This Skill Made Me Millions - FDDTC #38
2 Sept 2024 · 11 min
Devin Zander talks about the skill that made him millions: focusing on one business instead of chasing every opportunity. He emphasizes consistency and long-term commitment over scattered ventures.
If you ever want to be successful, listen to what I'm about to tell you. Because this saved my business and it allowed me to make millions of dollars per year, every year since about 2015. Hi, I'm Devin Zander. This is the From Delivery Driver to CEO podcast where we drink Kratom. And let's get into today's podcast. So I want to tell you a little story, okay? And this happened many, many, many, many times in my life. But I want to tell you about the time when we first had our first successful e commerce store. Things are going good. We're starting to make some money. We're excited. And the first thought that we had was, ooh, we should multiply this and do it on a bunch of stores. Like, we have one store that's making, you know, almost $10,000 a month. All we have to do is launch 10 more stores, and we will be making $100,000 a month. Oh, my God, it's genius. However, we went out there and we launched those other stores, and guess what happened? Each store, Instead of making $10,000 a month each, the store that was making $10,000 a month dropped down to like, $3,000 a month. And the other stores barely did any sales at all. And I couldn't figure out why, but it turns out the answer is pretty obvious. And if you're anything like me, you have a limited attention span. Yes. You have 24 hours in the day one, whether or not you want to accept it. And with that, you can only give so much attention to certain things. Right? And you can only do so well with limited attention. Now, think of it this way, okay? If you have wifi in your home, and let's say your speed is 1 gigabit per second down. If someone is using half of your download speed, right? Then you can only use 500 gigabits down. And that's exactly how our attention works as well. If we are giving 100% to something, we'll get the full results out of it. But once we introduce something new to the equation, then all of the sudden we have to subtract from the other thing and the results there go down. Okay? And this is. You're going to see this in many aspects of your life, right? Let's say you add a new hobby or you do something just in your normal life, right? Well, the time you spend doing that has to come from somewhere else, right? Maybe you have to spend less time with your wife, your kids, or at the gym. Right? And even with starting your business, right, it's a sacrifice. You have to give something up. You have to give up maybe Netflix or, you know, the six hours a day you spend on pornhub, you big weirdo. Okay, how do you even find so much time to spend on there? But we gotta make sacrifices, okay? And the big thing that messes people up non stop is they're trying to do too many business ideas or whatever at once. This is something you see a lot in entrepreneurs because entrepreneurs typically have adhd. But even worse than that, you see it with online marketing entrepreneurs. And I assume that's what you are if you're listening to my podcast. And the big issue there is you're constantly bombarded with ads, with emails, with YouTube videos, with content, right? Like, dude, you can't even go to pornhub anymore without seeing business opportunities. They're like, hey, did you know that you could be an only fans model? And I'm like, what, Little old me? Really? I doubt that. Anyways, that was a joke. Hilarious. Podcasts have to have some sort of comedic relief. But as an online entrepreneur, you're constantly bombarded with the next best thing. Oh my God, this is not. There's nothing like this. It's never going to be this easy again. And you have 10 minutes to make a decision. And there's only five spots remaining. Sound familiar, right? Guilty. We've used sales pitches like that before too. So I can't pretend to be some golden boy who is holier than thou. But my point being is you, listener, dear old listener, you're constantly having people trying to distract you from your purpose, which is to hopefully, if you're listening to this, it's because you want to start an E commerce brand and you want to make millions of dollars with it. You want a better life, you want to provide for your family, you want nice things, you want less stress, you want less headache, you want less worrying, right? And you need to understand and listen to this message, even if you aren't doing E commerce, okay? But you have to understand that all those people, like, they do not have your best interest in mind necessarily. They're trying to enrich themselves. And obviously I run a business as well. We sell courses and all that. We're trying to make good money from doing it too. But. But what I do want you to understand is you need to look out for the people, and this is a little off topic, who are constantly selling you different business models, okay? It's like one week it's crypto, the next week it's E commerce. The next week. After that, it's writing books on Amazon, right? Like, because that means they don't care about you at all. Because each time you start a new business model, just like each time we started a new store and how it caused us to fail, right. Each time you start something new, two things happen. Number one, it's taking away from the last thing you started, right? And that will cause that to likely fail. Number two, it's kind of throwing all the skills and all the expertise that you've gained on that last business out the window and saying, start over from scratch. So I would really suggest that you pick a lane and stay with it. Okay? Results come. It just takes time, it takes consistency, it takes effort. But let's say you're starting an E commerce store and