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If I could go back and give my younger self five business lessons before I started Bumblebee Linens and MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, they would be these: 99% of entrepreneurship advice is wrong for anyone with a family, start before you feel ready, do not build a business around what you love, everything is a commodity so sell to emotion, and a side hustle is not actually risky. Those five ideas are the frame I have used to build a seven-figure ecommerce store and a top-25 marketing podcast while working roughly 20 hours a week and being home for my kids every night.
This is the very first Family First Friday solo episode of the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast, where I share the mindset shifts behind The Family First Entrepreneur. Every one of these lessons came from either doing it wrong myself or watching one of the 450+ entrepreneurs I have interviewed do it wrong at a bigger scale.
Here are the five lessons in order, plus what I would do differently on each one if I were starting today.
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Table of Contents
Key takeaways
- 99% of entrepreneurship advice is aimed at single, unattached men with no family responsibilities. Follow it and you will win the business but lose the reason you started it in the first place.
- You will feel ready to launch about six months after you have already started. Start before you feel ready, because the first few steps are also the least risky.
- Do not build a business around what you love. Most of running a business is sales, marketing, customer service, and inventory, none of which is a passion for anyone.
- Everything is a commodity, so sell to emotion. Drew Whitman’s Life Force 8 explains why customers buy: survival, enjoyment, fear, sex, status, comfort, protecting loved ones, and social approval.
- A side hustle is not risky if you keep the day job, spend small, and iterate. My wife and I started Bumblebee Linens with $630 and now do over $1 million a year in revenue.
Lesson 1: 99% of entrepreneurship advice is wrong for anyone with a family
Most entrepreneurship advice is wrong for anyone with a family because it is written by single, unattached men who have no one to feed but themselves. The “grind 80 hours a week” mantra works for someone with no dependents. It destroys someone with kids, a spouse, and a mortgage.
I have interviewed more than 450 successful entrepreneurs on this podcast, and privately many of them will admit they never see their family, they are burned out, and they are running on fumes. One billionaire I interviewed said his single biggest life regret is that his business destroyed his marriage, and he would trade all of the money to be back with his family.
You can be financially free without being a stranger to your kids. You can make real money and still have the time to enjoy it. The tradeoff most business media assumes is not actually the tradeoff, if you build the business around a set of family-first principles from day one.
Lesson 2: Start your business before you feel ready
Start your business before you feel ready, because you will feel ready roughly six months after you have already started. Nobody feels ready on day one, and waiting for the feeling is what kills most first businesses before they ever launch.
I wanted to start MyWifeQuitHerJob.com for years before I actually did. Two things blocked me: I was intimidated by WordPress (yes, engineers can be intimidated by tech too), and I told myself I hated writing.
When I finally installed WordPress, the setup took a couple of hours, not two years. The next day I wrote my first post and realized blog posts do not have to be long or eloquent to be useful.
When my wife and I started Bumblebee Linens, we knew nothing about ecommerce, nothing about advertising, and nothing about selling online. We made over $100,000 in profit in year one anyway.
The first steps of any business (installing the software, listing the product, taking the first order) are the least risky steps in the entire journey. Delaying those steps is what makes people feel like starting a business is dangerous.
Lesson 3: Do not build a business around what you love
Do not build a business around what you love, because most of what you actually do every day as a business owner is not the thing you love, and turning a passion into a business is the fastest way to grow to resent it. I sell linens, but my day is spent on sales, marketing, inventory, and customer service. The same list would exist if I sold computers, supplements, or garage doors.
My wife loved to embroider blankets and pillowcases as a hobby. The moment we started doing custom embroidery for paying customers, she started hating it. That is what commercialization does to a hobby, and it happens to nearly every passion-turned-business I have watched.
Focus on the purpose of your business instead of the passion. For us the purpose was replacing my wife’s income so she could stay home with the kids. Every decision (which product, which channel, which price) had to pass through that filter, and that clarity is what kept us going through the boring parts.
Lesson 4: Everything is a commodity, so sell to emotion
Everything you sell is essentially a commodity, so the winning move is to sell to emotion, not novelty. Almost nobody invents a genuinely new product. Everyone else is selling variations of things that already exist, and the brands that win are the ones that trigger the strongest emotional response in the buyer.
