Empowering MBA

Empowering MBA

Starting today, I’m launching 18 startups in 18 months.

3 years ago, I quit my job. 

I had 2 years of savings to make it work and a bullet-proof plan to become profitable. I started with “get-rich-quick-schemes” like day trading and drop-shipping. 

The first month taught me the value of doing what you love. When your heart’s not in it, sooner or later someone will come along who eats your lunch. The market is always hungry.

I had quit my job to regain freedom: of time, place and money. I now had the first, was gaining the second and losing the third.

The market rewards value. For my next enterprise, I looked inward: what drives me and how can I be useful to others? This led me to startup consulting, digital marketing agency work and, presently, growth coaching individuals and small businesses.

Along the way I found my calling: being able to help anyone within 5 minutes, now and 300+ years after I’m gone.

With support from friends, family, loved ones, business partners and delighted clients, I became break-even after 13 months (and have been since then). 

And, after 32 months, I gained my second freedom: location. My entire business is now online.

This leaves the third pillar: money. Which brings me to this next endeavour: 18 startups in 18 months, which I call “Empowering MBA.”

Why I pursue this

A few reasons:

  • Coaching steers people in the right direction. It accelerates progress but doesn’t enable it. At least, in my experience, coaching alone is insufficient to many. 
  • Many are incapable, unwilling, scared or lack confidence to go from 0 to 1 – to initiate the change they desire – but would gladly take something from 1 to 2. With this challenge, and the skills and assets I acquire, I hope to create such opportunities for others.
  • Being able to help anyone in 5 minutes can only be done if I have the resources to accommodate others’ needs. Coaching is 1 aspect but, again, it alone is insufficient.
  • 3 years in, I’m confident in my coaching skills. But I feel I (still) lack as an entrepreneur. Especially what I consider money skills. This is a challenge to acquire those, improve myself, become more resilient and provide value while doing so.
  • Entrepreneurship accelerates personal development and skill acquisition. Feedback loops are tight. The market is brutal, but fair. 
  • I get paid per hour. Effectively, I have a job, not a business. 
  • I want more uncorrelated (and time-independent) income streams to gain financial freedom and fund ideas (and people) I care about.
  • Practise what I preach. I want to be a practitioner, not an aggregator. I want to be in the arena, not a spectator. I want to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.
  • I want to inspire others and show what is possible in 18 months (or less) of concerted effort regardless of one’s starting point. 

In a nutshell: I want to have freedom, reward loved ones for their trust, and be able to help others in more ways than I’m currently capable of.

I fundamentally believe the world would be a better place if everyone would pursue their calling. I want this challenge, once completed, to serve as a roadmap for others and get 1 step closer to that reality.

What does the Empowering MBA look like?

Inspired by Charlie Munger, Naval Ravikant, Alex Hormozi, Pieter Levels, Jakob Greenfeld and many self-made individuals I admire, this is what I have in mind:

Every month I pursue 1 business idea. The goal is to get 10 paid clients and have it operate without me. The former means the idea is validated and the latter means it’s a business, not a job.

However, unit prices matter (getting 10 people to pay $5 and getting 10 people to pay $5000 are different things) so depending on the idea and business model, the numbers will change.

Similarly, having a business operate successfully without me may require more time. These are guidelines, not laws.

But, any idea without sufficient paying clients after a month will be deemed a failure. The market has spoken. Time to move on.

My Empowering MBA is built around focus, rapid iteration and validation, constraints and failing forward.

I constrain my ideas to niches and business models in which my experience and interests give me an edge, focus on 1 or a handful of distribution channels, and pursue proficiency in 3 “money skills” (see below).

While some startups will fail, my constraints ensure skills, relationships and knowledge will transfer, stack and compound, increasing the odds of subsequent ventures. I’ll fail forward.

I believe success becomes inevitable with repeated asymmetric bets, playing the same game, over a long enough time horizon.

The money skills I referenced earlier are:

  • Persuasion – learn to sell verbally or in writing and you can live and work anywhere.
  • Creation – learn to create physical goods, digital goods, communities or pieces of art and you can find a patron anywhere. 
  • Investing – learn to preserve wealth to attract the wealth of the rich. Learn to grow wealth to attract the wealth of all. (But no bet that can destroy wealth is ever worth it.)

I’ll focus on acquiring these over the next 18 months. 1 is enough to feed a person. But I want to become competent in all 3 to show others it’s possible, to lay the foundation for future endeavours and because breadth comes more naturally to me than depth.

Like a traditional MBA, I’ll focus on 1 skill over the course of a semester. Every startup during that period centres around that skill.

