Part 6 – How to Create a Positive Remote Culture and Finding Job Security

Follow the transcript:

Joshua Aguirre  00:08

Why did I start this in the first place? Terrified that I was going to lose my arm. They’re afraid of not having that strong vision, challenging themselves in such a deep way, because that’s when you find the most scary things about yourself.

Valery Aguirre  00:28

Welcome back. I’m Valerie and I’m with my co host, Hilary, say, Hey,

Hillary Merwin  00:33

hello.

Valery Aguirre  00:36

My enthusiasm was like at a nine you were like at a two.

Hillary Merwin  00:39

I felt like your enthusiasm was really high. So I was trying to bring it down. No, I’m kidding. Hi. Good to be back. We’re here with Joshua. Gosh, are you in a different room? I know.

Valery Aguirre  00:51

He’s like in the background. It’s all good. It’s all good. Well, anyways, we hope you enjoyed our last few alt episodes. Pretty soon we’re going to be jumping back into Josh’s story. But yeah, we

Hillary Merwin  01:02

talked to a friend James or friends Aaron. They’re both freelance rockstars a lot of good advice. I missed you. Oh, I’ve

Valery Aguirre  01:09

been missing you so much.

Hillary Merwin  01:11

It’s so good to be back.

Valery Aguirre  01:13

I know. It’s really exciting, especially after a couple of Ault. episodes that we have are hopefully exciting to the audience. But yeah,

Hillary Merwin  01:19

let us know what you thought about we’ll we’re the plan was to do shorter form episodes. I think that wound up being like 30 minutes, but we got to talk to some of our friends who are doing some cool stuff. Yeah, it was great to talk with Aaron too, in our last episode, just getting real, real about the real about the challenges. Because we don’t want to beat around the bush. It’s not easy. But we’re here to encourage you. That’s what this podcast is all about. To encourage you to pursue your passion monetize what it is you love and to be able to make a living from that. So we’re getting back into Joshua’s story. So we took a break for some of those all two episodes, but where we last left the story where we lastly the bell,

Valery Aguirre  01:59

I know there is some tension in the media group you were working at because you had a lot of personal things happening in your personal life with your mom.

Joshua Aguirre  02:09

Yeah. And there was there was also some tension between us.

Valery Aguirre  02:12

Wait, who’s us with Hill? That is surprising? Coming up in a bit.

Hillary Merwin  02:16

All right. But yeah, I know. Thank you for being open about talking about that situation with your mom, Josh. I know we’re gonna get more into that today. Kind of what happened after that incident. And, yeah, we also talked about the importance of building a healthy culture and how you didn’t feel super supported in the company culture where you were at when you were dealing with this highly personal issue. Also, we got granular ill grows I hate that word. But we talked about some practical ways to build a healthy culture. I haven’t here my notes, let me read them creating a vision time management. We’re gonna get more into that today. setting intentions, we talked about how to make every morning Christmas morning. And we talked about the difference between time consuming tasks and energy drains, and also how to give your team permission and incentives to innovate. So if you didn’t listen that episode, that was episode six, jump back, listen to that one, and then meet us back here. So yeah, I think that about wraps it up so we get into it to the story or what know about I’m cut to the clip. Inspiration for the next steps we take in life can come from many places. A motivational TED Talk, a friend’s vice of vivid dream, or inspiration can stem from a feeling of helplessness hardship, of seeing a need in the world and struggling to find a way to fix it. On today’s episode, we’ll continue to explore Joshua’s story, his mom’s struggle to find stability, and how his desire to help her translates into something bigger, more impactful. This next endeavor we discussed today, Joshua, starting a nonprofit might seem unrelated to the rest, but it’s not just as a refresher, we follow Joshua’s entrepreneurial journey from the spark of an idea to create a community of freelancers in Bend slabs to the soon to be ending nine to five at a media company, spoiler alert. And now a nonprofit will see how this hodgepodge of business ventures feed into one another, how one can achieve financial stability and social impact with enough vision and bootstrapping hardware, and will show how this freedom to adapt and build new things in response to life’s twists and turns. That’s just one of the many benefits of being an entrepreneur. Our circumstances and passions can directly speak into the initiatives we choose to create and pursue if we’re willing to work hard enough to see them come to fruition. So let’s jump back in. We left Joshua at a low point, while struggling to help his mom find stability. He was losing the motivation to invest in his business during his free time.

Joshua Aguirre  04:53

It was really hard to focus on anything other than getting my mom to care she needed

Hillary Merwin  04:57

after going in and out of emergency care, the hospital Oh finally provided his mom temporary housing. Unfortunately, the new situation was less than ideal. Joshua’s mom was sent to Pine Hills, which the locals callously referred to as crying hills, feeling helpless and navigating a confusing system, Josh was sensed he had hit a wall, my mom

Joshua Aguirre  05:17

didn’t have a will to live, the system wasn’t cut out for that situation. So people like her just fall through the cracks. And I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Hillary Merwin  05:28

Now, all he felt he could do was be there for his mom is to support and pray that she would get better. In the meantime, his focus began to return. And with it a new sense of pain and purpose. And that’s when he connected the dots.

