Make Money Online

I do not handle the cold weather well. It’s 36. Out right now, and that’s wind chill, so it feels like it’s 36. It’s probably higher. 41. And I’m wearing a t-shirt and the heater’s cranked to 76. And that’s it. It’s easy. Like, it’s not, you just get through it. You watch Netflix and you chill. And you eat some popcorn and drink some bourbon because bourbon makes you heartier. This is

So, growing your business. How’s your business doing right now?

Draft is good. I’m booked solid basically every minute of every day. And sometimes that involves cooking lunch for my friends in the middle of the week, which I’m very grateful for. And sometimes it involves meetings and sometimes it involves writing, but I don’t really have much wiggle room. Like if I if something happens, like I don’t sleep well the night before, or I get sick or um I get slammed with some other work that has to be an emergency for whatever reason, then I’m going to have to cut something. And that’s like the definition of discomfort for me. It’s like, if something comes into my schedule Do I have to get rid of something else? Or I’m going to either burn out or stay up until two in the morning or whatever have you?

Is that what growth means to you? Is filling out that time and doing these cool things?

I think the broader question, which is still deep, is what does growth mean to The two of us. It doesn’t mean it’s easy to say what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean like being Uber for perjury and blowing up and making $46 billion and taking over the planet. conquering markets, right? Like for us for us growth is a little bit more nuanced. It can mean booking yourself solid. It can mean booking your schedule solid, which is kind of what you’re talking about. It can mean hiring, right? It can mean you and I both have assistants and we love working with them. It can mean Delegating a lot of workout to like contractors, something like that. Like our friend Brennan, he has essentially a fleet of contractors mentoring for his group so that he can Do a little bit of the like higher level thinky work around it. It can mean hiking your rate. and making more money, you know, like or reducing the number of clients you have by charging the ones that you do have slightly more.

Yeah, I think you’re right. And it’s not the type of growth you think when you think, I’m going to grow the business. If I went to somebody in a bar and said, Hey, I’m going to grow the business. I run a business. Here’s what my business looks like. And I’m going to grow the business. they would probably have a very different impression from the kind of conversation that you and I have. They probably think, well, they’re going to hire and like build out a bigger office and like I see this in like cartoons growing up and stuff. Like you start out in a garage and you start to be successful, and then you sell some things and people really like it. And then you move into like, you know, your tiny office in the middle of like a small town USA and then you start selling more and then you move into like a dedicated building off some place and then you move into a factory and then you move into a bigger factory and then you have a corporate headquarters and And like, neither of us gives a shit about that in the slightest way, right? There’s there’s nothing. And you’re staffing up and spending more money and making more money, and you fall more precipitously when you fuck up. But like, none of that. Again, it’s a $70,000 rule. You and I both make more than $70,000 revenue in our business. So what now? And that’s scary. That’s scary. Oh, I was about to say. Yeah, I’m petrified by it. Yeah. Because I don’t know, like everything that I do with whatever money I have or without the money or whatever. Everything that I do, like the money problem is more or less solved. Like, I have a system together for it. I know how to make money effectively. I know how to. Make a little bit more than I need, and I know what constitutes what I need. And now what? Like. What I’m hearing from you, and correct me if I’m wrong, the solution is not to make more money.

Yeah. I think there’s a higher level consideration there that’s important. I want to harp on this a little bit, which is that like you read business books and they have this very confident sense for what success means for a business. Because that’s how they got to be successful with their business. But then they just like they know all of the psychological persuasion methods and their giant mansplainers, because it’s always dudes. And they like Just talk to you and they talk at you about what you should be doing with your business and why aren’t you doing it? And you’re doing it wrong right now by not doing it that way. And you have to have the integrity to say no. to like half of their advice and know what half is important to say yes to. You’re just going through a buffet taking three or four things and ignoring the rest of it. And that doesn’t invalidate their advice. You just have to you have to come off with enough confidence that you know what to say yes and no to. Or you’re going to grow a business in a way that makes your life a private hell for the foreseeable. And I’m not here to tell anybody on this podcast, make your life a private hell for the foreseeable. That is That’s our other podcast. That’s our other podcast. It’s towards the index. It’s very, it’s near the end. Kind of a mullet. We thought about editing it out and then we didn’t. Make money online and fuck up a lot. That podcast.

Right, right. Yeah, wasn’t I so smart that I had this very deliberate and amazing system together for doing everything that I needed to do and that I made $10 million? That is never how it goes.

Right. Right. And that’s obviously how Bill Gates became successful because there was no struggle. There was no frustration. There were no weird backroom stories that ever went on with that person.

Yeah, it’s a lot of gloss. Sturmoon drong. But like every talk at, so I saw this talk by Darius Kazimi at XOXO. We cited it in a previous episode. And. The other talks at ExoXO are very harrowingly personal a lot of the time. One of them from this past year talked about a dude struggled with terminal cancer. It turned out to not be terminal. He went on stage and talked about it. He there was another one where they were talking about their product like going into the shitter basically and a lot of people hating it. And he had a nervous breakdown and dealt with a lot of Severe mental illness issues. And those are the kinds of things you never hear about from successful business creators because they have to puff themselves up and feel very confident. And the reality is we are all gigantic walking sacks of emotional messes. That’s it. There’s no other way to it. Even possibly especially the President of the United States, like everyone, everyone is a giant walking sack of emotional mess. And you You look authoritative. You make a practice out of looking authoritative, but that is acting. You are acting.

