Helmsley Media

When I did a search for “lifestyle business” I found some interesting posts discussing the term. It seems that this is something of a swear word thrown at businesses that aren’t considered “real businesses”. They describe the connotations surrounding the term as indicating that these are not real businesses, especially in the venture capital community. An “equity business” is viewed as something that is worth of investing in because the long term growth prospects are considerable, even if short term profit is extremely unlikely.

The way I see lifestyle business is as a means to create leverage for oneself. Looking at someone like Timothy Ferriss from the Four Hour Work Week for example, you see that building a lifestyle business is a great way to create a cash cow that can fund either your grander business aspirations, or it can fund your lifestyle.

The main thing I see separating a lifestyle business from an equity business is that a lifestyle business needs to be profitable very early on. If we don’t have a plan to profit from our very first customers/visitors, then it’s not worthwhile trying. In an equity business we’re more interested in growth of our customer base, in establishing critical mass and market share, then we go looking for a way to tweak things in order to reach profitability. The equity business tactics are certainly much higher risk, but also higher rewards.

I think the term “lifestyle business” is inaccurate. Of course we can provide ourselves with a comfortable lifestyle from this type of business, but I believe a better term would be cash cow. This term also provides something of a shift in our mindset when we look at it this way. Lifestyle business has connotations of sitting back and relaxing, whereas cash cow reminds us that the business is used to fund other activities within our larger operations. For example, we could look at PlentyOfFish.com and say that it is a lifestyle business, but I’m willing to bet that the owner/operator Markus Frind would look at things differently. Sure he can run his site in minutes per day (allegedly), but if you’re generating in excess of $10 million in revenue annually from such a minimal amount of work, you have a lot of options. These numbers are of course unrealistic for most of these types of businesses, but it shows the upside potential.

By applying this type of mentality to the online media business, my plan is to develop a small number of so called lifestyle businesses online. Then I will use the proceeds from these to build something focused more on equity, on building a large user base in spite of no plans for short term profitability. Sure you could do up your business plan, create a few prototypes and go the venture capital route, but then you hand over all control and a huge piece of the pie. Perhaps this is why the VCs look on these “lifestyle businesses” with such disdain, because it shows that they aren’t needed. I’m not saying that VCs are a bad thing, just that they aren’t the only choice if you want to build something big in online media.

Of the many reasons that compel me to be an entrepreneur, flexibility/freedom ranks high on the list. I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but being able to live/work wherever I please, and to not be a slave to the clock, are very appealing to me. Before I wanted to be an entrepreneur because I wanted to be exceedingly rich, but after reading The 4-Hour Workweek I realized that most of us think this way because we believe this to be the only way to live the lifestyle we want. The all too common mistake that most of us make is to build a business that imprisons us, instead of letting us free. The focus now is to build a business around the things I love to do, and a business that requires a minimal amount of ongoing maintenance from me.

Over the years there have been a number of different business gurus/mentors that have influenced my views on how best to conduct business. It started with Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad and the lessons on what it is to buy and build assets, instead of liabilities. Next was Michael Gerber’s E-Myth
and the idea of a business as a system with 3 main people involved; technicians, managers, and leaders. Finally there was Timothy Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week (which I mentioned above) and the idea of lifestyle design, or building a business as a means to finance your dreams and provide you the time to live them out.

This has been a long process for me, and I’m not all the way there yet, but as you start moving forward you can start to see the pieces of the puzzle much more clearly. It is difficult to read these books and get a sense on how you can achieve what they have when you’re at square one and they are already so successful, it can be much more helpful to learn from somebody who is somewhere in between. Over the last couple of years I have been watching the progress of a lifestyle entrepreneur with great interest, his name is Yaro Starak. Yaro has been running his blog Entrepreneurs-Journey for a while now, but it’s only been in the last couple of years that things have really picked up for him, which is reassuring to see how the progression can be quite rapid after a few things are in place.

A recent post on Yaro’s blog talks about what his life is like now on a daily basis. He wrote the same post 4 years ago, and now he is comparing the differences and showing you how things have improved for him.

A Day In The Life Of An Internet Entrepreneur 2009 Edition

It’s a little ridiculous me to say that I’m more ambitious than Yaro seeing as he has achieved a great deal more than I have at this point, but I guess it’s just that my interests are a little different. I want to be involved in Hollywood filmmaking, and you can’t really do that on a small scale. If you’re producing Hollywood films it’s a huge undertaking. My point is that a lot of lifestyle entrepreneurs are interested in freeing themselves to be able to focus on the things that interest them most. Yaro seems interested in a relaxing lifestyle, I want to free myself to engage in a very expensive passion. A great post that outlines the different types of lifestyle entrepreneurs is on Anywired.com that talks about 3 different types of lifestyle entrepreneurs.

Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Complete Guide and 40+ Resources

Yaro seems to fall into the first category, the time minimalist, while I seem to fall more into the third type who does it for the love by focusing on topics of passion. I guess I could also be classified as the second type, the nomadic entrepreneur, seeing as I’m currently traveling to do my work in Denmark (although as I write this I’m in Portugal). I wrote a guest post on Yaro’s blog recently talking about how blogging isn’t just about making money, and how it’s a great way to chase dreams as well, so I suppose that sounds a lot like the entrepreneur doing it for the love of it, doesn’t it?

