If I Lost My Business, What Would I Do Instead?

0:00So this is a hypothetical question, but what would I do if I lost my business? And not to be dire, I'm not saying like, oh, like, what was me I lost my business? Meaning like, I just don't have my business anymore. What would I do? The truth is, is that I've recorded this episode two times and deleted it because clearly, as I got like halfway through 15 minutes and then recording both episodes at two different times, I had no idea what I was gonna do. I just kept speculating. And I ended up deleting the idea out of my Asana board because I'm like, this is maybe this is a bad idea or I just clearly don't know what I would do. And yesterday I just sort of recorded some podcasts in myself, which I sometimes do just to kind of clear my thinking a little bit and I actually did come up with it.

1:01And it was pretty clear. And I guess I thought in the episode that I maybe had a bunch of options that I would do in case I lost my business. And the truth is, is I kept saying in these other episodes that I deleted, I kept saying that, well, I'll probably be a consultant. So what would happen is like, yes, I'm not doing swimming university anymore. So how would I make money? How would I earn income? Would I start another business? Would I open a brewery? Would I try to start something similar to swimming university? Or should I just go, hey, I had a successful business for the last, let's say, I mean, I've been doing it for 20 years, but it's been like relatively successful since 2011. So, well, it's been a long time. But I'm like, all right, I feel comfortable that if somebody wanted to book an hour of my time

2:04to talk about strategy or something, I could do that. I could certainly help them build systems and processes to run their businesses and think through choices in order to operate it sort of a lifestyle business. And I'm like, that's probably what I would do. And I would double down on this podcast and my newsletter and simply my personal brand. That's not true. Cause I'm like, well, you know, I kept hemming and hauling when I was recording it and I go, I don't like that idea. So the truth is, is like, I wouldn't be a consultant. And there's a clear reason why. And I came to this conclusion and I taught the stuff about it. She's like, yeah, no, no shit. I'm like, what do you mean no shit? I'm thinking that that's my only option. You know, like, what else am I going to do? She's like, no, you're a builder.

3:07Uh-huh, okay. I'm a builder. Yeah, you can't, you're not a consultant. You're not a guy who trades his, you know, a time for money. You don't think that way. You've never thought that way. You're, you build stuff. And I was like, oh, okay, right. Yeah, all right. Then with that, that, well, okay. So that sort of solves that problem. And then I was like, but, but maybe I wouldn't be a consultant then I would just build something in the personal brand space. Like I would build something like a community or a, where I would talk about online business. And the, and the thing is, is like, nope, nope. That's not it either because I love doing this podcast. I do. And the reason I love it is because I get to talk about business.

4:07I, that's the simply it. I get to talk about business and I get my steps. And I know that there are some people listening to this. And there are some people interested in what I have to say. That's it. I started a newsletter and that's okay. It's, but I keep sending video. I like, oh, I'll make a video. And then when I send it out, I'm like, well, I'm gonna unlist the video because I don't want it out publicly. I don't want it like on YouTube. Like I don't want to play the YouTube game in this space. And then I thought to myself, like, oh, well, okay, if that's true then, let's, let's take this in a more realistic way. Let's think about this realistically. Right now, some university, we publish YouTube videos. We play YouTube. And I have a studio that I built in the basement. So if I didn't have some university anymore, what would I do

5:09with that studio? And the clear answer to me was, I tear it down. It wasn't like, oh, I'd repurpose this into a money lab studio or a personal brand studio. I keep calling it money lab, but I wouldn't do that. I would tear it down. And I would, what would I do with all that equipment? I have two lights. I have a teleprompter. I have a tripod. I have an extra camera. I have an extra computer like what would I do with it? And I'm like, oh, I would film brew cabin videos with it. And it's like, oh, okay, we'll hold on. What would you do with that space? I'm like, well, it's a basement. I would still have my desk down there. I still have a TV, I have a couch, I have like a, you know, I would probably, honestly, I'd probably add a pool table or a drum set or something. Like something's just for fun.

