Are you looking to start your own business but overwhelmed by all the information out there? In this video, I share insights from my 25-year entrepreneurial journey, offering tips to help you avoid some of the mistakes I made along the way.
From shifting your mindset with books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad and The Millionaire Next Door, to using practical tools like Google reviews, I’ll walk you through what has worked for me in growing my businesses.
I’ll also talk about the importance of finding mentorship, avoiding the “shiny opportunity syndrome,” and how the right podcasts, like The Thrive Time Show and The Game by Alex Hormozi, can fuel your success.
Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe if this video helps you on your entrepreneurial journey!
Let’s get you out in the field making money! 💪
Big thanks to Cloud Work Pro for sponsoring this video! If you’re an experienced I.T. technician looking for contract work, be sure to check them out at cloudworkpro.com.
💼 Apply To Work On CloudWork Pro:
https://cloudworkpro.com/techs/?utm_source=fta&utm_medium=youtube&utm_campaign=fta-sponsorship
📚 Book recommendations:
Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
https://amzn.to/3XjkoyW
The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
https://amzn.to/3MFhDTx
How to Stop the Pain by James B. Richards
https://amzn.to/3MFhnnx
$100M Offers by Alex Hormozi
https://amzn.to/47tl9Ks
$100M Leads by Alex Hormozi
https://amzn.to/3ZdFl0K
🎧 Podcast recommendations:
The Thrive Time Show with Clay Clark and Dr. Robert Zoellner
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/47Wh7BX2bOSS5vQQQ1VPjI?si=6cea032001ae4a34
Apple:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thrivetime-show-business-school-without-the-bs/id1076405618
Think Media with Sean Cannell
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/0XMQ4IYW7lP1jKSqC2lXWg?si=8d41201b0cef4bd3
Apple:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-think-media-podcast/id1492533163
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/6YNopzKDGDwf0auIpPTIID?si=544006db6af14fcd
Apple:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-game-w-alex-hormozi/id1254720112
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🌟 About Michael Firey
👨💻 Experience:
I.T. field tech freelancer since 2000 working with Field Nation alternative direct clients.
Field Nation I.T. field technician since 2010
WorkMarket I.T. field technician since 2011
Local small business owner since 1997
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🎥 Video Transcript:
Are you dreaming of starting your own business? Being self-employed.
But
you just don’t know where to start.
In 1997, when I first started,
educational resources were pretty scarce. I mean, you could buy courses on CD,
maybe DVDs,
you could go to school, which I did.
Fast forward to today.
Now we have the opposite effect. There is an overwhelming amount of information.
From YouTube, and podcasts, and books, and
TikTok experts, and
what do you listen to? What is actually effective? What’s actually going to work?
You know, do the people that are sharing this information actually have enough experience
that you can trust what they’re saying?
It’s to the point now where the sheer volume of information that’s available to you can be paralyzing.
If you don’t know me, I’m Michael Firey and I run Field Tech Academy as well as some local small businesses.
Over my 25 year career, I’ve faced a lot of different challenges trying to run a small business and be successful as a self-employed person.
if you watch my channel, then you know that I share information about the IT field contracting industry and little tips and tricks about IT skill sets that will help you in that industry. But I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m some business expert.
What I want to do today is teach you about how I’ve gotten to this point.
I want to share some of these things with you, because I want you to maybe avoid some of the mistakes that I made,
and maybe you can grow faster and stronger and be more successful than I have been.
I’ve made it my mission to try to help people, you know, and I really focus on I.T. technicians. But hopefully this can help other people.
And a company that’s supporting me in this mission is Cloud Work Pro.
They believe in what I’m doing so much that they’ve even sponsored this video.
Cloud Work Pro is the source for I.T. field service contracting across the United States.
And you can explore opportunities with them at cloudworkpro.com.
When I first started out, I really had to shift my mindset from an employee mindset to an entrepreneurial mindset.
There were three books that really helped me to change my perspective on things.
Maybe they can help you as well.
I went to college, and I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
But that degree didn’t really change my mindset.
One of the first books I read was Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.
He really helped me to see a different view of money and investing and assets.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad is Robert’s story about his two dads. One was his father and one was his best friend’s father. Now his father’s mindset put him in a classification of poor dad, but his friend’s father had a mindset that Robert calls his rich dad.
Because of that mindset.
It really helped me to understand that you don’t have to have a ton of money to become wealthy.
