Start 20 Businesses in 12 Months

In this post, I'll share the real message behind the title, the lessons from my past businesses you can use to start your next one or build your current one, the six systems every business should run on, including yours, and four things you can do today to improve your business journey. That last part is where it actually starts to change.

If I could start over, I would start twenty businesses as fast as I can. Not because I want twenty businesses. But because of what twenty attempts do to you. They build the one thing that actually decides whether you make it. The skill. Because that is what running a business is.

I am also not saying start 20 businesses at the same time, only one at a time with your complete and full attention and energy. Chances are you will never get to that 20 before you make things work. And that's the point, you're not collecting businesses, you're building the skill. Most of them will die. You should start them anyway.

As someone that helps entrepreneurs build profitable businesses with my frameworks, there are certain mindset, mentality and hustle nuances you can only learn by building actual businesses, successfully or not. Practical experience in business trumps theoretical experiences.

It took me eight failed businesses and 18 years to learn what I'm about to share with you. I want you to be able to build a successful business in a matter of months.

Business is a skill that you build. And like any skill, you're bad at it right up until you're not. And like any skill, the fastest way to get good is more reps, faster. Business is not all about the idea, the funding, the timing. It's a skill. Just because you have the right ingredient doesn't mean you make the meal.

You will suck at business initially and you will fail. But failing isn't the point, because every attempt, win or lose, makes you sharper for the next one. Every one of my failed businesses taught me something I just couldn't piece together until a few years ago.

The real message

So why twenty businesses, and why in twelve months? That's because every real attempt deposits a skill in you that you keep for life, whether the business survives or not. If you lose a business because you couldn't sell, you will walk away knowing how to sell. That skill doesn't die with the business. It's yours now.

Twenty attempts across different sectors throws every kind of problem at you. These experiences will make you the operator who can make any business work without breaking a sweat. Skills pay the bills.

Lesson 01You are the bottleneck

My first three businesses all taught me the same lesson. I just had to learn it three times. Three completely different businesses. Same problem underneath all of them. I was the machine. When you start, the business is just you. You sell, you deliver, you fix, you follow up. It feels like hustle because you're always busy. I got genuinely good at one thing, getting people interested in what I had to offer. I never got good at building anything that ran without me standing in the middle of it.

That's the first ceiling every founder hits. It's called founder dependency. If the business stops the moment you stop, you don't own a business. You now have a job that you can't quit. Unfortunately, this is why a lot of good businesses end up failing. So check yourself.

This is lesson number one in business. The earlier you can recognise this, the earlier you can start thinking of building a business capable of running without you, and this is real freedom.

Lesson 02Being brilliant at one thing will not save you

For my next three businesses, I stopped being small and started playing with real money and investments. I'm talking 6 & 7 figures. And real money teaches you fast, especially when other people's money is involved.

After those first businesses, I went and did something different. I got a real education in business, the kind you can't pay money to get. I spent years in sales at the corporate level, inside several million & billion-pound companies. I mastered the skill everyone says matters most. Sales. And I closed plenty of deals, more than £45 million over the years. I sat in the rooms where the real decisions got made. I watched how a serious business actually runs. I learned: Distribution. Profitability. Logistics. Buying and selling whole companies. Scaling with real structure behind it.

For the first time, I felt I understood business from the top down. I thought that was the missing piece. I thought, now I finally know enough. So I went back out to build. Even with elite sales skills and a corporate-level understanding of how business actually works, my next businesses still failed. All that corporate education wasn't enough to make my own thing work.

Business is more than just about selling. Business is also more than theory. I may have been good at sales and know all the theory behind a successful business, but I was poor at running a profitable business.

Lesson 03Revenue is not profit

I built an ecommerce business that did £1.8 million in revenue. And I lost nearly £100k of my own money running it. I saw all the mechanics inside those million & billion-pound companies. Cashflow, logistics, margins, I knew the words, I had sat in the meetings. But watching it from a boardroom and losing your own £100k are two completely different educations. Revenue is not profit. I knew this.

