are you building the world's littlest skyscraper

Summary

there’s a building in Wichita Falls, Texas, called the world’s littlest skyscraper. it’s about 40 feet tall. in the early 1900s during an oil boom, a guy named J.D. McMahon raised $200,000 from investors to build a downtown skyscraper. he built exactly what the plans said. the plans were just in inches instead of feet. he skipped town, was technically not liable, and the city was left with a useless 40-foot building.

1. that’s a metaphor for entrepreneurship. you’re in a frenzy of doing. more sales here, fix this problem there, hire here, ship that. you’re building. at some point you stop and look at what you actually built and realize it isn’t what you wanted.

2. know your TAM, your total addressable market. how much of your market can you realistically own. if you’re brick and mortar, how many locations, how many employees, how much of the demand. if you’re online, what slice is yours to take.

3. zoom out at least once a year and do the actual math. best case scenario, how big can this get. if the answer disappoints you, you need to evolve before you’ve spent another five years building a 40-foot tower.

4. score the opportunity 1 to 10. score your skill set 1 to 10. Amazon is a 10 opportunity. selling rocks on the corner is a 1. you may have a 7 skill set stuck in a level 4 vehicle. or a 10 skill set stuck in a level 2 vehicle. that mismatch is the trap.

5. you have permission to change vehicles. my personal mission, building better humans, has never changed. how I deliver on it has evolved many times. when a better-fit opportunity appears, take it. don’t stay loyal to the wrong skyscraper.

do the math now. don’t be the J.D. McMahon story told on yourself. try harder.

Transcript

the wichita falls story

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. Are you building the world’s littlest skyscraper? This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon and today I have a question for you and a story. So do you know what you’re building in business right now?

So I went to pilot training in Wichita Falls, Texas. If you’re not familiar with Wichita Falls, Texas, it’s in North Texas, north of Dallas. It’s about the last major city that you would hit before you hit Oklahoma. It’s very north Texas and it’s very hot there. Like I said, I did pilot training there, very hot.

Smaller town, nothing like Dallas or the surrounding giant cities that are in Texas. A smaller town, medium-sized town, should I say, but it’s pretty cool, pretty cool spot. Anyway, they have a cool downtown area. And I remember going there a long time ago and there’s just one building that kind of stands out.

It’s very unusual looking. It’s this, it looks like an elevator shaft, like with a building around it. It looks like a skyscraper. It looks like a miniature skyscraper. That’s the best way to describe it. And the legend has it, and this is a true story, so it’s not just a legend. What happened was in that area, there was like a big oil boom in the early 1900s and a lot of the residents were becoming millionaires, like overnight millionaires leasing out their land, selling their land or whatever for mineral rights, oil drilling, all that kind of stuff.

And in a frenzy of all of these people trying to capitalize on this boom, this dude named J.D. McMahon came in and was trying to help facilitate the growth of the city and was like, hey, it looks like you guys need a ton of office space. I will build you a skyscraper in downtown Wichita Falls and here’s what it costs.

the frenzy of doing

And he got a bunch of investors, raised a bunch of money, and this was, I believe, early 1900s. And he sent the plans of what it would be, everyone, all the investors signed off on it. He raised all this money, I think it was $200,000, and $200,000 early 1900s, that’s a lot of money, a lot of money.

So he builds the skyscraper per the plans, exactly as he had stated he would, and then he skips town, he gets the hell out of there. And what he didn’t mention was, or what people failed to realize, is that he had put in, the plans were in inches and not in feet. So he wasn’t building a legit skyscraper, he was building a miniature skyscraper.

And that’s why this building is only 40 feet tall, I think is the official size. And like I said, it looks funny, if you’re ever in Wichita Falls, you can go check it out. I wouldn’t go to Wichita Falls just to check out this one thing, but if you ever find yourself there, you can check it out. And so it has all the history behind it and everything else.

And so he ripped everyone off. He did what he said, they tried to take legal action against him, but everyone was in such a hurry and they weren’t paying attention to detail, they had no attention to detail, that he didn’t actually do anything wrong legally. He had the plans, the plans said it was in inches, people didn’t know, he may have had conversations that were very misleading.

Not a good dude, but they ultimately couldn’t take any legal action on this guy because he had done exactly what he said he would do. And that was to build a world’s miniature skyscraper, the world’s littlest skyscraper is what they call it. And I think that it’s very interesting that people got in this frenzy and they weren’t paying attention to detail, they didn’t check up on the construction, they were just waiting for it to be done and then it was done, super disappointed with the final product.

And it just goes to show how much you need to pay attention to detail. But the real reason I bring this up is, a question for you is, going back to the beginning of the podcast, do you know what you’re building? Because right now, depends on where you’re at in business, you might just be building and building and building, you’re in the frenzy.

total addressable market

You’re just doing the next thing, you’re like, maybe you’re just, I always call entrepreneurs chief problem solving officers, like, maybe you’re just solving the next problem. How do we get more sales here, I need to hire a new person here, there’s a fire over here that I need to put out, we need more marketing, we need more advertising, we need more sales, so on and so forth.

