Accidental Entrepreneur – Teacher turned Multi-Business Owner

[00:00:00] Yvonne Heimann: Hey. Hey everybody. We are back with yet another episode of Boss Your Business, and today we have the real, the only, the magnificent Jason in the audience, not in the audience. He’s a guest. Didn’t we just talk about Yvi talking weird when I speak English rather than German? That was a weird one.

[00:00:25] Yvonne Heimann: You had, I’m literally just jumping right in. Jason, you had quite, quite the life, so my audience always loves this whole question. How did you get here? You actually started out as a teacher and now you actually own and run, uh, involved with seven businesses.

[00:00:43] The Real Jason Duncan: That’s right.

[00:00:44] Yvonne Heimann: We’re talking, we’re talking teachers.

[00:00:46] Yvonne Heimann: Sorry to totally interrupt you because this is this, this was one of the ones when I saw that submission. Teacher in Germany for all of my European people listening, teacher in Germany is a little bit different than teacher in the States because teacher in the States, [00:01:00] you don’t have any money, you don’t have any resources.

[00:01:04] Yvonne Heimann: And I admire every teacher in the US? I swear, I don’t know how the hell they make it happen, but please, please tell me how the heck did you go from teacher in the US to seven businesses? And being able to manage and even come on my podcast?

The Real Jason Duncan, Accidental Entrepreneur

[00:01:27] The Real Jason Duncan: So, um, I, I consider myself an accidental entrepreneur and so this is the story.

[00:01:33] The Real Jason Duncan: So in 2010, I was teaching very happily in the school system. I had, uh, I, I was gonna be a teacher for the rest of my life. I, I loved it. I was very good at it. I was actually the number one teacher in my subject matter in the county. My students performed extremely well on all the tests, so I was very good at my craft.

[00:01:57] The Real Jason Duncan: A friend of mine came to me and said, hey, I’ve got [00:02:00] this idea to start a business and I want you to be my business partner. I had never wanted to start a business. I had no entrepreneurial desire, no, nothing. I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to be in the education system for the rest of my life, and he convinced me to start this business with him.

[00:02:15] The Real Jason Duncan: Because he had this, he was kind of a crazy, not, he wasn’t crazy, but like a mad scientist idea.

[00:02:20] Yvonne Heimann: He do gotta have to be a little bit crazy to do this kinda thing.

[00:02:23] The Real Jason Duncan: Well, so he, but he had this idea and he said, you are good. You’re good with people. You’re pro, you’re good with sales. Well, we can make this work.

[00:02:31] The Real Jason Duncan: And, and I reluctantly agreed to do it, but with no intention of ever leaving teaching. I, it was gonna be what people refer to now as a side hustle. And so we did it for about a year and, and it was okay. It, we didn’t make any money, but we, we, you know, we were having fun with doing it. And, uh, the following spring in 2011, my principal came to me and he sat me down.

[00:02:55] The Real Jason Duncan: He said, we need to talk. Yeah.

[00:02:57] Yvonne Heimann: That’s never a good one.

[00:02:58] The Real Jason Duncan: Never. And so [00:03:00] he said, uh, hey, you know, the, the, you know, the, the way I remember the story was like this, the, the Great Recession has caught up with school districts all across the state and we’re having to make cuts and I cannot renew your teaching contract for next year.

[00:03:13] The Real Jason Duncan: I didn’t have tenure. I was the last guy hired in the building. And that was, that was how they make their, made their decision to save their budget. And that was a bad day. It was a very bad day. And that was in April of 2011.

[00:03:26] Yvonne Heimann: Especially with you being somebody that loved that craft, that had that kind of impact.

[00:03:31] The Real Jason Duncan: Yeah, well, I, I, I truly loved it. And, and, uh, I, we, I wouldn’t know you, you wouldn’t know me. No. Of audience would be listening to me right now. Wouldn’t have written a book. I wouldn’t have a podcast. I wouldn’t have done anything had, had that day not happened cuz I’d still be a teacher right now. Although, you know, COVID was kind of dumb.

[00:03:47] The Real Jason Duncan: I probably would’ve fired cuz I wasn’t gonna put up with all the COVID nonsense during the pandemic, but anyway, that’s a whole nother story. After that, that moment [00:04:00] of decision of saying, well, what am I gonna do? I thought, well, I’ll go get a teaching job somewhere else. Well, nobody was hiring teachers.

