20 Aug Oz Konar: Focus, Diversification And The Secrets Of Entrepreneurial Success

What are the secrets of entrepreneurial success, and what do you need to do to learn these secrets? We look into these and more in this episode. Matthew Sullivan sits down for a chat with the founder of Business Lending Blueprint, Oz Konar as they talk entrepreneurship. Oz discusses why focus is an important facet of success, and why you need to have a revenue generating cash cow before you diversify. He also discusses mentorship, passion and why you need both. Tune in and learn the lessons of success from an entrepreneur who has paid his dues.

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OZ KONAR: FOCUS, DIVERSIFICATION AND THE SECRETS OF ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESS

Helping People Design And Build Their Dream Businesses

Oz, I would like to welcome you to the show. Fasten your safety belts. Scream if you want to go faster. I’ve got your resume. It says that you’re a passionate entrepreneur, multiple seven-figure business owner. Does that mean you own over one million businesses? I would imagine if you owned one million businesses, you’d be pretty busy or was that just me interpreting it?

That’s the revenue. A seven-figure business means multiple businesses are generating multi-millions of dollars.

How did you manage that? What is this business?

I didn’t manage that. Initially, I thought it was a good idea. I’m a big fan of Richard Branson, who owns a ton of businesses. He’s a cool guy. He owns a lot of businesses. He was my role model when I was younger. I thought this philosophy was just start a bunch of businesses. They all failed. It didn’t work that way. I noticed that focus is key. He’s done that after he made a couple of businesses very successful then he diversify. I missed that important link that you need to have cash cow businesses that generate revenue so you can diversify. That was a massive wake-up call. I did away with all of the businesses. I kept only one of them that was promising and put everything into that one. As it grew, I started diversifying into separate businesses that are still parallel to what I do.

There’s the heresy to entrepreneurs that you’re suggesting that they focus on one business.

I did a video on that one, the myth of multiple streams of income, why that’s a lie for most people. If you didn’t make one thing work, you’re not doing everything right. We suggest you don’t take that recipe and apply it to ten other businesses. What’s not working for one thing most likely will not work for the other things. Spreading yourself thinly is not going to help you. My suggestion is to pick one thing. I know it’s very difficult to do. You would get distracted right and left on social media and everything that’s going on but try to stay focused on one thing and it will pay you dividends in a relatively short amount of time.

One of the biggest challenges facing someone who is setting up their own business is what you do. It is quite tempting to try and do all things to all people. Tell me a little bit more about how you started out about seeing Richard Branson as this icon of success where he had all of these different versions of companies. It’s quite difficult to replicate that. What brought you to this light bulb moment that, “If I focused on one thing and became very good at that, I would do quite well.”

I had a corporate job so I climbed the corporate ladder but then I always had a very massive interest in entrepreneurship. I had no idea what I was going to do with myself, honestly. I was learning entrepreneurship, buying courses, training, books and going to conferences while I had this corporate job and making a good amount of money in New York City. My job was to sell. I was a salesperson on the phone and in-person, cold calling, pulling on doors or whatever you can think of. I was selling financial services products, loans, business loans, credit card machines, payroll and all that stuff. Through that training period of me being a lost soul, I noticed that I don’t want to work for somebody else. I sold that idea to myself that I want to own my business but I didn’t have anyone around me as a mentor that would tell me how to go about that. I set up a goal that I would quit my job one day and start my own business and I did that.

I burned a ship and started a business. In a short amount of time, I decided to focus on social media marketing. That was the hot thing when I started. I started off my social media company that I noticed that, “Real estate is fun too.” I started a real estate company. Talking about real estate, a friend of mine says, “Why don’t you do coaching as well? That would help.” I’m like, “That’s a bright idea.” I started a coaching company. A relative of mine during dinner says, “I have this bright idea. I’m just missing funds a little bit, only $1,000 or so. I want to start a manufacturing company of these tiny trailers, caravans.” I’m like, “That’s the right idea. We should partner up.” I started that too. We have these four companies. They are technically functional on paper. All of them required marketing, customer service and all of that. It slowly started acquiring customers. I’m like, “What do I do? Which one do I focus on?”

