Money, Mindset, and Machines

How are you all? Happy Monday. Come on in here. I woke up this morning thinking about my entrepreneurs, my business owners, my solopreneurs, my side hustlers, all that stuff today.

But let's just call them entrepreneurs for today. I was thinking about you today and we'll use that for all of them. It is. The Daily Boost from MotivationToMove.com.

How are you? My name is Scott Smith. Did you have a good weekend? I should ask, right? That's the only nice thing to do. I had a great one, by the way.

Busy all weekend long. Why? Because I'm married to a woman named Joy. And from 5.45 in the morning until about, I think she goes to bed about 10.30. It's as if somebody wound her up and she just keeps going.

And then she unwinds and she falls over, goes to sleep, gets up and does it again. So she did that to me all weekend long. It wears me out, but man, it's fun as well. Good to have you here today.

I woke up, like I said, a moment ago. Thinking about my entrepreneurs, my brothers, my sisters, just like me. That's what I do. And like I said earlier, entrepreneurs, business owners, solopreneurs, side hustlers, wannabe entrepreneurs, all these people.

Very unique position to be in. People that are getting out of bed in the morning and having to make their own way, make their own money. If you have never had to make your own money consistently, oh my God, I'm 100% commission salesman. So, so am I.

It doesn't bother me at all. But if you've never done it before, you probably don't understand. But if you have done that, if you are responsible for making the money, first dollar in the door, and maybe you have employees and you're making sure they get paid, you're taking care of your work family, it's a big-ass deal.

So I was thinking about you today, particularly when I started thinking about making a change, because what happened to me a long time ago, I share often the story about my wife passing away 20 years ago when I got into this business. But a side of the story I don't often share is

was where I was when I was in my mid-40s. I was in the early 40s, I guess. I'd done really well. I had started out in radio, got into TV, got into film, had production companies, did all kinds.

I did all the stuff. I'll never forget one day. I was going to television studios. I was doing voiceovers at Disney and Universal. I had some film meetings.

I was living the life. I had arrived. And I was like, man, I don't know. This is not serving me, right? I had the houses. I had the boats. I had the motorhomes.

I had the motorcycles. I had the family. I had all the stuff. It was like, huh. And it wasn't bad. I really kind of liked it, but it just, it wasn't there.

And if you get to know me and you do, you listen to me every single day, you know, that's going to get under my skin a little bit. And it just, but I didn't know what to do.

And so, yes, my wife passed away and that kind of thrust me into the business I'm in right now. But just before that, the biggest problem was this. I didn't know what to do.

I just knew I wanted to have an impact. That's it. I wanted to have more impact. Didn't know how to do it. And until I discovered podcasting, which became my voice and my vehicle, I had no way of getting there.

Really frustrating time. So I get you, man. If you're there, if you're going through that right now, particularly with AI these days, AI is challenging a ton of people. It's like, okay, I've done everything.

I'm a little bit like, what do I do now? I want more. And by the way, AI is going to come take it from me. What am I going to do? It's scary, right? It was scary back then, too.

For me, when I was doing it, we didn't have AI, but we did have the internet. But I never forget you guys and what you have to do every single day just to get your ass out of bed.

Just to get through the day to get the thing done that has to be done. When everybody else goes home. I know. I've been there. I've done that. I lived that.

Now I've done it 20-some. The last full-time job I had was 27 years ago. Never forget walking out. Never forget my boss, Dave. So how do you do it, man?

How can you walk away from a paycheck every two weeks? I said, well, I don't trust you're going to get. So you could fire me any day, man. You can. And to me, the security of being on my own and controlling my own destiny was far better than the insecurity of waiting to see if maybe I didn't have a job one day.

I made the change. So over the years, I've done my own thing, self-employed, paid my own bills, lots of money, lots of success, lots of freedom, pretty much whatever I wanted.

By the way, that's key. Sometimes what I want is not what you want. Sometimes you think, Scott should do more. I'm like, I don't want to. Scott should do less.

I don't want to. It's individualized, right? But I've done it ever since then. And I've also coached a ton of people along the way, advised them probably more.

In the beginning, I coached a lot. I did a lot of... really just coaching stuff and consulting stuff, some done-for-you stuff. I would help people actually do things and build things.

These days, I mostly advise them and architect things for them and help them through the process. Somebody comes in and go, hey, I kind of want to do this. I say, well, I'm not going to do it for you. I'm kind of busy, but I'll tell you how, and I'll make sure you stay on track.