6:09I wouldn't turn it into a studio. And that realization was like, oh, well, then, okay. Well, then, so you don't want to make YouTube videos about running an online business. And the answer to that is like, yeah, I know, absolutely not. I don't mind making crude crude. I don't mind making, you know, low five videos showing you behind the scenes of what I'm doing in my business. I don't mind doing that. What I never want to be though is just a teacher, like a public like, hey, I built this business so you should listen to me. I don't want to do that. I want to build things in real life and I want to share them, which is exactly what I do in this podcast. Sometimes I'll answer questions, but for the most part, which is kind of consulting, like I'm consulting, I guess,

7:11in a way, but most of the time I'm building stuff and then sharing it. So why not just build stuff? And yeah, I can still share it on my personal brain that's fine. That's just an outlet, but that's not a business. That's not what I would do for money. So what would I do? And the answer kind of sucks, but I would make brew cabin videos. Because that's the thing that I really want to do. If I look at all three of the like projects that I have, I have obviously swim university, which is my main project. I have this, my now my personal brand podcast newsletter, whatever. And then I have brew cabin, which is like my YouTube, I have a website, social media a little bit. I do some podcasts with other people.

8:13Those are my three projects. When I look at the ease of growth, and I'm here, air quotes, right? The effort that I put into say, swim university is pretty high, meaning that I put a lot of, I mean, I've spent a lot of years building up my skill set so that when I produce content at swim university, it is of high quality. And that output leads is like, it grows very easily is what I mean. Because honestly, I don't have a lot of competition. And the competition that I do have is mostly local. So it's like, it doesn't really affect what I'm doing. And I've just been doing it for such a long time that, you know, when I put out content, when I sell products, like it's fairly easy

9:16because we did a lot of good, there's like such good, there's such a good foundation there, right? Now, if you look at brew cabin, the same thing applies, but the effort is like 10x. So when I do brew cabin videos, or even write articles on brew cabin, I'm putting like 10x the amount of effort into those pieces of content and I do at swim university because it's just me versus like at swim university, there's a whole team. But again, the growth metric is easier. When I put out a video, like it gets views, it gets talked about. I get people reach out to me. Like it's fairly easy to grow in that space when I do my work, when I do it the way that I want to do it

10:19and the same is true for swim university. So thinking about that, what happens when I put that kind of work into like money lab, or now what's now my personal brand? The truth is, it doesn't really work. It's much, much harder to grow in this industry because there's so much competition and there's people doing it a million times better than me. I can just, I can honestly carve out a niche of, hey, I'm an anti-hustle, hey, I'm lifestyle business boy, whatever, right? But that's like taking a small subset of business and the audience is also fairly small, but it's definitely bigger than, I would say it's bigger than pools and it's bigger than home brewing. I could be wrong about that, but I feel like it is.

11:24So, but the competition is so much higher, you have like huge, huge household names who are in this space. Just shark tank alone, right? Like business people are famous for being business people. There are no pool people who are famous for being pool people, and there are brewers who are famous for being brewers, but like not, I mean not in the household name arena. So, simply the niche is just oversaturated. Now, the thing is is that you can still carve out a tiny little portion of that niche and you can make a lot of money doing it because the, you know, you can charge way more than you can for like home brewing or whatever. But for me, I'm not willing to push myself to do the things that I think are required

12:25to build like a legit business. I don't wanna go through that. I'm not, I don't think I'm interested in that in my like later stages of life. I don't think I'm interested in consulting or being a, hey, now that I've done this thing, I'm just gonna go teach it. I don't think I want that. And if there's, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I'm just saying that like for me personally, not really my thing. And with that said, I actually came to a wacky conclusion which was, oh, I'm gonna stop tweeting about this. I was, you know, for the last like six months, I've been like trying to build up my, my Twitter game and my threads game and LinkedIn. And I'm like, I don't think I wanna put this out there that I'm this like fucking guru

13:27when it comes to online business. That's not, I don't feel that way. In this show, now that it's called business casual like that fits me much better. And what I'm talking about in this show is my own business. Not like it's none of your business but I mean like my businesses, right? The things that I built. And yes, occasionally I'll answer some questions but it's mostly questions about what I'm doing or through the perspective of what I've done. And that's just, that's all I want. I don't need to, I don't feel good making money off of that to be honest. I know, I wouldn't mind taking sponsorships like I wouldn't mind building an audience and having an audience but like truthfully, yeah, I think Steph's right. I'm a builder and it means I need to build something. And I'd much rather build, which sounds crazy.

