Gavin Cheung: Navigating the Path of Entrepreneurship and Career Switch (Co-Founder of MotionGrey)

hi Gavin welcome to the show so the first question we have is we would love to hear about your story and career development let's start from the very beginning can you share your journey to entrepreneurship and what inspired the creation of motion gray yeah so I graduated when I was around 22 from SFU at that time I had an econ major and also a business minor and fresh out of University I actually got a job at bench bookkeeping as a bookkeeper I was actually making 30,000 a year at that time and then my goal is

actually to get into the big four so because I graduated with an econ degree I actually wasn't eligible to go straight into big four right away so I actually had to go to UBC solder for the DAP program during that time I did the math and I realized that it would take me probably a year and a half to finish off my diploma of accounting degree and then from there to get into the big four it would probably take me maybe half a year to a year and then when I did the math my goal

at that time was to make money so I realized that it would probably take me until I'm 30 to make $100,000 and the thing with that is is not really guaranteed because if I had to work for six years to get $100,000 on top of that I'm not guaranteed to even get the job I might not even get into big four right away on top of that there is like pandemics there is like economy stuff that happens so what happens if I do get the job and then afterwards like a pandemic happens and I get

laid off or let's say the recession happens I get laid off too so at that time I realized I had to diverse my risk and I wanted to learn something new on the side too while I was actually still going to the DAP program so at that time I asked my friends I looked around to see who was um doing any side hustle doing anything kind of cool I had a really good friend that I met in school when I was young and then he taught me how to do entrepreneurship I guess and then sell

things online and then we started off of a company called pulse Labs which was gaming chairs at that time we weren't really equipped we didn't really have the skills to really compete for gaming sh because the big companies that we were going against had a lot of money and a lot of experience but eventually we learned a lot from that and then we started motion grade which was standing desk primarily based and then from there I guess we got lucky and then next thing you know a couple years later I didn't have to become an

accountant anymore so next question within the e-commerce methods youve utilized Drop Shipping Amazon FBA a Shopify can you share a specific campaign or product launch that exemplifies your approach and the results it yielded how did this experience refine your strategy moving forward yeah so actually for anyone that gets started in e-commerce I do recommend starting with Amazon FBA the reason why is because Amazon FBA is like easy mode in a sense where they deal with all the logistics for you they deal with all the customer service for you and they also deal with all the

marketing for you so if you were to create let's say a shop by store you have to generate a lot of traffic into the website which is actually very difficult for a new website because for anyone that has created a new website before you're going to realize that nobody actually goes to the website so having said that Amazon I always recommend is the easiest place to start and I have a special place when it comes to Amazon because that's actually where I started too so every time we launch a product we like the approach of

not ordering too many units and then kind of exploring to see if the market does well so in a situation with let's say Amazon I was selling like a lap desk I would order maybe 200 300 units first and then afterwards get it into the market and get it onto Amazon and then just start I guess selling it and then getting reviews on it through like certain programs and then afterwards doing certain types of advertisement like Amazon ads which is called PBC from there once we start getting a bit of sales we can usually have

a really good understanding whether or not it's a winner or not and then if it is a winner we do continue it at this point because I guess we're big enough we do have a lot of products that are just making a couple sales a day back then when you first start you probably want to prioritize winners so for example if you just get start it and you have a product that doesn't make a lot of sales you probably don't want to prioritize that but because we have the scale now where we have people looking

over these listings we have warehouses where we can store all the inventory we could launch I guess more products and not worry if they don't generate the income that we want right away so you mentioned you order 200 items usually right to begin with and you want to test out to see if they sell well on Amazon how long is that process of testing out a product yeah great question so from the moment you find a product you probably have to get it manufactured which does take I would say anywhere from 15 days to a

month after that to ship it from China to Canada or us you probably takes around 45 to 60 days the reason why is because you're going to take ocean fright which is the cheapest method a lot of times you have big things you actually can't Airship it over because it's really expensive so I would say usually two to three months to really get the first sale from that point once you get the first sale it's really when the momentum gets started where your listing is active and people can start seeing you on the first page

of let's say Amazon and then from there yeah it really just depends on the volume of demand for the item itself but three months to launch a product I think it's pretty safe to say and correct me if I'm wrong the good thing with Amazon FBA is that they have their own Warehouse so you don't have to rent your own space yeah exactly so that's why I always recommend that as a beginner so now we have a warehouse and we actually have a couple warehouses so we don't have to necessarily fully focus on Amazon and

