Could you just give me say, a bit of a heads up maybe on the pros and cons of trying to run two businesses?
James: Sure. The pros are you have some protection in case one tanks. I generally think it’s fine to run two businesses. A lot of people in regular jobs have a side job or second job or a side hustle where they’re trying to do something else, whether it’s Airbnb or buying and selling things on Gumtree or Craigslist, or garage sales. So, I think it’s generally quite fine to have two things.
In your case, you know, you weigh up, what is the split between the jobs? Just as an example, when I was a General Manager in my last official job, I was working probably 70 hours a week in that job. And I had four kids, and I still managed to figure out how to build a website and start my online business on the side of that back from 2005 onwards, until the point where I was able to quit my job permanently and get back 70 hours a week.
So I’d have a look at, what’s the point? Is it to have two and keep two? Is it to have one supersede the other? If it’s to supersede the other, I’d say start as soon as possible. But don’t quit the one that’s already working. If it’s to have in addition to, then great, then you’ve got what I call a catamaran. And that is, you’ve got two hulls pointing the same direction. You got the same founder in the middle like the trampoline, and you can go between the two. And I’ve done this the whole time I’ve been online. I’ve always had a minimum of two business models. I actually had up to 10 or 11 at one point, which was too many.
But these days, I still have SuperFastBusiness, SilverCircle and revenue share deals, and affiliate income, and then a couple of sites to the side. Now, the prime area that I focus on is SuperFastBusiness and SilverCircle, and rev share partners. But they’re all doing similar things with similar people. So it’s in alignment, and it’s easy for me to do that.
The non-business projects that I have, I’ve got two of those in particular that are outside the online business coaching space. But I’ve made sure that, where they’re involved, then I’m getting other people to do the things that I would normally be doing if they were my prime thing. So, one of the projects, I’ve got someone else being the face of it and creating the content around it and producing stuff. And what our role in that is to bring it to the market, to make it convert and to advise on logistics.
And then, of course, our surfing site which a lot of people in our community know about, it’s all team-driven. The team run it, drive it and build it. So, it’s got no involvement from me, other than some research and development. So that’s my sort of overview on it.
And just as a side note, I think most people have far more time than they realize. Like, just more time. There’s so many hours in a day. And if you’re under the pump or feeling the pressure right now and you disagree with me, then great. That means there’s some things that can be changed to free that up. But you spend eight hours sleeping, you spend eight hours in a full-time job. You’ve still got eight hours a day to do stuff.
So I think it’s more than easy for us to run two projects at once. And if there is anything in common, any synergies at all, if they’re pointing the same direction or they share the same customer, or even backend, if the accounting or the sales function or the website platform, anything is in common, then you get some benefit. The downsides are that it can diffuse your focus, and you may be just generating second thing or third thing as an excuse to escape from doing the hard work on the first or the second thing. And this is pretty common.
And it’s also the same reason a lot of people start partnerships. It’s to try and get freedom from boredom and to avoid responsibility. So as long as those filters are met, then I think it’s fine for you to do a second project.
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