[#028] My First Billion: The Delay Was Protection
It’s crazy how this works.
Sunday, I walked into church expecting a normal service.
Well, kinda normal, because it was family and friends day.
However, what happened, I wasn’t ready for and couldn’t have prepared for.
I left ordained as a minister and installed as the Lead Associate Pastor.
WHAT???!!!
I had no idea it was coming.
My wife and pastors knew. And a handful of other people, but I was the last to find out.
And I'm still processing it honestly.
Because you can believe God has a plan for your life and still be caught off guard when He confirms it in front of the whole church.
That's what this week started with and it set the tone for everything else.
Because this week I've been in the lab and the portfolio is growing.
We have four companies now in the portfolio...
Media company, business education/consulting company, NIL consulting firm/agency and our event company.
Had a team meeting with the NIL side and that's really crystallizing.
The NIL world is massive and still new and I’m excited about it because I’m learning a lot about it and the opportunity to help so many young athletes.
On the Strategic Scale Summit side we finalized all the numbers from the last event.
We got an 8X return on what we spent to pull it off.
We were in the process of making a bunch of changes for the next one, however this update made us stop in our tracks.
We were changing pricing, event structure, how to attend and new messaging.
Then we stopped and asked... why are we changing four things when the event performed?
So we dialed it back and decided…
Let’s just change one variable:
Just the audience the event is for.
That's a lesson I keep relearning...
When something works, you don't overhaul it, you refine it.
Change one thing, measure it, then change the next thing.
Rinse and repeat.
It sounds simple but it takes discipline to not fix what isn't broken just because you're excited and like to create.
Speaking of lessons…
We had an event planned for the 27th of May, Launch Your Ads Live.
I also have a school trip to Spain with my twelve-year-old MJ at the end of the month.
The dates I had on my calendar said we leave the 29th.
Turns out we leave the 27th, same day as the event was planned.
Now here's the thing...
We had some delays in launching the marketing for the event.
Funnel builder got sick, had to do way more revisions than usual, so marketing hadn’t launched and no tickets were sold.
Old me would’ve been frustrated about the delays.
But if we had been on schedule, we would've been selling tickets to an event I couldn't even be at.
The delay was protection.
I've seen this happen enough times now to recognize the pattern and be at peace with it.
What feels like a setback is a strategic setup.
What feels like friction is redirection.
And what feels like lost time is God buying you time you didn't know you needed.
Earlier this week I posted about Thomas Edison watching his factory burn to the ground.
Instead of responding in panic, he told his son to go get his mother because she'd never see a fire like this again.
He then rolled up his coat as a pillow, laid down on a table in the ruins, and went to sleep.
Then woke up and started rebuilding the next day.
That story hit me because I think the best builders aren't the ones who never lose anything.
They're the ones who've lost something and chose to build again anyway.
That's where I am right now in some ways.
I haven’t technically “lost” anything…
However, I’m building from a place of a more solid foundation.
I’ve outgrown the identity I obsessively built and God has healed me from the need to prove.
He had to show me that my days of people-pleasing, status-tracking, and overachieving for the sake of significance are over…
…and that is not the version of me who can hold the next season.
This looks like me building from different principles and a different pace.
I’m reading this book called Blueprints Of Dominion by Isi Igenegba and during last night’s reading, it said…
“True prophetic economy will first break you before it builds you. It will strip your metrics of success. It will offend your timelines. It will confront your motives.
God is not trying to bless you. He’s trying to rebuild you as a portal. Until you become the economy, you cannot steward one.”
That landed for me and was even prophetic, it put words to where I am.
In the lab, being rebuilt by God while building what He wants me to build…
Without my arbitrary success metrics and timelines fueled by my motives.
This is the first email I’ve written all week, I’ve just been building assets.
IP, building out workflows, tightening systems, creating marketing assets.
The unsexy, behind the scenes stuff that creates quantum leaps.
On A Personal Note
Vanessa and the kids head out of town this weekend, so I'll do what I always do when I have the house to myself...
Sleep in, read, think and binge watch some shows (I’m knee deep into 1923 right now).
Maybe take myself out to lunch or dinner and go for a hike. We’ll see. This season is quiet but it's not idle.
And I'm learning that the best way to build something is based on The Theory of Constraints.
Identify the weakest bottleneck (the constraint) that limits a system's throughput, such as production speed or profit.
Fix that constraint.
Then move on to the next one.
And everything doesn’t have to be done now.
You do plan on being in business 5, 10 even 20-30 years from now, don’t you?
Just like we saw with optimizing the Strategic Scale Summit…
Don’t try to overhaul everything at once.
I’ve made that mistake several times.
Change one thing.
Get it right.
Then change the next one.
If you're in a season where it feels like everything needs to change... try changing just one thing this week (based on your #1 constraint).
You might be surprised how much happens from that.
Tell those you love that you love them.
Marquel