Joshua Aguirre  05:42

There was a pain inside of me that was bigger than I could comprehend. And I needed to, to do something with that energy. So I felt like this calling to help people that were homeless on the streets. And I was in downtown Orlando, and I saw, like a number of individuals experiencing homelessness there. And my brain clicked for first time in my life where I said to myself, like, I know where my mom is at in this house halfway house, I know that there’s these people struggling in the streets. And I felt like, why am I going to worry about what car I’m gonna buy next. If there’s people struggling right in front of me that I can help. And it was a revolutionary moment in my life that I realized that all all business, all entrepreneurial ventures that I have, should be directed at social impact. And helping people like my mom, like these people that were in front of me,

Hillary Merwin  06:54

it wasn’t a coincidence that Joshua felt a sudden desire to serve. It was in his DNA. My mom

Joshua Aguirre  06:59

was very big and serving, she taught me a lot about like, how to care for people and always took people inside the home and prayed for people. And I loved watching her do that, because it showed me that she had such a big heart for other people. And that I can have that heart to my then girlfriend at the time, and I decided to do some some outreaches

07:22

we want to buy a whole bunch of food sandwiches in this case, and hand them out to people that needed them. All after the fact. We were told, that will be legal, we can’t do that you need permits, you need to be an organization, we needed to have that emotional control.

Hillary Merwin  07:40

And so the adventure began to build his first nonprofit, where to start, Joshua took the advice of his mentor, James, just Google it

07:49

zero experience. It was a lot of Googling, trying to figure out what’s out there just researcher, it’s not like a super simple, but as long as computers, go through different websites and pay a whole bunch of money so that professionals could do it for you. But it’s a little simpler than that. Once you take away like that intimidating factor that it’s, you know, 501 c three tax exemption, and it was all haul you know what happened, Robert, quickly, way quicker than the typical, usually, you put in about requests to be level 123. And it could take months. It was like record time. Sometimes I feel silly sitting here, but it was like nine days later.

Hillary Merwin  08:36

That’s interesting. i It makes me wonder like, because I’m definitely the type of person who wouldn’t trust myself to google it and think that I’m doing all the steps correctly. I mean, obviously, that’s why their services but you guys figured out a way around that. Was there ever any like fear that Oh, what if we missed a step or

08:55

of paperwork, you miss one period or hyphen or something a letter wrong and it’s like you get denied. But there was a lot of well, we don’t know, we don’t know what’s sort of figured out trooping forward,

Hillary Merwin  09:07

this laid the groundwork for what they would eventually call the Joshua wave

Joshua Aguirre  09:11

named after Joshua and the Bible, because he was a great leader. And the wave actually comes from a book that I read, called the wave. And the connotation of the book isn’t that great, but the concept of a collective of people who are moving in unison with each other to some sort of greater good, is kind of what I was trying to pull from that and I felt that the wave of change was something that needed to be really embraced as as one person helps another that person will help to more people

Hillary Merwin  09:51

and, and so began the early days of their nonprofit, and the team slowly grew. You might be thinking at this point, how to Joshua have so much time to dedicate At the side hustles there are only so many hours after the work day to hustle. Well about that. To make a long story short, tensions with the media group were still high. Josh was trusting his supervisors never really bounced back after being told to leave his personal problems at home. Eventually unresolved tensions mistrust and a quick lapse of judgment led to Joshua getting fired,

Joshua Aguirre  10:23

was such a an unexpected thing to happen to me, because I’ve been always like, at the top of my game with careers that the bosses loved me and to get fired, because of something that I did was very out of character for me, and blame it on like, what I was going through, blame it on, you know, distractions or whatever, like it still my fault. And still I still take accountability for the decisions that I made. I was also really taken aback by like that, that feeling of losing my only revenue stream. And what I realized in that moment is, you know, I have these side hustles that weren’t fully ramped up yet. But Job security in a nine to five isn’t really real. And what makes job security really tangible is having multiple streams of income, multiple businesses that you can rely on to support you when one business falls out.

Hillary Merwin  11:21

So you could say he was a free agent now with more than enough time to invest in his budding ventures. So what was the next step, after googling how to start a nonprofit, he worked to understand the needs of the community, do research and build a team starting with his then girlfriend, looking back at the situation with your boss at the media group now, having all this experience under your belt as a business owner? How do you perceive that situation now in this idea of job security

Joshua Aguirre  11:50

organizations today are learning how to reinvent job security. Because in the past, in corporate environments, it’s an illusion, you know, you don’t really have job security when you’re working for one company, because that company cares about numbers. And if you’re impacting those numbers, you’re not producing the results that you were hired for. And it’s very cold and mechanical,

Valery Aguirre  12:19

right? You think you’re like, indispensable, because you do well, and you show up and you’re doing a good job. But the reality is, you quickly got fired because you had trauma and personal stuff.