I do a lot of that now. But I've noticed a couple of things over time. Unless you're just a hardcore business person, and you should be if you're in business, and I say hardcore business person, understand how business operates, understand what a business is for. At the end of the day, the business is about making a profit.

I don't understand anything called a nonprofit. I don't get it. Particularly when I see a nonprofit and some CEO making $10 million a year. I just don't get it.

Somebody's profiting. So the key areas that I find when I'm advising somebody along the road are very simple and you may not like it. And this is updated for today in 2026.

As I spend hours every single week talking to all my entrepreneurs, here's the first thing. Money. Money. Money is the most important thing if you're running a business.

In fact, I will go so far as to say money is the most important thing if you're just a personal person living. You don't have enough money, you've got problems.

You have enough money? Well, you're probably still going to have problems, but you're not going to freak out quite as much, are you? Is money the root of all evil? No.

Just read the rest of it. You'll see what I mean. Is money the only thing? No. Is it the most important thing? Probably not. Family, spirituality, things like that are certainly more important.

But day-to-day, Can't pay your bills. Can't eat. Money's pretty damn important. I had a conversation one day with a lady who said to me, she kind of wanted to do her own thing.

And she said, I'm not all about money, but I just, can you teach me? And I said, yes, I can teach you how to do this stuff. She goes, well, what's it going to cost? I'll hire you any price.

And how long is it going to take? I said, well, from experience, if you've never done it, never started your own business, it's probably going to take you about 18 months to actually really begin to make good money.

I know the internet doesn't say that, but it's true. It does. Some people do a little sooner than that, maybe nine or 10 months. In any case, let's just call it a year.

And if you take my standard advisory fee, it's going to be about $24,000 to do that. And we're going to talk once a week and architect this thing and get it done for you. She says, okay, as long as I can make a lot of money, then it's worth doing that. I said, but what if we could do it in like, like in the next 30 minutes?

She says, what do you mean do it in the next 30 minutes? I said, yeah, money's not everything. You're going to give me some money, right? And that's nice.

I appreciate that. But why don't I give you a million dollars? I'll just go to the bank and wire you a million dollars right now. And boom, you're done.

You're making the money, right? You're good. And she goes, oh, God, that feels so good. I mean, it's what I want to do, yes. But ultimately, I got a kid.

He needs a car. And I got college coming up. And there's going to be weddings. And I don't have enough money. A million dollars. And I know you're not going to give it to me, right?

You're not going to give it to you. But I'm just saying, if I gave you a million dollars, did that instantly become the most important thing to solve your problems? He goes, yes.

Again, I'm not going to argue the details of this. We could do this all day long. I'm a practical person. I'm a realistic person. I get it. I understand it, all right?

I'm just saying. If you can't pay your bills, there's not much you can do. You lose mobility. You lose portability. You lose opportunity. You lose options.

A lot of people are stuck right now. You're stuck at a house. Low interest rate. Can't sell your house. You have no options anymore, do you? What fixes the problem?

If you had enough money, who cares about the interest rate you have? You just move on, right? I know that's what rich people do. Yeah, BGLers or B1. Up to you.

So my entrepreneur is, if I can get you thinking about money first and not, when I say money, I'm thinking value-driven money, doing the right thing kind of money, earning your money, feeling proud to get paid, creating something people want to give you money for.

So of all the problems you have today in your business, Ultimately, if you had enough cash flow, enough money in the bank, you can take care of about 100% of them. Yeah, 99%, right?

What's the next thing? Probably where I spend most of my time because I can fix the money thing fast. Get your leads, get you making money. I can get that fast.

Pretty easy to do. As soon as you get good enough cash flow, as soon as you can pay your bills, you have that peaceful base. As soon as things are calm and cool, we don't have to talk about it too much because you automatically go after it and do it.

Mostly getting there is mindset. I got to get your mindset right. And everybody has a good mindset. Like today, it's Monday morning. Let's go, man. Pump me up.

But what happens when you get smacked in the face this afternoon or when what you thought was going to be an awesome week is not an awesome week and you still got to get the job done and pay the bills and payrolls just five days away?

What happens when you're working so often, your wife doesn't even know who you are anymore. Your kids don't know who dad is. That's mindset stuff. And we spend a lot of time on that.

That's probably one of the biggest parts of it. And you will not be the person you want to be money-wise or anything else until you grow personally. So if you're an entrepreneur or anybody else, we're going to put money up front and make sure. Because can I be selfish here?

Can I really? I can offer you a lot of value. But do you think I want to lose sleep over the fact that you can't afford to pay me or your money is going to run out in the next couple of days? And God, I hope Scott can do this in the next 60 days because otherwise I'm out of here.

