Don’t Start a Business Until You Answer This Question

Businesses are vehicles, not destinations.

After spending seven months in Latin America while trying to grow my marketing agency, I found myself questioning whether I was building the right business for the life I actually wanted.

In this episode, I explore why we should design our ideal life first, then choose the business that supports it. We discuss finding your strengths, following market demand, adapting to technological shifts like AI, and why the best business is the one aligned with who you are.

Because success isn’t just about making money, it’s about building a life you actually want.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, it's Sam here. Hope you had an amazing weekend. So, over the last year, I've been living in Latin America whilst trying to grow my online business, which is a marketing agency. Like many most businesses, there have been many ups, many downs, and there's been times where I've had a really healthy client base, and times where I've had a smaller client base. But then, over the space of a couple of months, I lost almost all my clients at once. And naturally, what happened was I started questioning whether I was on the right path. Should I rebuild? Was there something I should have done differently? Was it my fault? And looking back, I honestly think I did provide a good service. But the bigger issue is that most of my clients were small businesses, and small businesses do have unpredictable cash flow. Sometimes, in quiet months, marketing is one of the first things to be cut, even though that's usually the thing that helps them keep generating more revenue, or so it's kind of like a uh removing marketing is actually going to probably hurt their bottom line even more. But anyway, it's not my decision to make. So that experience going through this has really forced me to zoom out and reflect on instead of asking how can I rebuild this business, started asking myself what what kind of business actually fits the life that I want to live? How can I pivot this into something which is still using my skills and still that I'm interested in and I can provide value that the market needs. You know, I I started an agency because I wanted to be my own boss and have a location at independent income, and it absolutely helped me achieve that for a period of time. You know, I would not be here, I'm in Paraguay right now, I spent six months living in Brazil. I would not have been able to do that had I been stayed in my nine to five back in the UK working, which required me to be in an office five days a week. So freedom was really my main goal of starting this. Um but over time markets change, offers become saturated, and you have to pivot. So I think a lot of people, when they choose a business, they try and find what is the hot opportunity right now, and then they go into that, they spend a lot of effort and time trying to make it work. But I think what makes more sense is to start with designing like your ideal life. What do you actually want to build? What do you want your day-to-day to look like? Do you want location independence or are you happy being in one living in one place for the whole year? Do you enjoy working on a computer, or do you prefer being, you know, like a more of a physical job, interacting with people face to face? Do you want to have employees, or do you just want to be a solo entrepreneur? Or would you rather build a simple cash flow business like agencies are a good cash flow business, it's got high margins, or would you rather build something you could eventually sell? Typically, agencies are quite hard to sell because a lot of times the clients are attached to the owner, the operator, and that's why they joined. So, how many how much money is actually enough? Like, how much money do you want to make? Five thousand dollars a month in Thailand gives you a good lifestyle. Five thousand dollars in Dubai or London is you know, you don't get much. Um, so success is personal to your individual goals, and success looks different to everyone, like the life you want should determine the business that you build, not the other way around. I think a lot of people do it the other way around. The second mistake I see people make is ignoring the skills which they already have, and they jump from trend to trend to trend. But if you're in your late 20s or older, you know, you've probably accumulated a lot of work experience, a lot of skills, and you're probably more valuable than you realize. You know, and these don't have to be directly correlated with jobs that you've done in the past, they could it could mean you've traveled to a lot of different countries to understand many different cultures, you know, travel is an amazing education, could be that you speak another second or third language, maybe you just become great at some like niche skill, like knitting or jujitsu. Uh, one of my favorite questions is from Naval Ravakamp, which is what feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else? And I think that's one of the best career questions that you'll ever ask yourself because whatever that is, whatever feels like play to you but looks like work to every to everyone else, is where you'll naturally spend more time doing it and you'll become more competitive because you're willing to work more because it doesn't feel like work, and then over the years that repetition and expertise becomes your competitive advantage and your moat. So there's one final piece that people often ignore, and that is demand. Is there actually enough demand? You can be super talented about at something, you can you can be you can love something, be very passionate about it, but if no one's actually gonna buy it or pay for it, then it's a hobby, it's not a business. Uh the market rewards value, not effort. So instead of asking what business should I start, ask what are