Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

The honest version of my job description right now is that I take consulting clients to cover the bills, and I spend the rest of my time building software that's just barely breaking even (for now).

I love it. It suits me. And I’m certainly not complaining. But it isn't the trajectory I would have drawn for myself, because there was a stretch where I was running a business doing five million dollars a year, and now I'm not. No big exit, cash off the table event.

I've been chewing on how I got from there to here. The frustrating part is that I don't see one big mistake that accounts for it.

I've gone back through it more than once. The decisions look reasonable. Not brilliant, but reasonable. Given what I knew at the time I'd make most of them again. There's no single moment I can point at and say that's where I put it in the ditch, though there are certainly a few moments of questionable driving. The business just got smaller, and then smaller, and the story I'd tell myself about each individual step is a story where I come off fine.

Which leaves an uncomfortable possibility sitting on the table.

What if I wanted it to?

Not consciously. I never sat down and decided to let it go. I did mastermind plans to shut it all down about once a year, then I'd think about the people who'd lose their jobs, or how it would look to someone who in hindsight didn't matter, and I'd chicken out.

But I wonder if some part of me felt lighter every time the thing got a little smaller. I wonder if I made a few hundred small decisions that were each defensible in isolation, and all of them happened to point the same direction, and the direction was out.

I remember thinking that I wanted to do the work and then being unable to actually do it. The specific work that the agency needed from me. I found it almost impossible to do. 

You know the moments I'm talking about.

It's a Tuesday. You know exactly what the right next move is. It isn't hard, it isn't confusing, it isn't blocked on anybody else. It's just sitting there being obvious. And no matter what, you just can’t get your body to engage in the work, so you do nearly anything else, and you call it prioritization (or blame your undiagnosed ADHD).

I'm starting to think that over a long enough stretch, that feeling is information.

Not information about your character. Information about the journey. My body telling me I was doing the wrong thing even though I had a clever strategy doc that demonstrated why it was. 

And maybe the signal isn't the resistance. It's the absence of it. The stretches where you never have to negotiate with yourself at all. Where the obvious next thing is just the next thing you do, and there's no gap between knowing and starting.

It’s something I noticed this week. Maybe it’s just the excitement of finding strong product-market fit again but there’s been a magnetic force pulling me back to my keyboard. I feel like I have my entrepreneurial superpowers back because what I’m spending my time on aligns with what I want to be doing.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I'm now flowing through every day like water. It’s not all easy. Some days I’m tired, others I’m cranky, and some days it feels like my brain has just decided not to turn on. 

But that's a different animal. Tired is everywhere at once. This was something else. It was sitting in front of the monitor with my arms crossed, staring at a single task, not moving, and having no idea why that one had me pinned.

One of those is a Tuesday. The other one lasted years.

I said I couldn't find one big mistake. That's not quite true. There's a piece of this I've never written down.

Just off our peak we had two serious offers and a run of tire kickers. Neither of the real ones closed, and the reason was mostly me. The number wasn't what I thought we were worth, so I passed. I called that discipline.

Both of the serious ones came with an earn-out. Multiple years. Stay, hit the marks, get paid.

The earn-out was the part I couldn't get past. Two years of the exact work I'd been sitting in front of with my arms crossed just for the chance of doing a little bit better financially than I was currently just didn’t make sense. 

I told myself it was ambition. I was going to hang in, build it back, and get the real number in the end. So I passed on the base hit and kept swinging. That cost me another five years in the job.

I like where I ended up. If I take that deal I don't get here, at least not in this shape. So I can't call it the wrong call. But I'd probably have gotten to somewhere like here faster. 

The mistake wasn't holding out for a better price. I couldn't tell the difference between conviction and avoidance. Or maybe I could and decided not to do anything about it. Who’s to say…

What are you holding out for right now, and are you sure the number is really the reason?

Collin

PS - I didn't find the courage to actually shut it down until we were under half our peak revenue and I was writing the outsourcing chapter of the book. There's a hint of it in the PS of this post. I wrote the follow up, but it went straight into the book instead.

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It will help you build a repeatable way to find customers without losing your weekends (or your soul).

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