How to Start a Business Young (What Actually Works) | 061

A profit doesn't happen by chance. It happens by design. Let's dig in, and today we are digging into some really delicious content with our guest, Connor Hebel. Welcome Connor. Thank you for

having me. I'm so excited to be here.

I am so excited to have Connor on our podcast, and we'll get into why in a minute, but let me tell you who Connor is. Connor Hebel is a teen entrepreneur, Best Selling Author and the founder of island micro greens, an education micro greens company dedicated to helping people grow fresh,

nutrient dense food right at home. After facing his own health challenges, Connor discovered the powerful role that simple, intentional food habits can play in improving well being. What began as a small project has grown into a nationally recognized brand that has helped 1000s of people learn

how to grow micro greens in their kitchens and apartments and small spaces. His work and entrepreneurial journey have been featured in publications such as Forbes and entrepreneur, highlighting both his innovative approach to food education and his accomplishments as a young founder. Connor is also the

author of let's get growing a teen's guide to business success, where he shares the lessons he learned building a business as a teenager, and encourages others to improve entrepreneur I'm sorry, and encourages entrepreneurs to pursue entrepreneurship with purpose, creativity and

resilience. Thank you for that intro that was so incredible. I wanted to read Connor's actual bio, because I've known Connor for a year now, and everything that I know about him, every time I turn around, he is doing more and more incredible things as a young entrepreneur. He's blazing trails. He's making

everyone healthier, and he has such a beautiful, wonderful spirit about him. And I am so so so happy to have you here today, Connor.

I'm so glad to be here because we've known each other for so long, and to really be able to deep dive into all the cool stuff, from health to business, it's going to be so much fun to even YouTube too. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, that's a little teaser. Connor has promised to talk to us about YouTube today. That's a topic that we have not dived into, and he's done it so well, and so I'm really excited to dig into the to the expertise that he has created over the past couple of years. He's done an excellent,

excellent job with YouTube. Just talk a little bit about starting a business as a young person, what did you find? Any challenges or things that kind of came up that maybe people were like, Oh, you're such a cute little boy. Good luck with that.

Right? That's a really interesting thing, because there's definitely pros and cons to starting at a young age. One is that time's on our side. We can learn, we can make the mistakes. We can keep going. And it's that consistency, because when you start, you have momentum, you have the ability

to keep going for a longer period of time. So that's really huge key part. So make all the mistakes now, because there's usually, like a two to three year gap of just making a ton of mistakes before you really understand what you're doing. So do that learn all the stuff you can. As far as the challenges,

one of the big ones that you mentioned is that people think, Oh, you're you don't know what you're doing. It's just a hobby, like it's not going to take off. And what really helped was, after a couple of years, people started to realize, Oh, this isn't just something that I'm doing and I don't know what I'm

talking about. The more that I consistently moved forward, the more that people saw, Oh, this really is mine. Now the challenge was, I was 14 years old, so I legally could not have a business myself, so I had my parents help me. And people thought that my parents were doing my business for me, when

that was not the case. I was doing a lot of the work. Now I did have help. I was 14, and when you have a business, Coca Cola isn't just made by one person, it's made by a ton of people. So my parents would help me a lot, because that's how a business works. You have a ton of people in it. It's a group

effort, and people would mistake that my parents were in it as them doing it all. For me, you want to have someone who does all like does a lot of the work, and you want to do you want yourself and you want other people. And that got misconstrued a couple times. And so knowing that when people

young kids have a business, it's okay for their parents to help them, and there is some times where the parents are forcing their kids to do that, I don't agree with that, because then you're going to not have someone who wants to do entrepreneurship. But when the parents are helping and they're

supporting, that is a really good sign. Yeah, and you don't fully know the full story, so having that judgment does not help.

And there's so many young people that really do have that passion and that drive and that vision, and they are just too young to to do all the pieces around it that need to be done. So having all those people and all that support around you is a really positive

thing, especially even as an adult, it's intense. There's a lot that goes into a business, and you have to reevaluate pivot a lot in a business.