Drew Whitman calls the eight core drivers behind almost every purchase the Life Force 8. If you appeal to any one of them, you can sell almost anything.
The Life Force 8
- Survival, enjoyment of life, and life extension. Health, safety, longevity products.
- Enjoyment of food and beverages. Restaurants, snacks, gourmet ingredients, coffee.
- Freedom from fear, pain, and danger. Insurance, security, medical.
- Sexual companionship. Beauty, dating, fashion, grooming.
- Comfortable living conditions. Home, furniture, appliances, HVAC.
- To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses. Luxury goods, education, status.
- Care and protection of loved ones. Children’s products, pet products, family safety.
- Social approval. Fashion, cars, personal brand.
How brands actually use the Life Force 8
Look at the brands whose ads work. Dr Squatch sells bar soap, but every commercial sells sex. Old Herbal Essences commercials implied an orgasm from shampoo, and Old Spice dares men to be manlier.
Every one of those is a direct pull on a Life Force 8 driver, and it is why those brands scale in categories crowded with identical-on-paper competitors.
Stop obsessing over finding a unique niche. Start obsessing over which of the eight emotions your product legitimately triggers, and how to communicate that emotion at every touchpoint from ad to landing page to unboxing. The product is less important than the feeling it evokes.
Lesson 5: Starting a side hustle is not actually risky
Starting a side hustle is not actually risky if you keep your day job, invest small amounts, and iterate. The image of the entrepreneur as a bet-the-farm gambler is a media stereotype. Every successful business owner I have interviewed has been the opposite: methodical, conservative, and willing to make small mistakes to learn.
My wife and I started Bumblebee Linens with $630, and we both kept our full-time jobs. We made tiny bets: order 50 handkerchiefs, test a price point, tweak the listing, order 100 more, and we had room for lots of little mistakes because none of them were fatal.
That store now does over $1 million a year in revenue, and neither of us has held a regular job in years. That is not because we took a giant risk. It is because we took a lot of small ones, kept the safety net of a paycheck while we tested, and only pulled the ripcord on the day job when the business could support us.
How these five business lessons fit together
These five lessons all point at the same conclusion: build a business that fits your life, not one that consumes it. Ignore the grind advice, start before you are ready, pick a business by purpose (not passion), sell to emotion instead of chasing novelty, and de-risk the whole thing with a side-hustle timeline. Do all five together and you can build a real income without giving up the years and the relationships you started the business to protect.
Frequently asked questions
Is most entrepreneurship advice bad for people with families?
Most mainstream entrepreneurship advice is bad for people with families because it is written by single founders with no dependents, and it assumes you can trade 80 hours a week for equity. If you have kids or a spouse, follow that advice and you will win the business at the cost of the life you started the business to build.
Should you quit your job to start a business?
Do not quit your job to start a business. Keep the day-job income and paycheck while you build a side hustle with small, calculated experiments. Only leave the day job once the business income can reliably replace your salary, because the safety net of a paycheck is what lets you take the small risks that actually grow a company.
Do you have to be passionate about your business to succeed?
You do not have to be passionate about your business to succeed. Most of running any business is sales, marketing, inventory, and customer service, none of which is anyone’s passion. Focus instead on the purpose the business serves in your life, such as replacing a spouse’s income or funding a specific lifestyle.
How much money do you need to start a side hustle?
You can start a side hustle for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. My wife and I launched Bumblebee Linens with $630 and grew it into a seven-figure business. Small starting capital forces small, calculated experiments, which is exactly what builds a durable business instead of blowing up early on one big bet.
What is the Life Force 8 in marketing?
The Life Force 8, coined by Drew Whitman, is the list of eight core human desires that drive almost every purchase: survival, food and drink, freedom from fear, sex, comfortable living, superiority and status, protection of loved ones, and social approval. Products that appeal directly to at least one Life Force 8 driver consistently outsell products marketed on features alone.
Is it too late to start a business now?
It is not too late to start a business now. The single biggest reason most people never start is that they wait to feel ready, and that feeling never arrives before you launch. Start the smallest possible version of the business you can imagine this week and you will feel ready roughly six months after the first sale.
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