For those of you who have been reading Leaving Work Behind since the beginning, you will know that the first one was back in May 2011, when I decided that I wanted to quit my job and build a successful online business. Since then, notable moments of clarity that have changed the direction of my business (and my life) have been chronicled in posts such as Why I Am No Longer In A Rush To Get Rich and How I Plan to Revolutionize My Online Business.
I am writing this post as a reaction to yet another epiphany that I experienced last week. It will probably act as a catalyst for the biggest shift in my online business yet. In this post, I want to share my epiphany with you and tell you what I think it will mean for me and my business.
Building a “Real” Business
I use the word “business” above very deliberately, as my epiphany was essentially a moment of extreme clarity in which I realized that to call what I was doing “business” was a bit of a stretch.
Sure – I make a comfortable full time living from what I do. But the approach that I have typically taken to my day-to-day work is not that of what I would consider to be a businessman.
I wouldn’t say that my success has been incidental to my input, as there have certainly been times when I have been very single-minded in what I’ve done, but I no qualms in saying that my growth over the past three years has often been severely stunted by my attitude towards my work.
And to an extent, I have no qualms with that. I’ve already linked to Why I Am No Longer In A Rush To Get Rich above, which outlines a way of thinking that I still believe in. Life isn’t just about working to make more money. However, when it does come to getting work done, my approach has been all wrong. I have been approaching certain areas of my business as more of a casual hobby than a career.
In short, if you want to be successful, when you do sit down to work, you need to have your priorities straight. And ultimately, being in business is about making money. That is a simple fact that I have not appreciated enough.
Misguided Goodwill
My naivety with respect to the above can be pointed out with ease if you care to look in the right places.
Consider this blog as an example. In July 2013 I published a post, My Thoughts on the Future of Leaving Work Behind, in which I said that I was going to focus on creating a solid community rather than making money. An admirable cause, perhaps, but not the right one. Fast forward nearly twelve months and I have that community, but this site generates no more direct income that it did back then and the traffic levels are around the same. Furthermore, I’ve incurred costs in the region of $2,000 associated with setting up that community.
Does that sound like a successful commercial venture? No. But for some reason, it hasn’t bothered me. I haven’t given it much thought. From a commercial viewpoint, Leaving Work Behind has simply trundled along, unmanned, for the past year. I was telling myself that building something that I considered of value for my readers was enough, but it’s not. In order to create something that will stand the test of time and truly benefit people, I need to build something of commercial worth. I need to build something that will pay my bills and make me money so that I can justify it from a commercial perspective. I’ll explain why in more detail later in this article.
Another great example of my less-than-business-minded approach is Healthy Enough – a startup blog that I recently began pouring money into. With the relativel success of Leaving Work Behind, Paid to Blog and now Paid to Blog Jobs, I should have had plenty to be keeping me busy. (That’s not even to mention my writing business, which has consistently delivered the most income out of all my online assets since 2011.) And yet, instead of optimizing and growing my existing income streams, I decided to pour a huge proportion of my efforts into starting a brand new blog. Why hasn’t anyone put me in a straightjacket?!
The fact is this: I love the idea of Healthy Enough. It’s a passion project. Or to put it another way, it’s a hobby. A costly hobby that could potentially make money in time. Put simply, pouring time and money into that site is not a wise commercial move – I can invest my money and my mind into far more promising projects. And yet, I have been ignorant of that fact for many months.
Over the past couple of years, it seems that I have had a complete lack of appreciation that the things that I do on a daily basis are what keep a roof over my head and food on my plate. I have dreamt of having a life of total security, doing exactly what I want to do, but I haven’t been taking the correct practical steps to make that dream a reality. I make emotional decisions about this blog and other projects without considering the commercial (i.e. most important) aspect.
In a nutshell, I’ve essentially been running my business like a hobby, and it has to stop.
So What Now?
As you might expect, such a huge change of perspective will have some pretty major repercussions.
I haven’t even mentioned the event that actually sparked this all off – the pre-launch of my first book, Belief. It was made available to my LWB Book Club members last week on a pay what you want basis. That’s exactly what it sounds like – people were able to pay what they wanted for the book, starting from $0.
The launch was pretty low key, to say the very least. My pre-launch email list was 400+ strong, from which I generated 33 “sales” for a total of $80. That includes one kind donation from someone I know that skew the number somewhat, which if you take away, leaves me with a value of 19 cents per person on my list.
