Never Get a Real Job: How to Dump Your Boss, Build a Business and Not Go Broke

Young serial entrepreneur Scott Gerber is not the product of a wealthy family or storied entrepreneurial heritage. Nor is he the outcome of a traditional business school education or a corporate executive turned entrepreneur. Rather, he is a hardworking, selftaught 26yearold hustler, rainmaker, and bootstrapper who has survived and thrived despite never having held the proverbial real job.In Never Get a Real Job: How to Dump Your Boss, Build a Business, and Not Go Broke, Gerber challenges the social conventions behind the real job and empowers young people to take control of their lives and dump their ninetofivesor their quest to attain them.Drawing upon case studies, experiences, and observations, Scott dissects failures, shares hardlearned lessons, and presents practical, affordable, and systematic action steps to building, managing, and marketing a successful business on a shoestring budget.The proven, nob.s. methodology presented in Never Get a Real Job teaches unemployed and underemployed GenYers, aspiring small business owners, students, and recent college graduates how to quit 9to5s, become their own bosses, and achieve financial independence.Q&A with Author Scott GerberAuthor Scott Gerber The title of your book is Never Get a Real Job, but are you suggesting that theres an entrepreneur in everyone?Millennials are no longer beneficiaries of the handout, resumedriven society of old. Boomers and Gen Xers need to stop training Gen Y to believe that the mantra of work hard, get good grades, go to school and get a job that they were told to buy into, is alive and well. Its not its dead and now it needs to be buried for good.Fact: there are over 81 million young people unemployed worldwide. And this number does not account for the tens if not hundreds of millions more that are underemployed. Its becoming more and more apparent that in todays world, young people will need to create a job to keep a job. Millennials need to retrain themselves to become selfsufficiency experts capable of generating their own incomes. I truly believe everyone can become entrepreneurial and partner with individuals whose strengths fill in gaps and weaknesses. The key is for us to stop thinking Facebook and start thinking about practical, nutsandbolts, incomegenerating, ontheground businesses. When we finally turn that corner, Gen Y will truly become the most entrepreneurial generation in history.How should young entrepreneurs go about determining if their passion can become a scalable business?The Hollywoodesque scene for most young entrepreneurs, where two guys are sitting at a bar, write their idea on a napkin and then proceed to build a gazillion dollar business is fiction at least for 99.9999% of us. In truth, every entrepreneur needs to have a gutcheck moment. They shouldnt simply believe their idea will work as a business and get started. Rather, they need to prove it to themselves, poke holes in it, determine if it can generate real revenues as well as how fast those revenues will start rolling in and be able to defend their assumptions to their harshest critic. I know my detractors will mention revolutionary and gamechanging companies such as Facebook and other Silicon Valley darlings that went on to raise millions, get acquired for billions, or go public. However, I would never advocate to young entrepreneurs, especially in our current economy, that jumping right into a business on passion alone is an advisable way to start a business.What made you want to be an entrepreneur?The thought of working for someone else gave me chills. Office politics, dress down days, cubicle life, water cooler rants, a lack of real decision making abilitythey all made me want to reach for Vodka and a bottle of Xanax. If I was going to fall flat on my face or go bankrupt, it certainly wasnt going to be because I let myself end up in a position where I could be underpaid or downsized without any warning. Real jobs, and the quest to attain one in the first place, didnt make sense for meand they especially dont make sense now in the new, postrecession economy. I found all the arguments that real jobs are stable and secure to be ludicrous. After all, how stable and secure is ANYTHING that you dont control, own or have a real say in? And with evergrowing rises in outsourcing, globalization, on and offline educational institutions, and recessions, I know I absolutely made the right decision and have absolutely no issue telling others they should do the same in order to take control of their lives and financial futures.Jobs are not going to materialize out of thin air just because politicians say they can make it happen.The only job that is remotely safe for young people in this new economy is one of their own creation and design that they own and control. However, even though we live in a world of an over abundance of collegiate institutions, enha