My First Million
The best business ideas come from noticing what's working and doing it better, faster, or for a different audience.
Farm vs Market Price Mental Model
When you own a cash-flowing business, ignore daily market price fluctuations and focus on the underlying business fundamentals, like a farmer would ignore random offers for their productive farm.
Decision Rule
If your business produces consistent cash flow and you know its fundamental value, ignore market volatility and focus on operational performance.
How It Works
Stock prices reflect market emotion and speculation, but business value comes from actual cash generation. Daily price movements are noise, not signal about business quality.
Failure Modes
Selling good businesses during market downturns
Getting distracted by price movements instead of business performance
Confusing paper wealth changes with actual business deterioration
Making emotional decisions based on stock ticker movements
Example Decision
“Andrew's stock dropped 50% but the underlying business fundamentals remained strong. Instead of panicking, he focused on business operations and ignored the 'yokels at the fence' offering different valuations daily.”
Related Knowledge
Structure matters more than price in business deals
Focus on creative deal structures rather than just negotiating lower prices when acquiring businesses
B2B influencer marketing works as well as consumer influencer marketing
Business influencers can command similar premiums and drive similar results as consumer influencers in their respective
Audience-Accelerated Business Acquisition
Investment strategy where you buy existing profitable businesses and use your audience/influence to dramatically accelerate their growth rather than starting from scratch.
Influencer-Business Synergy Multiplier
Strategic combination where a mediocre-to-good business paired with the right influencer creates exponentially greater value than the sum of parts.
CEO Management Error Classification
Framework for determining when to intervene with hired CEOs by classifying potential errors as either fatal (business-ending) or non-fatal (learning opportunities).
Scale local service business from $13M to $140M revenue
10x revenue growth while maintaining service quality and building systematic training programs