Hillary Merwin  12:30

Because as humans, we’re not always going to be at the top of our game, right? And there’s some people that can maybe push through for a little longer, but at some point, you’re going to break and you’re not going to be at 100%. And so it’s like, are you in a culture that’s safe? That’s going to recognize like emergencies? Yeah. And like, Josh has been this really amazing worker, he’s going through a hard time, we know he’ll bounce back. But right now, maybe he needs some time, some time and support,

Valery Aguirre  12:55

and you didn’t get that clearly. Right. So do that fire something in you? Well, I

Joshua Aguirre  13:00

think in hindsight, it made me realize that there’s two types of organizations, there’s that cold mechanical organization that works like an engine, and you need to feed it the right fuel. And if you accidentally put some water in the engine, you’ll blow the engine apart, right? Because it’s not working the same way. And then there’s these new types of organizations that operate more like organisms, and they’re fluid. And culture is a huge part of that. So if you look at your own organization, or you look at your freelance career, and you say, how do I want to build mine, you want to put a big emphasis on culture, because, you know, humans are complicated beings, and they don’t operate mechanically, and you can’t expect everything, to go perfectly all the time. And to base things solely in results. It has to be based in like, the way that the organization is utilizing the people. And are the people intrinsically motivated? Are they? Are they caring about the company, because I genuinely cared about the company. But I had something going on that was bigger than the world right now. And I needed to put my attention focus to that.

Valery Aguirre  14:23

You did mention getting, like, intrinsically motivated, like, how does that even happen? For like just an employee? How do you get intrinsically motivated?

Joshua Aguirre  14:34

I think it’s a matter of like, understanding what interests you and then pursuing those interests in your career. And I don’t think that a lot of people do that. I think they’re, you know, especially the way that they’re raised. They’re going after what their parents want them to go in or what society is telling them is going to be a profitable industry. And they might find things they like about those jobs and can etc, those interests, but they’re really trying to build interests around something that is extrinsically motivated.

Valery Aguirre  15:09

What do you mean by that?

Joshua Aguirre  15:10

So, if I’m extrinsically motivated for money, for success, material success, then I’m naturally going to look for things that I can justify as interests for that extrinsic motivator, like meaning money, yeah, well, no, I’m, I’m meaning like, well, I like, you know, in my job that I work with some cool people. You know, I’m trying to justify the intrinsic motivators support, the extrinsic motivation of loving money.

Hillary Merwin  15:43

So how is this emphasis on culture that was kind of inspired by this hardest situation you went through? How has that shaped you as a business owner and the way that you run your company?

Joshua Aguirre  15:55

Well, I think that it’s operating more like an organism instead of a bureaucratic machine. And, I mean, yeah, there are like, you know, gears and components to the machine have to be the organization, you still expect that if the people are still doing the job, that you’re gonna produce some results. And, and there’s that, you know, if this then that kind of formula that that flows throughout business. But I think putting an emphasis on the first pillar of a successful business, being culture allows you to set yourself apart from competitors, that value the customer is the most important thing. And if the customer is the most important thing, always, then you’re never going to build a team, because the team will never feel more important than the bottom line.

Hillary Merwin  16:48

Yeah, I feel like this is really relevant. Now. I don’t know if at the release of this podcast, but this episode, but with this great resignation, like employers can’t afford to not focus on culture now. Because as a generation, maybe it’s Millennials Gen Z years, where we’re looking for that place that’s going to allow us to, or like, we’re not going to put up with being treated like machines, right? Because there’s other options, we can freelance, we can gig, there’s like this whole gig culture and and so I think employers now are like scrambling to understand how to create a healthy culture in their companies. Whereas before, you could kind of get away with just this toxic culture and and I think now to be a successful company, you have to understand how to make people feel. Maybe not safe, because it’s, it’s no one’s responsibility to give you a job security, in a sense, like, but yeah, to help them feel not like a number, but not like a number. So yeah, do their best and work at their fullest, like fullest capacity.

