Oct 29, 2021 3 min read BCC

A Portfolio Of Small Bets | BCC 040

Listen to this week's newsletter:

This tweet from @JustinSaas hit hard this week:

Justin Welsh

@JustinSaaS

Last week my little one-person business crossed $1.3M in revenue.

It took 810 days, I ran zero paid ads and operate at a ~98% margin.

Here are the 14 steps of my strange journey:

Hope it's helpful to someone.

[🧵 thread]

October 26th 2021

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Retweets

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We had a nice back-and-forth about it with @dvassallo who (I think) coined the phrase "portfolio of small bets".

The idea is that rather than putting all your eggs in one basket, be it with a job/employer, one big client, or having any sort of "single point of failure", you diversify and have more, smaller bets.

Justin, as he explains in the Twitter thread, started with consulting, then doubled his rates, and then added a digital product, an online course to help people master LinkedIn.

If any one client went away, he'd still be fine. Adding the product gave him an even more resilient portfolio.

All of this got me thinking about my own portfolio of small bets. Did I even have one?

Turns out, I did, and I realized something that blew my mind.

Here's my current portfolio of small bets, in descending order of cost:

Film/TV/Commercial Producing ($X,XXX-XX,XXX)
Owner of Craftsman Creative ($X,XXX/mo)
Creative Business Consulting ($X,XXX/mo)
Creative Business Coaching ($X,XXX/mo)
Hourly Consulting Calls ($XXX/hour)
Online Courses ($XX-XXX)
Co-founder of Benchmark App

And, coming next year:

Craftsman Creative Membership Community ($XXX/year)
Craftsman Creative Book ($XX)

So, yeah, NINE different "small bets" that I've built over my career, most of them over the last 18 months.

Here's what blew my mind:

I have already built a portfolio of NINE small bets!

I had NO idea that I had so many. I think if you'd asked me off the top of my head I would have said three or four.

There are two places where creatives get stuck, the first being not creating a portfolio of small bets that can help them get the freedom they want through their creative work.

The second is building too many at once and not giving them each enough attention.

I have the second problem.

In total this portfolio delivers a nice six-figure income for me and my family. But right now it's very imbalanced - one or two of them represent over 90% of my income.

So my goal for the next two months as well as 2022 is to balance out the portfolio. I know exactly how to get each of these small bets to $10k a month in revenue, for example:

500 books per month
40 hour-long strategy calls
two consulting clients
one course a day

When you start to break down each small bet you can start to see a clear path forward to the goal we all - I think - want: freedom and independence.

The portfolio of small bets approach is one way to achieve that outcome, and there are more and more people every day that are using the framework to create the life they want for themselves.

Thanks to Kevon Cheung for this awesome shoutout!

"Your mission [of helping five-figure creators build six-figure businesses] is so needed! The transition is not easy at all but so vital."

Some links for you this week:

I started using a new template for this weekly BCC Email (you'll see the difference if you subscribe to the weekly emails)!

The template pack was built by @brennandunn and you can get it at https://createandsell.co

The new artwork is an NFT that I snagged on the first day that @AprilynneA launched them, and you can see the rest of the amazing connection (and even purchase your own!) on OpenSea.

Lastly, some new chapters of the book this week!

https://blog.craftsmancreative.co/7-principles-of-marketing-mastery-for-creators/

https://blog.craftsmancreative.co/marketing-for-creatives-pull-not-push/

https://blog.craftsmancreative.co/grow-awareness-and-trust-through-your-marketing/

Thanks for reading!

Daren