Thoughts on parallel entrepreneurship?

[J. van Driessen]

The way I see it, there are 2 schools of thought regarding parallel entrepreneurship:

1) Don't do it. Focus.
Most business advice I hear tells you to focus on one thing only. Business is hard enough without spreading yourself thin, laser focus on one thing only.

2) Diversify.
Working on one business only introduces a single point of failure. Spend 90% of your time on one thing that gets the most traction but always spend 10% trying out different ideas.

Parallel entrepreneurship is probably harder since you need to balance multiple projects, and unless you're Elan Musk, is maybe more feasible for lifestyle businesses? Or maybe one can only start with parallel entrepreneurship once one had a first exit, or at least has one very successful project?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. In which conditions can parallel entrepreneurship work?

PS: The reason I ask: my dream is to have a business empire. After multiple attempts at different things, I now have a SaaS company with a co-founder that's really starting to take off. I wonder at what point I can start building other pillars of my empire.

 

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[Private Witt]

The way I see it, there are 2 schools of thought regarding parallel entrepreneurship:

1) Don't do it. Focus.
Most business advice I hear tells you to focus on one thing only. Business is hard enough without spreading yourself thin, laser focus on one thing only.

2) Diversify.
Working on one business only introduces a single point of failure. Spend 90% of your time on one thing that gets the most traction but always spend 10% trying out different ideas.

Parallel entrepreneurship is probably harder since you need to balance multiple projects, and unless you're Elan Musk, is maybe more feasible for lifestyle businesses? Or maybe one can only start with parallel entrepreneurship once one had a first exit, or at least has one very successful project?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. In which conditions can parallel entrepreneurship work?

PS: The reason I ask: my dream is to have a business empire. After multiple attempts at different things, I now have a SaaS company with a co-founder that's really starting to take off. I wonder at what point I can start building other pillars of my empire.

Split attention has been my single biggest issue and have lost a lot of time to this practice, yet has yielded some gold in my journey, but remind myself all the time to stop splitting my time and resources to this nonsense.

 

[ApeRunner]

Yes I know @MJ DeMarco and others only recommend to focus on one business. But reality is complicated.

In my case, I have focused on just one business for 10 years only to get diminishing returns. I can't kill this business because is my main source of income and I have a family to support.

So now I'm automating and delegating this business in order to create another one from scratch. So effectively running two businesses at the same time.

One thing to notice is that my 2nd business is my main focus. The old business is kind like a cash cow.

It's not easy, but it's working for me. I could not sell my old business nor kill it. So there are benefits in being a parallel entrepreneur.

Markets change and die. There is a reason why companies diversify. BUT is much harder for a solopreneur to handle more than one business.

 

[TreyAllDay]

It is complicated and it depends on a number of factors. I got into other businesses only because opportunities were there.

A story on how it can go good: In 2017 I was in my first 6 months of creating my intranet company and a client asked me if I knew of any digital signage companies for their stores (basically programming a box to play ads on a tv in their showroom and then have an interface for them to control it). I thought to myself "hmm. I'm not in this business" but having 10 stores pay $23.99 a month for access to a software I could write in 2 days, that would be completely passive. My mentor (who turned me onto MFL) told me NOT to get involved in two "services" and I almost didn't. But oddly enough this side service grew to 300+ stores and will grow more this year, I hardly spend any time on it and it's by far the most profitable service I own.

A story on how it can go bad: I have a hard time saying no to people, and a close friend of mine asked me last year if my company would be interested in coding small projects for their creative agency who didn't have a designer. I said NO, but my cousin who is a developer was desperately looking for work. I said "okay we'll do some development jobs for this agency, it'll go through my company and we'll contract you to do the work". Biggest mistake of my life - I ended up losing a bunch of opportunities to grow my passive income streams because I was dicking around playing middle man on small $1000 jobs meanwhile my business paying me $250k/year is being neglected.


SOO - basically. It depends. You have to look at each opportunity objectively. If you're not 100% sure it's worth it and will build passive/growable income it's not a good idea.

 

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[Kak]

I'm strongly in the diversify camp as long as you have things figured out as far as your time is concerned. Make sure you delegate well to the point where you lead. Task work kills your ability to diversify.

To those that like to brag that they sleep 3 hours a night to "crunch it" and take pride in working (mostly on tasks) 100 hours per week it probably isn't for you.

I am about being rich, enjoying captaining the ship, not working 100 hours a week swabbing the decks.

 

[Andy Black]

I’m doing lots of things, but consider them all legs to the same stool:

• "Build Your High Ground" & "Grow What You Know"

 

[William Ainslie]

It depends - I have to focus on parallel entrepreneurship until I find the thing I could focus on.

I made the mistake of wanting to make things to simple - and not develop other areas sufficiently.

I also think we must work as hard as we can on as many things as fits in until a few things are so big we have to focus on those and maybe end up with a thing...

 

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[ApeRunner]

Task work kills your ability to diversify.

You have to delegate operations as fast as you can.

Thing is that maybe your actual business is not a great idea (like it happened to me). So sometimes you can't pivot. But you can start and FOCUS on a new and better business.

Here is a story to illustrate:

Dataforseo started at the "Aha! Time". But let me start from the very beginning. In 2014 we were building (and still building today) a project called Rankactive. Rankactive is a 100% white-labeled SEO software for SEO agencies. With Rankactive you can add your logo, connect your subdomain and show your customers rankings, analytics stats and stunning dashboards with useful SEO-data.


