Being an Entrepreneur with Guest Brad Costanzo: MakingBank S1E49

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Summary

What nut are you trying to crack in your business?

When staring down the barrel of opportunity, that’s the question any entrepreneurial minded person needs to be asking.

Whether the “business” is your own venture or someone else’s, it undoubtedly has problems that need solving, and those problems are the nuts. Find a way to crack them, and the money will flow generously.

Entrepreneurs don’t avoid problems, they don’t shy away from challenges—they actively seek them out, because it’s in the problems and the challenges that the rewards lie.

Rewards like generous proposals of investment, and lucrative buy-out offers.

Entrepreneurs know the ability to ask deep, penetrating questions—questions that flag major pain-points of a company, an industry, or an individual—is far more valuable than the ability to provide quick answers.

People don’t pay for patches, they pay for long-term solutions to sources inefficiency. But before those solutions can be offered, the inefficiencies must be clearly stated in no uncertain terms.

And that’s what today’s guest on Making Bank—Brad Costanzo—is a master of.

In addition to being the founder and owner of several companies including, Bacon Wrapped Business, Costanzo Marketing, and Stiletto Coffee, Brad is the man who knows how to find a client’s true pain-point and resolve it.

As an uber-successful entrepreneur, Brad’s philosophy is simple:

Want to be successful? Change your mindset to actively seek out problems. Don’t worry about being able to solve them—you can pay someone else to do that.

Listen as Brad shares the details of his incredibly entrepreneurial journey, and offers key insights including:

• The difference between being an entrepreneur and entrepreneurial-minded
• Why failure and losing everything shouldn’t be a deterrent from getting back in the entrepreneurial game
• How to actively seek out problems rather than avoid them
• Why entrepreneurs make terrible employees

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Transcription

Josh Felber: I am Josh Felber. Welcome back to Making Bank. I’ve got another successful entrepreneur on Making Bank today for you. His name is Brad Costanzo. He is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold two different companies, Angel invested in others, and is one of the most highly sought after marketing consultants, helping business owners apply proven but highly unique and effective market strategies to grow their businesses. He is also the host of hit podcast Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo, which he uses as a platform interview celebrity entrepreneurs and experts, extracting valuable insights and strategies that he shares with his audiences.

Brad, welcome to Making Bank.

Brad Costanzo: Thanks Josh. It’s great to be here, man.

Josh Felber: Cool. Yeah. Being on your podcast back in August, I’m like oh man, I’ve got to get this guy on the show.

Brad Costanzo: Has it been that long? Man, time flies.

Josh Felber: I know. I went and looked. Back in August, I knew I definitely wanted to get you on the show. We kept running into each other at different events and stuff. I’m honored and excited for you to be on today, man.

Brad Costanzo: Yeah, me too. Thanks a lot.

Josh Felber: Serial entrepreneur. That’s what I say, I’m a serial entrepreneur as well, with all the businesses I’ve owned since I was a kid.

Brad Costanzo: Right.

Josh Felber: When did you kind of get that first bug and get started.

Brad Costanzo: Probably when … I’ll give the credit to my dad, because he told me when I was like 15 years old, he’s like, “All right. Next year, you can be like a lot of your friends, or right now, you can be like a lot of your friend and go get a job flipping burgers, or I’m going to show you how to create a lawn mowing business, and you’re going to put ads in the newspaper. You’re gonna go mow lawns, and you’re gonna go work for yourself, cause it’s a good skill to learn.” I was like, that’s cool.

So then, I did that. I put ads in papers, “I’ll mow your lawn for 20 bucks.” I like to think that then my next step there was this genius entrepreneurial drive, which was, I found my friends who didn’t have as much money as I did, and they had crappy jobs. I paid them $10 to go mow the lawn for 20. It really had nothing to do with me being this brilliant entrepreneurial mind. I was lazy and I had really bad allergies to grass, so I hated doing it. I was like, I’ve already got these people who hired me, and I really don’t want to mow their lawns. I would much rather play video games.

Josh Felber: Nice.

Brad Costanzo: So that was kind of the early genesis of the whole thing.

Josh Felber: That’s cool.

