how many companies you should start, my framework

Summary

Confucius said the man who chases two rabbits catches neither. true. and also, you might want a rabbit tomorrow. so how many companies should you have. here’s how I actually decide.

1. I have several. End of Three Fitness came first, then Garage Gym Athlete, then PT Biz with partners, a real estate company with Emily, and a newer sub company under PT Biz. that looks like entrepreneurial ADD until you see the gaps. these were years apart. each only got started once the previous one had a track record I trusted, a team, and clear numbers I could step away from.

2. starting too many too soon is the trap. if you split your attention, every company suffers. the rabbit example holds. some of my companies probably could be bigger if I was 100% all in on just one. I like them where they are, and I like my lifestyle, so I run them where they sit.

3. the framework is one question. what is your mission in life. mine is building better humans. that one answer becomes the litmus test for everything new I might take on. my mentor offered me a real estate company very early at End of Three Fitness and I passed because it didn’t fit the mission and would split me at the worst possible time.

4. now look at the companies through that lens. End of Three and Garage Gym Athlete literally build better humans through fitness. at PT Biz the company mission is helping clinicians scale their practices, which isn’t my mission directly. but my contribution to PT Biz is everything self-development related, taking care of clinicians’ mental health, families, sustainability. that’s building better humans inside a business that helps them help more humans.

5. the real estate company is the exception. it’s mostly Emily’s passion, design and architecture, and I’m a partner but it gets almost no time from me. that’s honest. don’t pretend everything fits when it doesn’t.

6. concrete test. a successful friend asked if I wanted to open a Papa John’s franchise with him. how long did I think about it. one nanosecond. it’s a great financial opportunity. it doesn’t make humans better. no. ask yourself why five times before any new venture. start with “why do I want this.” if the root answer doesn’t trace to your mission, pass. try harder.

Transcript

the man who chases two rabbits

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Hey, Jerred Moon here and welcome to the better human business podcast today, I’m going to be answering the question, how many companies should you have? Because Confucius said the man who chases two rabbits catches neither.

And I could not agree with that more. If you split your attention in too many directions, you are not going to succeed. You will fail. But at the same time, just because you caught a rabbit today does not mean you don’t need a rabbit tomorrow. So there are multiple different schools of thought on this.

So let’s dive into it. Personally, I do have multiple companies. I started into three fitness, did that for several years. We only sold fitness programs. Then that kind of morphed and evolved into garage gym athlete, which is a separate revenue stream, separate company where we’re doing a monthly membership model, but still within that fitness vein.

And then I started PT biz with my business partners. And that’s all about helping clinicians scale their practices, scale their businesses. And I’m going to talk about my decision to do that. And then also somewhere in there started a real estate company with my wife. And then also even more recently, we haven’t even fully announced that we have another company, a sub company to PT biz.

So how do I justify having all these different companies? Do I have the entrepreneurial ADD? Am I splitting my focus in too many different capacities to where I’m not succeeding as big as I should in any one of these areas? And so let’s talk about that a little bit more and what my framework is for all of these and the question you need to ask yourself.

The first thing per the rabbit example, if you chase too many rabbits, you’re not going to catch any, right? Very true. I think that in each business, if you start a new business or a new revenue stream, it needs to be very well established before you can move on to the next thing. If something’s not very well established or you still feel like there’s a lot of room for growth, do not split your attention.

why i run multiple companies

Do not split your focus. Like into three fitness, I was just selling one off programs that was, that had some scale potential, but not unlimited scale potential. Then we got to garage gym athlete and it got to a point where I felt like it got the biggest that I could make it without going in directions.

I did not want to go with the company and I could do whole other podcasts about deep dives on those kinds of things. And so I’ve strategically moved through these companies as I started them and each one of these gaps, they weren’t all started within a year or within two years of each other. All of these are several years apart, having very well established track record, knowing my numbers, know how the company operates before I’m willing to move on to a new revenue stream because if you do too much at once, you will lose your focus.

And I will say some of these companies probably could be a little bit bigger if I was a hundred percent all in. All I did was garage gym athlete. Sure. I could grow that company larger, but I like where it’s at and I like my lifestyle and I like what I’m doing. So how do I make these decisions? Is it all about, Hey, I, what I’m doing, I like my day to day.

No. The question I asked myself and the question I think you should ask yourself before wanting to take on a new revenue stream or before starting a new company, a new business is what is your mission in life? Again, what is your mission in life? I have a lot of goal setting information that I work on with people.

I really want people to get, go deep on their why, why they even exist, why they want to achieve goals, why they have goals. And once you answer that question, it becomes the litmus test for everything that you’re doing. I answered this question a very long time ago. My mission is to build better humans.

That’s my mission. That’s why I feel like I was put on this earth and that’s what I’m here to do. Doing it in my family, doing it in my businesses, build better humans. In fact, when I discovered that I was, I had the opportunity with my mentor to do, to start a new company. I was doing into three fitness, but I was in the very beginning stages, but start a new company with my mentor.

