FBC – 196 – You Really Don’t Want This To Be YOUR Story

You Really Don't Want This To Be YOUR Story.

Today, we are going to talk about a horror story! Trust me you don't want to be that guy. There is a very powerful lesson you can learn from the story you are about to hear so ensure that such misfortune doesn't happen to you…

All the answers inside this episode…

So I've always told you that as far as I'm concerned, you don't need to know how to do everything. The best skill for me is to know who to ask. Okay. You just need to figure out, like oh I have car problems. Who do I ask? I have computer problems. Who do I ask?  And it makes your life easier. Right. So you usually have a cable guy, a pool guy, and something like that.

A perfect illustration of this is a book that I'm reading at the moment, a very famous book actually. “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. So maybe some of you guys actually read the book and this is a good example of what I mean. So you need obviously to know who to ask, but then you need to ask them. Don't be ashamed to ask them. They're there for a reason, right? They're your specialists. You need to go and ask them.

I just want to give you a story that's in the book somewhere. It's this guy during the gold rush. You know, in the US, everybody migrated west to go and dig for gold and stuff. Most people lost their shirt looking for gold. But the people who made the most money consistently were people providing the picks and shovels.

So this is what you want to be, right? Ideally, this is the business you want to be in. You're providing the tools for people to go and risk their shirt. And well, I mean, whether they succeed or not, you still get paid. Right. So all the big shovel sellers, the lodging, the food and all that stuff. They made a lot of money because, well, they didn't care whether you found gold or not.

So the advice is, try to be that person who provides the picks and shovels. Right. You don't need to be the person who goes in the mines.

So this one guy sold everything he had and he went there and started looking for gold and digging and stuff. And he found gold. So he retraced his steps. He put a pin for the exact location of where he found gold and stuff.

And he went back to Pennsylvania where he was from and he asked all his family and relatives to chip in so that he could buy picks and shovels and scale that thing up. So they all chipped in and he went back there. And what happened when he went back there? He found a lot of gold.

So everything was rolling for the guy. You know, he was living large and making money. And all that gold allowed him to recuperate the money invested into buying the picks and shovels and stuff. Then he bought some more sophisticated tools to be able to drill faster.

At some point he hit a dead end. They tried and tried and at some point came to the realization that, you know what? There is no more gold. But he had these like machines and stuff that he bought and he didn't know what to do with them. So he sold everything for next to nothing and then went back to Pennsylvania. So they stopped and quit everything without consulting any experts about whether there could be more gold.

You Really Don't Want This To Be YOUR Story

But anyway, the guy he sold the tools to. What is the first thing that person did? He went to see mining experts. Who basically knew the soil and the topography of mines and stuff like that. And so that person said, well, you know what? If you drill another three feet, then you will find a lot of gold. All right.

So what did the guy do? He drilled three feet and he found millions, but like millions and millions of gold, you know. And the original found out and was devastated and wished he’d asked someone for advice. But he learnt from his mistake because he remembered that one time in his life, when he didn’t know who to ask.

So there might be something that you're doing now and it's not working well for you. And it could work if you ask the right person. All right. So sometimes people are like, oh, man, I don't want to. Like, for example, like building a house or something.

I don't want to pay this architect or I don't want to pay this structural engineer because I'd rather do it myself. But sometimes just understand that you need to ask some expert’s opinion. And the best way to do this is to focus on knowing who to ask.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do so many solopreneurs end up with a story they did not want?

They follow somebody else's playbook without auditing whether the lifestyle, customer type, and daily workload match their values. After 2 to 3 years they own a business they cannot stand. Choose the daily reality first, then reverse-engineer the offer and audience that produce that exact day.

How do you avoid building a business that traps you?

Write the ideal Tuesday in detail before picking a model. Who do you talk to, for how long, what do you make, what does revenue per day look like. If the model you are considering does not produce that Tuesday at scale, pick a different one before you sink 12 months into it.

What red flags suggest you are heading toward a story you will regret?

Constant client emergencies, calendar full of calls you dread, revenue tied to one churning platform, no recurring income, and zero space for deep work. Two or more red flags showing up in month six means redesign the offer, not just push harder on the same broken model.

How do you course-correct without blowing up the business?

Run a 60-day transition. Raise prices on existing customers, productize the most-repeated deliverable, and stop taking the work you hate. Keep cash flowing while you migrate. Most solopreneurs can rebuild their daily reality in two quarters without losing more than 15 percent of monthly revenue.

About the Author

Martin Ebongue has been building automated online businesses since 2013. He runs The Vault, a six-figure system covering Etsy, lifestyle design, AI automation, and growth hacking, without a personal brand, without filming his face, and without selling courses. He coaches solopreneurs on building durable income streams that don't require a team or a 60-hour week. Find him on YouTube and LinkedIn.

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• FBC – 8 – The Weirdest Challenge To Boost Your Confidence
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