FBA but as a beginner you definitely want to utilize that because you don't want to be worrying about like customer service and also worrying about shipping your products out and doing fulfillment it takes up a lot of time and the return might not be there so the timeline could be very long it can be very long in terms of testing your product yeah for sure it really also depends on how long the production time is too so there are certain people that I've met and I've mentored in the past where they wanted to create products

that are more unique so the more customization you need the production time could extend from 15 days all the way to even a couple months uh when it comes to launching the product too it depends on how experienced you are in launching products because when it comes to selling a product I think whether you're good at marketing or not is going to be the difference a failed product many times is not because the product itself isn't good it's probably because your marketing is not the best I am a strong believer that there's a lot of

good products out there that probably don't sell because they didn't know how to get marketed while there's a lot of crappy products out there that are making millions of dollars because they know how to Market it so well this leads me to my next question so delving into building a lasting brand we're talking about marketing now could you discuss a particular branding challenge motion gray faced and how you turned it into an opportunity how did this situation impact your Brand's message or strategy yeah so I guess impacting our image there was a time during I

guess Co and even if you remember there was a time where it was raining and stowing really badly and then I believe certain roads were um destroyed and then those roads actually were very important because a lot of our Goods actually had to go through those roads for example when they land into um Canada the trucks actually had to pick them up and actually go through those roads and because those roads were broken a lot of the items that we actually sold were getting delayed and then at that time a lot of the customers weren't

happy with delivery time times because of this delay and basically imagine is during Christmas time you have a bunch of people that are buying gifts for um their friends and family and if the things aren't coming on time they're very upset too because um it looks bad for them too and it feels bad because imagine you're buying a gift for your husband or your wife and then the item isn't on time it makes you seem very um irresponsible or it seems like you didn't care about them and you ordered it late people don't realize it's

because of these Logistics issues so because of that we dealt with a lot of angry customers at that time what we did to really make things better is we actually first is we didn't make any profit so we gave them large discounts and on top of that we actually offered a lot of free products to kind of complement the products that they ordered to really hopefully make them feel that they were important to us which they definitely are so that was definitely probably the the worst time I remember waking up every morning to a lot

of angry messages and that does take a mental toll on the individual too it's not easy being an entrepreneur people think it's all rainbows and sunshines but the reality is you go through so many hurdles and sometimes you know I was thinking about this yesterday I was thinking about how over the years as an entrepreneur I've experienced so many challenges but when you've made a milestone you're just sitting at the top of the hill you kind of forget all the challenges you go through and and people think that it's just all rainbow and sunshine but

in reality the amount of mental health burdens you have to go through yeah there's actually a pretty funny um saying to this too that I always think about I believe that if I came out of University with a really high-paying job I would have never been an entrepreneur so if I landed let's say a couple hundred K job right out of University definitely it's not worth the risk but it's because I didn't make a lot of money I was making 30,000 a year as a bookkeeper I realized like I probably have to kind of like

go for it and try different things and yeah still toly I stand by that if I was making a lot of money and I can stop thinking past five I would definitely do that but I guess that's what comes with being an entrepreneur now I have an interesting question I think this one relates to what we're talking about you've advised prioritizing profitability in the early stages of a business can you share how motion gray has managed to align your personal passions with the company's profit driven goals over time yeah so the reason I actually say

profitability is the most important especially for e-commerce at the very beginning is because at least from my experience I've noticed that it's very demoralizing to spend a lot of time on something and not see any return so for example as an entrepreneur you can spend a lot of time building something and it could take maybe sometimes years it could take months and you're not going to get much of a return and it's very discouraging because you don't really know if it's working well or not at that time because imagine I would spend 50 hours a

