E192 - Lessons from Michael LeBeau: The Ultimate Side Hustle Reframe

Rob Tracz: What's going on guys, and welcome back to another Friday recap of surviving the side hustle. As usual, let me kick it off by asking you something so you can think about. ⁓ what if the thing you think is holding you back from building your business is actually the thing making it possible? The full time job, the day gig, the typical nine to five you feel guilty about not quitting.

That's all for today's episode of Surviving the Side Hustle. If you found value here, please don't forget to rate and review the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening from. And please create a shared success by helping us share this episode with someone who you think would benefit from today's conversation. And finally, don't forget to connect with us at survivingthesidehustle.

com and give us a follow on social so that we can take part in following along in your entrepreneurial journey. We'll get started just after this message. If you're an ambitious business owner or side hustler who's ready for a breakthrough, tired of spinning your wheels, looking to slide past burnout and build real momentum, I'd love to invite you to book a free Prime Performance Strategy session with me or one of our strategists. This is your chance to get personalized insight on what's been holding you back and get a clear path to move forward.

No fluff, just actionable strategy. Welcome to Surviving the Side Hustle podcast, the place where expert-based business owners learn how to build momentum, avoid burnout, and create sustainable success on their own terms. I'm your host, Rob Tracz, strength and conditioning specialist, turned founder and CEO of Prime Performance Coaching, the personal performance strategy firm for high achieving business owners and operators. I partner with driven entrepreneurs to implement the Prime Performance Process If you're building something on the side right now and you've been telling yourself the story that your job is the obstacle, I want you to flip it.

What is your day job actually giving you? Stability, a skill set, a network, time that you're not using well, the runway to be patient. Because the entrepreneurs who blow up their stability too early often make their worst decisions in the panic that follows. See, everybody tells you that to be a real entrepreneur, you've got to take the leap.

Burn the boats and go all in. But here's the truth: the boats aren't always the thing stopping you. Sometimes the boat is the exact thing keeping you afloat while you build. This week's guest is building a real company without quitting his day job.

And the way he's doing it is going to reframe how you think about your own side hustle. This week I sat down. The ones who build patiently on top of a stable base get to make decisions from a place of strength. This is exactly the kind of thinking I coach inside my pace principle.

There's a whole framework behind it, but the core idea is that sustainable growth is about building at a pace your life can actually support. Not torching everything for the sake of looking committed. Sometimes the most ambitious thing you can do is keep. an awareness-based operating system that's helped me and countless solopreneurs and small business owners evolve from just being high performers on the edge of burnout to prime performers building sustainable success.

The impact of prime performance process has led me here, where I'll show you how to get unstuck and design your own prime performance life without sacrificing your health, relationships, or sanity. So whether you're hustling after hours or scaling your passion project, So if you're interested, visit survivingthesidehustle.com forward slash free call to request your spot now. Again, that's survivingthesidehustle.

com forward slash free call. Looking forward to helping you become a prime performer. Until next time, remember, success doesn't require a complete sacrifice. Just strategy, momentum, and the right support.

With Michael Lebeau. Michael is the founder of Tech Cycle Solutions, a company focused on electronics, recycling, and secure data destruction. They help corporations responsibly dispose of laptops, servers, and other devices while making sure sensitive information is completely destroyed. But here's the twist: Michael isn't doing this full time.

He's actually a high school computer science teacher in Massachusetts, teaching newcomer students the stable thing in place while you build the new thing slowly enough that it actually lasts. Stop resenting your day job and start leveraging it. The stability you're embarrassed about might be the exact foundation that lets you build something real without the desperation that kills most businesses early on. Today and here, you're going to get real stories, science-backed strategies, and practical frameworks to help you excel every step of your journey.

It's time. Let's get intentional, build momentum, and become prime performers together. And the second lesson I want you to take away is awareness is the entire business. This is the part of the conversation that genuinely surprised me.

And I think it's the most important business lesson in the whole episode. I admitted to Michael that I have a stack of old laptops sitting in my house because I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with them. Can I throw them out? Is that illegal?

Is my data still on there? I don't know. And it turns out that exact ignorance, mine and millions of other people's. many of whom are learning English for the first time.

And he's building tech cycle in the hours after the final bell rings. And he didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. He told me flat out he doesn't even like the word. It feels too corporate or too big, too much like a costume that he hasn't earned yet.

He fell into electronics recycling through a student's relative. He got laid off from a part time gig in the field, saw an opportunity nobody else was seeing, is the business. Michael's entire company exists in the gap between what people should know and what they actually know. Most people don't know electronics recycling is a thing.

They don't know that their old laptop has a hazardous lithium battery. They don't know their network switch has a hard drive on it. And they don't know that the lowest person on the totem pole at their company is tossing sensitive devices in a dumpster. And he told a story that stopped me cold.

And built a company one step at a time with the support of his family and a business partner with an MBA. This episode is for anybody who's building something on the side, in the crack of a full schedule, without a safety net of free time, wondering if they're doing it right in the first place. But the core frame here, so if you haven't listened to it already, the guest interview, make sure you go back and check it out. But Michael said something early in the conversation that I think a lot of people need to hear.