[00:04:05] The Real Jason Duncan: Now I couldn’t get a job teaching and I decided to take a look at this business that my friend and I had started and I thought, okay, this energy thing that he was wanting to do is not gonna work. But I think if we switch it to this other thing I could, I could probably make it work. He didn’t think so.

[00:04:20] The Real Jason Duncan: I thought so. I had bought the equipment, I’d put the money in. So we’ve separated friendly and he, he went on, he took everything we’d been working on and I, I took and retold the business to be a lighting retrofit company doing LED lighting. And uh, and I gave myself until August the 15 to do something of significance, make money.

[00:04:40] The Real Jason Duncan: And because August the 15th was gonna be the last check I got from the county.

[00:04:45] Yvonne Heimann: Got it.

[00:04:46] The Real Jason Duncan: And so on August the 12th, I made the pitch of a lifetime and they bought and that changed my life. And now today, you know, mu many years later, decade plus later, I am the owner of seven different [00:05:00] businesses. I’m looking at buying another one and, uh, but I spend most of my time coaching entrepreneurs on how to build, scale their businesses and exit their businesses the right way.

[00:05:10] Yvonne Heimann: Which, which kind of leads this whole thing to, because I’m like, I was, I was giggling when, when you came to the part of, he was like, yeah, I don’t see the future. You saw the future and it’s like he was the one that came up with the idea. Life. Right. I think we’ve all been there in, in a similar situation before, like I’ve been. So, you have that business, you got that big pitch. Everything is great. Now, how do you come from, I’m, I’m assuming you spend a lot of time. I’m like, that’s, that’s also, it’s, it’s a physical business, so it’s not necessarily an online business, which a lot of my guests often are. That means you are boots on the ground. You are doing.

[00:05:59] Yvonne Heimann: That’s, [00:06:00] that’s it. You can’t just automate that stuff.

[00:06:03] The Real Jason Duncan: No, no.

From one business to seven???

[00:06:04] Yvonne Heimann: That’s a lot of time. Yet you still went from one business to seven businesses to actually having a plan to exit businesses without exiting businesses. And guys, you will, you will get the link to the book. You will learn how he did all of that.

[00:06:25] Yvonne Heimann: But I do wanna hear the behind the scenes stories of all of this. How you took this from one, even if it’s not a brick-and-mortar store, but, but a physical business. A doing a, you can’t automate this business to seven. How, what happened in that timeframe?

[00:06:42] The Real Jason Duncan: Well, a, there was a lot of mistakes, um, , and I don’t recommend it.

[00:06:47] The Real Jason Duncan: I certainly don’t recommend it.

[00:06:49] Yvonne Heimann: Learn, learn from him. Don’t do it again.

[00:06:51] The Real Jason Duncan: The, well, the Instagram gurus, they all tell you, they say, you know, the average millionaire has seven sources of income. And that in fact is true. But what they [00:07:00] don’t tell you is that they didn’t get seven all at once. They, they, they perfected one and then they started building the second one, and then when they got two or three working really well, then it’s explosion time.

[00:07:12] The Real Jason Duncan: Then you can go get 7, 8, 10, 12, you can get whatever. So the fact that I have seven has nothing to do with that thing that they talk about. It’s just right now that happens to be seven. But the reality is I only owned one business during the time I was running the lighting company, and I still own the lighting company.

[00:07:30] The Real Jason Duncan: It’s one of the, it’s one of the seven, but I only had that company for a decade, and when I exited the daily operations of that business in 2020, I bought into the lie that I’m supposed to have seven sources of income. Now, I was a millionaire by that point, but I, but I want, I did only had one source of income.

[00:07:48] The Real Jason Duncan: And so I started this company. I started that company. I started this company, I did this, and I worked with a CPA and in a law firm, tried to figure out how to structure everything and, and it, it was a disaster early, [00:08:00] and now I’m still trying to disentangle it, but, but I’m building back the right way. And uh, right now I’m in the process of buying another business and I’m doing this one the correct way.

[00:08:11] The Real Jason Duncan: So I don’t, I don’t think, I don’t say you should go buy seven businesses or start seven businesses that as fast as I did. Cuz they’ll probably likely, some of them will have some failure points. But every failure point is a data point. So I feel like I learned a lot. I got a crash course in starting businesses over the last three years.