You need to have a cash cow business that generates revenue so you can diversify.

Within each one of them, you have different options. “Do I focus on Facebook for marketing? Is it LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube?” That even got me more spread out. One of them we’re trying YouTube and the other one we’re doing LinkedIn. You got to keep up with how LinkedIn works and know all the things that change about it. “How do we accept payments? That’s important.” We got to figure that out. Fast forward in 6, 7 months, I burnt out. I was putting in eighteen hours a day not knowing what I’m doing, missing meetings, missing customer calls. I’m like, “This is madness. I want to go back to my job. At least that one thing and I would do it that fine.” I always believe in the power of mentorship.

At that point, I had a mentor from Australia. This gentleman is powerful when it comes to identifying the problems in entrepreneur’s lives and directing them. I’m passionately telling him what’s happening. “I’ll figure it out. I know this is a process. I’ll come out on the other end.” He’s like, “You won’t. You’ll burn out and you’ll get depressed.” I’m like, “That’s a lot.”

That’s a lot amount of money too.

I already did, at that point. I’m a positive-minded person. I’m reading the book The Secret and all that stuff. I’m expecting huge money to come to me without me delivering anything to the world. This guy was like, “Let’s do this simple exercise. I know you’re fighting me. You think all of these businesses will be successful. Take a legal pad and a pen. Make a list of all the businesses. Write down how much time you’re spending per day on each one of them and how much revenue they’re generating.” When I did that, it was a massive shock. I was faced with reality. Three of them were flat on their faces. I had hopes that they would become real businesses. Only one of them, which is our current business had the potential but the boss was too busy dealing with other businesses because I didn’t put in enough time.

That moment happens to everyone, the epiphany they called. You noticed that, “What a concept, focus on one thing.” Although I’m sure so many people have told me before that focus on one thing but I totally ignored it because I was fixated on the idea of becoming the next Richard Branson. I’m like, “If he does it, I can do it too.” Without looking into how he did it. There are many of them. That was the moment I noticed that focused on one thing and one thing only. Since then, I have never let go of that idea because I never want to go back to that period in my life. There’s a lot of pain associated with that period.

You feel terribly busy and fulfilled in some respects. At the end of the day, when it’s 3:00 in the morning, you feel like, “This is the life of the entrepreneur. I have no family time. I’m not making any money but I’m incredibly busy. I’m building this network of companies and empire.” In fact, all that’s happening is you’re hemorrhaging cash. Your wife and children will end up hating you. I remember going through the same process where you get jealous of all these people that have these great ideas and go, “I want to do that too. That’s a brilliant idea. Can I do that as well?” You end up with this feeling that you want to collect these businesses. You become rubbish at all of them. The only thing you become good at is becoming bad at managing businesses.

You forward ideas because you want to own them. You hear something bright and like, “I can do this better than these guys. They have no idea what they’re doing.” You jump on it and do that while you have ten other things. It starts affecting your self-confidence, your financials and your relationship life. I was newly married and my wife said, “I don’t remember the last time we had dinner together because of your businesses. What’s happening?” Fast forward, if you continue down that path, there’s no way you can have a marriage. It’s already become a solid relationship because you’re occupied by something.

Hustling is fine. Many people keep talking about it. “Get a hustle.” Hustle cannot be a long-term strategy. You need to have a strategy. Hustle is temporary. When you have the right plan, you need to hustle to get it off the ground but if you’re working on the wrong plan, hustle is slowly killing you. I see people who have been running their business for five years, still hustling and they think that’s business ownership. I’m like, “That’s because you’re doing it wrong. You shouldn’t be hustling at this stage in your life of the business.”

You ended up running or creating a business that was very similar to the company that you left. My question is people talk about entrepreneurship and passion, which is a much-overused word. Do you find that you become passionate about something when it’s successful? Do you think you have to have a passion for something before you can start it?

