Who am I?
Who is the "Business Deviant" and what makes me a deviant?
Who is the Business Deviant and what makes me a “deviant”?
I call myself the Business Deviant for two reasons.
Firstly, I don’t want to use my real name because I am currently working on selling my business (or at least getting it to the stage where I can hire an operator to run it).
Secondly, I don’t do business/life the way a lot of my peers do.
I don’t work 80 hours/week
AND
I haven’t created a passive income business which enables me to travel the world and sip cocktails on the beach.
So what do I do?
Well, I work as much or as little as I want. This is usually around 10 hours per week.
I enjoy working and I make good money (more than I need to be able to do the things that are important to me) doing it. I run a membership site teaching in the hobby space.
Most of my time is spent with my wife and two young children.
Until the kids start school this WILL NOT change.
We are all together from 1pm till bedtime every week day and all day at the weekend. We spend our time learning, teaching and playing together as a family.
This is my priority (singular) until the kids start school and then we can re-assess the situation.
I also enjoy spending time on fitness, friendships, creativity and learning.
Questioning everything and doing what is right for me
I hustled like a motherfucker throughout my twenties and early thirties to get better at my professional skills and build this business.
But, then in 2018 I hit an income level I had never imagined when I was starting out. $100,000/year.
For some people this will seem like a huge amount of money and for others it will seem trivial.
To put this in context our household spend at the time was $30,000/year.
The business has continued to grow since then with around $360,000 revenue ($60,000 in expenses) annually.
I’ve allowed our household expenses to grow to around $100,000 per year since having two kids.
Even when I tell my business friends these numbers, most of them don’t understand why I don’t just work a little more to grow the business more.
If I spend too much time around those kinds of people it makes me question everything that I value. It makes me feel that I must be doing everything wrong.
If I’m doing the right thing, shouldn’t everyone else be doing this?
The crucial realisation is that I am doing the right thing for me.
Be careful who you look up to
At the end of 2023 I was invited to join a mastermind group that was mostly populated by business owners who were in the same space as me but around ten times the size.
Part of this mastermind was a WhatsApp group. I generally steer clear of WhatsApp because I like to limit the amount of bandwidth I give to inputs BUT these were people who I looked up to so I thought it would be valuable. So, on Christmas Eve 2023 I downloaded WhatsApp and joined the group.
Immediately the notifications started pinging.
CEOs of 7 - 8 figure businesses were panicking about Wordpress plugins on 24th December. They were asking for advice about installation, security and unforeseen interactions between bits of their tech stacks.
WTF?
This continued throughout the holiday season and it made me realise that I didn’t want to be like these people. They maybe had “bigger” businesses than me but they couldn’t even step away from the minutiae for the holiday season.
I can see two reasons for this predicament.
Either, their businesses were poorly designed and couldn’t function without them.
Or…
They were so obsessed with working on their businesses they couldn’t step away from them even for a few days.
Whichever way I look at it, I don’t want to be in their situations. I need to limit time spent with these types of people lest I start believing they are the norm and I’m doing something wrong…
The Business Deviant
There it is. I don’t fit into mainstream business groups. This makes me a deviant…