Scott Clary is the host of the “Success Story” podcast, where he has candid conversations with the most prolific business & thought leaders in the world. In this episode, he tells Moshe why – when it comes to building and scaling your business – the more BORING it is, the better!

Why he started his podcast:

“When I started my podcast, I had this idea of how do I future proof myself? In my mind. I was like, well, whatever I do in the future, why not build an audience before I need them? Why not build an audience that eventually, if I want to start a new company, I can do that. If I want to do coaching and consulting … I have an audience there. That could be customers. If I want to get a job, well, what if I come with an audience built in? So, it was just future proofing. That’s really all it was.”

Passion projects are great, but they need to make money:

“You can’t just say, I’m doing a passion project and not figure out how to drive revenue. Any passion project, any hobby, can turn into a business. You just have to find the KPIs or the leading indicators that are indicative of eventual revenue. So for me, I thought, okay, I’m going to start this. How do I grow it? How do I increase my downloads, my subscribers, my viewers, my followers, my listens, whatever metric you want to track? … And over time you’ll figure out what that metric is, and then how to tie revenue back to that.”

When to quit your 9-5 and go “all in” on your project:

“Of course, you do have to focus on revenue. That’s the lifeblood of business, but if you can find a way to do it for a long enough period of time, you will find a way to turn that idea into revenue. The version of entrepreneurship that I hate is when you quit your job and you have three months of money in the bank account, and you are rushing to make it work.

That’s why I like anybody who asks, you know, should I start a business? Yeah, go for it. But don’t quit your nine to five yet. Figure out how to make it work. Figure out how to test things where you’re not going to miss a mortgage payment or a rent payment or not be able to put food on the table. Because when you operate in that environment where you’re able to continue testing, you know, indefinitely, you’re going to find a way to make that thing eventually work.”

Why a boring business is better than a sexy one:

“First of all, I think the business that I’m building as a podcaster, it’s a stupid business to get into. Why is that? Because it’s a vanity business. It’s sexy, it’s exciting. What does that mean? That attracts a lot of competition. … Don’t build a vanity business. Don’t build something that’s fun and exciting, because everybody wants to do it.

But if you do something like you want to find a way to clean toilets in a commercial capacity, you probably don’t start off there. You probably start off doing it yourself and you build a business around it. Paper, glass for new home development, these are not sexy vanity businesses.

Even if you think about where to pursue a career, what’s easier: to make a lot of money as an employee or a founder of an AI company when everyone’s building AI companies or just go into some really boring type of law?

Think about who makes money in acting or sports or podcasting. It’s like the top 0.01%. But, If you look at not just the top 0.01%, but the top 10% of people that own landscaping businesses, or top 10% of people that own toilet cleaning businesses, or top 10% of people that are personal injury attorneys, they’re all flying private.”

Confidence is critical when starting a business:

“Confidence is extremely important in business. And if you, if you don’t have any, you have to find a way to go get some. You have to find a way to track how you’ve been successful before and use that confidence to push you forward.

Why is it important? Because in the first few episodes, I was shooting way out of my league. In the first few episodes, I interviewed Robert Kiyosaki, Anthony Scaramucci, Grant Cardone. These are guys that, candidly I was scared. But I just called and emailed and some of them said yes.

Then, I had to figure out how to interview these guys. So, the first few episodes I was horrified. … For me, anything that I’ve done that’s worked out, I’ve tied it back to being super uncomfortable and scared when I first started yet doing it anyways.”