[00:08:31] Yvonne Heimann: Yeah, that seems to be a theme lately. I’ve been saying a lot lately where it’s like, yeah, I spent the last two years figuring out what I don’t wanna do. Still data, still, still, um, helping you figure out where to actually take it. And I’ve like when, when you started going down this road of yeah, everybody tells you you are supposed to have 7, 8, 9, 20 different sources of income, which there is a point to that. And you can, you can do something similar. Not that [00:09:00] necessarily running multiple businesses, but running the same business with multiple offers. But yeah, my systems, my behind the scene was going like, holy crap, because you are starting up new businesses, potentially buying businesses, you also need to run them. You need to be able to outsource them. People need to know what to do and where to go and how and resources.

[00:09:26] Yvonne Heimann: You started how many businesses all at the same time?

[00:09:30] The Real Jason Duncan: Well, I didn’t do ’em all at the same time, but it was in a very short period of time. And I had a CPA that screwed me up because he tried to do a structure that just was dumb. It just caused more confusion. So my current CPA, he is trying to unravel all that and we’re close.

[00:09:49] The Real Jason Duncan: Uh, the cool thing for me is that I’ve got, I’ve got, you know, one of my businesses, the, the one I started back in 2010, that that business still has a significant amount of [00:10:00] revenue and profitability and tax advantages that offset a lot of the other things that, uh, might have otherwise made a mistake.

[00:10:08] Yvonne Heimann: So me knowing what I know and listening to you doing all the things.

[00:10:18] Yvonne Heimann: After learning that lesson of, yeah, okay, maybe you shouldn’t start a whole bunch of businesses all in a short amount of time.

F.O.C.U.S. (for any business owner)

Once that lesson set in what happened and how did you manage coming back to successful businesses to turn this around? What did you, what did you focus on? What, what happened?

[00:10:40] Yvonne Heimann: What was that breaking point that was like, oh yeah, we actually can do this.

[00:10:45] The Real Jason Duncan: Okay. There’s so, so the word focus, interesting, stands for Follow One Course Until Successful. And that’s what I was not doing. There’s a old, uh, I think it’s a Russian [00:11:00] proverb, I think that says he who chases two rabbits catches neither.

[00:11:05] The Real Jason Duncan: And, and so the issue, the issue was I was chasing way too many rabbits. And, um, so the, so what I had to do is come back to focus. Now how do you focus?

Finding your purpose as a business owner

Well, one of the things that, that I recommend to my clients and I think is what all of us should be doing as entrepreneurs is you really need to focus on finding what your purpose is.

[00:11:26] The Real Jason Duncan: Why are you on this Earth? Why are you here? Because you can be very successful running a lighting business or running an online business or running a, a brick and mortar store. You could be successful at those things, but, but that may not be your purpose. Now, a lot of people who teach about purpose say that you have to abandon everything.

[00:11:45] The Real Jason Duncan: That’s not your purpose, and that’s not what I’m saying at all. I think you can still do those things, but once you find your purpose, it gives you the ability to focus on the thing that will provide you the long term joy. That we’re all looking for. Yep. Because I [00:12:00] wasn’t gonna get long-term joy running a lighting company.

[00:12:02] The Real Jason Duncan: I’m not gonna get long-term joy running an e-commerce company or a hard money lending company, or a real estate investing company. Some of these companies I own, like that’s not where the joy comes. The joy for me came when I discovered that my gifts are teaching and leadership and my purpose on earth is to use those gifts to help other people get the results they want and find their purpose.

[00:12:21] The Real Jason Duncan: And that’s what I do now as a coach, as a speaker, as an author, as a podcaster. That’s what I do every day. And I’m hundred percent content in that.

[00:12:30] Yvonne Heimann: That feeling of content is priceless.

[00:12:35] The Real Jason Duncan: It is.

[00:12:37] Yvonne Heimann: And it’s like we hear all the, the vbu and all the, the mindset stuff behind the I’m like, I’m all in it.

[00:12:46] Yvonne Heimann: Don’t get me wrong, but it’s like it really is. Once you are in that purpose, is what makes you jump out of bed in the morning, rather than be like, oh great, I need to take care of this bill and this, this [00:13:00] company and that here. Now, if you have that purpose and if you were in it and you were living it and you are doing it, oh yeah, I have fun.

