Before we jump in:
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The two skills: PATIENCE and DELAYED GRATIFICATION
The richest people I know all worked hard on something boring for 5+ years. Often 10 or 20 years.
One common trait of successful entrepreneurs and operators is that they are great at delaying gratification.
They understand that it is impossible to get it all right now. They are willing to do work today in exchange for rewards four weeks, four months, or four years from now. They understand that it takes sacrifice, boring work, and good decisions compounded for a long time.
Hell, if it were easy, everyone would be running companies and living the dream.
I get some version of this question all the time:
Nick, I really want to start a business and become an entrepreneur. I want to be successful and replace my corporate salary in year 1 but I really value my family time and have kids. I’m also a little league coach and my current job allows me to take several weeks of vacation each year and I’d like to maintain that from the start. What should I do?
These people have gotten the totally wrong idea about what it means to be an early stage entrepreneur. They truly believe that in less than a year they can launch a lifestyle business, replace their salary, and have perfect work-life balance just 6-12 months in.
Let me tell you right now that that is total bullshit.
If you want instant work life balance and to be home by dinner every night, you’re dreaming. It doesn’t work that way. Starting a business is really hard, and you can’t give up your main income source until you have a proven model that can feed your family. You will have to make sacrifices. You will miss some dinners. You will miss some weekends. You will miss some vacations (especially in the first few years as you build your base)
To me, it all comes down to patience and delayed gratification.
5 years in, you can absolutely be making 3X your old salary, have a team of people under you and work less but earn more than you used to at your old job.
That said, it takes TIME, a lot of good decisions and hiring and delegating to a team. It doesn’t happen overnight.
I think another important factor is ambition.
Do you have a real desire to do something very few people are able to do? Do you have the ambition to get seriously wealthy? Are you willing to take chances and invest time in something that might not work? (even if it means spending 3+ years to see it through?)
Whatever the answer is, do not quit your day job before you are earning enough money from your side hustle to cover your expenses. Period.
Even though it’s not the end game, at the beginning, you will trade your time for money – there is no other way. You have to go out there and get paid $50-100 per hour to do work for customers.
When you have 20 hours a week of that work, and you’re making $5-10K per month (or whatever number makes you comfortable), then and only then can you quit your job. The good news/bad news? Those hours will come from your evenings, mornings, vacation days, and weekends at the start.
If you aren’t willing to do this, you should forget about entrepreneurship and just keep waking up, going to work, coming home, and taking your free time to do what you want.
It is unbelievable to me how many first time entrepreneurs with no money, no skill, and no network think they are going to build a billion dollar business.
They end up failing over and over again until they can’t support themselves and eventually give up and go to get a job.
Instead, start by trading your free time for money and then slowly build off of that foundation. It is lower risk. You will learn a ton. Your mistakes won’t be as costly. AND you’ll get paid.
Think of an entrepreneurial career as rolling a snowball down a mountain. At the beginning you have no snowball and the accumulation takes time. But once it starts rolling and picks up speed things get way easier. The key here is to combine patience and momentum. Business is all about momentum, and the beginning is the hardest.
Time has a way of amplifying good decisions and good businesses. Do something well for 10 years, and it’s hard not to be successful.
Play a game where most of the people who stick with it end up winning, and it is likely that you will win if you stick with it. Business is the same.
Things get easier with experience, resources, and time under your belt. Your leverage gets more powerful. Your opportunities get better. Your decision making improves.
So stop thinking about entrepreneurship in a short-term way. Of course you are sprinting and racing at the beginning and keeping the pressure on, but you are really playing a 10-year game.
Patience and persistence are key. Build momentum. Delay gratification. Profit later.
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A few tweets from this week:
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AdRhino is a paid ads agency that I am a customer of and an investor in.
They run paid search and social media ads for clients in pest control, HVAC, plumbing, car washes, restaurants, real estate, and more. They track conversions so you can get an exact dollar figure return on your ad spend investment with them.
If your company does more than $100K in EBITDA annually and your current ads company isn’t providing good tracking or ROI, reach out to AdRhino.
I’m happy to make a personal introduction if you respond to this email.
Onward and upward,
Nick Huber