To put that in perspective, the recent beta version of Paid to Blog Jobs was launched to a list of 500+ and generated about 70 sales at $20 per month each. So that’s $1,400 per month. Admittedly, not all of the members are likely to stay on from one month to the next, but the contrast is remarkable. If you assume that each member will stay for a three month period on average, each person on my pre-launch email list was worth nearly $8 (compared with Belief’s 19 cents).
The difference between these two projects? One feels like a real asset that delivers concrete value with relatively low upfront costs (both in terms of time and money) and a lot of room for growth. The other felt like something that I “thought” I should do to “help” people, based upon an unproven sales strategy and with relatively high upfront production costs. Flabby, nebulous, vague notions that may have sealed the project’s downfall before it even got off the ground.
The bottom line is this: Belief and the associated marketing costs added up to $1,600 and took countless hours to create. My net loss, as it stands, is $1,520.
But this isn’t a post about Belief. I’ll leave that for another time, when I’ve figured out how I’m going to take that project forward (if at all). My point is this: the commercial project (Paid to Blog Jobs) has had a great start and offers lots of potential for the future. Its success, through leverage and scaling, will enable me to help lots of people. Meanwhile, the “passion project” has fallen flat on its face.
And therein lies the rub; the simple fact that I have failed to grasp. I can help the more people by making more money. Creating a popular product that people want to buy is far better for my community than creating something based upon a more emotional mindset that ends up stillborn.
All of this leads me to drastic action – a ruthless culling of everything I do in my business that does not represent a good commercial opportunity, either directly or indirectly. At this point that means the following:
- Healthy Enough is on hiatus, effective immediately
- My book series is on hiatus until I can better ascertain its potential
- All other activities are subject to scrutiny to ascertain whether they are in my business commercial interests
Whaaaat?
I know that these actions represent a big turnaround, especially given that it was only a few weeks ago that I was asking you to become a paid Healthy Enough reader.
I had six writers on paid trials for the blog, and I have of course paid them for their time. Wasting that money is my issue – it’s certainly not their fault that I had a change of heart and there was no way in hell I was going to back out on them. From one perspective it was a costly mistake – from my perspective it was a valuable lesson learned.
My original offer to the writers was a 5 post paid trial. With that in mind, I contacted each of the writers a few days ago, explained the situation and gave them two options:
- They could stop and bill me for what they had done to date
- They could continue to work through the trial period, as originally agreed
I may have been putting a stop on things, but I didn’t think it was fair to put a stop on a trial period that had already been agreed.
Some might consider my actions rash, and I do feel somewhat guilty that I brought other people into this situation, even if I never actually guaranteed them anything. It wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that my behavior often shares key characteristics with that of a yo-yo. But sometimes you have to make bold decisions and risk the judgment of others to do what you think is right – even if it means correcting some messy wrongs. This is certainly one of those situations.
What Does This Mean for LWB?
I have deliberately made the above sound rather extreme, because I want to drive home really how strongly I feel about the concept of running a business like a business. And I say that unapologetically.
But how does this align with Leaving Work Behind? How does it align with my reputation as a trustworthy guy who ultimately has the best interests of his audience at his heart? Can the prioritization of moneymaking really live in harmony with my somewhat altruistic past?
Of course it can. I want to make it absolutely clear at this point that my intrinsic character hasn’t changed. I’m still the guy who responds to every single email and comment that I get. I’m still the guy who ultimately wants to help you succeed. But I now have a better appreciation for how I want to help you succeed.
It’s simple: in everything I do, I must find the cross-section between (1) making money and (2) helping people. I no longer strive to help people without any underlying purpose – the underlying purpose is now to make every step I take a win/win situation.
Paid to Blog Jobs is a wonderful example of this – I am incredibly excited about its potential. It’s good already, in its beta stage, but wait until we really get rolling with it. I can focus on providing huge value while getting paid for my efforts. And the best part is, Leaving Work Behind serves as a natural advertisement for it while simultaneously offering up free content to those who are not ready or willing to spend money on what I have to offer. Everybody wins!
So don’t worry – Leaving Work Behind is not about to morph into some unrecognizable commercial enterprise. In fact, you may well notice no difference around here at all, as a lot of what I am doing will be behind the scenes. I suppose what will be noticeable is what I talk about here on the blog – the projects I am involved in, the motivations for being involved in them, and the actions I take. I will continue to offer up personal case studies of my projects as I always have done, but they will be more useful than ever, as my approach will be far more entrepreneurial – in the real sense of the word – than it ever has been.
So, for now, all I ask you to do is strap in and get ready for the ride. I’ve got a lot to tell you in the coming weeks, and I can’t wait to continue helping you with your own businesses by sharing the secrets of my own with you!
Photo Credit: Nanagyei