operations so i honed in on accounting and that's when i started going saying oh maybe i want to be a cpa maybe you know that's where i want to go and uh ultimately what i ended up doing was i got my bachelor's and i went for my mba did all of that right through and then things started changing in my life like i met my my wife my current wife now and um i started to settle down and when i started to settle down my medic salary really wasn't cutting it i wasn't even cutting it before because um most of it was going to child support and private school tuition for my children um but at now if i want to start life with somebody else i really have to get serious about the money that i'm making so the the knee-jerk reaction instant you know solution to the problem was to go back to it so i did i went back to it and i was i did that and i did medic full-time three nights a week so it was three 12-hour shifts a week at night and um and you know and i and i did did i t during the day all while i was still doing i was a full-time student so um i i wasn't busy at all didn't have much on your plate right right exactly um so that was a really busy time in my life uh but then then i found out that my ex-wife was an alcoholic um basically kids moved in with me once that happened i couldn't work at night anymore it just didn't work for my wife to be a primary parent for them um so that you know i had to come back from my medic hours um and that's when i really when when that happened um that's when i really started to look at my life and say what am i doing like i've always worked for somebody but i never wanted to work for somebody and now i've got my kids going through this crisis and every day i'm running them to therapy appointments to alatine meetings and i'm constantly needing to ask permission to do that i don't want to i want to just be able to be a dad to them in a way that feels natural to me without needing somebody's permission for that um and that's really what where i started to say okay i really want to start my own business i want to work for myself and the seed was planted ultimately that was 2014 is when i started that journey it wasn't until 2019 where i settled on who i was serving and how i was going to serve them so it took me five years to really what's that as you can see it took you about five years and that's what i like to hit on is that you know it always feels like when you read the book you listen to podcasts you watch the movie it's oh i was an overnight success and you know it just everything clicked and exactly what happened and then it was this fluid journey and it was everything was perfect and it's oh 99.9 of the time it's never the case and even once you made the jump it still took you five years to figure out where you wanted to focus on and what you wanted to drill down on yeah and what's interesting is is that finally like the end of 2018 beginning of 2019 is when i realized that attorneys was who i'm going to be working with but even then i still didn't have clarity on what i was doing for them because initially i was setting up a traditional accounting firm but ultimately that's not what i wanted to do and when i started to really look at the impact i wanted to have and how i wanted to help people i realized that what i really want to do is help people be successful and i didn't want to just look at people's past results and tell them how to save money on their taxes and you know and and that be the end of it i really wanted to work with people to help them figure out how to turn their business into a cash generating machine and then figure out what to do with that cash later right so that they can make a difference in not only their own lives but also their kids lives real quick tangent um this was all motivated by an experience i had for my grandfather so my grandfather came from nazi germany when he was 11 years old with his father he lost his mother and his twin siblings in the war and um when he when they came over i think they went to israel first then they came to the u.s when they came they really had nothing um his father had had sent over um i think he sent over some diamonds um so he basically had an orange orchard and um over in germany uh and he was very well connected he was a businessman and uh basically he was an orange merchant uh and when the war started to happen he because he was well connected he he was getting intel from top officials really telling him what's going on so i think he took his entire family fortune and converted it into diamonds and and pre-sent it to the us so when he finally ended up here in the u.s he had merchandise to sell um and he started started a diamond business in manhattan um ultimately my grandfather worked in that business with him um and was was successful with that business uh to the point where he and four of his cousins decided to buy a piece of real estate they bought an apartment building on the west side of manhattan um and now that move looks looks genius looking at it 60 years later or whatever it was right but that investment that he made in in himself and his family's future bore significant results so the tune of um he gave he gave each of his 36 grandchildren the down payment for their first home purchase and he also put each of us through it helped put each of us through private school and our children through private school so every year he's you know part of my kids tuition was paid for by my grandfather um and being on the recipient side of that it had such a major impact on my life it's a minor thing like in the grand scheme of things when we become older we realize that forty thousand dollars is nothing it's a drop in the bucket it really you know it's not really that big a deal but for him to be able to provide it to us at that moment in our life when it was so significant and allowed us to get a step you know towards home ownership and being able to settle down um it was such a blessing to have that that's really what's motivating me to help others create something like that for their families um that's a that's an awesome story and it's kind of fun to see how a gen the generational impact of something that happened generations back is continuing to both impact you from a financial but also from a direction you take in your life and your business so i think that that's that's definitely fun fun to hear so well as we wrap up and we could go on for much longer and i'm sure we'd have a great conversation so we'll have to have you back on i'd love to have you on we do an expert episode and it's a bit different flavor than the journey but we get to talk and share your expertise and i always love listening to your podcast to sharing your expertise so maybe we'll have to have you back on in the future but as we wrap towards the end of this podcast now we've kind of caught up a bit to your journey definitely encourage people to check out your podcast with profit with law and also all the services you guys offer but i always ask two questions at the end of each podcast we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is is you know we've talked a lot about your journey and along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what did you learn from it well i mean the worst the worst decision that i i shouldn't say decision the worst thing that could have happened to me