Todd Connor - Third Shift Entrepreneur: Keep Your Day Job, Build Your Dream Job

TODD CONNOR

Copyright 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:

ISBN 9781119708360 (Hardcover)
ISBN 9781119708384 (ePDF)
ISBN 9781119708377 (ePub)

Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Images: Craft paper tear voinSveta/Getty Images, Cardboard paper sheet koosen/Shutterstock, Clouds sharply_done/Getty Images
Author Image: Courtesy of Todd Connor

The stories and content contained herein are inspired by the hundreds of entrepreneurs I have met, supported, as well as learned from over the last 10 years. It is their stories that inspire me as well as instruct me on what well-informed personal entrepreneurship strategy, not to mention a life well-lived, looks like. I'm deeply humbled to work alongside nearly 30 staff and 200 volunteer city leaders at Bunker Labs, who selflessly bring their A-game every day to serve military veterans and military spouses that are starting businesses like the ones you will read about here. They are by far the most talented, inspired, tenacious, and humble group of people I have ever had the privilege of working with. Not a week goes by that we do not share deep belly-laughs as well as sincere tears serving this mission together.

Thank you to the team at Wiley, including Brian Neill, Deborah Schindlar, and Tim Gallan, who embraced the broader vision of this book's potential and brought their rigor to strengthen the final manuscript. You are each a pleasure to work with. In addition, I must acknowledge Emily Drake, who runs The Collective Academy. She's brilliant, inspiring, and hilarious. We all need an Emily Drake, if not the Emily Drake, in our lives.

Thank you to my husband, Andrew, who has always been the touchstone to whom I return. There is no season of my life in which I don't find him both absolutely indispensable as well as the perfect companion.

This book is also dedicated to my son, Jasper. I hope he finds the deepest fulfillment in life, which is to be of service to others. I also hope he is unabashedly himself in pursuing all the dreams he will have in this life.

Finally to you, the person reading this. I think you too are exceptional. Your dreams matter and while you are undoubtedly inundated with reasons why you cant, I hope to be a persistent voice in your head that says you must.

After serving as an officer in the Marine Corps, I launched my first venture, which was a free boxing gym for inner-city youth and young adults in Newark, New Jersey, called the IRONBOUND Boxing Academy. I was working full-time at a private school in downtown Newark, lived on campus and oversaw a residence hall of 70+ teenage boys, and I was also a graduate student pursuing my master's degree in American Studies from Rutgers-Newark. From October 2016 to the summer of 2018, my life consisted of work, school, and boxing. I was the epitome of the Third Shift Entrepreneur, only I didn't know it at the time. In June 2018, with a nudge from my own Third Shift Entrepreneurial community known as Bunker Labs, a veteran nonprofit organization that helps people start businesses, I left my job to pursue IRONBOUND Boxing full-time.

For the past two years, I've taught boxing to CEOs in the NYC Metro Area, served as a part-time consultant supporting veteran entrepreneurship initiatives, and moonlighted as a brand strategist with an E-Commerce Coffee Company based in Atlanta. I even managed to launch my own podcast called Confessions of a Native Son. If there's anything I've learned along the way, it's that it's time for a new playbook for entrepreneurs. Too often we create myths around entrepreneurship and tell stories of Harvard dropouts who make their way to Silicon Valley. That thinking and those stories leave the vast majority of us out.

Starting your own business takes more time, money, and effort than you expect, and especially so because a lot of that time, money, and effort is spent on the wrong things. Before you waste money, rack up tons of debt, or step into the unknown, I encourage you to understand and embrace a Third Shift Entrepreneur mindset. The sad reality is that the majority of business literature today doesn't accurately reflect the vast landscape of our American identity, particularly for minorities. There are socioeconomic and racial disparities among our society, which have left out many groups from business ownership. If we're going to overcome them, we need new frameworks and playbooks.

There's nothing more freeing than being able to generate income for yourself and your loved ones as an entrepreneur. You unleash untapped power and confidence in yourself when you're able to come up with an idea for a product or service and monetize it. The entrepreneurial journey is one of the most rewarding experiencesa true act of realizing your full potential. I believe everyone who has the aspiration should have the opportunity, and my hope is that the strategies in the following pages reveal an approach that will allow you to do so. This is a book, in essence, that creates a pathway to entrepreneurship for the rest of us.