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How I Failed in 2022

2022-12-16 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 40:02 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: YouTube, writing online and creators, Productivity and time) · mode: Reflection and life update · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, He changed his mind, Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present

Ali goes through his business's failures of 2022: missing a 5 million revenue target, scrapping the Part-Time Creator Academy and Creatorpreneur, leading without a clear vision, too little thinking time, over-delegating video writing and poor guarding of his own time; he concludes he wants a lifestyle business, not growth.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — A rambly video on the failures of 2022; what a failure is

  • ★★ Ali says much of failure depends on how you frame it; he prefers not to think of failure and, as is standard in personal development, reframes it as a learning experience. — 00:01:06

00:01:35 — His first therapist; sponsor read for BetterHelp

  • ★ Ali says 2022 has been the first time in his life that he has seen a therapist. — 00:01:35
  • ★★ 2022 was the first year Ali's business had targets for revenue, profit and profitability, which felt more important as the team grew. — 00:02:34

00:02:48 — Failure 1: missing the 5 million revenue target and spending as if it would be hit

  • ★★ Ali says his business made about 3 million in revenue in 2021. (hedged) — 00:03:03 · Angus
  • ★★ At the start of 2022 Ali and his general manager Angus set a revenue target of 5 million for the business. — 00:03:43 · Angus
  • ★★ Course sales are the biggest part of the revenue of Ali's business, ahead of sponsorships and AdSense. — 00:03:43
  • ★★★ Filming at the end of November 2022, Ali expects his business to make about 3.3 to 3.5 million in revenue in 2022, short of its 5 million target. (hedged) — 00:03:43
  • ★★ Ali aims for profit margins of 60%, a fairly arbitrary figure that he considers healthy. — 00:04:09
  • ★★ Against a target of 3 million, Ali expects his business to end 2022 with about 2 million in pre-tax profit. (hedged) — 00:04:57
  • ★★★ Ali's mistake was not keeping the business's spending and targets conservative, so that it stays very profitable even in the worst case rather than only in the best. — 00:05:24
  • ★★★ Ali's lesson: a single revenue target is pointless; a business should make conservative estimates and budgets for worst, middle and best cases, such as a course selling only 10% of its places. — 00:06:00
  • ★★ After years of growth from simply showing up and making videos, the last 12 to 18 months are the first time Ali's YouTube journey has felt hard, because he felt out of his depth. — 00:06:42
  • ★★ Trying to grow his business from 1 million to 5 million in revenue and its team from about three to 20 people were challenges Ali had never faced before. — 00:07:52
  • ★★ Citing the idea that happiness is expectations minus reality, Ali says his channel and business were smooth sailing while he had no targets, because anything was a bonus. — 00:07:52
  • ★★ Ali says chasing an arbitrary revenue target makes his business less fun for him, because it means chasing an external metric outside his control. — 00:08:37
  • ★★★ Ali would much rather make less money and have a more chilled-out time doing what he enjoys while still making decent money. — 00:08:37
  • ★★ Ali says reaching much higher revenue takes really wanting it and being really good at it, and he does not think he wants it. (hedged) — 00:09:15

00:09:38 — When is enough enough: a lifestyle business, doing rather than managing

  • ★★★ After months of journaling on when enough is enough, Ali has realised he is already at the point of enough and no longer feels a need to grow his business. — 00:10:43

  • ★★★ Ali once thought he wanted a team of 50 and a whole office; he now finds he likes being a doer rather than a manager or leader, and does not really like running a business. — 00:11:05

    “I really like being a doer rather than being a manager or rather than being a leader per se.”