You’re just doing it, you’re in the frenzy of doing all the things. But when you are finally done, and you will eventually be done, what are you going to have? Are you going to have a legit skyscraper, something that could go up in Chicago or New York City, this massive structure that is truly what you thought you were building this entire time?

Or are you going to end up with the world’s littlest skyscraper? Are you going to finish and realize that you boxed yourself in to a business or lifestyle that wasn’t what you really wanted? Which one is it going to be? Which one are you building? So my advice for you and something that I do on a regular basis is I try to zoom out and look at how big can this actually get, because we can all pretend like we can scale forever, but you will find your limitations somewhere.

There’s something that keeps coming up in conversation in my world, and that is TAM, Total Addressable Market. Do you know what your TAM is? How much of the market can you actually address? How much can you actually serve? If you have a brick and mortar, how many locations is it going to take for you to serve?

How many employees is it going to take you to serve that addressable market, and how much of the market can you even take? Because you can’t take 100, because you’re always going to have a competitor somewhere. If you’re an online business, what’s your total addressable market? How much can you own in that market?

Same process, but ultimately, what’s the biggest possible scenario that you can imagine and that’s realistic, and then what are you actually building and working towards? These are things that you need to sit down and think about every once in a while. I recommend at least once per year, because at first, it’s just success at all costs.

skill set vs opportunity

You’re just like, I just need to do whatever I can to build what I need to build to support my family and have the lifestyle I want. Then it’s just slowly adding on top of that, and that’s when you get past that survival standpoint in entrepreneurship, this is where I think the frenzy comes. The frenzy of what happened in Wichita Falls in building this miniature skyscraper is just you’re caught up in all the doing.

You’re too involved in what’s going on. You’re solving one problem after another, but you don’t actually know how big this thing is going to be and what you can really do. It’s okay to realize that an opportunity that you have been working on is not your biggest opportunity. How many times I’ve had that slap me in the face as an entrepreneur already is crazy, but you can be working in a level three opportunity, so if opportunities were one to 10, 10 being like Amazon, and one being selling rocks on the side of the street, where are you?

Maybe you’re in a level four opportunity as far as how big this can actually be, but what’s your skill set? Do you have a seven skill set, but you’re stuck in a level four opportunity? Or do you have a level 10 skill set, and you’re stuck in a level two opportunity? You really need to start thinking about these things.

What’s the scalability of your business? What’s it going to look like in five years, 10 years, 15 years? If it doesn’t match up with what you want, the vision you have for your life, you don’t have to keep doing that business. If no one will give you permission, then I will give you permission. You don’t always have to be doing what you’re doing now.

You can evolve. You can change. I’ve gone through multiple iterations of what I do, what I offer, and how I serve. My mission, personal mission hasn’t changed. Building better humans, that’s always at the core, but how I do it has changed. It’s evolved over time to get into bigger opportunities. As I see new opportunities, I realize my skill set might better serve this opportunity over here because I have a higher skill set for bigger opportunities.

That’s what I’m going to go do. Constantly be assessing that. That’s my only takeaway for you today is this isn’t goal setting. This is just thinking and actually doing the math. Think about what you want, and then go and look. How big is the market that you’re in? If you hit it out of the park, what would that be?

evolve before you’re stuck

How big could your business actually be? Best case scenario, working real math. Once you realize, okay, here’s where I might get bottlenecked, is that okay with you? If you get stuck at a certain amount of revenue per year, you can’t really grow past it, and you get maybe 1% to 2% growth per year, are you going to be okay with that?

If not, you might be finding yourself with a higher skill set and a lower opportunity vehicle, and you might need to change, evolve, and do something else. That’s perfectly okay. Or you might be like, you know what? I think my skill set is matching my opportunity vehicle, and I’m good. This is where I want to be.

I just need to work on building it as big as I think that it can get. You don’t want to end up in the situation where you’re 10 or 15 years down the road, and you’re done. You’re stuck. Your business can’t grow anymore. It can’t grow that much. It’s just we’re talking about fractional percentages of growth every single year.

You get past that really fun phase where things are growing fast, and it’s awesome. You’re going to get stuck somewhere. You don’t want to be in that position where you have the world’s littlest skyscraper. You’re like, damn, I’ve been working all this time for this thing. This is not what I actually wanted.

So it’s better to start thinking about those things now, doing the math now, and really assessing what your total addressable market is, how big your business can actually be. Do it now. Don’t wait. Don’t wait until you’re too far down the road and realize you can’t pivot or shift, and you don’t want to get stuck.

I know that’s a lot. It’s a lot of thinking. There’s a lot of things to do. You have to actually do some math here, but if that’s too hard for you, try Virgo.