I love lifestyle businesses. It’s a way of building freedom quickly without the headache of overhead and management demands. If you want to find out how to do it well, read The Company of One and apply its numerous case studies towards building cash flow.
If you are coming from a jobby job, then you can learn quickly how to make deals, manage projects and invoice your own customers.
You may not build something that can sell for millions or billions, but you can work on your own time on your own terms.
I like lifestyle businesses to start because they help someone who is not entrepreneurial learn some of the basic skills of not taking a paycheck for perceived security.
Also, once you have figured out how to operate a lifestyle business, it is a safety net. You can always support yourself with cash flow and little risk by defaulting back to this baseline.
Growth Businesses Have Bigger Upside and Headaches
If you want to 10x your business you likely cannot do this as a solopreneur or with a lifestyle approach. You need systems, people and structure to grow to meet the demands of the revenue model.
This is risk, but there is upside opportunity you otherwise would find elusive hustling on your own. It’s high hassle with high money. The hassle is in the building.
Growth businesses require learning how to scale with product-market fit. In this experimentation, you have to figure out what the market will buy and how to package, communicate and deliver it to be wanted at scale.
You don’t get to live a lifestyle anymore. You are pursuing answers to a lot of uncertainty that are inherent to figuring out a business model. There is much more failure involved commensurate with the mass variables involved with growing.
It takes skill and faith.
If you can’t stomach it any longer, you can always downsize back to the rudiments of a lifestyle business. You earned that.
However, the cost to grow will be a reward over time if you can persevere, have vision and make your ideas work.
A Strategy for Growth
My approach to business is to protect your downside first. Your upside tends to take care of itself.
If you have staying power, and you are in the game, you open yourself up to the opportunities that flow from being in the hunt, conversations and interactions of your growth business.
Learn to build a lifestyle business well. Get customers, know how to service them, and keep that flow going. Yes, you may be the person delivering all the time, however, there’s also benefit in self-reliance.
If your growth becomes too unwieldy or unsustainable to keep going, you can always go back to a lifestyle business.
Sometimes, it’s possible to run your lifestyle business in parallel on the side as well. If you have the bandwidth, it’s a great way to keep some low level flow going while you are pushing on growth.
For growth, know it is a lot of pushing and finding the right customers, product-market fit, audiences, systems, employees and operational flow. You are figuring it out and the missteps can be painful. But, the perseverance and vision you have rely on your staying power. Manage cash well and keep a focus on driving that signal in the noise by repeatable ROI on your efforts.
Lifestyle businesses are easier to start and maintain, but they have a lower ceiling for growth. Growth businesses can be scaled to a much larger size, but they require more effort and risk . The author recommends starting with a lifestyle business and then transitioning to a growth business if you want to grow your business.