[00:13:10] Yvonne Heimann: Yeah sure. Let’s, let’s check inwards what’re happening with that company and that company? You take that, that fun, that enjoyment into the other projects you are running. At least that’s what happens for me. It’s, it’s still not just a job, even if you are not on the purpose, if that makes any sense.

[00:13:29] The Real Jason Duncan: It does.

[00:13:31] The Real Jason Duncan: I mean, you get to know what you’re here for. You gotta know what you’re doing. And part of what, what I, I’ve just recently done is I launched a course called The 40 Days to Find Your True Purpose. And I’m in the middle of that right now with a group of guys. We’re going through that together. But, but finding that purpose is really, really important and, and which works really well into my concept of exit without exiting.

[00:13:51] The Real Jason Duncan: Because if you can get yourself out of the weeds of daily operation, which is what Exit Without Exiting does, then you have time [00:14:00] to find your purpose. Because if you’re too busy and you’re in the weeds every day doing 50, 60, 70 hours worth of work that other people should be doing, you don’t have time to discover your purpose and you’re gonna wake up when you’re 60, 70, 80 years old and go, what was I doing?

[00:14:13] The Real Jason Duncan: This is not what I wanted.

[00:14:15] Yvonne Heimann: Yeah, we are, we are completely aligned with that. And the moment I saw the book title from Exit Without Exiting, I knew exactly, without even reading, reading any of the description or anything. I knew exactly what you were talking about, where it’s like, we don’t wanna be quote in our business all the time.

[00:14:34] Yvonne Heimann: You lose the sight. You lose the creativity. You lose the enjoyment because if you are so deep in your own business and you knew do all the nitty gritty and the daily operations, you are not being the boss. You are not being the CEO. You are, you are not gonna be able to even just grow the business because you are so close in it that you can’t see, how do you say in [00:15:00] English? The woods within the trees.

[00:15:03] The Real Jason Duncan: I don’t even know. Just the force for the trees.

[00:15:04] Yvonne Heimann: Thank you. Something like that. I was close enough where I’m like, yeah, when Chelsea Peitz, actually, I think she connected us. When, when I saw that information I’m like, oh my God, I have to have him on the show.

[00:15:18] Yvonne Heimann: And not only get this book out there, but also pick your brain.

Exiting without exiting

So how did you get yourself out of the business zone? Actually, Exiting without exiting?

[00:15:31] The Real Jason Duncan: So it started with awareness. Awareness of the sad fact that I was stuck and what I refer to as the ironic prison of entrepreneurship. Ironic because entrepreneurship’s supposed to provide freedom, but it ends up being a prison for most people.

[00:15:47] Yvonne Heimann: I feel that one.

[00:15:48] The Real Jason Duncan: Yeah. So I got, I had an awareness. With the help of a business coach that, like, I, I had built a business around me and we were successful, we were doing really well. But, but it [00:16:00] still was kind of, it relied too much on me as the owner, as the operator, and, uh, it made my business worthless.

[00:16:11] The Real Jason Duncan: Any guy, broker who knows anything about the business will tell you that a business with the owner operators worth 30 to 50% less than a business with the owner who’s not involved. That’s outta the gate. But the worst part of that, see, that’s easy to say, but the worst part of that is that most businesses, 75% of businesses, that list for sale, never sale.

[00:16:31] The Real Jason Duncan: And the reason. The owner is the operator. And so it’s not just that, hey, I wanna buy your business. Are you the owner operator? I’m gonna offer you 50% less. It’s, hey, I wanna buy your business. Are you the owner operator? And you say yes. And I say, nevermind.

[00:16:44] Yvonne Heimann: Like, I wanna buy a business. I don’t wanna buy you.

[00:16:46] The Real Jason Duncan: Yeah. I, and I, this is a true story. I’m in the process of buying a business right now, and I’ve got a couple that I’m really interested in, but before I had called it down to these two, um, there was a motorcycle repair shop and I love motorcycles. And so I was looking at a [00:17:00] motorcycle repair shop and I thought, this is an interesting business.

[00:17:02] The Real Jason Duncan: Let me look at that. So the, the broker calls me after I submit my NDA and my application for, for information. And she calls and says, yeah, it’s a great business. People come from all over three or four states to bring their bikes in. He’s the only guy who does this brand of bikes, blah, blah, blah.

