On paper it sounds easy to run multiple businesses for example you might think it's just like splitting five workdays into one workday per business. But actually you get much less productive "growth work" capacity than that. Here's why. Admin work is roughly fixed per business per week, not proportional to how many hours you spend on that business. So the more businesses you run, the more your total time gets eaten by admin even if your total hours stay the same. One business, 40 hours/week: ~4 hours/week is admin (updates, coordination, logistics). You keep 36 hours for growth work. Five businesses, same 40 hours/week total: each business still carries its own ~4 hours/week of admin. That's 20 hours/week gone to admin — leaving only 20 hours for growth work. Same total hours. Half your growth capacity, gone — just from spreading across more businesses. This is why having an operator in your business is crucial. Let me give you a practical example. I bought a hyperbaric oxygen therapy clinic in June. My goal is to work there two days a week. Due to summer traveling and holidays I've been able to average only once a week so far. That time has largely gone to admin work and synchronizing things with the employee. Little if any of it has gone to growth work — developing client acquisition. Right now some admin still sits with me because it's above my employee's access rights, or because I need to do it once myself first so I actually know how it works. Moving all of that to the operator is the goal.

On the surface it might look like that I am working on five different things but beneath they are actually connected by one common theme: they all build future for me that I want to experience.

When I get in to the groove with working I would just want to keep going. Working evenings, working weekends and mind running 24/7. The best antidote to this is to have exciting hobbies. Example this weekend I organized a small 'training camp' for my orienteering club mates. Leading up to it I created a map from my yard and nearby forest. This took a lot of time but kinda forced me to shift off work things and get out in the nature. During Friday and Saturday organizing hosting my club mates and the camp itself forced me to switch off from work stuff. 118 km cycling on Saturday definitely did that :D As a result I was fully 100 % off from my normal everyday work mode. Actually it feels now hard to start on Monday and get back to the "zone" which actually is a great sign. This means that I truly switched off. It takes a while to warm up! On top of this every business is somehow linked "to the real world" and what we people do in our lives. Even if you love building businesses and you could just work, work and work staying grounded in the "real world" is where you learn the most important lessons. After all every business is basically one of three: 1) B2C business serving people wanting to live their life happily 2) B2B serving other B2B or B2C So everything is linked back to why people buy products and that is basically: 1) Stay alive 2) Reproduce 3) Have fun Practical example: Long bike ride reminded me that I have been considering buying a gravel bike for over a year now. I got into checking what kind of bikes are out there new or second hand. I began pondering about things like: - How does whole business ecosystem around cycling work? - What is the role of a bike manufacturer when most of the bike components are bought from other manufacturers? - What is happening in me psychologically during the process of making a purchase decision? - What goes into negotiating a good deal on second hand market? This is where first hand learning happens which is key over to anything you could learn from other hand aka second hand learning.

Happy to join. Cheers

Hi there. Happy to join and find tips and tricks from like-minded people