Right. Right. That’s exactly it. It’s You’re not inhuman for admitting vulnerability. And that’s really what it comes down to. In fact, you’re more human for admitting vulnerability and knowing that if you cop to being a broken mess. Was it the first step of AA is admitting you have a problem, right? There are 11 more steps, but that’s the first step. And it’s that’s why it’s there’s the first step for a reason. So admit you have a problem and then grow your business.

Yeah, I actually ended up making substantially more than that this year. And I actually went back and looked at my numbers and was shocked because I felt like I worked just as hard this year as I did last year. But to go back to your point, my kind of cognitive process around this, it’s similar. I ask myself, am I. Feeling too strained. And that can be: Am I working too hard? Or are too many people coming in the door and I’m saying no to too many good opportunities? Okay, well once that happens, that seems like a good like criteria for whether or not I should grow the business. So once you get past that hurdle, that is a hurdle to say, okay, I definitely have, that’s the problem, is I have too much work or I’m turning away some work. The next question is, should I grow the business in this way? Because you have to figure out the exact tactic by which you’re going to grow the business. Is it by launching a new offering? Is it by hiring out? Is it by charging more, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have to think through all of the ramifications for doing that. And you may have picked the wrong tactic. To say, okay, well, maybe I shouldn’t be hiring, maybe I should be doing this. Okay, now you have to think through all the ramifications again and keep doing that until either you’ve run out of tactics. Then maybe go to your like mastermind group or a colleague or something like that and generate more tactics. When you know you’re completely tapped out, don’t grow the business. Or you follow the lead on a tactic and come down and say, you know what, actually, I feel okay doing that. I think it would be a beneficial step for me in my business, being careful and deliberate. And then, okay, now I’m going to do this. Because if you just say, I’m going to grow the business and why? What’s the point? Have you thought about it? People don’t think about it. Do you think people think about growing their business a lot of the time? They just see a success and they think they have to grow it, I feel.

You should be excited to grow your business in the way that you have chosen. That should be a thing that makes you happy to go into work every morning. I thought I’m going to slightly change the positioning of my business about a year and a half ago, and I am still a year and a half into it now. I love going into work every morning. I love it. And it was not clear that I would love it. But if I stopped loving it anymore, then what the hell is the point? If you are independent and listening to this podcast, you are probably able to call the shots on a level that is above Most other people. And if you aren’t taking advantage of that every single day of your life, I don’t know what to say to you, man. Like, it’s hard. It’s You don’t need to feel hamstrung by your own context. And if you want to change it, you don’t need to feel hamstrung for long. It might take six months to a year for your market to adapt or you to figure out your new positioning, but like rip the bandaid like today. Do it today.

Yeah, yeah, I don’t really care what other people think of me and the way that I grow my business. They might think I’m shooting myself in the foot every day, and that might be true. But I don’t think that that should have. I mean, I take everybody’s opinions seriously, to be very clear. I know that when somebody is care mad about draft or concern trolling me or something like that, like they’re doing it From probably some sort of genuine place. They are actually concerned in some capacity. And it’s better than getting no feedback because people have expectations, and building those expectations is something you should be grateful for. But No one is the captain but you. You’re on a one-person plane, probably. Most people’s businesses start that way. You may have two or three other people that you depend on. But really, that’s it. And I think that people I don’t know. They put too little stock in their own self-confidence. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Well, you’re connected to the human race in some capacity, right? Like you’re connected to your clients in some way and your colleagues and your loved ones and stuff like that. So you get afraid of alienating your previous clients or not having a big enough market or you mentioned before shareholders, pissing off the shareholders who have a very cold capitalist stake in your company that don’t actually work there every morning. In any of those situations, you’re going to take all of those things as like A sign that you might be messing up in some capacity. And only somebody with the most sociopathic tendencies would drown out every single other voice in Blazer Trail alone. And they’d probably fuck up. You take suggestions from others every day in your job and your life, but you take one path, right? I’m not saying any other sentence than the one I’m saying right now. And I’ve made that choice in my life. And I, you know, whatever actions you take, that’s what defines your life. I know that’s terribly basic, but like. So you have to distill all of those things down and be almost an editor of those perspectives. And good editors cut a lot. Mm-hmm. They cut a lot.

Yeah. I mean, I told you, right, when we started making this podcast, we’re going to do it until we’re not having fun anymore. And when we start to not have fun anymore, we’re done. That’s it. So we should always be having fun. I have been looking forward to this all day, right? Recording this episode. I love doing it. But if you’re not having fun anymore, you have to admit that to your heart of hearts, man. You really do. And then you have to cut it. And if you’re making profit, like that’s not an excuse. Others should be so lucky to make profit. A lot of people just flop around and don’t do anything. Like you’re in a very good position if you need to cut parts of your business out. Which is obviously the opposite of growth. You’re pruning a bonsai tree, right? And making your decisions to save the rest of the tree.