One of the biggest things was to figure out how to make money work for you, instead of you spending all your time working for money.
The second book that really altered my thinking was The Millionaire Next Door
by
Thomas J. Stanley
and William Danko.
This book talked about seven common traits that they found in all truly wealthy people.
Most of the truly wealthy people don’t live in the big, flashy neighborhoods.
They live in regular middle class houses.
They drive regular old mid-range cars.
They buy clothes from regular department stores like Dillard’s or Sears, of course Sears isn’t around anymore, but you get the idea.
It helped me to realize that a lot of the people that I saw as rich, that were driving the nice cars and living in the big, crazy houses were really just showing off flashy debt payments.
Now the third book that really influenced me early on,
you might think that it doesn’t really fit into a business conversation,
but it’s called How to Stop the Pain by James B Richards.
You know, we’ve all been through our own trauma.
In 2004, I went through a really, really difficult divorce.
And it shook me to my core.
But this book and my faith
helped me to
cross that bridge from trauma and pain into becoming a more healthy person.
And I understood if I wasn’t emotionally healthy, and if I wasn’t physically healthy, then I really couldn’t achieve the larger big term goals that I had.
I’ll include Amazon links to all of these books in the description that way you can check them out if you think they would help you.
Despite reading these books, and despite graduating with a four year degree in business,
I still didn’t quite understand certain business fundamentals to get a small business to be successful.
I was constantly struggling financially
I tried to grow my business beyond just me as an individual and bring in other people.
You know, I knew that I had to have people working for me to ever get my business past the point of it just being a job that I created for myself.
Looking back, I realize now that I really kept myself isolated, and that was one of my big problems.
I didn’t really know what I didn’t know.
You know, I was just in this eternal loop of failing and trying to learn from it and just not ever seeing what the next step needed to be.
What I should have done was seek out other business owners and people that were successful in general,
or maybe someone that was successful in the industry that I was trying to get into.
I should have been learning from people that were ahead of me
and not trying to do it all on my own.
If you’ll seek them out, there are a lot of resources out there.
For example, the Small Business Administration has an organization called S.C.O.R.E.
And what S.C.O.R.E. does is they offer mentorship.
And they bring in local business owners who volunteer their time to help small business owners and fellow business owners.
And that’s a great resource to check in to.
About midway through my business journey, I started finding some new online resources that were really practical and really helped me out a lot.
Now, before I share those resources, let me just take a quick second to tell you about our video sponsor, Cloud Work Pro.
They believe in the mission of helping technicians to improve their skills and to become better technicians and better business owners.
Cloud Work Pro is an on demand I.T. field service marketplace that operates across the United States,
and they bring together
technicians and companies that need technicians to do service work.
Cloud Work Pro stands apart from a lot of the other I.T. marketplaces out there in a few distinct ways.
They are focused on becoming a professional marketplace full of professional techs and professional buyers.
To accomplish this, they vet every single technician that applies to become a part of their marketplace.
Cloud Work Pro technicians, on average, have 14 years of experience. So you know that you’ll be working alongside other professional technicians.
And their clients enjoy having access to this network of professional and dependable I.T. field service techs.
So you can trust that you’re going to be in a marketplace where your talents are respected and rewarded.
If that sounds interesting, please consider applying at cloudworkpro.com or you can click the link in the description and that link will let Cloud Work Pro know that you were referred to them by Field Tech Academy.
I have personally used Cloud Work Pro as a technician and as a buyer, so I am comfortable making this recommendation to you out of my personal experience.
By 2018, I realized that I couldn’t continue on my own.
I had closed my local computer repair shop,
and I was relying strictly on a part time job and I.T. field contracting, ironically.
I had all but given up on being able to succeed as a small business person.
Then a friend of mine recommended a podcast called the Thrive Time Show.
You know, you hear how you should listen to this, you should do this, blah blah blah blah.
I really didn’t have a lot of faith in this making a difference.
But when I listened to a few episodes,
the things they were saying kinda shook me.
I may not have been successful to this point, but I’d been around enough to know when I heard good information.
The Thrive Time show is hosted by Clay Clark
and by his partner, Doctor Zoellner.
What I learned from them was how to
use Google reviews to help to grow my business, how to get those Google reviews, how to improve the SEO on my website to help feed the algorithm.
And how to come up with offers that you can make to new customers that were so good that people would feel stupid saying no.