week working on this business after a year I still don't see any results I don't know if I'm actually on the right track so in e-commerce you're fortunately able to see results a bit quicker because you can start seeing sales having said that I always recommend getting a bit of money first verifying that your ideas do work whether it's through pre-orders whether it's through selling on marketplaces and then afterwards kind of double Downing on a strategy that does work so having said your question is how do I put my passion in with profitability I've always

noticed that I'm passionate towards building so when I launch products I like to see that what I'm actually doing has direct results so being able to directly launch products that I feel are superior of quality and also are very useful and being able to sell it to customers it's kind of like a very good feeling that I get so I guess it all correlates together it's a win-win the best of both World fantastic so you mentioned how it's great to get a bit of financing to get your product launched do you have any tips and

advice in terms of where entrepreneurs could potentially get more budget for them for themselves yeah so for us we're actually fully bootstrapped we never actually borrowed money from anywhere else that's actually one of the good things about e-commerce I can't comment on any other type of startups because I've never done that before but for e-commerce I think even with $5,000 it's enough to get started so the funniest thing is that I actually had someone that I mentored that wanted to do e-commerce that essentially sold his company for a couple million and he wanted to learn

about e-commerce kind of as like a new thing for fun and he told me like right away away he's like Gavin I have um a couple million dollars I can just drop a couple hundred K on a product and we can just go for it and I told him the same thing I would probably tell you guys right now is that probably learn the process first 5,000 is definitely enough to learn the process you don't want to be dropping a lot of money into something you don't necessarily know what to expect at the very beginning

how I earned the first 5,000 is I actually worked two jobs when I first started so when I was working as a book keeper I realized that 30,000 is not a lot of money I probably need to save a bit more so I actually worked as an insurance agent on the weekends doing car and house insurance so I got a bit of commissions from selling like ICBC and also from house insurance and then I also got like the hourly wage from doing the admin work and the funniest thing is I still actually have over a

100 clients from insurance still to this day that I kind of handle passively so yeah that sounds amazing it's a great passive income that's awesome Gavin you said $5,000 is enough can you break that down for us how do you spend the first $5,000 yeah so I do recommend starting with am on FBA I think Shopify stores are much more expensive and the reason why is because you need to set up much more infrastructure for Shopify stores but having said that when it comes to Amazon I think that first I would say 3,000 is a

good amount when it comes to inventory you're probably not going to have the most quantity but then once again as I mentioned before you probably just want to see if it sells first you probably need to spend around 4 to 500 on getting trademarked which is the whole purpose of private label you need to get trademarked to have your own brand I would say another 400 Maybe be for miscellaneous marketing fees when it comes to like let's say photography and like kind of setting up your listing and stuff like that and then the last thousand

which would make it 5,000 is for I would say shipping so Logistics obviously 5,000 is a bit more of a budget side it could range anywhere from 5 to 10 grand but I do believe it's still possible to start one with 5K okay awesome and so can you walk us through the lifecycle of a successful product from conception to Market I'd love to hear about how customer feedback and market research shaped its journey and how data played a part in guiding those key decisions yeah so I can break down the whole journey of what it

looks like to be I guess an e-commerce seller I'm going to focus on Amazon because I think Amazon's much more straight forward I can break it down on Shopify next time but I'm going to do Amazon for this one so first off is about finding a product right so let's assume that you set up all the infrastructure already so you have your LLC set up you have your Amazon store set up already really is just finding a product so finding a product isn't as simple as looking around the house and selling whatever kind of pops

into your mind it really is about data driven decisions so there is a lot of softwares out there that kind of help you see what the existing revenue is what the current demand is for search word keyword volume what for example your competition looks like so it really is making a calculate decision based off of those things at that point once you find a product that matches the criteria that you're okay with handling it's about differentiating the product so you don't ever want to launch a product that's identical to someone else because at that point

you're not going to stand out at all so it really is about making it either look better work better or have more value so those are the three ways I've noticed is ways to differentiate at that point let's say you did all the research you differentiated your product you're going to go talk to your suppliers or find suppliers to create this product so still to this day I think Alibaba which is reaching out to China suppliers is usually the best I know that there is places in India now like in Vietnam Cambodia but still to

