Building a business as a multi-passionate entrepreneur
Today I want to talk about building a business as a multi-passionate entrepreneur — or as a multi-passionate person.
This is something that a lot of people struggle with when they're first starting out, especially if you really enjoy doing a lot of different things, you love learning, you're really interested in a bunch of different things, and you can do a bunch of different things. But what do you offer to sell in your business?
When you're first starting your business, you're probably trying to figure out which thing you can and should build a business around, which of these things are actually going to make you money? And a lot of times we hear things on social media like, “you have to niche, you have to pick what you're going to sell you can't offer everything”, because if you're trying to sell everything to everyone, you're going to sell nothing. That is typically what we hear in the online space in the entrepreneur space, and that is completely true! If you have offers that are all over the map, it's going to be really hard for you to position yourself as a knowledge expert, and as someone who really knows what they're doing. But I think to a certain extent, we've kind of swung too far in that direction.
Now, people feel that it's wrong to want to build multiple businesses or have multiple offerings within their business. And I think we’re going to swing back towards the middle, and this is something that you really start to discover when you have built a more established business. If you are thinking of going out and starting another business or increasing your passive income from this business — I think that's where we kind of come full circle and we come back around to “is it okay for me to be multi-passionate for me to have these different things?” And the answer is yes.
Choose one thing first
I think the important thing to think about is when you're first starting out and you want to do all these different things. Choose one of those things. Give that thing your time, your attention, build a successful offering around that thing. That doesn't mean you can never sell those other things that doesn't mean you can never create a business out of those other things. It just means not right now.
Where your attention goes that thing grows. So if you're really splitting your time and your attention across multiple things. It's kind of like you're moving each thing an inch instead of focusing on one thing and moving that a mile. And that's really where that thought process of niching comes from. It's not that you're never going to be able to create other businesses. It's just best to focus on the thing that you really want to build your business around and put your time and attention there.
Focus on your “why”
Maybe you're wondering, “okay well I like all three of these things, what should I do?”. You need to focus on the why of your business, the why for you. What do you want out of your business? And how do you want your business to support the life that you want to live? Because if you don't take that into consideration while you're building your business, it's so much more likely that you're going to build a business that doesn't make you feel supported and that you don't enjoy in the long run — and that's not what we want. So, when you're choosing between multiple business ideas, think about what is going to support the why of my business, what is going to support me as a business owner, what am I going to be able to grow the easiest. Think about all those things when you're deciding which one of these things do I want to put my focus on right now, and save those things for later! I like to keep a list of revenue stream ideas or new business ideas in ClickUp, so that I know, “okay I'm just parking this here for right now, that doesn't mean I'm leaving it forever, but I just don't have the time and the bandwidth to give my focus to something new right now or some something else right now". And so I'm just going to park it here for now and I'm going to circle back to it”.
And what's going to happen is after you've built a successful business that is more established, you can focus on taking yourself out of the day to day of that business a little bit so that you now have the time and the bandwidth to look at new streams of revenue, look at new businesses, so you're not splitting your time, and I think that is the piece of the puzzle that a lot of people either aren't aware of.
This is something that I see with a lot of my peers and my friends who have built successful businesses. They're now looking to “okay what's the next thing?” — either “how do I get this business to the next level?” or “now I want to put my time and attention over here to this other thing!”, and that's really where you start to get into this kind of serial entrepreneur type of person.
Being a business owner, being an entrepreneur, is a skill set, and you will get better and better. As a business owner you will use those skills and apply those skills to any businesses any revenue streams that you want to create and build in the future. So that's why it's so important to just park those ideas — it's totally okay. Don't make being multi-passionate a bad thing. You should still want to have multiple streams of income, and that's where being multiple multi-passionate can really help you in the long run. You just need to have the clarity to set those other ideas aside until the time is right and until you have the time and the bandwidth.
