Focus

Focus is critical to your success.

When you start out in business you may not be focussed, and that is natural.

You need to fire shots in lots of different directions and see what hits.

As soon as you have found something that works you need to focus.

I know, its hard.

Especially with entrepreneurial ADD.

But you need to.

And you will find that it is so freeing when you finally make the decision to focus on one project.

At a certain stage in our business, we were firing in all sorts of directions.

And then we decided to focus on one particular business (in our case, social casino).

If someone tells me about some cool new opportunity, I know that I won’t chase after that new shiny object.

If someone wants to partner with me on a project, I’ll immediately and politely say “No” and “thank you for thinking of me, but I have all my focus on one project at the moment.”

It is liberating.

And it also gives you a chance to succeed.

Invest in (Online) Businesses Instead of Traditional Investments

One thing meditation has helped me do, is step a bit outside of the narrow line of thinking that is ingrained in us.  I do think a lot about investment and something just doesn’t sit right with me.

Recently I opened up an online investment account, fully intended to do the “recommended” thing of buying several diversified index funds to “track the market”.  This would be money that I would put away and basically never touch again.  At best I could hope for about 5-7% return per annum.

This is what we are supposed to do.  People go to university and study for years how to properly do asset allocation.

The thing is though, the world has changed.

Once, it was very difficult to start a business.  You needed a lot of capital, you’d need to beg a bank to lend you money.

These days you can start a business from your laptop, run it from anywhere in the world and hire an army of freelance workers from sites like Upwork, while you rake in a passive income stream.

Nowadays, I’m fully involved in growing our social casino business, Megarama.  But a long time ago when I was just starting out in business I created a couple of interesting little experiments that have returned an amazing ROI (small amount of cash, but nice return).

One was a website I created which was really an effort to SEO another site.  It’s basically an informational site for doctors in Israel who are interested to learn aesthetic medicine and in particular Botox administration for cosmetic use.

The site looks like the most crappy site you’ve ever seen, built on Google Sites.  I can’t remember how long it took me to create, but it wasn’t a massive effort (couple of days??).  I spent a bit of money on SEO for the site – can’t remember how much but probably around $200.

It didn’t take too long before my site was ranking #1, 2 and 3 for the key very niche search terms (in hebrew) for “botox course for doctors”.  I put a crappy email form on the site and started to collect leads.  Then I reached out to a number of people who were running such courses and came to an agreement regarding selling leads (again, wasn’t hard).

This was about 4 years ago I think.  Since I signed the lead selling agreement the site has consistently been making over $500 per month. Again, not significant. But the effort that went into it was not huge, the cost was minimal.  Lets say I spent around $500 and my time was worth lets say $100 per hour at the time (3 days work lets say), that’s a cost to launch the site of about $3,000.  The return on this is $6,000 per year, or 200%!!!! 

That is a hell of a lot better than a 5% return per annum.

(Oh, and BTW, the ONLY work I do on this site is send a monthly invoice. I LITERALLY do no other work).

It’s my personal experience that these online, passive sources of income can have tremendous longevity. Obviously each business is different, but there are ways to maximize longevity and minimize risk.

I’m just using this as a case in point.  I had a similar outcome with another small website I created around the same time.

 

The concept for these online business investment vehicles would be as follows:

(1) It needs to be TOTALLY hands off. i.e. I need a team of people who can execute on my ideas. Obviously there will be initial set up costs. But imagine that you could put together this team… To use an old cliche, “where there is a will, there is a way”.

(2) The system needs to be able to scale.  You need to find a repeatable business model that works and then be able to pour lots of money into it and see commensurate returns.

And there are two ways you can go about it:

(1) You can start a business from scratch. 

OR

(2) You can buy existing businesses (hopefully undervalued) and then uncover value to further improve the ROI.

Consider for a moment that you are able to build the team and system which can execute this with minimal or no daily involvement from yourself, in terms of ROI you can’t even compare it to any other asset class.

Especially if these are businesses you understand and have a degree of control over, the risk as I see it is minimal compared to riding the waves of the market.

Here are some interesting articles for further reading on the topic:

“Why a Website Should Be Your Next Investment”

“How To Invest In Websites In Your Spare Time”

“I was given $25k to invest in websites; here’s what I did : Entrepreneur”

“How to Sell an Amazon FBA Business”

Marketplaces or Brokers

Here is a list of some marketplaces and brokers for buy and selling various types of online businesses. Mind you, probably the best deals would be found “in the wild” and not on these sites.  It is doable for sure.

Fliptopia

App Business Brokers

Flippa

FE International  (This company also offers management services…)

Empire Flippers

Jungle Flippers

 

Risk

When talking about having left my job to pursue a career in entrepreneurship, I often get a comment something like “oh, but not everyone is willing to take a risk like you did.”

A commonly held view of entrepreneurs is that they are risk taker. I’ve even heard some entrepreneurs boast about the risks they took, because they think that is what an entrepreneur is supposed to say.

I beg to differ. I believe that most entrepreneurs (at least the successful ones) are NOT risk takers.

(Fine print disclaimer:  this is obviously a generalization and there are exceptions to any rules).

How I Evaluated Risk

Lets take my story as a case in point.

I believe that my leaving the medical profession and embarking on an entrepreneurial adventure was the LOW RISK option for ME.

Yes, I left a stable, well paid, “prestigious” job.

Yes, I embarked on a path that was uncertain.

Looking at the Upside

The way I weighed the risk at the time is as follows:

(1) I don’t like my job.  In fact, I was existentially miserable. One of my main values is creativity and medicine doesn’t allow for that (apart from research, which I detest).  I was drawn to the creativity of entrepreneurship (creating something from nothing).

(2) As a specialist I would be in one of the top pay brackets, however my earning potential was capped at around about $200,000 per year and limited by my time.  To earn money I needed to expend my own time.  As an entrepreneur my earnings would be uncapped and could be divested from my own time. I wanted to be able to not have to work in order to support myself.

(3) Medicine didn’t challenge me, at least not in the right ways.  To succeed on the traditional path, you need to be good at rote learning, sitting down and memorizing thick text books.  As an entrepreneur, I had unlimited challenge.  My success was totally dependent on my own ingenuity.

So from the top 3 points above, its pretty clear the upside of being an entrepreneur:  I would be catering to my core values (creativity, achievement) and my earnings would be uncapped and potentially not linked to my own time.  So from the upside perspective, it was a no brainer.

The Downside…

What about the downside? This is critical to examine when weighing risk.

The downside of staying in medicine:  I would be miserable, always wondering “what if I had tried”, it would quash my sprit and my soul. Pretty dark.

The downside of failing at entrepreneurship:  I would lose my savings and would need to go back to work as doctor, one of the most highly paid professions.  I knew I would not be sleeping on the streets. (Although this wasn’t really an option for me – I knew that I had this as some theoretical backup, but my motto has always been that I “will succeed or die trying”).

So for me, staying in medicine was HIGH RISK (really!). Entrepreneurship was the low risk path for me, as far as my values and desires go.

I would say that successful entrepreneurs are actually very very shrewd at HEDGING risk.

I will often hear of successful entrepreneurs who are financially free testing new business ideas with very small amounts of cash.

Entrepreneurs are the ultimate hedgers. They actually look at risk very carefully and examine it critically.

Do you have any other examples? What do you think?

Leave a comment below.