[00:17:17] The Real Jason Duncan: And I thought, okay, that’s pretty interesting. I said, so tell me a little bit about like how you know, who’s the mechanic? Does he have a main mechanic? And he goes, she said, well, there’s just one mechanic in the business. I said, okay, well, is the, is that mechanic staying? And she goes, no, he’s the mechanic.

[00:17:32] Yvonne Heimann: So the owner is the mechanic.

[00:17:37] The Real Jason Duncan: Yeah.

[00:17:37] Yvonne Heimann: So pretty much I would be buying a brand without a brand.

[00:17:44] The Real Jason Duncan: Yeah. So I said, lady, I didn’t say lady. I mean, I was respectful of it. I’m like, lady, this, this is not a business for sale. She goes, what do you mean? If I buy it, I, I don’t turn wrenches.

[00:17:56] The Real Jason Duncan: I don’t know how to fix motorcycles. She goes, well, you know, we [00:18:00] have a lot of tools and we’ve got, you know, we’ve got real estate. Like, well then you’re selling tools and real estate. Don’t list this as a business for sale. Well, you know, you got customers that’ll come back.

[00:18:10] Yvonne Heimann: No, customers are coming for him.

[00:18:13] The Real Jason Duncan: They come to him, they don’t come to the business, you know? So anyway, so, so that, that’s, that’s an all too often repeated story about businesses. So my, my process of leaving the daily operations or my business started with the that awareness. And the second was, okay, if I can’t sell it, which is what I wanted to do to begin with, what are my alternatives?

[00:18:33] The Real Jason Duncan: And then of course I looked at selling it to my employees cuz they already knew how to run it. Yeah. And then ultimately I decided, you know what? What if I just kept it, but I put systems in place, put people in place, put delegation the right way, and, and could I step away from daily operations? And I did.

[00:18:49] The Real Jason Duncan: And that’s, and, and then when I did it, I, I told people, I was like, you know, I, I exited, but like I didn’t exit. And so I exited without exiting. And they were like, ooh, that sounds good. What is that? Tell me about that. And now, [00:19:00] I have the book. So the book Exit without Exiting, How to Exit Your Business Without Selling It and Begin Living the Exits Lifestyle much sooner than you ever thought possible is now my story, but not only my story, it’s the stories of three other entrepreneurs who went through similar journeys about how to get out of the daily operations of your business.

[00:19:19] Yvonne Heimann: I love it because it also feeds completely into into my purpose and my thinking and my values. Even though I’m coming from a different perspective. I’m coming from the, my business needs to be able to run without me in case I get sick or my family gets sick because I went through cancer with my late husband and losing him.

[00:19:39] Yvonne Heimann: I’m like, I got smacked over the head for two years, realizing what happened to a business and your income if, if your business runs only on your back and, and your influence. So we definitely talk completely the same language, even though we are coming from different point of views. And it’s [00:20:00] also being able, following the structure that you are teaching, being able to be able to exit. If you ever decide, hey, you know what? I’m good. I just wanna go somewhere on the beach and just open up a coconut bar. What the heck ever. You can because you actually can sell your business. You are not leaving any employees behind. The structure is there, the business is there and somebody else can follow it.

[00:20:30] Yvonne Heimann: So I’m like, yes, you make me excited.

[00:20:36] The Real Jason Duncan: I love it. That’s good.

Embracing delegation

[00:20:38] Yvonne Heimann: Do you have a, a couple of tools or processes to help people a little bit to already get started and get an idea of it before they buy the book? So what are, what are some things you would say? You know what? You want to exit without exiting, this is the one thing you need to do right now.[00:21:00]

[00:21:00] The Real Jason Duncan: You have to embrace delegation.

[00:21:04] Yvonne Heimann: Ooh, I feel that one.

[00:21:06] The Real Jason Duncan: Yeah. Most entrepreneurs have some sense of understanding of what that means, but very few really know what it means and very few even less know how to do it. And here’s what I’ve discovered: most entrepreneurs practice one of these two things. They’re not delegation.

[00:21:25] The Real Jason Duncan: We practice confiscation or abdication, but we don’t practice delegation.