That loss taught me how a business actually works underneath the surface. The importance of Cashflow. VAT and tax. Negotiating suppliers. Churn. Production. Shipping product in from another country. Logistics. The unglamorous machinery nobody posts about. I got good at business operations here because the alternative was losing even more money. I learned how to know when to walk away, because some businesses are like quicksand, the harder you try, the more you sink.

Lesson 04Scaling too fast will kill your business

That same ecommerce business taught me a second lesson. When it started doing consistent 6-figure months, my instincts told me to scale it, and scale it fast. I doubled the ad spend, doubled the team, doubled my inventory, doubled the output, and assumed I would get double the business back. That assumption clearly didn't end well.

Scale a solid system and you get a bigger business. Scale a broken one and all you get is a bigger problem.

Scaling is not simple maths. Two times the spend, the team, and the effort does not give you two times the result. What scaling actually does is multiply everything at once, including the cracks, risks and failings of your business. A weakness you could live with when you were small becomes the thing that takes you down when you're big. Growth doesn't fix a shaky business, it exposes it, faster. Scaling requires a solid system in your business. Scale a solid system and you get a bigger business. Scale a broken one and all you get is a bigger problem.

Lesson 05There's no such thing as quick money

I was lucky enough to be doing property at the same time as my ecommerce business, and it did two things. It quietly mopped up a good chunk of what ecommerce had cost me, which was the first time I ever saw one business carry another, and it showed me a brand new problem. Property makes good money but it is slow money. Money from property is capped by how fast you can raise funds and what the market decides to do that year. Even when you get the deal right you can still lose. Most of your cash sits locked in bricks and mortar and it ties you down. Property is a brilliant long term investment. It is a poor business. Knowing the difference between something that grows your wealth and something that pays you to run it is its own skill, and that is what property taught me. Business done right is initially slow money but as the wheel spins more, the money spins faster.

Lesson 06Being the middle man doesn't pay well

I turned property into a service. I started running property investments on behalf of other people. I did the work, they got the asset, I took a fee. People always say being the middle man was the best position. On the surface it made sense. Underneath, the income was capped. I made up to £20k a client but it took 6-8 months depending on the project to get my full payment. And once you did the real maths across the acquisition and the renovation period and divided it by the months and the work involved. The return on my time wasn't there.

Lesson 07Marketing and lead generation prints money

E-commerce and Property handed me two of the skills I'd been missing for a decade. Proper marketing and proper lead generation. This is where I learned Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, amazon ads, ROAS, all of it. I learned how to get a business seen and trusted, and how to turn that attention into a steady flow of buyers. For the first time in my life I could put money in one end and reliably pull customers out the other. After years of knocking on doors and posting flyers, these businesses changed everything I thought was possible.

Lesson 08You can know everything and be known for nothing

I was getting more powerful with every business. Operations, money, marketing, lead generation, sales. On paper I should have been unstoppable. High performance coaching seemed the logical choice. By now I could do almost anything business related. Sales training. Marketing setup. Lead generation through ads. Operations and delivery frameworks. So I offered all of it. And that was the problem. I could do everything, which meant I was known for nothing. A jack of all trades. Almost decades of collecting skills, and I still couldn't build a business that worked, because nobody could tell you in one sentence what I actually did.

If what you do is too complicated to explain, no one will bother to care about you.

I essentially solved every individual problem from my past and created a brand new one by piling them all into one confused offer. If what you do is too complicated to explain, no one will bother to care about you.

Lesson 09Target rich people

I ran a career consulting business for 18 months. This time I was known for one clear thing. I got 320 people into well paid jobs and grew an audience of over 125k followers on Instagram, and I'm proud of that to this day. But I picked the wrong market. People hunting for work are, by definition, short on cash. The hours invested in training people was not worth it financially. I felt fulfilled but fulfillment doesn't pay my bills or give me freedom. It doesn't matter how good your service is if you're selling it to people who can't pay what it's worth. Good service. Wrong people is not a sustainable business.

