Multitasking
I do a lot of things. Just like hundreds of thousands of other entrepreneurs around the world.
Most people do only one thing, but not us.
It’s not something that a lot of people can do effectively, they easily get drained and seem unfocused. Then there is the school of thought that preaches that you can’t grow any business if you are involved in many — because all you would actually be doing is spreading your energy and focus across a wide span of activities so you can not dedicate enough time and energy to see traction develop in any of the areas; this makes you a jack of all trades and master of none.
I sit on the opposing side of this table yelling to anyone who cares to listen that this is so wrong. We have multiple issues, bills, challenges and needs coming at us from one angle…the way out is to build multiple streams of income.
Now building multiple streams of income is tricky — I argue that companies like Google, Tesla, Amazon all succeed in doing multiple things. There are thousands of unknown names you are not aware of that are pulling this off — thousands of massively successful entrepreneurs on who juggle at least 4 or 5 businesses together and they are very successful at it. Being unknown and having zero share of the spotlight gives the illusion that there aren’t successful entrepreneurs who do multiple businesses — we only look at empires that has risen to the global limelight.
But stop to think about this for a while — maybe the unknown tens of thousands of entrepreneurs who are successfully running multiple businesses, who have developed very stable sources of income, who have employed a few hundreds of staffs, who can afford vacations when they want…don’t exactly fit the limelight stories because each of their businesses has annual turnovers of a few hundreds of thousands or under 10 million Dollars. Ten million Dollars in revenue does not exactly fit the profile usually covered by journalists: too small. This is because journalists, media, the public likes big and shiny headlines like companies turning over billions in revenue…and perhaps the reason why a news article a couple of years ago read “Burberry has fallen” and their reason for this was because revenues dropped to 2 billion Dollars a year.
The media is crazy with news of valuations: companies that raise money from investors and acquire users, constantly failing to find product-market fit and hoping to flip the switch one day to start turning in profit. These businesses don’t generate any profit. These companies somehow manages to gain valuations that doesn’t justify anything apart from vanity metrics driven by user acquisition and some vague engagement parameters drawn up by execs. If you’re up for it, check out this list of Unicorns here and see how many have managed to turn a profit. I can guarantee you one thing: you’ll be shocked.
Here’s another fun fact: of the 110 U.S. companies with a market capitalization of at least $50 billion, only three were unprofitable last year: CVS, General Electric and Qualcomm. As of November 2020, there are more than 400 unicorns around the world.
Perhaps, entrepreneurs who multi task are just comfortable building small but profitable businesses without the burden of fast growth and vanity metrics; just a pressing need to turn a profit after expenses. This is not to say there aren’t grand aspirations of building a billion Dollar business or taking over the world, but they are more realistic and have developed some form of rare calmness in en era defined by huge valuations.
Most times, entrepreneurs running multiple businesses get way more than they bargained for and stuff just picks up…and I have a few names.
https://twitter.com/gaganbiyani
https://twitter.com/EricJorgenson
https://twitter.com/ChikaNwobi
There are a number of high profile role models in this space, approaching the closing aspect of this article and I thought to reach out to these remarkable multitaskers. Hopefully, they reach back and we can throw together a live Zoom call.
There’s a book — “Range, why genralists triumph in a specialized world” by David Epstein which does a lot of justice to this topic. You can find it on Amazon.
Until later, keep keeping on.