[00:21:30] Yvonne Heimann: Okay. There comes the language in, language issue in I’m, I’m definitely gonna need some explanation.

[00:21:35] The Real Jason Duncan: Yeah. So let me, lemme explain. So, and this actually was a subject of my TED Talk last year. You can look up the, if you just YouTube search The Ironic Prison of Entrepreneurship, you’ll find my TED Talk and it’s on this topic of delegation.

[00:21:48] The Real Jason Duncan: And so confiscation is when you assign a task and then pull it back, you confiscate it because they’re not doing it the way you would want it done. They’re not doing it as good as [00:22:00] you. So a lot of entrepreneurs do that because they look over their shoulder, hey, you didn’t do this right. I don’t like the way you did it.

[00:22:06] The Real Jason Duncan: Let me get, let me take it back. Well, that’s one side. Well, the other side, and this is the other side’s actually, the side that I spend more of my time on the confiscation is, is abdication. And abdication means to formally, uh, give up your right to something. So a king who gives up the right to his throne is abdicating his throne.

[00:22:26] The Real Jason Duncan: That’s what that means. So a lot of entrepreneurs, they will give a task to someone. And then never check back in again, which is abdicating. They, they’ve given it to Bob and hope that Bob does it and never look back. Well, neither one of those confiscation or abdication is delegation. Delegation is when you assign the task, you entrust that task of that person and then you empower that person to do it. And when you do those things and you truly embrace delegation, you can exit the daily operations of your business. [00:23:00] Now, why you want to exit is up to you. Like some people wanna exit, like you said, Yvonne, they wanna go sip a, a sip, a coconut drink on the beach somewhere for the rest of life.

[00:23:09] The Real Jason Duncan: And that’s fine. And if that’s what you wanna do to exit, that’s cool. But others say, I don’t want to exit, but you know what, I’m stuck at 50 hours, 60 hours. I can’t give any more hours and my, my income is limited. What do I do? Well, I’ll show you how to exit the weeds of daily operations. Get rid of all the crap that you shouldn’t be doing, and focus on the things that are gonna take your business to 20 million, 50 million or IPO.

[00:23:31] The Real Jason Duncan: Like I can show you how to do that. And I’m doing that right now with my clients.

[00:23:36] Yvonne Heimann: Do you, do you think it is only the, the lesson of learning how to delegate? Or do you think it might also just be a habit of handing things off where it’s like, great, I built this business, I’ve been doing everything by myself. It’s this, this shift of mindset of why didn’t I hand [00:24:00] this off?

[00:24:01] Yvonne Heimann: Do you run into that?

[00:24:03] The Real Jason Duncan: Well, it starts with mindset. I think more than more than that. I, I, I think that a lot of people think that they’re supposed to be the hero of the business. They’re supposed to be the one that fixes everything, and that’s not true. Um, I mean, if you think about any of the, the major businesses that are, that run the world today, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, these businesses hate ’em or love them.

[00:24:27] The Real Jason Duncan: They don’t have a hero entrepreneur running the company anymore. They have somebody who realized I can’t be at the helm and keep and take this business to the next level. They had to embrace the delegations. So from a mindset point, you gotta get to the spot where you say, I’m not the hero of this business.

[00:24:44] The Real Jason Duncan: It doesn’t revolve around, it can’t revolve around me. It’s not my conjoined twin. It is my baby that I need to sit down and let it walk and let it run on its own.

[00:24:55] Yvonne Heimann: You gotta be the parents sending them off to college. It just is.

[00:24:59] The Real Jason Duncan: Yeah, that’s [00:25:00] right. And they’re gonna push you off too sometimes, right?

[00:25:04] The Real Jason Duncan: I mean, you, your kids aren’t not gonna do stuff you want ’em to do, man. Mm-hmm. , they’re gonna make you mad.

[00:25:08] Yvonne Heimann: But you just, you just gotta trust that trust you were a good parent and let them on and let them do their own mistakes. It’s just is, it says the one that has no kids whatsoever. I can’t even train my damn dog Riley right.

Tools

[00:25:24] Yvonne Heimann: What are, what are some tools that help you do what you. .

[00:25:29] The Real Jason Duncan: Well, I, I, uh, I’m a very big advocate for mindset as, as, uh, you know, I’ve just kind of alluded there a little bit, and so I study mindset deeply and not only do I study it, but I practice it. So one of the things that helps me is, uh, the practice of daily affirmations.