A residential customer was sure he'd destroyed his hard drive. He'd taken a drill right through it, but it was solid state drive, shaped differently than he expected. So the drill went through the plastic and missed the actual data. Michael turned the computer on and emailed the guy all of his own data back to prove it.

Six or seven years of information the guy thought was gone. And here's the lesson for every entrepreneur listening. The biggest business opportunities aren't in solving problems. He said he doesn't see himself as an entrepreneur.

He sees himself as somebody with a job to do. And he's going to accomplish that job one step at a time. And whatever comes at him, comes at him. At first that sounds like humility or maybe imposter syndrome.

But the more we talked, the more I realized it's actually a superpower. Because while most people are paralyzed trying to live up to the identity of being an entrepreneur. People know they have. They're in solving problems people don't even know exist.

Michael isn't competing in a crowded market trying to be 10% better than the next guy. He found a massive growing problem, e-waste increasing every single year, accelerated now by the AI hard drive, re hardware refresh, I should say. And most people aren't even aware of this. The awareness gap is the moat.

Think about your own business through this lens. Like the image, the brand, the Instagram flashiness. Michael isn't carrying any of that weight. He's just solving the next problem in front of him.

No grand vision he has to live up to, no pressure to look the part, just what's the next step? And how do I take it well? The whole episode is about what becomes possible when you stop performing the role of entrepreneur and start doing the actual work one problem at a time. Are you fighting to be slightly better in a category everybody else understands?

Or are you educating people about a problem they didn't know that they had? Because the second one is a fundamentally easier and more durable business to build. When you're the one raising the awareness, you're not just a vendor, you're a trusted guide who showed them the problem in the first place. And the guide usually gets the business.

This connects to the heart. So the first lesson I want you to take away is your constraint might be your unfair advantage. Michael flipped a belief I hear almost every side hustler I talk to. Most people see their full-time job as the enemy of their business.

It eats their time, it drains their energy. It's the thing they have to escape from before they can really build. And so they spend years resenting the job while dreaming about the leap. Of my coaching philosophy and what I built under the prime principle opportunity and the luck formula.

The whole idea is that business is often being positioned in the gap nobody else noticed. Michael got lucky, sure, but only because he walked through a door most people didn't even see was there. Opportunity favors the person paying attention to the problems everyone else is ignoring. Michael sees it completely differently, however.

He said teaching is actually one of the best jobs to have while starting a business. Because the school day ends at two o'clock. If he had a job that kept him until five or six every night, he wouldn't have the afternoon hours to run pickups, work the shop, and be available during business hours. The teaching schedule isn't a cage.

It's the exact structure that makes the business possible. Here's what most people miss. The constraint your cursing And finally, the big idea that I really want to bring home to you guys is you don't have to quit your job tomorrow. You don't have to call yourself an entrepreneur.

You don't have to have a grand vision or a perfect brand or all of the answers. You just have to solve the next problem in front of you. And love the work enough to keep solving the next problem and the next one and the next one. Michael is building a real company in the margins of a full life.

No leap, no safety, net of freedom. might be the exact thing giving you the room to actually build. And it goes deeper than just the schedule. The teaching job gives him a stable income, which means tech cycle doesn't have to be profitable tomorrow.

It gives him benefits, which lowers his risk, and it gives him a community he loves and social interaction that keeps him grounded, which, as we'll get to, turns out to matter more than he expected. That stability is what ⁓ lets him make smart, patient long term decisions instead of the desperate, scared short term ones. He's not building tech cycle with a gun to his head. He's building it from a position of security.

And that changes the quality of every decision he makes. Or free time. No costume. Just a guy who found a problem worth solving.

A structure that supports the build, a twenty minute nap that keeps the engine running, and a genuine love for the work that makes the whole thing sustainable. That's not a lesser path. For most people, that's the smarter path. Build it one step at a time.

Build it on a foundation that holds. Build it around something you love and let it grow at the pace your life can actually support. Now let me challenge you with this. If your business is stockpiling old electronics, like laptops, servers, devices with data that you need destroyed securely, Michael is your guy.

TechCycle Solutions is NIST compliant and HIPAA compliant. They inspect every device and they'll give you a certificate to back up the data destruction. The easiest way to reach him is email support at techcyclosolutions.com.

And he gets back to people within the day. Or you can also call the office at 617-302-6306. Or hit the contact form at TechCyclesolutions.com.

Michael, again, dude, if you're listening to this recap, thank you for coming on. The conversation was really incredible. But before I let you guys go, I want to leave you with a reframe from the episode that I think a lot of you guys might want to hear. Michael spent The whole conversation, insisting he's not really an entrepreneur.

He's just the teacher who's solving one problem at a time. And you know what? That mindset is exactly why he's succeeding. Because everybody else is paralyzed trying to look like an entrepreneur.

The brand, the image, the title. Michael skipped all of that and went straight to work. And here's the truth: you don't need to become an entrepreneur to call yourself one. You become one by quietly solving problems one step at a time, until one day you look up and realize that you've built something real.

So if you've been waiting to feel like an entrepreneur before you start acting like one, stop waiting. Drop the costume, the mask, solve the problem that's in front of you, and take the next step. Learn to love the work. The title catches up to the work, never the other way around.

I'll catch you guys next Tuesday with a new interview with a guest. And until then, stay sharp, stay aligned, keep surviving the side hustle.