this day I think China is by far the best manufacturing uh country you're going to reach out to a bunch of suppliers to see who can make you that item at a really reasonable price and then at that point you're going to make sure that it reaches your quality standards it reaches everything you're You're Expecting and then you can place the order at that point when you place the order you're going to start preparing everything so that when your item arrives at Amazon you're ready to sell so that comes with the listing itself so all

the written portions and also the photography so you're going to send the item to a photographer get everything prepared so by the time you arrive you're ready to sell immediately so once it's done production you're going to have a fright for to pick it up going to ship it to the Amazon warehouse they should do all the logistics for you so you don't ever have to touch your product and then once it arrives it's good to sell and then at that point it's about marketing so tell us more about marketing how do you get your

product from the bottom of the search engine to the top in Amazon yeah so when it comes to how things show up on Amazon it's all about ranking so at the very beginning you're right when you first launch a product you're probably not going to be seen at all how ranking works is that the first page at the very top tends to generate all the traffic and all the sales as you guys probably buy things online you guys probably rarely ever scroll onto the second or third page to buy things all the sales are on

the first page so when it comes to launching a product since you're not on the first page the only way you can actually get onto the first page is by doing uh paid ads which is called Amazon PVC which is essentially bidding for certain positions on a page targeting certain keywords so at the very beginning assuming that your item is of better quality it does look better it does offer more value if your item is seen and it's exposed on the first page you should naturally get some sales as you naturally get more sales you

get more reviews you should start seeing yourself rank Higher and Higher and eventually have that organic position where people can see your product without you always having to spend so much on advertisement that makes sense I know that kind of dry sometimes but let me know if that makes sense that makes a lot of sense and so reflecting on a time when motion gray faced a significant obstacle perhaps related to supply chain product quality or Market competition how did you innovate or pivot to overcome this what was the lesson learned and how has it shaped

your business philosophy yeah so I think a lot of times our biggest problems is logistics and supply chain because of I guess the size of our products too so every single time let's say like for example when covid hit too yes sales were really good but a lot of people were dealing with supply chain issues the reason why is because Boats were literally not sailing at a certain time because workers weren't working and a lot of times it does cause a lot of unhappy customers because people aren't receiving their products so what we've realized and

what we really emphasized on recently is buying those warehouses getting that a ual physical properties around so that we don't have to fully rely on the supply chain like boats coming in with our products and then immediately Landing in our warehouses and immediately shipping it out so we do store more inventory now just in case like any of these things do happen but yeah so having said that we really focus on our Logistics now that's I would say our main difference compared to other companies and so we all know what the interest right currently the

real estate market especially when it comes to Consumers buying a house or an apartment hasn't been as trendy as the previous years now my question for you is would you say investing in warehouses these days is a good investment so for us we actually invested in it because we believe that the cost of having it definitely pays out a lot more to us because we need it compared to I guess as if we were like a speculative real estate investor I don't know about that but we do get a lot of value out of it

because now I guess our storage cost could be lower like we have now an office that we can all meet up in and even like getting the trucks directly into our warehouse and out of it it's also much more convenient than I guess before when we used to have to rent other people's places so it's definitely worth it for us on top of that I would say when you have that economic mode if you just come into like let's say the industry you don't have these things you're definitely paying a premium when it comes to

borrowing space from a warehouse or let's say Logistics right so being able to have these infrastructures locally in Canada and even in the US allows us to start having more and more of a economic mode which I think in the long term is also the right move for us too and so now my next question leads us back to saving budget considering your advice on starting with minimal Capital can you share a story on a time when budget constraints led to a creative solution that significantly impacted motion Gray's success how do you approach Financial Planning

and risk management in the early stages so actually I'm going to answer this in a different angle so I strongly believe I was just talking to my friend the other day that right now is probably the easiest time in like history to create a brand and to do well in a brand and the reason why is because marketing is the cheapest has ever been so for example you can have an individual no budget no anything launch a to video and it goes viral and he sells up I've actually met a lot of individuals in the

last couple months I guess because ever since I started doing Tik Tok I've meet a lot of other people that do Tik Tok and a lot of them actually tell me stories about how literally one video changed their trajectory of their business and their career just because it went viral because I can give you guys an example I have this friend in La he essentially sells soap so all he did was he talked about a soap and how it helped his skin and his acne and the video went viral and got 8 Mill views and

because of that he said he went from like very low Revenue all the way to 100,000 in his first month like in that month that went viral he did 100,000 in it in that month now he's killing it like he rolled the momentum and now for example he's doing very well I think he's just buying McLaren today I don't want people to associate success to cars but he's been doing very well and he's only I believe 20 years old too so my advice for I guess anyone that's like listening to this or anyone that's young

