I’ve known entrepreneur and business coach Ben McAdam for a few years now — we’ve met up all over the world, from Thailand to Mexico to Australia. He has a fully location-independent lifestyle, and right now he is based in Australia. He runs Profits Collective, where he coaches business owners on how to make more profit, just by looking at their numbers.
Sounds cool, right?
A lot of what Ben does now has to do with earnings, mindset, and helping others make more money. I had to sit down with him to ask him more about where he came from, what exactly he’s doing now, and how we can all learn from his experiences.
More Interested in a “Non-Job”
Ben shared that he was a talented classical pianist in his teens, but he eventually got to the point where he had to decide what he wanted to do for a career. “It’s very competitive to make money out of playing the piano. There wasn’t YouTube back then,” he explains.
Around the same time, someone gifted him the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. The book opened up his eyes to a lot of other “non-job” things to do, as he already knew from a young age he didn’t want a traditional 9-5.
Ben reminisces and says he “went down the rabbit hole” and businesses became his new obsession. He adds that he always had a thing with numbers and math, likely because he was a musician at heart, and says that often the skills are tied together.
He got into accounting and worked at a few firms, but realized that he was a bit of a square peg in a round hole. He wanted to use numbers to help people grow their businesses, but most of his colleagues were more concerned with filling out tax forms. He continued to try to make it work, and even ended up becoming a CFO in a small to medium-sized business.
Soon, with his first child on the way, Ben knew he would want (and need!) more time freedom. That’s when he started looking for clients to create his own business, and things really began to take off from there.
All About Time Freedom
Ben says that he was very interested in time freedom after he read Kiyosaki’s book. He thinks back to his very first job in accounting and remembers that within weeks of starting he read a random article in a business magazine about a business coach. He was immediately interested — the coach talked a lot about the time freedom he had and it really inspired Ben. He thought to himself, “I’ll do that one day.”
When his wife became pregnant, he knew that it was the best time to get started. He wanted to ensure that he had plenty of freedom to be there for his family. He says that’s what finally got him to start doing the hard things and the uncomfortable stuff, like reducing his hours at his day job and cold-calling leads.
Ben soon discovered that if he concentrated on the high-return-low-effort leads that could earn him several thousands in just a few hours, he could spend as much time as he wanted to with his family. He could charge $2k for a tax return that would take him 2 hours of work, max. It was a no-brainer.
I feel like one of the biggest mindset shifts for people coming from a 9-5 to entrepreneurship is it’s hard to realize that business can be asymmetrical. You can make an insane amount of money for a little amount of time — it doesn’t have to be directly correlated. I’ve been in business for over a decade and even I didn’t realize this until much later on.
I asked Ben his thoughts on this and he couldn’t agree more. “That mindset of charging for hours spent is very hard to get rid of,” he said. He also added, “But the sooner an aspiring business owner can get rid of it, the more money they can make.” True that.
Mindset is Key
Ben works with a lot of business owners over at Profits Collective, and a lot of his coaching has to do with mindset shifts.
One of the patterns that he sees over and over is that people make enough money to tick off their goals, but usually, old habits get in the way of actually completing them. For example, one of his clients wanted to help his mother retire, and it was going to cost him about $1k per month to do it. After looking at his numbers, Ben told him that he could easily spare that for his mom. Within the next week, his mom was able to retire. Sometimes the opportunity is there and all you really need is a push from someone else to take advantage of it.
Accountability and priorities are other pieces of the puzzle. Ben says, with a nod to Ramit Sethi, “Plan your rich life and prioritize the things you want to spend money on and be ruthless about the stuff you don’t care about.” If your goal is to save more, instead of spending $25 to go out to eat, maybe spend $15 per meal with a meal-prepping service. You’ll be able to save more money, and, incidentally, more time because you get your meals delivered instead of going out.
In terms of accountability, he says it’s the main reason why people search out coaches — having someone to hold you accountable and give you the shortcuts so that you get to the benefits quicker is ultimately what it’s all about.
Deep down, I think everyone wants location and time freedom. And while the tactical steps needed to become an entrepreneur may be straightforward, the mindset piece can make or break people. And that’s exactly what Ben coaches folks on — you could have all the money in the world, but if you think you’re poor, then you’re poor, and you’re going to live like you’re poor.
Entrepreneurs can create their own lifestyle design, but a lot of them don’t. Ben’s job is to show them, through the use of cold, hard numbers, that they can actually do whatever it is they’ve been dreaming about.
I love the business model and find it incredibly helpful and useful for all of my fellow entrepreneurs. Sometimes you just need someone to hold your hand and show you the way. Ben is that person.
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
This article was written by Neel from MaidThis Franchise, a remote-local franchise opportunity for people looking to escape the rat race and reach financial freedom. Learn more here.
