A first-person YouTube monologue by Peter Vander Wall reflecting on 2024: he restarted his business in February, endured several months of negative cashflow, and recovered to a similar monthly revenue as the prior year but with an improved business model. He recounts personal hardship (his wife was in a 60 mph car accident but is okay), long workweeks (~60 hours), and a shift in mindset toward documenting his business journey ("document, not create") with a plan to post roughly weekly. The speaker positions his content niche around marketing expertise and transparency rather than broad business instruction.
Chapters
Nobody said this would be easy. Today is, let's see, December 18th. I probably won't end up posting this till January 1st, but anyway, this has been the hardest year of my life. Also the best year of my life. Started my business over in February, basically just completely from scratch. We lost money for like five months straight. We had months where we were negative, a couple of thousand dollars before I was even taking a paycheck out of the business or like trying to cover any personal bills. My wife got in a car accident at 60 miles an hour. She's okay, thank God, but that was one of the most stressful experiences of my entire life, getting that phone call. And at the end of the day, I'm still here. And I think that's the lesson of this year. Right? Like, nobody said this was going to be easy. Building a business and getting married at 22, like living an outlier kind of life is supposed to be hard. And as much as it is hard, it's amazing. Like, I've got an incredible wife. She man, she loves me like nobody else has ever loved me. I love her like I've never loved anything else. Like it truly is just beyond words. Our relationship is so good. I also love my work, like, as much as building this business is a grind. And I'm constantly doing stuff that I don't really want to be doing. At the end of the day, I can still go home and be proud of the day's work that I put in. You know, I think we did the math a couple weeks ago. I've been working like 60 hour weeks for like months and months and months with very few breaks. Like maybe a long weekend here and there. And look, I mean, do some people work way harder than I do? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, my life has purpose. And that purpose doesn't come from having it easy or doing what everyone else is doing. That purpose has literally come from the hard things that I'm trying to pursue. And this is really changing the way that I'm moving into 2025, especially when you compare it to the outlook and the mindset I had moving into 2024. Like this time last year I was on such a high, I thought I was going to be on a million dollar run rate by the end of 2024. Like, I didn't plan for things to go wrong at all, but instead I'm sitting here with a business that's actually the exact same monthly revenue that I was doing this time last year, but just with a better business model that I think is going to be much stronger for us long term. And. And I'm actually stoked about that. Like, with everything that happened this year with probably a dozen times, I was legitimately considering what it would be like if I had to go get a 9 to 5 job. But we were still able to get back to a comfortable financial position, really, in just like 6 to 12 months. Now, if you're here, you'll know this isn't my first YouTube video. I've kind of like messed around with YouTube for the past, like two years. In fact, let's see, like, how many archived videos do I have? It doesn't give me a count and that's annoying. 2. 33. I've got 59 videos that I've published to YouTube since. Let's see, when's the first one? June 15, 2023. And I think maybe about a quarter of those are still like active on YouTube, available to watch. But here's the plan moving forward, right? I'm not in a position to be able to educate on every single thing in the business world. I have a very narrow area of expertise right now, which is basically marketing. Like, I genuinely do believe I understand marketing better than 99% of people, but. But that does not qualify me to be able to create content on other domains and other aspects of business, like some people would like to think. You got all these YouTubers who, they're really great at marketing, which is why they've got great content that gets a lot of views, but they're going outside of their domain of expertise and trying to educate there as well. So they'll make a video about sales, or they'll make a video about recruiting or hiring or operations or automating your systems. And I don't want to become one of those. Right? And so the way I want to move forward is to document, not create. You've probably heard this phrase before, but the way I'm going about it is I want to document my mindset, my way of thinking about things, my way of going through different circumstances that are going to come up in business. And I want that to just be an open book for all to see, partly for myself, to be able to look back on in five or 10 years and be able to see how I was thinking when I was 23 and I had just restarted my business. But. But also hopefully for other people who are out there building and don't always know exactly what they're trying to do, to be able to see somebody out there who's being real and they can relate to somebody who doesn't have it all figured out just like them. And if that's you, then I hope you follow along. I think there's a couple of people who are doing a really good job of this right now. Alex Hormozi, obviously, especially if you listen on his podcast feed. It's very, very, very much geared towards what he's thinking on a day to day, week to week basis. And just like kind of documenting that into the world. Not exactly just like telling you what to do. And then the other person doing this really well is Paul Daly. And he's a guy in the info space, so his business is actually extremely different from mine. But the way he's documenting his building the business and his thoughts around business and the way his mindset and beliefs are kind of shifting over time, I think is really cool. So I'm gonna try to post at least once a week. It's going to be mainly centered around things that are going on in the day to day of my business. Might include some conversations with a friend or a fellow entrepreneur or somebody who you all might find interesting. But at the end of the day, this plan is not set in stone. Right. I could scrap it by February and come up with a totally better plan. But if you want to see what it's like building a business when you're honest about the fact that this is legitimately hard stuff, hard problems to overcome, hard circumstances to deal with, and not complaining about it being hard, and not complaining about about it being hard, but just being real and being open and transparent about that, hopefully you'll consider subscribing and hopefully my work here is something that you'll find interesting. So anyway, see you in the next one.
