The Propaganda About Multiple Streams of Income is WRONG

Multiple streams of income aren't making you rich, they're keeping you broke. This is the biggest lie that holds business owners back. Diversification isn't freedom, it's distraction. In the past year, I've sold off real estate, Airbnb's, a tiny house, even entire businesses. And in that time, my net worth has more than tripled. Everyone wants 17 streams of income, but. But one strong river outperforms 17 leaky faucets every single day. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, and we made over $50 million last year in revenue mowing grass. Last week, I talked to a friend of mine that has a $400,000 painting business with a couple employees, and it's pretty profitable, but it's plateaued the past three or four years. So to make more money, he ended up spending his evenings and weekends managing 10, sometimes 12 vending machines. And they made him about $2,000 of profit every month. Not bad. That's around 20, $25,000 in profit every year from spending his evenings and his weekends just literally switching out cans of pop and bags of chips. Simple enough. And he did that because a few years ago, he watched a YouTube video about making passive income and how easy it was to do vending machines. In his mind, he thought that his painting business was plateaued. It was dead, and he wasn't going to be able to scale it past $400,000 in annual revenue. That so he would spend his daytime working hours doing the painting and managing his crew. And in the evenings and weekends, all his discretionary effort went towards these vending machines. Last year, I recommended that he just get rid of the vending machines and spend his weekends and evenings working on making the painting business better, with better marketing, better software, better systems, and training his crew more. One year later, when I talked to him last week, the business has more than doubled almost $900,000 in annual revenue over the past 12 months. Why did the business all of a sudden more than double in just one year after being flatlined for three or four? The reason? Because all his discretionary effort and time and energy went back towards the one major business he'd been dabbling with, the vending machine thing. Watching YouTube videos, watching different side hustles that he could start instead of just focusing all of his time and energy on the business. And because of that, the business more than doubled. Recently, I watched a video from Cody Sanchez about her 17 different streams of income. And don't get me wrong, I like Cody Sanchez. And that is a great YouTube title and a great video that will get a lot of views, but it makes for a horrible strategy for building your wealth. We've all been told that the wealthy people, on average, seven streams of income. But that's survivorship bias. They built one massive stream first and then added branches later on. They did not add 10, 15 different businesses and then become a millionaire instead. Instead, they created one massive flowing river and then later on diversified into other smaller businesses. But most owners split their energy too soon and end up mediocre at everything. And a mediocre business has mediocre profit margins, it attracts mediocre talent, it has mediocre marketing, and therefore has mediocre levels of success. When I was coming up and growing my businesses, I watched all the same YouTube videos you see and the podcast and different books about people that have all these different businesses and all these little streams of income. So I started a couple Airbnbs. I got a tiny house and started renting that out. I got a bunch of real estate, and I thought it was smart diversification. Guess what? They all went up in value. And I could make another video on this and talk about how much I made on Airbnb and how much I made on the real estate market, but at what cost? Because every property, every tenant, every contractor pulled my attention away from the main business. And for me, that's the Mike Holdco, which is Copilot, CRM, Augusta, the franchise, and the media. Outside of those three things, I'm trying to reduce as many distractions as possible. And when I was buying all of those things and buying the real estate and starting different businesses and trying to figure out all these other things, I wasn't investing, I was distracting myself. Honestly, if I just took the down payment money that I spent on the real estate and put it in the S&P 500 in the stock market and never looked at it, I probably would have made about the same amount of money as all the time to buy the property, get tenants, get management, rehab, remodel, and all the work and time and energy that I put in that real estate. Probably the returns would have been better if I just put the money in the stock market. But it's not about just the actual returns, the actual money that was made. It's more a function of if I would have had that time back and if I would have had that mental space that I spent the weekend looking at the property. I spent that evening fixing the toilet. I spent that evening vetting a new tenant. I spent that that weekend trying to figure out which property management company I was going to use. If I just put that all towards the big business, it would potentially have a 20 or 30% impact on the big business instead of a 1 or 2% increase of my overall income. So about a year ago, I was trying to get rid of all these distractions and these little side streams of income, things like real estate and the Airbnbs and even businesses, and I started selling them off. Over the past 12 months, we've been able to take the NPS score from Augusta Lawn Care from 52 to 87. NPS stands for net Promoter Score. And if you've ever looked at the range, it's from