I probably think it's the most easiest ever been to go and make money when it comes to marketing back then for me when I first started it wasn't that easy because you got to spend on Google ads you got spend on Facebook ads like social media was a thing but it wasn't like anyone can just do a random video and it could go viral I felt like it wasn't as easy but nowadays like if I had to really redo it it really would be just being creative when it comes to like social media marketing so

the other day I met this girl she started a jewelry shop and she's using Shopify and we were talking about ways to market the product and she brought up Tik Tok and she said that Tik Tok actually didn't help her to sell her product because when people are on Tik Tok they're mainly scrolling so how do you incentivize people to actually click the button and buy yeah so I can't comment on every single industry and it also depends on what type of jewelry she is what price range it is and also what her Target customers

are but from what I've always seen is that your at the very beginning of your brand probably your whole purpose is to get traffic so traffic onto your website traffic into your brand if you just create a Shopify store you're probably not getting any clicks to your website to begin with and it's because you can't really randomly find a website to go to you need to get either like on Google you need to either push it somewhere right so on Tik Tok I really believe it really would be just making natural videos of people talking

about the jewelry or people that I guess already have influence that are using the jewelry itself and I've noticed that videos that don't necessarily push the product that hard do better so for example instead of like just talking about that jewelry in the video it would be more like the jewelry is on someone and the guy's doing something and I strongly believe that that's the way to go so I have a video of my cat that went viral on Tik Tok and it had 2 million views it was actually the first video I ever done

and the thing is that I think over 30 or 40 people in the comment section actually asked where I got my furn furniture from and that already showed that hey like people are kind of curious of things that look nice in videos they don't necessarily like getting push things but if you kind of have it casually sitting or resting in the background sometimes it does grab people's attention and you'd be surprised if there's a million people that view a video if even 1% of 1% like are interested in it which is a very small amount

and I think it's quite reasonable to assume you could already sell a product or sell a lot of units so Tik Tok is mainly for awareness and genuine interest to drive those two factors yeah and I would argue this too like how long does it actually take to create a Tik Tok video if you're just starting a business your time and your marketing budget's probably not the most like in a sense where you don't have millions to spend on budget you probably don't even have thousands on top of that you probably have a lot of

time because you're just getting started you spend 15 20 minutes on a video and then you just be consistent and see where it goes I really believe that that's the way to go that's actually how the soap guys started too is he said that he just spent 15 20 minutes a day on a video just kept it consistent and eventually if one video hits then it's like a lottery I've also heard from a lot of people they have the fear of showing up online a lot of people would like to stay just under the radar

Anonymous what advice would you give them yeah so I actually have the exact same fear I actually didn't have social media at all until last year so I had no Instagram I had no Tik Tok the reason I actually decide to have social media was because I realized that it could benefit my career and my business probably a lot more if I was known and if I had myself out there so having said that when it comes to creating a Tik Tok video when it comes to like putting yourself out there I always think of

it like this if if nobody sees you and you don't get many followers nobody sees you nobody cares right if you start getting traction and you start getting I guess more followers then at that point like who cares because you're doing something correctly so if you think about it in that sense it's like oh like no one's going to see you anyways if you only have like 50 to 100 followers so you don't have to worry about people judging you or putting yourself out there and if you get to the point where you have like

a million followers then you're definitely doing something right people are going to be more like impressed so at that point it's like something to be proud of too so I don't think it's something to be scared of I do think that is the future in a sense looking ahead what emerging Trends in e-commerce do you see as opportunities for motion gray how are you planning to integrate new technologies or methodologies to stay competitive and Innovative yeah so I think that when it comes to any business that has I guess established themselves for the last couple