[00:25:47] The Real Jason Duncan: So I use a, I use an app on my phone, uh, that helps me with this. And it, it was not designed for this, but it, it’s called, uh, oh, I dropped my phone. Oops, sorry. But it’s called [00:26:00] PrayerMate and so it’s a prayer, it’s a prayer app on your phone. But, but let me do that again. So kinda opens up there.

[00:26:07] The Real Jason Duncan: So that’s what it looks like. Well, anyway, so what it does is it, it, it just allows you to input your own prayers or subscribe to some prayer lists. So what I use it for in addition to those other things, is I put my daily affirmations in there. So if I, if I scroll down to, to one of these, so like there’s one of my daily affirmations, I know that I have the ability to achieve the object of my definite purpose and life.

[00:26:28] The Real Jason Duncan: Therefore, I demanded myself persistent, continuous action toward its attainment. And that’s one of five that I say every single day. From a tool standpoint, I use that app and my phone, uh, like bricked on me Thursday. And so I’ve been without a, a working phone for the last two or three days, and I just got this one last night.

[00:26:48] The Real Jason Duncan: Um, they sent me a new one, and so for the last two days I didn’t have my app to go through and I was kind of lost and like, I need this to help keep me, keep me centered. But other tools I use, I use, [00:27:00] I use VAs. I, I’ve got two amazing VAs in the Philippines that I use for different parts of my businesses.

[00:27:06] The Real Jason Duncan: I’ve got a VA at Uganda that I use for, uh, web development. She’s, she’s good. Um, and then I’ve got a, an assistant personal assistant here, and I, I run an apprenticeship program, so I bring in young men who are interested in being entrepreneurs, and we do a year-long apprenticeship program. Starts off with a 90 day internship and then it graduates.

[00:27:24] The Real Jason Duncan: So I’ve got, I use a lot of people in the business to help support all the little pieces and parts of the business, but to, frankly, the thing that I do every day is, is this business is my coaching business. So everything I do revolves back to this because all the other ones are set up to pretty much run on their own.

[00:27:42] The Real Jason Duncan: This is the one that’s in month center of my purpose, and I do it, you know, 90% of my active hours are involved in this business.

[00:27:49] Yvonne Heimann: Love that. Um, question for my digital entrepreneurs and my coaches out there. How are you running slash managing your coaching? Are you doing group coaching? Are you doing [00:28:00] one-on-one?

[00:28:01] The Real Jason Duncan: So I do some one-on-one.

[00:28:03] The Real Jason Duncan: Uh, I do some one-on-one. Um, and then I’ve got, uh, I’ve got a friend of mine who is a former coach of mine, uh, that has a company called, uh, Client Folio. You ought to take when you go look this. The name, his name is Mitch Russo. When you go look this up, please just, I know I got an affiliate somewhere, but just tell him The Real Jason Duncan sent you.

[00:28:22] The Real Jason Duncan: But it’s Client Folio is what it’s called Client Folio. And the IO is after the dot. So you spell Client Folio, but put the IO after the dot. Right? Um, so clientfol.io.

[00:28:34] Yvonne Heimann: And we always have the links in the description. So if you find your affiliate link, you’re more than welcome to just send it over and we’ll get it all.

[00:28:40] Yvonne Heimann: Make it easy.

[00:28:41] The Real Jason Duncan: Yeah. So we, so, so what this does is if you do one-on-one online like this, like Zoom or whatever is it, it is a form, uh, format where you can, it’s a software you can pull up and you can type your notes live while you’re talking to the person. And then you can send out, immediately they get a, they get their homework assignments.

[00:28:58] The Real Jason Duncan: It’s a pretty cool thing. Now, [00:29:00] I don’t do a ton of one-on-ones. I do very few. And the people who I do one-on-one pay me a lot because I don’t like, that’s, that’s a lot of active hours.

[00:29:07] Yvonne Heimann: It’s a lot of handholding. It’s a lot of time, it’s a lot of effort.

[00:29:10] The Real Jason Duncan: So my, my one-on-one packages are, are, are, are kind of expensive, but it’s you commensurate with the value that you get.