Yeah. Yeah. Man, there’s a lot there. There’s it’s we talk a lot about setting boundaries on here, right? And respecting ourselves in a lot of ways. And hopefully, these are some like You can get some kind of tactical things out of this where you have to look at yourself. What are you working on right now? Are you liking doing it? Are you assessing this every, oh, say, three, six months, max? I mean, you should be just sit down in a coffee shop for two hours on a Saturday afternoon. You’ve got the time, I assure you. And think, do I like what I’m doing right now? Okay, I don’t. I’m completely miserable. What am I doing to address it? And that can mean slowly moving in the right direction like I do. or cutting it wholesale like Kai does. And there are benefits and drawbacks to each of those things. You have to know What you’re doing and why, and what steps you’re taking to make yourself happier. And if you’re not doing those things, Maybe that involves growing the business. Maybe it doesn’t. For me, it usually doesn’t. I’ve hired one person in four years of being independent. Have no ambitions to hire another at this moment. I waited two years, probably too long, to hire that person. Took a long time, a lot of squirreling up of confidence to get to that point. But it it worked out well for me and made a lot of sense at the time. And I, you know, I only wish I had done that sooner. But it came with a lot of thought, a lot of soul searching in dark corners of bars with people who were like, What on earth is your problem? Most of the time. Most people just wonder what the hell my problem is. Most of the time, like, why aren’t you doing this? And the answer is, I don’t know, I’m looking into the void most of the time. which is very exciting for professional conversation at a bar. I’m really fun at parties, guys. But yeah, does that make sense? Like how it’s a process of soul searching to even decide to grow in the first place? Because you can stay stagnant forever. I would have been very happy to make as much money as I did in draft in 2014 and 2015. I didn’t. Fine. Worked out. I didn’t end up miserable. Could have just as easily been the other way. Mhm.

Right. Exactly. Yeah. You got to just recognize what you need to cut away. Like, you might be wedded to something that’s dying. And man, you got to be super unsentimental and calculating about it, or you’re not going to figure out a good way to grow effectively. You’re going to have all of these things dragging you down. And it’s going to make you miserable and burn out and probably not succeed as a business.

I think the takeaway here is that growth doesn’t necessarily mean you get to be a social butterfly. Like if for me, and probably for you, like the opposite is true. Like, I end up talking more with fewer people and Part of that involves, well, you just have more like sophisticated, complicated problems, so very few people actually understand it. I went out with like a close personal friend, and normally we’re able to talk about our jobs pretty effectively because she’s a developer and I’m a designer. And I just talked about like some of the deals I lost recently and my sales process and how things are breaking down in a couple of ways. And she just blank stared. Like. What alien are you? What even is going on? And I thought, like, well, you know, this doesn’t mean you’re a bad friend, and it doesn’t mean you’re like, I’m going to cut you out of my life or anything, but it does mean that I’m going to share the things that are currently in front of my face with other people. And I find, in my experience, that that’s increasingly few people. I’ve closed ranks a lot, a lot over the past two years.

Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. And so finding a tribe is hard. Finding especially as you grow, the like nature of that tribe and the needs that you have from that tribe change. For me, they’ve changed quite quickly. And it’s Really caught me flat-footed in a lot of ways. Like, I don’t, I love my friends. If you’re a friend and you’re listening to this, you’re wonderful. And I wish you could come over and, you know, roast marshmallows outside because it’s Beautiful outside right now. But I also find that I’m doing the real talk less often with them. Because they just either they don’t identify with it strongly or they’re unable to help or You know, in a few situations they probably feel jealous. They’re like, well, you’re making this much money and you’re living the dream. Like, what’s the problem, Nick D? Well, I spent 35 minutes just telling you what the problem is. So I don’t know what else.

Yeah, nobody understands what I’m doing. I mean, other colleagues understand what I’m doing, but like I’m going to a bar tonight or something, nobody’s going to understand what I’m doing. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’re still a human who has feelings and can talk about other things. I care about things that aren’t just running a business. My God. But like. I find that, you know, that’s people talk about their jobs all the time, you know? And whopping that off feels like just not having an arm anymore. Like you’re just you’re losing so much conversational facility. And and I find that to be quite challenging. But life. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s likely you’ll find most of your real tribe on the Internet. I mean, just because the Internet is really big and facilitates a lot of tiny niches, right? So it’s easy to find Paul the rat people term is because Paul owns a bunch of rats as pets. And if you think that’s disgusting, you’re not his rat people. If you know that rats are cute as pets, which they are, if they’re domesticated, and then it’s okay. And you resonate with that, right? Like, and so you just need to find the people that get what you do. I think that works to bring it back to the original topic, that works against growth quite a bit. You’re deliberately taking a confident point of view that might alienate a lot of people. You’re not looking to be the next Facebook. You’re not looking to be the next Adele. You’re doing something that targets a specific niche and finding kindred spirits within that.

I think you’re exactly right. So develop what that is, because that’s not hard at all. And that’ll be your homework for next time.