I won't take you. I don't want that. I don't want that for you or for me. So it's the money and the mindset. What's the final thing? Machines. AI. I was reluctant to put that in.

But what's happened is every single person I'm talking to, they can't not put it in. They don't call it machines, but that's what it is. It's AI. And whether you're afraid it's going to cost you jobs or whether you're excited you could actually make a business out of it, I don't know.

This is a very odd time we're in right now. Nobody quite knows what to do with it. But I can tell you this, the future is going to be Affected by machines.

Impacted by machines in every possible way. I think it's going to be good, actually. I think we're going to get through a very difficult time right now.

But I think it's going to be really good. It's going to bring some great lifestyle. It's going to bring some great money for a lot of people. But it's machines.

Back in the day when I was working, back in the day, like 20 years ago, I became a workplace automation expert. That's one of the things I did when I started my business consulting. Still an expert to this day. That's why I'm pretty much an expert at AI right now.

I say pretty much because I don't want to pretend like I am, but I know more than most people do. And the reason I do is because long ago I was helping clients.

They'd want some money, I'd help them with their mindset, and then they wanted automation to have a freedom lifestyle. So we would build workplace automation in place that gave them that lifestyle. The funnels you hear about, all that automation stuff, right? And then take that a little bit deeper.

And that's basically what we have now with AI, except on just steroids. It's amazing. So if you're a business owner, if you want to be a business owner, if you're thinking about money, you should be first if you want to be a business owner. And secondly, you know you need to have the right mindset because it's going to take longer than you think.

You're going to have to sell it yourself. Can't count on somebody else to do it for you all the time. And finally, if you don't just accept that machines are going to be here and if you don't get into it here in the next year or two and just bring it in, I think it's right now about 93% of all businesses have no plan for AI implementation.

Hang on for the ride, guys. You're going to be playing catch up in about maybe two years, maybe one. Got to pay attention to that. But here's the good news about this, okay?

Here's the good news. You ready for this? I don't think I've delivered bad news yet, have I? Here's the good news, and I believe this with every bone in my body, that once you wrap your head around the fact that what you do every single day for a living is to make money.

And you do it right way and you hold up all your values. I'm not saying do it wrong, okay? But it is about making a profit. And then you realize that, wait, wait a second.

If I can get dialed into that dream and I can find the right idea and find the right model and the right thing that works and I can make some money, that's going to make me happier. And along the way, I'm going to get to be a better person. My mindset's going to change.

People talk to me all the time about the fact that, you know, I pretty much have this infectious, energized feeling. I go, go, go all the time. I don't do it all the time. I have bad days too.

You hear them sometimes. But generally speaking, I can always tell you that my mindset's in the right spot, even if it gets off kilter just a little bit.

I turn around, I get my mind back in place, and I go do it. And I help clients do it. And the machines. When you wrap around the fact that machines are there, your life is going to get easy.

I have saved. Can I estimate this for you? In the past, let's call it 90 days. Probably not that long, actually. I have saved somewhere around $30,000 in money I could have given to somebody else.

I have tried to give to other people in the past. I've tried to get humans to do the job for me. It's difficult. Nobody gets it done on time. You can't find them.

The output, the quality you get is not great. All the stuff, right? Graphic artists and people like that. And AI, the machines have just made it easier.

And I didn't mean to go looking for somebody else, but one day... Claude jumped up in front of me and said, we can do that. And I went, really? Let's give it a shot.

And what could have taken two months took 75 minutes. And I saw the light. It's like the new Fable model from Claude right now. Mythos light. Stripe, the big merchant company.

Dozens and dozens of engineers required to do a re-engineering of their product. It was going to take four to six months to do it. It cost millions of dollars.

AI did it in one day. That good or bad? It's just the way it is now. And since business is built to be profitable, where costs can be cut, they're going to cut it.

But the reality is this. The future is very bright. Once we get through this kind of little bit of changes going on right now, it's going to be huge. So if you're in business, embrace this like crazy.

And if you're not embracing it like I am, you need to give me a call. Because I am. I'm driving people right into it. I'm going down that way myself. Just the only way to go.

Life is changing as you speak. All right, let me get off the call. I just want to start that. I am thinking about you guys very, very much. I'm sorry.

I'm knocking my bottle around here now. Stop it, Scott. Oh, my goodness. I even got people sending me text messages while I'm on the podcast. Leave me alone.

I'm talking to the peeps. All right. Hey, Scott Smith on Instagram. You want to send me a note there? You can send it to Scott at DailyBoostPodcast.com as well.

I'll see you tomorrow.