Brad Costanzo: But, I’ve kind of had that bug the whole time. Although, I didn’t really … I’d start side businesses while I had other jobs. I was working for … I was a finance degree, and I was gonna be like a Wall Street guy, but for several years I just screwed around and got sales jobs. Then I became a financial advisor for Prudential Securities. Not on Wall Street, but I was in Dallas. The thing is, that’s an eat-what-you-kill kind of job. Sales is a very entrepreneurial style job, so I’ve always liked that. I had enough drive to just go do it on my own as opposed to just have a job for a paycheck. Right? I’d much rather do that.

Throughout out my career, I’ve always dabbled on the side. These little opportunities, I’d chase them and see if they’d work. A lot of them didn’t. Some of them did. That was kind of the early ages. I think it’s cause I have a problem with authority and I’m a really bad employee that I just have no choice.

Josh Felber: I think that a lot of us entrepreneurs are. We’re the bad employees so we gotta go find something to knock out ourselves.

Brad Costanzo: True.

Josh Felber: As you were moving along, trying these different businesses and working as a financial advisor, what do you think helped you along the way to what you were able to turn around and sell down the road, business wise?

Brad Costanzo: Being able to sell it down the road, I kind of ascribe that to a little bit of luck. Just getting in there and doing it, creating a business that somebody else found valuable and wanted to buy. There was no one thing that I did, because I was actually surprised that somebody purchased it, to be really frank. I was like, “Holy crap!” It was cool. I didn’t know I could sell this.

I didn’t build that company to sell it. It was an information publishing business, and in a very niche market, but I was kind of really surprised that I loved it, and then I had another company that I started and I sold for less money, but I sold it.

It was pretty eye-opening in that a lot of the things I do now, a lot of the new ventures, I have an eye on the exit, which is, “Is this a potentially sellable venture?” Because it’s nice to have a business that has a sellable exit involved because who wants to be just working their entire life, or who wants to just have a business that just peters out after a while?

There’s something amazing when somebody pays you several times earnings, which means several years of your life. If you have a small business and you’re able to sell it for three times earnings, that’s like somebody to me, they gave me three years of my life, because it would’ve taken me three years to earn that, right? That’s what that means. So, hey, you just gave me time, which is the most valuable thing in the world, and with that time, I can now go do other things.

That’s kind of a roundabout way of asking a question, but I think the skillset that I developed the most which has led to most of my success has been an insatiable curiosity about business and strategies and tactics, and sometimes to my detriment because I learn a lot that I don’t apply. But I’ve learned a lot that works, so it helps.

Josh Felber: With, I know you said selling it and buying that time back and everything, what did you- So, you sold your businesses. What part of that did you then … Did you leverage that to do other things? Did you just kind of sit …

Brad Costanzo: I did. It was kind of cool. In 2012 when I exited that business, I had some cash in my pocket. The one thing I didn’t want to do was just go out and immediately- I didn’t have another business idea that I just wanted to go immediately start, and it was kind of nice. I didn’t retire, but I took just a little mental break and I just examined other things, and I stumbled into consulting because I was starting from scratch. Luckily not from broke, like before, because I’d lost everything I’ve got twice in my life through dumbass investments.

I built it back, and then this time, I was like, “Okay, I got some cash in the bank, I don’t just want to go throw it at something and then go, ‘Oh crap, it’s gone again.’” Because that was a pattern. So, I started asking friends of mine who were entrepreneurs questions. “Hey, what challenges are you having?” “What are you trying to do that’s not working?” “What’s a nut you’re trying to crack?” Which has become, on my podcast, one of my favorite little go-to lines. “What’s a nut you’re trying to crack in your business?”

And people will tell you, and when they told me, I was like- Well, the first one, my very very first client that I had was Drew Canole from fitlife.tv. He had a much smaller business back then, and he had a thing he wanted to do and he didn’t know how to do it. I had an idea, but I didn’t really know, so I said, “Well, let me take a stab at it,” and we made a whole bunch of money together with it. I helped him create a new profit center for his business, and then helped him grow that, and he referred me to other people because people just saw that I was able to use the skillsets to grow my own businesses and then apply to theirs. I stumbled into consulting, and I loved it.