years in like an industry it really is about continuously innovating the products so back then let's say when we created chairs and tables our chairs and tables are definitely very good quality and very nice and it has newer technology in it but what I guess our goal is to keep improving these items so but what I always say is that you don't need to invent something you just need to bring something slightly different to the market so tables and chairs are more or less I think universally like they're perfect the way they are right you

can't really improve a desk you can't really improve a chair but what we could do is we could always add certain things to it that make it a bit more useful so for example like tables especially with new technology now you can always add like a bit of things here and there just to make the table a little bit nicer um so that's really our goal we really want to like kind of set ourselves up for like a branded long-term table or like a long-term brand so that people are proud to have like a table

or like a chair or a piece of furniture in their house that's from us I guess it just reminds me of the strategy for Apple like iPhone 1 now we have you know iPhone 15 Pro Max that's a really good idea so my next question with an increasing focus on sustainability and corporate social responsibility how does motion gray address these concerns with its operations and product lines yeah so we actually recently I think like last year we partnered up with a company called Chop value in which they actually use table to tops that are recycled

from Chopsticks so I think every table uses like many thousands of Chopsticks that they actually recycle locally from restaurants and a lot of different places that partner up with them so that's one of the ways that we kind of like give back in a sense where we have these Chopstick tabletops which they're very sustainable and very recycle friendly on top of that when it comes comes to overall just like Logistics too like with our shipping companies and also with our like let's say FedEx ups and campar we also make sure that we are very efficient

when it comes to shipping we try to keep the trips minimum in a sense where the pickups are maybe like once a day we try to have everything like at once so that it's not like trucks keep coming in and out and then yeah that would be mostly it we also do contribute a lot to I guess being price friendly when it comes to our products and actually I guess in my spare time like my whole purpose of my Tik Tok like creating it was to teach people about e-commerce and like Amazon FBA I do

enjoy teaching people about it I do believe that if you get the right person to teach you or you have the right Mentor it does help you complete the journey and it also helps you be more successful compared to if you learn it yourself and lastly I guess doing things like this is always very lonely so having hopefully someone like me to encourage you from time to time definitely helps you complete the journey a lot of people actually ask me they say like okay like you hear the typical thing where it's oh Gavin like if

you make so much money why do you teach why do you Mentor a lot of the people on Tik Tok a lot of the people that sell courses they are scams right so having said that number one is I teach exactly what I do I do have a brand where I'm very proud of and I can tell you guys that I have that brand right so I can't really fake that I do it I literally have a brand our brand does over eight figures every year for the last couple years having said that when it

comes to teaching I do charge I don't want to like say like I'm promoting myself right now and the reason why I charge is because I actually used to teach a lot of students for free there and then so when I first started I taught around 20 students for free and what I realized is that if you teach people for free they actually don't respect your time and they actually many times don't actually take any action because it literally cost them nothing to learn about it and they're not really invested like you don't know if

they even had a high intention to do it at the very beginning but once I actually started charging I've noticed that my students executed much quicker and they also were able to launch much better so the first person that actually offered to pay me was a friend at that time where she essentially saw that what I was doing and she said that hey Gavin like I'll pay you if you can teach me how to do it at first I really didn't really want to take it because I was discouraged from my other 20 students that

never started so I was like okay if you pay me like I'll see where this goes and right now I think that she has a pretty known company now in the America and she does I think around 5 to 8 million a year I don't ask her how much she makes I think that that's very rude but I know that she does very well now and I do believe that I was able to impact her in her entrepreneur journey and ever since then I I was much more encouraged to keep mentoring and that's why I

actually still teach to this day but I don't take on like every student I just kind of take it on when I do have the capacity but yeah that's that's basically it so this leads me to my final question you talk about not taking on everyone you're actually selective and so what would be your top three tips for or students young professionals or individuals contemplating a career switch or embarking on an entrepreneurial Journey such as eCommerce how can you stand out yeah I actually love this question so much so my first tip is that you

