Omar Zenhom calls it the vampire effect: when you run two businesses, one inevitably drains time, money, and energy from the other. His Webinar Ninja became the vampire while General MBA, his beloved side project, quietly bled out to feed it. The blood donor can only sustain this so long before it collapses.
When you're running two businesses, you often will experience what I call the vampire effect. I should trademark this, right? When you're running two businesses, one of them will almost always be doing better than the other one at any given time. And here's what happens when one business starts pulling ahead. This happened to me. There were years where Webinar Ninja was in a crucial growth phase and I needed everything to make sure it was going to grow. It becomes the vampire. It sucks your time, your energy, your attention. It takes your money, your best ideas, and the 100% General MBA, a business I genuinely love, is becoming the blood donor. They're kind of giving up everything. It keeps everything alive but is doing it quietly, just sustaining, just kind of trucking along. The bleeding one will always win your attention, and the blood donor can keep giving for a while, but not forever.