Yeah, one of the things that you did really well, and for young people out there, thinking of starting a business, or starting a business, you all have been raised with the technology that comes along with where we are now in the world. So one thing that you did really incredibly

well Connor is YouTube. So let's dig in a little bit to why YouTube, how, what you learned. Give us some YouTube knowledge.

Yeah. So when you're starting to look at social media, before you decide I'm going to go with this platform or that platform, there's some key things to consider. One is, where is your target audience at? Is it on Facebook? Facebook has a ton of people of all demographics, so

it's a really unique platform. There's so many different people, because you have the parents who are posting about the kids, so then the grandparents get on, and then the kids, as they get older, get on. So it's a very unique platform. Then you have Pinterest, which is a lot of

photos. It's more towards women, usually middle aged, but you have the younger and so usually not as much older. And with Tiktok, you typically have a younger generation, so that one's really fascinating in itself. YouTube is really good for tutorials, how to videos, people who are ready to learn

and ready for education. So it's really good for a product where you're teaching people, and that's where my product excels, because I'm teaching people how to grow microgreens. But there's a couple key things within YouTube that is super huge, and it's also in Pinterest, and that is that YouTube one is owned by

Google. So what does Google do? Google loves to promote YouTube because it's a part of the platform. The second thing is, YouTube is a search engine. So when someone searches something up, how to grow microgreens, it's a search engine, which brings it back to Google. So when someone searches either on

YouTube or Google, they're going to find my videos. When you go to Google and you search up how to bake a cake, for example, you're going to find videos on how to bake a cake. It's you have the ad, then you have the videos, then you have the websites and the blogs and all that. So my videos rank before

anything else does, yeah, and that's huge, yeah.

I loved what that you shared that YouTube is a search engine because not everyone thinks of it that way. And I have watched your videos. I love your video. Thank you so much. I had one that was on for you. Had one that was a real, real long one.

That was a compilation.

Um, but I love that you know that that you you have, are so great on camera. You're so clear in your delivery. You the the knowledge that you're providing, the education is top notch. I mean, you've been doing this for quite a while, someone would come on your video and go, Oh, that's a

young person. They might not know so much, and you do. I remember one time we were looking for a house, and I randomly just said, you know, whatever Realtor can meet us there, should meet us there. That's fine. And so I looked at her picture, and she looked very young. So I was like, Oh, this

is going to be interesting. We'll just go see this house with her, and we don't need to use her well, I was so wrong about this woman. She is an absolute Dynamo. She asks the questions I ask before I ask them, and I ask a lot of questions when I'm looking for a house. And so judging a book by

its cover and looking at someone and going, hey, they don't look like they're their age does not I guess what I'm saying is the age does not denote the the knowledge and the ability and the comprehensiveness of what you provide. So whenever you're looking at videos, don't just look at the person actually

listen to what they have to say.

And I think that's something really good about YouTube, is you have people of all ages, of all demographics, teaching people on content. So I feel like that bias is a little less on YouTube, which also really helps. And can I share a secret about YouTube? Please. When I

started, I could not do a video at all. I was so terrified. My first 10 videos, I literally would say a sentence, pause the video, have near a panic attack, like I would be a step away from tears. Sometimes I'd literally cry because I was like, I can't do. This, I am so terrified, and then I would continue on. You

couldn't tell a difference that I was like, so panicked. And so just know that if you're like, I can't do YouTube. I don't do well on video. That is okay. You do not need to start out doing videos like professionally at all. When covid hit, I literally could not be on a phone call with someone for more than a

minute because I had so much social anxiety. So know that you don't have to start well, if you look at Mr. Beast's videos, who's like one of the best YouTubers, his first video is horrible. Any video, the first video is going to be horrible. Don't worry about that. It doesn't matter. What matters is

that you do it and you show up after those 10 videos, which took me a year to do, by the way, a whole year to get the first 10 videos done, I was able to slowly move into that comfortable space. And it's that step by step process that 1% getting better. It it can. It is a lot to do videos, and that is

okay. What matters is that you do them, you move forward, and you learn from those mistakes, from those challenges, from the overwhelm, because it doesn't start out easy, but what happens is you start to get used to it, you start to get acquainted to it, and then you're able to start doing it, and it becomes

fun. It's like your first 100 stages. The first 100 are horrible. They're so overwhelming, but then it gets better. God bless you.