  • ★★ Ali enjoys reading, writing, teaching, making videos and podcasts and turning academic papers into videos, but finds vision planning, objectives and key results, KPIs and managing a team objectively not fun. — 00:11:32

  • ★★ Ali's business has recently been working with the coach Daniel Priestley, whose books Ali calls really good. — 00:12:01
  • ★★ Daniel Priestley (quoted): Daniel Priestley says that to optimise for fun, freedom and flexibility you want a lifestyle boutique business doing at least 100,000 in revenue per employee per year. — 00:12:01 · lifestyle business
  • ★★ Daniel Priestley (quoted): Daniel Priestley says beyond 12 people a business is too big to be small and too small to be big until about 40, a stretch he calls the desert. — 00:12:29
  • ★★ Having realised he does not want more than a certain amount of growth, Ali can now spend all his time writing or filming videos instead of managing. — 00:12:52
  • ★★ For 2023 Ali wants his business's targets to be quite conservative, so that even the worst case leaves a very profitable business. — 00:13:38
  • ★★ Angus now runs the whole business side of Ali's company, and half the team works on the courses, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy and customer support. — 00:14:13 · Angus, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali's advice to himself: be conservative in your business estimates and keep expectations low; needing ambitious revenue targets just to sustain a business is a very scary place to be. — 00:15:09
  • ★★★ If Ali could make six figures doing what he loves, he would be living his best life; growing far beyond that for the sake of growth is not the way forward. (hedged) — 00:15:53

00:16:05 — Failure 2: scrapped projects, line extension, planning versus doing

  • ★★★ In 2022 Ali's team started three major projects and then scrapped them, which annoyed a team that had put a lot of work into them. — 00:16:17
  • ★★★ One of the scrapped projects was the Part-Time Creator Academy, a YouTube channel meant to teach people how to be creators. — 00:16:17
  • ★★ Ali's team spent about six months planning the Part-Time Creator Academy and its branding, paying around 10K for logo designs. (hedged) — 00:16:46
  • ★★ After making a handful of videos for the Part-Time Creator Academy, Ali realised that starting and growing a second YouTube channel from scratch was not worth the work. — 00:16:46
  • ★★★ When Ali proposed scrapping the Part-Time Creator Academy, there was palpable relief in the room, and the team scrapped it along with a few other things. — 00:17:44
  • ★★ Another scrapped project was Creatorpreneur, which Ali's team tried to build into its own brand teaching people to be creators without Ali being overly involved. — 00:17:44
  • ★★★ Ali says his business, though fairly passive income, relies on him: there is really no such thing as passive income, and it depends on him continuing to make relevant videos. — 00:18:09 · passive income
  • ★★ Ali's business ran into the problem of line extension from The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: being good at one thing and trying to be good at others. — 00:18:36
  • ★★ MrBeast (quoted): MrBeast said in an interview that one of the biggest mistakes creators make is starting other businesses once they are big on YouTube and neglecting their channel. — 00:19:03
  • ★★★ Wanting both a small lifestyle business and a bigger business, two very different visions for a business and for life, Ali pulled his team in two directions. — 00:19:44 · lifestyle business
  • ★★★ Another mistake, planning the Creator Academy channel for six to eight months, taught Ali that you learn a hundred times more by doing a thing than by planning it. — 00:21:26
  • ★★ On Ali's second channel his team did a daily vlog every day for 30 days. — 00:21:26
  • ★★ The bias towards action helped: committing to a 30-day daily-vlog experiment gave Ali's team enough data to decide that the daily vlog was not a project they wanted. — 00:21:54
  • ★★★ Ali would not say the lesson is to always jump into action: both always acting and planning too much have caused problems in his business, so there is a middle ground. — 00:22:21
  • ★★★ Ali says you only really learn to run a business by doing it repeatedly, which is why second-time founders do best and coaches with that tacit knowledge are valuable, more than business degrees or books. — 00:22:51

00:23:19 — Failure 3: team autonomy versus the leader's vision

  • ★★★ Ali's mistake in leading his team was not seeing the importance of having his own vision for the business and hoping team members would tell him what to do. — 00:23:19
  • ★★ Ali would adopt Gareth's suggestions, only to decide three months later he did not want them, so Gareth wasted three months of effort. — 00:24:03
  • ★★★ As the leader and owner of a business, Ali says, he needs to know where it is going, and can then be agnostic about how the team gets there. — 00:24:31
  • ★★ Ali's team members told him they like autonomy but also like knowing where the business is going. — 00:24:31

