Exploring Resilience and Adaptability in the World of Outside Sales | SOS Ep. 335

The Surviving Outside Sales podcast, hosted by Michael Kelly, presented by Sales Builder Academy. The goal is to survive and thrive all phases of outside sales, whether you're getting in, dominating or getting out. Surviving Outside Sales. Now on with the show To the Surviving Outside Sales podcast. I'm your host, mike O'Kelly.

Hopefully everybody is getting recharged, going on vacations before the kiddos go back to school, making those last minute plans for summer, as we are halfway through August Now. What that also means is we're halfway through the third quarter and it feels as if this quarter has been flying by. It also feels like this year has been flying by. So this week and today, another biopharmaceutical company has laid off their entire sales organization. I have just misplaced the name of this company, but this morning I saw a post from a sales director who said the entire commercial team had been let go. Hundreds of sales professionals let go. This is your wake up call.

Okay, a W2 position is not going to get you where you want to get in life. All right, maybe for three to five to 10% of the people. That means nine out of 10 people are going to experience what a lot of people have been experiencing lately, which is layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, reorganization. You have to protect yourself. You have to insulate yourself. It is time to get off of the sidelines and get into the game. Okay, there is something that you do that you can make money off of in your spare time. There is a skill set that you have that you can make money on your spare time. There's an ability that you have that you can make money in your spare time. You start to build that up and it alleviates the pressure. If I'm going to stop actually I'm going to stop using the word if, when your W2 position is taken away from you, you will be better prepared for what lies ahead. With everything that's happening with the economy, with everything's happening with the dollar, you have to prepare and build multiple streams of income. You are not going to get where you want to go by making $150,000 a year. I don't care if it's $200,000. I don't care if it's $100,000. You're not going to get to where you want to go in life anymore. Interest rates through the roof. Have you noticed? Gas prices are almost $4 a gallon. I noticed that none of the media is talking about it. Gas prices through the roof. Okay, everything is much more expensive. It is absolutely amazing to me how expensive things have gotten. So you can just complain about it or you can do something about it. You can take action.

You can create things in the beginning that people call side hustles. Now the reason why I don't use the word side hustle is because a side hustle is something that you do on the side, but it's not something that could be necessarily scalable. For instance, when I decided to go out onto my own, there was a lot of months that I drove Uber. I drove Uber for about nine months, nights and weekends. I'd work all day trying to build up my businesses and then I drove Uber. I practiced what I preached. Uber completely changed the way that they pay drivers, so I moved on to other side hustles.

I also got too busy in my coaching business getting ready to open the restore hyper-wellness. I don't have the bandwidth to do that anymore and it's not worth my time, but it was one of those things where I took big swings and I was like you know what? I just need an extra $1,000, $2,000 a month. How and when can I use it? So I started driving Uber on nights and weekends and I would drive from, like you know, seven o'clock to 10.30 or 10 o'clock, a couple hours, and make about $100. And I would do this a couple days during the week because once my kids went down for bath, or once my kids did bath and then my youngest daughter would go down. I mean, yeah, I'd missed a little bit of time with my oldest daughter, but other than that I was just sitting around spending time with my wife, chit-chatting, et cetera, and I said, well, I can go out and make some money, I can go out and just assist what I can, and outside sales I'm used to being behind the wheel. Now that's a side hustle.

Driving for Uber is a side hustle. Let me ask you real quick how many of you have driven for Uber? How many of you have gone out there and tried to make money in various ways? I did it just because I wanted to trade my time for money, because I had extra time and I didn't necessarily know what I was going to do. Now I've got my website, I've got courses. I've got Scout and Seller. There's our sales technology company. I've got my corporate clients, my coaching students. Now I've built things that occupy my time.

But back then I didn't have it. I was debating which franchise to buy. I was consulting with a couple companies and I wasn't quite sure the direction that I wanted to go. But I wanted more money and actually over a nine month period, I made about $40,000, driving Uber. Now I will tell you, on Friday and Saturday nights I worked probably six, eight hours, because that's where the money was made. I could make five, six hundred bucks a night and that's real money. That's real money when you do it, you know. Friday, saturday, you know. Plus, uber used to have crazy bonuses for volume driving and they took all those away. So guess what happens? Just like an incentive plan, you take away incentives. People stop doing the things that you want them to do.

My point being is that is a side hustle. I can't scale with Uber. Okay, I have to physically be out there for hours and hours and hours. So what I decided was I need to figure out ways where I can replicate myself, and I suggest the same thing to people when they ask me what should I be doing in the beginning? Just figure out how to make ends meet or figure out how to just get that side hustle so you can invest in certain things.

Now, uber was one of them. I did before Uber. I tried to. You know you can recharge the scooters. You basically can pick up the scooters in the app and move them to other parts of the city and you get paid like twenty, forty dollars or something crazy for doing that. And I tried doing that, but the scooters were super heavy and not many fit into my car, the back of my car. At the end most, I think I get like six in the back of my car, and so if you just took them back to get recharged, you only got like five bucks and I was like, yeah, I did that for like two weekends, that's all. My wife was like it's just not worth my time. So that's when I decided to go down the Uber route.

But first of all, what you have to do is you have to realize that things are going to change in your life. If you're going to pick up something, you're going to pick up a new project, you have to realize you're going to have less time to do the Netflix. You're going to have less time to, you know, sit around and drink wine or drink beers, or, you know, spend time with your loved ones, but it's not long term. Okay, it's not long term. I want you to think of this as a short term investment, when I mean short term, between six to 12 months, maybe 18, if you really have to stretch it. Short term, short term pain for long term gain.

Driving Uber afforded me the opportunity to pay for my website. It afforded me the opportunity to figure out and kind of buy time so I could figure out and create my plan behind the scenes. That's all the Uber was. I was buying time so bills could be paid, mortgage could be paid, daycare could be paid while I was building other things that were not ready to be monetized. That is what you need to think about and that's how you need to think about things. I wasn't going to be an Uber driver for life, but I was like, hey, very low barrier to entry, everything's done on the app. I've got an automobile. I'm used to driving because I was an outside sales professional and I drove almost 600,000 miles in my career. I'm a road warrior. I know how to talk to people. I know the city of Charlotte like the back of my hand. This is perfect. But then, when it wasn't perfect for me anymore it didn't fit my schedule I stopped doing it.

Point being is it's time to take action and figure out what your thing is. Everybody has a thing that they could be doing and they could be learning and they could be building. A lot of times you have to have somebody help you pull it out of you. I didn't think a couple of years ago I was going to be a sales coach. I had a mentor who pulled it out of me. He said you know what? I think you'd be really great at this because you've got a lot of stories to share. You have a lot of passion and you're very good at laying down steps that people can follow. So it's time for you right now, if you're listening, you have to start thinking about your future plans.

Just working your main job there's no. That's too risky. That's like walking around in life without car insurance, without health insurance, without life insurance. Yeah, something might not happen, but it's going to be catastrophic if it does and you're not protected. Protect yourself. Build something up. If you want help to build out, I can help you with that. It's called sales escape plan. I can walk you through that. See you on LinkedIn or go to Mikeokellycom and then connect with me and let's have a conversation and see if I might be able to help you. Please download the episode, share what you'd like my individual and thank you so much for listening to Surviving Outside Sales. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.