Sorry if you're watching the video, I just have those knees that snuck up on me. Yes, and in that light of videos and the overwhelmingness and the the oppression of it that people can have. I mean, I've literally had people stand in front of a camera that have spoken to rooms full of 1000s of people, and

when the light went on, they froze and couldn't say the name and the name of their business. It's a real thing. The more you do it, the easier it becomes, the better that it gets. When you I started on video myself doing videos with Facebook Lives. And so for nine months, every Tuesday, I would do a

Facebook Live and it didn't take very long for me to get used to hearing my voice, which sounds weird, or seeing myself talking on video, or where my hair was, it didn't take too long to get to the point where I was like, It's okay. Um, I'm used to it however. You need to continue to expose yourself to it and do it

over and over, like Connor said, to get better, to get good at it.

In the word succeed, there's something really interesting. If you break it apart, it suck seed. So before you even get good, where you can succeed, you have to suck. It has to be horrible and awful. And when you start your videos, it's okay to have your hair all over, like whatever

you're doing. Not be able to say stuff, have all the ums and the ahs and not word, because you're learning, and it doesn't take long before you start to get comfortable and it starts to become easy. And the cool thing about video is that when you learn how to do videos, when you learn how to speak on stage,

they work together, because when you're doing one, then it helps the other. So it's a really big skill to have. In fact, Warren Buffett talks about when you're able to speak, and you're speaking to multiple people, and you're able to influence and talk to people, it raises the level of salary that you're

going to get by, like 50% it's the biggest skill that you can have, and it will change your life, and

it is the number one fear.

It is, yeah, I love the quote that most people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely

people are more afraid of that than death.

It's wild. It is, yeah, that's it's crazy. And honestly, once you start doing it, it really isn't that bad, but getting over that, getting that, getting moving and doing that, and I appreciate that the part of your story that you shared was that you could only do one sentence, and then you

got terribly uncomfortable and ill and had to do another sentence, and took you an entire year. That's sometimes. That's how growth happens. It happens slowly over time, continuing to step out, even though it's uncomfortable.

And one of the biggest things during all that is you want to find a mentor. You want to find someone that's going to support you and hold you while you're just like, I can't do this. It's not going to happen. I'm falling apart. And the person that I highly recommend is Amanda Vander

Gulick. She's been doing YouTube since the very early days. And when you search up how to bake a cake, hers comes up either first or second. She's done this for so long, implemented, learned from all of the algorithms and how much it's changed. And when I was like. I don't know if I can do this. She just held that

space for me, and is the reason why I was able to get past those first 10 videos. It makes it super simple. So I highly recommend checking out Amanda Vander Gulick, because her YouTube content is so powerful and it makes such a huge difference in the SEO optimization that's

really, that's a really great promotion. Sorry, the word just flipped out slipped out of my head as I was trying to say a good recommendation. And he and Connor's right, you having somebody there as a mentor, a coach, somebody standing beside you, and somebody who's been

there and done that, that is the value. So Connor didn't have to learn every single solitary lesson and mistake himself by working with Amanda. Amanda, right? Yes, Amanda, working with Amanda, and she's great. I've seen her videos. It really did help facilitate that when it was a very painful year of getting

to learn how to do that and and now it has paid off. Very, very well. Yes, well, Connor, we I heard from a little birdie that you have a gift for our listeners. Can you talk about that? Of course, yes.