along my journey at the time was going through divorce but when i look back at the journey and i say well you know where did i end up i would never have ended up here had i not done that right so when you're going through that crisis it feels like the world's fallen apart and this is the worst thing that could have happened to you but it's part of the journey and you know i i am where i am because of lots of decisions that i made on the heels of that um but that's not really that's not the business decision so the one business decision that i that i regret that i wish i could have done differently is simply how long i waited so i started my business moonlighting so i started building my business while i was working as an employee and i'm sure a lot of people do this and i did it at a necessity because i have to put food on the table i had a mortgage to pay i had kids to put you know a kid's school tuition to pay i had you know mouths to feed so i had this need and based on the need i felt like i wasn't ready to take the plunge ultimately what ended up happening was is i build up clients to a certain point and then i couldn't serve them my service would fall off the map and clients would leave that would make room for new clients and i had this ever evolving door that was being created by the fact that i was building my business in this way um and when i had reached that first point where i am too busy i that that should have been the point where i said okay i'm giving notice and i'm moving into this full time and just trusted that i could have continued the process fast enough to be able to get the income that i needed from it um that game of going back and forth and really killing myself in the process like getting the clients then killing them off and then getting them again uh that went on for over two years and you know at the end of the day it was it was basically a coaching session that i had with a with my business coach um where it really became clear to me that i needed to make a decision but it also became clear that it wasn't all or nothing and basically i went to my boss and i said look it's time for me to go but financially i'm not ready so i have a proposal for you there's one major project i'm working on everything else is kind of like extra anybody else could do everything else this major project requires me to be on client site twice a week how about i stay on to do two days a week of work and here is what i would charge for that and i basically named a fee that was 75 of my salary and they said yes so ultimately i cut down to two days a week and was making most of the money i was making yeah and you know and and ultimately at the end of the day that was how that was what my solution to the problem was three months later that client stopped paying and that was the end of that so i was out whether i liked it or not but um it was the impetus that i needed it was the push that i needed to just put that behind me so that's the answer to you your first question is you know like the biggest mistake that i had was just not trusting myself enough to be able to take the plunge and do it um and then the second thing is the biggest piece of advice that i could give to somebody who is building their own business thinking about building their own business is to get really clear on what it is that you want i am in the position now where i work with hundreds of business owners and most of them have gotten lost on the journey and forgotten why they started in the first place and the truth is is that we usually tend to over complicate what we're doing we usually tend to add on more than we want make it more expensive than it needs to be and if you really get get in touch with what is the result that you want what is the lifestyle you want and you build your business around that you'll avoid a lot of detours that are unnecessary and the last thing you want to do is to build a successful business 20 years from now look back and say i don't even like what i built i don't even like where i'm at and that's what a lot of people are on the path to do and that's why i work with my clients the very first thing that i do i have like a 90 day law firm turnaround program the very first thing that we do when we start is to go back to the drawing board and identify what their vision is for themselves for their family for their personal life and then how does that translate into what they want to create with their business so my best piece of advice for you is go back go back and get clear on what it is that you want to make sure that what you're building is in alignment completely with that oh and i love that because you know that is really most people start a business they have a clear goal in mind they have a reason why they start the business and yet either because you chase the dollars you get pushed in different directions or other things oftentimes by the time you get to 10 15 20 years down the road the business is different than what you wanted to do and you're not even enjoying running the business anymore so i think that is definitely a great piece of advice well as we wrap up and before we go if people want to reach out to they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor in your business they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out connect with you or find out more best thing is to go to profitwithlaw.com or search any podcast player and look for profit with law tune into the podcast if you're not a lawyer or in the legal services first of all a lot of my business friends have said that they really enjoyed the show even though it's they're not a law firm because business is business and there's a lot of really good ideas and good conversations that happen there but if you know an attorney or you are one um share it you know let tell somebody about it it's a great show and really ev all the instructions on how to connect with me is buried right in there you know listen to any one episode and you'll find out how to take the next step with us go to the website there's links there as well that's really the start of the journey is just get to know me and my brand by tuning into the show and checking out our website and uh if you like what you see reach out to us well i definitely encourage people to reach out i love the podcast i'm an avid listener and i'm worth it for those that aren't on the legal side i listen to you as an example real estate is one of the podcasts of real estate marketing is they have a ton of advice that i am import over to the legal sphere i think there's a lot of times when you listen other industries you can get a lot of insight as to what they're doing well and what they're not doing well and learn that so definitely encourage people check out the podcast go to the website and uh and connect and learn more well thank you again moshe for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast feel free to go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show we'd love to have you also make sure to subscribe and make sure to share the podcast so we can make sure that everybody can find out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat and we're always there are always here to help thank you again moshe and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you
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