Early Exit #37: What If It All Falls Apart?

Imagine the worst case scenario: losing all your income. What do you do? Surprisingly, you have a lot of options.

Apr 16, 2024

You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business by Nick Lafferty.

Last week: I was at a marketing conference in Austin meeting some of you!!
The week before: March Finance Update

What if you woke up tomorrow and lost all of your income?

Poof. All of your income disappears overnight.

If you’re a full-timer, you’re going from 1 income source to none which scares the absolute shit out of me. That fear is my primary motivator for building a diversified set of income streams.

If you’re a consultant, you’re going from many income sources down to none, which isn’t as unrealistic as it sounds.

In the 11 months I’ve been solo, I’ve slowly lost all of my recurring affiliate income. My income now is weighted all towards consulting, and while I have many clients, it is possible that over time that number starts to dwindle as well.

Does that also scare the shit out of me? Hell yeah it does.

So today we’re going to talk about that fear, what it actually means, and why it’s not as big of a deal as you think.

So what if it does?

Let’s look at two examples of losing your income:

Losing a full-time job
Losing affiliate income

In my affiliate example it all came from one place: my website which has been crushed by Google algorithm updates in the last year.

And while it seemingly disappeared overnight, it actually died a slow, painful death over 12 months.

That income also didn’t appear overnight either.

It took me years of writing, optimizing, and doing other activities to grow my website into an income producing asset, which is what makes losing it (and any income source) so painful.

I may have lost that income, but I didn’t lose the knowledge that got me there in the first place.

I could take that knowledge and try again. I could take a course and expand on that knowledge to fix any mistakes I made.

I could look at joining another company with a similar business model (fun fact: I once talked to a company about acqui-hiring myself and my website).

Here’s my point: The knowledge and skills it took to build my income stream is super valuable.

But don’t just take it from me.

Take It From Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank is a productivity Youtuber with with ~3 million subscribers. Well, he was a Youtuber.

He stopped uploading on his channel for nearly a year and instead pursued a business that only sold Notion templates (you can see why I like him..).

That business generated over a million dollars in sales in 2022.

He talks about this exact topic on a recent video with Ali Abdaal (also another productivity Youtuber)

Ali asked him this question: Are you worried about tying your future to Notion’s? What if Notion stops growing, does that mean your business will stop growing too?

You get to space with a rocket ship. And you eventually have to jettison parts of the rocket. Whereas if you have one bicycle, and you never replace any parts on the bicycle, you’re never getting to space. You can travel forever on a bicycle but you’ll never have that huge burst required to get to space.

His point is that your business will need to evolve over time. Your focus will need to change if you want to keep growing.

Maybe Notion does stop growing one day. But it’s not a dead end.

Thomas is known as someone who can translate complex ideas into simple formats. If he stops teaching people how to use Notion, he can teach them something else.

He’s proven that he has those skills and he can pivot into something else.

Those skills give him endless amounts of opportunity

There’s always opportunity

Maybe don’t burn down your banana stand though

If you’re focused on growing then there will always be opportunity for you.

I’ve grown so much over the last year, but I’ve done two really big things:

Built a consulting business that grossed $34k last month
Built a newsletter approaching 2,000 subscribers

But those things are way more interesting if we abstract away all the details.

In my consulting business, what I actually do is:

Identify founders and companies that need marketing help
Coach them on the right and wrong ways to grow their business
Help generate millions of dollars of new business

Wait, that sounds cool as hell. Where else could I apply those skills?

A venture capital firm could hire me to exclusively help their portfolio companies grow (hint hint, anyone?)
Another agency hires me to help them find more clients.
I could, gasp, take a full-time job.

Let’s talk about the newsletter. When I show up mostly every week in y’alls inbox, what I’m actually doing is:

Finding an opportunity in the market for authentic content
Creating a brand and that people seem to enjoy (thank you all ❤️)
Writing content that is genuinely helpful
Building an audience without any ad spend

Where else could I apply those skills? I could:

Help other founders build an authentic brand on LinkedIn (there are legit businesses doing this already)
Help other companies grow their own newsletter or community
Help a VC firm tell their unique investment story how they help founders grow

So even if my consulting business and newsletter falls apart tomorrow, the skills that got me here will help me pivot into something else.

What got you here can get you there

You’ve also done some really cool shit.

You have lived a vibrant, unique, and interesting life.

Your work? It’s cool as hell.

Start abstracting away the details of your life and summarize it like I did above.

Ask yourself these questions:

What have you learned?
Who have you met?
What have you built?

The skills that got you here can also get you there.

So if it all falls apart tomorrow? Who cares. You’ve got all the skills you need to start over.

See you all next week,

Nick