So over the past 14 years, I've learned so much about growing microgreens, the things you want to do, the things you want to avoid, the questions and misconceptions. And so I created a micro green master class that will take you from micro green beginner to micro green growers, so that you

can grow your micro greens easily at home. So if you take out your phone and you text to the number 26786, the word micro greens all one word, micro greens to 26786, I will give you my free micro green master class. It's usually valued at $250 but for you all, I'll give it to you for free. So type,

take out your phone, text micro greens to 26786, and that way you'll get to learn the knowledge of micro green growing. And for those of you who just want to learn how to do YouTube videos, this is a great way to see some of the content, so that you can start structuring your videos in the

way that will help get your videos viral and in that right direction. So it's a double benefit. And as I say health is wealth. So when you start helping your health, you're going to start helping your wealth. If you look at a lot of the successful people who have already made it in

entrepreneurship and business, you'll notice something really interesting. They take care of their health. They go on walks, they eat well, they do the things that make the difference, because they know about the power of 1% about atomic habits that you want to move forward. And if you move forward in one

area of life, it's going to make the difference in the other area. So that health is super powerful and makes such a huge difference in where you go with your business.

Awesome. Thank you, Connor. And in case you didn't get that number, worry not. You can go to our portal. It's profit connect doors, dot club. That's the website address, profit connect doors, dot, C, l, u, B, all of our guests are in there, all of their contact information and

their free gifts. You can watch all of the podcasts in there. If you get in there, you watch this one, and you get in there and you want to see some more, they're all there, and we will have all the instructions to get Connor's free gift. And I do have a couple more questions for Connor. First of all, we forgot

to talk about your book. Can you talk about your book?

This is my book. It is called, let's get growing. And it's a teens guide to entrepreneurial success. However, it's very for everyone. It's not just for teens. I started there because it's everything that I have learned over the past six years of having my business, because

there's so much that you start out and you just don't know, but there's these little, tiny shifts that you can do in your business that over a period of time of just changing and adjusting will completely transform your business. And so within each chapter, I share some of those things to just

micro shift, micro adjust. And a lot of what we talked about today is within that book of the health of the business and the power of just changing that 1% those tools are so powerful. So when you move into that space, it makes all that difference. So let's get growing is a powerful guide for entrepreneurial

success.

Awesome. And I'll make sure that we get a link to that in in the club as well, so you can have access to that. Something that we're adding to the podcast this year is I would like to watch ask a powerful question to our guests. So Connor, are you ready for our powerful question today, I am.

Let's do it okay, what is the most unexpected experience that made you adjust your approach in your business?

I would say I. The realization of how long it takes for things to happen, you think, oh, it's gonna be one year and I'm gonna be making all these millions of dollars. And that's not usually how it happens. There are unicorns that does happen sometimes. However, it's okay if it doesn't happen

like that. And to shift instead of being like fast, fast, I need everything done right now to be able to do that long term. My YouTube channel has been going for two years, and it's been a slow progression, but what happens is that it starts out slow, and then it does that, it spikes up. And so just allow

your business to do that spike. It may feel uncomfortable while you're in that slow, monotonous process, but it will spike eventually, if you have a good quality product and you know what you're talking about. And so that spike is huge. And then once you get to that spike allowing things to happen. So I

was recently asked to go to the United Nations and give a two minute speech, and it was so powerful, because it's like this happens when you allow and you sit back for things to happen, they will because people want to be around other people who are doing incredible things, and they will find you also be

willing to go out and have find the people that you want to be around, because they may be looking for You too.

Awesome. That's so amazing. And like I said when we started, I've known Connor for over a year, and just the things that have occurred for him over this past year have been amazing, and so I'm so excited to encourage him in his journey. I am so grateful Connor for all of the juicy, delicious,

amazing value that you brought to our listeners today. Thank you for

being here. Thank you so much, and it was so good to be on the podcast with you, because all the things that you've been doing have been so cool and so powerful, like writing your book, doing this podcast, there's so many things you're doing that you're on the right direction, and I totally

see your success.

Thank you so much. Connor, so remember and listeners build with clarity. Lead with purpose. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. Bye. You.