Enter Action With Boldness

If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.

The above is an excerpt from the table of contents of Robert Greene’s “The 48 Laws of Power“, one of my all time favourite books.  The book is full of valuable lessons that can apply to numerous areas of one’s life, not just to business.  This particular law is one of my favourites, not because I am very adept at following it, rather because it is the one law which I most likely break most repeatedly.

I am a very analytical person by nature.  I enjoy breaking things down, and visualizing how all the pieces of something should work to achieve a desired result.  In building my business I have spent countless hours brainstorming, researching, and studying how best to achieve my goals.  It’s likely that I spend over 90% of my time planning, less than 10% of my time executing  my plans, and probably no time at all on monitoring my results.  A shame to say the least.  At the risk of sounding egotistical, I think that my plans are quite good, and that were I too execute them as I envision them, I would achieve some great things.  Sadly this has not been the case.

In writing this I’m not attempting to elicit sympathy, rather I’m hoping to provide a venue through which to hold myself accountable, and to provide you some insight into something that perhaps you yourself could use some work on.  The one thing that I need to become better at more than anything else, is to begin allocating more of my time and attention to the executing of my plans.  This goes into the 80/20 law, or Pareto Principle.  If you’re not familiar with this, it basically says that 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions, and therefore by isolating what those most productive actions are, and doing more of that, you will achieve greater results with less overall effort.  I won’t go too much further into that, but you can find a more in depth explanation of the Pareto Principle on Yaro Starak’s blog Entrepreneur’s Journey.  Another great place to read about similar concepts is in Timothy Ferris’ book “The Four Hour Work Week“.

If you spend too much time analyzing the variables that go into your situation, you have too little time to execute whatever strategy you develop.  Accoutants have a catch phrase for this too, “Relevance vs Reliabilty”.  This basically states that as you spend more and more time analyzing a company’s financial situation, the less relevant the information you find will be to that business.

So what is the point of this article?  Well hopefully you gain something from it, but primarily I wrote it as a reminder to myself that the fastest way to get to where you want to go, is to stop thinking about it, and start walking.

Whenever I watch tennis I am amazed at how these players make it look so easy. Of course it isn’t easy and this is why these players are making millions of dollars. The better a player is, the easier they make the game look. When I watch Andy Roddick play against some guy in the first round he seems pretty comfortable, but when I watch him play Roger Federer he looks like he is working extremely hard, while Roger almost always looks like the game is effortless to him. I have experienced this in my own sporting endeavors before, a state of being where you feel as though you are hardly trying, and yet you are performing better than you have ever performed before. Oftentimes this means you are “in the zone”.

The zone is not just applicable to sports though, it can happen at anytime in your life really. It is being in the moment so that you can allow your training to take over, so that your choices are more automatic, and you are less likely to doubt yourself. So how can we apply this principle to business? It’s difficult because business is more of a marathon than a sprint, and to maintain this state constantly is quite difficult. Even if you can’t be in the zone all the time, you can implement the art of not trying.

If your mind is overloaded with things you need to get done, and your life is quite complicated, using the art of not trying is probably not going to be feasible. In order to successfully not try you need to cut out the trivial many, and focus on the critical few as Tim Ferriss says. The sports analogy I would use is that you need to have smooth and efficient technique in order to appear effortless. Roger Federer looks like he isn’t trying because he is so smooth on court, and regardless of whatever pressure he is under he still looks smooth because of his impeccable technique. In business this means focusing on what really matters, and not being overwhelmed by numerous small things that should be delegated to someone else, or batch processed at a later time.

If you feel like you’re working too hard, you probably are. Unfortunately that also means that you are probably doing things in an inefficient manner, and until you become more efficient you have to keep working hard. In reality the better word to choose would probably be effective, because if you are really efficient at doing trivial tasks, you aren’t really going to be getting ahead. This of course applies to sports as well. If Roger Federer only had smooth technique he wouldn’t be the champion he is today, but because he also hits very effective shots, he gets amazing results.

So, think about your daily routine, how could you become more efficient, and more importantly, how could you become more effective? Decide what are the most important tasks that you need to get done, and do those tasks first. In a worst case scenario, if you didn’t get to respond to some email or to do some other trivial task, at least you got that important item done, and you will be feeling a lot less stressed as a result. Really break down your day, and find the time hogs. Write out what you need to get done the night before, and when the morning comes, attack the most important items first.

For those of you who buy into the law of attraction, which is the foundation of “The Secret”, you’ll understand what I’m getting at here. It’s important to be clear on what you want in life and for your business, but you can’t try so hard. When you start trying too hard what happens is you start to focus on the opposite of what you’re hoping to accomplish, and by focusing on the negative you tend to attract something negative.

Sometimes it’s easier to keep our bad habits, we’re too lazy to change them, even though changing these habits would mean we could be lazier later! So don’t be lazy now, find and fix your bad habits, you’ll thank yourself for it later.