When it comes to procrastinating my own work, I am an expert. It comes at no surprise that it took me a good 15 years before starting my first article even though I’ve worked in this field for ages. I’ve always been good at helping and improving other people’s visions beside my own. In the last few good years, my desire to help others with their business has outgrown my own need to run a business.
Now, this might come across as weird because a lot of people have asked me in the past ” if you are good at what you do, why don’t you just invest the money and time in your own projects instead of spending the resources on others?”
I’ve done this for a while with off course my own share of miserable failures and successes (spoiler alert, my failures are vastly more than my successes). With that in mind, I’ve created more projects and companies than I can remember. They all ended up in the same way. I would get very excited, invest a lot of resources into the said project to only abandon it once it became stable, sell it off or stop doing it just because it was the wrong decision. It took me a good 20 years to realize my passion is mostly in the startup phase, the growth and proving the concept works, especially if the project had a 1 in a million shot of succeeding. Those kinds of underdog projects would get me really hyped up.
I think the moment I realized this was when I was doing 80 hours a week running fulltime 2 companies alongside a bunch of side projects(perfect recipe for a burnout right?). There was nothing wrong with the business model; on the contrary, “life was good” as some would put it in terms of the cash flow. However, the job became stable, and that is what it was… a job. Fair enough, they were my own companies, but it became the very thing I dreaded my whole life.
Start over
I even tried various industries to get the same high I got when I started my first business when I was 12 years old. Some might still remember those annoying ringtone websites where they sold tunes for a couple of euro’s, chances are you purchased it, and you purchased at least one ringtone from me ( truly sorry for that everyone).
To understand this feeling, I have to go back in time. I was underage, and I had to take my mother to the Chamber of commerce to incorporate the company. The company was merely there to keep the taxman happy and the books in check for the money which the websites generated. I shut it down a couple of years later when I moved to the UK. The whole ringtone scene become consolidated and I did not see it as a business and simply put I was outmanoeuvred by people who did see it as a business. That was the start of a long journey of many failed and successful projects, but I never could recreate the same feeling of seeing my first payout. It was like your first kiss, exciting, new, and you can feel your heartbeat. Come to think of it; I wished my first kiss had the same excitement as my first payout!
I was fortunate to grow up in a family of entrepreneurs. My stepdad had accountancy where I worked and learned all the ins and outs of running the business. My brother ran one of the country’s first hosting companies where my love for technology was awoken, and my mother had an art school where I would frequently go and experience the joy and peace that creativity had to offer.
What now?
This has been the million-dollar question that has kept me busy for the past 4 years. Do I want to start another new company? Not really to be honest, after the tenth project, it becomes some routine. You might want to call it losing your business mojo. I would start a project, and right after the growth period, I would sell it off because it was no longer challenging. This all changed when I met a new client, and we had the initial consultation, and I heard how passionate they were about their product.
The product in itself might not be that exciting to some. They were producing underwear for ladies during those lovely few days of the month. The underwear would absorb everything and would not stain any other clothing. As a guy, I am far from the target audience, but I fully understood the product’s potential. The client spoke with such passion for their idea and how this is THE product of the year and how outdated the industry is when it comes to female hygiene. We had several consultations, and I created a marketing strategy for their product which represented their vision.
The client decided to go into a different direction because of their limited resources which I understood, but some projects can not work with a low budget, especially when it comes to that specific market.
What the client did manage was infecting me with their passion during the consultation sessions. I felt the passion they had for their idea, and they drew me into that passion, and I would dive into it with them as if it was my own project and feed on each others energy. This…this is what I have been looking for….and then it clicked. To get the same high as my first company, I love to help others with their business! ..in theory at least.
2020 and coronavirus
It has been a strange and turbulent year for the whole world, and let’s be honest, we all took a hit one way or another. I try to absorb as much as possible information on different subjects and try to find the correlation between them and predict the next movement to avoid total destruction (a bit dramatic, I know). This is why most of my inner circle never can figure out what I really do because I would diversify my resources in different markets. This method is not bulletproof and has its drawbacks like spreading your time too thin, which is never a good thing businesswise. On the positive side though, having different streams of income allows you to take a hit or two if your niche is hit.
Before the iPhone launch, I was a heavy supporter of investing in commercial real estate because of its stability and healthy ROI. This was until I received my first order through eBay and experienced how e-commerce is becoming more mature, and the focus is shifting towards user experience.
I concluded that commercial real estate would suffer heavy losses in the near future. Basically, any business that can sell their product/service online has no use of having a high street storefront unless they are offering a unique experience.
2020 has accelerated this process, and many have suffered heavy losses, both personally and financially, people’s lives are destroyed overnight. But at the same time, I’ve seen many people grab the opportunity to start over or finally invest in themselves and their dreams. This event’s mere happening has prompted me to reach out to startups and even business that have been around for years but missed the boat during the internet boom and are now just barely making ends meet to see how and if I can help them.
2021 a new beginning
I’ve decided to dedicate 2021 to these startups, struggling businesses all around the globe to show everyone their story and struggles. I will (try to) record, monitor and report this journey on this blog (if my procrastination allows it). Starting a business and winging it on your own takes guts and if you have just started or been running a business for a while and you have ended up on this page for some reason, follow me on this journey. I’ll guarantee you will learn, laugh, and maybe even cry with me when I visit these passionate people when I try to tell their story, struggle and growth.