Mike Brown warns entrepreneurs against chasing side projects like rental properties when their main business is thriving. Success breeds "shiny-object syndrome," pulling founders into ventures they don't understand and draining resources. Instead, invest excess capital in passive, low-risk vehicles while staying focused on what's working.
So we don't need to take money from our primary business and then go find a new risky vehicle to beat the market. This should be as low maintenance and as low risk as it possibly can. And we just need to stack that wealth over there while we concentrate on accelerating our primary business. But what happens is we get shiny object syndrome. Like once our business starts to get to that stable place, now we go, oh, I'm going to go build a portfolio of rental properties. And people are taking time away from their best investment and they're redistributing that time over to their rental house where they're not an expert. Where it's very capital intensive, where they have a whole new learning curve. And now all of a sudden they are actually allocating their resources in the wrong spot and they're going to learn a whole new business, which is a business in and of itself. So what I really try and teach people to do is concentrate on your primary business at all costs. Don't get distracted and redeploy your capital over here into something that's safe, that can grow without you.
