He Had The Dream 9-5 Job

📜 Sunday Strategy Breakdown

🪙 The Vault

Dickie Bush did everything right.

From getting into Princeton, and playing college football, to sophomore year landing his dream internship.

He was offered to work at Black Rock which is one of the leading hedge fund, and investment companies, which would be making Dickie 6 Figures plus right out of school.

Until one day during his shift, Dickie overhears a conversation a senior employee has with his boss.

This was 2018.

Now in 2024:

Overhearing this conversation has put him on track to hit $10M just this year.

What Did He Hear??

Senior Employee at Black Rock: “Can I take off one day next month to see my son’s Little League game? “

Black Rock Boss: “ NO “

This struck Dickie.

He realized that a senior employee who had been with the company for 10+ years longer than him had no freedom.

And if Dickie stayed in this spot, when he is older and has a son, will possibly miss out on time with him too, if his boss doesn’t “approve”.

This caused panic, and ended up starting his journey to financial freedom…

The Self-Accountability Challenge

While still working for Black Rock Dickie is determined to make a change in his life, his first move is to start a newsletter.

He writes one for 9 months, has no traction at all and actually almost gives up.

The next step was to gain traction from Twitter.

He started a 30-day challenge, which led him to stay accountable in public as he wrote every day for 30 days.

On day 27 he posts with 0 likes and 0 retweets before he goes to bed, what he wakes up to changes his life.

It went viral.

Dickie links his newsletter at the bottom of the post and adds his first 1k subscribers overnight.

Now it’s cool that he got some online virality, but how does it translate to money??

Turning Eyeballs to Money

With the recent virality of Dickie’s post, he had a sea of dm’s hitting his inbox, which included potential partnerships.

One company reached out to him on Twitter DMs asking him to write a post for them, which he would be compensated for.

Dickie unsure of how much he should be compensated tells the company to let me write it for you, and you can pay me for the results.

The 30-Day Challenge worked! And Dickie got pretty good at writing, which landed him solid results with the company.

After the post, they request Dickies payment information to send him over compensation for the writing.

His heart dropped, and he asked the company if they accidentally sent too much…

Their response: “ Did you want more? “

Now he was on to something.

How Does This Become A Business?

Now Dickie knew this ghostwriting gig could easily turn into 5 figures a month, but he decided to take a route that would move him farther.

Dickie tweets after the 30-day challenge “ The 30-day challenge was rough, who would do it with me to keep accountable? “.

With his recent explosion in Twitter growth, he had close to 100 people saying they would join, and because of this popularity, Dickie knew it was only right to charge a small fee and profit off of this group.

Like a good businessman, he set up this accountability group which talked over a Slack channel ( similar to text messages).

He charged $50 and it was returned to you if you had completed the challenge. ( He really wasn’t trying to take anyone’s money ).

After originating this business idea from his original 30-day writing sprint, and the most recent success of his accountability group, he partnered with an established creator in the space to build out his business:

Ship 30 for 30

The idea was to build out this “Accountability Writing Group” into a Million Dollar Business.

His plan started here:

After his first accountability challenge, he hopped on about 50 Zoom calls with most of the members.

In each call he would ask them questions about the difficulty, what resources might have helped, what could be improved, etc. This was his direct market research.

I’ll show you why this was so important in a second.

After these 50 Zoom meetings, Dickie is left with a bunch of unorganized notes and a great idea.

Taking this he spends the next few months in this schedule alongside his day job:

• Wake up at 4 am

• Work on Ship 30 For 30 for 2 hours.

• Go to work.

• Speed through work-related tasks.

• Take lunch.

• Work on Ship 30 For 30 for the rest of his day.

• Sleep.

• Repeat.

This was his reality for a year and started turning this “idea” into a money-making reality.

That year Ship 30 For 30 was doing about 40k a month, reaching 500k for the year…

While working his 9-5 job!!

Why He Believes You Shouldn’t Quit Your Job

Dickie doesn’t quit his job until he hits $1M a year with Ship 30 for 30.

To some, that seems way too long, but he has a strong opinion on why it was the smarter move:

“You operate in a sense of scarcity when you quit your job”

His point is that when he made his first bit of money online, he would have tried to double down on the ghostwriting that made him his first $5K.

But that was the wrong vehicle.

Because he was working his 9-5, he was able to say no to more ghostwriting clients and took on the bigger challenge of building his business, which is now on track to hit $10M this year.

His rule of thumb is to hit 2x your salary before you quit your job.

Not advice you thought you would get from an entrepreneur.

Now it’s your turn, to start brewing up a business idea, and 2x your salary!

Don’t forget to check out The Vault section where I leave bits of gold…

And Tuesday, we dive into the root cause of entrepreneurs’ success.

Tune in 📻

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Ship 30 For 30

My 30-Day Writing Challenge