When you don’t have any levels of measurable success, your passion is in making money because you’re operating in survival mode. Everyone can talk this big game of, “I always had a mission to save 1,000 kids or help 1 million people.” When you’re trying to survive, that’s very rare that that’s your mission. You’re trying to get a business off the ground and you’re going back to what you know. What I know was selling business loans and alternative lending but what I haven’t noticed is that what served me well as a salesperson was also an amazing industry as a business owner too. You can’t just explain that by passion. It’s a lot of research to find that I was passionate about saving myself and my family from financial ruin because I came from a low-income family.

My father and my grandfather came from a low-income family so I was trying to break that curse and get wealth in the cycle. That was my passion. It wasn’t to serve humanity or anything like that at that point but when you start becoming successful, your passion and desire shifts too. I’ve noticed that I make a lot more money when I saw real serious problems for people. If I create, design, redesign or re-innovate my product to help these people get better, faster results, the second order of consequences of that is me making more money. When you do notice that you’re like, “If I focus on customer success like Jeff Bezos says, create a customer-centric company, that’s what that means.” You’re creating a company that focuses on the desires of the customers and the potential outcomes you wanted to get through the use of your product or service.

Whilst I noticed that my passion has shifted from me to, “I need to find ideal customers but I’ve got to give them something that they have never seen before and that will transform their lives.” The whole passion thing has stages. It’s very rare for someone to claim that they’re passionate about building the next Facebook when they’re going through massive financial trouble. You can’t ignore that there’s an elephant in the room. You’re about to be ruined financially and it has a lot of emotional benefits. If your house is burning down, you’re going to be passionate about putting out the fire, not just go build something else.

I agree with this as an overused buzzword. “Do what your passion takes you. Do what you love.” There are stages to it. We’re running an eight-figure company as an eLearning company in the business lending industry. I would say 99% of our focus is on customers. How do we keep the customers longer on our platform? How do we have them get success? They talk about their success and that builds us more customers. How do they have more transformations? A similar example is on Tony Robbins. If he wants to just do it for the money, he would have quit a long time ago. He doesn’t need it at this point but it is that flywheel effect of continuing that cycle that feeds itself over and over again.

You mentioned Jeff Bezos, Tony Robbins and Richard Branson. When you’re starting out in business, sometimes it’s quite difficult to see the relevance of some of the things that they say. You mentioned Jeff Bezos talking about the importance of customer-centricity. At what point did you begin to realize the relevance of what these people are saying? It does make sense hearing it. It’s almost like the words that don’t have any real relevance. At what point did you start realizing what that meant? What do you think is the most important piece of advice that you’ve picked up over your journey that has resonated and stuck with you?

You have to pick different mentors at different stages of your career. When I first started out, when I didn’t know anything about business, I focused on Richard Branson but I totally misunderstood it because I wasn’t at a level to understand what he was talking about or the businesses that he built. I didn’t even care about Amazon or their business model. I need to spend time understanding that because it was not relevant to me at all at the stage that I’m in. The epiphany moment when my coach called me out on that, that guy was focused on helping someone go from $0 to $50,000 per month. That is very relevant because I was at $0. You got to find the right person for the situation that you’re in. As you grow, your mentors change.

I’m not with them anymore. I am working with other mentors. My strategy on choosing a mentor, I want to work with people who are at least ten times bigger than I am as far as the business, business acumen or their past experiences. I didn’t understand Jeff Bezos. I’m still not claiming I fully understand what he does but I understand him and his philosophy until 2020 when I read The Everything Store. That’s when it dawned on me that, “What a concept. If you keep your customers happy, you grow and you make more money for them.” That’s something we all know on the surface level.

The customers are right. Take care of our customers but the application of that to real life, to our own business doesn’t sink in until you reach certain milestones in your business. That’s the same thing. I never cared about the business model of Google. I know they’re successful and the top search engine but when I started making strategic hiring decisions, I wanted to find out how they hire people. They’re known for that and for their meticulous system of hiring the right people and building the right culture within the organization. It was not relevant to me until that moment that I needed to hire someone where I will be paying probably six figures or more. You can’t randomly hire someone for that position.