might not necessarily know what you want to do fresh out of University or let's say working your first or second job I think that that's totally fine to not know what you want to do what I encourage you is to try more things so for example when I was a bookkeeper I tried let's say Drop Shipping I tried Amazon FB I tried Shopify I tried insurance I tried a lot of different jobs I think that doing a lot of different things allows you to know what you don't like which is actually very important because when

you know you don't like certain things it helps you minimize your choices to eventually go into something that you might want to do so for example at that time I realized I don't really like sales in a sense where I don't feel that I'm that good at sales I don't feel like I'm good at like talking to people and like closing deals so because of that it's like okay maybe I'm more leaning towards like online stuff where I don't need to like face the person I realize I also don't like accounting things because I'm not

really good with numbers I'm not really good with small details I actually make a lot of errors all the time so because of that I realized I can't be doing like lawyer stuff I can't be doing like accounting stuff I can't be doing like very detail oriented Things So eventually that led me into e-commerce I believe that everyone has their own like Road you don't need to do e-commerce just because I did it a lot of people make make money their own ways you just have to find which ones match your personality and match your

skill set so my second tip would probably be to look at who's above you so this is actually the one tip that changed my life and I actually read it somewhere in a book when I was like 18 but I strongly believe that there is no surprises in life and you probably know exactly what you're going to make and what you're going to do in a couple years based on the people that are moving the same Journey as you so for example let's say right now I'm by the way guys I love accountants but I

just feel like it wasn't right for me but let's say back in the day when you get into the big four you're getting around 40,000 a year right $40,000 is definitely very good but you're not going to suddenly make a million a year you're not going to suddenly make 100,000 a year if you look at all the pay scales which is publicly advertised like you can actually Google what your peers are making you can see that hey you enter at 40,000 the next year you get around 50,000 the next year you might get 60,000 you

get like 10K raises a manager might make anywhere from 80 to 100,000 and then a senior manager might make anywhere from like 100 to 140,000 for example right the P scales might be off now those were based off of what I was looking at back then when I was looking at Big before but what I want to emphasize is is that all these pay scales are very transparent and you know exactly how long it takes to get that pay scale so for example if you're okay with the pay scale and you're okay with your life

and you enjoy what you're doing totally fine but what I've noticed is that a lot of people go into these jobs thinking that hey I'm going to suddenly become very wealthy one day working this like job and reality is is that it's very probably unlikely so if you're working as an accountant in big four and you have that pursuit of wanting to earn like 150,000 a year when you're young that's probably not going to happen because it's probably going to take you seven eight years to get to that senior manager level and that's when you

finally make it I don't want people to think priority is money but I think when it comes to let's say freedom money and all these different things you got to look at the job like that so let's say if I want a lot of freedom I need to look at what my manager is doing when it comes to his freedom and say like oh am I okay with having that work balance when I'm his age or like when I get to that level so it's just money is the easiest I guess currency to quantify but

like I like to use money as an example but for me it was money like I did want to make more money I'm not really money driven but I wanted to make at least enough that I was feeling I guess more relaxed and more not pressured so that's two third one I think when I reflect at my journey I reflect on my life I think that you always hear this saying you are what you hang around and it's very important like you make the average of your five closest friends I believe that that's really true

and I can explain to you guys why I think it's true so opportunities come when you are with the right people I believe that if you're around winners you're naturally going to win I don't think that I'm very smart to be very honest I think that the number one blessing I have is that I was surrounded by very nice people they're going to push you into the right directions they're going to teach you things without you having to make mistakes to learn they'll give you a lot more opportunities and I do notice that the further

I get into my career the people that I meet give me a lot more opportunities to I guess like invest in certain opportunities see certain things that I wouldn't see if I wasn't in that Circle and I think that that further like pushes my career down so very important I guess a lot of people might ask like where do you meet these people I really think it really is just having your hobbies having the things you're passionate about naturally you're going to meet these people I don't think anyone likes it when someone 's like meeting

people for that purpose of wanting to like benefit something I think it has to come naturally but if you're around the right people I think it's impossible to lose like I I have like a couple friends that I just know are like straight winners and I can't help but think like if someone's around them like how can you lose when you have someone that's like literally a straight winner I love that love it well Gavin thank you so much for these wonderful tips and thank you for being on the show