The Relationship Between Experience and Hardship
By: Josh Felber
Tags: Making Bank, Joshfelber, Entrepreneur, Podcasting, Jeremyslate

with guest Jeremy Ryan Slate #MakingBank S5E26

The great thing about being an entrepreneur/working in business is that you don’t always have to have a background in actual business. Business is creating, communicating, producing, and much more than just beyond the company itself. Working with people and using your own experiences, combined with other practices, can sometimes teach you more than a classroom ever could. In the end, success is not solely based on what you went to school to do.

Take Jeremy Slate, founder of Create Your Own Life Podcast, the latest guest on Making Bank, for example. After studying at Oxford University for Literature and being a former champion powerlifter, Jeremy turned into a new media entrepreneur. Today, he has a podcast that teaches people about leadership and new media techniques.

From being a teacher to starting a company and barely having enough money to support himself, Jeremy is wildly successful with his podcast and aims to help fellow entrepreneurs. Learn about how he found his business through his entrepreneurship journey and how he managed to push through his hardships.

Finding the Way to the Business

When it came to finding out what he wanted to do with his life, Jeremy didn’t know what he was doing right after college. Trying to find a job became hard after graduation because he had a master’s degree, and he felt overqualified for some jobs and underqualified for others because of the lack of experience. “At night I was managing a gym and during the day I was painting houses…so I was doing that like 18 hours of the day for the first year out of school.”

Eventually, his journey led him to teach. While doing this, he realized how quickly he was getting burnt out. Not only was he tired, but he wasn’t enjoying what he was doing. Once there isn’t joy in what you’re doing, it makes it ten times more difficult to do that actual job. When his wife saw a network marketing opportunity, he grabbed it — starting his entrepreneur life. For two years, he sold life insurance. Eventually, he worked with Amazon, working in private labeling. Despite liking these jobs, he knew they weren’t for him.

All of these separate steps led him to his job now. Jeremy was interested in websites, blogs, and podcasts. Teaching himself how to write CSS and HTML, he trained himself with the skills he needed to get started with his show and website. After his first half-hearted attempt at making podcasts (which he quit about 60 days in), he ended up with Create Your Own Life a few years later, which took off.

“We had 10,000 listens on our first 30 days. And it led to me interviewing a lot of incredible people, like former CIA director, etc…[they] were like, ‘hey, we don’t like starting a podcast. We like to go on some shows.’ And that’s where the whole company concept and everything else came from.”

Jeremy felt like he was finally doing something that he was meant to do with his podcast and website. Finally, things clicked for him. He was enjoying his guests and where the company was going and saw great success. Before he knew it, his wife and he were booking people onto great shows, while also training them how to deal with media.

Dealing with Hardship

Although Jeremy realized that he was succeeding and creating the business that he wanted, that didn’t always mean it was easy. After the first big high, he recognized that he was facing a low.

“We made over six figures in our first nine months in business. It was great. But then we had a lot of internal disagreements [that] ended and the crazy part was like trying to figure it all out. I didn’t mean money for three months,” Jeremy talks about the struggles.

When he was at this point, Jeremy took other jobs and used the money he made to pay the people that he’d hired. At this point, Jeremy describes it as basically starting at ground zero, even after the experience. His main priority was keeping his team on board and moving forward, despite the hardship. If there was one thing that what keeping him going, it was the people that he surrounded himself with, and that helped him move forward.

During this time, Jeremy reflects on how easy it would’ve been to throw in the towel and look for a 9 to 5 job. With essentially no background, Jeremy and his wife were relentless and persevered to keep going.

It was a journey to get to the mindset, but Jeremy didn’t let himself give it up. Pushing forward with his decisions and working harder to make sure that everything would be okay, he managed to turn his company towards success rather than struggle. In the end, that allowed him to create his brand better than ever. It turns out, all of his experience and hardships built him up into the successful entrepreneur that he is today.