Entrepreneurs Don’t Want to Hear the Advice, “Have Patience”. Here’s Some Good News | Ep. 54
Summary
Patience. Everyone says you should have it. Entrepreneurs don’t like that advice.
We believe the world needs our idea today, not tomorrow and people should have our product now.
Here’s what I learned about a product idea I had about twenty four years ago, how it came to life in the last year and is taking off (finally) and what you can learn from it for your business.
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Hello, friends. Welcome to another episode of Build a Business Success Secrets. I am your host, Brandon C White.
And today we’re talking about publishing a newsletter that took me 24 years to get published and the lessons I’ve learned that will help you and your business in your expectations and how adjusting just a few things can make all the difference.
Let’s not waste another second. Let’s get to it. All right, let’s roll back to 1996. I had just gone back to school to get my masters in psychology from the tree farm that I was or tree nursery, that I was working on when I was making eight bucks an hour.
Or maybe by that time it was 8.25. I don’t know. I have a picture on my website where I was making eight. And then maybe by the time I left, I got a raise. But I going back to school didn’t know what I was gonna do get a master’s in psychology and this part of the story I wanted to build a fishing magazine because there was no fishing magazines or newsletters even that I could get for the very specific light tackle saltwater niche that I did and couldn’t find anything out there.
So I went around and I asked people if they would be interested in it, and my whole goal was to print a newsletter now. Alou newsletter, slash magazine.
It was really going to be a newsletter, and I built my first business plan on a scrap piece of paper on the part time job that I had working on a spinach farm so that I could pay Programmer toe actually program the site.
But the original plan was to publish a print newsletter, and I’ve always liked print because even in today’s age, digital is cool.
But there’s been tons of studies that show that people value print more and truthfully, even though we are on our screens a lot, I get newsletters and still get magazines that sit around my house, and then I could pick up when I’m eating and read and things like that.
It just feels Thio have something in your hand that’s tangible, and I still think there’s a market for it. But long and short of it is that didn’t work out, and I wound up building a Digital magazine is what we called it or a vertical site was one of the buzzwords back then and turned into what we now know or think about as a social networking site for sport fishermen.
And a lot of things happen from 1996 until I sold that company eight years ago. But fast forward to about the beginning of 2020.
I started to think about Covid. It had come into effect, and I was thinking about our marketing, and I knew that a lot of people would be online, obviously at home, and the increase in just general usage has gone through the roof.
But I was thinking, Maybe now is the time to actually write a print newsletter, and I’ve always wanted to do that. Let’s make that happen.
And I had the business plan now wasn’t going to write a fishing newsletter because, although I think that’s still probably has a market, and there’s a few of them that have survived in the travel industry, which unfortunately now sort of been dead.
But there are some fishing newsletters out there that air interesting on the high end, But I thought, well, what if I were to publish a print newsletter that would go along with the podcast and how would that work?
Now it’s one thing to design a website and get it up there and to create the content that is hard. But the going back to print design is different. You’re you’re printing on it on a sheet of paper.
I’m looking at this building Business Success Secrets newsletter here. So I had talked to my executive assistant G. I said, Hey, look, we’re gonna build up, put out a newsletter every month, we’re gonna make this happen.
So in June of 2020 we published our very first issue of Build a Business Success Secrets newsletter. And the idea was that I would publish things around your mind, body and business, which is really my philosophy on being an entrepreneur or starting a company or forget just starting a company, growing your company and being an entrepreneur.
And what I’ve gleaned over all these years since I first started that first business plan and the success or the successful things that I’ve done that have paid off, made a lot of mistakes and a lot of things.
I tried just didn’t work out, at least for me. So in June of 2020 we published the first newsletter. We put it out, It isn’t perfect. It wasn’t perfect. I’m looking. I’m saying it isn’t perfect, because I’m looking at it and we’ve been tuning it since then.
And I think the moral and what I wanted to pass along is Ah, lot of the time we have these goals that we believe are gonna be this short timeline and we’re going to get there and it always takes longer than we thought.
But in this case took me 24 years. I think it was gear. Somebody said to me like, Hey, Brandon, your your business plan actually came true. You printed a newsletter. And if you’re listening and you’re having early stage company where you’re scaling company like hey, brand and I don’t wanna wait 24 years from my business to come true and I totally get it.
