Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of GlaspTalk. Today we are excited to have Elaine Poppelt with us. So Elaine is an accomplished journalist and content strategist and author with a wealth of experience in entrepreneurship and small business. And she has written for renowned publications such as The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, and CNBC. And Elaine is the author of two influential books, The Million Dollar One Person Business

and The Tiny Business, Big Money. So where she explores innovative strategies for entrepreneurs and small businesses to achieve remarkable success. So she has also moderated events, led business plan competitions, and contributed significantly to the small business community through her expertise and storytelling. And today we will dive into Elaine's journey, her insights on small business success, and her unique approach to empowering entrepreneurs.

Thank you for joining today, Elaine. Thank you so much, Kazuki and Kay. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much. So first of all, you have been a journalist for over a decade, but I'm really curious, you know, your like starting point. What did you, why did you become interested in journalism or, you know, have you always enjoyed writing since you were a kid? I was lucky that I always did. I remember I was an early reader and writer and I remember writing stories in kindergarten

and I never stopped. I always loved stories. I see. I see. And you, and then your career, first career was a reporter, right? And how did you become or ended up, you know, being or becoming a reporter or journalist? I was one of those kids that I was editor of my high school newspaper. And I, when I went to college, I went to Yale University, I worked on the Yale Daily News. I was actually the arts and entertainment editor.

I had no interest in business whatsoever at that time. I was co-editor of arts and entertainment. And then over time, my interests changed and, or expanded, I should say. And I ended up writing about entrepreneurship, but I worked for the first seven years of my career in newspapers. I worked in urban areas in New Jersey, and I had a chance to really learn a lot about how life works in doing those jobs. I worked for the Jersey Journal and the North Jersey Herald and News, which you probably

don't know of. Actually, the Jersey Journal, I just heard, is folding. You know, it was back in the era of print newspapers. And then I got kind of burned out on writing about bad news. I was the, I actually, one of my beats was, I covered City Hall, but I also covered the Hudson County Jail and I would go to the jail. You can imagine some of the stories. And after years of that, I felt like I'd like to do something kind of light and fun.

And I wound up going to Women's Wear Daily. I became a fashion editor for about a year and a half. And it was really fun, but it was a little too light for me. But I found in writing about it, I got interested in the business of fashion and just business in general. And then I wound up getting a job at Success Magazine, where I became the acting editor. And then I went on to Fortune, to Fortune Small Business Magazine, which I actually

joined, they had a website and it was the early days of the internet and I ran Fortune Small Business online. And it was, at the time, very cumbersome to publish online. And it was just me and this one web producer. And it would literally take all day to publish one story. And if I made one single typo, she'd have to go get the engineers involved to fix it. And it was a very interesting time because I got to see the whole internet evolve, which

is something that has made me very excited about AI, because I saw how it was such a game changer for people around the world in terms of how we work and what could be accomplished. And also in terms of exchange of information, similar to podcasting, actually, I remember I got, it was a letter from somebody in Vietnam who had a question about dealing with nepotism in a factory that he was involved with in his family.

And he asked me, because I was in the US, how we would deal with it. And I remember, nowadays, getting an email like that from across the world would have been nothing, right? Because we could write to anybody at any time, but at that time, you couldn't do it. And I thought, wow, this is going to be a big remover of barriers for people, though people around the world will be able to communicate with each other and get good ideas from other

countries and some of the walls between countries are going to come down. Even if they'll still be there, they'll be permeable and we can all learn from each other. We saw this happen over the last 15 or 20 years where opportunity has come to places in the world that really had no opportunity. People find out about things going on. We have digital nomads, they'll travel to a place where things are happening and it's

been tremendously exciting. So I'm really excited to see now what's going to happen with AI. I know a lot of people are worried about it, but I think it's actually going to be a very valuable tool for us and transform the one-person business and many types of businesses. Yes, I totally agree. And then some people say, sorry, it's a little bit jump, but some people say, with AI, we could really build the one-person billion-dollar company, because AI, we can automate many

things with AI and so on. And you wrote a book, The Million Dollar One-Person Business, but I think it could be the billion dollar one-person business in the future with AI, maybe. Do you have any thoughts around this? Well, I like how you think about that, Kazuki. I think that it's very possible because we're just learning how to use these tools and experimenting with the prompts and everything else about them.

Once people really master them and start sharing that information, it's going to be very much like the web, where things just become second nature for us. And maybe one person can do the work that 40 people used to do without sweating it, without working 100 zillion hours a week, where they can have a life. I think it will also give us back some leisure time where we can do more creative things than we have been able to do, because you have a startup, it takes a lot of time.

And the time you're putting into it is well worth it, but it's time you're not out walking your dog or seeing your family or doing other things. So imagine if we could get back that time and still have the startup and scale even faster. I think that's what it's going to allow us to do. It's also a tremendous game changer in terms of access to capital, because not everybody is plugged into those networks.