00:25:41 — Failure 4: no time to think; strategy versus execution

  • ★★★ Ali recommends entrepreneurs spend several hours every week just thinking; Traction counts at least an hour a week thinking about the business and its vision as a hallmark of an effective leader. — 00:25:41
  • ★★ For most of 2022 Ali was working in his business, in the weeds and micromanaging, rather than making time to step back and think about it strategically. — 00:26:05
  • ★★★ Beginners in business make too much strategy and too little execution, Ali says: business plans, cards and five-year models are nonsense at the start, when it is all about execution. — 00:26:56
  • ★★★ When a business is scaling, more execution no longer moves the needle: once it has traction, its leader's strategy and vision become really important. — 00:27:18
  • ★★ Ali journaled about 10,000 words on where his business is going, which made him realise he does not care about growth. — 00:28:28

00:28:55 — Failure 5: over-delegating the writing of videos

  • ★★ Two years into his YouTube channel, Ali outsourced editing to Christian, which he calls amazing. — 00:29:23 · Christian
  • ★★★ About a year before this video, seeing writing as the bottleneck to more videos, Ali hired writers to script his videos so he could read them from a teleprompter. — 00:29:23

  • ★★★ Ali calls hiring writers to script his videos over-delegating: abdication rather than delegation. — 00:29:52

    “It was abdication rather than delegation.”

  • ★★ Reading writers' scripts from a teleprompter felt really bad to Ali: he had to spend hours tweaking each script, six hours to edit one. — 00:30:30

  • ★★ Ali says the common advice to delegate anything someone else can do 70% as well as you is not black and white. — 00:30:58
  • ★★★ A business's core strengths must be done at 100%, Ali says: a blog post made from his video need not be written as he would, but his videos, the core of the business, must be. — 00:31:25
  • ★★ These days nobody on Ali's team really writes his videos for him. — 00:31:25
  • ★★ Ali's team is hiring researchers to find scientific papers for his videos, while Ali writes the videos himself. — 00:32:08
  • ★★ Ali says people subscribe to his channel for his own thoughts and opinions, not those of a writer he reads from a teleprompter. — 00:32:49
  • ★★ Ali really wants to make a video on how to uncover your core values, part of acceptance and commitment therapy, with someone else sifting the research papers for him. — 00:33:28

00:34:13 — Failure 6: his own time management and the book

  • ★★★ Ali's final failure of 2022 was his own time management: overly involved in micromanaging his team, he stopped making time for writing and filming. — 00:34:13
  • ★★★ Despite a bigger team, Ali filmed about half as many videos in 2022 as in 2021, which he puts down to spending too much time micromanaging people. — 00:34:50
  • ★★★ For five years Ali has made videos by picking a topic that might help someone, writing a few bullet points and speaking from the heart. — 00:35:18
  • ★★ Overthinking his videos and micromanaging the team meant Ali did not make the time to sit down and film. — 00:35:18
  • ★★★ Ali's book has been the major project of his life since the publication deal was confirmed a year ago, yet it is the thing he has made the least time for. — 00:35:44
  • ★★ Ali's editor Rachel pointed out that he called his book his highest priority, yet it was the lowest priority in his calendar. — 00:35:44
  • ★★★ Ali has realised this year (2022) in particular that it is his job to guard his own time. — 00:36:38
  • ★★★ Ali's calendar now blocks four hours in the morning for writing and three hours for filming; everything else fits around them or does not happen. — 00:37:08
  • ★★★ Ali advises working out the most important things and actively protecting time for them, because the urgent is rarely important, yet urgent things always take over the calendar. — 00:37:31

00:37:43 — Is this kind of video useful; clover emoji; the stool collapses

  • ★★ Ali cannot fault a former viewer who finds him less relatable now: in medical school he learned far better from people a year ahead than from professors. — 00:38:21
  • ★ Ali is keen to keep documenting his business but wants it to be useful, and asks viewers whether to continue or stick to productivity and personal development. — 00:39:11

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: lifestyle business · Part-Time Creator Academy

Also: People: Amber · Angus · Becky · Christian · Daniel Priestley · Elizabeth · Gareth · Gordon · Jamie · MrBeast · Rachel (editor, mentioned from 2022)

Projects: Creatorpreneur · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing · Traction

Concepts: acceptance and commitment therapy · core values · happiness equation · line extension · passive income · reframing failure · stretch goals

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