The One-Person Business Model: How to Productize Yourself

the Golden Era of the American dream centered around being the successful company man someone like a Don Draper or a Harvey Specter or even like a Greg house basically someone who's so knowledgeable and smart and competent in their institution that they're indispensable plus they just dress really stylishly and they shake hands they close deals when I got my first big boy job as a technical consultant for a company called proficient my job was basically to make Salesforce marketing Cloud implementations for big companies and do their email marketing I was also tempted for a brief period

of time to become like the Harvey Specter of Minnesota and at the company I was at I just thought it would be really cool to like be really really good at my job and to dress well and for everyone to think I'm awesome I quickly realized though that corporate life is a lot slower paced than what it looks like on TV shows and it can be really mundane it can be really frustrating actually a lot of your time is spent in meetings and meetings where you can't really get anything done you're just waiting to get

started with your day or figure out what your task is you're waiting to get aligned that's a word they like to use use often if you came to the Monday morning sync up you would know and then even when it comes down to doing the work the work is like changing out the header on this email or making a data extension with certain parameters a lot of times it's boring it's not that cool plus office politics can be very very frustrating and I don't think companies fully realize how much money they're ultimately losing by not

treating their employees well for instance I have a friend she's an absolutely badass software engineer but after three years of being with her company she asked for a 10 salary raise which for her she actually deserves way more than that but they only gave her seven percent it's no wonder why so many people have like a side hustle going on but what you might not realize is that it is absolutely possible to take your gig work and move it to a seven figure run rate I know that sounds crazy but I can say that because

I have actually achieved that this year and originally I never thought it would be possible to be making so much money with like my skill acquisition and my knowledge but it's absolutely there for the taking in fact I would almost argue that learning how to productize yourself to take your knowledge and turn it into a one-person business taking your side gig and turning it into a money making machine basically turning your personal brand into a major business this might be the single most important thing you could learn to financially thrive in the modern world and

so while this is a sort of pivot from my usual style of video in this video I want to talk about five principles that helped me turn myself into a seven figure business and how you can do the same so the first idea is that it's not about hard work it's about learning skills that solve problems this is honestly the most important thing that I have learned maybe in the last 10 years because so much of my life has been devoted to hard work first I was a chemistry major in college that was a lot

of hard work then I was a teacher in Los Angeles writing curriculum and actually teaching classes to 7th and 10th graders that was definitely hard work and then all the other jobs that I did since then even stocking shelves at Target there was a degree of hard work like spending 10 hours at Target being a cashier or stocking shelves it is actually psychologically draining because it's so boring and there's so much tedium involved but when it came to making bigger money and leveraging my intellect to actually have a return on investment it wasn't about the

hours I worked it wasn't about my hard work it had more to do with the fact that I was now able to solve problems I indirectly learned skills that solve problems and you should do the same this is actually the foundation of building a product around your personal brand and of course it's been said so many times the bigger the problem that you're able to solve the more expensive you can make your product but the thing I always found frustrating about hearing this sort of business advice this classic business Trope is how am I supposed

to solve any problem I don't know what the problem is I don't know how to solve it and then I don't know how to turn it into a way to actually make money and the starting point for all of this is to solve your own problems by learning necessary skills now one of the most important things I've learned about skill acquisition is that it doesn't take that much time Josh Kaufman had written a great book about how you can get reasonably good at a lot of things by studying them for 20 hours and I feel

this now more deeply than ever because I learned a lot of skills this summer but one of them was motorcycling and to become like a motorcyclist as someone who had never ridden a bike before to suddenly having logged 1200 miles this summer motorcycling you realize the biggest thing is that you learn it all in eight hours in eight hours I've finished instruction and was able to test for a license now of course I wasn't like probably wasn't super safe the first 100 miles that I drove on the highway or whatnot but I now can definitively

ride a motorcycle same with flying a plane so I took flying lessons this summer just because I'm a rich now it's crazy how fast they will let you just fly the plane yourself after 20 hours of flying a plane they will let you do solo flights and after 40 hours of flying just 40 hours Manning this object in the sky you get your private license it's actually incredible so with most things even with tennis I'm not taking tennis lessons after just three hours of lessons I can hit the ball over the net most of the

time like I understand the fundamentals of how the ball goes over the net which was like not happening before and so after 20 hours you can get reasonably good at learning a skill definitively more than the person who has never done it before and after 50 hours you become actually really really solid and this even goes for skills in the corporate world like learning Salesforce there's so much you can learn to become solidly competent in it within 20 hours and definitely like almost a fantastic level of competence within 50 hours I can say this with