[00:29:16] The Real Jason Duncan: Yeah. Now I do some group coaching and I love the group coaching. Now the group coaching is, uh, like I’ve got a business accelerator, which is a six week program that’ll increase your valuation of your business by 50% in six weeks. And I show you exactly what to do to make that happen. And if you follow the plan, it happens.

[00:29:34] The Real Jason Duncan: Pretty simple. Um, but, but I do that by group. I do that on Thursday mornings. I’ve got, my next one starts on April 13th, I think, but that’s called the Business Accelerator. Um, I also do, occasionally I do this one called the 40 Days to Find Your True Purpose. I’m in the middle of one of those right now.

[00:29:51] The Real Jason Duncan: But the thing that I love more than anything else is my mastermind group called the Exeter Club, and it is an exclusive mastermind for, for entrepreneurs [00:30:00] who want to figure out: what, what do I do next once I get out of the weeds? What do I do? Now, what’s next? How do I get this business to 50 million to a hundred million?

[00:30:09] The Real Jason Duncan: Or how do I sip the coconut drink every day? How do I do that? So we, I commit a lot of resources to the Exeter Club and we do some pretty phenomenal things.

[00:30:20] Yvonne Heimann: Love it, and I love the diversity. That’s, that’s where, for me, it comes in the whole different streams of income where yeah, we do wanna have a backup, right?

[00:30:29] Yvonne Heimann: Something could go wrong in one of those. Now, for everybody that’s interested, where can they find you and where can they get the book?

[00:30:36] The Real Jason Duncan: You can look up The Real Jason Duncan anywhere and you can find me at The Real Jason Duncan, you that’s also my website. Now I want you to go buy a copy of the book.

[00:30:46] The Real Jason Duncan: It’s only 16 bucks, but go to therealjasonduncan.com/book and you can get a copy there and for five extra bucks, I’ll sign it for you. And that’s free shipping so you can get that. But that book has everything and there’s, all the secrets [00:31:00] are in there. It’s the four core principles that I teach and all of my courses.

[00:31:03] The Real Jason Duncan: It’s the story of how I did it. It’s the story of how other peoples have done, how other people have done it, and it’s also the stories of how not to do it. So there are, that book is what’s funny when you write a book. This is gonna be the good. And I read it for the first time when I, they printed and gave me the final, final, like, this is going to print.

[00:31:22] The Real Jason Duncan: I had to read it and it took, takes about five hours if you just read it all at once. I, I read it on the airplane. So I read it all at once, and when I got done, I was like, you know, that’s actually a book I would read. That’s a good book. And it finishes with a fantastic story, which I’ll tell if I have time.

[00:31:37] The Real Jason Duncan: Finishes with a fantastic story about James. James is one of the characters in the book that I use as a story, and he’s the prototype. He’s the one who does it right, and he’s sitting on the back porch at his house and he’s drinking coffee and his wife comes out that’s in the morning. And his wife comes out just to say good morning and say hello.

[00:31:54] The Real Jason Duncan: And she has her cup of coffee. She says, you know, I was talking to our son last night putting him, putting him to bed and he [00:32:00] said that he wanted to be an entrepreneur when he grows up. And he, and of course James was proud that his son wanted to be that, and, and she said, but you know what was cool? And when I asked him why, his answer was, because entrepreneurs get to spend all their time at home with their kids.

[00:32:16] The Real Jason Duncan: Now, if you’re an entrepreneur and you don’t have a kid, your kid’s saying that you’re not doing it right.

[00:32:22] Yvonne Heimann: Yeah. I’ve that, mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . I, I can’t even, yeah. Yeah. . That’s all I have. That’s, that’s literally all I have. Yeah, that’s pretty much sums up of you being able to tell if you are doing this thing right or not.

[00:32:43] The Real Jason Duncan: Yeah.

[00:32:45] Yvonne Heimann: Yeah. I got goosebumps on that one. I will be messaging you because I want my copy signed. Just saying. For everybody listening. Okay. You guys listening or watching you will be getting all of those links in the description. [00:33:00] It’s all there. The book, finding Jason, all the things. Um, this is it for this episode.

[00:33:05] Yvonne Heimann: Go ahead on over and I think the best one for you to follow up on this podcast is my podcast with Vanessa Cabrera, who is talking about what happens when entrepreneurs actually take the leap and get ready to exit without exiting? I’ll see you in that episode. Bye everybody.