It's not about the money. It's about the freedom to do what you want, as this million-dollar, one-person business founder discovered.

Mike Brown started his career flying jets for the Navy as a weapons systems officer. After completing his military service in 2012, he built and sold an eight-figure investment firm in the oil and gas industry.

By 2019, Mike began coaching entrepreneurs at his firm, Unbreakable Wealth, in Golden, Colo. His goal was to help entrepreneurs find freedom by breaking the chains that money and wealth create. In doing so, he built a million-dollar, one-person business. Along the way he wrote Be Rich Now, a book he plans to release in Q4, started a newsletter and launched a YouTube channel where he interviews other successful entrepreneurs about their money stories.

“Most of us don't need as much money as we think to live the life that we want to live,” Mike said at a recent event I moderated at the New York Public Library in the “Tiny Business, Big Money Series,” named for my second book. "We get trapped in the societal belief that more is better. And what I've found, working with hundreds, if not thousands, of entrepreneurs and high earners at this point, is that most of us don't need more money. We need more freedom. We need to give ourselves permission to live life on our own terms. So, if that's your starting place for moving from employee to entrepreneur or growing your company, be sure that you're creating a life that you never have to retire from. Be sure you're creating a life that you actually want instead of getting lost along the way.”

Mike is part of a fast-growing trend—the rise of million-dollar, one-person businesses, the trend that inspired my first book. The number of these businesses doubled from 2021 to 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, with the total count of nonemployer businesses reaching 116,803 for the first time. Nonemployer businesses are staffed by the owners or contractors and don’t run payroll.

Looking to unlock more freedom in your own life? Here are some insights Mike shared:

Time = wealth. Wealth is not about earning more money. It’s about freeing more time, according to Mike.

“The difference in generating wealth for yourself versus being an employee is leverage,” Mike said. “If you want to create true wealth, there has to be some sort of a leverage point.”

You don't necessarily need to be an entrepreneur to find leverage, but having your own business makes doing so easier, he explained. "As an employee, unless you're at the very highest levels of a Fortune 500 company, your income is going to be capped,” Mike said. “Entrepreneurship is really about moving into a place where your income is uncapped, and you can actually divorce your time from money.”

Money = fuel. “Money is just a battery,” said Mike. “Money is only important in that it can allow us to create the life that we want to create. For me, that mindset starts with getting really clear on ‘What is the life that I actually want to live?’ because entrepreneurship does not guarantee that you're going to be free. It just guarantees that you have some sort of leverage, but if you don't use that money in service of creating a life that you want to create, you're just as trapped as an employee.”

Service = fulfillment. Many entrepreneurs go into business for the first time because of an unmet need for significance, recognition, or money, according to Mike. But once these entrepreneurs find what they crave, they often seek something more in their next business, he explained.

After selling his last company, Mike realized, “I’m still the same person as I was yesterday. All of this external validation didn't fill me up like ‘What's next?’ did. And that's when I started the transition and realized it's not about me. True fulfillment and alignment come from serving other people.”

He transitioned to this way of thinking in 15 years of being an entrepreneur, he said. “Now I get to leap out of bed to work,” he said. “And it's because it's about it's about serving others. It's about empowering others. It's about helping them live their best life. I have a lot of hard-earned wisdom from blood, sweat and tears over the last 15 years, and now, just getting to share that with other people is the most fulfilling career I can imagine.”

Mike recommended reading "The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life" by David Brooks to understand the difference between “first mountain” businesses (built as sources of external validation) and “second mountain businesses” (whose primary purpose is to serve other people). “My advice, especially to people just starting out, is if you can make it not about you, that is the path that will ultimately result in fulfillment,” Mike said.

Transitioning to a second mountain business may require an entrepreneur to heal trauma if that hurt drove the quest for achievement in the first business, he explained. “The more you can heal that and move to a place of service, the more aligned and fulfilled you’ll be, and the faster you're going to grow,” he said. “And then, it turns out, when you get to that place, the money starts to flow.”

Paying customers=a business with potential. “You don't need money to start a business,” said Mike. “You need customers. You need demand. So even if you want to build a product, you can go on Kickstarter and say, ‘Hey, this is my product idea,’ and the market will tell you if your product is a good idea or not. You don’t actually need to have money to invest yourself to get that product made.”

Most important action step=finding those paying customers. Go out and sell if you’re looking to grow your business, Mike advises. Not next week. Today. "The thing people are most afraid of is selling ‘the thing’ because we all fear rejection, ultimately," he said.

If fear of hearing “No” is holding you back, ask a few questions, he recommended: “What do I need to do? Where am I fearing rejection? How can I lean into that and just go get some customers?” he advised.

Ignoring armchair quarterbacks =peace. Many people are familiar with the concept of power of attorney, in which someone authorizes another individual to act on their behalf legally. “You're only going to grant someone power of attorney that you trust with your life,” Mike said.

He believes in granting “power of opinion” with the same care. By “power of opinion,” he means the right to weigh in on his life.

“We grant our power of opinion to people whom we don't respect, whose life we don't want, who want to keep us small, who are playing small themselves,” he said. “And we're truly giving up our power. A lot of people love to say, ‘I don't care what anybody thinks about me.’ That's not true. We all care what people think about us. It's just choosing people that's important.”

To protect his peace, Mike limits this brain trust to a select few. “I keep my power of opinion very small, but I look at people who are further ahead of where I want to be, who are living a life that I want to emulate, and I make them the judges,” he said. “And if they come to me and say, ‘Hey, we think you're out of alignment, or you're not doing something,’ then I listen to that. But people who want to throw stones or who haven't achieved the things I want to achieve or aren’t living the life I want to live —I just feel free to let that stuff go because why would I listen to someone who is not creating the thing that I want to create?”

