SH - Part 1.

The Big One

I’ve always said that all the businesses that I’ve started, new skillsets learned or projects tested out have just been a training programme for the one-big-thing.

The one real business that both creates real value and change and also enables me to just work on one thing in a hyper proactive and productive way.

That’s the biggest problem at the moment.

The inability to go all-in on one project.

Whether that’s because there’s 8 total projects or just because I haven’t been fully “all-in” on any one particular thing.

As a result, most of the businesses have been set-up to be “passive” assets that work well, but don’t actually grow that fast (supplement brand), or whether it’s because the business model itself isn’t quite right (to me) when it comes to building a brand (KDP) or even the fact I don’t like client based agency business models (SEO agency).

It all just means that things are not fully aligned. From a energy, mental clarity, skills and capital point of view.

The other issue is that none of these are real brands.

Despite the one company we did build and exit (Evopure), this was a real brand but in a saturated/commoditised space (CBD). The rest of these businesses have never been real brands, and as a result its been tough to do anything “fully aligned”.

And also, in short, it was only just for the money in these other businesses.

I really enjoy the game of business but I always wanted to sell and walk away from everything and just have 1 real brand.

1 project to work on 12 hours a day, selling products that I would recommend to every single person I meet, and have such a clear belief that I’d be OK with “selling” people on a DTC ecommerce brand even if I just met them in a coffee shop or in the gym, simply because the belief of the product and the brand was so high.

CBD could have qualified for that, but honestly it was tough to differentiate one brand from another. Our blends were pretty top tier, but truly recommending to everyone I ever met, not so much.

I’d been in this “looking for the one thing” frame for years at this point.

Probably roughly since just before Covid, maybe late 2019, early 2020.

Wanting to wind down the agency, sell off the other digital assets and just work on one thing, to go all in on that one thing.

The mistake everyone (including me) makes is diversifying.

Doing more than 1 thing.

If you truly want to build something awesome, you need to build one thing first, for as long as you plan on growing it.

As soon as you diversify, you diversify focus, and hence effort.

And progress slows.

People try to kid themselves saying “Elon Musk runs 4 companies” - problem is, he started with 1, went all in on that, sold that and then moved on.

People who do one thing extremely well for a decade create 8 and 9 figure businesses all the time that no one knows about.

The reason is they did one thing, really well.

I’ve known this for a long time but have continued to just break this rule.

The issue/excuses is that life just doesn’t work in this way.

What ends up happening is you build something, test something else and if it “kind of” works, you are stuck in a position where you can’t walk away (if it failed its easy to walk away) and you can’t grow it (because you’ve got 5 other projects), so you are in this business or productivity purgatory.

This is also the issue with learning.

When you learn a new marketing strategy or operational efficiency to integrate, where do you implement them?

It was daunting to think about doing these new strategies for all the businesses and realistically it’s not possible, but doing it for any one individually, didn’t really make sense either, because that business wasn’t a brand, it was just a cash flowing asset, whether that’s just a collection of books, an Amazon FBA business, a marketing agency or a supplement company.

They all could be the one thing, but when they all live, progress is minimised.

Even during this time, I was still looking for that one big opportunity.

Something that could enable me to finally pull the trigger and dive into a new business to create the one thing.

If/When that did happen, it would be pretty easy to start, because the other businesses are so hands off and passive at this point that it’s not a big deal to only do an hour a day on them and continue having the same results…

An even the hour a day would still be a distraction, so these would slowly have to get sold off or walked away from, but they would also serve the purpose as to fund the one thing, enabling that to grow even more effectively and quickly.

Issue is, that one big thing didn’t really ever formulate into an idea.

I didn’t really see a clear opportunity that tied all the skills, network, contacts, interests etc into one business.

Until recently when things started to crystalise.

An idea that ironically was thought of years ago but now had added clarity to it.

The brand that really could be worth 9 figures, that really could build a unique, super high value product that everyone would benefit from.

With the key ingredient that this brand aligns all the skills, or the “spokes” that I’ve been developing for the past 12 years in business. All the skills, knowledge, psychology, mindset and capital.

Can potentially be deployed in an aligned way. Instead of all of these things being implemented individually, and doing fine, but can be collectively integrated to be far more powerful and be 1000X the impact.

The metaphor I’ve used to describe this feeling of adding skills, knowledge etc without having the main one-thing to utilise it, is; Adding spokes to a wheel without a centralised hub to connect everything.

Anyway, at the end of the day this is still just an idea and a plan at the moment, so there’s not much point talking about the actual concepts yet, but it’s a monumental step closer to becoming reality.