993: The TWO businesses that you're building! (Whether you realize it or not)

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Hey, what is up?

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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and in this solo Sunday episode, we are going to be talking about the two businesses that you and I and all of us are building, whether you realize it or not.

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This is so important to understand from a strategic perspective.

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I'm excited about this one.

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Let's dive in perspective.

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I'm excited about this one.

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Let's dive in.

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So we're kind of kicking it old school in today's episode because this is some very fundamental business advice and strategic advice that I've picked up along the years.

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It's a quote that I think about it pretty often.

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To be honest, there are so many times when I think of it I have long lost the origins of it.

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So I'm going to make it abundantly clear at the top of today's episode that this is not my original quote.

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It's not my original idea, but it is very much a sound business principle and piece of advice that I've taken to heart and it's served me so well across my.

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It feels crazy saying this 16 years at this point of being an entrepreneur, and so, first things first, I'm gonna tell you the quote.

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Here's the quote.

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I've had it written down.

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I always reference back to it.

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It says you're always building two businesses the one you have now and the one you'll have in five years.

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Now I think about this so frequently and it's funny.

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If you are a regular listener of this podcast then you'll know that quite frequently when I'm interviewing all the amazing entrepreneurs that we have here on the air, I love asking them about their timeline and their time horizon and their long-term strategic plan and what questions they ask themselves as executives of their business.

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And sometimes when I do that, you recently heard an episode that I did with Chris Hardy, who is a college classmate of mine.

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He was our featured guest in episode 981.

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He's also a financial wizard.

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I love hearing the way that Chris thinks about numbers in business and so even in that episode with him we kind of teased about the fact that in business school we're told all different sorts of advice and we're told you know, you have to have a five-year plan and a 10-year plan.

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And you frequently hear me say on the air actually you don't even frequently hear me say it you frequently hear me throw a little bit of shade on that traditional business advice, because I always point out the fact that it's hard.

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It's hard to plan long-term.

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I mean, whatever we think our business is going to look like six months from now.

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There's going to be so many twists and turns along the way, and that's why I've always felt that business plans are a little bit silly.

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I think that the time and a place for them is really just as a formality.

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If there's a bank or a potential investor that's looking for those things, we can make educated guesses, but at the end of the day day, it is ultimately just that.

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It's just guesses.

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It's it's a plan, it's it's a roadmap.

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Directionally, it's sound, which is something we talked about in last solo, last week's solo sunday episode but it's not really that tangible thing that is going to get us there step by step.

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It's not an action plan and it's not a to-do list.

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Why?

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Because, truthfully, a million things are going to change and it's so hard to account for all of those things.

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Just look at technology Technology alone, I mean.

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I could use the pandemic as another example.

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Whatever plans people thought they had in 2020, every single element of business completely changed.

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For a lot of remote businesses, it helped them greatly.

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For a lot of in-person businesses like me, I was running retreats back, from 2017 forward, and obviously, that business came to a grinding halt in 2020 and 2021 in particular, and so I always kind of scoff at that idea of looking too far forward and thinking that we have the answers and thinking this is going to be the exact step-by-step roadmap that's gonna get us there.

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So the question, then, is why do I love this quote so much?

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Why do I love that idea that you're always building two businesses the one you have now and the one you'll have in five years?

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Well, I'm gonna tell you exactly why.

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It's because I think it is an incredibly important thought experiment.

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I think we need to always be doing this.

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I think we need to always be viewing our team, our business, our operations, our products, our services, the way that our workflows, our tools, our softwares, our scalability.

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I think we need to view all of those things through this lens, and you've heard me say before that I'm a firm believer.

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The bigger questions that you ask, the bigger answers that you'll find, and this thought experiment really goes to the very root of that essence.

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This thought experiment asks you, forces you to ask yourself the question of okay, what are we doing right now?

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And understanding where you are.

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Awareness is the first and most important step of any process improvement plan.

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And then the second question, and the very big question, is what's my business going to look like in five years?

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Big question is what's my business going to look like in five years, whether or not you ever make it there?

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You're probably going to change directions 500 times along the way, and that's perfectly okay.

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But even by asking yourself this big, fundamental question, it's going to put very important parts of your business under consideration and hopefully it's going to invite you, give you that leeway, give you that freedom and that permission to think bigger.

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Because five years, let's face it, it's a big chunk of time.

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You and I both know a lot of things are going to change, not just in the business world.

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A lot of things are going to change societally.

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A lot of things are going to change.

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For you and I personally, a lot is going to happen over the next five years, and so that's why, when we look at that timeline, it invites us, it kind of forces us to think bigger than the business that we're currently working on.

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You're probably very well-versed in the current business problems that you're facing.

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You're probably very well-versed on the things that you're currently working on, you are incredibly well versed at your workflows and your operations and your team.

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If you're a one-person team, a one-person business, if you truly are a solopreneur which, by the way, I'm just going to interject I love that.

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I was a solopreneur for so long.

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There's something so beautiful about solopreneurship it's so fun, it's so exciting.

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You get to be adaptable, you get to be flexible.

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But that's where imagining the business that you're going to have in five years, that's where this becomes fun, because you do get to ask yourself do I want to be a solopreneur?

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Do I want to have a team?

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Do I want to have a tiny team?

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Do I want to have a big team?

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Whatever it is, there's no right or wrong.

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That's the fun thing about this thought experiment.

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It's the fun thing about most thought experiments is that there is no right or wrong.

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It just gives you that freedom, that time, that container or lack of container to think, to dream, to vision, to do all of these important things.