So I dove in. I started all the way at the beginning because I didn’t want to miss anything, get anything out of context. And I started at the beginning and just listened to episode after episode after episode and taking notes and really trying to think, you know, how is this going to apply to my business?
They offered paid coaching, but I was at a point where I really didn’t have the money for paid coaching, so I was going to try to consume and implement everything I could from a free perspective until I could get to a point to pay for coaching.
The things I learned worked.
I was able to actually feel confident reopening my local computer repair shop.
I gained new customers. I gained new Google reviews. My revenue started to increase.
And the best part was it really renewed
my faith that I could do this.
I even got to the point where I was able to afford to pay for the monthly coaching for a little while, and that accelerated things quickly.
In 2023, I started listening to another podcast
called Think Media.
Think media is ran by Sean Cannell.
They really teach people how to have a successful YouTube channel.
And I really saw the idea of being able to create a YouTube channel to try to help technicians learn some of the things that I learned along the way, and how to get into this whole I.T. contracting industry.
So I started this channel.
On one episode of the Think Media podcast,
he interviewed a gentleman named Alex Hormozi.
What Alex had to say was so foundational and practical and actionable.
It blew my mind.
I found out he had his own podcast, so I went and checked it out.
Alex’s podcast is called The Game. He’s also written books called Gym Launch, $100M Leads, and $100M Offers.
And of course, I’ll link to those in the description.
I did the same thing with his podcast that I did with Thrive.
I went back to the first episodes and started listening to them. Now, his first episodes were really focused towards gym owners,
and at first I thought, oh, this isn’t going to work. But then I started hearing what he was saying to these gym owners, and I realized that he’s teaching them universal business principles.
After a few episodes, the Game podcast switched from really being focused strictly towards gym owners to being focused towards any small business owner.
Now Alex is not someone you want to listen to around small children. He has a lot of language, but what he teaches is really practical and really mind shifting things that he has learned and implemented. And the guy is worth, I think, $100 million now.
So he might know a thing or two.
Right now I’m about 500 episodes deep into the podcast and I am just learning so much, and I’m beginning to implement those things in all my business endeavors.
One of the things he talks about is the shiny opportunity syndrome. And man, he’s stepping on some toes, to use some church language.
You know, we as business people, we see a shiny new thing and we’re like, oh, that’s cool, that’s amazing. I think I can make money at that. And we go, we start that thing and then we figure out, oh, this is kind of hard. There,
there are actually negatives to this.
We might have a little bit of success and then we go on and then all of a sudden we see another, oh, look at that shiny new opportunity. And so we just drop this halfway done. And we go over here and we do this new shiny opportunity. And then all of a sudden we’re like, oh, well, this has downsides as well.
He’s really spending a lot of time teaching about how to
pick a thing, and stick with the thing, and become good at the thing.
Because when you first start out at any one thing, you’re going to suck.
We get this mindset. We’re like,
I don’t want to do it because I’m going to suck at it.
I’m going to be bad at it.
You should be bad at it. You’ve never done it before.
This applies to technicians. When I’m teaching you about these different skill sets and these different platforms, you know, trying to get established. I mean, you’re going to suck at first. It, it’s normal. It’s the way it works.
What we need to do as small business owners and as entrepreneurs is not bounce from idea to idea to idea.
Find a good idea and do it enough times that you become good at it.
And that’s just a small sample of what I’ve learned from The Game.
You know, I’ve been in an entrepreneurial journey for 25 years.
I’m still learning things. And the last few years have accelerated. The foundation that I built from the early years and the experience and the things that I’m learning now.
It’s just building and it’s stacking. I’m stacking,
And that’s allowing things in the more recent years to accelerate faster than it did in the early years.
So my hope is that me sharing some of these things will give you some places to go to, to try to learn some new things for yourself, and to kind of figure out how you need to approach this journey of entrepreneurship.
There are a lot of other good books and other good podcasts, and I’m not diminishing them. These are just the things that have personally changed my life.
If what I shared today gave you some new perspective and added value to your life, please smash that like button and subscribe to the channel.
And if you know of other resources and podcasts and books that would help fellow
entrepreneurs, then please
hit the comments and let us know.
That way we can all grow together.
And again, if you are a professional and experienced technician, check out cloudworkpro.com.
It is a great source for contract I.T. field service work.
You can start the application process at cloudworkpro.com
or you can click the link in the description.
And as always, let’s get you out in the field making money. I’ll see you in the next video.