It’s my birthday next week.
I’ll be 35 years old and it's making me reflect a lot on what I want out of this business.
After another busy week, I was driving home from the gym last night and that pesky devil popped over my shoulder and asked me “Why am I doing this?”
Truthfully, it’s not the first time I’ve considered quitting this business.
Ever since Blake dropped out earlier this year, it’s been a struggle to refine the business model and start to go to the well again on marketing and sales.
This isn’t my first rodeo. I know what it entails. And it’s damn hard building something from scratch and I need to make difficult decisions that don’t compromise my other goals in life.
After becoming obsessed with Magnet Monster’s success and working up to 14 hours per day, sometimes 7 days per week, I said to myself there would be no need to fall into that trap again.
I planned to use the leverage I’d built to rapidly grow this company.
But the truth is, it’s taking a lot more time than I thought and I’m having to be incredibly patient and stay true to my values.
What are those values?
- I won’t compromise time with my son & partner. That means I can’t realistically work more than 8 hours per day anymore, Mon-Fri. It’s not feasible if I want to spend 3 hours per day with them (at least) to work more than this.
- I won’t compromise my health. I used to be an athlete who prided himself on his fitness. Like a lot of other business owners, I fell into the trap of skipping gym sessions to prioritise work and eating for convenience and justifying it even though it’s wrong. This should take up at least 2 hours per day (including travel to the gym). I’m not yet back into this fully and it’s frustrating me. Making improvements, however.
- I want to do things outside of work. I used to be an avid reader; that’s literally come to a standstill at the moment and it frustrates me. I want to expand my knowledge beyond business books and podcasts to live a more interesting life.
All of this is lingering in my mind when there’s a hell of a lot of work that needs to be done.
So why do it? Theoretically, I could stop right now and do all of these things in abundance (for how long, who knows). I don’t need to work on this business right now and it’s not making me any money.
Magnet Monster is having its best-ever year in terms of revenue & profit (I wrote about this here). I have little to no involvement right now thanks to our excellent team.
So I’ve spent some time reverse engineering how I allocate my time and thinking about the fastest way to achieve my life goals in relation to what I’m currently doing on a daily basis.
And I revisited listening to my favourite philosopher, Naval Ravikant’s podcasts about the best way to acquire wealth (because ultimately, that’s what the goal is here - like most, I’m trying to reach a certain amount that enables me to live with ultimate freedom and provide for my immediate family to increase all of our lives quality).
And it boils down to this:
This is my superpower. I’m really good at this and I’m passionate about what I’m doing.
Plus, there’s a massive amount of leverage I can unlock by making this work.
There are synergies to increasing the profitability of Magnet Monster (we’ve already won business through CA clients referring us) and I’m getting to mingle alongside other incredibly intelligent business owners in a new space (SaaS) that I’m keen to build long-term relationships with.
Because like Naval says, you want to surround yourself with realistic optimists and build great relationships with them. That’s how compound interest is gained and that will lead to the best outcomes long-term in life.
SIDE NOTE: a lot of people say agencies are bad business models. I disagree entirely. Agencies enable you to meet high-quality entrepreneurs at scale leading to an abundance of opportunity and personal development if you pick the right niche to serve.
I also believe I’m early with this business. Founder-led content is increasing in importance as a strategy and we’re well poised to help a lot of entrepreneurs who are going to bite the bullet soon and look for help. Stopping now could mean a massive missed opportunity for us.
Lastly, I know I’d get the itch very quickly to come back and build something. I’m an entrepreneur through-and-through; I can’t sit idle throughout the day just reading books and going to the gym lol. I need to ‘feel’ as though I’m building something.
The problem is trying to balance that ‘feeling’ with what’s a reasonable amount of time to invest in this, quantifying the potential upside while not compromising the other areas of your life that are equally (or more) important.
I guess we’re all dealing with this on a daily basis. It takes blind faith sometimes to be an entrepreneur and what seems like an unreasonable amount of persistence when the results aren’t there.
But experience tells me that’s when most breakthroughs happen. So I’ll live to fight another week.
THIS WEEK'S SOCIAL JUICE
Magnet Monster has increased its gross profit by 256% this year. Here are the 5 changes we've made to achieve this.
5 Reasons Productized agencies are dead.
Here's the new agency model I'm advising all entrepreneurs to follow