Joshua Aguirre  18:01

Right? Yeah. And I think it’s worth speaking about remote culture versus in person culture, because when the great resignation, and with COVID, you know, more people are having to work hybrid. And the sense that we get from our clients as they don’t want their team to work remotely, because they don’t know if they’re doing their job. And the more resistant they are to that the more people jump ship, which makes sense. And then for the employee that is working remotely, they feel like such a disconnect from the culture because there’s not like good systems and tools in place. And I think for a long time, we’ve worked on how to build culture in a remote work environments, because it’s such a difficult, abstract concept to obtain, but really is grounded in the way that you are ritualistically touching base with your team, the types of meetings that you have with your team, being personable and not just focusing on the work at hand, but focusing on the person and what they’re going through. And, you know, how how you can be assisting in those areas that are more personal, you know, because if we’re only focusing on business, only focusing on this machine, and this new organism of remote work, then people feel like okay, well, I’m not intrinsically motivated to be in this machine, and I’m in front of my kids or my spouse every day and, and I see why life is important, right? Everybody is waking up to that because of COVID. So if you’re going to compete with the realities of living in life, you need to compete on the same level and that means you need to Bring, bring reality and love and life to your business in a remote work environment,

Hillary Merwin  20:09

can you that’s really valuable? Because I think, yeah, when it’s remote, there’s new challenges. But there’s also new opportunities to be able to do more, I think I think it’s the people that are innovating are the ones that are able to, like inspire remote workers to be part of a culture, can you give some, like practical ways that you’ve done that, like some practical examples of how to put culture first

Joshua Aguirre  20:32

step one would be having regular meetings with your team, and giving them a space or a platform to be able to connect with you on a one on one basis to share any types of concerns like opening up bilateral feedback. So step one is meetings, group and

Valery Aguirre  20:56

individual when you say meetings, let’s be honest, that sounds very like corporate like, Oh, what a waste of time.

Hillary Merwin  21:02

There’s one more remote happy hour. I’m gonna.

Valery Aguirre  21:05

Yeah, like flip. Yeah. So study make

Hillary Merwin  21:07

those engaging? Yeah.

Joshua Aguirre  21:10

So I focus on less group meetings, but more intentional short group meetings.

Valery Aguirre  21:15

I think it’s the word meetings that’s really bothering me. What about like, gatherings? Or just like?

Hillary Merwin  21:21

No, but then you get into like business jargon. Circling back, checking in checking,

Joshua Aguirre  21:27

checking open offices.

Valery Aguirre  21:28

Okay. That’s right. I like it.

Joshua Aguirre  21:30

So we have like open offices where, you know, one of our team members will just open up a Slack call. Or if you use Microsoft Teams, you know, just open up a call that anybody can jump into.

Hillary Merwin  21:41

We insert the story here. We’re Val, jumped into an open office call doesn’t always go as planned.

Valery Aguirre  21:49

Okay, so you paint the picture, picture Akron. So there’s a new team member on Slack. And I saw it was open office that one of like, the veterans opened up. So I was like, Oh, let me just

Hillary Merwin  22:01

like, All right, we’ll call on see the call was open. It was labeled open open.

Valery Aguirre  22:06

It was in the general channel, I think. So that usually means you could just go ahead and everything’s dandy, right? Nothing’s private is what I’m trying to say. So I Oh, and I see that there’s a few people that I obviously already know, Joshua and a few other members, right? The only new person, there’s only one new person, I’m rambling. So we’re gonna cut this down. I go in, and I quickly realize everyone’s video is off, except the two main people that are speaking. And it so happened to be in another language. So I was like, and it sounded very businessy. And usually, those calls are very casual, and you’re just hanging out. So I was like, oh, man, what if they accidentally open it in the wrong channel, I quickly reacted, and I was like, You saw my face, no reaction, smiling. So with a smile. On your camera, I entered in a video chat with my smile, and two seconds later, I exited. It’s basically like me entering like a conference room, like I open it and like, and closing the door. Apparently, there’s like a whole thing now where it’s like, people go into video calls and quickly get out because they pull a Valerie.

Hillary Merwin  23:20

And now every time you label like a call, like Open Office, anyone can come in, we promise this chill. Sign out right away, just like the description that you have to write. Alright, so

Joshua Aguirre  23:31

step two,

Valery Aguirre  23:32

step two of another way to improve culture, right?

Hillary Merwin  23:36

Bilateral feedback.

Joshua Aguirre  23:40

So So bilateral feedback, I think there’s something to creating a space where your team can have one on one sessions with you. And they can give you ways to improve the company, they can feel like their voices heard. And you can use that opportunity to give them feedback on how their performance is. It’s not like a performance review, like you would think of like 90 day evaluation. It’s more of like a friend talking to a friend and trying to figure out ways to improve each other.

