Every endeavor directly complementing
each other sounds like a good way of doing it. I have a lot of varying
interests, but I think I have discovered the thing that excites me more than
whatever business/industry I’m working with is the business development aspect.
I am very results driven, so taking a business and growing it, getting to see
the results of your efforts, has a lot of appeal. Of course, I’d also like to
not work so much. I’m a bit of a contradiction.
I tried a few MLM type side
“businesses” while in my late teens. Halon fire suppression, electricity, etc. I
sold (tried to sell) Kirby vacuum cleaners once upon a time. Also Cutco knives,
but with my mindset of wanting to scale and grow companies, I found a loophole
in their rule about not selling to commercial users and racked up 30k in
commissions my third week with the company. Unfortunately, they did not share
my optimistic appraisal of the situation and no longer wished to “share the
opportunity” with me. Lol.
Currently, I have an IT business,
REI, just joined forces with my wife to build her (our?) It Works!
distributorship (The first MLM type of anything I’ve been involved with in a
lot of years. This one is actually doing quite well.) I have a community
involvement charity, an insurance agency, and a handful of other
dormant/possible future projects. I founded my IT consulting company about 20
years back. I’ve taken a couple breaks from it. Well, tried to, anyway. I fire
myself all the time. It just keeps pulling me back in. I’ve developed or built
and sold insurance agencies on one of my attempted breaks from IT, but I always
end up the designated IT guy that everyone goes to and sometimes clients are
specific that they want me to do a job instead of sending one of our techs. So
even when I step away from the business, I still end up working in it. I really
enjoy the work though, which also makes it difficult to stay out. And, like you
mentioned, Brian, it is just too lucrative and something I’m passionate about.
When someone asks, "What do
you do for a living?" How do you respond? RE investing may be the most lucrative,
and therefore the one we highlight the most, but how much business are you
leaving on the table by only saying you work in real estate? Of course, how do
you shine the light on other areas you work in without taking that light away
from promoting yourself in RE? After all, maybe the person you are meeting
knows of a property situation that would benefit from your help. If you tell
someone a half dozen different things you're involved with, they're gonna tune
you out. Kinda like what most people did while reading this post. I suppose
that's where a solid elevator pitch comes in, but there's only so much you can
effectively pack into just a few seconds of speech.