Photo credit: Michelle Warner
Ever felt like throwing in the towel, deleting all of your social media accounts and email list and starting over? Deleting your business?
Would you believe me if I told you I actually did it? And for no reason other than forcing myself to start over from scratch?
Yep, sometimes I don't believe it myself. But I did.
Why? Because I was ready to build a new branch of my business - this one focused on a mostly passive course and infoproduct model - and I wanted to share the journey of creating it publicly.
And maybe more importantly, I wanted to hack my own behavior and productivity by showing what it really takes to build a new business from scratch.
So I did. The result was Michelle Builds It, a new site where I'm chronicling my journey in real time while at the same time teaching anyone who follows how to build her own business alongside me.
In case you still think I'm crazy for doing this, here are the 5 specific reasons I made the choice I did (some are because I want to help new entrepreneurs, others are more selfish).
1. Hindsight is 20/20
You don't have to look far in the online marketing industry to find an entrepreneur promising to share the exact process he took to leap from beginner struggling to make any money to wildly successful blogger raking in the cash.
Only one problem: hindsight is 20/20. So while I don't think these entrepreneurs are deliberately trying to mislead anyone, I do think it's incredibly easy to forget what their journey really looked like.
By sharing my journey live and in real time, I hope to model the real journey for new entrepreneurs, so they can see not only the tangible steps, but also the muck and confusion that hits everyone along the way to success.
2. Entrepreneurs Deserve to Know They're not Crazy
The other problem with hindsight is that it sets up new and young entrepreneurs to think they're getting it all wrong if they're struggling or if one thing doesn't go exactly right for them.
Wrong. As entrepreneurs we all know that our businesses will sometimes make us crazy, irrational, defeated and ready to throw in the towel.
Being an entrepreneur can make you turn to anything for possible relief. True story: one time I read a feng shui book at 9 pm on a Saturday night and ended up staying up all night rearranging my entire house. I convinced myself that unless I righted every feng shui wrong in my home my business would be destined for failure. And probably by morning.
Those stories - the 5 alarm feng shui emergencies we create for ourselves in the middle of the night - are the stories we forget to tell when we've made it and are looking back at our journey.
But they're also the stories that most help new entrepreneurs get comfortable with the ups and downs of their own journeys, so by sharing my business building journey in real time, I'm giving entrepreneurs a pass to accept the crazy that's inevitably going to happen.
3. I'm Hacking My Own Behavior
I'll admit it - most days I'm a productivity disaster. To do lists, project management tools, color-coded calendars - they all make my skin crawl and have for as long as I can remember. It's one of the reasons I'm unemployable - I just can't deal with the structure.
But that also means that in order to get anything done that doesn't absolutely have to be done, I need to find a way to hack my own behavior. And at this point I've spent the better part of the last 3 years saying I was going to build this business...eventually.
All of which means my choice to build my new business publicly was as much selfish as it was to help new entrepreneurs: by recruiting a group of entrepreneurs to follow my process, I'm hacking my own behavior by building in public accountability.
Knowing there's a group of people waiting to hear from me, even now when I'm just building and don't have anything to sell (yet), keeps me moving and moving much faster than I would without them around.
4. Momentum Breeds Momentum
Just like baking in some public accountability, by sharing my business building journey publicly I'm baking in momentum for myself. And in my world, momentum breeds momentum. I need it to keep going.
I've never been one who is good at going into deep creation mode and then switching into deep promotion mode. I'm best when I'm doing both all the time and can switch back and forth on the fly. By sharing publicly I'm feeding myself the feeling of momentum that I need to feel in order to create my best stuff.
5. All Feedback All the Time
As entrepreneurs we all hear the advice to start early and start often, that the best businesses solicit feedback from customers as early as possible.
What's earlier than inviting people to follow along with you as you build your business, literally from day 1? Since my expertise revolves around teaching entrepreneurs how to build and scale businesses, the entrepreneurs interested in following my process may roughly be the same people interested in my products once I have them.
Bingo. I've just created a feedback loop for my business from day one. That means I'm not only helping entrepreneurs build their own businesses by sharing my process, but I'm learning more every day about the pieces of the process they struggle with the most. And there's no price tag that can be attached to information that valuable.