And why do we need capital? We need capital to hire people and to pay for technology, but if we need to hire fewer people and now maybe we can use no code and low code tools to create things, now we don't need as much money to do the same things. And now people that maybe they're shy, maybe they just didn't know about where to go for money, whatever it is, now they may not need that money and they could still scale a startup.

Or do a high revenue one-person business. I definitely think we will see a billion dollar one-person business. I don't know what industry you would be in, but it will be very interesting to see who is the first one. Yes. Yes. And sorry, a little bit back to your career at Fortune, Fortune Small Business Magazine. At the time, I think you were interviewing many small business owners and startup entrepreneurs,

I think, featuring them in the articles, I guess. And do you remember any interesting founders at the time or any example, use case at the time? Well, one that really stands out for me was Tim Ferriss from the Four Hour Workweek. He, at the time we did a book excerpt, I was the book editor, among other things, and I had lunch with his publicist one day and I said, you know, it's so hard to find good business books that are really engaging and the person really has business acumen and

it's not just all smoke and mirrors. And she said, I have a book for you, you've got to take a look at this. And nobody knew of him at the time, he was really new to the scene and he sent it and I loved it. And it wound up being the first book that I excerpted. And I had to interview him because we had certain requirements about the business details and things. And that eventually, 10 years later, when he had the 10 year anniversary of the book,

I wound up co-hosting the show with him. a couple of times. And what I had found in doing my own books was a number of the people in the case studies had been inspired by his teachings. And I had some real life case studies of real businesses, not scammy, let me sell you a webinar kind of business, but like professional services businesses and e-commerce that had done what he talked about so early and realized it,

and they got to 1 million. And it was very exciting to see, you know, when you excerpt something, you don't know if people will apply the ideas, but people really did. And they took so much inspiration from him. And he was such an early thinker on all of this stuff. It's, it was just incredible how he had that foresight. You mentioned it, like when you interviewed each of us 10 years ago or something.

So Tim, feel it. So yeah. Yeah. 10 years ago. Yeah. It was, I'm trying to think of when this would have been 2018. So probably 2008 was when his book came out. You can fact check me on that, but that, that was when I did the excerpt and then, you know, I had my family. I didn't really keep in touch with him that much, but I noticed that so many of the case studies when I was doing my own book mentioned him.

So I reached out to him and said, you're not going to believe this, but all these people were inspired by you. And he was excited to see how his ideas had been applied. And then it was, I think it was in 2018 that I was on the show a couple of times. But I follow his work pretty frequently because I think he's one of the most important thinkers on this whole idea of independent work and creating your own lifestyle based on what you want and not what the system says you should want. I think he he's just tremendously engaging around talking about it.

Wow. Yeah. Amazing. And, and then, you know, you, but, you know, you were interviewing, you know, you, you met a lot of, you know, I think sort of putting a small business owners and, and at the time, but that was, I think I remember like two, like about, you know, 10, almost 10, 20 years ago, but, you know, then you, your first book came out in 2018, right? I think, what happened? Like, did you think about writing the book in that days? Or, you know, I'm curious why it took

eight years for you. And because you were preparing to write or summarize, you know, your learning into book, you know, I'm curious, you know, your journey from like learning from meeting small entrepreneurs to writing the book. Yeah. Well, it happened by accident. It was a result of my Forbes blog when I, it was in 2007, I went freelance and I had my family. I, my older girls are now 20, but I had them in 2003, they're twins. And then I had another child.

So I had three children under the age of four. So I went freelance for more flexibility, but I always worked full time. I, and, you know, another desire that I had was to write about things that maybe I couldn't write about it, just one publication. Usually one publication will have a certain mission, but I had some other ideas too. So I started my business and I was writing for a whole bunch of different places over the years, you know, on entrepreneurship for a while.

I was the small business editor for Crane's New York business. I did all these things as a freelancer. I wrote for the Economist Intelligence Unit. I wrote for Inc. You know, I was still doing a lot of stuff for the people at Time Inc. like the Fortune small business, et cetera. So I guess these ideas were just percolating. And I started writing more about freelancing for Forbes and my editor at the time, Tom Post said, you know, you're writing a lot of stuff

about one person businesses. Why don't you make that your blog instead of just entrepreneurship in general? And those posts were really taking off. And what I realized was a lot of people don't have the dream of creating a startup, but they would like to be independently employed. Like they're, I guess we're on a continuum, right? Elon Musk is on one end and maybe, you know, the solopreneur writers on the other, I'm mildly entrepreneurial, but I'm not as entrepreneurial

as Elon Musk. And you're somewhere in between as startup founders. And my belief is that entrepreneurship is very inclusive, that there's room for all of us on this spectrum. And maybe where I am right now, my shift where, you know, in five years, maybe my daughter graduates with computer science skills and we do a startup together or something like that. And now I'm more, I'm leaning more into that entrepreneurial side of myself. So I think everybody has that potential.