But I did pivot and I did build a company that way, and then I was able to sell it and get here to the very house that I’m recording this in. So it doesn’t mean that you won’t have success, you may pivot, but it means that you could come back toe ideas that you have and being in my forties.
What being in your forties gives you maybe other than a few gray hairs is it gives you some perspective on patterns that happen in markets, and these patterns go through cycles. And when you’re young and my first downturn of a market happened in 2001, when the dot com crashed in my lifetime, that I could really remember from her good cognitive lens that was like the end of the world, the dot com crashed and I had never seen something like that.
I remember as a very young kid waiting in line to get gas in the I guess it was the late seventies or eighties, but I was really, really young back then in my single digits.
So that wasn’t something that really I could process other than hey, we gotta wait in line to get gas and license plates alternated and that there was this interest rates went through the roof, but you know, it didn’t impact me.
But the 2001 crash really was a something that I had lived through. I had a business. I truly understood the impact of it. And then again, in 2000 and eight, I saw it happen again with the housing market, as most of you listening probably did. And then we turn into this coronavirus thing that effectively has impacted. Interesting enough.
Some parts of the economy have I have just been obliterated, like restaurants. I was talking to a friend, actually. Wyatt from breakwater barbecue. If you’re ever in Half Moon Bay, I give him plug because we had it for dinner on Friday night and I’m craving it now cause I’m starving, but great barbecue in Half Moon Bay.
But we were talking about the restaurant business. And the truth is, is, if you don’t really have that dining experience and you don’t have the up cells where the Martin is so but going back to my point is, in your forties, you start to see these cycles, and you’re like, Okay, we’re in this cycle, we’re going to come out of it, and I think I’ll save it for another podcast.
But this is like the best time to ever start a company and or get your company to survive, and I was able in that dot com crashed to get my company to survive. Came out of it, ultimately sold it.
I think you could do that. I think we’ll do another podcast cause a lot man standing. But my point is, Is that you could you have these ideas and just because they’re not good at the moment doesn’t mean that they won’t be good later, that you can’t still fulfill your goal and your dream that you wanted toe happen.
And on this there was one of my board members was Mark Walsh, who was an early person at America Online. In fact, he was the CEO of the genie, which is a really, really long time ago, which was way ahead of its time. And then he was at America Online and then did vertical scope. And that’s really where he had his success during the dot com boom in the nineties.
But one of the things he said to me when the dot com crashed and we basically shut down my company worldwide Angler and I had subsequently brought it back, But he said, Your business isn’t bad.
It’s a media business. Media businesses have forever been great businesses. It’s that you can’t control market timing.
And that comment that he made actually is what really got me thinking that I was gonna buy back the company and I wasn’t going to give up. And if I could make it through the dot com crash, I believed the Internet wasn’t going to go away, that we could build something successful.
So his comment really resonated with me and I and I offer that to you to say sometimes there are things that you can control and sometimes there aren’t. You can’t control the market.
So if you shelve these ideas, you can come back to him and you could build them another time, and then you can come up with some other ideas. But this is the story of 24 years later, and I can’t really didn’t even realize that I had achieved my goal, which is really cool. It actually really made me feel good.
So we have ah, built a business success newsletter. It hasn’t been perfect. We’ve been offering it for 99 cents, basically shipping. We lose money on these things. But I took my own advice. I put something out that I was embarrassed about and got it out there and got feedback, and our term rates been really low. Now I think it could be way better.
The funny thing is, is that looking at that original business plan, even though this is about mind, body and business effectively, life as an entrepreneur, it follows the same themes where what we cover in here in the different aspects.
So it’s really cool to see. And I think we almost have it dialed in, I think in 2000 and 20 in the first part of the year, we’re going to move from a four page to an eight page because I am really excited about in the feedback.
Been awesome. If you are at all interested, I will give you a shameless plug here that you can check it out at BSuccessSecrets.com My business plan 24 years later coming to fruition. The December issue is coming out any day now. Pretty cool.
So don’t give up on your ideas. Log those ideas and just because they don’t work at the moment doesn’t mean that your dream or your goal is over. It just means that it didn’t happen at that moment.
But you’ll have moments in the future where it can, and I wish you that it doesn’t take 24 years. But if it does, does it really matter? Because just means it happened anyway.
Send me an email with your goals and some ideas that didn’t work for you. That may work. You can always reach me at my email at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you and thank you friends for tuning into the show.
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Remember, you are just one business plan away. I’m rooting for your success. We’ll see you soon.