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And so, once you start painting that picture, it's really fun to bring that back to the present state and say, okay, what, where's the gap?

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Where's what's missing here?

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What's that bridge look like?

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And it can start changing and challenging your current thinking.

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Because if you do say, well, I want to have a team of two five years from now, okay, cool, what sort of tasks will you be handing off?

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What sort of talent are you going to be looking to bring on board?

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And even when you start thinking about those things this is something I've found in my years of life is that when I start thinking about things and I start envisioning them and I start talking about them and I start writing about them and I start dreaming about them and I start writing about them and I start dreaming about those things, not overnight, but during the day.

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These are the things that are on my mind.

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Those things tend to happen, and there's all sorts of energetic and spiritual conversations that we can have about that very premise.

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But more often than not, when you start eyeing things, talking about things, writing things down, targeting things, wanting things, working towards things, the more often they happen.

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And so that's why I love asking myself this question for all of my businesses Okay, what's the business that I'm building today, and what is this going to look like five years from now?

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Trust me, I even do this on a more micro level.

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I mean, here we are in December, here at the end of 2024, and I go back to what I was thinking and writing down and saying 12 months ago and in some cases I'm right on track, I'm right in line with the very things that I said I wanted to do.

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And in other cases I go oh, holy cow, I've slightly deviated from that and some of those I've deviated in a good way and I say, yeah, I just have more more understanding, more knowledge, more experiences, and I understand why I've deviated here and some of them.

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It brings me back and I say I did care about that, though I do want to go back to that.

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I want to make sure that I stay on that track.

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And that's where, coming back to last week's episode about directionally right decisions, it's not saying this is exactly where we need to be, but at least setting that direction.

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So it's fun for me to talk about this, because a lot of people will think, okay, well, I need to have a five-year business plan, but the reality is, hopefully, at this point in the episode you already see it's not about that.

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It's not about that very traditional, fundamental way that we've been taught to view business by business schools or old school business books or anywhere else that you get business advice.

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It's more about setting that stake in the ground.

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It's more about understanding.

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Okay, I'm not just doing what I'm doing today because I wanna keep doing this until infinity, until I eventually retire.

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I'm doing this because it is part of a bigger growth plan, and so if that's the case for you which, holy cow, I hope that it is then the next question is what is that growth plan leading towards?

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Is it leading towards something where you can scale, where you can make more money, where you can expand your products and services, where you can help more people, where you can provide for more people?

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As far as hiring goes, maybe none of these things are in your purview, and again I want to stress that is perfectly okay, but the only way that we're going to get where we want to go is by first identifying where is it that we want to go, because there's so much beauty in the contrast.

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I've been thinking about that a lot lately.

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So over Thanksgiving I went and visited my sister in Virginia, so she's at Virginia Tech right now doing her veterinarian rotation and internship, and I don't even know how to describe that whole process.

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It's so convoluted, I think, to become a medical doctor or a veterinarian, whatever it may be.

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There's so much that goes into that and it's a very difficult and challenging path along the way.

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So kudos to everyone who has persisted through all of that.

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But as my sister was giving us a tour of the animal hospital that she works in, she showed us, you know, radiology is over here, cardiology is over here, oncology is over here, and she showed oh, this is where they do the contrasts, and then they do the imaging to go along with that.

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And I always think about that term contrasts.

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There's so much that we learn from the contrasts.

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If you want to see the difference between things, if you want to really paint a picture of what your eyes see, or the things that you prefer and the things that you don't prefer, you have to really start looking at the contrast.

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And I think that that's one of the things.

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Well, to finish that medical analogy, that's why, if you go in and you've got a heart condition, for example, they'll inject contrast into your bloodstream so that on the images they can start picking up oh, holy cow, it's going here, it's leaking here.

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I have no idea what I'm talking about from a medical perspective, but you get the gist of it.

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You get the theme of why we use contrast, and so it's the very same thing that happens when we go through this thought exercise of painting that contrast what am I doing and building today versus what do I want to be doing and building five years from now.

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Only when you have those two lists put down on paper next to each other, that you can immediately see the contrast, and that contrast is going to guide you, it's going to start filling in some of those gaps, so that you don't just get stuck on the hamster wheel of doing what you're doing today for the next 12 months, in the next 24 months, in the next three years, five years, 10 years.

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You don't want to be doing that.

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We all want to be growing.

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Growing can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but we want to make sure that we're moving towards something important, towards something that fulfills us, towards something that gets us excited about what it is that we're doing, and so to get there, we need to paint that contrast, which is why I love that quote.

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You're always building two businesses the one you have now and the one you'll have in five years.

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That's it for me today.

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It's a question I think about a lot, and I think it's especially relevant here in the middle of December, as this year races to an end, and I'll tell you what.

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One thing that is also racing here is that in the middle of this month, december 18th, is going to be episode 1,000.

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I'm so excited about that.

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So make sure you pound that subscribe button, because, leading up to episode 1,000, we are continuing to have some amazing guests that get me personally excited and inspired to do even better work in my own businesses and put even more incredible things into the world.

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So pound that subscribe button because we'll see you, as always, every Monday, wednesday, friday, saturday and Sunday here on the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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Hey, it's Brian here, and thanks for tuning in to yet another episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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If you haven't checked us out online, there's so much good stuff there.

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Check out the show's website and all the show notes that we talked about in today's episode at thewantrepreneurshowcom.

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So thank you to not only today's guests, but all of our guests in general.

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Thank you.