And that kind of interested me too, that a lot of these people starting the one person businesses, they were in corporate. And a lot of times people are told, like, if you're a corporate person, you don't have what it takes to start a business. You're so used to the cushy office and blah, blah, blah. But corporate jobs are not that cushy anymore. They're really hard. And my personal observation after interviewing probably thousands of entrepreneurs at this point over many years,

is they're great entrepreneurs because usually what happens is they find something they don't like in the company, you know, how it's done. There's a better way. They ask their boss if they can do it. Their boss tells them no. They're really frustrated. They quit and start a business. And it may be many different types of business. It could be like a one person FinTech. It could be a scalable startup.

But all those skills that they're getting in corporate America are very useful. They're building a network. They're learning how to get along with people. They learn how to present an idea. They learn how to have good work habits. They learn how to get things in on time. They learn the art of selling, which even if you're not selling something specific, you're selling people and your ideas. If you're sitting around a conference room table and they say, hey, you know, what's your idea for this project? And you speak up and say what it is.

Of course, you want to be credible. You want to give them the information they need. You want to be engaging. So you're learning a lot of things that once you're out of that world are extremely valuable or, you know, how to approach somebody that you don't know or, you know, how to network professionally, how to seem professional when you're dealing with people. It's such a great school. I mean, Tim calls it learning on someone else's dime.

But what I find is not that many people in the business world, especially in the venture capital world, really embrace that. They think you've got to go all in right away. And meanwhile, people over 50 are actually some of the most successful group of entrepreneurs. There's like a lot of young entrepreneurs, but some people have kids. They can't just go all in and move to a business accelerator. Maybe they're starting it on the side while working a full-time job, but they're still just as entrepreneurial.

I think what's so exciting with the one-person trend is it's for all, and you can tailor it to wherever you are in life, and you're not locked into staying in that one place. Maybe it's the two of you in the startup. I don't know how many people you have, but you can always hire more people. You decide, well, this thing has legs, and we want to go further, or we got more funding, and now we're going to grow it to 50 people.

There's no one locking you into what you did in the beginning, but I'm kind of at that ground level where I'm looking at the people at that first stage where they could go down a few different possible paths. But in answer to your question, that was a long answer, a literary agent noticed that I was writing all these posts about the one-person business, and they were going viral, and she followed this. I started doing it in about 2012, and I think she might have reached out to me in about 2015, and she saw all

of them, and she thought this could be a book, and it was kind of in the back of my mind anyway, but I didn't know how to make it happen. I had not written a book, so she and I collaborated in terms of packaging it up in a book proposal and marketing it based on what I had learned and all that reporting, and luckily, by that point, I had done so much reporting. I knew it was a real trend. I had census data to back me up. It wasn't my own data.

It was very thorough government-issued data, and it was stuff that was out there in clean sight. Anybody can look at that census data. You have to know how to read it, but it's not that hard, and it was very credible, and I think one of the reasons it was not being celebrated was we always celebrated job creation, creating jobs in the community. We didn't really celebrate creating an alternative to having one of those jobs, but there's a certain portion of the population, not everybody, but some people

like that, and that's their potential. If they realize that, they're going to be really happy, and then other people love being part of a corporate team, and I feel there's room for all of it. I see. Thank you. By the way, was writing blogs and writing books totally different? Pardon me? I'm sorry. I'm curious about the writing books process, and was writing blogs and blog posts and writing books they totally different? Or how, how does the process look like? I've never written any books

in my life. But I'm curious about that process. Well, writing a book requires a lot of project management, it requires a roadmap, like you would have a business plan for a business, not everybody really has one, but kind of in the back of your mind, you need one. And with a book, you really need to think through what the journey is for the reader, you're starting in one place, and they hope to get something I'm talking about a nonfiction book.

They hope to learn something in the course of the book and experience some personal change in terms of their knowledge. Most people hope to be able to execute on it. I mean, it could be a business book, it could be a book about fitness, it could be a book about finance, personal finance, whatever it is, but you're going into it to learn. So I have to think about where is the reader right now? And where do they want to go? And how do I get them there? So then I break it down,

what are the steps? What are the big steps that they have to take in terms of their personal knowledge in order to get there? So chapter one would probably be an overview of where they're heading, and you sort of highlight what's ahead. And then I usually do a very robust outline where I'll figure out which, when you're writing a book, you want to think about the reader's journey from start to finish.

