MBA2300 Why It's So Hard to Go All-In on Your Business

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, powerful business lessons you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started with my co-founder back in 2014. And in today's episode, you will learn why it's so hard to go all in on your business. Whether you're juggling your business with your day job, or you can't choose which side hustle you should really work on, or maybe you do have a full-time business, but you have a few other projects that keep your attention and take your time.

0:44Something inside you knows that if you just go all in on one business, you'll be a whole lot more successful than the aggregate of all your efforts. But why don't you do it? Why is it so hard to just really go all in? This is a real challenge for most people that are building businesses, whether they're transitioning from a full-time job to their passion project or their side hustle, or they built a few businesses or projects, and they're not really sure which one they should choose to go all in on. What's holding us back? Well, that's what we're going to discuss in today's episode. Why it's so hard to go all in, what's the psychology behind it, and how we can actually commit to a business to be as successful as possible.

1:27And we'll discuss why it's important to go all in. What's the consequences of not doing this? What are the opportunities that are left on the table? We've got a lot to cover, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. This episode is sponsored by Time Doctor. Measure and improve your productivity wherever your people work. With accurate and employee-friendly time and activity tracking, you can empower your staff to work from the office, home, or anywhere else with total peace of mind. How do I know? Well, I'm a big user of Time Doctor. Me and my team use it every single day. Because Time Doctor gives you detailed, in-depth analytics for a real-time view of you and your team so that you can manage productivity, engagement, and staff attrition in your business.

2:09So go ahead, boost productivity and enable your team to get better together with Time Doctor in your tech sack. Don't wait, join over half a million happy customers and unlock the power of visibility, accountability, and productivity with Time Doctor by starting a free trial today. Visit Time Doctor's website over at www.timedoctor.com to get started. Again, that's timedoctor.com. Why don't we go all in? What's holding us back? You might say fear. You might say lack of confidence. Some might even say the fear of the unknown. But I'm here to tell you that all that is just a bunch of bull. Yep. Here's the bottom line.

2:49We don't go all in because we want it all. We think we can have it all. We think that we can get great rewards without taking any risks. And our rational brains know this is absolutely ridiculous and it's not true. Just think about any big achievement you've made in your life. Maybe it's even starting your side hustle, that side business that you work on on the weekends and evenings alongside your job. You took a big risk. You made an investment in yourself. You are sacrificing your time with friends and family and playing video games and watching movies so you can build that side business. You took a risk and therefore you're getting some level of reward.

3:28Now, if you want a bigger reward, if you want to continue to be rewarded, you can't expect not to take any risks. Now, I'm the first person to say, don't be irrational. Don't put yourself in a position where you're in serious hardship financially with you and your family. But many of us are not in that position and still won't go all in. You've heard me say this before on the podcast. Part-time efforts give you part-time results. If you're going to work on something part-time, you're going to get an equal part-time result. That includes if you have a main business and you're working part-time on smaller projects, things that take your attention.

4:04Now, full-time efforts give you full-time results, give you big-time results, because you have your full focus. Going all-in gives you clarity. It gives you focus. It gives you a chance to understand that you have one mission, and everything you do has to be aligned with that mission. It makes it easy for you to choose what to do and not do, what to say no to, what to say yes to. It makes it easy for you to know how to invest your money and invest your revenue, your gains, your profits. When you're spread thin and you're spread across different projects, you're thinking, maybe I need a little money here and money there.

4:34Maybe I should give a little money to this project. Maybe I should get a little bit more time to this project. Attention. Maybe this decision I make will affect my ability to do well in this other project I'm working on. See how it gets murky? It's so much easier when you're all in. Everybody I've studied, every biography I've read, it's all about successful people that go all in, that dedicate themselves, that put all the chips in the table and say, hey, I believe in what I'm doing. Now, if you don't believe in what you're doing, if you don't believe that you're going to be successful, if you don't believe that you have a solid plan of action, that's a different story.

5:07You need to make sure you do have one of those things before you actually start implementing and going all in. But if you do have it, then it's time for you to say goodbye to some of the things that are distracting you, some of the things that are holding you back, the other projects, the other work, the other even part-time jobs maybe. In tech, they call this killing your darling. Sometimes you have to kill features or parts of a product that are not serving your customer base or maybe serving only a small portion. The time and effort to develop and maintain those features costs more than the benefit it's giving them.

5:39So they have to kill those things off. You may have not noticed this in a lot of the software you use like Facebook or Instagram, but it's because you probably didn't use that feature. And therefore, it was the right idea. It was the right decision. Sometimes you got to make the decision to kill your darlings, to consolidate, to focus on what's going to get you the best result. You see, there's a cost by splitting your attention, time, money across different things. There's the context switching, meaning that if you're working on one thing and then you switch your head, you have to shift gears and work on something else.

6:11That switch takes time, effort, and fatigues you. If you you have any kind of product or service, you're going to need to market it and invest in marketing and advertising. It's so much easier to get better at that when you're working on the same brand, the same product, building brand awareness and brand affinity with your audience. Imagine now you got to split those dollars with other brands and other products, other things that have nothing to do or are not really helping the goals of another business. What about your team? They're not getting your full attention in one business at some point while the other might be neglected.

