What Does it Take to Build Something that Creates both Happiness and Profit?

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My journey began at nine years old when I placed candy machines in three local stores and tracked every penny in a journal.

I think about the work that went into doing that for someone who had been on the planet for only a handful of years.

I had to save the money to buy the machines.

I had to reinvest money back into the candy from my stacks of quarters sitting at the bottom of the machine.

I had to wait for a ride to the store to buy the candy, had to ride my bike for miles to check on my machines, and did all of this while dealing with my own shyness when dealing with others.

It was a lot, but I never thought about stopping.

When I was 18, I wanted to buy investment properties to flip and make money, but I had no money for a down payment.

I found a loan officer that said she could find ways to get homes for no money down, but that I would have to have two years of established work and income.

So I worked some painful, shitty jobs for two years. Then I purchased four houses on my own by the time I was 20.

When I was 26, I started my digital company, and it wasn’t until I was 31 that I finally thought I could actually do this work without another full-time job to fill the gaps for keeping a roof over my head.

That was five years of working nonstop for others, while going to school full-time, trying to build my own business, and stumbling along the way.

By my early forties, I was making half a million dollars a year from my digital business with long-term clients, one-time projects, and a long wait list.

Yet, I was quite unhappy and felt disconnected. I felt uninspired and different from most people that I shared space with in my professional life.

I started paying attention to how little time I had and how time now meant more to me than money.

That was when I decided to start building EliminateMeetings.com.

I had the idea while walking one day to a client, and bought the domain that day.

I sat on the idea for a year and then started to practice the idea of eliminating meetings in my own life as a test.

Within 12 months, I eliminated 58% of my meetings. By 18 months, I had eliminated 91%.

I then spent the next 13 months diligently building out data, concepts, systems, and a 60-page website that could help change other people’s lives, all while still managing my digital company.

I did all of this not knowing if anyone would ever care or if it would make a dollar.

When I look at my life as a solopreneur, I see the work.

I see so much time spent alone, toiling in the dark, striving for a goal, and the whole time, all I am wondering is if it will allow me to have a better life.

Money means nothing to me if it doesn’t create the opportunity to live, to experience, to help, to be.

And this is the 3-minute version that leaves out the tears, the fears, the frustration, the self-consciousness of being seen, and the endless hours of showing up time and time again to build.

There were plenty of moments when I had no idea if any of it was going to work. I kept going anyway. I think that is the part of being a solopreneur that people rarely see.

They see what you built.

They rarely see how many times you had to convince yourself to keep building it.

The work is hard. The uncertainty is real. And much of the time, nobody else knows how much it takes to keep going.

But we keep going.

And maybe that is the one thing we can all understand about building a life of our own: none of us really knows where it will lead.

But if we don’t keep building, we will never see those possibilities.

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