All Good Things Come To An End: What’s Your Action Plan?

David Bowie passed away at 69… two days after releasing a new album.
Three weeks prior to that, Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister, leader of Motorhead suddenly died only four days after celebrating his 70th birthday.
All good things come to an end.
A few years ago, I was driving north to Toronto after paying Buffalo a visit.
One of the biggest nightmares you hear about in the news (almost) became a personal reality.
A truck carrying a palette of boxes that were secured with little more than shrink-wrap lost one of the boxes, right there on the freeway…
…with me and other drives doing 75mph.
Thankfully (and very luckily), the box fell right at the foot of a huge bridge where the traffic narrows.
This narrowing forces cars to slow down, so we all had ample time to swerve around the box safely, without putting cars inother lanes at hazard.
The incident certainly got me to thinking, though…
“If that box caused me to be massively injured, where would my life be afterwards?”
Thoughts of establishing an income security system suddenly weighed heavily on my mind.
I’ve had income streams collapse in the past and you can be sure that these experiences have taught me to always hedge my bets.
This was a HUGE turning point in the way I look at business and what the proper model should look like.
By the time the year the incident occurred came to an end, the following four criteria were essential to any business I’d consider taking part in:
- I needed a business that drew repeat sales from the same buyers — ideally this would come from an automated billing program, but would be acceptable from fostering repeat business without having a credit card on file.
- The ideal business must be managed by others without compromising my control.
- The business cannot be usurped — as unsexy as accounting happens to be, if you’re going to have others running the books, you MUST learn to accept accounting to an extent to make sure nothing flighty’s going on.
- The ideal business can be operated remotely — speaks for itself.
Shortly after my moment of clarity, I had coffee with a future business partner.
He recommended it’s time we jointly read this book together and start laying down the foundation for the Year-3 exit we agreed to when we became partners and incorporated.
Companies that are largely automated and subscription-based are massive buy-out targets — far superior to businesses that operate on a piecemeal sales system.
Bottom line: If you want to build the same financial security system I’ve been working on, I strongly recommend you pick up John Warrilow’s book, The Automatic Customer.
You’ll be shown how to build a business that’ll serve you well without consuming all your time while carrying the promise of a lucrative “out” when the time comes.