The hardest part of living the “Four Hour Work Week” is something that is only glossed over in the book…
It’s actually creating the income to fund your business, your outsourcers, and your lifestyle.
This is a pretty big black hole in the book.
Tim Ferriss’s release of the Four Hour Work Week has created a new gold-rush of “Get Rich Quick” junkies - this time, instead of the million dollars and a Porsche, they’re out to become part of the “New Rich” - to own lifestyle businesses.
The lifestyle is easy to build.
But building any sort of business (lifestyle business or otherwise) is hard work…
It’s not something that you can create overnight. It takes time and effort.
So how was Tim Ferriss able to build a lifestyle business?
Well, he never set out to build a lifestyle business to begin with… So there are gaps in some of the “How To”…
But if you read between the lines, there are 7 lessons that Tim Ferriss provides about building a business, and turning it into something that runs independently of you and funds your lifestyle.
But he does illude to a few concepts that show you what it takes.
1. Business Takes Hard Work
Once you’re past the excitement phase, starting a business is hard, unrewarding, time consuming, dull, boring, costly, arduous, stressful, crappy work.
Starting a business is hard, hard work, and it’s not for everyone.
But it’s one of the few ways to achieve the type of lifestyle that Tim Ferriss talks about.
Before Tim Ferriss achieves his “Four Hour Work Week”, we see how hard he works - both as an employee and as a business owner.
In the early stages of the book, he could easily be described as a “workaholic”.
He works more productive hours in a day than most people do in a month!
Tim Ferriss did not decide he was going to work 4 hours a week, then started a business.
He built a business, THEN decided to work 4 hours a week.
He didn’t have an internal conflict about working so hard when he “should have” be off on month-long lifestyle adventures. He was just working hard to build his business.
Sure, it’s good to begin with an end in mind… But your end is “build a lifestyle business”. It’s not “live the lifestyle”.
And building the business is going to take a lot of hard work.
2. In Business, You Don’t Have To Do It All Alone
OK - the bad news is that building a business is hard work, and someone has to do it.
BUT the good news is it doesn’t have to be you.
One of the key points in the book is that you can outsource practically any business activity.
Just on this point - I had a Virtual Assistant comment on my blog recently scoffed that she thought Tim Ferriss’s book conditioned business owners to expect Virtual Assistants to do “flunkie” work.
Running a business means doing a lot of “flunkie” work. Most small and start-up business owners do a lot of the flunkie work themselves.
If you think it’s boring, degrading, meaningless - whatever - it’s a necessary part of business.
(That’s why people outsource as much of the easy “flunkie” tasks to Virtual Assistants!)
There’s an issue that you’ll need to deal with though - to avoid the work, or pay for it.
If you’re outsourcing “little” tasks in your business, it immediately becomes obvious how much value a business owner invests into a business in the form of “free” labour and how it’s easy to undervalue our own time.
If a task’s outcome doesn’t make you money - how does it deliver value to your business?
Is it simply a case of the task being unprofitable in the short term? Will the task be profitable in the long term?
Is there a way to get rid of this task, or perhaps streamline it so that it is profitable - or at least costs less?
As a business owner, you don’t have to do it all… but for some tasks, that doesn’t mean you should get someone else to do it either.
3. Business Takes Someone With Strong Character Traits
Tim Ferriss has successful character traits.
He works hard. But more importantly, he sticks at things, long after most people have quit.
If you look at any successful person, you find that consistent action over a long period of time reaps rewards. A lot of action over a short period of time does not.
When business gets hard, you need to stick at it.
Success is like wine - it takes time to create.
Practically every successful person I know took 1.5 to 2 years of hard work to achieve success.
That’s 1.5 to 2 years of delayed gratification.
1.5 to 2 years of practically nothing… until they received something big.
1.5 to 2 years of trepidation and frustration before jubilation and celebration.
Do you have the character necessary to stick it through?
4. Choose a Business You’re Passionate About
Passion gets you a long way in any niche.
I’d prefer to hire a passionate marketer rather than a qualified marketer any day of the week. You can train someone to build their aptitude, but you can’t build attitude.
Someone with an insatiable passion will soak up skills and market insights faster than a dry sponge.
That’s why passion gets you a long way.
In Tim Ferriss’s example, he was passionate about nutrtition and combat arts.
This passion meant he’d already gathered a lot of knowledge about the needs and desires of his marketplace, plus a lot of technical information about nutrition and sports, long before he even developed a product.
But as we saw, after working so hard in his business for so long, he burned out and lost his passion.
It would have been easy to flake out and throw it all away (in some respects, he did) - this is where his strength of character showed through.
You still need the strong character to keep going when things get tough. But starting with a passion will get you a long way, fast.
5. Do Your Market Research Before You Begin A Business
This is something that Tim Ferriss DOES go into in his book - in fact, he dedicates a chapter to this area - but it’s such an important point that I thought I’d mention it here.
Market Research is CRITICAL for moving into a new business area.
I recently watched one of Marcus Hochstadt’s DVD interviews with James Brausch, who revealed that even though he has owned thousands of websites, there are only a few hundred profitable marketplaces online.
If you’re planning to build a freedom business, internet business, lifestyle business, or any other sort of business… How will you know that you’re going to reap a reward from your business?
It takes time to build a business and take it to profit.
Will you be investing time, money and effort into a business that is never going to compensate you? (A mistake I’ve made several times already)
How will you know unless you do your market research?
6. Make Sure Your Business Has Great Marketing
Just reading the book, it’s clear that Tim Ferriss is an exceptional marketer.
Featured on (how many?) TV programs and other forms of media. Building a brand. Carving out a marketplace. Speaking at Ivy League Universities.
And all of this was long before he even released his book.
He has an incredible marketing mind.
If you’re wanting to build a freedom business, or lifestyle business, do you?
How will you break into markets? How will you get the word out about your products? How will you communicate with potential customers? How will you build a brand?
It’s not easy…
There are plenty of people who are failing where they should be succeeding, simply because their marketing is sub-par.
Will you be doing your own marketing? Or will you be hiring or outsourcing to achieve a better result?
If you’ll be outsourcing, how will you fund this? (Marketing is rarely profitable from day one.)
How will you measure and track results, so that you know that you’re moving towards your goal?
7. Make Sure Your Business Is Constantly Moving Forward
A client and friend of mine, Brian Cavill, has a saying - “If you stop moving forward, you’re a backslider.”
Now, I don’t know if the saying is his or not, but it rings true in practically everything. If you’re not growing, you’re decaying. If you’re not competing, your competitors are. If you’re not improving, you’re getting worse.
In Steven Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, it’s one of the 7 habits - “Sharpening the Saw”.
There were a several examples of this principle in Tim Ferriss’ book, but to pick two examples:
Tim Ferriss applied the 80/20 rule, and only supplied his products to a small number of large distributors, and fired a large number of small distributors. Although it meant a smaller market, it improved the efficiency with which he distributed his products.
In another, we see his systems and procedures for outsourcing. These had been refined and improved over time as a result of problems he had with providers - and no doubt he was still improving them.
It takes hard work to build any sort of business…
I wonder how many people who dream about owning “lifestyle businesses” will be able to stick through, and create their business in the end… Or if they are just that - dreamers.
Brent