Lesson 10Every business runs on six systems

After that last failed business, I took a break. I knew how to make money, I knew how to make profit, I just wanted to make significantly more in the same time or less. So I sat back and asked the only question that mattered. Why do I keep failing when I clearly know what I'm doing. I've closed millions, made millions and learned business at the highest level there is.

And the answer was hiding in all eight businesses at once. I failed because I was missing a system that ensures all my actions were repeatable, measurable and consistent. I discovered every business runs on six systems, and they hold each other up. So I built the Elite Performance OS. Six systems, designed to hold each other up instead of taking turns falling over.

Each system ensures you are able to run a profitable business. For example, if you get your sales system right while the operations system is broken, the business still dies. It just dies later. When one system decays, it drags the rest down with it.

Lesson 11Always test your idea in the real world

Having a framework that explained my own failure was the easy part. I didn't rush out and build with the Elite Performance OS. I went and tried to break it.

I spent two to three years on the road, taking the six systems into businesses that had nothing to do with mine. Different sectors. Different countries. Different sizes. I focused on businesses doing 6, 7 and 8 figures. Even in industries I never worked in. Markets where I didn't even speak the language. To me, if the six systems were real, they had to hold up everywhere.

And oh boy, they held up. Every single time. More than 350 businesses now use my frameworks through my app, Aseyi, and I've worked with 35 founders who have since gone on to do over £61 million in combined revenue. The Elite Performance OS stopped being my story and became something I could hand to anyone.

Lesson 12Your business is as strong as your weakest system

Here is what all of this means for you, and it's the whole reason any of this matters. The six systems don't care what your business is. They don't care whether you sell software, coaching, or coffee, whether you're in London, Lagos, or nowhere near either. Every business stands or falls on the same six things. Yours included, right now, whether you can see it yet or not.

And your business is only ever as strong as its weakest one. Most founders never find out which system is failing them until it's too late. You don't have to be most founders.

Lesson 13The failures became the point

My failures stopped being the thing I hid. They became the entire reason anyone listens to me. I lost the money. I hit every ceiling. I learned painful lessons the slow and expensive way, so the founders I now work with don't have to.

That's what I do now. I sit with business and build the systems that make them more productive and more profitable. And I can charge properly for it, because I'm not selling advice off the internet. I'm selling experience.

And the ceiling that meant I could only ever help one person at a time, that's gone too. I now teach a room full of founders how to run a profitable business that puts and pays them first. Far more leverage.

So when I tell you to start twenty businesses in twelve months, I don't mean fail twenty times. I mean get your reps in fast, and keep the skill each time. Business is a skill you build. And it allows you to see the whole system your business runs on.

ActionWhat to do next

1. 01Start that business today. Stop polishing the idea in your head. Get the reps in. Whether the business works or not, you get to keep the skill.
2. 02Identify the weakest system in your business. Go through the six honestly. The weakest is the one quietly costing you, and that is where your attention needs to go first. If you want it scored for you, that is exactly what my app, Aseyi, does. It's an AI coaching app that tracks all six systems and shows you which one is dragging the rest down and what you need to do to fix it daily. It's free to download on iOS, with a free trial so you can see your scores before you commit.
3. 03Run the two-week test on your business. If you disappeared for two weeks, no laptop, no phone, would money still come in? If the answer is no, your first job is to build a business that runs without you, not a bigger version of the one that owns you.
4. 04Upskill yourself. If there is a system you keep dodging because you're not good at it, stop hiding behind the thing you're great at and go and get better at the thing you're not.

It took me eight businesses and eighteen years to learn what I know. I trust you're going to do it faster, because now you know the lessons I was too busy failing to see.