Valery Aguirre  24:17

So when you say bilateral feedback, you’re really talking about like management is chatting with someone other than management. And that person could actually give management some advice like yeah,

Joshua Aguirre  24:27

for me, I see it as like one freelancer to another. Here’s how to improve your service got it. True, true. True. And I think that that is the way that we’re going in the future, you know, to try to build each other up, build each other up into business owners, and everybody has something unique about them that can be monetized. That’s what I believe. And so if they’re using their passion to help further my business, I want to use my passion to further their business. Case in point I had A an interview with somebody which got cancelled. Because he, he’s from El Salvador. And he had a few clients. And he applied for a job that I had open on Upwork. And after he applied, and I said, Okay, let’s schedule the interview, he said, Oh, I no longer need it. I just got fully booked. And I don’t have time, I just want to be honest with you. And after read, like reading his way that he rejected me, I was like, Please, let’s meet, like, I want to meet with you. You don’t have to take a job. But I just want to introduce myself. Why? Well, because in the meeting, when we actually met, it was just sharing a little bit about our culture. And I saw something in him that I see in a lot of our freelancers like potential to grow beyond. And I saw that in him. And the way that he replied, to me about this being honest, because most, most freelancers will take on more than they can handle. And so they get terrible at communication. I have a lot of respect for the freelancer who says, nope, my quality hits its limit here, this is where I want to stay at. And I’ll fight to get that freelancer. So I said, I’m not offering you a job yet. In fact, we already hired the position that I was interviewing you for. But I want to help you going forward to build up your Freelancer profile to help you improve your LinkedIn to help you do that. So I’m gonna give you my personal Calendly link. And you can book me anytime that you want, free of charge. And I’ll use my experience to help further your career. And this isn’t a way for me to buy your loyalty because I can see the potential that you have, and I want to work with you someday. And by the end of the call, he was asking me for a job. He was like, Well, I can work like I can do it like, and then he was like, Well, before I let you go, like I asked you I actually have had a pain point with a customer. This is how it happened. And so the immediate feedback started, I started telling them like how to go about it. I shared my screen and taught them how to research and the pet owner tools and all of that stuff. So

Valery Aguirre  27:04

we’ll come back to the what Petco and

Joshua Aguirre  27:07

so I could see he was already understanding the value that our culture provides. And I think those, those environments are created over time over consistency of like, really appreciating and loving each one of your team members and finding ways to improve their life.

Valery Aguirre  27:27

Yeah, like authentically, because I feel like everyone could say that. And it’s like, yeah, we’re a family. We love each other. And it’s like, but I want to go, deuces gotta do my own personal thing that’s more important. In reality, gosh,

Hillary Merwin  27:37

no experience with that. Insert sarcastic. Oh,

Valery Aguirre  27:48

that was my actual laugh.

Hillary Merwin  27:51

What was your work during that time? What were you doing? What were the businesses you were starting next to the Joshua wave.

Joshua Aguirre  27:56

So I started the nonprofit in 2014. And, you know, that was just, you know, gathering a group of people that were going to be chasing this vision of helping others and doing it in a transparent way. But I also was working on another venture of creating a freelancer marketplace competing with like Upwork or oDesk at the time. And then I felt like, Okay, I need something to actually generate short term revenue. So, you know, we created this company, I came up with a name, but we, we were running it, I was running it with my brother and another business partner of mine, Andrew, and I went to their house and brought a presentation and a whiteboard and presented them this idea of starting a company called Casio,

28:51

there was a small group of us that were interested in starting a business and lowers like, I don’t know, maybe we got like six or seven people together to a room. And we were like, alright, let’s, let’s start a dropship site. And we narrowed it down to like, handful of products. And then it was like, Alright, this is it, found suppliers watch the website, and that was it.

Valery Aguirre  29:13

What made you want to work with them?

Hillary Merwin  29:16

Yeah, like why the other people bail? I didn’t know there was

29:19

nobody. I think they just realized, like, maybe what had to be timewise had to be invested. And they just weren’t interested. Joshua and I had very like minded goals, you know, of like, creating a passive business. And that’s really how it came down to the three of us.

Hillary Merwin  29:45

Since he hadn’t yet gotten invents the Freelancer marketplace off the ground. He needed something to generate short term revenue. Not the most romantic of beginnings to a new business. But sometimes you just have to start somewhere. Joshua found himself juggling Seeing a nonprofit, for profit and a startup and some freelance gigs on the side. And not to overcomplicate things. But soon the media group eventually hired Joshua back

Joshua Aguirre  30:10

from having like so many things going on. The first thing that I dove into was, how do you manage your time? Well, and I read the book, getting things done, I created my own course on Udemy. And it helped people build time management skills for juggling a lot of things. Because I had the problem of having really good initiatives with too many of them.

Hillary Merwin  30:35

Because it’s a little bit counterintuitive, as an entrepreneur to think of a fast social impact model, like immediately before you’ve kind of established a business. So I wanted to get into like, how are you able to do that? Because that’s mostly when people are like, millionaires are like, oh, yeah, I think I’ll do a social impact. Yeah.

Joshua Aguirre  30:53

Yeah. Because like, what what comes first, the impact or the revenue? It was a feeling of, I have some resources. Now I can help with people right now, in some capacity. Why am I going to worry about what car I’m gonna buy next, when I feel like called to this new, greater purpose through the pain that I experienced with not being able to help them off?

