Why falling in love with your business is bad

Ever wondered why your passion-driven entrepreneurial endeavours met an untimely demise? Brace yourself as we unveil the harsh truth about why falling in love with your business idea can spell disaster. From the depths of my personal experiences, I divulge the hard-hitting reality of seeing businesses crumble due to unforeseen circumstances and the emotional turmoil of those who have tied their identity to their enterprise. 

Unmask the drawbacks of irrational decisions and clouded visions that are often the side effects of an impassioned business outlook. Discover the benefits of a more pragmatic approach - falling in love with the process of building your business rather than the business itself. Tune in for a dose of reality and a fresh perspective, as I take you on an intimate journey of starting my cleaning business, Mission Cleaning Services, demonstrating the power of a grounded perspective focused on numbers and steady growth.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hey everybody Mike here, and welcome to Task Force Entrepreneur. The podcast I started went from being a tech engineer to starting a house cleaning business. Yep, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, what's up? Everybody Mike here, listen.

Speaker 1: 0:22

In this short episode I want to talk about why falling in love with your idea is a very, very bad idea, something you want to avoid, and I think this goes contrary to what most people believe. So the prevailing wisdom goes like this If you love what you do, you'll work harder. You'll work more, you'll push through the bad times. Now I want to share with you guys my opinion on this topic. I think that it's a bad idea to fall in love with your ideas because things change right. The economy can change. You can be in business one week and a month later, be out of business, right and to no fault of your own. Your personal situation can change right. You could have something happen within your family, an emergency or just a very bad situation, and things change right. Your business you have to shut it down or you have to relocate or something right. Something can change personally, that affects your business, and so, obviously, the reason that I'm saying that you know, hey, don't fall in love with it in this scenario is you might fall in love with it and then when it comes crumbling down, you're absolutely crushed. And you know, if you're anything like me, I've had this happen. I've lived through this, had a business that was doing very well and essentially, in my opinion, right, to no fault of my own, just kind of had it taken away, and in my case my employer thought it was a conflict of interest. It wasn't, but you know, that's neither here nor there. So the point is that things can get taken away very quickly and if you tie your identity to that business, it makes the crash hurt that much more.

Speaker 1: 2:04

Now, if you were a little more pragmatic and, you know, less emotional, you might be saying well, you know, mike, I'm not worried about that, because if it fails I'll just take it as a lesson and move on to the next thing. Right, I will fall in love with it, but if it fails I'll be okay. And to that person I say being in love with something is an emotional state. If you love your business, if you're passionate about it, then you will be more likely to make irrational decisions about your business because of how deeply you feel for your business, you might be making decisions not driven by data, not driven by revenue and profit and all of that stuff you might be driven by. I really want to see this business succeed, right, even though maybe the numbers have shown you that, hey, we've taken losses for the last you know two years, right? So it makes it a lot harder to make good decisions on where to invest your money, where to not invest your money, where to invest your time and energy in your team, right, and in my opinion, it just clouds your vision a little bit.

Speaker 1: 3:13

Now I want to give you an alternative scenario. Instead of falling in love with your business because I know someone out there is listening to me and they're like you're crazy, you need passion, you need to love what you do and all of that stuff. So my alternative to this is, instead of falling in love with your business and your great idea, fall in love with the process of building a business, and this is something that I personally went through. I went through a string for probably you know five years, ten years, where I started a business, got really invested in it and then just kind of something happened and I just kind of it went away. I was in limbo for a while because I had tied everything to the success of that business, right. So what I learned about myself and maybe someone out there if you're listening you might feel the same, you might realize that you're the same is that I never really was in love with web design one of my businesses, or, you know, doing IT training videos another business. It wasn't about that specific topic or industry, it was the process. I loved interacting with customers. I loved the idea of generating income, you know, and building something bigger than me. So the cool thing is, once you realize that that's really what you care about, that's what really matters to you, it opens up this endless possibility in the world of everything around you. Case in point my cleaning business that I started, mission Cleaning Services, that I'm in the process of starting right, I'm documenting on this podcast.

Speaker 1: 4:50

Obviously, you know I'm not overly passionate about cleaning on its own. If I'm being completely honest, I don't mind cleaning. I actually tend to like it sometimes. But it's not a business that I'm just like. I woke up one day and I'm like that's my life's work, right, it is something I think people need. It's something that I think is profitable and it's something that I think I'm capable of doing and I think that I can dominate the local and you know, who knows, maybe someday regional market, right.

Speaker 1: 5:26

But the point is because I'm not overly invested in the emotional aspect of the business, I'm much more focused in on the numbers. In all of my other businesses, even the successful one, I was never really that into the numbers. You know, obviously I cared about things like revenue and profit. But you know, in this business I'm very clued into profit margin because cleaning services are notoriously low profit margin in my opinion, compared to other things Like, for example, pressure washing. Pressure washing margins are excellent or they can be Cleaning not so much. You know I've seen numbers vary, but you know it's kind of an anecdotal story but you know I've seen people, for example, say that they were earning 10 to 20% profit margin in a cleaning business, right, cleaning houses, which you know. I think that percentage could be okay. But when you consider that they could be bringing in a million dollars a year in revenue but they're making about 100K and, by the way, that's, you know, that's profit to the business, that's before you pay yourself, right? I don't think that's super exciting. I do think it's exciting, it's very cool, and they should be proud, right.

Speaker 1: 6:43

But to me, that's an area that I really want to be laser focused in on, and I couldn't do that if I was just, you know, too invested in the idea of cleaning. Now don't get me wrong. Like I said, it's something I want to do, it's something I am going to do, and this doesn't mean that I'll be likely to quit, you know, because, oh, hey, things got hard right. I like to think I have the maturity to understand that, hey, you know, there's going to be tough times and we have to be able to persist through those. But I'll always remember to be honest to myself about the numbers, and that's something that I'm kind of, you know, giving you guys as a form of unsolicited advice. Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please do me a big favor and leave me a review as a new podcast. Reviews are everything, and it would just mean the world to me. I'm very serious about that. I would mean a lot. So if you leave me a review, that would be awesome.