The Principle That Tripled My Business for 3 Consecutive Years

Hey, guys. Matt Paulson here. In this video, I want to share with you a fundamental principle that I believe about business. This principle is something I discovered in about 2013 when my business was really beginning to get some traction. I certainly don't pretend to be the person that discovered this principle, but when I applied it in my life and in my business, my company's revenue and my personal income doubled every year for three consecutive years. So during this period of time, from 2013 to 2016, I kind of went from making a solid upper middle class income to a truly exceptional income. When I began to implement this one principle in my life, I'm sure you're thinking, okay, Matt, enough of the hype. What's the principle? Well, it's actually something quite simple, but it's also very powerful. And I just don't want you to underestimate what this one principle can do for you and your life and your business. So the principle I'm talking about is that if you want to make more money, you have to do less. If you want to do more. If you want to make more, you have to do less. So if you are a business owner and you want to make dramatically more money than you do today, paradoxically, you actually have to do fewer things. You've got to focus on the things that you're best at in the world and let other things go, even if they make you money. The marketplace is going to compensate you. When you are better at something than anyone else and you focus solely on that one thing, you have to put all of your effort and all of your focus into the one single thing that you are the best at or that you can become the best at. When you try to do too many things at once, you do become mediocre or at best, moderately successful. Michael Jordan was moderately successful at baseball. Lots of people would love to play in, in the minor leagues of baseball, but, you know, really, basketball is his thing. And there's just no athlete that is. There's no athlete that's an NFL quarterback and also makes the MLB all star team. It just doesn't happen. There just aren't enough hours in a day to become the best in the world at multiple things. And when you try to do a bunch of different stuff, you just end up being okay at a lot of different stuff. I want to kind of run through kind of how my story kind of interacted with this principle. So in 2012, I was running MarketBeat. We called the Business Analyst Ratings Network back then. We changed the name in 2015. I also still had my day job and I had a bunch of different little Internet businesses going that I was trying to get going. I had a press release distribution called Lightning. Excuse me. I had a press release distribution business called Lightning Releases. I had a network of personal finance blogs. That's where the name American Consumer News, which is still the company name, came from. I had a WordPress optimization service to make people's WordPress websites faster. I also operated a small web development consultancy, MarketBeat, even then was kind of the breadwinner of all my business projects. And I still had to put in 40 hours a week at my day job and a bunch of time to do my other projects as well. My day job and all these other projects were really distracting me from focusing on the one thing that I could be the best at. I remember not getting back to a handful of advertisers on MarketBeat because I was too busy trying to fix some urgent issues with smaller businesses. Really, these other things were stopping me from reaching the level of success that I could have reached with MarketBeat simply because of the opportunity cost of doing these other things. So when my son was born, Mica, In September of 2012, I finally realized I probably don't have time to do all this stuff. The first thing that I got rid of was my day job because it took up most of my time and was only responsible for a third to a fourth of my income. In early 2013, I developed a new normal and market continued to be the standout business. Soon after that, I stopped doing web design consulting and I focused exclusively on my product businesses. So, you know, during this time, 2013, 2014, you know, my business revenue, personal income, both continued to grow because I had more time to focus on the one business that I had the chance to be the best at. Over the next couple of years, I went through a process of selling and unwinding all my other little Internet businesses to put all of my kind of operational, actual work time into MarketBeat. So market, you know, MarketBeat revenue doubled in 2013, doubled again in 2014, doubled again in 2015, and then we were flat for in 2016, 2017, and then we really started to grow in 2018, 2019 again. But it was really the period of time when I began to leverage all of my best effort and my best energy and my best time into market beat. That's when things really started to take off. I believe that putting all of my best energy into this one business, the one business that was going to go the distance, that was the key driver of my doubling of revenue and income for three consecutive years. Today, I probably wouldn't even consider being involved in another business as an operating partner where I've got to work in a business 10, 20 hours a week. I've certainly invested in other businesses. I've done some pro bono projects like startups who Follows where I work with some contractors to make it happen my spare time. But I would actually make less money if I became an operating partner in a new business where I was responsible for running part of the business. Me starting another business has actually cost me money, because if I'm running another business, I'm not putting my best mental energy and effort into growing MarketBeat. And that will cost me money. Let's say I want to make an extra 100 grand this year. To do that through MarketBeat, I just need to grow the business revenue by 1.1%. And, and to do that, I just would really need one good optimization or improvement idea to grow that business by 1% and bam, there's another hundred thousand dollars in revenue. But say I wanted to make 100 grand from a new business from the ground up, I'd probably have to put 20 hours a week into that for a year to 18 months to make that happen. And I can almost guarantee that If I'm putting 20 hours a week into a new business, I'm going to be missing out on a lot of the 1% improvement optimization ideas at MarketBeat. So to stay focused on the one thing that I do better than anyone else, and that's running a financial media company, I'm not even going to entertain the idea of starting a new business with someone else, because inevitably, it's going to cost me money simply because of the opportunity cost. So that's the principle. If you want to make more, you have to do less. You have to focus on the one thing that you're best in the world at, or you have to focus on the one thing you can become the best in the world at and just not let other things become distractions. If you want to make more money in your business, you have to understand that there's an opportunity cost with your time. So if you're putting time into a bunch of side projects or new ideas, you're not putting your best effort into the one business that's going to go the distance for you. Focus on the one project, business or idea that's doing the best for you. The marketplace is going to reward you for that if you do it long enough. Ultimately, if you want to make more, you have to do less. That's the principle. Thanks for watching.