6:42So you've got to keep that in mind. This gets a whole lot simpler when you just focus, when you just go all in on one project, on one business, on one idea. But another reason why it's so hard to go all in is because sunk costs. They call it the sunk cost fallacy, which is we put in so much time and effort into other things, it's so hard to say goodbye to it because I've already invested all this time and money and effort to get that project to a certain point. If I cut it off or sell it or stop doing it, All that time and energy I've done is a waste. Well, that's one way to look at it. But another way to look at it is you're going to continue to waste that time and energy and not focus on your main project or main business, the business that has the potential to really grow exponentially and not drag along.

7:25It's the opportunity cost that you're wasting every single day. You can't change the past, but you can change what you do in the present that will affect the future. So what are some helpful exercises you can do to go all in in whatever you do? Pilot it. Go all in for one week on one project on one business. Things are okay. Go all in for a month, then for three months, then a year. Now, if you have other projects that you have to sunset, that's going to take time for you to work on to kind of close down, allocate days or times to do that. So say, for example, you're working on a main business and you have a few other businesses on the side.

8:02Make the week, Monday through Friday, the main business only, full focus all in. And then use Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon, four to six hours on that day to work on your side projects to sunset them, to kind of close them off. Now, this is going to motivate you actually to go even more all in on the main business because you're not going to want to keep wasting your Saturdays. You want to relax. So you're going to want to be really, really focused on closing things off as soon as possible so each Saturday is not wasted. You are going to see a whole different you during the week because you're going to be totally focused on growing your main business.

8:38You're going to start making big decisions. You're going to start investing your time and money on things that make you money and give you extra time. And here's a little secret. You're going to spend the time doing this anyway. What did I mean by that? Well, look at the last week that went by. You scattered across all these projects. You're working hard. You're spinning your wheels. You're making things happen. But your progress is probably not there. The time is going to go by anyway. You're going to work hard anyway. You might as well work smarter and just focus on one major business and get exponential results.

9:11Look at anybody you admire in business. They go all in. Whether it's Steve Jobs going all in on Apple or Sarah Blakely going all in on Spanx or Hamdi Ulukaya going all in on Chobani Yogurt. Hamdi didn't build a$10 billion yogurt company while also side hustling in real estate and, I don't know, NFTs. No, he stayed laser-focused and built one of the most unique and delicious yogurts on the market. This episode is sponsored by Time Doctor. Measure and improve your productivity wherever your people work. With accurate, employee-friendly time and activity tracking, you can enable staff to work from the office, at home, or anywhere else with total peace of mind.

9:51We run a remote team and we use Time Doctor. A great example of Time Doctor really helping us work better is when we analyzed our team's projects and tasks. You see, with Time Doctor, you can create all the different tasks that you do every single day in every department. And then when you're doing that task, you tell Time Doctor, hey, I'm working on this task right now. Now, with this implemented, we're able to see what the workflow of each customer service agent was. We learned that some of our customer service agents were speaking to the customer, trying to close the conversation while logging their feedback in our feedback project management tool.

10:31This is all because we're using Time Doctor and we can see all the tasks in what order they're doing them. After learning that, we're able to train the team and say, no, finish up the conversation so you can get back to the customer faster, then wrap up the ticket that has the feedback in our project management tool. changing the order of their tasks, allowing them to be more efficient and deliver better support to our customers. Why don't you join me and over half a million happy customers and unlock the power of visibility, accountability, and productivity with Time Doctor by starting a free trial today.

11:02Visit Time Doctor's website over at www.timedoctor.com to get started. Again, that's timedoctor.com. I know it's scary to go all in. I know that it's a risk. I know that you may not want to let go of things that are working, even if they're making a little bit of cash. Hey, I get it. I grew up in an immigrant family. My parents migrated from Egypt to the U.S. We were very conscious of being thrifty and being on a budget and not wasting money. So saying no to money is kind of hard. It's in my DNA not to say no to money. But what I realize is that, yeah, I'm saying yes to the money that I'm making on the side, as little as it may be.

11:39But I'm saying no to opportunity to make more money, to have more fulfillment, to have more success. by not focusing and going all in. Thanks so much for listening to the$100 MBA show. I hope you love this podcast. If you do, hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app. Just hit the triple dots on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on Stitcher Radio, on Overcast, on whatever app you use to listen to podcasts and hit follow so you get our next episode automatically. You get access to over 2 ,200 episodes in our back catalog by just simply following the show. Thanks so much in advance for doing that.

12:12But before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the best parts about going all in is that you have clarity. You wake up every morning. You know exactly what you have to focus on. You know what your goal is. Everybody's singing from the same song sheet. You're not being pulled across different directions. You're not feeling guilty. It's just simpler. It's easier and allows you to have more energy. Thanks so much for listening. And I'll check you in tomorrow's episode, Q &A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care. I'm out.