When my team came to visit me for a team-building trip, I naturally took them to the golf course.
We filmed some content, and all four of them hit golf balls for the first time in their lives.
Needless to say, it was not pretty. Balls went left, right, and occasionally six feet straight ahead. Meanwhile, I’d been playing for about a year at that point, so they were looking at me like I was some kind of wizard. (I’m not. Trust me. But I’ll take it.)
Then, while we were filming, one of them asked me a question I liked a lot more than I expected to:
“Is it normal to fail at a business before succeeding?”
Here’s the story.
My first business was a dating blog. Business number two was a network of niche websites. Business number three was an olive oil company. None of them made me rich.
It wasn’t until business number four that I made my first millions.
So yes, it’s normal. You take a few shots. You miss. You take a few more. And even now, a lot of the ideas I come up with still end up being failures. That part never goes away. You just get better at failing faster and cheaper.
But get this:
The failures aren’t really the point. The point is what you keep doing every day while the failures are happening.
Here’s what I mean. Roughly 80% of our sales calls get booked on about 20% of the days in a month. Most days are quiet. A handful of days are absolutely insane, and the calendar fills up all at once.
You’d think that would mean you could just work the busy days. You can’t. If you don’t do the work on the other 80% of the days, those great 20% days never show up. The outreach, the follow-ups, the content, and the emails like this one are the inputs. The big days are just when the results finally land.
For some reason, that’s how life seems to work. You get a huge chunk of the results on a small chunk of the days, and you don’t get to pick which days. So you show up every day, you do the inputs, and you take your fair share of failures along the way.
Now, here’s the important part:
As your company gets bigger, you get busier. You’re in more meetings, putting out more fires, and making more decisions. And the first thing that quietly stops happening is the boring daily input work. Nobody notices for a few weeks. Then the big days stop coming, and nobody can explain why.
Perry Marshall wrote a whole book on this idea, 80/20 Sales and Marketing. It’s worth reading if you haven’t. But the practical version for a busy founder is this:
Build one system that works. That could be one lead-gen channel, one sales process, or one marketing engine, whatever it is. Prove it works with your own hands. Then hand off the majority of that work to someone else, so the inputs keep happening every single day whether you’re in a board meeting, on a plane, or, in my case, on the golf course.
Because eventually, you just can’t keep up with it yourself. Nobody can.
That’s why you hire an A player. Not to have ideas for you, and not to replace you, but to keep running the inputs on the 80% of days so you still get to cash in on the 20%.
That’s what we do. We find the right person for that seat, at the right cost, and they keep the machine running while you do the things only you can do.
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