In this episode of "Ask Evan," host Evan Carmichael responds to a subscriber, Chris, who is launching his fifth business after multiple failures, facing marital strain, and experiencing severe burnout from working 80‑hour weeks. Evan offers a step‑by‑step entrepreneurial roadmap: first, recognize that success hinges on genuine passion and deep industry knowledge; if the founder lacks expertise, partner with someone who does and align incentives. Second, focus on creating and delivering high value to customers, especially business clients who can provide repeat orders and make the founder indispensable. Third, build the business around a core customer’s needs rather than hoping for random sales, turning the founder into a critical supplier. Fourth, delegate or bring in expertise for tasks outside the founder’s skill set to prevent health and relationship breakdowns. Throughout, Evan emphasizes empathy, urging Chris to find what he truly loves, share the workload, and prioritize personal well‑being to achieve a sustainable, happy life.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my newsletter subscribers, Chris, who is starting his 5th business. He's had all his other businesses fail. His wife is threatening to leave him if this business doesn't work out. He started a new company. He's been working 80 hours per week and is shut down because he's working too much. His body is shutting down on him, and he started a new business now that he has total unfamiliarity with and wanted my advice on how to get it going to succeed so that, you know, he saves his business, saves his marriage, and has a happy life. This is a tough one, and I'm really sorry that it's kind of gotten to this point where it's so serious with your wife and all these failed businesses before. The biggest thing that is challenging for me is that you have no familiarity with this business, and, and one thing you see from successful entrepreneurs is the ones who really make it are the ones who have a strong passion for what they're doing. So they really get their business and they're really excited about doing it, and they know everything. They're the experts in their field. So if you have a total unfamiliarity with it, what I would suggest is try to find somebody who knows that business and partner up with them. Get somebody involved who can do the things that you're not quite sure about and give them incentive to, to do that job well. Ideally, it would be start a business that you are passionate about and you have some connections with and you feel you can add a lot of value. To start making money, the amount of money you're going to make is going to be in direct proportion to how much value you add to people. So the more you help people, the more value you can add, the more money you can make. And that usually comes from really knowing your industry and something you're really excited about. So, you know, with this new business, think about how can you add as much value to potential customers as possible. And what might help is building around the customer. So I don't know what the new business is, but try to find a customer, ideally a business customer who could be a repeat order for you, and try to make yourself an indispensable part of their business. You know, if you're working with a company and they see you as being indispensable, you're adding so much value to them, you're helping them out so much, they're going to keep wanting to work more with you, tell their colleagues about you, you know, increase the contract size, give you more work. So it's a great potential opportunity if you can sell to a business and build around their needs instead of just launching and hoping that people will come and buy from you. So I hope that helps. You know, maybe not the news you wanted to hear, but try to find something you really love about this business and do that. Be that person in your company and get other people around you who can, you know, share the load of the things that you're not good at or don't know about or, you know, you don't have the knowledge. And hopefully that'll help you be able to get this company off the ground and get you to the point in your life that you're really happy about. So I hope that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. If you have some other thoughts for Chris as well, I'd love to see it. Or if you have your own question, feel free to leave a comment under the video, and we'll see you on the next episode.