When I first started out, I was looking for virtual assistants where I can pay $2, $3 an hour. You can go wrong but it doesn’t hurt you that much. You go through the process of hiring somebody else. To answer your question, it changes. That’s why we got to stay plugged into whatever community we belong to. If you consider yourself a startup, what is happening in bigger companies in different stages? Don’t just focus on Jeff Bezos because you might not get 95% of what he’s doing. In fact, like me, you might misunderstand the whole thing and make a lot of mistakes.

If you look online, people want to know what Warren Buffett is buying. That’s not relevant to you. He’s buying the quantities of $5 billion, $10 billion. He’s already been made the buying decision five months ago and it’s being released. Buying it with your $10,000 will not make it relevant. People want to know what Warren Buffett is buying right away as if that will make a lot of difference for them. That’s why relevance is important. It’s important that you need to have layers of mentors so that way not only you’re looking at the top, however, you’re looking at somebody who can help you at your immediate level.

What’s not working for one thing will most likely not work for the other things. Spreading yourself thinly is not going to help you.

That is one of the biggest challenges because as an entrepreneur, you have to have that mindset that you are right. “This is my vision. I’m going to make it work.” You have to have that bullheadedness on one side. It’s very difficult to balance that with the emotional maturity to be able to say, “I need a mentor. I need someone to bounce these ideas across to make sure that I’m not believing too much of my MPR.” Was there a particular moment when you thought, “I should see whether or not someone else agrees with me.” Is that something that you’ve always believed that one should have the humility and the sensibleness of the emotional intelligence to be able to go to someone and open the kimono as it were?

Most entrepreneurs are usually eight-type personalities. They want to do their own thing and are overconfident. It’s very difficult for that type of personality to accept that they’re missing something, need to search outside and ask for help. That’s why the failure rate of small businesses is super high, yet the product, location and what you do is important. It starts with the entrepreneur because your business is a reflection of who you are, your lifestyle and what you do. For a long time, I would have mentors but I would not apply what they teach me. Instead, I would fight them. Think of this scenario. I hire this mentor to help me. They try to help me but I would try to sell them on my version of the plan and why that’s a great idea. They’d be like, “We respect that but what you’re not seeing is that it’s not working.” I go like, “It’s not working right now but it will work in six months.” I went through a few people because I would always try to sell my idea.

Were you waiting for the person who gave you the advice that you wanted to hear?

Yes. We all have similar personalities with different personalities. My style of mentorship is to have someone who’s going to call me out. I don’t need a motivational mentor. I need someone who can be like, “Matthew, you’re wrong. Here’s why you’re wrong. Now go back and fix it.” That way I can go back and logically think about it and be like, “He’s right.” If someone is like, “I love what you’re doing. This is awesome. Keep doing it. You’ll be fine.” That’s the worst kind of mentor for me because I don’t lack motivation. I usually resist too much on my own idea. I need someone who’s going to hit my head and be like, “It’s time to wake up.”

You don’t need the motivation and the momentum. You need the science behind it. In your business, is that one of the key pillars when you work with people to deliver truth and no holds, no-frills methodology? How would you say that you compare to the traditional coaches? I’m not talking about specific mentors but the coaching industry as a whole seems to be filled with a certain type of person who may not be predisposed to deliver the truth.

That’s one of my problems with the whole coaching industry and what’s happening in it. Everything is about making the other person feel good about their situation, what’s happening and this positive, bright future and outlook. I try hard to separate myself from that crowd. Maybe certain individuals need that but if I were that type of mentor, I would be conflicting with my own personality in return that would not be transparent and authentic. If you ever watch any of my webinars or training, it usually starts out with, “This is not for everybody. I’ll be direct with you, tell you what’s working and what’s not. If you are soft skin and you cannot tolerate hearing the truth, this is not for you.” I do weekly calls with my customer network and say a rapid-fire Q&A session. We’ve been doing it ever since we launched this product and for a straight hour when they ask me anything, I provide answers. That’s with that consensus.