So chapter one would be an overview of where you're going to be taking them, and you'll look ahead to what some of those key steps would be. And then you might use chapter two to establish the why of the book, you know, what is the trend that you're going to be writing about and why? Usually, what I'll do in the outline is I figure out if I'm going to use anecdotes at the beginning of each story, I'll decide which ones they're going to be so I don't go down rabbit holes, because you want to make sure the anecdotes really support what you're

trying to say. So sometimes you'll think this is a great story, I've got to get it into the book, but it doesn't really do anything to support your core arguments for the book. It's a big process, it takes me sometimes a year to do an outline because it's that robust. But then you also have to do a book proposal. I publish with Random House and Norton & Co, so they require a pretty robust book proposal. And usually you have to go through a literary agent.

So if you don't have an agent, you have to get representation because they don't want just some random person saying, oh, you know, my sister-in-law said I should write a book. Here it is. They, you know, they have a zillion people that want to write a book, kind of like American Idol, right? You have to be vetted. And then if they like it, they'll say they're interested. And then it might go to auction, where they're competing to be able to be your publisher.

Then it might take anywhere from a year to two years after you've actually sold the book to write it. So you have to really look at it as a long game. It's something that like maybe you'll make a lot of money from it, maybe you won't. That's not really the reason to go into it. Sometimes people think, oh, I have financial problems, I should write a book. It's going to become a bestseller because I'm a ghostwriter too. And I have those types of people approaching me.

And I say, you might not make any money from it. The only person who might read it is your mother. Do you still want to write the book? If you still are that committed that you will do that, then it's time to go ahead. But it's good to test the idea. I had tested my ideas in a blog. But as you pointed out, it's not the same to write a blog. But I did know which profiles people found interesting.

If I didn't answer certain questions readers had, they will usually write to me and ask me about it. So I knew, okay, people are very curious about this. How did they find the time to do this? Or did they quit their job? And I started to get an intuitive sense of what do people need to know in order to do this for themselves? And what I learned was people like to learn from their own peers. It's sometimes too intimidating. We all love to get inspired by Elon Musk or Sarah Blakely or someone like that.

But they're so far ahead of most entrepreneurs that in a way, they're very aspirational, but they're also demotivating because it's so hard to get to where they are. So when I have people that are just everyday people that got to 1 million, it seems much more attainable, especially when they're doing real businesses. And I started doing events where either in person or I have a library program at the New York Public Library that's on Zoom where I have the real people from my books come on and I interview them.

So you can judge for yourself how credible they are. And they're all very heavily vetted by me. I really check them out thoroughly before I write about them because I don't want somebody misusing the platform just to sell something. These are people that have real businesses, like event planning businesses, auditing businesses, everyday businesses, but they've run them really well using the best of technology, using outsourcing, being super smart about how they find new clients.

And they share a lot of their best practices, which are always evolving too. So since I interviewed them for these books, many things have changed. So I always ask them, who are you and what have you been up to lately? Because every time I ask them the question, it has changed. And they're always doing new things, which is another lesson of never standing still and never just resting on your laurels. We all have to keep on reinventing ourselves and listening to the marketplace.

Because last year, whatever was relevant then is not relevant now. It's changed. I see. Yeah, thank you. So in that sense, when do you think this is ready to publish a book? Because you can edit fake continuously many times, right? But at some point, you need to publish a book. So do you have any tips? Or yeah, this is time to ready to publish one. How do you decide? Well, if you're self-publishing, I think you need to get some target readers, like beta readers,

respond to the book and let you know, do they understand everything? Are there unanswered questions? Are they bored? Are they interested? People that are very trustworthy, who will not just protect your feelings, people will be brutally honest with you. If you're using a commercial publisher, you get a deadline, and it's due. And they'll ask you if you're set. My first publisher, Random House, they asked me to send it in chapter by chapter, one chapter a

month, which I thought was a really good best practice because it's easy to let things creep up with a book. You can get into overwhelm. And all of a sudden, it's the last minute. These are a lot of my ghostwriting clients. They get a contract, and then they can't finish the book because it's due in two months, and they need help. That's not ideal, right? Because you need to let things bake.

It's similar to a startup idea, right? You have the idea, you're out going for a jog or a bike ride or something, and it's in the back of your mind, and then an insight will come. But if you wait till the end to do the whole thing, there's no room for the insights to come. You're just crunching it out, and it won't be as good. I mean, you need a little adrenaline to it. There's a balance. But I think you definitely need other people to read it. And you have to really take yourself out of the process in a way and be very thick-skinned about

it. And think about the fact that a book is a literary work. It's a creative work. But it's also a product, and people have to want to buy it. They have to want to read it. It's like a startup, right? You might be so passionate about it, but if you're too early to market, if someone else has a better version of what you're doing, somehow you're not conveying how great it is. You just don't have the words to express how great it is.

