Eggs, Baskets, And Avoiding Suicide

This is a true story about how too many eggs in one basket can wreck your life and make you almost suicidal. I didn't even change the names (name, actually) to protect the innocent... because there were no innocents in this story - only one dumb*ss who learned his lesson.

This story begins in 1996, and it stars me. I was slogging away in my "career" in HR Management for corporate America. Big company, household name, great benefits, yadda yadda yadda. I had the very real vision of a future full of daily middle management "fun" for, oh, about the next 35 years of my life. I was not hurting for "things," but my soul was a mess. Anyone who has spent a few years caught in the cogs of a giant corporation, with all of its inane bureaucracy and entrenched morons in positions of power because they're golfing buddies with the head honchos knows exactly what I mean.

For the rest of you, three words suffice: KILL. ME. NOW.

Along came what saved me - Ye Olde Internets. I remember the day I decided to start a little resume writing service online. I put up a Geocities web page (remember those little charmers?). And in those Wild West days, all you really had to do was mention such a thing in a BBS or AOL chat room and you got takers. But the demand took me totally by surprise. I was making rent and a car payment working weekends. Let's just say the "webpreneur" bug infected me. And it's incurable.

That resume thing turned somehow into an email marketing business. For the life of me, I can't remember how it evolved along that path, but it did. By the middle of 1997, I was doing well enough to contemplate quitting the soul-sucking "career." Which I did, despite the pleas of my family and many friends not to do something so reckless and insane. They meant well - and they turned out to be more than half right in the short term - but I didn't listen.

So there I was, off on my own and facing the unknown. It should have been the scariest time of my life, but it was just the opposite. I felt set free. Again, if you've been there, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And I really poured everything I had into that email business. I built it up to a very comfortable living. I worked literally about an hour a day (sometimes not even that much) once all the pieces were in place, and spent the rest on the golf course or taking my wife out, etc.

But I made one critical mistake. I put too many eggs (basically all of them) in one basket. I had two really big customers that ordered regularly. After they'd been with me for awhile, I got lazy. I stopped trying to find new clients. I started thinking short-term. I stupidly assumed the big fish would stick with me forever. I took my eye off the ball, bottom line.

Then along came a little thing called the CAN-SPAM Act. Now, what I was doing was not spam, but that didn't matter to these two big players. They freaked out, got scared for their reputations and businesses, and they bolted. Both of them. Within weeks of each other. I simply could not convince them to hang tough.

To put this in perspective, I went from six figures to almost nothing in the span of about 5 weeks. Talk about a wake-up call. But it came too late. The business folded, I went from riches to rags, and fell into a deep funk.

I've since recovered, obviously, but it was slow going, in part because I was so depressed about that experience. At the time I just saw myself as a victim of bad luck. But that's not what I was. I was a victim of my own shortsightedness and failure to treat my business as a business. I assumed way too much and got lazy. I could have avoided it all had I kept my head in the game.

And most importantly, things never would have been so devastating had I just not put all the eggs in one basket. I guess that's why I'm posting this thread. Don't rest on your laurels if things are going well for you. And if you're still in business building mode, moving your way up, diversify. Don't rely too heavily on any one source of income, be that one customer or one way of doing business or one big money niche. Have multiple streams set up, so when you do take that inevitable hit in one area, you can keep right on rockin'.

Because feeling suicidal is never fun, and starting over from nothing is possibly even less fun.

John