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A simple life is a better life.
Over the last year, I have been removing unneeded aspects from my business and my life. I am seeing how much energy, money, time, and life force I wasted trying to build a big fancy enterprise when a simple one would do.
Ironically, my simple business model generates higher profits and more money in my bank account than the complicated one did. The quest for more got me less, and the quest for less got me more.
Today, I am sharing the biggest mistakes I have made in hopes that you can learn from my experience instead of having to suffer through your own.
First, A Quick Note On This New Phase In My Life
I have hinted at this before, but around the time I sold Stodzy, I went through an emotional meltdown. I wrote about that whole experience in a previous article. For today, just know that this meltdown was the catalyst for me to make big changes.
Why is it that we are only capable of making big changes after we have experienced enough pain? It would be so much easier to make the changes we know we need to make before we have to suffer.
So, I committed to simplifying my life and my business. The experience has been liberating.
This Has Brought Me Face To Face With Many Of The Mistakes I Have Made
As I have been cleaning up the bloat in my enterprise, I have been getting random flashbacks of the specific missteps that cost me the most time and money.
1. Starting Copyblogger Academy:
Copyblogger has taught me that membership communities are terrible businesses. They are hard and stressful and I don’t think online communities are as attractive as people think they are. If people want to buy courses, they don’t need the community attached to it. Believe it or not, people still want to build relationships outside of the internet. 🤯
When I bought Copyblogger, I partnered with my friend Jonny to start Digital Commerce Partners. We grew it to $1M within a year by using Copyblogger as a way to generate leads and clients.
I wish so badly that I had just kept it that simple. I wanted to get fancy, and my ego told me that having a big list meant I should build a fancy community.
If I could do it all over again, I would have bought Copyblogger, turned it into a lead generation engine for the agency, and ridden that setup forever. :)
Starting Treatment Leads:
8 years ago, I decided to build a third arm for my behavioral health marketing business.
I already had Stodzy for client services and Recovery Local for media and lead generation. It was straight forward and simple. Best of all, the entire model allowed me to focus 100% of my efforts on SEO. I didn’t need to worry about anything else and the clarity of purpose made us very good at what we were doing.
Then I saw some people I was jealous of starting a call center, and I convinced myself I needed one too. I launched Treatmentleads.net to field and broker my own calls. It was an absolute disaster. I wasted around $100k and 6 months of time that should have gone toward building my boring, profitable agency.
All because I was jealous of a group of people I didn’t really even like.
Building The Ad Network For Recovery Local:
I own a network of directories used to sell featured listings and generate leads. About 4 years ago, my partners and I decided to build an internal ad network.
The idea was a centralized database where customers could buy ads that automatically dispersed across all our directories all at once. So we could centralize the sales process and display our ads across the entire network all at once.
It sounded good, but we were solving a problem that did not exist. The manual process of invoicing and creating listings was a minor inconvenience, but what we were doing was working just fine. We pulled focus away from our actual success to build something we never needed.
TBH, it caused a lot of problems, created a lot of disagreements, and set up back as a company. I regret it more than anything else I’ve ever taken on.
All Of These Mistakes Are The Same Mistake
It comes down to ego.
I used to have a voice inside telling me that if I was not building something complex, I was not building something worthwhile. In almost every case, I overcomplicated things because I was comparing myself to someone else.
I saw Gary Vaynerchuk running 600 employees across multiple departments, so I thought I needed to build a huge enterprise.
I saw Brian Clark building a massive online coaching community, and I wanted to mirror Brian.
I saw Recovery Brands build a massive ad network across healthcare sites, and I thought I had to do that too.
Comparison is the thief of joy. I have learned how self destructive it is to live life chasing other people’s dreams.
In Conclusion: This Is What Works For Me
Everything successful I have ever done in business follows the exact same pattern: a boring, service based business that generates cash and reinvests into media, directories, or better sales for the agency.
I was meant to be an agency owner who invests profits into other cash flowing assets. I am not meant to be a Steve Jobs style CEO. I am not meant to manage 100 employees (At the height of Stodzy, I had 30 employees and believe me, it is more stressful and less profitable than running a lean team of 5 to 10 people).
I am meant to do exactly what I am doing right now.
My journey required me to learn the hard way. Hopefully, yours allows you to skip the messy experiments and go straight to making money, living on your terms, and enjoying your freedom.
I no longer want to be Gary Vaynerchuk. I like a simple life that lets me travel, see the world, and chill with my family.
It turns out my simple way was the best way all along, even if I had to fall on my face to figure it out.
Love you guys. Talk to you next week.
Tim
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