negative 100 to positive 100. And any brand can ask their customers a simple question and get a score on that range. Now, some of the best and biggest brands you know are 60, 70 on an MPS score. So for Augusta Lawn Care to be ranked at 87, MPS score from the owners of Augusta puts us in a very elite category. And here's a side note, is that our churn, the number of owners that left Augusta every year, that churn got cut in half in just 12 months. Why? Why did net Promoter score go up and churn come way down? Because I was able to focus. And by doing that, the team was able to focus on solving the problems for the owners. So how did we do this? We sent surveys out to all the owners inside of Augusta Lawn Care and all the general managers and. And asked, hey, what can we do better? What can we change? What is hurting you? What is helping you? And we did more of what helped them and less of what was hurting them. And by doing that, we increased the Net Promoter score and dramatically decreased the churn. If you simply ask your customers what you can do better and how you can serve them more and how you can solve more of their problems, they will tell you. And if you execute on those things instead of being distracted with a hundred other little things and other little services and little side projects you got going on, and if you just execute, you will grow a bigger business, guaranteed. But what I find so often is us as entrepreneurs, myself included, we love busyness. We love the dopamine of new streams of income. We love the starting line. It feels like progress. But here's the thing. When it comes to entrepreneurship, you only need to start once. And after that, you just need to keep running to reach the finish line, stop going back to the starting line, and like, well, I like the gunshot going off and everyone's starting to run. And People are cheering and clapping and saying my name over the loudspeaker and the screens and there's lots of people and people just keep going back to the starting line over and over. And yeah, you ran 26 miles, but you ran the same one mile 26 times. In entrepreneurship, the person that finishes and reaches the goal and gets the finish line and gets the outcome and has the success is the person that starts once and then goes through the grueling pain of continuing to run year after year after year after year. And when you see the startups that are in AI and after a year or two are raising billions of dollars, you somehow think that's the standard when reality the vast majority of millionaires have built their business for 10 plus years. And it wasn't that they're smarter or better or have more skills. It's simply that the vast majority of their competitors went back to the starting line and started some other industry. And instead of doing lawn care, now we're going to do construction. And instead of doing construction, now we're going to do painting. Instead of painting, now we're going to go sell cars. And they went from one industry to the next to the next. And every single time you are going back to the starting line. If they just flipped a coin and chose one of those options and then stuck with it for 10 years, they'd probably be better off. So why is it that we as entrepreneurs are always going back to the starting line? We're always starting new things and we're always trying to start new little side projects that give us $1,000 or $1,500 or we buy into the logic of passive income. It's really avoidance. We're scared to go all in on one thing and we mistake motion for momentum. Momentum takes all the energy and diverts it towards one thing. Motion is chaotic and goes in many different directions. Having multiple streams of income keeps you from focusing and prevents any clarity in what you're doing. The same way when customers show up your website and they also don't know what to do next. Should I fill out an estimate request form? Should I call them? It's hard design to even navigate. That's why at home service web design, we fix all of that so you can eat pie. Starting more streams of income is usually fear in disguise. Fear of doubling down, Fear of doing more of the same thing and doing it again and again and incrementally getting better over time. Most business owners would be better off choosing one thing and doubling down on it for the next 10 years just committing blindly for the next decade, I'm doing this thing and getting really, really good at it instead of trying to dabble with a whole bunch of different things. And a lot of times it's under the guise of, well, I want to see which one will take off. And you have all of these irons in the fire that are actually absorbing all the heat out instead of just putting one in the fire and really getting it hot. Instead of building 10 side hustles, build one business with systems. The valuation of business triples when it can run without you. And so if you're thinking about, how do I have an exit, how do I sell the business, how do I build up the valuation of the business so I can give it off to my family or my kids or to my employees, well, the number one thing you want to do is build systems so that without you, the business can actually operate. Because as soon as you do that, it can actually be sold to someone. And as soon as it can be sold to someone, the value of that business goes up. There is zero enterprise value. If you were required to be present every day spinning the plates and being the person that does the sales, and then you do the operations, and if someone didn't show up in the office, you're answering the phone. If that's you, there's no enterprise value. And I would not go so far as to say you have a job and not a business because you might have a $2 million quote, unquote business and be still spinning all the