If you give yourself the freedom to provide someone a direct response that will help them, that saves so much on the BS and also on the time because I’m not concerned whether I’m going to break their heart or not. If they know me, they know that my intention is not to target or attack Matthew personally. My intention is to help them with the question they ask me. Over time, we started attracting people who see it that way and repelling those who are a little bit more on the sensitive side or need a traditional coach who would make them feel good. My call to action is, “If you’re at point A and you’re not happy, I’m not going to motivate you to stay there. You got to go to point B. You got to define that. If you can’t do it on your own, you need help.”

That’s totally the opposite of what’s happening in the coaching industry a lot of times. They’re like, “Your point A, that’s okay. You’re not doing that bad. High-five. You’ll be fine. Stay put. Read a couple of affirmations or read this book and you’ll feel better about yourself.” Honestly, in certain situations, people are driven by pleasure or fear. My motivation is fear. Fear of going back to where I was, being poor and broke, that feeling. Feeling pleasant about the situation doesn’t help my growth. I need to be pushed out of my comfort zone. The people that I coach aren’t in that mindset. That’s why we’re attracting those people. If I didn’t believe in that type of thing, I will not teach anything that’s in conflict with my personality but you’re 100% right. The whole industry, most of it at least is designed to help people settle and be happy where they are, which I totally disagree with.

I disagree with the effectiveness of feeling comfortable. There’s this metaphor that if a shark stops swimming, it dies because it doesn’t get the throughput of the oxygenated water in the lungs or the gills is working in a different way. To a certain extent, I completely share with you that feeling that if one doesn’t create or drive on self every day, the moment you start sitting back and feeling comfortable, that’s when the tidal wave of things that will go wrong wash over you. How do you teach that? Do you have to uncover that? The industry that you’re in is a very specific industry. How do you teach people to focus and feel that fear? Are you trying to mold people into your way of doing things?

I get the main idea and that’s something I thought about a lot, honestly. When we had the first version of our training platform, it was mostly focused on the product. How do you do lending? How do you fund deals? How do you make money? It bothered me because you’re attracting people who don’t understand entrepreneurship. They just focus on the material aspect of running a business. Something is very wrong here. I can teach the mechanics of how to fund a deal and make a lot of money but if someone doesn’t understand to think like a business owner, the concept of consistency, compound interest of time put into an effort, a single-mindedness on one topic or focusing on one thing, everything else is temporary.

I can teach somebody skills but I can’t teach them the principles. It’s very difficult. At this age, I’m not going to bring someone and try to teach them, “Lying is bad. Don’t lie,” which comes with the package but I can teach them how to do funding. On the second version of what we call The Blueprint Training, the first 5, 6 lessons are all about mindset. I said, “You’re dying to know about the product but unless you go through this part and digest it, you will never be successful long-term. You’re going to have this rollercoaster effect and be successful. One day, it’s going to go down but I want to train you to think like an entrepreneur. Understand the truth, face the truth, understand your current situation and come to peace with that.

The first entire big module is on teaching people the right mindset. That was very transformative for our community. Everyone who is coming into the Blueprint, a lot of them know a lot about me because my face is the brand of the company pretty much. Whether I like it or not, that’s how it is. They know a lot about my philosophy. When they come in, they’re expecting to immediately learn about, “I got somebody who needs $20,000. How do I fund it?” “We’ll get to that. You’ll learn that but let’s align you properly to be a successful business owner.”

That lesson is supported with a lot of facts and science from the past 1700 and why that’s important, the magical compound interest investing it took time and effort and why our memory is so weak so we can’t just go off of our memory before we get a lot of things. We need to go off with principles. Once they go through that then module two is about the products and services. After we made a switch to that one, that has been instrumental in us in attracting amazing individuals for our standards. They’re applying those principles and lessons. That’s why our community is helpful to each other, which in the financial services industry, it’s unheard of. Everybody looks at this industry as wolf feeds wolf. You have the famous movie The Wolf of Wall Street. We’re doing a 180-degree different approach than that. That helped us do that by focusing on how to think properly before focusing on what to think about.