Then it's going to fail, and nobody will purchase it, whatever you're selling. So you have to also put on your entrepreneur hat as a book writer. You're also expected to be very engaged in promoting it, which is another thing. If you're going to write a book, you have to let aside all modesty. It doesn't mean you have to talk about yourself, but you have to get out there and talk about the message of the book and find the audiences it will be helpful to, and talk to them about it,

and tailor it. So sometimes I might be on a real estate podcast, for instance. I'm not going to talk about all the other entrepreneurs except for the ones who are doing Airbnbs and real estate, because that's what they're interested in. So you have to think about that the same way if you're marketing a product for a startup. Maybe one thing is for small businesses, another track in your marketing is for B2B enterprise clients.

You have to put on many different hats, but the goal is to get the book into the hands of people who will benefit from it. You might target the academic market. Some authors, like David Miriam and Scott, wrote The New Rules of Marketing and PR. That became an academic bestseller and became a textbook, even though it's a really fun-to-read book. So for some people, that might be a way to get the book out. There's so many different ways.

A lot of people who write books have podcasts or they do LinkedIn Live. So you have to think about that. Figuring out what is most comfortable for you. Some people do email marketing. When I work with ghostwriting clients, I have to really impress that upon them because they sometimes think that if you build it, they will come and that does not happen. If people don't know about it, they won't read it. Word of mouth is very slow with books.

It's yes, maybe over a 10 year period, other people will tell their friends, but in the beginning, how do you get it out there? You just put it up on Amazon. There's thousands of books up there. It's not just going to rocket to the top unless you've done some prep work. It's almost like a crowdfunding campaign where there's a lot of prep work that goes in before that ever happens. I see. Yeah, that makes sense.

I'm also curious about from your experience and also from the interviews you talked, you said you've interviewed and met thousands of entrepreneurs, I think, in the past. What are some common challenges entrepreneurs face? Because you said ideally, we could outsource something and hire something, automate something, but some people are struggling. What are the challenges that they face and how do they overcome those challenges? Well, I think one common challenge is social pressure or social approval.

A lot of us are raised by parents who want us to do well in school, go to a good college, have a career with a company that they're proud of the name of that company to tell their friends. If you're going to be an entrepreneur, at some point, you're going to have to let that go and do something that maybe people around you who love you don't understand the reason behind. They may feel that you're taking too big of a risk and you have to realize that you may not

be able to prove to them that what you're doing makes sense for a while and just be comfortable living with that. That's why I often recommend starting things on the side because that way, you can build some runway because friends and family funding is very important for a lot of businesses. If people around you don't believe in what you're doing, then you're cutting off an important source of support and emotional support.

You could say, oh, entrepreneurs shouldn't really care what other people think, but we're human beings and we're not meant to live in total isolation. I think social support is very important. We saw that in the pandemic, just us all being cut off from each other, what that did to people's mindset. We need each other and we need community, but not everybody is going to have that kind of personal support. You have to have a willingness to make it happen no matter how much support you have.

That might mean you have to build your own network, going to tech meetups or things like that. It might mean you get the support of a professor in your business school who mentors you. It might be that you just watch every YouTube video known to man about email marketing or something like that, but you have to have the willingness to make it happen in whatever way you can do it, whatever way suits you and your personality and where you are in life.

I think that's very important. Sticking to it is important. I think it's hard when you have an unstructured work life to be disciplined. Some people are just naturally creatures of habit. I'm like that where if I don't get up and do yoga at 545, my whole day won't be as good. I'm a Virgo and I'm a creature of habit, but not everybody is. If you have trouble with motivation, then either you have to find a way to build your own internal motivation or you have external motivation like a coach or a friend who

acts as an accountability partner. A lot of times that's why people team up in a startup because you keep each other honest about how much work you're putting in. I would say work-life balance is also challenging because it is so hard. You're fighting a system where we're all meant to go into jobs. It depends on where you are in the world, but if you're in the U.S., buying health insurance is very expensive. It's hard to get it outside of a job.

You have to somehow find a way to get that or do without it, which can leave you exposed. If you're riding your bike and you get hit by a car or something like that, then you're living with the threat of that. Not to mention housing is very expensive. You have to be able to find a way around all of that. Those are just some of them. I don't know if there are any other specific ones that popped into your head when you're asking the question.

I see. Thank you. So many challenges. Also, at the same time, I'm curious about the scaling and time to expand business. I remember in the past, in your interview, you mentioned that there are around 30 million small businesses in the U.S. I think. Then over 40,000 companies make like over 1 million revenues. That's my understanding. Sorry, I need to check. That's good ballpark numbers. They've actually gotten better.

Actually, the number of small businesses is down to 28 million after the pandemic, but the number of one-person, million-dollar businesses is now over 53,000. But as I think you're pointing out, this is like a very tiny percentage, less than 1%. These are the elite athletes of the one-person business. Why I'm so interested and obsessed with them is I think we can all learn a lot from them. They have found a way around some of the obstacles that many people face,

which is they run out of money. That's a big one. They run out of time. They find ways to be very efficient. Another way to describe them is capital-efficient businesses. They're doing more with less. They're doing things with the resources of one person that we could never imagine 15 years ago or 20 years ago before we had the internet and mobile phones. I'm thinking about I'm really going to date myself here, but early in my career, if I had to check a fact,

how somebody's name was spelled, I literally had to go to the library and talk to the business librarian or call her on the phone or him on the phone because we didn't have the internet. How could we look it up? Or you try to call the person using the phone book. It was so cumbersome. Then when the internet came, it was amazing how much changed. We could do so much more. And so these folks are very good students of easy-to-use, free, and low-cost technologies.

