
Evan Carmichael responds to a reader who's spent eight years launching businesses without success. His advice: pick one business, keep your job, and build momentum through daily bootstrapped steps instead of waiting for investors. Lack of focus and momentum are what kill ventures.
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Listen, I'm a little upset today. I got into a fight yesterday with an entrepreneur reader of mine, YouTube watcher of mine. Let's call him Aaron because his name doesn't matter. So Aaron writes in to me and he tells me, Evan, you know, I've been struggling for 8 years. I've been trying to get my business off the ground. I want to retire in 5 years. I'm doing manual labor. I've got a software company, a telecom company, "and I'm not hitting the goals that I wanna hit. I thought I'd be further along and I wanna retire in 5 years and it's just not happening for me. What can I do?" And I write back and say, "Hey Aaron, you know, sorry to hear, but here's what you need to focus on. One, pick one business, okay? It's hard enough having a full-time job and trying to run one business on the side. How are you gonna do two businesses on the side, right? It's not gonna happen. You could do one thing really well and execute, or you can do two things in a really crappy way and not execute. You gotta focus. Successful people focus. So you gotta pick one business, one business, and do that while you have your full-time job. The second thing is, he writes to me and he says, "I'm looking for investors and everything is on hold until I get investors." You gotta build momentum here, Aaron. You need momentum, right? An investor looking at this idea, there's no way he's gonna put money into this. He wants to see that you're doing something. And if he says maybe and you come back a month later and he sees growth, there's momentum, it gets him excited, right? Think about it. If you were an investor, right, somebody approaches you with a business idea and first of all you have a full-time job and he has two other ideas that he's working on, are you gonna give this guy money? No, man, of course not. Like, this is common sense stuff. So I said, Aaron, before you move on, 1) Focus. Pick one business idea. And 2) Build momentum. Don't wait for an investor to come because it's not gonna happen. Every day take a small step, bootstrap this up so when you go to investors there's momentum there. Anyway, so Aaron writes back to me and he's like, "You don't understand my business. You don't know what you're talking about. You know, why didn't you ask me more about specifics of my company?" Dude, it doesn't matter. First of all, I'm from the software business. My background is in software, but it doesn't matter. It does not matter what business you're in. If you do not focus and you have no momentum, you're not going to take off. It's simple. And he keeps fighting me in like emails back and forth. I had to say the same thing 3 times, and maybe it's stuck on the last one. I don't know. I hope it did for Aaron's sake, but he's fighting me on this, and I'm like, dude, if you put the effort and energy that you're taking in being so stubborn and defensive and take that energy and put into something positive, you'll be unstoppable, man. You'll be unstoppable. And so the message— hopefully Aaron got it and he's gonna take action. I don't get anything from helping Aaron apart from I want him to be successful, right? He wrote in to me. I'm not charging him, I don't get a commission on anything, I just want him to be successful. How many people take the time to answer questions and try to help you out? This is for you, man, it's not for me. So the next time you're reaching out to somebody, this is for you guys watching, the next time you're reaching out to somebody, listen, right? If you're doing something and it's not working and you've tried for years and you've lost all your money doing it and you want it to work out, and somebody gives you a different perspective, hey, maybe it's worth listening to. You can ignore it if you want, but your path, what you've been doing for 8 years, it's not working. So you might want to switch it up a little bit. People are trying to help you, and unless you change your patterns, the patterns that don't work, you're never going to hit your goals. And that's what I want for you. So that's my rant for the week. I got it out. I feel better now. Thank you for watching. If you guys have a story about people not listening, or if you didn't listen to somebody and you changed your tune and you figured it out, you realize they were right, I'd love to hear your stories. Leave a comment below. Let me know what you think. If you like this video, thumbs up below. Click my face, subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
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