Overcoming fear=building a launch pad for success. “None of us want to look bad in front of the people that we care about,” said Mike. “So, we keep ourselves small and only do things just big enough that we know we can succeed. Rarely do we do something that truly scares us because we don't want to be seen as failing by society or by our friends and family."

Fear of success is the other side of the same coin, Mike said. “If we outshine or if we start to become more successful than those around us, there's a lot of isolation and loneliness,” Mike said. “So, a lot of times, we'll only allow ourselves to be just successful enough, but not so successful that we start to be cast out by the tribe.”

Looking to overcome either type of fear if it’s holding you back? Mike recommends The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level—A Transformative Guide to Overcoming Fears and False Beliefs for Personal Growth and Success, a self-help classic by Gay Hendricks.

“It talks about the upper-limits problem, where we'll place ceilings in front of ourselves to keep our ego safe, to keep from being rejected, to keep from playing full out because we want to be safe with the tribe,” he said.

AI=your next big competitive edge. Mike predicts that we'll all soon be thinking in terms of “before and after” AI and anticipates that, thanks to its rise, we'll see a billion-dollar, one-person business within the next year.

“I believe that we have already seen a fundamental shift in the paradigm in the way the world works,” he said. “And there are either people that are embracing that or there are people that are going to get left behind.”

He pointed Bill Gates’ famous quote that most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. AI is now changing what people can do in a year to the point it's hard even to project how efficient it will make us, he believes. “Right now, we can't possibly estimate what we can accomplish in a year with the radical speed at which the world is changing,” Mike said.

While it’s not too late to embrace AI, Mike said it’s essential to start learning to use it now as a leverage tool. He pointed to how no-code platforms like Replit are empowering entrepreneurs. “We can build things that would take months or years and massive capital investment almost for free at this point,” he said.

Access to tools like this is helping to level the playing field in entrepreneurship, as he sees it. “This is democratized,” he said. “Everybody can get access to it, but you've got to start now.”

AI + Assistants = leverage. Mike is also a big proponent of using apps and tools to do more in less time. He uses Notion, an AI workspace, for productivity. “If your productivity tool doesn't have AI, it's probably not that productive at this point,” he said.

He’s also discovered the power of voice commands. When using his phone, he records voice notes to communicate with his assistant. “I can get in a lot of context a lot faster than I would be able to create a task in project management software,” he said.

Another favorite tool is Wisprflow, a voice dictation tool that he uses in conjunction with OpenAI. “I speak into ChatGPT and give it three to five-minute extremely long prompts with tons of context," he said.

For copywriting, Mike uses Claude. “I've uploaded every word that I've ever written — every newsletter that I've ever written, my book manuscript —to Claude,” he said. “And now I'll just speak a three-minute prompt to have it help me write, and the document comes back exactly in my voice.”

Want to add to the advantages of using AI and other tech tools? Mike believes hiring a virtual assistant can be a game-changer. “Hiring offshore is a very high-leverage way to create a lot of value,” he said.

Your highest-value work = your ticket to a thriving business. Staying focused on the work only you can do is essentials to creating a unique and sustainable business. “I believe my highest value is doing two things: coaching and creating content,” Mike said. “So, I ruthlessly delegate every other aspect of my business, other than where I'm serving my highest and best good, which is meeting with clients or filming or writing content. Those are the only two things I'm trying to do. Between my assistant and AI, I am pushing as much off my plate as I possibly can.”

Facing reality = power. You’ll feel better about your business if you accept that running it will always be challenging. “Anybody that tells you that business is easy is either trying to sell you something or is being dishonest,” Mike said. “I am on my fourth business, and it is still incredibly hard.”

And it never gets easier. “One of the traps I fall into every day is, ‘I've done this so many times. Why is this still hard?’” he said. “It's always hard. We're always solving new challenges. There are always new things that are popping up. And so, by sharing that journey authentically...If I can share my authentic, vulnerable self, I'm giving other people the invitation to do so.”

Resilience = opportunity. Rebounding from the difficulties is often where the big opportunities lie, Mike has found. “My coaching business started because I had a massive business failure,” he said. “I was at an entrepreneurship event, and they asked me to speak. I said, ‘I don't know who needs to hear this, but let me tell you about my journey.’ And 25 people lined up afterward and said, ‘Me, too! I've lost so much money over here. It looks like I'm successful on paper, but I'm totally broke.’” And just by giving people permission, I realized we're all in this together. Nobody has it figured out. Even the wealthiest people I know don't have it figured out, and they struggle with the same things that I do.”

Your breakthrough = answering one question honestly. Mike encourages all clients to ask themselves, "What is the number one thing I need to be doing, and why am I not doing it?”

“This should be a speedy answer,” he said. “This shouldn't be a big complex answer. It's more like, ‘Hey, what's the one thing you need to be doing in your business today?’ And most everyone will go, ‘Oh, I know I need to email Bob back.’ And then I say, ‘Okay, why haven't you emailed Bob back?’ ‘Well, it's really because I'm afraid that he's going to say no, or I don't have the perfect answer for him.’

“And so, if you can look at the fear that underlies the things that you're putting off, that's how you can quickly shortcut getting the things done that move the needle,” he said. “Because the reality is that 10% of our activities generate 90% of our revenue. And yet we fill up our day with useless meetings or doing research on things.”

Are you looking to make a big leap in your business this week? Why not make answering Mike's question your number-one priority this week? I'd love to hear back from you about the results

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