Think about Zoom. You and I, we're doing this program on Zoom at probably a very low cost. We're just operating on whatever internet connections we have in wherever we are. It didn't take that much to bring us together. It took planning and thoughtfulness, but that was not possible years ago. Everything went through... If you've ever seen the movie broadcast news, these networks control that flow of information.

Now you could do a news show if you wanted to, and people could follow it. It's totally democratized the flow of information. So these people are on the front lines of this. They have a business. Maybe they do a related podcast. Maybe they're doing a YouTube show. Maybe it's YouTube, and then they make it into a podcast. They're spreading their messaging and going on online events and speaking at industry conferences.

In those conferences, there's so much combustion of ideas, and that in itself propels all the businesses forward. To me, it's so incredibly empowering, but you still have to have the passion for it and the will to do it, and not everybody does. Some people feel like they're calling us to be a school teacher and work for the school system, which is a beautiful thing, and we need school teachers. Whatever they do, entrepreneurship is not right for them at this moment, but maybe it will be someday.

I actually feel that with all the change that's going on, everybody should have entrepreneurship as a skill, because we really never know if our whole industry is going to collapse because of some change in technology. We could do everything right, have all the right network, have gone to all the right degree programs, be the top of our field, and then some disruptor comes in, and everybody in our field is out of work.

If we're not entrepreneurial, we won't know what to do next. If we are entrepreneurial, we could do so many things. We could tap into a whole other set of skills that we didn't even value as sellable skills. Going forward, the human side of things is going to be very important, so things like, for instance, being a mother. If you lost your job and you were a mother, and now your kids are older, you could be a very high end nanny making a six-figure income.

That's not a scalable business, but you might not have ever thought of that as something that you could do. There are people coming up with so many ideas just from very basic skills that they have that they may not even value as monetizable skills, or you could be a mom who starts an e-commerce website for other moms selling baby products or something like that, which a lot of moms have done, or you could create a database for moms.

If you're a mom who's very tech savvy, like maybe my older daughter is a computer science major, maybe that would be her someday. There's so many things that you can draw upon, but only if you're entrepreneurial. So I've really encouraged all my children, all four of them, to always learn entrepreneurship because you never know. And I don't view that as a dire thing. I think we have untapped potential that maybe can only come out if we're running the show. Yeah, totally makes sense.

And let's say the company hit 1 million revenue, then should they raise money to accelerate the business, to really scale up the business, or should they stay at the same one person, small business? I'm curious about what makes different between a small business and a startup, and the definition, and when to scale, and when should we raise money or expand the business more? Do you have some thoughts around here? Well, that's a very complex question.

Maybe a simple way to look at it is like a family, right? A family could be two people, a couple. It could be a family with 14 children. It could be somewhere in between. It could be a couple with a dog. It could be a one-parent family with four children. There's so many different variations on the theme, and a lot have to do with just random things that happen in life. But other things have to do with will, like maybe somebody wants to have a big family, and they're willing to put in all the work and resources that

takes. But with a startup, with a one-person business, I do believe there's a natural size for a business, and some businesses just don't lend themselves to going above one person, or the person themselves just doesn't want to have a team. They just maybe get it to $3 million in revenue. That's more than enough money for anybody, even after paying all the taxes and expenses, and they're happy with that, and they like their lifestyle.

There have been a few people like that that I wrote about that have families, and they just don't want to grow past that point. Maybe someday they will. The nice part about that is you can now sell a one-person business and have an exit. There was a roll-up by Thrasio of a lot of e-commerce businesses. Thrasio ran into trouble, but that showed us that it's possible to sell. So now you've built the wealth of selling the business, and you could invest in other businesses.

You could start another one and become a serial entrepreneur. What I saw in tiny business big money, because I had now followed some of these businesses for a while, some of them stay one person. Some of them become a traditional small business, like maybe eight to ten people, something like that. Other ones realize that they're a startup, and they start raising funding, and you really have to have funding in a lot of cases unless you bootstrap, and there now are some bootstrapped unicorns.

A good example is Zoho, which you might know is a CRM, totally bootstrapped. That's a personal choice of the founders. It's obviously pretty hard to do that out of cash flow, but you can do it. I'm not sure with Sarah Blakely. I think that she was bootstrapped for a long time with Spanx because she couldn't get funding. So I always feel like go for it. If you can't get funding, go for it anyway and try to be really resourceful. Then some people do an exit.