There are many elements of a successful financial services business but all of them revolve around the ability to acquire and retain customers. Would you agree that that’s the primary objective to be able to create a customer base, to consistently find and service new customers? Is that the major challenge? Would you say that there’s another bigger challenge in your business?

In our business, the business is you, the consultant. The opposite of the broker that we train is someone applying to Bank of America, Wells Fargo, a major corporation. I’m calling it a 1-800 number. What I tell all my brokers is that, “Product is you as the consultant. You have in your arsenal, all the different lending options.” Those are the features and the products but the benefit is there’s a consultant whose goal is to serve the customers in a very consultative manner and educate them. That has a lot of value, both emotional and monetary value. Also in marketing, you got to be in the business of acquiring a new customer but the most expensive part of marketing is acquiring your customer for the first time.

When you provide repeat services to the same customer, it doesn’t have as much cost, almost no cost at all. We’re training our brokers to be in the business of repeat income and repeat business. Why? It’s because it’s relevant in our industry. If a business needs funding and you provide them funding, do you not think they will need funding again? They will need funding again in 6 months, 8 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years. If you’ll look at a business model in a very transactional manner, it treats you that way. You’re always in that hunting mode of, “I got to get more customers.”

That makes you harsher on the phone because then you got to be a hard closer. “I got to close because there’s no other opportunity.” Whereas if you’re in the business of growth and scale through service, on the front end, you can be more selective on who you work with. You can be a lot more comfortable and you can pretty much do your business from wherever you want because you know that you’re not waking up with zero income at the beginning of every single month. We have options that pay your residual income, repeat income. On average, we know statistically speaking, a small business needs funding up to three times a year.

Technically if you have ten clients, nothing major, that’s 30 loans you can fund as long as they remember who you are. That’s why you need to invest in your personality so there will never be a situation where someone will confuse one of our brokers with some guy from Wells Fargo because that’s just a phone number. I’m not saying they’re bad or anything. That’s the value you’re bringing here.

A slightly different question, here we are in August 2021, either post-pandemic or mid-pandemic, depending on your view. How have you seen your business change in terms of the demand for financing and the type of people that are looking for financing compared to where we were months ago before the pandemic took grip?

If your house is burning down, you’re going to be passionate about putting out that the fire, not go build something else.

I don’t think any of us have been through a pandemic before so there’s no past data, at least in the relative past for us to compare and prepare for it. When it hit us, we didn’t know what was going to happen. Is it going to affect us on a positive note? Are we going down like most companies? I had no clue. I told my team, “We’re not going to change anything. We’ll pretend this is not happening. We’ll keep serving the client.” We’re not going to make any crazy moves because this is unpredictable but we’ve been saying for years that most jobs are not secure. You got to be an entrepreneur and have your own business. Maybe it will be more relevant through this because people will face the reality.

This is what happened. Most people lost their jobs and their income. They got fired and let go from some of the most secure industries. That served as a massive wake-up call. That’s when we had a massive wave of people coming back to us. They initially checked us out years ago. They said, “I’m doing fine. I’m getting paid six figures at my job.” You don’t have that anymore. You notice, “This can happen. They were right.” We experienced massive growth in the interest in the program but also massive growth and interest in funding as well. The industry is going through a period as you have never seen before because big banks are restricting access to the funds just like they do all the time when there’s any crisis. That opens up a massive opportunity for alternative lending companies like us. People need a massive amount of cash and they have a very limited place to go get it. Banks do not serve them anymore. They want to wait until everything is calm and they’re going to hear from the Fed.

They manage risk only primarily.

It is understandable. They’re a publicly-owned company so they need to manage their risk and all that stuff but we don’t have to deal with that. That’s creating massive opportunities, not only for us but for the brokers who come into the platform because every business is hungry to get cash.

Do you see the pandemic permanently changing the way that we do business? The reason I ask this is that the people that you work with have found themselves in a position where they weren’t anticipating being out of a job or looking at this. With the ability for us to run and grow businesses remotely, do you think that this is the beginning of a significant change in the way that businesses do business?

