The Real Costs Of Building A 'Boring' Business

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I want you to watch out for this because boring businesses are not all sunshine and rainbows. Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhom, where I deliver practical business lessons 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week, and more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. Here's the honest truth about boring businesses. They get sold to you as a safe, steady, reliable alternative to high-risk startups, low barrier to entry, predictable demand, proven model, and all that is pretty accurate. But here is what the sales pitch leaves out. Every business gets hard, especially in the beginning. And when you're building something they're not genuinely excited about, something you choose for financial reasons rather than a passion or a love or a need to get something out of you, getting through those hard times requires a completely different kind of fuel. You're not going to be motivated the same way as somebody who has a calling. Financial motivation sounds like enough when you are planning the business, especially if you're not in a good financial situation. If you're tired of being broke, I get it. I've been there and I've tried to build businesses just for financial reasons, and I was convinced of the idea of recurring revenue and steady cash flow is going to keep me going. But I'm telling you right now, No matter how dire a situation, once you start to get some comfort, that financial motivation has a shelf life. It doesn't last forever. And it's hard to see it now. Listen, I grew up with not a lot of money. I was paycheck to paycheck in my day job as a teacher. I understand financial struggle because financial motivation alone is not enough. You need other types of motivation to get you through the dark times. And yes, there will be hard times, and those hard times are going to last longer than you expect. You might think a hard time is a month or two. No, it can last 6 months, a year, even 2 years. I know people that went through a dark time of over 5 years. They made it through. But the point here is, is that they had more than just financial motivation to get through it. And for most people, financial motivation is just not enough. Okay. The grind you're going to have to go through is tough, but without the excitement of that specific kind of hard, that hard that you actually relish in, that you like, because you enjoy creating what you're creating, serving the people you're serving, you're willing to endure those tough times because of what you're doing. This is the whole entire episode here, okay? If you can't find the joy even in the hard times in what you're doing, then you trying to do this for some future goal of being rich or wealthy, whatever, 5, 10 years down the line— I'm just gonna suck it up so that I I'm going to be happy in the future. That is not going to make it for you. That's not going to be enough because that's somewhere in the future. It's not now. You're not actually getting any joy out of what you're doing now. And you need that to get up out of bed when things are tough, to reply to the fires you got to put out on your phone that are pinging you constantly. There's got to be something about the challenge that you are proud of. I want to paint the reality of the early days, an honest picture of what the beginning actually looks like. And listen, you're not gonna love it. Okay. That's just the truth. The day-to-day running of a cleaning service, that's a boring business, a lawn care operation, a moving company in the first year is just not glamorous. It's a lot of grunt work. And that grunt work is in everything you do in the beginning. Okay. It's managing people who don't always perform the way they're supposed to perform. It's dealing with customer complaints and bad reviews online. Even when it's not your fault, you know, people post things that are not true sometimes. It's the operational slog of the business every single day to try to make it work. And you're in the middle of it every day. So I'm not saying it's impossible to not be passionate about lawn care, but most people choose these types of businesses because they think it's a safe bet. And they kind of say, hey, I don't really care if I enjoy it or not, it's going to make me a living. In this case, just get a job. Why take on the risk of starting a business? Without that natural energy that pulls you into work every day, it's very hard to get through those tough times, to get through those grind days. And I find that anytime I'm obsessed with something, I enjoy it because I just can't help but want to see it through, want to see it get better, see progress. But if I'm not obsessed by it, if I am just not interested in it, I'm just doing it just to pay the bills, that's a very quick way to be depressed. And here's the advice I would give anyone who's seriously considering starting or buying a boring business. From the very beginning, design yourself out of the day-to-day operations. Do not build the job for yourself. This is not a lifestyle business, okay? You wanna build a business, get people to operate it, hire people to do the work, and build the systems that allow it to run without you in the room, meaning that you are basically an owner. An investor in your own business, because the business owner who is also the cleaner or the mover or the lawn guy, they're going to have a very hard ceiling. But the business owner is building a team to do all the work and expanding to new locations and treating this as an investment. They have a completely different ceiling. They're not really involved in the day-to-day. They don't really need to be interested in what needs to be done. They just need to make sure it's being done. And then the boring business only becomes a real wealth-building vehicle when you stop being the one that's doing all the work. Okay. And this applies to all businesses, by the way. You