What’s cool about it for me, the consulting side versus starting my own business, because I have my own separate business and businesses over here, and I hate the operations. I hate running them. I’m a crappy manager and I hate every part about it. I love marketing and growth ideas and I love … that part’s fun to me. The consulting is kind of what I like the most. It fuels my ADD and my need for variety and lack of complex systems.

Josh Felber: No, that’s cool. That seems like it plays in on your strengths, being able to step in and help other businesses from a growth perspective in those areas. Along the way, I know you got to interview numerous different guests, some awesome ones, I know.

Brad Costanzo: I interviewed this one guy, Josh Felber.

Josh Felber: No way!

Brad Costanzo: He was amazing.

Josh Felber: We gotta take a quick break in a minute here, but when we come back, I’d like to dive in some of those top things that you’ve been able to extract from them and either apply to your businesses or other people’s that you’ve been doing consulting and everything for.

Brad Costanzo: Yeah, absolutely. Sounds great.

Josh Felber: Awesome, man. I am Josh Felber. You’re watching Making Bank, and we’ll be right back.

Josh Felber: I am Josh Felber. Welcome back to Making Bank. We’ve been speaking with Brad Costanzo who’s been giving us a little bit on his background, as well as some insights that has led him to his consulting business today, and being able to help other entrepreneurs grow and excel at their businesses.

Brad, welcome back to Making Bank.

Brad Costanzo: Thanks Josh, good to be back.

Josh Felber: I know we mentioned that you’ve got to interview some awesome guests on your show. What are the top five extractions that you’ve really been able to pull from various guests that have helped you dominate and help other people grow.

Brad Costanzo: Oh, man. That’s such a hard question to answer, because I’ve done … doing this for two years, and there’s been so much I’ve pulled out. I’ll try to think of some few. But kind of a more 30,000 foot view or what’s been amazing about it is whenever- I use this platform very very selfishly. I think about my audience second, as opposed to, “Hey, I don’t do this show for them.” But I like them know that. I’m like, “Guys, this is for me. I’m picking the brains of people that I want to learn stuff from and I’m letting you guys listen, so just be happy that I’m giving it out for free.”

Because I’d be recording these conversations anyway, and it’s kind of cool that whenever I have a tactic or a strategy I want to learn or apply to my business, I will oftentimes call up or reach out to the person I want to know something from and say, “Man, I would love to interview you. My audience would love you.”

That’s my little thing. My audience would love you. Nobody has ever asked, “How big is your audience?” Even when it was very small in the beginning. Basically, this is my version of saying, “Can I pick your brain?” Or a cup of coffee, which everybody hates, including me. But because now I have a platform, it allows me to do that. So, at different times, I’ve done this for different things.

One of the most recent and tangible things is I got a coffee business. My wife and I started a national coffee brand called “Stiletto Coffee.” I know very little about the coffee business. She knows more about coffee. I know about marketing. But we’re trying a lot of new things that didn’t apply in the past. I’ve heard about these viral give-aways can be really really good to build up brand awareness, etc. and there’s a great software called upviral.com which I’m using. A guy named Wilco de Kreij is the founder of it.

So I bought the software and I was like, “Man, I would really like to know the best practices. … Hey Wilco, I would love to have you on my show. I’m a customer of yours. My audience would love you.” So he got on the show and I just like, “Here’s what I’m trying to do with your software. What would you do if you were in my shoes.” And he told me, so right now I’m running a give-away where we’re giving away a pair of $700 Christian Louboutin heels and a bag of our coffee, ’cause the coffee is marketed towards women.

I’m generating three cent leads on this. It’s been amazing, and it’s because I reached out to him and used that. A few of the other things that I- Some of my favorites, besides the Josh Felber episode, were Stephen Key, who is the author of “One Simple Idea.” I’m a big fan and user of licensing, and he shared a lot of amazing opportunities about what you can do with licensing. Ron Lynch. He sold over three billion dollars on TV infomercials. He’s one of the biggest experts and pioneers, I picked his brain for hours. And really, one of the things we talked about was how to market, especially towards women, because that’s mainly infomercial buyers, and that’s played into the marketing towards women with the coffee.