One of the methods of attracting organic traffic to our website were landing pages created for a particular group of long-tail keywords. At that time, it worked really well with Google - we created hundreds of pages and were getting good traffic that converted well.


One of the pages was referring to the group of keywords: "rank tracker api"
"rank tracking api."


These keywords had a zero to 10 search volume, but for some reason, our SEOs decided to create the page. Big thank to them!


We got TOP1 positions for these keywords and one day we received a request: "Guys, I found that you have APIs. I'm interested. How can we proceed?"


It was a $4,000/mo lead. That was good money for us those days — no way we could lose this lead. The main problem was... We had no API


“F*ck, what should we do?” - that was the first idea in my head.


No time to think, we need to act fast. The same day (even without getting money from that customer and even without an agreement with him) I told my tech guys to do the unreal: "We should build API in seven days and postpone all other things we're doing." Of course, they said that I'm an idiot: "We cannot do it," "It's impossible," "We cannot sell what we don't have," etc. To be honest with you, they keep saying that till this day


As I was handling this customer, our tech guys were building APIs day and nights. In about seven days we rolled out the MVP, received money, and the world met Dataforseo - the project that was born from "the just-for-traffic landing page."


This customer is still with us today, they have super-exclusive pricing, and I'm thrilled that we were able to do it. Together.

 

[Matt Sun]

I belive there is a sinergy to certain business. Take Mj De Marco for example, he made a lead generation business, and then leverage that experience to write his books, then he combined the force of his books with this forum, the forum helps selling more books, the books help getting more suscriptions to the forum. That's sinergy: the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

 

[Kid]

Question shouldn't be whether focus or diversify,
its "what is the right thing to focus on".

When you'll solve it, then questions like focus vs parallel won't even
appear in your life.

 

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[allen0879]

I'd say focus like hell on one thing at first until you have some success and you're no longer in startup mode, then diversify later. Use the cash flow from the successful business to invest. If you have a successful exit with the first business, it will also be much easier to diversify and take risks.

"The way to become rich is to put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket." --Andrew Carnegie

 

[pmaloneus]

It's more of a philosophy type of thing and whether or not you can be successful at it. Ultimately I think its more about someone's ability to manage multiple balls in the air... if you have one project you still have many many multiple mini-projects within that. To me it's really no different than managing different projects at once. All about allocation, bandwidth, outputs and outcomes.

 

[pmaloneus]

But it's not about philosophy. It's about science.

Science has proven that people are REALLY bad at multitasking.

Ironically, science has also proven that people are REALLY bad at recognizing they are bad at multitasking.

In other words, many of us think that we're good at "managing multiple balls in the air," but science has repeatedly proven that we're not. Our brains are not wired for efficient context switches.

And why we get tunnel vision in stressful situations. In fact, we get tunnel vision in less stressful situations all the time without even realizing it

It's only one data point, but...

Personally, I think I'm great at multitasking. And most other people seem to think I'm great at it as well. But I've subjected myself to controlled experiments where it's been proven to me that I'm not nearly as good as I think I am at it.

I still don't like to accept that fact...

Totally see where you're coming from, and what you just described is probably me to a 'T', lol. I just know I like to have the multiple irons running... short, medium, and long-term plays.

I think that the point I was trying to make was that as entrepreneurs and business owners we already have disparate balls in the air.... growth, execution, quality, marketing, leadership, employee..... the question I have is does matter if those are spread across multiple companies/ideas? Is the parralell the company or functions?

 

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[J. van Driessen]

When I want to really enjoy what I'm doing, I undertake a lot of projects/ventures at once.

When I want to make a lot of money, I focus on one thing, and one thing only.

You get good at something by spending time doing it. You get great at something by spending time doing nothing else.

Just like with relationships, a commitment and monogamy in business comes with a lot of benefits, but also sacrifices.

I agree with what you're saying.
Though 'the one thing' could be spread over multiple ventures. Eg. you might be very good in the startup phase or marketing, and do that one thing in multiple businesses, right?

 

[S.Y.]

But it's not about philosophy. It's about science.

Science has proven that people are REALLY bad at multitasking.

Ironically, science has also proven that people are REALLY bad at recognizing they are bad at multitasking.

In other words, many of us think that we're good at "managing multiple balls in the air," but science has repeatedly proven that we're not. Our brains are not wired for efficient context switches.

And why we get tunnel vision in stressful situations. In fact, we get tunnel vision in less stressful situations all the time without even realizing it

It's only one data point, but...

Personally, I think I'm great at multitasking. And most other people seem to think I'm great at it as well. But I've subjected myself to controlled experiments where it's been proven to me that I'm not nearly as good as I think I am at it.

I still don't like to accept that fact...

Does having two businesses really fall into multi-tasking?

I agree with you that we are notoriously bad at doing multiple tasks at the same time. The way I understand is,if I am working on task A right now, I can't work on task B at the same time.

When one has 2 businesses at the same time, one doesn't necessarily work on the two businesses at the same given time. I see it more as working on task A for business A. Then working on task B for business B

Full attention to business A.
Then full attention to business B.

 

[J. van Driessen]

Full attention to business A.
Then full attention to business B.

One could argue that there is a switching cost when moving your attention from business A to business B.

I would also think that downtime/thinking time that could be used for thinking about your business would result in less thinking for each business if you have to think about 2 businesses.

 

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