want to build towards that from day one, from the beginning, that you are allergic to work. I learned this from Ayman Abdallah. He's a great business coach, high-level coach. And he taught me that I need to act like I'm allergic to work if I want to scale my business. Meaning that if I do work, then I'm not doing my job. My job is to delegate. My job is to manage. My job is to recruit. My job is to scale the business. As a small business owner, you wear many hats. You're the owner, you're the marketer, you're the seller, you're the hire. I remember in the early days I was doing pretty much everything. I was writing, I was bookkeeping, I was selling, I was marketing. I was doing a lot. But lucky for you, you have LinkedIn. They have the tools to help you boost your visibility, find prospective customers, and find the best team for your small business all in one place. So while LinkedIn can hang up all of your hats, it makes it easier to wear them all. Learn more at linkedin.com/mbashow. You know that feeling when there's a spark building inside of you, that you were meant for more? That's your own drive pushing you towards what's next. Capella University gets that. With their FlexPath learning format, you can set the pace and earn your degree without putting your life on pause. You've built experience and you know what you're capable of. Now this is your time to turn that momentum into more. The only real question is, what can't you do? Learn more at capella.edu. So how do you stay motivated when the business you're running has really nothing exciting for you? This is the question that separates the people who make it through the boring seasons and the boring businesses and the ones that don't, because they're going to be long stretches where the business is running with nothing exciting happening. No big wins, no viral moments, no mentions on Forbes. Okay. No milestones really worth celebrating. Just steady, inevitable compounding of a business that's working but not thrilling. Okay. A lot of people keep going through this period simply because they have to, because it's what's paying for their lifestyles, paying for their bills and their family. And if you're an operator, you're going to have to start gamifying this and seeing the growth as the real excitement in your business. That's what you're going to get passionate about, not the business itself. That's where you're going to get maniacal about. It's about the growth. The game of growing is now your game. How fast can it grow? How many locations can you open in the next 12 months? How much can you increase the margin? What does the business look like at 10 times its current size? How can you innovate in your marketplace? How can you do things that other people in your space are not doing? Maybe it's content, maybe it's media. You want to gamify it for yourself as much as possible. Track the numbers obsessively, set growth targets, and feel a bit ambitious about it and celebrate every metric that moves in the right direction. I do this in our businesses regardless, because I like the game of business, but I also like the game of the business I'm in. I love teaching. I love making people's lives a little bit easier, making their path a little bit simpler as they're growing their business. I love what we do, but I also love the overarching game of trying to get bigger and better every day. So if your business is boring, use your boring business as a vehicle to play that growth game. If this episode's giving you a little bit of perspective, I'm glad because that's why I decided to do it. But I want you to subscribe to the show. Not only are you going to be supporting the show and supporting the whole team, but we have an upcoming episode I don't want you to miss. I'm going to break down how we grew this podcast to over 300 million downloads. In the last decade or so. And I'm going to give you my exact blueprint, including some of the mistakes I made along the way. So hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Let's keep going. One of the things that I think is helpful when you start any kind of business, let alone a boring business, is asking yourself, what are you going to have to give up? What are you going to have to sacrifice? Because anything worth anything has sacrifices. And a boring business is no different. In fact, in some ways it's actually harder, or the sacrifices are even more. Because you're— when you're building something that you love, that you're passionate about, that sacrifice feels like part of the journey. It doesn't feel like so much of a sacrifice. But when you're building something deliberately that is not glamorous, the sacrifice just feels like sacrifice. There's nothing to relish in. Okay. And here's what I believe you're going to have to give up in a boring business. And let me be specific. This is going to be in the beginning, in the first 12 to 24 months, as you're starting to make sure this business can run without you, as you're scaling, as you're building out a team, as you're making enough revenue so you can build that team. You need to make sure you're fully focused. That means no more game nights. You're going to have to cut back on holidays, if any at all, hobbies. You're going to just have to make sure you are fully locked in. Why? Because you want to get this done as fast as possible. You want to make sure that you get to the finish line of the business running itself before you get bored out of your mind, before you get no joy out of your work. You can't slow walk this, and the only way to make this happen is to pour gas on it. You gotta make sure you are burning hot. And in order to do that, you gotta say no to a lot of things that you might enjoy outside of work to make time, make room for you to be able to get this done fast. My opinion is you gotta put everything into building your business. Now, don't sacrifice your immediate family, okay? Make sure that you're taking care of them and spending enough time with them. So