  • Month 1-6: Persuasion – outreach, sales and copywriting. 
  • Month 7-12: Creation – coding (plugins, extensions and web dev)
  • Month 13-18: Investing – source, analyse, acquire and grow small, stable businesses

(Entrepreneurship, i.e. ideation, validation, effectuation & building MVP, will obviously be trained throughout.)

I decided on this order based on my background, assets and circumstances:

  • Which do I have the strongest foundation in?
  • Which best aligns with the assets at my disposal?

Sales skills are useful to every business and require nothing but time. Creation (physical goods, digital goods, communities or artwork) and investing could be equally effective starting points for someone else, but lay outside my circle of competence… for now (I can’t code, my designated creation skill, nor do I have money, or confidence, to invest).

Customise your starting point/game based on your circumstances.

Each month I’ll focus on a sub-skill. 

Taking persuasion, for example, I’d like to be able to persuade verbally and in writing. But each of these can be further subdivided: do I sell 1-on-1 or 1-to-many? Do I focus on landing pages, ads or emails?

I’ve got a general sense of the sub-skills I want to learn and which stack well, but I’ll remain flexible and change priorities as opportunities arise. 

The next constraints are niches, business models and relationships.

Business models I’ll focus on will likely form a cycle:

  1. Education (e.g. newsletter, podcast): be a student and document the journey.
  2. Agency: sell and implement solutions with labour. Gain exposure to businesses and leverage their resources to learn and acquire data.
  3. Software: sell tech solutions. Higher margin and more scalable than agencies.
  4. HoldCo: buy/invest in businesses I understand. Allocate capital and let operators thrive. 
  5. Education: be an “expert” and speak from experience. Educate at scale and across media.

This cycle forms a natural progression of asset acquisition and leverage:

  1. Knowledge (and media)
  2. Skill, media and relationships
  3. Tech
  4. Wealth and labour
  5. Attention (and media)

(Side note: I think of building assets & leverage as a stair-step method:

  • Level 1: time, energy, effort
  • Level 2: knowledge, skills
  • Level 3: labour/relationships, media, tech/machinery
  • Level 4: wealth, attention)

Looking at my background, interests and skill set, I’ve identified the following areas in which I have an edge:

  • Real estate (agencies)
  • Digital marketing & growth
  • Startups (including in-house)
  • Coaching
  • Relationships across the world (i.e. I can source talent globally)
  • Multilingual and multicultural understanding (i.e. I can copycat and localise successful business models elsewhere)

To increase my success rate, I’ll focus on business ideas, partnerships and client profiles that fall within these areas. Everything else is an opportunity others can pursue.

Even if my first few startups fail, if I continue to play in the same ballpark(s), with the same people, while developing my skills and network (i.e. my capabilities), I’ll be sure to find a way to provide (and create) value. Success becomes inevitable.

To accelerate this process, I’ll publicly document the entire journey.

  • Every month I write a premortem and kickoff document: the idea, the hypotheses, the potential pitfalls, economics and how I’ll get started.
  • Every day I’ll document that day’s lessons, resources and challenges.
  • I’ll end the month with a postmortem or “what’s next” report: status, what went well/wrong and what’s next.
  • Any checklists, (mini-)guides, deep dives and breakdowns or teardowns I create when the personal need arises.

I’ll share everything via newsletter and in a condensed form via LinkedIn (and maybe Twitter).

These media make the most sense: writing comes more naturally to me than audio or video, and potential partners and clients in my defined niches hang out here. Every other platform/distribution channel is noise (at least at first).

This public documentation serves 4 purposes:

  • Build trust and increase my serendipity surface area (i.e. attracting more, and the right, people and opportunities).
  • As a forcing function to work and to reflect. 
  • To improve my writing and thinking. (Which are even more important than money skills, in my opinion.)
  • So anyone can replicate my journey.

Why Empowering MBA?

Let’s start with MBA: this challenge forces me to learn, in a structured manner, about business and entrepreneurship, has clear learning objectives, and equips me with skills the market values. It’s got a core curriculum (entrepreneurship), broken up into thematic semesters (money skills) with monthly assessments (startups).

With the market deciding success/failure, it’s as close to a real-world MBA, a real-world business education, as I could imagine.

Then what makes this Empowering?

1. Me. I’ll be empowered as I become financially free, and capable of earning anywhere, anytime. Regardless of future setbacks, the acquired knowledge and skills (and, if maintained, relationships) remain. Whatever would be lost, business-wise, can thus be regained.

2. Self-starters. As I’m documenting the journey, anyone can replicate this. Any self-starter becomes empowered to profitably pursue his own passion and whatever degree of freedom and autonomy he desires. The Empowering MBA promotes permissionless apprentice- and mentorship. 

