Do you want a business that’s easy, quick and has low overheads with high revenues?
Everyone does.
The fact is, if someone is trying to sell you all of those things in one package, then they’re selling you a unicorn. Imagine a guru riding a unicorn, promising to sell you the secret key to everlasting piles of money, deposited directly through your mailbox every morning while you eat your bagel.
That’s essentially what you’re being sold.
Can you have a business which makes money quickly?
What about a business which is easy to run?
Or a business that makes a ton of money?
What about a business with practically no overhead?
The truth is, you can have a business that does any of those things. But your business probably won’t do all of those things.
What Do You Want?
When it comes to starting a business for the first time, people get really confused about what they want. Then they let themselves look for the golden goose – the business above – which provides them everything with very little sacrifice.
After a couple of failures or a few months, reality sets in and those seem people get a bit more precise in their targeting. They’ll say, “I want an easy, lifestyle business” or “When am I going to make a billion dollars?”
Naturally, once people categorise easy business, high turnover business and quick businesses, they then try to do things in completely the wrong order.
They’ll probably try a few easy businesses. Those will fail because they’re only easy for people who know what they’re doing.
Then, they’ll think, “Jesus Christ I wasted all my money on Warrior Forum guides and motivational ebooks! I need to make some money to pay for my rent this month!” And they’ll throw their lot in with the quick businesses. Then after a few weeks of grinding out their pennies, they’ll aim at the big markets with next-to-zero budget.
It’s all in the wrong order. Let me tell you what to do instead.
What To Do In Business
Firstly and always, assess your skills and what you’re good at. I wasted years trying for stupid stuff – great business ideas that involved me being a completely different person. Getting funding for a business that would require me to turn into an extrovert was an attempt to get into the high-profit market without having a clue what I was doing. Waste of time.
Meanwhile, I sold my first poem when I was a kid. I had a published article in a Playstation magazine back when I was a teenager. Wrote a short story for fun and got published first time. This isn’t a CV, it’s a painful admission – I was an idiot. If I could go back in time and tell my younger self something, I probably wouldn’t. I’d probably smack me in the face.
If I’d stuck to putting words on paper when I started messing around with it, I’d have been writing during the first and second Kindle booms and I probably would have retired by now.
Still, there’s no crying over spilt milk. The point is – Don’t bother doing anything other than what you’re good at. It’s a waste of time and if you’re an idiot like I am, you’ll say, “Don’t worry… we’ve got plenty of time.” I have plenty of time to get good at writing, but I missed several boom periods already.
Anyway, once you’re good at something, concentrate on one thing: finding how to make it profitable. It’s not going to be easy unless you’re a freak of nature or super-rich to start with. It’s probably not going to be quick, but you should aim to do it as quickly as possible.
If there’s a shiny object like “Get rich quick” or “Here’s how to make money in your sleep” ignore it.
Get your skills up. Find profitable applications. Then worry about what you can do afterwards. There’s absolutely no point in worrying about anything like scaling your business or how to invest your profits if you don’t have any. Don’t waste your time. At the very most, write it down in a notebook as something you can come back to next year.
Why Easy Businesses Aren’t Easy
There are certain businesses that are accepted as easier than others. They’ll have aspects f them that are easy. They’ll have aspects which are profitable or whatever.
They’re not easy for a beginner. E-commerce, affiliate marketing, physical businesses and high-level services are not easy and profitable as a beginner. They’re touted as easy because of two things:
- Unicorn-riding gurus sell you on the dream
- People with skills and many gold coins can do them easily.
Let’s take affiliate marketing for instance. I’m not talking about building a motivational blog and making $500 a month from selling protein powder. I’m talking about actual affiliate marketing – which is really traffic arbitrage.
Many newbies that haven’t made a penny want to get into affiliate marketing because it’s quick, easy and the overheads are low.
They are… providing you already have money to invest and you know what you’re doing. I truth, most affiliate marketers have neither of those things and blow through their advertising budget in a week, thus abandoning their “My journey to a million bucks a week” forum thread and never being heard of again.
Scaling Your Business
So, where did we leave off last time? Oh yeah, you have a skill and you’ve found a profitable application of it.
If you’re here, chances are you’re spending a god-awful amount of hours working. You’re freelancing, building stuff or networking. Those are all hour-intense, and there’s little passive income.
When you get to this point, you can think about two things:
- Higher ticket services.
- Building out some sort of infrastructure to deal with it all.
Reminder: You can’t skip to this bit. You’re not Trump or Branson. If you try and skip the “getting the skill” bit or “getting the customers” bit, you’re going to have a bad time. I’ve seen so many people try and start content mills, blog empires and affiliate marketing enterprises by hiring out all of the work from the start. Hell, I’ve worked for a ton of them.
If you don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t know how to provide a service, you shouldn’t be thinking about how you’re going to turn that into an empire. Forget Tim Ferriss and other unicorn riders. It’s a lie.
Alright, I’ll stop lecturing like a grandpa.
At this point, you’ve built a business using some skills and you understand the market. This is crucial because it’s your USP. It will come. Even if you’re a freelancer, you’ll find that people come back to you for certain reasons. If you’re writing books, some will be winners and some will be losers.
Here’s where you specify and drive the price up or pivot to something more profitable. The bonus: more money. The problem: you’ll need new skills and to think about things differently.
For instance, stop with the hundreds of projects. Stop taking on clients for lower money because you’re worried about overhead. Stop leaving everything to the last minute. Think as though your output is an assembly line at Walmart or something. That’s how professional you have to be. Robot-like.
This is the secret to the profitable business things.
Finally… Easy Businesses
Stuff like niche websites, passive income and asset building are not what you should start with.
Actually, niche sites are good for certain things… but they’re not a business on their own. It’s the same with the average asset.
These things are what you do to diversify after you know what you’re doing. There’s no sense in hiring a writer to write you niche blog posts when you don’t know what goes into SEO. There’s no point in buying gold if you can’t afford your grocery bill.
Lecture, once again over.
If you’ve gotten to the stage where your business is chugging along, you make a comfortable living and you’re bored out of your mind, then you can start diversifying. By all means, build websites, push money into buying traffic to those websites and do all those things that are now easy, quick and profitable because you can throw money into them and you know what you’re doing.
Final Thoughts
The above is a blueprint for how your business will probably progress. It could probably be boiled down to a couple of sentences though: find your skill, apply your skill, scale your skill and then diversify your skills. Avoid temptations along the way.
It sounds a lot less glamorous than “Write an ebook and live off the passive income profits” but it works. It also provides a framework where you’ll avoid time wasting and moving aimlessly from one thing to the next hoping to strike gold. There’s a progression.