Employee to Entrepreneur

How to Earn Your Freedom and Do Work that Matters

Steve Glaveski

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780730363880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Make the leap and become an entrepreneur today

Are you living for the weekend? Are you dissatisfied at work? Are you itching to do something that is important to you? How can you avoid the pitfalls that many first-time entrepreneurs have fallen into? How do you explore whether entrepreneurship is right for you without giving up your day job? Employee to Entrepreneur is your guide to leaving your job behind and building something for yourself.

Author and employee-turned-entrepreneur Steve Glaveski, shows you how to navigate the challenges, find the entrepreneurial success that is right for you and become a better person along the way. Employee to Entrepreneur combines storytelling with a step-by-step framework to teach you how to effectively explore and leverage entrepreneurship to gain freedom, fulfillment and financial security.

• understand what you want to do by first understanding yourself
• explore if entrepreneurship is right for you without giving up your day job
• avoid the common pitfalls faced by first-time entrepreneurs
• fund, test and prioritise your ideas in a fast and cost-effective way
• develop the mindset to succeed in your business.

If you're ready to leave your cushy employee life behind and build a business and a life you believe in, reading this essential guidebook is your first step to making it happen.

Chapter 1
The future is here

‘The only thing that is constant is change.’

Heraclitus

This isn’t a book about building the next billion-dollar unicorn. I’m a first-generation Australian, the son of working-class Eastern European factory workers. I grew up in a socioeconomically challenged suburb in Melbourne’s west, and went to public schools where illegal playground transactions were common. Several of my fellow alumni would be glorified on TV shows about Melbourne’s underworld such as Nine Network’s Underbelly series. I earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees at universities that don’t feature in the world’s top 500. Despite this inauspicious start, I managed to hustle my way into gigs with powerhouses such as EY, KPMG and Macquarie Bank before starting and building my own business, hosting an award-winning podcast and writing books like this one.

In other words, if I can do it, anyone can.

This book is about earning your freedom, progressing from being miserably comfortable in a cushy corporate gig where the only thing getting you out of bed each morning is your salary, to running your own seven-figure business, all while doing something you love and find meaning in.

Let’s go on a journey.

Exponential change

If you took a one-metre step today and doubled the distance every day for 30 days, how many metres do you think you might have walked by the end of the thirtieth day?

I’ve posed this question, inspired by XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis, to corporate executives and entrepreneurs at some of my keynotes. Responses range from a self-censoring silence to guesstimates of ‘thousands’, ‘100 000’, ‘one million’ or simply a playful ‘lots’. I use this idea to illustrate Moore’s law, which observes that computing power has been doubling every 18 to 24 months since the 1960s. In 1971, Intel released the world’s first microprocessor, the 4004. The chip measured 12 square millimetres and contained just 2300 transistors. Today AMD’s Epyc contains 19.2 billion transistors. Before you reach for your calculator, that’s 8.3 million times more transistors than the 4004.

In the 18 months to December 2017, computer processor companies added about 10 billion transistors to a microchip. That’s 10 times more in the past 18 months than we managed in the entire decade of the noughties, a time that also gave us the iPhone, Borat and Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water (human beings are fallible, after all).

This, then, is the difference between linear and exponential growth.

We’ve reached a major inflection point in human history — not so much in the quality of Top 40 music, as in the acceleration in technological development and the implications of this on society.

It’s easy to write off Moore’s law as just another buzzword, like innovation, agile and disruption. People overuse such terms because they conveniently encapsulate a phenomenon we simply can’t ignore. It doesn’t make them any less relevant or important. So, to put Moore’s law into perspective, I ask the 30-steps question.

The answer?

One billion and seventy-three million metres. That’s 1 073 000 kilometres, or about 666 000 miles ... sorry, I hope that number doesn’t summon the beast! It’s also the equivalent of walking around the world’s circumference 26 times!

Remember the famous legend in which the grateful emperor of India asked the inventor of chess to name his reward? The inventor requested one grain of rice for the first square of the chess board and double the number of grains for each succeeding square. The emperor happily agreed to what he thought was a modest reward. It turned out that by the 64th square the inventor had earned nine quintillion grains of rice (that’s nine million trillion), equivalent to over six trillion 50-kilo bags of rice, enough to cover all of India with bags of rice.

