Sam and I are in a mastermind group in Eau Claire with local entrepreneurs and up and coming professionals. Our good friend Dan Gjerseth, who is the best realtor in Eau Claire, started the group for local individuals who are like minded to him. It is a way we can learn, grow, and network together. We are thankful to have individuals like Dan in our life who strives to be better.
The first Monday of every month, we meet at a local business owner’s office for our meetings. At first we met as a group to get to know each other and explain who we were and what are goals were. After a couple months of this, we started having guest speakers come in to teach us about what they have learned as business owners. So far, we have had a guest speaker come in and talk about building scalable businesses to sell. This was a neat topic and it helped make us think about building a business for an exit. By building a business like this, you are thinking of the future. The goal is to build your business to run itself with proper systems in place, not just working in your business putting out fires every day. You have to have accurate financials that show your profit and loss. This does mean you shouldn’t spend down money at the end of the year to try and get away from paying taxes. The whole point is to make a business appetizing to buy, in case you want or need a change in life and need to sell. My take on it was, if you do build a business to sell, put all the right systems into place, then you can step away from the company, have someone else run it, and collect passive income.
The next speaker we had, discussed systems and buying businesses. The individual speaking has purchased a lot of businesses in his career. He described to us what things to look for when purchasing businesses. The main thing is to look for the potential return on your investment. Then he described the risk for reward and what returns we could look for. He encouraged us to analyze a lot of businesses for sale to get used to analyzing deals. This will help us know in the future when we find a deal worth pursuing. Another big topic, was implementing systems into his businesses, this allows him to have businesses that run themselves, so he can purchase more businesses with his free time. This can be scary to have someone else run your company or the company run itself. However, he has a method for making sure his business is still operating without him micro-managing it. One way he keeps an eye on his businesses without being involved in the day to day operations, is reviewing profit and loss and balance sheets every month. This gives him a framework of where his business is compared to previous months.
The most recent speaker we had discussed emotional intelligence. This was definitely off topic from the other speakers and not a common topic among most individuals I know in business. I found it to be a very eye opening topic. Anybody can start a business and have it fail but to start a business and have it succeed, takes a lot of perseverance. This perseverance comes from mental health and knowing yourself. The speaker talked about practicing and strengthening your mental health. When you notice things that elevate your blood pressure, take a deep breath, and work on lowering your blood pressure. Rarely are things worth getting worked up about. You will have a lot of ups and downs in business and life. You need to be aware of your mental health and how to properly navigate it, to successfully manage the highs and lows that come with life. This topic is extremely interesting to me, I believe mental health is the number one thing to a healthy, successful, and enjoyable life.
I am enjoying the mastermind group and look forward to our next one. It will be nice to take a break from having a speaker for a month, so we can digest and discuss the previous topics amongst the group and get everyone’s take-aways and feedback.
I am currently working on systems in my business right now, which will help it be self-running and become passive income. I will be updating on that process in other posts. I am also going to start researching emotional intelligence and mental health more. I am hoping this will help me short and long term to persevere in times of ups and downs.
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