so many things right like you don't know Photoshop what if I forced you to learn Photoshop for 20 hours you could probably already tell that you would be really really good at it by the time those 20 hours were up and once you put 50 hours into it you'd be better than most people out there when it comes to photoshop basically what this means is that you should always have something you are learning there's nothing like it it's actually a very rewarding thing because it quickly makes your life a lot better to learn new skills

and to learn them to that 20 to 50 hour learning level and the cool thing about solving problems and making money from learning skills is that you don't have to have a direct path you can even learn skills that are tangential to the goal you're trying to achieve and still get somewhere pretty amazing for instance one of my YouTube coaching clients is 20 years old with a net worth of 1.4 million dollars and the reason he was able to make so much money is because he coached other people on how to get better at a

particular video game like he genuinely sold a two thousand dollar product related to getting better at a video game and that turned him into a millionaire and his company moves at a seven figure run rate and this is really the secret to so much we've all been taught that hard work is the secret to success but as Naval Ravi Khan writes getting rich is about knowing what to do who to do it with and when to do it it's much more about understanding than purely hard work so what skills should you learn as I sort

of mentioned briefly you should learn what you're most interested in and you should solve the problems that you're facing in your life right now so for example I am focusing on three skills in this current season of My Life the first is getting lean I'm actually delving deeply into solving the problem of getting lean I am someone who is completely devoted to Fitness I eat healthy most of the time but getting down to like sub 12 body fat it has its own rules and structure and I've actually been studying from and learning the philosophy of

grego Gallagher from the brand kinobody I've been following his advice on intermittent fasting of course tracking your Macros walking 10 000 steps a day and specifically walking rather than running so that your appetite doesn't increase most people don't think about this but getting to a point where you're lean enough to have shredded six-pack abs that's just a problem you can solve you can learn what that looks like and implement it the second thing I've been learning is cold approach pickup which Probably sounds a little bit funny but it came to my awareness this year that

it would be really really amazing for my business and my personal life of course if I could start a conversation with anyone anywhere and build rapport with them that would be an amazingly powerful skill and yet I've always been very afraid of this if I saw an attractive girl at the gym I would not talk to her I would want to but I wouldn't or if I was at a party and there was someone I knew who was like a successful businessman maybe a successful Hollywood director or even a billionaire which I have been to

parties like this where there's been people I want to talk to and build rapport with I just didn't know how I consider myself modestly confident but there is a specific skill set when it comes to starting up a conversation out of nowhere with someone you don't know and so I've actually been just training for this like my business partner will occasionally take me to the mall and just point at people and I have to go talk to them and it's not just about talking to hot girls even though I have done a bit of that

as well but it's more about starting up a conversation with anyone like old ladies and the business owners and the cashiers and making them feel good building a rapport with them like sending off Good Vibes this is a skill and even if it sounds a little bit trite it's as learnable as like learning to code and then the third thing that I've been learning in the season of my life is Outreach and something called c-suite selling because right now I have a seven figure business and if I ever want to get it to like the

eight figure run rate I'd need to be able to connect with bigger brands with bigger budgets Brands like Porsche and Amiga watches and I'm currently part of a program to learn how to put together pitches to Brands just like these companies that have enormous marketing budgets like 100 million dollars a year in ad spend and from whom I can extract some portion of that so this is my current roster of what I'm trying to learn and I share with you just to open up your mindset on what you can set as a goal of learning

like you can set a goal of learning anything as hard skilled or soft skilled as it may sound some things you can try to learn and eventually productize yourself into is teaching people how to get leaner teaching people how to find love even learning how to play the piano or grow on Tick Tock if one of the problems that you're trying to solve in your own life right now is getting a high paying software engineer job working for a Fan Company you should just figure out what skills are necessary to land that role for the

Fang position maybe that's actually learning how to code better but also skills like interviewing persuasion Charisma Outreach figure that out for yourself and then move on to the next principle which is to build a program around the skill that you're learning and you do this not to sell but actually just for yourself I realized I had done this indirectly when I was trying to grow on YouTube initially because everything that I would study about how to succeed on YouTube when it came to writing scripts choosing titles and thumbnails editing putting it all together uploading the

uploading frequency I actually started to systematize I would keep tabs on what my philosophy was around YouTube growth and I would review it every day not because I realized eventually I would turn it into a product even though I totally have like now so much of what used to be my notes is on worksheets and course modules and all that but initially I did it just for myself and that's what you should do in this phase as your learning skills and working to solve your own Problem whatever goal you're pursuing right now start keeping tabs

on it make a sort of philosophy around it if you you will make a program around it and in this place I want to bring up the idea of having a commonplace book which is something that has completely changed my life as Thiago Forte writes in his book building a second brain a commonplace book is a place where you simply house ideas and I first came across this idea from a website called startgaining momentum.com which talked about people like Leonardo da Vinci who would take all of their ideas and put it in one book one