you get all these skills. Like, you get good at shirt design, you start getting good at ads, you know how to make your store look nice, and you're starting to, you know, get the hang of it. And then someone comes along and they're like, by the way, in this YouTube video, in the next 30 seconds, we're going to show you how you could become a millionaire selling audibleincomebooks.com and what's going to happen then is all those skills you learned about print on demand or whatever, those things are out the window. They're gone. They convince you to start over on something new, and then you start over from scratch. A complete beginner. All those skills, all the progress, everything you made, it's gone, dog. It's gone. It's gone with the wind. And then what's going to happen is if you fall into this cycle, the next shiny thing is going to come along, right? And you're going to get that. And it's going to be just like when you join the last thing you're starting over from again. All. All those results, all that progress, everything you made out the window. Like, all we've been doing is selling. We've. We've had two businesses. Well, yeah, I mean, two businesses, I guess, because all the stores are owned by one business. Over the past, I mean, what is it? Scup was founded. I'm looking at my watch as if my watch tells me what day, like, how long ago I started my business. Stupid Devin. God. But, you know, we started Scupper in December of 2015, and we started our E commerce brand in, like, August of 2013. And that's all. That's all we've been doing. I've had so many opportunities to do other things. I've had so Many people tell me to do this, this or that. And I need you to know, guys, the E Commerce business, we didn't succeed right away either. It wasn't like we're these special people where it's like these magic things. It's just we stuck with it and we didn't get distracted. You gotta stay the course. Don't let people distract you, okay? And it's normal, by the way, to get bored with something and it's gonna happen. I need you to understand that business, a lot of the time is gonna get boring. Especially if you have ADHD like me. It probably goes a little bit like this. You are really excited about something for the first week. Okay? You're like, oh my God, this is amazing. I can't stop, I can't put it down. I love this. I'm so excited to do this. And then the next week it's like, yeah, I should do that work. And then you do it right, and you're like, you know, you're kind of into it, but you're not looking forward to it as much. You kind of start getting a little more distracted and you're not thinking about it all the time. Like that first week you couldn't stop thinking about it. It was all you could think about. Second week, you're not thinking about it as much. Starting to come mature. Third week, you're like, oh, God, I don't really want to do it. And then you kind of half ass it. And by the fourth week, you're really bored. You're like, I don't want to do this anymore. So one thing is, there's nothing wrong with you and there's nothing wrong with the business model because it's come boring. We as humans tend to enjoy extremely new and novel experiences, okay? And that's normal. But you have to be able to do the work when it's not as fun or not as exciting. Because if you're constantly seeking out novel experiences like we discussed earlier, that means you're going to constantly look for new business models. But they're always gonna get boring. They always do. At least sometimes it's work, it's a business, but you stick with it and then you get results. So I know that this was a bit all over the place, but my challenge to you, dear listener, is stick with it. Just stick with whatever you're doing. Give it a year. But the important thing is, over that year, you really gotta be consistent. You can't go like two days, one week, four days, the next week, one day, the Week after that, okay? I got to make up five days a week after that, seven days a week. I promise you, if your goal truly is what we had discussed earlier, you want a better life, you want millions of dollars, especially if you want millions of dollars, okay? If you want your situation to change, you want nice cars, you want trips, you want never to worry about money or stress or bills again, seven days a week, okay? Just do it seven days a week. 365 days over one year. Just find five tasks every day that move your business forward. And if you do that every day for 365 days, I guarantee you that your life will be vastly different at the end of that year, and you will be very, very happy with the results. And I can promise you that if you do that, this isn't a business thing. This is a life thing. If you want better results out of your relationship, marriage, your family, like your relationship with your kids, your body, your fitness, learning another language, learning any skill, playing guitar, going out and making friends, or making more money in your business, be consistent. Work on it every day for a year, and you probably will not recognize the person you are at the end of that year and how far you've come, the progress you've made, and how much better everything can be just one year from now. How long have you been trying to change your life? It's probably been longer than a year. But your issue is you haven't stuck with it and you haven't been consistent. Give it a year. Be consistent. Stick with it. You owe this to yourself. You owe it to your family. You owe it to your dreams, because you do not want to let them die. Do it and let me know the results. Set a reminder to come back to this video or this podcast one year from now. Let me know what's changed. Okay? This is Devin, the From Delivery Driver to CEO podcast. See you guys in the next episode. Peace. Let's go. Fuck, yeah. We did it.