They scale up and do an exit, and they're like a real traditional, I don't even want to say real, but like what we think of as a real startup. A lot of it is you don't know what opportunities are going to come along, but my premise is there's no fault in going above one person. I think you just have to be open to what the universe puts in front of you, and then you decide do you want to go for it or not.

You might have some things going on in your life where you don't want to go for it, like, oh, I have a new baby. I don't think I want to do this really intense startup thing, or maybe I have a new baby. I'm going to bring them to the office, and they're going to sit there in the office in their playpen and soak up startup life and become an entrepreneur too. It's all personal. There's no right or wrong, but I think you have to really, like a book author, you've got to read what the marketplace is telling you.

You've got to listen to customers, listen to investors, just listen to your gut, and then decide what's right for you, and realize maybe some of the things you decide might be a mistake, but you'll never run a business without making mistakes, as I'm sure you know, right? Those mistakes make you stronger and more knowledgeable. Yeah. And so I'm curious about your future, and what's next for you, and are there any upcoming projects

or ideas you are particularly passionate about at this moment? Oh, that's a good question. Well, I'm involved in a lot of different things. I'm pretty sure I'll do another book, but I haven't fully baked the idea yet, so I'm not going to share that yet, but I'm going to be doing a lot more speaking because during the pandemic, I couldn't do a lot of live speaking, but I found that people really craved community.

I do a series with the New York Public Library that used to be in person, but now it's on Zoom with these million-dollar one-person businesses and the people from Tiny Business Big Money, and I would really like to take that on the road more because every time I do it, the room is full, and I could see there's a real need for community, and I feel like I can be a catalyst for that. I'm not selling anything with it. They're always free, the ones I do at the library, but I want to bring people together because I do feel it's

a revolution to let people know that they can do this, and you don't need somebody to anoint you as an entrepreneur. I feel that in the past, there have been a lot of gatekeepers telling people who can and can't be an entrepreneur, and if there's one thing I want to tell people, it's that you can decide if you want to be one, and there are so many different avenues for you. You can be an Instagram influencer. You could be writing code. You could run a small business baking bread in your community.

There's so many variations on the theme, but what we see is a lot of our institutions and companies are crumbling. There's a lot of churn on the Fortune 500. Some of the companies that are on that list, if you look back, they're not even in existence anymore, right? You think about like a blockbuster video or somebody like that. They have their moment, and then time marches on, and that presents so many opportunities if you're open to them.

I think the number one skill we all need is to learn to love change because we get everything all lined up and set up the way we like. It's finally humming, and then life throws us a curveball or something doesn't go according to plan, but I think we have to all train ourselves to love change. I do it through yoga. I was doing a lot of martial arts before the pandemic, but my class semi-disbanded, so I'm looking to get back into that, but I find having a practice like that

where you keep showing up and you learn to weather life's storms is really important. See the positive in it and see the opportunity and go into it with an open heart instead of trying to grasp and hold on to things that were in the past because we only have the present. And that's such a hard thing to keep in our minds. It's like we ruminate on what happened last year with this person or that, and it's so easy to miss out on the beauty right in front of us and

all the opportunities in front of us or the new person that can make all the difference in our business if we cling. I would love to challenge everybody listening to this to find some type of a practice, whatever it is, where you keep showing up and you get to experience all the learning that comes with that. Because I know like in yoga, I wanted to do the headstand and I went for years and I would see people doing it and I thought I can never do it. One day I just went and I did it.

I don't know where it came from. It was just being in the room all those times and you never know the day that you're going to learn how to do the headstand. And the headstand in a startup could be raising funding, it could be going on a podcast when you're painfully shy, it could be a number of different things. But if you don't keep showing up consistently, you'll never get the lessons and you'll never get the confidence that comes with that.

That you came when you were a little run down and you stayed up late because you went to a party or something the night before and you still showed up on your yoga mat or you still showed up at the dojo or whatever your practice is. Maybe it's meditation, that's common. Actually in Tiny Business, Big Money, I did a survey and I think 37 percent of the entrepreneurs said they meditate. I'm trying to get into that, I find it hard to do. That tells me something, right? That they have that inner strength, they go inward,

instead of letting external factors always tell them whether they're successful or not. I think this is, yeah, you already answered a bit, but so, yeah, from your experience, what is the most important trait or characteristic to become a successful entrepreneur? You know, like changing, you know, openness or acceptance of change, or like, you know, keep running.

So there are many traits or characteristics, but so what do you think the most important, yeah, yeah, what resilience can be? Yeah. So from your experience, yeah. I would say get into the ring. You know, I said I like martial arts. It takes a lot of courage to step out there and let people criticize. You have to have a thick skin in entrepreneurship. And I think anything that you can do to develop that, you know, write a blog, put yourself out there, share things on social media, speak, and they're going to be people that are jealous of you

or critical armchair quarterbacks. And you have to toughen yourself up in order to do anything, to write a book. There's going to be people that criticize the title of the book that have never even read it, that hate entrepreneurship, that don't think anyone should have a business. I have to put them out of my mind because that's not my people. That's not my tribe. But sometimes it gets to you.