I’m trying to think of some off the other most useful things that I was like, “Oh, this is great. I’m gonna run out and do them.”

Josh Felber: Fight Vinnie Fisher.

Brad Costanzo: Vinnie? Vinnie Fish- Yeah, love Vinnie. Vinnie’s awesome. I got a lot of great things from Vinnie. You know, Vinnie shared a cool reframe on selling a business because I was talking about that with the Stiletto Coffee. I was like, “No, we want to build a business that is sellable, eventually, someday.” He goes, “I want to challenge you not to build a business that you want to sell, but build a business that several years from now, you would want to buy.”

Josh Felber: Right, yeah.

Brad Costanzo: And he goes, “Think about that. Because if you would build a business that you would want to buy, obviously somebody else would want to buy it, but you’re gonna built it in a way that if you don’t sell it, you’ll be really happy to own it.” I was like, “Ahh, that’s brilliant, Vinnie-San.” That was cool.

Off the top of my head it’s kind of hard to think, because there’s just been so many other inspirational stories or just really tactical and cool strategies, but one of the most recent ones that I just did, which I’m still right now buzzing with. This is new to me, which is, equity crowdfunding. Using regulation K, regulation A+ equity crowdfunding. Not like Kickstarter, which is [inaudible 00:14:57] equity.

Some of the new developments out there which make fundraising available to any business owner, for equity. We’ve never been able to advertise for non-accredited investors in [inaudible 00:15:10] history. Now we can, and it’s really cool. So I just did an hour and 45 minute episode with one of the top experts in that field. I’m doing another one tomorrow with another guy, and I’m really diving into this. If you haven’t looked at it, I would definitely say you and your audience should just take a look. Regulation A equity crowdfunding.

Josh Felber: I know some of the laws recently changed. Yeah.

Brad Costanzo: Yeah. Really really cool stuff.

Josh Felber: Awesome, yeah. Definitely have to dive in with that.

I know you guys have your coffee business.

Brad Costanzo: Yeah.

Josh Felber: What kind of led you that direction?

Brad Costanzo: My wife’s been wanting to create a business for a while, living with an entrepreneur, right? So, she’s from Brazil, and coffee has been in her blood, obviously. Brazil is the biggest coffee grower in the world. She had the idea, “I want to start a coffee company.” And at first I was like, “A coffee shop? I don’t want to do that unless it’s a place where I can work out of.”

Josh Felber: Yeah.

Brad Costanzo: But we decided to do a national coffee brand, because we know a decent amount about online direct-to-consumer marketing. But in order to stand out in a very very crowded marketplace, like coffee, it’s kind of a commodity, right? How do we stand out?

We decided to do what nobody else is doing, which will either work great or it’ll flop, but hasn’t flopped yet, which is, change the branding, not about the beans but about the demographics. We’re selling to classy, sassy, professional driven women, and we’re doing it in a way- Like, the name of it is Stiletto Coffee. Obviously that’s gonna only apply to women. And it’s funny, guys hear Stiletto Coffee and they think, “Is it stripper heel coffee?” They think stiletto heels, they just think of stripper heels.

But that’s guys, but every woman gets it. She’s like, “Oh my god, I love stilettos. Louboutins and Jimmy Choos. So we took an object that is already very endeared to the market and we named our coffee after that. So we get the positive connection. And we’re trying a bunch of stuff; this is a 100% branding play. There’s very little direct response, I’m trying to inject direct response strategies into it.

But, I mean, I’m a newbie at … I mean, I think your always a newbie at something. Entrepreneur, right? And I’m constantly thinking, “What the hell am I getting myself into? What am I doing?” But I think it’s gonna work out really well. I’ve got a lot of resources and I’m a firm believer that I don’t have to know everything as long as I know people who do, and that’s been one of the great parts about the podcast is the … it’s like the best networking hack available to anybody that [inaudible 00:17:52], nobody’s really using like that.

It’s like, “I’m gonna build my audience and thought leadership, and I’m gonna monetize my podcast.” Screw that, I’m just gonna build the world’s best net Rolodex, which, getting there through this, because now I can call on people to say, “Hey, listen, here’s what I’m trying to … Here’s what I need help with.” Or, “Here’s what one of my clients needs help with. Can you help me out?” So it’s been one of my best secret weapons, really.

