“I love the business you’ve built – that’s exactly what I want but it just seems so far away and I don’t know if I’ll ever achieve it”.
That’s the kind of feedback I got from numerous people after I listed the income streams, audiences and projects which make up our online business micro-empire in my post a few weeks ago.
What’s so very easy to forget when you look around at what we & other people have built is the time element…
It’s taken us 7+ long years to get to the stage we’re at now with our projects – there have been many instances of 2 steps forward then 5 steps back, plenty of to-ing and fro-ing, uhm-ing and ah-ing and even more mistakes which have cost us both time and money.
What I’ve come to realise with the projects we work on is that each requires around a year to get set up, test, tweak, hone and build some solid, sustainable foundations for.
I wrote about building a Minimum Viable Business – but building this kind of business is different…consider this:
- I gave location independent about 1.5 years of my full time attention.
- Last year was all about Startup Training School.
- This year will be all about Then There Were None.
I can understand that your reaction to this may well be, “A year!?!? WTF?!?! That’s such a long time”. And yes, for many multi-passionate, multi-task loving people it is.
Focusing on one particular project for a year can feel like a lifetime to some and yet in my experience, it’s what you need to do if you want a venture to have the potential to survive & succeed in the long term.
{Notice that I said “potential to succeed” – even after a year, there’s no guarantee of success which is why I believe a year is the minimum timeframe needed to build solid, sustainable foundations under an idea – even one which has shown massive potential within the first few months}.
You may be wondering just what you need to do in that year, why it takes so long and why it can’t be expedited. Here’s a snapshot of how that year might break down:
- Months 1-2: Fleshing out the concept, the strategy and the planning for the business and revenue models.
- Months 2-4: Initial marketing/relationship building and proof of concept.
- Months 5-6: Building the brand foundations, website and collateral required to open up shop.
- Months 7-8: Refining & tweaking of concept & model, based on first customer feedback.
- Month 9-10: Ongoing marketing and building momentum.
- Month 11-12: Implementation of more sustainable approaches, ideas for expansion and review of first year.
{If you need help with any of those steps, join me in the Pioneer Collective – this is exactly what it’s for :) }
Naturally, you could do all of this in an expedited manner but if you do, you risk:
- Investing time, effort and money to build everything on top of a weak or unsustainable business model.
- Massively (and potentially unnecessarily) increasing your stress levels, for the sake of a self-imposed time frame.
- Not giving yourself enough time to build the all-important relationships which could make or break the venture (and likely require more than an intro tweet and follow-up email) – remember, relationships take time to build.
- Missing vital lessons, clues and insights which often only reveal themselves over time.
Giving your project a year does not mean it’ll take a year to generate income, nor does it mean it’ll necessarily take a full year to get there.
But how do you know where “there” is? “There” is wherever you determine it to be; for me, it usually means I can be confident that:
- The venture has long term legs – it’s commercially viable and sustainable without requiring ongoing, heavy investments of finances, time and energy.
- There’s a big enough and hungry enough audience for it – which I can reach without substantial ongoing investments of finances, time and energy.
- I still have an interest in and passion for it the project, and believe in its mission.
So if you’re sitting on a project, wondering how long it’s going to take you to make it work – are you willing to invest a year in it?