I am baking a lot these days. I always loved the taste of fresh bread but I couldn’t eat too much bread in a row because it gave me a heartburn. So I would bake one giant loaf of bread, eat that for several days, get sick of it, then crave it every once in a while. The tragic thing about bread is, you can’t just get it when you crave it as you would with instant ramen.
I found this YouTube channel with a lot of small batch bread recipes and I thought “huh, maybe this is how I can eat bread”. And it worked for me! One day I’m just prepping and letting the dough rise, and the next few days I eat the bread. But as I eat I prepare the next batch and I just keep going.
The nice thing about this channel is that it has a lot of variety for small batch bread. So far I’ve baked mini baguettes, pretzel rolls, focaccia, and ciabatta. The more I make bread the more my flour sprinklings and rolling skills become, and this kind of skill development is something I always enjoy with practically anything.
Unfortunately I suck at taking photos so I have no proof of my wonderful bread. I’ll be sure to take a photo of the next batch.
Anyhow, I wanted to start with this story about bread because I want to talk some business coaching today.
Many people want to quit the traditional moneymaking activity they’re doing because it doesn’t align with their souls. They burn out and they need to take a long sabbatical. After they recover they need to go back into a moneymaking activity, but the mere thought of going back to their job paralyzes them; so they want to make money with a passion project.
Unfortunately the passion project doesn’t make a lot of money, but there’s hope; there are people who do what you do and successfully make money. So you keep going and going, but it seems that no matter how hard you’re trying it’s not really making any traction in the money making department.
What to do in this case? Do we need to go all in on the passion project or do we give up and go back to the soul crushing grind? Well that already conveniently presents us with the binaries, and now we just need to find the wonderful middle way.
Bread and Hunger
Like I said above, you can’t really have bread immediately. If you’re really hungry and you don’t have the energy to knead, proof, cut, roll, and bake bread you really need to find a quick meal to eat. It’s a simple comparison between the realistic effort and time it takes for the food to be ready vs. how hungry you are at the moment.
Depending on your finances and your philosophy about money, you sometimes can afford to take an extended period of time with no income to invest in your moneymaking skill. But if the need to make money is more immediate, we have to understand that there are more proven ways to make quick money.
The binary tells us that we have to go back to our job, and furthermore that it will be a bad experience. This is a skewed view of reality: your job has a lot of benefits. You’re already decent at it, it probably pays more than minimum wage, and you probably have a lot of social network to tap into.
You could take another career path but that will come with its own set of challenges, like a learning curve and smaller pay. Your existing job may feel sucky but it also has its pro. To generalize this, every choice has its pros and cons; we just need to be able to happily make a decision on what pro to take so that we can take the con as a cost.
I know a guy from my Buddhist community who quit a lucrative software engineering job in the silicon valley to work at UPS, sorting packages. He said it’s the best decision he made in his professional life because he finally feels like he has an objective understanding of what money should mean to a person. You don’t have to be like that, nor should you have the finances to be able to afford that kind of a career change; but when financial needs are urgent, you need to address them urgently.
What Business Takes
So it seems like our business needs some time to start making money. Is that the case though? Is time truly a requirement? If so, how much time should it take? How much effort should it take? That seems to vary among people so how do we find the right time for ourselves?
Much like Buddhism, business can be developed incrementally but it can also shift in an instant. So what is required in order for a business to start shifting to profit? There are many factors to this but the primary shift I’m interested in talking about is the shift into being a provider.
Many businesses have something concrete to offer, like clothing or food. Many businesses sell virtual goods, like my coaching business. Many passion businesses, especially new ones, don’t have a concrete item to be sold so it can be tempting to think “oh man, if only I had something concrete to sell like a pizzeria!”.
The thing is, what stops a pizzeria from not being confident about their pizza? “Why would they eat our pizza when they could have either faster Dominos or better artisanal pizza?”. This is totally something a food entrepreneur can think. Then you have to offer your pizza to people and people say it’s good, but when nobody’s ordering your pizza it can feel defeating.
Many business owners put themselves at the mercy of the buyers. This can be true when you have something that people keep wanting and they suggest that you should start a business with it, like you see in movies. But that is not the only kind of business; many businesses work opposite of that, the business offers to people and lets them know something valuable is being offered to them.
When your business is a demand-driven one, you probably won’t need to worry about making money and read this writing. Entrepreneurs struggling with making money tend to be operating supply-driven businesses, which means… Something must be supplied, provided to the people to start generating demand.
All it takes is your shift into being a provider for someone. You see someone who can be your demand, but they don’t know it yet. You provide your supply to them at the risk of them declining it, because why? That is what providers do. Flowers don’t shy away from bees because the bees might not find them appetizing. Flowers are always open to provide, then bees come.
The wonderful thing about the middle way is that it is not a set way. There is a lot of creativity in navigating your own middle way. You can develop your business over time while working a minimum wage job. You can happily choose to build your savings so that you can commit later down the line. You can happily shift into being a provider, even if it means you need to couch surf with friends. No matter what path you choose, the important thing is you find your happy middle way.
My business coaching is the most affordable way to get coaching from me, FOREVER. There is no expiration date on my business coaching program. With the wonderful resources I created for you and weekly calls AND 1:1 sessions, I think it’s one of the best business coaching programs out there. Register and join the wonderful community of entrepreneurs who follow the happy business way!