Josh Felber: That’s really cool. Have you guys launched, then?

Brad Costanzo: The coffee?

Josh Felber: Yeah, the coffee brand.

Brad Costanzo: Yeah, back in January, we launched, and it’s June right now. So, we’re getting traction. It’s one of those things that takes a while to pack that snowball and get attention, especially in a market like this. It’s moving forward using influencer marketing, content marketing, contests. Ads are kinda hard, the margins are crap, so I can’t afford to spend a lot of money to acquire.

And this is an interesting thing for me, because I’ve personally only ever been involved in selling intangibles, whether it’s software or advice or info products. So you have a really high margin on it from cost to goods, there’s no real cost to goods sold, there’s just margin costs and almost immediate income. I get a consulting client, sometimes pay me 10 or 15 thousand dollars for a day of consulting and I love that. Awesome. And it’s like, I get to keep all that.

With this, I’ve gotta go negative for a while before we can go positive, and it’s big-boy business. I’m going, “Okay.” I’m going through that little part where like, “I’m not liking this spending more money than I making part. When is it gonna get better?” But it will.

Josh Felber: Are you guys advertising on Facebook? I know you said you’re running a viral contest.

Brad Costanzo: Viral contest, running ads to that. We’re doing some content marketing on Facebook to articles. Like, we’ve got one article we’re running like, “Seven morning rituals of successful, self-made women.” So it has nothing to do with coffee but it’s on our blog, and remember the successful, self-made women is kind of the avatar for the coffee, because that’s who my wife is. On there we’ve got morning rituals from Arianna Huffington and Jessica Alba and some other business leaders, and then as well as the very last one is Kenia, the founder of the company, my wife. And then it kind of flows into the, “Oh, and by the way, here’s Kenia’s morning ritual,” which is three times more detailed than everybody else’s.

Josh Felber: Right.

Brad Costanzo: Afterwards, there’s like a “Get a discount on the coffee and check it out.” So, we’re doing some things like that. Amazon promoted ads. A little bit of everything. I’m trying a lot of stuff. None of it’s working as well as I wanted it to. Some of it’s working, and it’s a process of elimination, really. It’s like, okay.

Josh Felber: Sure.

Brad Costanzo: That’s what marketing is, right? Guessing and testing, guessing and testing.

Josh Felber: Definitely, yeah. I just wanted, because I know too with our wellness company, with the skincare products, is just trying to test the ads and figure all this stuff out, and funnels and different things like that.

Brad Costanzo: Oh yeah.

Josh Felber: We’ve recently got the upviral software, so.

Brad Costanzo: Nice.

Josh Felber: Trying to put together something over there as well.

Brad Costanzo: I’m happy to give you any tips on what’s working for us offline.

Josh Felber: Cool.

Brad Costanzo: So far, as I said, we’ve got about 1,500, almost 1,600 leads off of a $50 ad spend, and most of it has just come- I don’t even know where most of it’s come- I’m blown away. Three cent leads. Now, I don’t think they’re scammy leads, I think they’re pretty good leads. But I uploaded them into Facebook and it, all of them almost-

Josh Felber: Found.

Brad Costanzo: They’re registered as a custom audience, though, so they’re not just spammy email accounts. Will it translate? I don’t know. If I get 2,000 leads by the end of next week and then I email them, and the strategy is, “Hey, here’s the winner! Josh Felber won a sexy pair of heels and he’s gonna look amazing in them on his next episode Making Bank!”

Josh Felber: Please.

Brad Costanzo: And everybody else walks away a winner too, because here’s a 30 or 40 or 50% discount on the coffee, just because they’re on your list. It’s just brand exposure. For the cost of one pair of heels, will it drive sales or are these all crappy, freebie-seeking leads that aren’t gonna do anything? But, it’s exposure. Every single one of them who enters, they share the contest, and then on the thank you page of the contest it says, “Here’s Stiletto Coffee, here’s who we are.” So it’s just getting it in front of the eyeballs of more people.

Josh Felber: Awesome. What are the biggest challenges working on getting your marketing done? Have you run into bringing a whole product business to market now?

