The one thing that can drive business greatness

Last night was Monday night for me, and that usually means I go out on a group bike ride. And it's a lot of other kind of 40-something, 50-something, even some 60-something dads mostly, and some moms that show up. And basically, like, we go out in a group in a big circle and go out and go out 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 miles, come back in, you know, just go out one direction, come back in. It's a ton of fun. And when your kids are a bit older, you tend to have time to go do these types of sports, right, that take a lot of time and hours, just like kind of cycling does. And last night was pretty special. It was a pretty unique night because we left from San Antonio, where I live, and we worked our way southeast. And if you know anything about San Antonio, the prevailing winds come off the Gulf of Mexico. So if you have to pick a— guess a direction that the winds are going to come into San Antonio, it's from the Gulf of Mexico. And last night was kind of one of those special nights where the winds were coming in like super hard. If you've ridden a bicycle, you'll know that the majority of kind of friction doesn't come from your contact with the ground. What actually slows you down and makes makes pedaling a bicycle difficult is the amount of wind you're coming through when you're trying to basically cut through this soup of oxygen and gases and stuff that we all live in. As we were cycling out, like, we're going into a massive headwind. 15, 20, 25 mile an hour gusts. It was hell. Like, we went out into this headwind and we were averaging maybe 16 miles an hour. And it was painful. Everybody's just kind of grinding. I mean, you just felt like everything was super hard. In this ride. And then, well, we got to the end of the ride where you turn around and we come back in exactly the way we just went out. Suddenly we had the wind at our backs and the wind was pushing us up and back to where our start position was in the second half of the ride. And everything just felt like super easy. At like 16 miles an hour, we came back at over 20 miles an hour, which for a bunch of old dudes, pretty good. And as I'm going through this hell of these headwinds, all I could think about was Man, I've seen this same thing happening to us in this bike ride. I've seen the same thing happening in business. And it made me think of two of my friends, one of whom is experiencing massive headwinds in his business, and the other one is experiencing massive tailwinds. And I wanted to make a video to tell you about these two guys, because ultimately the lesson of this video is you want to be like one of my friends and not like the other one if you have a choice. Hey, I'm Michael Girdley. If you like this kind of stuff, learning about business, talking about business, I do this for people that are entrepreneurs and aspiring multiple business owners. Click the link below or above, wherever it is, and subscribe to my email newsletter, and I'll send you an email once a week with stuff like this. It's free. So my buddy number 1 is a gentleman named Molson Hart. Great guy. He is somebody I've met through Twitter and is just somebody who's an entrepreneur and a free thinker. And his business is the following. They import stuff from China and other overseas countries, Vietnam and stuff like that. He imports toys that are targeted at the young market. Market, like, of kids. And technically, like, there are things that are educational toys. So his number one toy, which you should buy them, are a toy called Brain Flakes. Just a cool thing. And it's designed to, well, help kids be smarter and, well, better than your typical toy. And that's a great thing, right? Parents buy these for young kids. It's a winning thing, right? It makes the world a better place to have educational toys out there. But his business is facing a huge headwind. And that huge headwind is people aren't having kids anymore at the same rate that they used to. Actually pretty shocking. The birth rate for American women is down over 15% in the last 15 years. In fact, the number is closer to 17%. That means as you look around the United States, there's just not as many kids anymore. And for Molson, this creates kind of a headwind, right? You think about it, if he wants to grow his business, he's in a market where there's fewer and fewer potential customers. If people aren't having kids, well, like he's gotta perform even better and be even more competitive just basically stay the same size. So if people aren't having kids, what are they doing? Well, it turns out a lot of people are either becoming childless or deciding to stay childless. Secondarily, they're replacing kids with fur babies, i.e., pets. My other buddy, his name is Bill D'Alessandro, and he came out of investment banking close to 10 years ago and started his own business, starting to buy up different types of brands that were selling online specifically towards pet owners. And he eventually found one of those which has grown to be huge now called the Natural Dog Company. I've said that wrong. Maybe the Natural Pet Company. But anyway, you kind of see the idea. He started to sell things towards these people who were basically pet owners. While you look at Molson, who had this just frankly a headwind where people aren't having kids anymore, you're seeing the opposite with Bill. Bill has a massive tailwind where basically his customer base is growing like crazy. So if you want to think about who has an easier job in terms of building and growing their business, which one do you think it is? You think it's the guy whose market is shrinking because people aren't having kids, or you think it's the guy whose market is actively growing and booming because people are replacing kids with pets. And in the end, Molson is doing fine. He's got a nice business, but it's harder than it needs to be because it has headwinds. People just aren't having kids. On the other end of the spectrum, well, Bill just announced that he sold his business for big-time money to a private equity firm just by choosing something with massive tailwinds. It's been a transformative thing for him. His kids and maybe even their kids in the future. In the end, we as entrepreneurs get to pick what types of businesses and what markets we're in. And I think the lesson of Bill and Molson and even my bike ride is, if you have the choice, like, go find something with tailwinds. It creates just a lot more fun, and it's also just a lot easier. In the end, tends to have better outcomes. Just where you want to be. All right, that's this video. Let me know what you think. I'd love to hear from you in the comments below. Catch you next time.