(One of my mantras in life is the proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”)

3. Non-self-starters. But not everyone is a self-starter or entrepreneurial in spirit. Which brings me to my success factors for any startup in this Empowering MBA: 10 paid clients and have it operate without me. This way I empower 3 different groups of people:

  • Clients. Looking at my “edge”, I expect most of my startups to be B2B. To add value to another business means improving its capacity – improved cash flow or improved margins. This increases (empowers) the value it can provide to its clients, team, partners and shareholders.
  • Partners. I lack the skills and resources to do everything alone, especially early on. Joint ventures will be essential. These are easier, and more quickly, done with solopreneurs, freelancers or small teams. We make up for each other’s weaknesses and empower each other to focus on what we love doing. 
  • Operators. Even if most work can be done by partners or software, if I want hands-off, sustained growth, I’ll likely need an operator. I want to provide this opportunity to (and empower) a hungry student looking for an opportunity or an experienced operator wanting more autonomy or a change of scenery – to those more comfortable taking something from 1 to N (than 0 to 1).

In numbers:

18 months. 18 startups. 18 operators (opportunities created).
180 clients. 180 partners.
1800 customers served.

Business models and startup success/failure will change these numbers but aiming for a 1x opportunity, 10x direct impact (technically 20x) and 100x indirect impact for each startup inspires me. It feels empowering to me.

(Side note: My entrepreneurial or startup process mimics an entrepreneurship framework called Effectuation. It makes sense and is well worth a read.)

What does a day look like?

Get clients. Validate and (pre-)sell the idea. This is my role as entrepreneur/business owner, at first, and will be the bulk of my work.

Fulfilment, when needed I do it, but essentially I’ll collaborate with experts/talents.

  • Build the product/service, or
  • Find/onboard partners or HR.

1 hour of focused skill improvement. Preparation for future startups and expansion of my circle of competence.

  • Creation (month 1-6): I’ll learn coding, specifically web development, plugins/extensions and APIs.
  • Investing (month 7-18): reverse-engineering investors/HoldCos I admire and analysing businesses within the niches I focus on.

Fill gaps in knowledge, when encountered. If not, continue “working” (i.e. get clients or fulfilment). Application over study.

  • Reverse-engineer (successful) greats in my niche
  • Audit (unsuccessful) prospects in my niche 
  • Read (see book list below)

Write a public journal entry. (You can find all past entries at the bottom of this page.)

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Startups – Progress Report

I’ll be updating my progress here with links to posts about each month’s startup.

1. Empower Agency (tentative) – April 19 2023~
A text-based personal brand agency for founders and executives.

2. TBD

Public dashboards

Business Idea dashboard
Wanna steal an idea? Go ahead. Share/send me your progress. I’d appreciate a credit & tag if you’re building in public.

Meeting requests

  • Collab: I don’t pay. I do partner/joint venture/profit-share. Make me an offer 😉

Book list (partial)

Read anything with a clear purpose. Any reading should 

  • Solve my own problem,
  • Solve a client’s problem, or 
  • Sell to (help) a prospect

The majority of books I’ll read will be biographies (of founders) and (business/industry) history books, especially those on my niches.

I agree with David Senra (and listen to his excellent Founders podcast): there’s no better business education than learning from history’s greatest entrepreneurs.

Below a handful of other skill-specific books I plan to read (and reread):

General

  • The Tao of Charlie Munger
  • The Essays of Warren Buffett
  • The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
  • Paul Graham’s essays
  • The Millionaire Real Estate Agent
  • The Millionaire Real Estate Investor

Ideation & Validation

Copywriting – following Gary Halbert’s curriculum with some additions (Ogilvy, Sugarman, Kennedy)

  • Scientific Advertising
  • Boron Letters
  • The Gary Halbert Letter
  • Robert Collier Letter Book
  • Tested Advertising Methods
  • How To Write A Good Advertisement
  • The Lazy Man’s Way To Riches
  • Break-Through Advertising
  • 7-Steps To Freedom
  • Reality in Advertising
  • The Adweek Copywriting Handbook
  • Advertising Secrets of the Written Word
  • The Ultimate Sales Letter
  • D&AD Copy Book
  • My Life in Advertising
  • Ogilvy on Advertising
  • Ogilvy on Advertising in the Digital Age
  • Confessions of an Advertising Man
  • The Unpublished David Ogilvy
  • Communications of an Advertising Man (if I can get my hands on this)

Sales

Marketing

  • 21 Immutable Laws of Marketing
  • Obviously Awesome
  • Influence
  • $100M Offers
  • Marketing Examples

Coding – I have 0 experience going into this

Investing – I have already read many value investing books, so I’ll focus on reverse-engineering investors/businesses I want to replicate.

Past journal entries

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