We all have weak spots in our business

We all have weak spots in our businesses; areas that feel like are about to puncture and drown us in financial ruin. They might be the gaps in knowledge we are ashamed of, the glaring problems with our products, or the kinks in our personalities that we’re sure will prevent us from succeeding.

The nice thing, though, is that we’re not alone. Every single one of us, no matter how successful, has flaws that prevent us from getting to the next level. Even your idol has flaws, and big, gaping ones at that. However, we are so used to deifying people we look up to that we tend not to believe they could do anything wrong. This is amplified on social media, where we never see anybody fail.

Trust me though, we fail. All of us fail, and all of us have weak spots in our business.

The biggest weak spot in my business is my indecisiveness. It’s my inability to pick a lane and stick with it.  See, I have lots of trouble committing to a line of business. When I say commit, I mean financially committing great sums of money so that the business can scale and become profitable. I always seem to get companies right to the edge of breaking out, and then I pull back.

Here are some of the lucrative ways I historically made money, and what happened to them when they hit the point where they could break out and become massively successful:

• I made a lot of money at conventions, from 2015-2018. During that time I did 100+ events. I could have gone all in on conventions and become a real convention warrior for the rest of my career. However, instead of scaling UP my convention appearances, I have decided to cut them down, from 40 in 2016 to just 10 in 2019.
• My 2018 Kickstarter, Cthulhu is Hard to Spell, launched to 1,000+ backers and almost $40,000 in revenue. And yet, instead of adding MORE Kickstarters into the mix, I planned for 2019, more than a year, even though I had FINALLY broken through on the platform after seven other campaigns failed to break 1,000 backers.
• I own a Verizon dealership which made me tens of thousands of dollars between 2016 and 2018, and yet, instead of scaling it up, I have not put any money into it for years, and it has declined significantly since its peak. At one point it earned 80% of my total revenue. By 2018, it was down to just 10%.
• I own a publishing company called Wannabe Press. I’m a pretty decent publisher, and people beg me to publish their work all the time. Yet I have no interest in doing so. If I invested in that company, I could very probably make it a successful business, because I have seen glimmers of it in the past. Yet, I do not do so, against the advice of just about everybody I know.

Instead of any of those potentially lucrative lines of business, most of my time is spent writing books, which have never shown to be profitable for me in any of my past year, all while having multiple other businesses which have been historically very profitable.

Yet, despite the massive time commitment and the minimal gains currently associated with writing novels, I spend 5-8 hours every day doing so in the hopes that I can build another sustainable revenue stream selling ebooks as the expense of my other, more established businesses. Several of the businesses I mentioned above would require LESS time investment than I am spending now, and yet, I choose instead to follow the more labor-intensive path of books– a path that requires a much bigger audience than any of my other lines of business.

Who knows what will happen if it pays off and I start making a lot of money selling books. Maybe I will get bored with it too. Historically, that’s a very likely bet, and then I will be back at the beginning again, trying to find something that doesn’t bore me.

I know this.

Any halfway decent consultant knows this, and yet, I just can’t help myself. The smart money would be to double down on any of the things I have done in the past which have proven profitable.

Literally any of them. I have my pick. And yet, every time I hit the inflection point of my business, when I could see it taking off in a big way if I just invested more money into it, I think to myself “I don’t want to do that for the rest of my life,” and I back off.

I can’t seem to commit to a line of business, and that is my biggest flaw. It’s prevented any single thing I’ve done to become iconic. Sure, I’ve had hits, but nothing that has moved the landscape significantly. It’s not because I don’t have the talent. It’s because I don’t have the focus.

Most of us have many flaws, but we all have at least one. It’s not a weakness to have weak spots in your business. We all have our them. It’s a weakness not to do anything about them.

I’m working to correct my flaws, every day and in every way. That’s all we can do, work to correct our flaws. Notice them and do what you can.