central place so for me I log all of my ideas on Microsoft OneNote but as you're working on your system it's really important for you to organize the knowledge that you're acquiring and know when to implement it when and so start working with that commonplace book commonplace books they were a portal through which educated people interacted with the world they drew on their notebook in conversation and used them to connect bits of Knowledge from different sources and to inspire their own thinking as you learn skills and potentially you start to combine a series of unrelated

skills you need to find a way to synthesize your ideas and create a philosophy that is your own and you can build this program inside a commonplace book of your choosing the third principle then is to coach others now this is a step where it goes outside of you it requires a little bit of faith and courage but you actually start taking your system and trying to implement it on someone else's life so hopefully by this point maybe it's been a few months maybe it's been a year of skill acquisition and learning but to be

fair you probably could do this in less than a year take the program you have built for yourself and you've worked on for yourself and start trying to teach it to other people one-on-one we need to test the system now we know it works for you now we just need to see if it's replicable now this is where the ability to create content can be very very useful whether it's YouTube Instagram Tick Tock LinkedIn blog posts I feel almost a little bit dismayed to say this but the truth is we live almost at least half

of our lives are lived online and so many of the friendships we make the connections we make they're made through places like Instagram and Linkedin or dating apps people connect online and so whoever your first client is going to be there's a good chance you'll meet them online you don't have to you could do pamphlets or go to meetups and entrepreneurial organizations patients where you live but your best initial first client the warmest lead will probably come as a result of you making content and so having content creation as part of your strategy of productizing

yourself is probably going to be very useful now I myself do have a coaching program where I teach people how to grow on YouTube I work with motivated individuals who want to grow to 100 000 subscribers on YouTube in one year and if it's something that you're curious about there's an application form in the description box that you can fill out but even with the coaching program aside you can learn how to generate attention online just by doing it by posting and learning the feedback that the algorithms give you on the content you post the

one advice I will give about making content is that the heart of everything is writing so if you can write well write down your ideas really well and get better at the skill of writing you'll probably be able to make content that people will watch in any case you'll need to find your first client take them through your program get on one hour calls with them once a week I mean figure out anything find a way to take that person through your process the fourth idea then is to digitize ties and automate parts of the

program as you work with more and more people you'll find elements of your system that can be automated in my own coaching program I started by doing one-on-one calls with around 30 or 40 people and eventually I realized that so many of these initial calls they were all going the same because most people when they're starting out on YouTube they start from the same place and so I took the conversation that I would have with my one-on-one clients and I just turned it into like a 45 minute course and eventually I built on it but

I started automating parts of the system that were repetitive similarly you might be able to find strategies to automate simplify expand different aspects of the product you are building but you shouldn't get to this component until you work with people one-on-one because when you work with people on an individual level you're able to stress test the automated parts of the system if you try to automate before you get feedback from your audience then you don't actually know if you have a robust product a product that helps people examples of digitizing and automating include making worksheets

course modules membership Community groups on Facebook book or Discord or kajabi and then perhaps making apps so as you work with people one-on-one slowly start building out the parts of the system that should be automated and then the last principle is to work the process and to continually improve on the system eventually you want to be in a constant Loop where you are taking on new clients getting them results over delivering for them learning from the experience of coaching them or training them or taking them through your program and then making your program better improving

on your system your system will always find tweaks and improvements as you work with more people and get the results but the goal here is to get people results find ways to over deliver for your clients now this is the entirety of the process and by iterating on these steps you could genuinely turn yourself your personal brand into a million dollar business and Beyond I guess this is to say it is a very very exciting time to be an entrepreneur because when I started out I wanted to be an actor so badly and so much

of the results that I was trying to go after were contingent on other people but it's fortunate now that we can all move towards some degree of solo entrepreneurship and having a lifestyle that allows us to find opportunities that don't depend on other people because our very existence the fact that we ourselves have problems and that we are solving those problems for ourselves like that becomes the opportunity and the Heart of all this is your ability to keep learning all your life just keep getting better at stuff and solving problems for yourself and going after

the next thing and if you can teach whatever you learned in your last cycle of life and bring that on to the next person like that is worth a ton of money that is worth Financial Freedom so I hope this video has been useful if you're new to this channel my name is nikhil this channel features a combination of personal development videos for creatives lifestyle challenges basically useful and interesting video essays so if you like this video and it appealed to you consider subscribing and if you like this video you might want to check out

my other video on how I lived like Jocko willink for seven days it's a video I'm really proud of and is an example of skill acquisition my continuous want and desire to get better at different skills if you'd like to connect with me further you can find me on Instagram where I post more content like this in the form of reels and carousels but with that being said for those of us who learn skills that solve problems to us I say greatness is absolutely coming we'll catch you next time [Music]