When I was younger, back in the 80s, I was raised to believe that if you wanted to make good money in life you had to go to college and get a job.
Funny enough, nobody ever talked about starting a business because that was too risky and you had to be a super genius to do that.
Oh, and you need a lot of money.
So I went to college but I didn’t get that good job and I wasn’t making that good money.
I did get a job.
I didn’t like it.
I didn’t like it so much that I started a blog. It was about web design.
I didn’t know anything about web design but I started to blog about web design so I could learn about web design.
You following me here?
Eventually, people found the blog and asked if I was taking on any design clients.
I wasn’t because I didn’t know that was a thing.
At least not a thing that I could suddenly start doing.
So now I was taking on clients which meant that I had a business?
Yep, that’s a question mark because I still wasn’t sure if I had a business or not.
Again, I didn’t go to school for business. I didn’t start a business with a bunch of money. I didn’t have any employees.
So did I really have a business?
Indeed I did.
Why?
Because I owned everything. I owned the work. I owned the money.
That was a business to me and now I had one.
There was one small problem I was having though. I wanted to make more money and everyone that I followed online was building really big businesses that were getting funding and hiring tons of employees.
So naturally, this is where my mind shifted.
How do I scale?
How do I get bigger?
The problem with this kind of thinking is that if you really don’t want to get bigger, then you won’t get bigger.
Here’s something about me.
I don’t live to work.
I live to live.
If I could stay away from the computer because I had all of the money I needed for the rest of my life then I probably would for the most part.
Sure I’d keep on doing random things, but I wouldn’t spend much time on it because I’d be out there living and experiencing all of the things that I want to experience.
Growing bigger meant sacrficing those things which at that time didn’t make me a real Hustlepreneur or whatever the hell you want to call them.
However, that didn’t stop me from thinking about different grandiose ideas that I could try to build.
Those never came to fruition and eventually I got another 9-5 job.
It was for one of those companies that learned how to scale and got big.
I got to see from the inside how those companies worked and I didn’t like it much.
Don’t get me wrong, it was fascinating to see how 100s of people come together to try and form one cohesive unit, but I never liked the feeling of having zero impact on things.
Remember when I said I live to live?
One of the things that I love about my life is the feeling of pushing myself forward. That’s living.
It’s hard to do that when you’re just one cog in the machine.
After 3 years and 3 different jobs I struck out on my own again
Unfortunately, I fell into the same trap of big thinking.
What crazy idea could I come up with that would make me a ton of money?
Of course, this thiking failed me.
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with thinking big, but if your actions don’t follow that thinking then you’re in trouble.
My actions would never follow big thinking.
One day, and I don’t know how this came about, I decided I would start a blog again.
The idea wasn’t for the blog to be the big business. The blog was just going to be my outlet to finally do something. Maybe I would come across some people that would help me with something.
I didn’t know.
Since I used to be pretty good at blogging I decided to start a blog on blogging.
How cliche, right?
The interesting thing about it was that it was different.
There’s a general rule of thumb when it comes to business and that is most businesses in a niche/industry will gather around the lowest common thinking (you thought I was going to say denominator didn’t you?).
In the blogging about blogging world most people had the same opinions.
Wrote in the same fashion.
Gave the same advice.
It was hard to tell one blogger from another.
So I wrote in my way and it worked.
It didn’t help me create the most popular blog about blogging on the Internet but it did help me find a certain kind of audience.
“I love your no bullshit approach. I’m so tired of everyone else making it seem like blogging is all rainbows and butterflies.”
I didn’t think much of it at the time.
I figured that eventually I could attract everyone that was interested in blogging and that’s where my thinking when.
How do I scale?
I realized that some of my writing wouldn’t appeal to people so I neutered it a bit.
I became more generic.
I became…not me.
But it was okay because I was going to make more money!
The problem is, I didn’t make more money.
In fact, I was making less money now.
It didn’t make any sense.
I was doing everything correctly.
By whose standards? Well, I’m sure someone’s standards.
I would assess my business and look at everything that I was doing. I didn’t see any flaws.
I was writing the content. Creating the funnels. Getting people to sign up for the mailing list but I wasn’t getting much traction except from one audience.
The people that had purchased from me previously.
The people that had joined me when I was writing with my own voice. Where I was showing them how I saw blogging.
They loved everything that I did because it aligned with how they saw the world of blogging.
The further I got away from that, the further I got away from them.
That makes perfect sense, but how do you scale that?
How do you make that bigger?
Don’t you just appeal to more people?
Yes, but not all people and that’s where I was making my mistake.
Instead of finding more of my tribe and I thought I should expand the boundaries of my tribe until there were no boundaries.
If you were interested in blogging I was here to help.
But that doesn’t work because you have to see blogging a certain way to really learn from me. If you don’t see blogging the way that I do then you should find someone else that sees it the way you do.
You’ll be more ready to listen to them.
But this didn’t help me scale.
I needed to scale!
At least that’s what I kept telling myself but I remember how I feel into that trap twice before in the past and so this time I did some thinking.
What does scaling actually mean?
I won’t bother going into a long diatribe on this. Let’s just cut to the chase.
When people talk scaling what they mean is make more money.
So I didn’t want to scale, I just wanted to make more money.
I knew making more money was an option. I knew plenty of people pulling in 6 figures a month consistently and they didn’t have massive teams.
Most of the time it was just them and maybe 1-2 more people.
So making more money wasn’t a question.
However, was it possible to make more money by being one way while everyone else in the industry is another?
The quick answer is “Yes”. The long answer?
Well, let’s get into that.