14:30Like I'd much rather build brew cabin even though I know deep down that it will make less money than my personal brand ever will. Like I know that for a fact. But that's where I want to live. I don't want to live in the make money online space. I think I've made that pretty clear although I keep, I keep a toe in, right? This podcast, my newsletter, like those are, I'm doing it a little bit but I don't make any money from it and I don't really want to. And do I really want to make money at brew cabin? Not necessarily, but if there's people out there who are like, hey, you know, we want to sponsor you, we want to help push this out. We want to, you know, what can we do? Or, you know, then yeah, we can have that discussion. If it's like, hey, I can make courses or I can help this other company who maybe there's a magazine out there that's like, hey, we can team up

15:31and I can make money through this, selling this. And you know, I think there's definitely ways and in the home brewing space where I can be of service and it would be more of a partnership than me trying to build something from scratch. And that's probably what I would do if I lost to university is I would just go right into that because I've, when I think about just my existence, right, just my house where I live, I have two really impressive spaces. If you go into my basement, it's impressive. It's minorly impressive, you know, if you're in our space that may be impressive, it's like when I have service guys come over and they look at the basins like, what the fuck do you do? And it's like, oh, you know, it's like I make videos for YouTube about pool care. It's like, oh, okay, weird. But it like when you see it, it's a full on video studio very rarely

16:32would you see that in someone's house, right? And so that basement area is impressive because I've built a place for business. And where I'm at right now, which is my secondary garage, I've turned this into a like full on home brewery. That's more impressive when people come over, it's like, dude, this is like, you know, if people see it for the first time, it's like, this is fucking awesome, right? It's like, it's like a man's dream. It's it's, you know, and it's not why I built it. Because like, this is my hobby. And yeah, I'm, I'm interested in it. And it's cool because it's one of those hobbies that you don't have to be a nerd to enjoy. It's beer. You can just enjoy the beer. You don't have to look at the equipment, right? You don't have to be, you don't have to nerd out about the water chemistry. You can just come in here and enjoy free beer

17:32and just hang out, right? Whereas like if my garage was full of model trains, you'd be like, okay, this is, this is impressive, but also not for me, you know what I mean? Because it's model trains. So like point is, if I just choose between my two most impressive things that I've built, then the obvious next choice is not just consulting or just business, even though you could make, you make the argument that it's impressive that I built to university, but I'm like, yeah, but I just, I just want to do that again. And I will continue to talk about that here. So what's interesting is this podcast doesn't change. If I switch from swimming to university to brew cabin, same rules apply, business casual baby, you know what I mean? I'm not, I'm not forced to be like, well, now I just have to answer consulting questions

18:34or think about business at a larger scale. It's like, no, I've just switched the thing that I'm building. And now you just get to hear my process on that, which is going to be fairly similar, you know, they'll probably, you know, if I do brew cabin again, it's like, yeah, I'm doing the news. I'm basically doing swimming university, but just in a industry that I happen to, it happens to be like my passion, whereas right now, swimming university is not my, you know, pool care is not my passion. It's just the thing that I've always done my whole life. And you might be sitting there thinking, hey, Matt, what the fuck are you doing? Like, you, you know, you hear the advice all the time that's like, follow your passion, do that. And it's like, why, what are you doing swimming university for, man? Like, go do that. And I'm like, yeah, except I know that by doing this, it turns into a job. But also like, I'm doing both, it doesn't matter.

19:35And right now, I get to do swimming university, it doesn't take me that long. And then I get to do brew cabin, and swimming university pays for this. So I don't have to turn this into a business yet. But again, if I lost it, if I lost some university, I could easily put the switch and turn this into a business. It would take a while to build up and start making like, good money again, but I could do it. And that's what I would do. Would I be a consultant? I could do it as like a supplemental income and tools brew cabin paid off, just like I did. When I started swimming university, I did website design as a side gig for supplemental income, because swimming university wasn't making that much money. And then once swimming university got to like $40,000 a year, I could stop doing the website design stuff and focus all in on that.

20:36I mean, it would probably have to be higher, but back then it was all I had to get hit was 40. So that's what I would do. If I lost everything, I would do home brewing. And I would start a brewery. I would stay as a home brewer, help the hobby out, and just really lock in on that. I would love to know what you think. So do me a favor, go to jivonesie.com, G-I-O-V-A-N-I-S-C-I-D.COM. Subscribe to my newsletter, shoot me an email. I'd love to hear from you, and I'll talk to you next time. I love to hear from you and I'll talk to you next time. I'll talk to you next time. I'll talk to you next time. I'll talk to you next time. I'll talk to you next time.