Hillary Merwin  31:18

When the company decided to move operations to South Carolina, bringing the team with them, Joshua and his girlfriend got excited, ready to leave Florida and start a new chapter. But then as companies are prone to do, the media group changed his mind. They were staying in Florida. But Joshua no longer wanted his fate to be decided by a company. So he and his girlfriend packed up the car and decided to move away.

31:44

Actually, we want to know what Airbnb trip to Charlotte. After falling in love. We’ve been packed, u haul

Hillary Merwin  31:52

and left. Okay, now, I mean, it wasn’t gonna reveal that you were the girlfriend till later, but

Valery Aguirre  31:57

you probably booked some time the girlfriend? Hey, audience, you just couldn’t resist? Could you? I mean, it was about to come up. The tension was building it was building. Okay, about then set the story straight. Why is it you wanted to move to Charlotte? We didn’t get the chance to move to South Carolina. When that fell through. Joshua asked me, well, we could always move somewhere without relying on a job to move us. Where are you interested in going in at the time, I was reading, like a couple of Nicholas sparks books, you know, his movies were a hit, you know. So I thought of the Carolinas, I started researching a little bit, we came across Charlotte. And I said, let’s do a little Airbnb and checkout Charlotte.

Joshua Aguirre  32:41

And when we visited for those three days, I was like, hoping to see why I was being called here. And I didn’t see that. But I still felt that calling there. We knew that in order to move up there, we would have to have three months of expenses to kind of hold us over, you know, rent and food and all of that budgeted ahead of time. And I felt like okay, this is something that we can do. But we need to save up for one of the things that I’ve always maintained like materialistic about was my 1988, Toyota Supra twin turbo six speed, I fell in love with that car, and built it with my dad. So I had sentimental reasons for wanting to keep it. And when I felt this call to move there, I read this scripture, it was Matthew 1921, where Jesus said, If you want to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come follow me. And when I read this word, possessions, I immediately thought of my Supra. And I thought like, okay, God’s telling you to do things, something that I do not ever want to do, which is sell my, my baby my car. And I feel like I have to do that. So I put it for sale. And we sold it, this nice guy that came down from Georgia drove five hours to pick up the car. And he paid us almost exactly three months of living expenses, which, you know, convinced us that this is, you know, a God move for us and we decided to, to uproot our lives at that moment and take the leap of faith,

Hillary Merwin  34:28

okay, I’m kind of relieved that we know you’re the girlfriend now so I can stop being unnecessarily mysterious, and we can just now you can help me with the rest of the story.

Valery Aguirre  34:39

Nice, happy to help.

Hillary Merwin  34:41

My pleasure.

Valery Aguirre  34:44

Have it your way.

Joshua Aguirre  34:47

You know, when you move out of that mentality of a nine to five, and you’re trying to get into starting your side, hustle or scaling your side hustle. Typically there’s like 101 things to do. Look, I have a lot of friends who come up, come at me and they’re like, Okay, I’m gonna start a new revenue stream, you know, I want to do this, this and this. And like, my job is to try to help them, you know, find a more narrow niche that’s aligned to their passion. And so when when you find that niche, when you find that passion alignment, in your business model, the next thing to do is like, you maybe narrowed it down from like five things to three things like three different business ideas. Now you have to figure out how to like prioritize those, or how to manage your time to move those forward. So for me, it was like, starting this nonprofit, starting a partnership that was solely about profit generation, and then starting a startup that was more of like a passion project. And so like, I got three things to do, and freelancing. So that’s four things and a nine to five. So that’s five things like how do you balance your time? Now also, your screen, just kind of hair cut

Valery Aguirre  36:00

back to freelancing, but I just gotta

Hillary Merwin  36:02

thank you. What are some practical things you just said? All these things you’re doing now? I feel overwhelmed. What are those practical tools?

Joshua Aguirre  36:10

There’s two different tools that I use. One is coin, the pet bone tool.

Hillary Merwin  36:15

Stick with that. Let’s stick with that. For simplicity.

Valery Aguirre  36:18

Yeah. About that isn’t makeup word? Yes. I really have no idea. Okay, so that’s that

Joshua Aguirre  36:22

stands for purpose. Envision, brainstorm, organize, and the next actions.

Hillary Merwin  36:28

Well, let’s see if we can remember that I heard next

Valery Aguirre  36:31

day and vision. Brainstorm. Oh, oh, killer. No, sorry. I’ve been dealing with ocular migraine. No, not today, though. Not today. Not today. See? Okay, what’s Oh, organization, organize? And then next section. All right, so, okay, so that’s the tool that you created, or that you iterated?

Joshua Aguirre  36:59

Yeah. iterated, learned it from a book that I was reading at the time.

Valery Aguirre  37:03

Yeah, from people that stuff, right, that are smart.