people paying for, what are consumers buying every week, every month recurring? What are businesses spending money on repeatedly? What industries are growing? You know, is it I wouldn't say it would be a good time to start a magazine or a newspaper right now, but it might be a good time to start a subscription newsletter. Um, what businesses have recurring revenue? You know, like typically a business where you have to sell, you only sell a product once and the customers don't come back. Next month you've got to find new customers. But if you sell a product which people need month in, month out and they're gonna keep paying you is um is amazing. Like toothpaste, toothpaste is something that people need whether they want it or not. We all need toothpaste. Coffee is another great example, you know, drinking one right now, and every moment, every generation gets a handful of moments of opportunity for my parents' generation. Those who bought a lot of properties for back then, you know, before all the crazy asset inflation, you could buy a property for 2 to 3x your annual income. Now those properties have inflated so much, the currency is inflated so much that the same property is worth in some instances 10, 12, 15 times an annual salary. So it was very easy back then to have a regular job and invest in properties, and people who did that 50 years ago are laughing today. For our generation, it's different, you know. For my generation, I grew up with the dawn of the internet. I saw Google in the early stages, um, Windows 92. I saw you know the big square computers with the uh with the with the back on them, not these flat screens that we have today. Ones which took you know 20 minutes to boot up. Um you know, Google helped organize the internet. Google became a search engine which organized all all of the websites and made it easily searchable by people. And then WordPress, I think WordPress, I heard some crazy stat the other day that WordPress, um, 40% of the websites on the internet are built using WordPress, which is insane. So WordPress made uh makes building websites very easy if you don't know how to code. Shopify lowers lowered the barrier to starting an online e-commerce store. You know, so social media gave anyone with an internet connection and a camera the ability to reach millions of people, and now we're living through another one which is AI. You know, I'm not suggesting go out and start an AI agency, an AI company, but I'm suggesting that everyone should try and understand how AI is changing the industries they care about. Because the winners aren't always the most talented, the smartest, often they're the ones who actually adopt these things early. Like those who got started using Facebook ads 10 years ago could buy clicks and eyeballs for pennies compared to now. The CPMs are so much higher. Those who got on YouTube in the early days and saw that as an opportunity built really, you know, built massive brands, and they weren't necessarily as good as the creators today, many of the creators today, but they were just early. So, some websites which you may find useful are Google Trends, it's great for researching trending keyword and search terms. Indie Hackers, uh Austin has like startup founders sharing business thoughts and ideas and learnings on there. Uh, answer the public, again, it's like another keyword uh research tool, like what people what are people um you you type in a keyword, for example, let's say I don't know, guitar, and it will come up with all of the different searches related to guitar uh that people are asking. Reddit, you probably know what Reddit is, in and just forums, you know, in whatever niche industry you're in. So these will give you insights into which topics are trending. I've always had many different interests, and I could happily spend my life pursuing all of them, and I know that's impossible because if I really want to win at one thing, then every goal comes at the sacrifice of every other option, and every commitment requires saying no to something else. You know, I've spoken about this before in previous videos, that I don't think the future belongs to specialists, but I think it belongs to people with complementary skills. For example, people who combine tech and communication, people who combine marketing with psychology or an engineer who can tell stories, businesses, a business, someone with a business mind which also understands the creative mind as well. Like this is where your competitive advantage is going to be found. So most people ask what business should they start, but I generally don't think that is I don't think there's one correct answer. I don't think there is one ideal business that people should start. I think the better question to ask is what kind of life do you actually want? And what are you naturally good at? What does the market actually need? What are they paying for? And what are you willing to commit to for the next five years? If you drew them as three overlapping circles of what does the market need, what are you good, what you what are you naturally good at, and the kind of life you want, the answer would be found at the intersection of all of these. Not because that is the perfect business, but it's the one that's aligned with who you are, what the world values, and the actual life that you that's gonna make you happy, that you're trying to create. Because really, there's a million ways to make a million dollars. And finding one ideal business isn't finding one business model isn't the difficult part. The difficult part is finding one that you'll still want to build after the excitement wears off, and one actually that is aligned with your goals and the life that you want to create. Okay, so if you found this useful, make sure uh you comment your thoughts below. Hit subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you on the next one. Peace out. Thanks for listening.