1000 Hours on One Thing Vs 100 Hours of 10.
My biggest business mistake
This is a quick one and super easy to understand, hard to implement.
The knock-on benefits of spending 10X the amount of time, energy and productivity on one thing, whether that be a business, a product within a business or a marketing strategy, has huge upsides that are not proportional to the initial 10 times amount of work/energy/resources input.
This is a massive mistake I see tons of entrepreneurs and business owners make (including me).
In my first “real” business, I managed to get to £50k/month topline revenue in about 3-4 years. This felt like an entity but looking back was pretty good.
The issue is that then I started to diversify time and resources…. And most importantly diversified FOCUS!
As a result, the agency stagnated at £50k/month range, and slowly every 6 months or so would decrease by 5-10%. Sped up by Covid, the agency now isn’t even close to being the most valuable business.
Had I just decided to continue doing this one-thing, instead of essentially getting shiny object syndrome, this would probably be close to £200k/month business by this point, worth near £2.5m, instead we’ve winded it down.
Another great example of this “do one f*cking thing” concept is in our sports betting side.
The example I’ve been using to explain this is the amount of time it took me to get to anywhere near consistent earnings through betting sports.
The reason it took so long is due to the fact I was trying to do multiple different sports at once, not only this, I was trying to do multiple leagues in those sports.
AND on top of all that, sports betting was just a tiny percentage of the overall business projects we have/had.
So there was 4-5 main sports, with at least 3+ leagues in each one, all with its different nuances and factors….
On top of those 12-15 variations of leagues, there were 4 other main business, each with varying degrees of difficulty, that’s just a silly amount of projects.
Instead of this I decided to refine all the way down (albeit not to just one sport) but to automate everything aside from the development of one sport.
So we’re still betting 4-5, but full team energy, resources and flow state only goes on one sport or league at a time until it’s “solved” or we fail and run out of ideas and move on.
The results are pretty staggering.
Instead of averaging £1,000/month net profit, we’re averaging £5k/month.
All within about 6 months or switching things up.
This is a ton of work and there’s a lot of intentional friction that gets introduced, but the short version is it just works.
The other difficulty is that walking away from a project or business that fails is easy (as long as you don’t attach your ego or identity to it), but walking away from something that makes a bit (£1-2k net a month) is really really difficult to do, even if by not cutting ties or just selling it on the cheap, you are actually hurting yourself long term.
That’s why our approach over the coming months and years is to decrease the number of projects, refine things, sell some off, walk away from others and just get down to a place where there’s only 1-3 “main” things. Still 3 is too much but from 16 to 1 seems even too difficult to achieve now, so 16 to 3 is the goal.
Cheers.