And I think one of the most important things is to train yourself not to go down the pit, you know, with people that want to drag you down. Most people will cheer for you and applaud your courage, but there's always going to be those people. For some reason, they stick in your head more than all the people that say nice things. So anything you can do to just get in the ring, toughen yourself up and realize it doesn't matter what they say, right? If you believe in it and the people you trust believe in it, that's where having a brain trust

is important too. Like you're people that would be very honest with you, but when they say they like it and it's good and it's done, you can trust that they're really giving you the truth and they're not soft peddling it. Then you can go out into the world with confidence. And I mean, if you wait for everybody in the world to approve of what you're doing, you're never going to get that approval and you'll just miss out on life. You'll never be able to do anything.

So I guess that's what I would say. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. So since I think time is running up and I'm going to ask you, since our audience is, as I mentioned earlier, aspiring founders or aspiring writers or newsletter writers and bloggers and our content creator. So what advice would you give them? Let's say to both aspiring founders and aspiring writers, if you could add more.

You already shared many advice or lessons, but if you could add one or two more things to both of them. I would say, don't try to be the same as other people who are successful. I'll give you an example. Like with Tim Ferriss, there's so many wannabes that tried to write similar books to him. Don't try to be someone else. Everybody's got some unique pocket of genius and you may not know what it is, but the people around you know the things that you are very interesting about,

what your most interesting ideas are. And if they don't know, it's time to expand your network to other people. It could be a writing group. It could be an entrepreneur's group, but you really want to figure out your unique differentiating factor. It might be that you have an interesting life story, that you came from a different part of the world than the market that you're going into. It could be you have a very unique voice.

Like if you're a writer, maybe you write very differently from other people, but you definitely want to be different and figure out what your area of difference is and then find the common ground with your audience. Because whether you're running a business or writing a book, it's really about the recipient. It's not about you. I mean you do want to have something you want to say and you want to really refine that message so that it's sharp, which can take some time to really get super clear on what you want to say.

But then you need to meet them where they are and think about, okay, you know, what is interesting about this whole thing? Like when I'm doing talks or writing about the million-dollar one-person business, it's really about the person who has their job that they don't like. They want to get out of it and they're like, can I make enough money if I start my own business? No, they're not going to make a million dollars in most cases

because we're saying it's about less than one percent. But what if they made five hundred thousand dollars? Would they be happy with that? Probably. That's very achievable and I think more people would be at a million if they learn from each other. But it's about them. It's not about me. I'm the conduit to the information because I'm an experienced journalist and I know what questions to ask and I know how to check people out and verify things.

But it's really about them and their dreams. So it's putting it into language that resonates with them and that could be the marketing for a product. Like if you made a board game or something, why would they want to play this instead of Monopoly? What is it about it that's so much fun? That's your job as entrepreneur to get that across to them in the packaging and the font that you choose on the box. And that's the fun of it, right? It's like experimenting and testing and putting it in front of people and not taking

it personally. You know, just keep on learning from the world. I see. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for the great advice. And also this is the last question. And since Glass is a platform where people share what they are reading, learning as a digital legacy, I want to ask you this question. So what legacy impact do you want to leave behind for future generations? Well, I would like to help people to ignore the gatekeepers in their life that are telling them

they cannot do something. There are a lot of gatekeepers that get a lot of power out of being the person who decides if somebody can pass go, you know, if somebody's allowed to do something. But the gatekeepers we had 10 years ago are not the same people we have now. So be your own gatekeeper. You decide if you're ready, do the work. Make sure that what you're putting out into the world is the best that you can do.

Make sure that it's excellent and make sure you put the time into it. Sometimes entrepreneurs have a bias to action. And so sometimes writers do too. Put it out there when it's ready. Don't wait too long, but make sure it's polished and the best that you can produce. And then don't listen to the gatekeepers. You find a way to make it happen and you decide what your fate will be. You can't have total control over that. Only the universe does or your higher power, whatever you believe, but you can have an impact on what your journey

is by taking that attitude, not waiting for approval from somebody else. Beautiful. Yeah. And thank you again. Thank you so much for all the insights and sharing your experience with us. Well, thank you both. You asked such thoughtful questions. This was so interesting and fun. And, you know, the work that you're doing is so important, bringing people together and helping them with their development as future entrepreneurs or current entrepreneurs.

It's really, really important. I mean, the power of podcasting. Wow. And, you know, these online programs, it just broadens the world for so many people. So thank both of you for what you're doing. Yeah. Thank you so much.