you're present and don't sacrifice your health because your health is everything. Without your health, you got nothing. Can't run any kind of business. I'm gonna tell you why this is my advice and why you need to sacrifice and fully focus. You're not competing against people who are dabbling, okay? You're competing against people who are fully committed and sometimes corporations that buy up some of these small businesses to expand them. These are people who are doing nothing but building their business and trying to grow it and trying to take your business over. You're competing at a very high level of commitment. People are ruthless when it comes to trying to expand. When you're building a boring business, it's all about territory, whether it's vending machines or lawn care or whatever it might be. So you might have to take a pause in this chapter of your life in this next year or two on your hobbies, on your vacations, on your recreational time. It's not forever, but in this sprint, you need to fully focus to build your business and get the right people in place in your business to start scaling. You can always go back to those things, to those holidays and those hobbies when you make it, when you have a business that's running on its own and now you are freed up to now enjoy the fruits of your labor. So here's the question: is it worth it? I want to end with an honest look at this question. Is it worth it? And here's my answer. Building any business is worth it, but you have to answer that question for yourself. I love the game of business. I love the boring businesses. I love the exciting ones. I love the things that excite me. I love the things that allow me to reinvent myself. I like the things that allow me to express myself, like this podcast. I love all kinds of businesses. I'm a business fanatic, but that's me. But you have to answer that question for yourself because the return I'm about to describe is real, but only you can decide if it justifies the cost. A successful boring business can make you financially free, can make you never worry about price tags again. You could buy anything you want anytime you want. Most of the most successful business owners that I know personally, and the ones that are around you in your community, have boring businesses. They're the quiet millionaires that you don't see on Instagram. Here in Sydney, there's a Lebanese Australian chicken restaurant called El Jannah. It was founded in 1998. It was just one location. It's a pretty boring business. Okay. You're just creating a menu. That's pretty simple. You're serving food to people over and over, same kind of menu. And they were very consistent with the menu because they had a winning formula: their charcoal chicken and the garlic sauce and their bread. They started with one store and then became two, then three, then four, and today they have 51 stores in Australia. Recently, Aljannah Chicken got acquired for a billion dollars. So there you have it, boring does get exciting. Now, money doesn't solve all your problems, but it does solve all your money problems. Which is a big portion of your problems. Financial stress touches every part of your life, your relationships, your health, your ability to be present around the people you love, the capacity to think clearly and make good decisions, your ability to reach your full potential. This is what financial freedom can do for you. You become a better person because you can afford to, and this is just the truth. You could afford coaching, whether it's health or personal or mental or business coaching. You can afford an ability to rest and take some time off. You don't have to worry and stress about paying bills because those are checked off permanently. Huge. It's very hard to be generous. It's hard to take risks. It's hard to invest in yourself when you don't have financial freedom. So a successful boring business does remove a lot from a lot of pain in your life. Okay. It does solve for a lot. Doesn't make your life perfect, but it does give you a platform to become who you are capable of being, reaching your full potential, as I say. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Boring businesses are real opportunities, but they come with a real cost. The grind without the excitement is harder. It's harder to get through it. The early days are going to require some serious grunt work and you need to be fully present. You need to design yourself out of the operation as fast as possible. You're in a race against time here. Okay. And you need to make sure growth is the game you are playing. That's going to be the fuel that's going to keep you going.. And you will have to sacrifice things that you love for maybe longer than you feels like it's fair. But now you know the cost. Now you can evaluate if it's worth it to set you up financially forever. The question is, are you willing to pay that cost? Hopefully this episode gave you the full picture of what you are committing to when you start or buy a boring business. You got the full picture. Now you can make the decision. If you wanna continue learning and continue to learn with practical business lessons, I recommend a lesson that we published recently, an episode called The Real Truth About Quitting Your Job to Start a Business. My exact blueprint, what I did step by step when I quit my teaching job, because the cost of a boring business does not start on day one of the business. They start the moment you decide to leave your job and what is comfortable and what you're used to. So you're taking that leap. How do you do that? Well, check out that episode. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode. Why have I asked my HVAC guy I found on Angie.com to change my grandpa's trachea tube? I was so amazed at how he replaced our air ducts. I knew I could trust him to change Pop Pop's tube. I think we should call a doctor. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find pros for all your home projects at Angie.com.