Joshua Aguirre  37:07

So I mean, the idea is, when you’re starting something that you don’t know how to do, before you get into the research, you should identify the purpose behind that task, or objective or project. And that gives you some focus and some clarity on the direction that you want to go. A lot of times people will start with things that aren’t first priority, but they think it they think it reactively, like, like the website or something like the website or the business cards. Yeah, a logo.

Hillary Merwin  37:38

Like you saw, if you’re designing a website, you kind of jump right to the how it’s gonna look, instead of being like, like, what is the purpose of sight? Who is it reaching?

Valery Aguirre  37:47

Right? Okay, so identifying the purpose is key.

Joshua Aguirre  37:50

Yeah, the purpose gives you direction in order to research which is envision, like, you want to figure out what other people are doing in that category. So just slide if your task so

Valery Aguirre  38:03

just like googling what it is that you’re looking for it to look like at the end of it. Yeah, I

Hillary Merwin  38:07

would like an ecommerce website, right on or other website design,

Valery Aguirre  38:11

but practically really like just googling what it can be or what you want it to be sure, like,

Joshua Aguirre  38:16

I mean, in the older days, when I was trying to build like a system that didn’t exist yet, like the am roadmap like I would, I would go to Google and I would search a lot of different types of charts and graphs and different infographics that would help me visualize what this thing would look like. And so it wasn’t so much like granular research.

Hillary Merwin  38:36

Yeah, granular, okay, to strike two strikes,

Joshua Aguirre  38:39

we can’t do that intentionally.

Hillary Merwin  38:41

I have an example of envisioning. I’m actually Erin Swanson, who we talked to in the last episode, she gave me this idea because I’m helping a friend design a cover for her book, you know, I did all the Pinterest boards looked up online stuff, and I was getting stuck. And so Aaron was like, go to a library and touch books like and don’t just go because it’s a devotional. And so like, don’t just go to the devotional section go to like, the nonfiction, you know, and just pull out books. And it was the most helpful exercise ever. And I completely got expired. I actually brought my computer, the library, and I put all the books out on the table. And I was like designing a cover as I was looking at them. So

Joshua Aguirre  39:14

yeah, that’s, that’s a great example. I love that. I think you might get some good direction from your purpose, and then some good research, some good imagery, but then you’re going to find yourself in a position where you need to brainstorm like all of the things that you need to do according to that purpose. And that that part of brainstorming should be like compartmentalized and separated from organization. And this is this minute. What are you doing hills?

Hillary Merwin  39:51

I almost knocked over. Oh, my, oh my gosh, I’m trying to here we go. That I wrote

Joshua Aguirre  39:58

soon as I started talking about business My business partner Hillary gets distracted on her phone.

Hillary Merwin  40:05

While I was taking stuff for social media. I was multitask. Yeah. And then I almost knocked over the water glass.

Valery Aguirre  40:11

What letter are we on?

Joshua Aguirre  40:14

We were on brainstorm. But then you guys got D distracted.

Valery Aguirre  40:18

I honestly I legitimately got distracted. I was like, Okay, I’m gonna I’m waving. Yeah,

Hillary Merwin  40:24

we skipped. Did we cover brainstorm? Can we skip to the next?

Valery Aguirre  40:28

Kind of self explanatory brainstorm?

Hillary Merwin  40:30

Sure. So everyone knows what brainstorming is? Yeah. Now organizing. How

Valery Aguirre  40:34

are you under storm of ideas?

Joshua Aguirre  40:36

Yeah, organizing is taking what you’ve brainstormed and putting it into categories.

Valery Aguirre  40:41

Check. Good. And last but not least,

Joshua Aguirre  40:45

and last but not least, and, and for next actions. And that’s just putting your your steps in order. Yeah. So that’s a very simple

Hillary Merwin  40:52

way to come up. Something very important to remember the song from Spongebob, where it’s like fun. F is for a friend to do stuff together. U is for you. And it’s for anywhere and anytime. No one is joining in. Did you guys have a childhood?

Valery Aguirre  41:14

Yes. But I did not know that into SpongeBob. I just know.

Hillary Merwin  41:18

Well, when I was like a super fan. Anyway, we need to like pee is for purpose, know where you’re going anyway.

Valery Aguirre  41:27

Anyways, okay.

Hillary Merwin  41:30

Well, great.

Valery Aguirre  41:31

Thanks for your tool.

Hillary Merwin  41:33

What’s come we can talk more about this too. And actually, one of our all episodes we’re going to use to go a bit deeper, deep dive into more practical time management tools. But I think that when you just mentioned PEBB own we’re going to put on the toolkit. So if you go on our website, scaling side hustles.com We have a tab that says toolkit and all the tools that we mentioned here from the lamb analysis to the am roadmap business roadmap to this pet bone tool, we will link there so that you can use that for

Joshua Aguirre  42:02

Yeah, and I will say sorry to cut you off hills. But like I will say that the tools are being adapted for chat GBT so that like now the pet bone tool. The envision section is not just researching Google. It’s also like, knowing what prompts to enter into chat GBT so that you can get a better objective accomplished, toward the purpose that you set forth.