Brad Costanzo: Wanting to hire other people to do a lot of it for me but because it’s so early and I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s hard to hire somebody when you don’t know what you’re hiring them for. Like, “Uh, I think I need to do this, but I don’t know.” So that’s been kind of challenging, is just finding the right help. And I’m looking forward to get it to where, hey, something’s work and I’m just gonna hire this person to just do this.

Josh Felber: And do it better, yeah.

Brad Costanzo: Yeah, it’s just been me rolling up my sleeves quite a bit. I do have some help, and I’ve got people on my team that do help parts of it. But the hardest part is just the stuff that I don’t know that I don’t know. Unconscious incompetence.

The worst part of it all, though, is the unit economics. Knowing what I make per bag of coffee. It’s pretty low, makes me wonder “What the hell did I get into this business for?” I like much higher-margin businesses. But, I reached out to a guy who this is his main business. He actually teaches how to sell coffee on Amazon and other places the other day. And we have a consulting call, I’m paying him for his time next week.

And one of the things he kind of switched up in my brain was, he goes, “You know, Brad, one of the nice things about coffee is you don’t need a million customers. You don’t need to hit the big part of the market, because coffee, especially if they like the brand, if they like the flavor, is … people reorder it constantly. If you get a thousand really happy, loyal customers, they buy over and over again.”

Just a thousand people in the whole world, or a country, who want your coffee. If they’re buying your bag, and let’s just say I’m making $6 a bag, and that’s give or take depending on what brand it is and whatever. He’s like, “If you have a thousand people buying every single month, that’s not a lot of money, right? $6 a bag times a thousand people, that’s $6,000. But that’s every month without any marketing costs.” And he goes, “Now if you get 2,000, 3,000, 10,000 people, the reorder rate is so high, and the stick rate, people don’t just stick for four months, a lot of times they’ll stick for years.”

The goal of this whole thing, though, is to build a business that is sellable, because it is a brand. It’s something that I think, if we’re able to get more distribution, other companies would be like, “Eh, we like what they’re doing. We’d like to give them … millions of dollars to”-

Josh Felber: To go away or to roll up under, yeah.

Brad Costanzo: So well see. It’s a gigantic experiment and the reason I got into it, besides just to help my wife bring a dream to reality, is it was a fun, creative challenge. It’s not a get-rich-quick thing at all. Or get-rich-easy.

Josh Felber: Yeah. Businesses like that are definitely, you know, you’re grinding a little bit more, and really a lot more ins and outs to figure out.

Brad Costanzo: The nice part about it is it’s not- I’m working about 15 hours a week, probably, on the business. Maybe about 20. And then the rest of the time I spend with my consulting clients, and I still love the consulting stuff. It definitely pays the bills. It’s something I absolutely love to do and I’m good at it, and I like coming in and looking for the most leveragable activities.

And the nice part about having tried and failed in so many things, I got a lot of experience in the stuff. What works and what doesn’t. So, when I’m working with my clients and I show them, oftentimes some very out of the box ideas that are like, “Wow, I never would have thought about doing that.” I’ve had two of my clients, they’re like, “Man, you’re like a young Jay Abraham.” I think that’s my favorite compliment ever.

Josh Felber: That’s awesome.

Brad Costanzo: Except maybe I’m a little less wordy. However, I think out of the box, and I think of ways that aren’t just a traditional, most obvious answers, and a lot of times they work really well.

Josh Felber: Cool, man. What’s one piece of technology you can’t live without?

Brad Costanzo: Ohh, one piece of technology that I can’t live without would probably be … well, my trusty microphone here in the podcasting. I’m trying to think what I use more than anything else. That’s a really good question. Evernote is probably over … everybody probably says that. Evernote and Dropbox.

I love my Schedule Once, which is my calender, a scheduling app, because it’s the nicest thing. I don’t just use it for podcasting but for whenever somebody wants to schedule a time with me, whether it’s a paid consult or somebody just wants to schedule time with me to talk about something else, I just send them my calendar link, and I’m like, “Book this. Don’t make me go back and forth and say ‘Hey, what time’s good for you? This time’s good for me.’ Here. My calender is on there.”

