AP 0156: Can I Start Two Businesses at Once?

AskPat 156 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, hey what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 156 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

And before we get to today's question from Carly, I do want to thank and welcome today's sponsor, a brand new sponsor to the AskPat Podcast. I'm so incredibly happy and thankful to be working with Lynda.com. If you don't know what Lynda.com is, you are missing out. It's an easy and affordable way to learn awesome stuff. You can instantly stream thousands of different courses created by experts on business, software, web development, graphic design and more. I'm actually taking a couple courses right now on photography and they are amazing, seriously, from beginner to advanced courses. The best tools including transcripts, playlists; you can even get certificates of course completion and things like that. It's seriously one of the most useful sites you'll ever come across. So it's really cool, I've worked out a deal with Lynda.com to provide you with a special offer to access all courses for free for seven days. Just go to Lynda.com/askpat to try it out free for seven days. Gotta check it out, it's so cool. All right let's get to today's question from Carly.

Carly: Hi, Pat, it's Carly here. I have a question for you. I am just in the process of starting an online business in the hula hoop niche. I teach hula hoop fitness and want to take it online. But I am also a passionate Facebook marketer so I have loads of free strategies that I could put into some sort of video course specifically aimed at women and service-based businesses. And my question is this, is it possible to start both businesses or should I focus on one? Because just now I really can't decide which one to focus my time on. Like I said, I'm passionate at them both and I really don't know which one to choose. I feel as if the hula hooping one is going to be harder to try and get people onto. So, that's my question. Thanks, bye.

Pat Flynn: Carly, thank you so much for the question and you are an entrepreneur and I say that because every entrepreneur has a ton of ideas that they want to do at the same time including myself. I have a shoebox full of ideas, that for whatever reason the stuff I'm working on now doesn't work out, I have this physical shoebox that I always write down ideas and put them in there for later. And the reason I do that is because I know that if I were to work on more than what I have now, more than one thing at a time, I'm not going to get anything done. You have to prioritize because if you don't do that, you are going to work on everything and nothing will get done. And whatever business you are working on, you want to give it the full potential. You want to give it the best chance it has to succeed. And the only way you can do that is to completely focus on it.

And it might sound weird coming from me, somebody who has multiple businesses, but I will say as they were being built, they were being built one at a time. I've never built anything simultaneously. Unless you want to get to discussing what has been happening recently in my business, in terms of building the FoodTruckr site and the Smart Podcast Player, a bunch of different things at the same time. That's only happening, I'm only able to do that with my team that I'm paying a lot of money for. And, so, I wouldn't recommend—especially when you're just starting out and you're doing this for the first time—I would not focus on more than one business at a time. If you want to give the businesses a chance to succeed, build one. Get it to a point where you're comfortable it's running, and maybe you can hire people to help do the parts of it where human touch is needed, if it is needed at all. And then you can focus on the new stuff.

That's how I've been able to build my empire. One business at a time. It started with GreenExamAcademy.com, and fortunately for that site, there's only a finite amount of information that is required on that site to provide value because it's about taking an exam and there's only so much information. So it finally got to a point where there was nothing else I could put on it. I mean, I could still provide value and test and communicate with my audience, which I've done and I'm still doing. Although less than I had been at the beginning, but that gave me the ability to focus on SmartPassiveIncome.com. And I've been able to add on to that portfolio over time, but when you're starting out, you need to focus on one. That's probably the thing that's holding most people back, is trying too many things in different niches at the same time. You will get nothing done.

There is an amazing book out there. Let me go grab it. I have it right here: It's called The One Thing. I highly recommend all entrepreneurs read this. I found it on the bookshelves at Barnes and Noble, but you can download it for Kindle. Number one Wall Street Journal Best-Seller, New York Times Best-Seller, Number one Amazon Best-Seller, USA Today Best-Seller. This is by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan. Again, it's called The One Thing and let me a few passages from it, here. There is that Russian Proverb, “If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.” And that's a Russian proverb. I love that. That's what starts out the book. What's really cool about this book also—and I'm not trying to just plug this book. Well, actually I am because it is that good. This wasn't a paid endorsement. It's cool because parts of the book are already underlined for you, so it makes it easy to get the big items flipping through this.