Hillary Merwin  42:24

Nice. That’s yeah, that’s so important. Because as much as I don’t want to use Chad TPT if we don’t adapt, Oh,

Valery Aguirre  42:31

speaking of that, ever since Michael Brown talked about it, like how do you use it? By the way?

Hillary Merwin  42:38

Yeah, not to like, I’m still using my brain but, but sometimes to like inspire something or, you know, inspire like a prompt or whatever. I’ll use it. Yeah,

Valery Aguirre  42:48

I’ve used recently

Hillary Merwin  42:50

because I maintain my creative integrity.

Valery Aguirre  42:53

Right, right. No, but I’ve used it for about for. So I’ve used it for having to, like update. And indeed, I was, I needed to hire a couple of people. Yeah. And it was just super helpful, because it just kind of just did all for you. It literally writes you a job description. And by

Hillary Merwin  43:15

pay me to do for you.

Valery Aguirre  43:17

Well, I’m just saying I needed something quick, because I needed to like update make it more quick. I can be quick. All right. Hello, I love you. But you know, it was challenging. It was right there and available. All right. Now I can see how people could use that to create a resume. Like, oh, everything I’m seeing Yeah, you could use it for everything, which is nuts.

Joshua Aguirre  43:35

Hell, you’re not being replaced by chat up T. Excited, I am no being replaced by fear.

Hillary Merwin  43:42

Oh, stop it. I know. But honestly,

Valery Aguirre  43:45

after Micah’s interview, it’s like, embrace it, you gotta use it to your advantage. And that’s what I was doing. Also,

Hillary Merwin  43:53

Val is referring to our one episode, Episode Five with Mike Brown. Okay, we hope you liked that episode. Coming up, we’re gonna have some more all episodes where we hear from listeners about common challenges that entrepreneurs face. And we’ll try to quickly in 1015 minutes, answer those questions, so you can come away with real practical tools and advice for how to get through those obstacles.

Valery Aguirre  44:18

hallway with me? To the podcast,

Hillary Merwin  44:21

you’re singing Norah Jones? Yeah. Now we’re gonna have to link that now getting. So if you have a question you want answered in one of our all episodes, about a challenge you’re facing as an entrepreneur, like how do I manage my time better? What are some of the habits that I should have to be successful? Any of those kinds of questions, you can email contact at scaling side hustles.com And send us those questions and maybe we will cover it on the podcast. And for those of you who are interested in a free consultation, and or getting on the podcast so that we can walk through your business plan with you, Joshua, thanks Like, you can go to scaling side hustles.com and fill out the form. Just a few short questions we’re going to ask to get to know your business better or the idea or the business that you have. And submit that form. And we will get back to you.

Valery Aguirre  45:17

whatever idea you may have, whether you think it’s silly, where you think it’s viable, or you don’t even think it’s monetarily feasible. Bring it to the table, Josh will flush it out, and we’ll translate for him. We’ll translate all of that business stuff you talk to you. So maybe you’re

Hillary Merwin  45:35

starting a business with

Valery Aguirre  45:40

chipmunks, no. Taxidermy,

Hillary Merwin  45:44

a taxidermy business, digital, digital dexterity. Everything’s digital. Now you have to we have to think of like, you know, a digital taxidermy business. So any it’s an e commerce Store. You need to find a way to have people send it now this is getting morbid.

Valery Aguirre  46:06

Yeah, I’m picking up like Norman Bates. Go.

Hillary Merwin  46:11

Like from psycho.

Valery Aguirre  46:12

So I go Bates Motel. So like, if you have like, an idea for like an Etsy shop, bring it to the table, Josh. We’ll figure it out. We’ll interpret whatever you don’t understand. But a bing bada boom,

Hillary Merwin  46:24

yeah, for example, your graphic designer, maybe have some amazing designs turned into stickers. You want to start an Etsy shop. You can come on and tell us your idea and Josh and kind of walk you through, you know, depending where you’re at, in your process, we’ll walk you through, you know what your business strategy should look like. And don’t worry, Val, and I will be here to interpret everything he says. And make it understandable, relatable, and just fun time and more fun. funner Hey, Oh, Josh. So yeah, head on over to scaling side hustles.com fill out that form. And we love to meet you.

Valery Aguirre  47:03

Yeah, and while you’re at it, rate us we love the five stars. Don’t be sure to

Hillary Merwin  47:08

give us those five stars helps us reach more people. But yeah, that about wraps it up.

Valery Aguirre  47:14

Cool. Was that the final? Yeah,

Hillary Merwin  47:17

like next time, some kind of like outro like next time as the base. Music is Kelly. Next time on scaling side hustles. We’ll dive into the beginnings of crest to what it means to bootstrap how to build remote teams, and what happens when it all falls apart.