In certain aspects, yes and no. Honestly, people have very short-term memory. If this is the end of the pandemic, it hasn’t been a massively long period of time. It came and hit us. In two years, it’s done. In years, barely anyone will remember the consequences of what happened. Life will go on but if this is still going on and we’re in the middle of it, that’s a different story. People remember the plague or the 2008 recession.

Mine is back to 1462.

They know what it refers to because it left a massive mark on humanity. With the 2008 recession, it took almost a decade to get through that’s why people still remember that. Although we can discuss how much they learned from it, that’s a different story but they still do remember it. That’s how I look at it. I’m like, “If this is the end of it, this is pretty sure. I know we lost a lot of people. A lot of people’s lives have been impacted but I don’t foresee any major pivot.” Maybe they’re more acclimated towards working virtually than putting themselves in an office.

We’re 100% virtual but we made a decision prior to the pandemic. If that turned out to be the right decision then we’ll stay remote as long as we can, depending on the size of the team. People are going to be adjusting to a hybrid model. They’re going to want to have their key players in the office, everyone else, remotely and change that structure but as far as how they do business, I don’t foresee any long-term massive changes.

It is an exciting time though for entrepreneurs and smaller businesses. There’s a new layer emerging where people can build businesses without having to go through that same expense of getting into offices. The gap has been created, which is quite exciting for entrepreneurs.

When we think about what’s happening with the past couple of years before reduces and reworks were around, you needed to get yourself on a lease for 5 or 10 years to get an official office. People noticed, “That’s crazy. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be around. I might not need it.” They gave birth to reworks and reduces. People noticed, “I don’t even need that.” That’s the transition away from that. You see those companies are struggling financially because there’s not as much demand. I don’t think this has happened because of the pandemic. This was going to happen anyways but the pandemic accelerated that process of people noticing that this is an extra cost. The reason you needed to have an office back then is that your customers wanted to see that. They were giving you legitimacy based on where you’re located. I can talk to somebody and tell them I’m working from home. They don’t freak out.

That’s the thing that I’m pleased about but all of these things make the business that you’re in gives it a much greater chance of success because people realize that the leap from working for someone else in an office to working at home for themselves, that gap has shrunk. It’s more possible. It must be quite an exciting time for you in terms of the number of people and the opportunities that you can provide to your customers.

Before, we had to paint a picture of what would have happened if they lost their job but now, we don’t even need to tell them anything like, “Do you see what’s going on?” They’re like, “Yes.”

This is all very interesting and sage advice, Oz. I’m going to move on to my questionnaire section. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the questions. I would be rather delighted if you haven’t. I have ten quick-fire questions here, which will remove all of the layers and show you for the person you truly are or they won’t. Question number one, what is your favorite word?

Effort.

What is your least favorite word?

Excuse.

Number three, what are you most excited about?

Student success.

Number four, what turns you off?

When you start becoming successful, your passion, your desire shifts too.

Laziness.

Number five, what sound or noise do you love?

Classical music.

Number six, what sound or noise do you hate?

Baby crying. I have two kids, by the way. I love them.

Number seven, what is your favorite curse word?

I don’t know if I can say it but crap.

Number eight, what profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Surgeon.

Number nine, what profession would you not like to attempt?

College professor.

The final question, if heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

Good job, son.

It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on. It’s been so interesting to hear about the business you built and the truth. How do people get ahold of you and find out more about everything, the courses, the teaching and everything that you do? What’s the best way for them to contact you?

This has been amazing. You have one of the best questions I’ve ever heard so far. That’s awesome. That means you’re an amazing listener and that’s great. We try to keep things simple in our business. We have one source for everything. If you’re interested in what we do, it’s BusinessLendingBlueprint.com. That’s our website. You’ll see my social tags there. Our videos are free. We have a ton of free content. You don’t have to buy our program. You can still get highly educated on what we do here. That would be the resource.

It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on. I look forward to staying in touch and following your progress.

Likewise. Thanks, Matthew.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• Oz
• The Secret
• The Everything Store
• BusinessLendingBlueprint.com