Josh Felber: It works best.

Brad Costanzo: So, yeah. Scheduleonce.com is what I use. There’s other ones out there, but it’s probably the one that I use daily.

Josh Felber: Cool, man. Awesome. Any other insights or anything you could think to …

Brad Costanzo: Yeah. One of the insights that I had recently, and it kind of depends on who the listener is, but there’s this big … I did a podcast episode on this, and the more I started to think about it, the more it made sense, which was, the difference between being an entrepreneur and being entrepreneurial, and it’s huge.

Because a lot of people want to be an entrepreneur. They want to be that because they think it’s sexy and fun, and it’s like, “Oh, I’m working nine to five, I don’t like to work nine to five. I want to be a entrepreneur so I can only work half a day.” And it doesn’t matter if it’s the first 12 hours or the second 12 hours, you’ll work half a day, right?

You got the hardest boss ever, and it’s the hardest money you’ll ever make. There’s no such thing as easy money for an entrepreneur. And a lot of people get caught up in trying to be the entrepreneur instead of being entrepreneurial, and you can be entrepreneurial if you have a job, if you have a- Even if you never want to own your own business, an entrepreneur simply finds problems that they can solve for a profit, and you can do that if you’re at a job. Go to your boss and say, “Listen, what nut are you trying to crack, boss? What are some business challenges you’re having right now that you just don’t know how to solve?” And they may be like, “Well, why are you asking me this? You’re an accounts receivable clerk.” “No reason. I just want to know what problems you’re having.”

And when you change up your mindset to look and seek out problems, even if you don’t know how to sell them, remember, you don’t have to be the smartest person as long as you know how to find them. I’ve told some of my clients, some of my listeners, “Listen, you want a great way to do this? Just ask these people for what problems they want to solve and then reach out to me and I’ll see if I can help you solve them or whatever, I’ll pay your referral fee.”

But that’s the difference between being entrepreneurial, and worrying about trying to become an entrepreneur. One of them is a lot easier, being entrepreneurial. So that may be my most recent insight that I guess might make sense.

Josh Felber: It definitely makes sense, because like you said, everybody sees the entrepreneur as glamorous or sexy as it’s been brought around over the years, and then they probably have no business being an entrepreneur. But they have ways that they could become that entrepreneurial person within where they are, and become that hero there, and that kind of thing.

Brad Costanzo: Right, and even if you do have their own business, right? Whatever you’re doing, just always think of what does an entrepreneur do? Well, they solve problems. They find a problem, produce a solution, and make a profit on it. Do that in your own business. Constantly be looking for the problems that you can solve, whether it’s the problems your customers have, or you have, or your competitors have, or somebody else. The more you stay in that mindset, the more money you’ll make.

I try to do that with myself. I hate the operation side of business, it’s the necessary evil, but you kind of have to do it. But I can hire people to do that aspect. I never want to get out of the mindset of problem, solution, profit. By the way, why I also like consulting so much, because I just get to stay in that mindset where I do the best, and my consulting business is myself and my assistant, so it’s really really cool. I think that’s key.

And the other cool piece to leave you with is I found that you gain a lot more credibility and trust with potential clients by asking good questions than providing quick answers. Because if you can ask the right questions, if you can ask really powerful, good questions of people, and you can probe and figure out what real causes and symptoms and solutions are, you never even have to offer an answer.

I’ve noticed this in some of my client enrollment calls, which is, I just ask questions. I almost never provide, like, “Here’s exactly what you need to do. Oh my god, we’ve got the solution for you.” No, they’ll just say, “Man, you’ve been asking some great questions, you obviously get this. How can I give you money?” I’ve literally had that conversation so many times. So I tell my clients who are also consultants, who are experts, they sell their advice. I’m like, “Understand the power of questions over answers. When you do, you make your life a lot easier.”

Josh Felber: Cool, man. That’s some great insight at the end, and I really appreciate you sharing your story and what you’ve been working on in the first half and everything. It was great to have you on Making Bank.

Brad Costanzo: It was great to be on here, brother.

Josh Felber: Cool. I am Josh Felber. You’re watching Making Bank. Get out and be extraordinary.