It was more in the real estate space, but I was just like, this doesn’t fit with my mission and I think it’s going to split my attention too much at into three fitness. So I just passed on it. I was like, it’s going to split my attention, which I don’t want to do. And two, it doesn’t really fit my overall mission of what I’m trying to do in this world.

wait until each one is established

Like when I am on my deathbed, I don’t want to say, Oh yeah, I made lots of money. Glad that happened. I want to be able to say, I stay true to myself, I stay true to my principles. And so that’s why you’re not going to see me start a supplement company because I don’t believe in the efficacy of supplements to overall health.

I think you could start there. Like if I just started a protein supplement and I was like, yeah, I believe in this one thing. But then if you want to scale, you have to have other things and you start coming in and I feel like it starts to water things down. You won’t see me do things that are not congruent with my overall mission.

And I urge you to do the same and answer the question for yourself. What is your mission? Is it to build better humans? And so let’s take a look at those in, in just these companies real quick. So into three fitness and garage gym athlete, they’re very fitness based company. Obviously we’re quite literally building better humans through programming and through mindset and through just getting people fitter, helping them lose weight or become stronger, all those kinds of things.

Pretty simple there. Now a peachy biz, a big part of what we do is we help clinicians, cash based clinicians start and scale their practices. And this might branch out to more people over time, but that’s the main goal there. I am not passionate about helping a clinician be able to take cash and grow a business.

I’m not gonna, if you are, if you’re here from the PT biz community, yeah, I’m not super passionate about that one specific thing, but you know what I am passionate about one, I’m helping those clinicians help more people quite literally physical therapists, chiropractors, they help humans get better.

They’re actually out there building, repairing humans and making them better. And I’m helping them do more of that. That’s one thing. Two, if you’re actually a part of what we do at PT biz, the biggest addition, the biggest things that I’ve brought to the table have been everything self development related.

So making sure that people are focused on their family, make sure that people are focused on their mental health, making sure that people are focused on taking care of themselves and their health and all of those things. That’s been my biggest addition here. I can help a lot on the business side and I do, and that’s a lot of what I do behind the scenes.

ask why five times

But as far as content, what I’ve brought to PT biz is making sure the humans in the program are better because as an entrepreneur, I know entrepreneurship can eat you alive. It can ruin relationships, it can ruin your mindset, it can ruin your mental health if you’re not careful. So I would like to equip the humans in our program to be better and to be able to take care of their mental health, take care of their families, not burn down the bridges, not burn up their relationships.

So even though I am, my mission is to build better humans and the overall company mission at PT biz is not build better humans like straight up, doesn’t matter how I fit, how my puzzle piece fits into the equation is to build better humans. And that’s always going to be what I’m bringing to the table.

And now the only one that I would say doesn’t truly fit that mission is I do own a real estate company with my wife and I want to say we run it by better human principles and all that kind of stuff. But that one is, to be honest, it’s more her passion, what she loves to do with design and architecture and all the things that she’s interested in and that she went to school for.

So that’s the main reason I’m a part of that company. Does it build better humans? I’m sure I could work myself backwards somehow to saying that it does, but ultimately that one doesn’t. And that’s why I don’t spend almost any time on it at all. It’s just a company that I am a part of. My wife runs it.

So you’ll see how this works, right? Like I try to stay focused in my area, building better humans. And I do that across multiple different companies. I could do that over one company, but I feel like my mission is bigger than one company. If I felt like my mission in life was to help human beings start a garage gym and train in their garage.

Boom. That’s my mission. Start a garage gym, train your garage. I would only do garage gym athlete, right? That would make a ton of sense, but that’s not my mission in life. My mission in life is to build better humans and I can do that in a lot of different capacities. It also eliminates a lot of businesses I won’t do that I’m not interested in that could just be a money grab or a great opportunity, but I’m not going to do it because it doesn’t make any sense to me.

the papa john’s franchise i said no to

Like for instance, I have a friend here in the local area who’s a very successful entrepreneur and he asked me if I would like to. He had a Papa John’s franchise and he wanted to open another one and he needed someone to do it with. And so he asked me if I’d be interested. How long do you think I thought about starting a Papa John’s franchise before I immediately said no, it was a nanosecond.

Not even let me think about it. Do you know why? Because Papa John’s franchise is not making humans better in any capacity. I don’t believe that at all. I would never open that company. I would never be a part of it. I won’t put my name on it. So these are the questions that you have to ask. This is the framework that you have to go through and I typically like to have people ask themselves why five times, why they want something.

You have to do a lot of reflecting to find out what you want, why you want it and get to that root cause. I have a lot of that information in my book, Killing Comfort. If you want to go grab that, helping you dive deeper on what your mission in this world is, what you want to do in this life. But that is my ultimate response to how many companies you should have.

You should have as many companies as you think that you need to fulfill your mission. So that could be one, that could be two, that could be none. You could be perfectly fulfilling your mission through working for someone else. It really does work that way. But if you are going to have a bigger mission and you feel like you need multiple companies, do not shoot yourself in the foot by starting a new company or new revenue stream too early as that shiny object it may be and you split your attention too much to where you will not succeed.

Make sure you have a very long track record before you start a new one and you’re very comfortable in moving that. You have the team that can support you focusing on something else temporarily and then go after it. So ultimately ask yourself, why was I put on this earth? If you can answer that question, how many companies you start and what you do in these companies is going to get a whole lot easier.

Try harder.