The power of exponential growth is essentially why ideas like immersive virtual reality environments, artificially intelligent systems, autonomous vehicles and multi-planetary humans are slowly but surely moving from science fiction to science fact. In many areas, these innovations are already being realised. As cyberpunk science fiction writer William Gibson famously noted, ‘The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed’.

What this means

Let’s put science fiction aside for a second.

Twenty-five years ago, if someone had told you that you could enter a query into a computer form and generate an archive of thousands of results within a split second, you probably would have imagined it was some kind of magic box descended from the heavens (or perhaps from the fires of hell, depending on your religious persuasion). The more logical among you might have guessed that the trick involved a ‘really big hard drive’, rather than a search algorithm that effectively queries every indexed website in the world.

The search algorithm determines relevance before presenting you with the best fit-for-purpose results. If it relied purely on search terms, without filtering, you’d probably end up with what we had in the early days, when an innocent search for cars would generate a list of pornographic websites that featured the word ‘cars’ a thousand times over in black text on a black background in order to game the system. You probably wouldn’t understand (any more than most of us do today) how that same search function handles 40 000 queries a second or 3.5 billion queries every single day. Google’s capacity is something we take for granted.

Ten years ago, if someone had told you that you could push a button and within a couple of minutes your own private black car would pull up and take you to your destination, and charge you for it without your having to utter a single word to the driver or hand over any physical payment, you probably would have thought such a thing possible only for card-carrying Freemasons (or, for fans of The Simpsons, the Stonecutters). As an aside, I don’t advocate not speaking to Uber drivers. I’ve had many fascinating conversations with them. On one occasion, I learned that my driver had escaped a detention camp in Iraq in a flurry of bullets, made for a camp in Saudi Arabia, and eventually claimed refugee status and safe passage to Australia.

Today we take ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft or China’s Didi Chuxing for granted, so much so that if the estimated wait time is longer than five minutes, we get annoyed. Damned annoyed! Infuriated even, though of course I’m not talking about myself.

For better or worse, Facebook’s tentacles reach deep into many aspects of our lives, yet 12 years ago it was nothing more than a rather crude idea emanating from a Harvard college dorm room.

Today these things are a part of life. On average, each day we check our smartphone more than 80 times and spend more than 145 minutes engaged with our phone. We take Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media for granted, as we do video calls to our friends on the other side of the world.

Moore’s law underpins this rapid change. It paved the way for the web, cloud computing, smartphones, connected devices, and game-changing platforms like Amazon and Google. It has changed the way we connect, consume and learn. And settle disagreements: ‘Hey, Google … ?’

With these shifts has come massive disruption to incumbent organisations across almost every conceivable industry — and, by extension, to employees and their livelihoods. Historically, though, each wave of innovation ultimately created more jobs than it destroyed. The first industrial revolution gave us machines, chemical manufacturing, iron production, steam power and the factory system, giving rise to entirely new industries. The second industrial revolution gave us steel, petroleum, automobiles, mass production and the transition to electric power. Today the third industrial revolution has given us computers and the internet, new sources of energy and vast improvements in productivity, all helping to reduce the cost of producing and distributing goods and services virtually to zero. The total number of ‘things’ (including physical devices, software and electronic sensors) connected to the internet (IoT) is projected to reach 21 billion by 2020. Increasingly, this is changing the way we interact with our surroundings and even with each other.

Productivity is indeed increasing, However, median household income in the United States has stagnated since the turn of the century and in ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1 The future is here
• Chapter 2 Collecting the dots
• Chapter 3 Finding your why
• Chapter 4 Embracing your what
• Chapter 5 An entrepreneurial mindset
• Chapter 6 Taking action
• Chapter 7 Knowing your how
• Chapter 8 Testing your ideas
• Chapter 9 Strengths and weaknesses
• Chapter 10 10× your output
• Chapter 11 Power up!
• Final thoughts
• Index
• EULA