Everyday, I am constantly seeing entrepreneurs make one big mistake. It isn’t that you spend too much money or that you’re stuck in a bubble and refuse to get out of your comfort zone. It’s that you can’t focus all of your energy on one business!
I don’t want to hear bullshit excuses coming out of your mouth. Your new business doesn’t tie in with your existing one! You can’t try out a few business ideas before you pick the best option!
If you don’t focus on one business you’re bound to fail. Hypothetically, even if all of your ideas are revolutionary and they are bound to do well in this world, you’ll make them crash and burn. Why? Well, it’s because if you’re splitting your time between a few businesses, you won’t be able to put in the required amount of time and energy into any of them.
Let’s look at some stats
There are 24 hours in a day… that equates to 168 hours in a week.
The average adult gets 7 hours of sleep a day, or 49 hours a week.
An average small business owner works 52 hours a week.
The majority of your week is spent working or sleeping (49 hours + 52 hours = 101 hours).
Each week you spend 3.5 hours in the bathroom and 7.6 hours eating.
After you subtract the necessities, you’re left with 55.9 hours.
And if you’re one of those “average American’s” you spend a lot of time doing miscellaneous things such as chit chatting, texting, and most importantly, watching TV. And if you go by the stats that the LA Times gives, you spend around 5 hours a day watching TV.
5 hours of television a day equates to 35 hours a week. And if there is only 55.9 hours in a week left, there isn’t enough time left to hang out with your family and friends.
If you want to run 2 businesses at once and do things right, you only have time to eat, sleep, keep up with your hygiene (no one likes a smelly person), and work. There isn’t time to watch TV, travel, text message, or even talk with your family.
My mistake
Sadly, I know the stats I showed you above won’t convince you to focus on one business. Even if you agree with what I am saying, some how you’ll convince yourself to start multiple companies at once… it’s just a matter of time.
But before you go down that path, I ask you to NOT take a page out of my book.
With my first real business my business partner and I were making a decent amount of money. Cash was rolling in and we were living the “good life” (or at least what we thought to be the good life).
So why didn’t things take off? Well, we got side tracked with a lot of other businesses, which caused our main one to suffer. And it also cost us over a million dollars.
After that you would think we learned our lesson, right? Well, we didn’t. We made the same mistake a few more times. Financially we did alright, but one could argue that we would have made 3, 4 or even 10 times more money if we focused all of our energy into one company.
Even today, we have to force ourselves to focus because we both have A.D.D. We’re like 2 little kids in a candy store, looking for our next fix.
Conclusion
It took my business partner and I 3 years to figure out that we need to focus and another 3 to actually focus. We’re finally able to sit down and concentrate on one business, so hopefully things will work out in our favor.
Don’t make the same mistake we made and what millions of other entrepreneurs are making right now. 2/3 of small businesses fail within the first 6 years and you’re bound to be one of them if you don’t focus.