First one. This is him talking about his successes and then he goes to say, “Where I had huge success, I had narrowed my concentration to one thing. And where my success varied, my focus had too.” Here's another part, “extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.” So I think that's why your hula hoop idea is really exciting, but I also like your idea in terms of Facebook because you talked about niching-down which is really smart. That's definitely something everybody is going to want to do. The key really is to just have things happen over time. Success is built sequentially, and it all happens one thing at a time. This is an example he uses in the book, it's called The Domino Effect, and working on that one little small thing that's going to trigger everything else is extremely important. Not just with all businesses that you're thinking of doing, but even within the business you're doing. You need to narrow your focus within that one project. What is that next step? Focus on that one thing within that current project that you're working on. Many projects to one project. Within that one project, many tasks to one task. The cool domino example he gives is, there was this study done where they found out that if you push a domino, that domino can knock down another domino in front of it that's one point five times bigger. If you keep increasing the size one point five times bigger than the previous domino after fifty-seven dominoes—imagine that, after fifty-seven dominoes—that final domino going in that same proportion is going to reach the moon. It's going to be as tall as the moon. So you imagine that really tiny small domino, it just starts at two inches. The fifty-seventh domino is reaching the moon. You can knock down that giant domino with just a little tiny poke at that two-inch domino at the front. How crazy is that to think of? So the analogy is, you just need to start small and start with one thing and focus on that next task within that one thing. Semi-related to what you have going on in terms of deciding what business to take. But I think it's obvious what the answer is.

Do not try two things at once. Keep that in the back of your mind. Have that be there as the next thing, and also have it be a reward for building your first business, and building it, and keeping track of how you can make it more passive, to a point where you can then have time to focus on other things like this other business. And you might find out that this first business that you choose isn't your cup of tea. Maybe it's not going to work out and you'll have the second one to work on, but at least you gave it a shot and they didn't fail because you didn't give them enough attention. They failed because . . . Something else. But you don't want it to fail and set yourself up for failure at the front because you're spreading yourself too thin. Do not spread yourself too thin. Focus on that one project

Now in terms of which one to choose, I can't answer that right now. There's going to be a little bit more research to be done, but the hula hoop one sounds interesting. I would do a little bit more validation, perhaps. Put up a sales page for a product of some sort or determine how you're going to monetize that and see if you can validate. See if you can even get a paying customer for something you're going to create in the future. This is minimum-buyable product strategy that a lot of people are using nowadays.

The Facebook one is interesting as well. However, I think it's easy to say, and it's obvious, that that one is much more competitive. The weird thing about Facebook is it changes every day. If you were to create a course, for example, you'd have to go in and keep updating it and things change all the time. You're at the mercy of Facebook in terms of building that business. In terms of a hula hoop, when were those made? 1950? Maybe even before then? Those haven't changed a bit. The only thing that has changed is there's been a couple of them that put counters on them so you know how many times it goes around. That's the only thing I know about hula hoops that has changed. There's that to consider as well. But there's a lot more research that has to go into it, and I'm not going to talk about that right now. I do talk a lot about niche research. You can actually see the work I've done for specific niches I've gotten into at NicheSiteDuel.com and just click on updates at the top of that page.

But Carly, I hope that answers your question and at least you have some proper direction now as far as, okay you have to choose one. You have to choose one and do a little bit more research, and also rely on your gut a little bit. What feels good to you. What do you think is going to be most exciting to you, and give that a shot. Give it full strength, and then take it from there. So Carly, thank you so much for your question. I really appreciate it. An AskPat teeshirt is going to be headed your way no matter where you're at in the world.

For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show just like Carly's, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask there right from that page as well. I also want to thank today's amazing and brand new sponsor, Lynda.com. Again you can actually try out Lynda.com for free for seven days. How awesome is that? You can get any course for seven days, Lynda.com/askpat. Check it out. Seriously, there's so many cool things. There's a lot of business advice in there as well. From beginner to advance, you're going to love it. I'm just in love with the photography course I'm going through right now because I have this DSLR camera. I'm always using the automatic button, right? I want to use the aperture. I want to use . . . like I don't even know what all that stuff means, but some of the courses I've watched already, high-quality videos, have already taught me so much. So again, Lynda.com/askpat.

Thanks so much, and let's finish off with a quote like we always do. And this one's from Doug Brown. I love this quote. “A comedian can't stand in front of an audience and tell them he's funny. He has to tell the joke and let them decide.” I love this. This totally has to do with marketing because you can say you're the most awesome thing in the world. You have the best product in the world. But you have to let your audience decide that. You have to tell the right joke though. You don't want a joke in your sales copy, but you have to tell the right things in order to make your audience understand that you are worth their time. That your product is worth their money. Cheers, thanks, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.