How Do You Narrow Your Focus on Business Opportunities, and Learn to Say “No”?

7 years ago · 5 minute read

AMA question #5:

“It seems that once you start scratching the surface of side gigs and business ventures you get more opportunities than you can action. How do you narrow your focus to the best opportunity? Or how do you say no to business ideas that seem too good to pass up.”

Here’s our answer.

Key points:

• You can get good at something if you try, but don’t chase ideas because they seem really unique.
• Uniqueness isn’t an asset; doing something that is totally novel is a recipe for disaster. Stick with things that are proven, that others do, and just do your version of that.
• There’s a myth that you’ll strike it rich if you have a great idea first. Not true.
• Remember the side gig matrix: low capital, low risk, low time and the best steady income for your time you can achieve. If it requires a lot of money or has high risk, cross it off the list.
• Ideas are never too good to pass up. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

AMA Video Transcript

Nate Broughton: It seems that once you start scratching the surface of side gigs and business ventures, you get more opportunities than you can action. How do you narrow your focus to the best opportunity? Or, how do you say no to business ideas that seem too good to pass up?

Dana Robinson: I love it that people are asking these questions. Because asking these questions on the front end are going to save you a lot of heartache on the backend. You definitely need to be thinking about how do you approach a new side gig. I think the very first thing is an easy way to narrow your search and your evaluation, is this something you know? Because I just got a great email from someone that was really stoked on what we’re doing. They listed ideas, and they were all over the map. I put it back on the person like, “Are you good at any of these? Do you have skill, aptitude, experience, knowledge? If you don’t, then you should just cross them off the list.” So, that’s really the first place to start.

Dana Robinson: Now, occasionally, you might say, “Well, look, I’m not skilled at this thing, but I want to be.” That’s okay. But know that you’re going to come into this and take a long, long, long time to prepare. And that means you’re not going to be in that side gig for a year while you watch every video possible and become skilled at that thing. So, you want to go hard and fast and get into a side gig, cross off everything you don’t know really well.

Nate Broughton: Okay, I like that. One of your first side gigs turned businesses was lawn mowing, right? I think that’s a good example story to tell. Because you went with kind of the one thing you knew at the time, and you knew that wasn’t going to be your end all be all. You knew that that thing might not turn into five grand a month in income or even two grand a month. I don’t know, you went into it and said, “What do I know what to do? I’m going to get started with that. That’s going to teach me business.” Part of the reason we advocate for side gigs is because you’re going to get this experience, hopefully, on a small scale if you follow our side gig matrix, which we should talk about. But I think that’s a good example of just picking something that you do know how to do. It’s not sexy, but it’s real.

Dana Robinson: Absolutely. And that actually raises a really important point about business anti gigs. And that is this myth of uniqueness. People really think, “Oh, if it’s a novel idea that I’m going to be successful.” So, it’s even this American mythology that it’s like winning the lottery when you have this stroke of genius, this idea that you think is so amazing, that that alone is going to cause people to come to you and give you their money. The reality is, the more basic, the more pedestrian, the more common something is, the more likely you’ll be able to make money at it, and the less likely you’re going to fail.

Dana Robinson: With Landscape, 5 million new businesses a year they get started in the US, the number one business that gets started every day in America is a lawn care business.

Nate Broughton: I like it. And you know it-

Dana Robinson: It is no barrier to entry.

Nate Broughton: It makes me think of one of our recent guests who started a soap company, too. He was working a job, he was on an airplane, he was like, “I must come up with a business idea or a side gig.” Really, it started as a side gig. He came up with one, and that was started a soap company. He just went with it. It may not be the grandest vision of all time. But he knew it was something that he could probably figure out, and he just went with it. I think that’s really instructive advice, a really instructive story that people should listen to. And God, I hate that unique idea thing. There are no unique ideas, there is only good execution. That’s probably plastered on some fucking wall somewhere, right? That someone needs to buy that poster and stick it in their house and bow to it every night until they pick their side gig and get started.

Nate Broughton: So, really quickly, though, I want to run through the side gig matrix. Run me through the qualities that make a good side gig, because you need to have this on your wall too, when you’re trying to pick which one to go with.

Dana Robinson: Yeah, there’s another easy way to cross things off the list. Low cost. That means not a lot of money up front and not a lot of ongoing capital. If it has a lot of costs, cross it off the list. Low Risk, a side gig doesn’t need risk. You don’t want to be losing sleep, you don’t want to lose your house because you got into some side gig that gets you sued. So, low cost, low risk, not a lot of time. In the beginning your very first side gig might mean mowing lawns, it might mean driving Uber while you develop a skill that you can leverage to do more. But ultimately, you want a side gig that has a low time requirement, so you know your ultimate goal. And steady income, and really the most income for your time you can get. So, you want steady income. Those are the four … what we think are the requirements of a side gig. If it doesn’t have those, cross it off the list.

Nate Broughton: And we talked about this a ton and the Opt Out Life blueprints. So, if you’ve got your answer here, and then get over to the blueprint section of our site and sign up for the blueprint. We’ll give you a bunch more.