plates in the business and being the backup. However, if you can build a business that runs without you, it has real enterprise value. It is simple, sellable, and it can run even when you're gone. You might be asking, well, how do I do that? How do I create these systems? Well, the number one thing I have learned is to delegate outcomes. Buy back your time as entrepreneur and hire great team members. That's how you create optionality later on and not by dabbling around now and all these different things, just focusing on one thing and creating the systems, creating infrastructure, creating the team, creating the vision that then allows for the business to grow without you. Leverage beats diversification every single time. And people in the comments and everyone's like, they will point to that one billionaire that likes to dabble and try stuff out and do side projects that don't really make a lot of money, but they just enjoy it. And that's after they made the billion dollars. And what you don't see is the millions of people that Try to copy the side hustle thing and doing all these different ventures and different industries and little side projects that never make a million dollars and you can dig a thousand holes and not get anything. And try all these little side hustles and vending machines and laundromat and try washing these and going to go ahead and start this other industry and this other service and you constantly digging these holes all over the place. When instead I'd just rather you drill one hole a thousand feet deep and hit gold. Now you might be saying, oh, I don't need to hit gold mine. I don't need to make a bunch of money. Well, then let's take it from the moral side. When you scatter your focus, you actually starve your team. You underinvest in the people counting on you. Their growth is stunted because you're distracted. You don't serve people by being spread thin. You serve them by building depth. Usually when you start a small business, you're hiring entry level laborers or technicians for a small business. That's normal. As the business grows, it gives the company the ability to be able to pay more and more, as well as give the employees that are working for the business more learning opportunities. It gives them a ramp to learn skills and earn more. And so if you're distracted in 100 different areas, and like my friend, his $400,000 business plateaued, he was wondering why he's churning through his technicians. Because they realized there was no future at this business. It wasn't growing. There was nowhere to move up into. There was no skills for them to attain. And so he kept burning and churning through all his technicians. And by focusing and being able to double the business to over $900,000 in annual revenue, now he's able to have an estimator and an operations manager, and there's a way for them to move up inside of the company. So if you're not worried about making more money for yourself, think about your team. Think about the people around you that would be given more opportunities if you just stop being distracted and focused on your main business. So what's the fix? You say, well, look, you told me not to do all this side income, side hustle, passive income stuff. What's the fix? Kill the distractions, sell the side hustles, the streams of income. Focus on the river. Master one business model before you even think about diversification. At Augusta Long Care, we have seven stages of success for owners, and it's the last and seventh one. That's about diversification. When you think about real estate for tax purposes when you think about other industries. But that could take 5, 10, 15 years of copying and pasting a profitable business model before you diversify. Riches come from depth, not dabbling in my opinion. It's like, why would I diversify or go outside of my market if I'm already the top 5% in my industry? You already have an edge on the market if you simply think about a return on investment perspective. If you have built one successful business, you are probably in the top five, 10% of your industry. Why would I switch to a different industry where maybe at best in the top 30% or 50% and there's way more competition that have years of experience on you? In home services, the best way to win is simply outlast your competition and stay in the game longer than them because they get distracted by other industries. If it's a really bad winter, I'm getting out of snow and then all of a sudden it's like, well, it's be so much better if I could paint interior. And also the painting becomes, I'm going to do cabinetry and then cabinetry. You know what, I'm going to do full remodels and then remod. Not enough money here. I'm going to do roofs because that's where the money's at. And they get distracted over and over and over again. And because of that, every time they get an edge on the market after a few years, then they join a new industry and they're back to a 50th percentile. They're in the middle of the market. Why would you go invest in real estate when there's millions of investors that have been doing it for decades, when you already have a million, 2 million, $3 million business in home services and therefore in the top 1% of your industry. Take that market edge, that experience that you have and just dominate it. Just double down and stop dabbling. Multiple streams of income are making you poor. One strong stream will make you free. Alright, so the challenge for this week is to audit your income streams. Which ones are actually moving the needle? Which ones are just keeping you busy and potentially distracting you? I want you to cut the noise, pick the river and dig deeper. Because wealth isn't built by chasing streams. It's built by digging deep, damming one river and letting it flood.