As Success Grows Opportunities Shrink

The most common question asked on this blog, interviews, and emails I get is always “if I had to start over tomorrow with nothing what would I do”. It’s a hard question for me to answer. There are an extraordinary amount of opportunities to make 100$ per day. I mean I can think of probably 50 off the top of my head. The problem is those just don’t work for us anymore. I am not a one-person operation anymore. We now have a large office with 5 employees, our own server racks, and many other expenses so that we have to make thousands per day just to break even. So messing around with things that make 100$ per day just no longer works for us. It actually gives me a warm feeling to think I could go back to the days of working a 9-5 job during the day and look for these opportunities to make a few hundred a day in profit. Course if I was actually in that position again I would probably want to jump out of a window… as I did during that time. Just seems like such a easy position to be in. The stresses of knowing many people depend on my ability to earn money are pretty intense and something I am still trying to get used to. But at the same time its very nice to be able to leave the business for a few days and know that I have very good people to keep everything going. Within a year I hope to make this same post only whine that I have to make 10’s of thousands of dollars per day just to break even. The opportunities at that level I know will be even more competitive and challenging. This post was inspired by listening to Warren Buffett talk a few weeks when he was asked why they don’t invest in smaller businesses anymore. His answer was pretty much that even the best small business just does not move the needle enough for it to be worth it to them no matter what margin of profitability. He said for them at this point that they need to buy a company worth 5-10 billion dollars to really move the needle at Berkshire Hathway. He also said that those opportunities are very rare and come along perhaps once every couple years. So while I am not Warren Buffett or have the enormous pressures of 80,000+ employees I can relate to what he is saying. The more success you have in business the less opportunities are available for you.